The Breaking

CHAPTER Seventeen


Jessup’s pickup was a Ford. If Cole had missed the emblem on the front or the back of the vehicle, he still would have gleaned that fact from the Ford mud flaps, Ford visor, and air freshener that dangled from the rearview mirror. There was a passenger seat directly behind him that was piled high with tackle boxes, tool kits, and rifle cases that Cole guessed contained much more than tackle, tools, and rifles. Because of the air freshener, he could smell a touch of pine mixed in with the pungent varnish used to treat Skinner weaponry. Ford pine.

“What’s so funny?” Jessup asked from behind a wheel that was wrapped in a leather cover emblazoned with faded oval symbols.

Cole sat on the far end of the bench seat, with maps, atlases, and several spiral notebooks sandwiched between him and the other Skinner. His arm rested on the edge of the door, hanging partially out of the lowered window. It was getting dark, so the air was cooling down considerably. The more that blew across his face, the wider he smiled. “Nothing’s funny,” he replied. “I just never thought a Skinner could afford to be a germaphobe.”

Jessup turned to look at Cole as if he didn’t realize he was pushing the gas pedal down almost far enough for the truck to fly into orbit. The bottom portion of his face was covered by what looked to be an old surgical mask tied around his neck and ears by elastic bands. “Germ a what?”

“What’s the deal with the mask?”

Jessup looked at the road and then leaned over to stick his face partially out the window. As soon as he leaned back in, he slammed his foot on the brake and twisted the wheel to send the truck into a controlled spin that pointed its nose back toward a dirt road leading away from Highway 69. “Here,” he said while removing the mask and tossing it over to Cole. “See for yerself.”

With the mask resting in the palm of his hand, the next logical thing for Cole to do was place it on the spot on his face where it was meant to go. Before it got close enough to touch his nose, his sinuses were flooded to capacity. The scents were pleasant at first. Trees, fresh air, oil from the truck, mildew from old lawn furniture that had been dumped on the side of the road about a hundred yards back, even the gritty scent of dirt—all of it washed through him like a torrent. It wasn’t long before the combined odors were enough to make him pull the mask away.

“Takes some gettin’ used to, don’t it?” Jessup asked.

“What the hell is this thing?”

“Something I put together with a little help from a certain dead a*shole we’ve both heard about.”

“Lancroft?”

Jessup nodded. “That’s one of ’em, but not the one I meant. I helped myself to plenty while we were all sifting through that house in Philadelphia, but I was more interested in the things that nobody else knew quite what to do with. I’ve always been a tracker. I love getting my boots dirty while everyone else taps away at their keyboards and checks phone records.”

“Who do you know that could check phone records for us?” Cole asked. “That would be great!”

“Nobody. That’s the point. When the power goes out or if you’re too far away to get a damn signal, all of you techie dickheads are helpless. But that ain’t the case for someone who knows their craft all the way down to the bone. That mask you’re holding there is the best thing I ever done. The main ingredient comes from the other dead a*shole with whom you’re very well acquainted.”

“Don’t make me guess,” Cole said.

“In case you don’t remember Henry, he’s the Full Blood that happened to disappear on your watch, and don’t tell me you don’t know where that body’s buried.”

“Let’s not get into that right now.”

After taking a moment to steer around a pothole resembling a crack in the earth’s crust, Jessup let the matter drop. “So I found a box Lancroft had in cold storage, locked away in that secret lab of his where he did all his cuttin’.”

Just mentioning that room flooded Cole’s mind with memories of stark white lighting, dissection tables, and a carcass that was pulled apart and held open by metal studs screwed into a chrome tabletop.

“Everyone already helped themselves to all the Full Blood spit, blood, fur, and what-have-you,” Jessup continued, “but left some of the more interesting bits for me. At first I thought I’d found some kind of paste smeared onto a plastic sheet. Then I saw it was a membrane Lancroft had removed and preserved. Removed,” he added with a wink, “from Henry’s nasal cavity.”

Cole held up the mask. “This is the inside of a werewolf’s nose?”

“I don’t know if that’s exactly where it’s from or if it’s from deeper inside his misshapen dome, but yeah. Lancroft didn’t know what to do with it, but I did. It took some tricky work with preservatives and a lot of playing around with the mixture that we use to bond our weapons to us, but I got the damn thing to do something besides make my nose burn when I breathed through it. Long story short, I dumbed down our bonding agent to bridge the gap between humans and Full Bloods, sewed what was left of the membrane into that mask, and voilà! Portable Wolf Nose! Patent pending.”

Turning the mask over a few times, Cole said, “This could be huge! You bridged the gap between humans and Full Bloods? Do you know what that could mean for the ink Paige came up with?”

“You mean the stuff that screwed up her arm?” Wincing almost in time with Cole, he quickly added, “No, this was just a real simple tweak that barely worked. I wouldn’t trust it on anything that actually goes inside of you or mingles with blood. What I need you to do is see if you can pick up our young one’s scent.”

“We’ve already gone a few miles,” Cole pointed out. “Are you sure it was in the right direction?”

A sly grin eased onto Jessup’s face. “This ain’t the first time she tried to bolt. She’s new to this, so she sticks to the roads. Just see if you can narrow it down for me.”

Cole raised the mask to his face again but was cautious about drawing another breath. When he did, he was once more besieged by smells from every end of the spectrum, ranging from the candy bars piled on the dashboard to a mound of animal scat somewhere in the field outside. “How the hell did you use this to find anything specific? Do you mix in something to help weed everything else out?”

“Nope. Just good old-fashioned discipline. Concentrate on what you’re after and focus. Helps to have a sample, but most of the stuff we’re after is pretty distinctive. Turn your head that way and see for yourself.”

Jessup pointed toward the road, and when Cole did as he’d been told, he was introduced to a new scent that easily superseded the others. It was a mixture of animal musk, something that might have been perfume, and another odor he couldn’t identify. He pulled in a slow, deep breath and let it roll down his throat like a sip of wine. It wasn’t perfume, but the flowery smell did have an artificial taint. The other scent was pungent and exotic, interesting and bitter, enticing and repellent.

“You smell her?” Jessup asked. “She’s either wearing some sort of girly lotion or has been using it long enough to stick with her, but the main thing I followed was that scent of fungus and ripe fruit.”

“Is that what it is?”

“That lotion or whatever smells artificial. There’s something else that I don’t really know how to describe. It’s natural, but not like any nature I ever smelled. That’s the scent of a Full Blood. From what I’ve heard, those eye drops Ned whipped up are better at close range, but this here mask can find scents that’ve been laying around for days or maybe longer.”

“And you’re sure it’s a Full Blood?” Cole asked.

“Met up with a whole mess of Shunkaws in Kansas where that little girl out there damn near ripped my head off. Her and another Full Blood jumped me, so I got their scents up close and a little too personal. Followed it all the way to where that girl was hiding, filthy, on all fours, clawin’ at the ground. And I don’t mean in the good way.”

“Lambert said she was just a kid.”

Still wearing the fraction of a smile he’d put on for the benefit of his last joke, Jessup shook his head and told him, “He’s got that right. Was a kid, but not anymore. That girl is wilder than the other Full Bloods I’ve ever seen, and lately I’ve seen a whole lot of them. Since she barely seems comfortable in her own skin, I tend to believe what I was told about her bein’ nothin’ but a pup.”

Cole tentatively placed the mask to his face and drew a breath. It took a lot of effort to sift through the scents, but the task kept him busy enough to get his mind off the gnawing pain in his stomach. He leaned out the window and then settled back into his seat. Pointing ahead and to the right, he said, “I think she’s headed that way.”

“That’s about what I thought. I made camp a few miles off-road.”

“Another camp?” Cole asked.

“What’s the matter? You’d rather take your chances in that small town after word spreads about the guy you attacked in that motel? Besides, cities ain’t safe for us no more.” He eased up on the gas and steered toward the shoulder of the dirt road. The truck clambered over the rougher terrain, causing both men to clear their seats with every other bounce. “She’s still skittish about the whole transformation thing. Either that or she’s bashful. Whichever it is, she don’t like bein’ too far away from her clothes. I think you and I might be okay with her, but I didn’t want to scare her by bringin’ much of anyone else. That’s why I sent your friend away.”

“Fine by me. I don’t mind the break.”

Ahead of the truck Cole saw a clearing that was barely the size of an overturned refrigerator and a camper parked amid some tall weeds. It was the smaller kind of camper that was towed instead of driven. A cooler and some duffel bags lay just outside the little clearing where a slender girl sat on something, her back hunched and her hands clasped between her knees. The burning in Cole’s palms confirmed she was a Full Blood. Either that or there was another werewolf lurking nearby. Once the truck came to a stop, he asked, “Where did you find her?”

“She and another Full Blood attacked me in Kansas.”

“And why is she sitting at your camp now?”

Her eyes took on a brilliant, otherworldly shine as she looked at Jessup. The older Skinner met them when he said, “The other Full Blood told me to watch out for her.”

“Was he the big bastard who killed Gerald?”

“From what I heard . . . yeah. That’s the one.”

“And why would you listen to him?”

“I don’t know. Why would you?” Smirking at the response that got from Cole, Jessup added, “I was wearing that mask when I pulled up to the motel, just to make sure you weren’t part of another Nymar trap. I can smell the Full Blood on you. Were you attacked too?”

“Sort of. He told me I needed to find the young one and hide her away.”

“Sounds familiar,” Jessup said. “Why do you believe him?”

“First of all, because he didn’t kill me. And second,” Cole added as he handed the mask back to Jessup, “because he made more sense than the last batch of Skinners I met. How screwed up is that?”

“The way things are goin’, it sounds about right. That girl’s gettin’ spooked. Let’s have a word with her before she decides to run off again.” Jessup pushed open the door and held up his hands to show them to the girl sitting in the small clearing.

She had long, thick hair that was blacker than charred coal. Watching both of the Skinners with crystalline hazel eyes, she said, “Don’t kill me. Please. Randolph said you people could help me. I don’t want it to hurt me again.”

“What’s your story?” Cole asked.

Rubbing her hands against her elbows, the girl lowered her head and pressed her arms against her chest. “It hurts.”

“What does?”

She was quiet, so Jessup explained, “She means the transformation. It still hurts when she does it.”

“Not just that,” she said. “Whatever is inside me hurts. Like, all the time. And it only stops hurting when I change and hurt other people.”

The tendrils wrapped around Cole’s guts squeezed him a little tighter, as if to remind him of some common ground he shared with this girl. Still, no matter how badly he wanted to sympathize, every Skinner part of him thing wanted to see if a shotgun blast would do any better on a Full Blood in its human form. “At least tell me your name.”

“Cecile.”

She looked to be somewhere in her early teens. Her clothes were a tattered mess, but no more so than those worn by other girls who strove for a “ghetto chic” look. The muddy stains, however, looked like they’d come from being buried in a pile of dirt. Her body was lean and muscular, but she still held herself as though she was nothing more than a child who was still afraid of the dark.

“What do you want from us, Cecile?”

“She’s in trouble and needs to be hid,” Jessup said. “Ain’t that right?”

“You’re the one driving around with an arsenal, and I’m the one in trouble?” she scoffed.

“You’re a Full Blood, girl,” Jessup replied. “You can run laps around this state in the time it takes me to scratch my ass. You can go anywhere you like and chew a hole through the side of a bank vault, but you decide to stick with a pair of Skinners. You gotta know what we skin, right?”

“Yeah. Randolph told me.”

“So what’s your story, girl?”

When he got a questioning glance from Cole, Jessup shrugged and told him, “We made the drive all the way from Kansas, but I spent most of it either talking to myself or chasing her down when she decided to run away.”

“I didn’t mean to run away,” she said, fatigue weighing down every syllable. Clawing at her midsection as if she wanted to tear it out, she went on, “It’s hard for me to hold it back. I try, but sometimes I just can’t.”

Full Blood or not, Cecile was confused, shell-shocked and overwhelmed by what was going on around her. Cole knew just how she felt. “Take it easy,” he said while placing one hand on the girl’s trembling back. “Just take a few breaths and maybe you’ll feel better.”

She shook her head slowly as she said, “I’m . . . I’m a werewolf. That’s not going to get any better.”

“Is this a new thing?”

She looked at him with a fear in her eyes he frequently saw in other people, but wasn’t supposed to be pointed at him. “You’re Skinners,” she said. “You kill werewolves.”

“Sometimes,” Cole said with a smirk. “Never a Full Blood, though. I’m not good enough for that.” Before Jessup had a chance to speak for himself, he added, “Neither of us is. Besides, do you really think we want to kill you?”

“I guess not.”

“So tell me how you got pulled into all of this.”

Cecile’s eyes glazed over as if she was looking at something else instead of the tall grass and water cooler in front of her. “I changed for the first time . . . I don’t even know how long ago. He was there when I did.”

“Who was?”

“He told me his name was Randolph Standing Bear.” Cecile wrapped her arms even tighter around her legs and started rocking. “One night I was sleeping in my room. My brother was in the other bed. Dad was in his room. I woke up screaming. My whole body hurt. Then . . . I changed. I thought it was a nightmare, but he told me it wasn’t.”

“Randolph told you that?” Cole asked.

“Yeah. He was there. Watching me. He said I had to leave my home and go with him. He changed too and I went with him.” Lowering her head while steeling herself, she added, “I guess I still thought it was a dream.”

“What did he want from you?”

“He said he had to take me away before the others found me. Said I needed to figure out what I was before the others tried to teach me the wrong way. Said I needed to learn how to change, how to hunt, how to kill, how to do everything my instincts told me to do.” Looking up at Cole with eyes that had become multifaceted jewels, she told him, “When I changed for the first time on my own, I was hungry. I chased down whatever I could find and ripped it apart.” The jewels embedded in her eye sockets lost some of their luster, until they were merely the soft, wet orbs through which every human saw their world. “Or maybe that was a dream too.”

“What about your family?” Cole asked. “Do you want to get back to them?”

Her eyes narrowed, and although she didn’t change form, the beast rose close enough to the surface for aspects of it to be seen around the edges of her face and in subtle changes of musculature. “They’re dead. Randolph told me and I believe him. Even if they weren’t dead before, they wouldn’t have lasted long once the others came.”

Cecile pulled in a breath, placed her chin flat against the tops of her knees and stared straight ahead. Blinking once, she said, “When we killed those men in Billings, Randolph broke my arm and put something inside.” Looking up at the men as if she could sense the reflexive anger that had come over them, she added, “Not like that. He never touched me that way. I mean inside as in . . . inside the wounds. Inside my bones.”

“Inside your bones?” Cole asked.

“What men in Billings?” Jessup snarled.

Cecile stretched out her left arm and twisted it to display the veins running along the inside of her wrist. “He broke my arm there. Pulled it apart and . . .” She paused as if to consider if that was another of her dreams, but gave up on that right away. “It healed up right away. After I changed back again, there wasn’t even a scar.”

Jessup grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “What men in Billings?” he demanded.

“They were in the back of some bar,” she said. “They tried to kill us, but we tore them apart.”

“What did they look like?” Jessup asked.

“They weren’t like me or Randolph, but they had fangs,” she said. “They fought back more than the first ones we killed.”

“They had fangs? What else?”

“Fangs and . . . I don’t know. It all seems so hazy.” One blink was all it took for her focus to go away from him and to something else. She still faced the Skinners, but wasn’t seeing him when she said, “Randolph told me I needed to hunt and I wanted to hunt. Wanted to kill. I . . . think I ate them, and I don’t even know if they were animals or . . .” She pulled in a deep breath, gripped her arms and said, “I don’t know what I’ve become, but Randolph keeps telling me it’s important.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Cole cut in. He looked at Jessup and asked, “Isn’t that right?”

Reluctantly, Jessup nodded. Despite the bravado he’d shown earlier, it seemed the older Skinner was just as tired and ragged as Cole when he said, “Randolph told us to hide you from the other Full Bloods. You remember that part?”

“Yes,” she replied.

Walking over to the duffel bags, he rooted through them and started pulling out spare pieces of clothes. He tossed a few shirts and a pair of faded cargo pants over to Cole. “Why haven’t you talked about all of this until now?”

“Because Randolph said you might try to kill me,” she explained. “Guess you would have tried to by now.”

Cole held the clothes in his arms and asked, “What’s this?”

“Might as well strap on a set of reflectors if you wanna wear that bright blue Broncos shirt.”

“Got any more in there?”

“For that skinny friend of yers? He’ll be swimming in them, but yeah.”

Cole walked around to stand in the grass a few paces behind Cecile so he could change clothes.

Sitting down so he could stretch out his legs with a labored grunt, Jessup said, “Why don’t you get us some food, Cecile?”

“You’re sending me away?”

“No. I’m hungry. You and Cole probably are too. There’s some PBJ, chips, and some old candy bars inside.”

Cecile rolled her eyes, turned her back on the men and walked to the camper.

“All right, then,” Jessup said in a low voice that made it clear he knew all too well that a Full Blood could still hear him if he wasn’t careful. “What do you think of this?”

Cole’s eyes were continually drawn to the other man’s vest, partly because of the rattle that accompanied almost every one of his movements. The teeth braided into the fringe looked like melted wax and were sharp enough to double as bullets, which meant they’d been pulled from the mouth of a shapeshifter. “Seems like we should help her. If she’s tricking us to get information about the rest of the Skinners, she won’t find anything that the Full Bloods must not already know.”

Jessup walked back to the bed of his truck and returned with a large overstuffed backpack. While talking to Cole, he removed several see-through bags stuffed with cash consisting of wadded bills and copious amounts of change. “Did you catch what she said about the thing stuffed into her arm?”

“Yeah. What was that?”

“I don’t know,” Cecile replied while coming out of the camper. She carried two plastic grocery bags to the clearing and set them down. “If I did, I would have told you. I could hear everything you said, by the way.”

Cole and Jessup looked at each other, shrugged and sifted through the grocery bags. “Guess you’re not as much of a pup as I thought,” the older Skinner said.

“I would think the ears start working as soon as they grow in,” Cole said as he picked a sandwich, tore open the Baggie and sniffed the crust. The bread was soggy after being in the bottom of that bag for too long, but the jelly was grape, just as God intended.

“You hungry?” Jessup asked Cecile.

“Yes.”

He tossed her a sandwich, which she held up to her nose and sniffed. Not interested in whether she liked peanut butter and jelly or not, he asked, “So you don’t know what that thing is in yer arm?”

“Nope. Randolph acted like it was special, though. I think it’s something he just found.”

“Does he ever mention something called a Jekhibar?” Cole asked.

She squinted while gnawing on the Snickers bar she’d found and replied, “I think so. It was while we were changed. so . . .” Rather than say the words, she waved her hand around her head as if she was scrambling her brain.

“Jekhibar?” Jessup asked. “That’s an Amriany word.”

“Are you sure about that?”

He nodded. “Hell yes. Ever since the Blood Blades came over, I thought it best to read up on the other stuff they’ve got. The Jekhibar is a Unity Stone.”

“What’s it do?”

Jessup shrugged and stuffed a quarter of a sandwich into his mouth like a hamster stuffing wadded tissue into its cheeks. “Hell if I know. Ever since these damn Full Bloods have been making their presence felt, all kinds of shit’s been turning up. And don’t take offense to any of this, girlie. We’re talking big picture stuff here.”

“You can call me a damn Full Blood all you want,” Cecile replied. “Just knock off the girlie crap.”

He chuckled and nodded. “Sure thing. Anyways, I thought all the Chupes and Squams and Half Breeds were coming out of the woodwork because they’d been scattered from wherever they were hiding on account of the big bad wolves coming around. Then there was the Mud Flu, which just about cut the Half Breeds down to nothin’. Now, buggers I haven’t seen for years are cropping up all over the goddamn place, most likely because the whole ecosystem is out of whack.”

“You mean like the food chain?” Cecile asked.

“That’s exactly what I mean. Kind of like when hunters take out too many of the coyotes in a certain area or bobcats in another. That’s when all the other things poke their noses out and spread all over the place.”

“But the big wolves are back,” Cole pointed out. “Now more than ever.”

“Which don’t bode well for us. These little peckers have been out long enough to find better food and bigger dens and warmer beds and greener pastures and . . . you get the point.”

“Got it about five minutes ago,” Cecile grumbled.

“What about the Nymar?” Cole asked. “Have you found a lot of Shadow Spore?”

“Hell no,” he spat while tearing open a candy bar as though he was ripping off a small animal’s head. “Why would they be out where we’d just pick ’em off? The whole point of burning out as many of us as they could was so they could set up shop all over the place. The cops are either on their side or believe them bloodsuckers are victims being stalked by folks like us.”

Cecile didn’t even look up from her sandwich when she asked, “Well, aren’t you? Stalking them, I mean.”

“Think I liked it better when she was givin’ me the silent treatment,” Jessup grumbled.

“So we don’t have to worry about Nymar,” Cole stated.

Jessup was quick to reply, “I wouldn’t go that far. Just because they’re not out skulking in the alleys everywhere don’t mean they’re not a threat. Fact is, they’re a bigger threat than they realize. And you should pay close attention to this too, young lady. Those Nymar used to spread rumors and outright lies about how they ruled the cities to keep your kind out. That’s no lie anymore.”

“Trust me,” she said. “Randolph is a lot more pissed off about that than you are.”

“This is his territory,” Cole explained. He stood up and turned his back to both Jessup and the girl. “And this shit is really getting hard to choke down.”

“It’s all I got,” Jessup said. “There’s tuna salad somewhere, but it might clean yer plumbing out more that you’d like.”

“Not the sandwich,” Cole said. “Why the hell do we care what a murdering animal like Randolph has to say? Why should we care what he wants? Have things slid too far down the crapper for us to even try to be Skinners anymore?” Shifting his eyes to Cecile, he asked, “Do you even know how many of our friends that goddamn beast has killed?”

“You think the Full Bloods are setting you up?” she asked. “Then you guys really must not know a lot about them. They don’t need to set up anyone but themselves. Everyone else is just tall grass to them. When it gets in their way, they mow it down. And when it’s time to mow, there’s nothing that can stop them. I’ve only been one of them for a little while, but I can see that much already. How long have you guys been fighting them?”

Cole was still fired up. He looked to Jessup to see whether he stood alone against the wolf in a teenage girl’s clothing.

“Look,” she continued, “I know people are dying. I saw it on the news and on the Internet. Randolph told me about what’s out there. You kill them, they kill you.” Quickly raising her hands, she added, “And yes, I know it’s not a game. Skinners have died, but you’ve got to see this from my side here. You don’t just kill werewolves. You peel them and drain them and I don’t even know what else. I may have eaten a human being, but you guys even give me the creeps.”

It gave Cole the creeps to hear her talk about things so candidly. Then again, he knew from experience that it didn’t help anyone’s sanity to tiptoe around the truth. Sometimes it felt good to just embrace the madness and move on.

“Obviously you and Randolph aren’t friends,” Cecile continued. “But if the Full Bloods wanted to find you, they could. I barely know how to move around in my other body, but I feel like I can smell and hear everything there is. I think Randolph’s older than all of us combined. When he talked about Skinners, he told me to see if I could trust you and then tell you the whole story about what’s going on with the Breaking Moon. He said you needed to know because if anyone had a prayer of hiding me away from the others, if only for a while, it was a Skinner.”

“And what can you tell us?” Cole asked.

“The Breaking Moon,” she replied, as if reciting something she vaguely remembered from a dream, “is why the others are here.”

Farther down the road a few cars rolled by. They were too far away for the Skinners to worry about and might as well have been in another universe than Cecile.

“There’s some kind of heat inside of us,” she said. “Full Bloods, I mean. Those big dogs too. Are they Half Breeds?”

“Yes.”

“I remember Randolph mentioning that now.” According to the look on her face, Cecile was hearing plenty of things in her mind at that moment. She winced at the screams the same way Cole had when he’d been awakened to his new world. “The heat is real. I can feel it all the time. It’s some sort of power,” she continued. “Randolph described it as the fuel that allows them—I guess us—to do what we do. I thought it sounded crazy, but I can feel it working when I change. It’s like a match is always on inside me. Kind of like, you know, inside a furnace?”

“A pilot light?”

She nodded and then smiled wistfully. “I used to like watching my dad light the pilot light at the old house back in West Virginia. Sometimes I snuck down there and left the little door on the side of the furnace open so that little flame would go out. Dad would go down there with a coat hanger he’d twisted up to hold a match and I’d follow him to watch.”

A semi pulling a trailer rumbled down the interstate. After it passed, a stray breeze swept across the camp. Her hair fluttered like streamers against her unmoving face. Crossing her arms and standing against the wind, she looked less like she was bracing herself against the elements and more like she was giving them silent commands to function around her.

“When my dad would light the match and stick it into the end of that bent metal hanger,” she said, “he told me to stay back. Then he stuck the match into the furnace and . . . whoosh!” Even as she said that word, her eyes sparkled as if she was looking at the little spectacle that had captivated her all those years ago. “The flames just exploded in every direction. They filled the whole furnace and all these streams of fire came out of all those metal pipes or whatever was in there. You know the ones I mean?”

“Yeah,” Jessup replied. “I do.”

She nodded, acknowledging him, but just barely. “That’s what it feels like when I change. Inside, there’s this little flame in me. Always burning. When I change, though . . . whoosh. It fills me up. Kind of like sex, but more.” She glanced over at him with the sly expression of a girl who’d done the deed, but not enough times for it to have lost its shock value. When Cole failed to react in kind, she rolled her eyes and nodded. “I’ve had sex, don’t you worry about it.”

She was just learning to use her sexuality as a tool. If he’d been about fifteen years younger, it would have had a lot more of an effect. Instead, he was able to see her as the young pup that she was. “So what’s this got to do with the Breaking Moon?” he asked.

“All the Full Bloods—and I don’t think there are a lot of them—we’re like the flames shooting out of those pipes. We each have some of that fire in us and we can use it however we like. Randolph says that part just goes into living, but we get to live for a real long time.”

Cole felt like a spy who’d found himself sitting at the dinner table inside an enemy’s camp when he asked, “How long?”

She glanced over at him, smirking like an officer who’d just found a spy sitting at her dinner table. “A long time. That is, unless we’re hunted down and murdered by some psycho with a Blood Blade. Oh yeah. He told me all about that too.”

“Sounds like you werewolves do a lot of talking.”

“I haven’t slept since that first change. That leaves a lot more time for talking.” After that, Cecile became more focused. “So anyway, we all get our share of the fire and the whole world is the furnace. Like, the ground. The earth. That sort of thing. We pull it up and draw it in to . . .”

“Recharge your batteries?” Cole asked.

Cecile snapped her fingers. “Exactly! Wherever it comes from, it’s tied into the moon cycles. He told me I wouldn’t be able to become all of what I can be until I pass some sort of Blood Moon trial.”

“You mean a lunar eclipse?” Recognizing the puzzled and vaguely annoyed look on her face after seeing it so many times when trying to bring various girlfriends in on the whole Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate, he said, “When the moon passes between the earth and the sun, it’s a lunar eclipse.”

“No,” she said after an impatient click of her tongue. “That’s a solar eclipse. A lunar eclipse is when the earth is directly between the sun and the moon.”

Before fighting back with a scathing commentary on the modern school system, Cole paused and said, “Oh. You’re right. Yeah, I was thinking of the other one. But they’re called Blood Moons because when there’s a lunar eclipse, the moon looks all . . . you know . . . bloody.”

“Done?” she asked.

Suddenly, Cole didn’t miss Paige so much. If Cecile had a stick in her hand and was about to crack him upside his head, she might even make him homesick for his days at Rasa Hill. “I’m done,” he said.

“The Blood Moon is different. That’s something each of us needs to go through. With the Breaking Moon, we all get our fires stoked. It’s supposed to come up through the earth to keep us going for the next however many years it’ll be before the next one.”

“You don’t know how many years that is?”

“Nah,” she replied with a shrug. “But I know it’s a lot.”

A lot of years in Full Blood terms could very well mean several of his own lifetimes, Cole thought. Rather than break her conversational stride, he let it pass.

“Whatever the fire is, it’s drawn to us,” she continued. “Like in physics, how air will move from one spot to another to fill a vacuum. Know what I mean?”

“Uh-huh,” he said in a way he hoped was convincing.

“All the Full Bloods draw more of this fire than anything else, so they all picked their own territories and patrol them. This is Randolph’s territory. I think it goes up through Canada and covers most of the States as well. That system got messed up when that friend of his came over to rip up Kansas City.”

“Liam,” Cole said. Finally, it seemed all the crap he’d gone through since becoming a Skinner was coalescing into something greater than chasing monsters through back alleys.

“He was here for too long,” she continued. “Randolph said that two Full Bloods in the same territory will threaten the Balance.”

“What balance?”

“The Balance.” Since her stressing that word didn’t have much of an effect on her audience, she shrugged and added, “That’s what he told me. You’ve never heard of it?”

“No.”

“I guess another Full Blood in someone else’s territory can draw some of the fire away from where it was supposed to go,” she said. “This whole system has been going for a while, and all that stuff in Kansas City ruined it. The other Full Bloods know Liam is here, drawing more energy or whatever for himself and Randolph.”

“So, if more Full Bloods are in one spot, more energy is drawn to that spot?” Cole asked.

“I think so.”

“Like the girl said,” Jessup muttered. “Physics.”

He thought for a moment until a picture formed in his head. Imagining the world as a source of energy and the Full Bloods as points scattered across its surface, he was able to make a good guess as to what that Balance was all about. If the Full Bloods positioned themselves just right, they could draw from the energy equally. Once the collection points clustered too close together, more energy would flow in that direction and get siphoned away from the others.

“That’s why they’re here,” he said. “Those other Full Bloods can’t let Randolph and Liam get stronger because it would put the rest of them at the bottom of the pile. But if they all came here, they’d draw even more of the energy, right?”

“Maybe all of it,” Jessup offered.

Cecile nodded. “There will always be this wildness in us, but the Balance is supposed to help ease it.”

“From what I’ve been hearing, you Full Bloods are a long way from being balanced,” Cole said. “One of them attacked Randolph and damn near leveled that prison. Others are tearing apart some town in Oklahoma as we speak.”

“Atoka?” she asked.

Jessup stepped forward. However she reacted, he wanted to see it first. “That’s the place. From what I’ve heard, things are pretty bad there right now.”

“Is Randolph a part of it?”

Unable to answer that, Jessup looked over to Cole. All Cole could say was, “I don’t think so. Randolph genuinely seemed to want to do something to fix whatever’s going on. Since he was attacked by another Full Blood, he may be on the outside of this whole thing. Maybe the others are looking for you.”

Cecile shook her head. “No. They’re going to stay there until the Breaking Moon rises. I was born there. That means it’s a spot where the energy collects. That’s how I was turned into . . . this.”

“From what I’ve heard, it’s a war zone and getting worse.” Abruptly, Cole stopped and straightened up as if smacked in the face. “Is that why Randolph wants you hidden from them? Because you’d be drawing some of this fire or energy as well. And if you have a share of it, then that means there’s less for everybody else.”

When he looked at Cecile, he stared into her eyes intently. Even if she’d shifted into her full, raging form, he wouldn’t have backed down, because his next questions were too important. “What happens if one of them gets it all?”

“Then however bad the Full Bloods are now,” she said, “they’ll get a whole lot worse.”

Silence fell upon the camp.

A gentle wind drifted by, fanning the flames of the campfire and sending a much-needed chill down Cole’s back.

“What about that thing in your arm?” Cole asked. She looked at him intently, but he merely waited patiently. That was enough to give her the strength to continue.

“I think it draws even more of the power to it,” she explained while rubbing a spot on her arm. “It’s hard to explain, but it feels like it’s getting hotter. I don’t think any of the power is going into me, though. It’s just getting hotter like it’s collecting something.”

“Randolph wanted you to come to us to hide you,” Cole said, more as a way to let that idea roll around inside him. “There’s another one of those things somewhere. He was looking for it at the place where I was being held. Can you find it?”

“I don’t even know what to look for!” she cried. “Randolph protected me, but he wants me to give in to this monster inside of me. You guys haven’t tried to kill me yet, even though you probably had a chance. I don’t want to be a part of any of this.”

Jessup crossed his arms and studied her carefully. “So Randolph is after both of these stones to collect this energy or just to keep it away from the other Full Bloods?”

“All he told me was that the others can’t be allowed to get more powerful than they already are. Once things got past a certain point, he said all of it would be wiped away.”

“All of what?”

Glancing back and forth between the two Skinners, she said, “All of everything.”