Sometimes Paige would eat anything that wasn’t trying to run away from her. When it came to hot dogs, however, she was much more particular. Knowing this all too well, Cole got a bad feeling about the place where Officer Stanze brought them for a late lunch.
Chi Town Hot Dogz grated against the Skinners’ nerves right off the bat. First of all, Cole bristled whenever he saw something spelled with a z instead of an s. Second, it referred to Chicago as Chi Town. That one always rubbed Paige the wrong way, but not as badly as when a Nymar from Jersey used the phrase, “Chickey Ville.” That hadn’t turned out well at all.
Stanze got his hand on the door and was pulling it open when the radio on his belt began to squawk. After a few sentences came through, he keyed the transmitter attached to his shoulder and then let the door slip from his hands. “I gotta go.”
“I thought your shift was over,” Paige protested.
“It is, but I’m in uniform and they need backup, so…can you find your way without me?”
The Half Breed was already loaded into Paige’s trunk and the Cav was parked outside, so she nodded. “Sure. I’ll get back to you about that check.”
“Great. Nice meeting you. Same with you, Cole. Tell whoever’s at the counter that I sent you and you should get a free dog.”
Cole waved at Stanze, who was already climbing into his cruiser. “Bribing cops now?” Cole muttered.
“Not that sort of check,” Paige replied. “He’s a good guy.”
“Let’s hope he knows his lunch spots. I’m hungry.”
Chi Town Hot Dogz looked as if it had once been a fast food burger joint. Cole recognized the layout of the drink dispensers as well as the proportion of booths to tables. Looking over to Paige, he recognized the sour expression upon her face. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve already got a complaint for the manager.”
Rather than answer that question, she stepped up to the counter with one of her own. “What kind of hot dogs are these?”
The guy behind the register kept his smile intact despite her tone. “Grade A, Chicago style,” he assured her.
“No. Are they Vienna Beef? I don’t see a Vienna Beef sign.”
“You mean like that one?” the cashier asked as he hooked a thumb toward a plastic sign that was partially hidden by a Cubs pennant. It was the official yellow, blue, and red logo that Paige had been looking for, so she nodded and moved on.
“What about the buns?” she asked.
“They’re fresh.”
She pulled in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “The buns need to be poppy seed. The dog needs to be Vienna Beef, topped with pickle spears, tomatoes, peppers, relish, mustard—does any of this sound familiar?”
Unlike most of the food service employees Paige pulled through the wringer, this one kept his spirits up. “Sure. Check the menu and see for yourself.”
Everything Paige had demanded was listed under the heading, #1 DOGZ.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll take one of those.”
“You want any ketchup on that?”
Paige wheeled around and stomped for the door. “We’re leaving.”
They wound up eating lunch at a round metal table, sitting on metal seats that felt as if they’d soaked up the heat from a sun that had gone supernova ten minutes before they arrived. Since he’d passed about sixty-three signs advertising REAL KANSAS CITY BAR-B-Q, Cole dragged Paige to the closest one of those places and wouldn’t accept any other suggestions. As always, once she had some food in her stomach along with some on her face and T-shirt, she was much better company.
“So what did you and Officer Stanze do while I was out crawling through the dirt?” he asked.
“He took me around to the spots where people were killed and others were supposed to have been dragged away or attacked by dogs.”
“Fun date.”
Pausing while in the middle of sopping up some greasy sauce with a hunk of white bread, she replied, “I bet he is.”
“Well, I found some Half Breed dens,” Cole announced before she could follow her previous train of thought too far. “Three, as a matter of fact. One in Penn Valley Park and two in North Terrace Park.”
“Did you get a look inside or did you just spot a few holes and call it a day?”
Anticipating that reaction, Cole had a speech prepared. The three dens were pretty similar, so it didn’t take long to fill her in.
When he was done with his presentation, Paige asked, “What about that Alvin guy? Did you find him?”
“Sure did. He’s a Nymar, and a loopy one at that. He didn’t even know there were any others like him.”
Paige shrugged and grabbed the short corn on the cob that had accompanied her lunch. “There hasn’t been a big Nymar presence here for years. Even in places like Chicago it’s not unusual to hear about some Nymar living their whole lives thinking they’re the only ones. Just proves they don’t have their shit together half as much as they say they do.”
“Otherwise, they’d have a better welcome package,” Cole said.
Paige bit into her corn, accidentally squirted Cole in the face with it and said, “Exactly!”
“Alvin said the Half Breeds got there a few days ago.”
“Good. That means they’ll still be resting up from their first transformation. It takes them a couple days to recuperate.”
“What about that thing in the trunk?” Cole asked. “Did you feed Officer Stanze a story or just swear him to secrecy?”
Paige shrugged and finished off her last piece of beef. “With all the Half Breeds running around this town already, there’s probably hundreds of grainy pictures being taken by dozens of cameras. He’s a cop so he’s in on all the weird calls that have been coming in. He seemed like he’s already seen and heard a lot worse than a screwed-up hunk of road kill.”
“Learn anything on your drive?”
“We drove to those spots, but I only felt an itch at a few of them. We’ll check those out after lunch. Everything he said makes it pretty obvious that the Half Breeds were out hunting and sniffing out their territory over the last few days.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Not good, not bad,” Paige replied. “But it could be worse.” Falling into the tone she used when teaching Cole a new attack, she explained, “Half Breeds are made when someone survives a really bad werewolf attack. You knew that much already. The first time they shift into that new shape, pretty much every bone in their body is broken. Muscles and tendons hold them together, but it kills the person in a bad way. All that’s left is the wolf.
“They’re pretty useless for the first day or two after they’re turned, but the first thing a wolf in pain wants to do is crawl away somewhere until it feels better. Once it feels better, it gets hungry.” Paige picked up a napkin and began the meticulous process of cleaning her face, hands, and clothes from the assault of barbecue sauce she’d endured. “Once the muscles harden around their broken bones, they can walk. Once they figure out they can walk, they’re off. After that, they eat, run, eat, kill, and eat some more until they die. Those Half Breeds you found sounded pretty fresh, so they may be a little ways off from becoming a real problem.”
“Their skin was still damp and there wasn’t a lot of muscle around the ribs or legs.” As he said that, Cole remembered the sight of those things in the hole. The smell came right along with that memory, and after that hit him, he grimaced and pushed away the rest of his lunch. “So do you think the ones from North Terrace Park attacked that girl from the university?” he asked.
“Actually, I think the one in the trunk is the girl from the university.”
“How could you know that?” Cole asked.
“Well, to begin with, it’s a female. They have shorter front legs and longer ones in the back. That makes them just a bit faster. The males are the other way around.”
After pitching their garbage into a huge metal barrel, they went back to the car. Rather than start the Cav’s engine, Paige walked around to the trunk and opened it. The stench rolled out like a kick from an invisible pair of hiking boots, but she ignored it as she peeled open the garbage bag and reached down to poke the dead creature inside. “Look for yourself,” she said.
Once Cole’s eyes stopped watering, he was able to point out a few things. “This carcass is pretty small. The descriptions of Lisa Wilson being run on the news say she was only five-five or five-six, so I guess this is about the right size,” he pointed out. “And its fur is thick. Actually, the fur covers most of its body. I usually don’t see that in the ones that are standing still.”
Paige grinned and gave his arm a playful swat. “Very good, young one. This was killed while it was in full wolf form and on the prowl. Stanze said he hit it with his car and then shot it. Looks to me like he unloaded a whole clip into her. He was probably so freaked out that it wasn’t dead from the crash, he just kept on firing. But look closer. Right…there.”
Paige used the tip of her finger to push aside some of the fur to reveal the green smudge on its belly. “Oh shit,” Cole grunted. “Not another werewolf infected by Nymar. Are these things gonna start popping up all over the place now?”
“That isn’t Nymar. Stanze gave me a press release with descriptions of all the missing people. Under tattoos and distinguishing features, Lisa Wilson is listed as having a shamrock tattoo on her belly. This thing’s skin is a bit stretched to see details, but check it out.” Placing her fingers around the smudge as she had at the station, she bunched the creature’s skin together so the symbol came together again. “See?”
Cole leaned in to get a better look. Fortunately, he didn’t have to get much closer before he asked, “That’s her shamrock tattoo?”
“Yep. Not so lucky for her, but it gives us a bit of a timeline. If this is Lisa Wilson, the first batch has hit the streets. She’s got enough muscle to have fed, so that means there’ll be more resting up somewhere.”
“Wow,” Cole said. “I’m impressed.”
“Skinners have been watching these damned things for a long time. It’s been a while since there have been this many in one place, and I’ve never even heard of dens being planted like this.”
“Planted?”
Even though people were coming and going from the barbecue restaurant without casting more than a glance at them, Paige became uncomfortable. Cars flowed back and forth along the nearby street just as casually, but she didn’t seem to like the looks of them either. “Let’s get moving,” she said as she slammed the trunk shut. “I’ll talk and you drive.”
It wasn’t until they were pointed south and merging with the rest of the late afternoon traffic that she said, “Some of those pictures we saw before coming here, the ones from MEG, were of the Full Blood that came to drag Henry out of Wisconsin before we could finish him off.”
“You think Mr. Burkis is here too?”
“The Full Bloods aren’t known for traveling in packs. They’re territorial, but I’ve only heard of them crossing paths every once in a rare while. If Burkis was the one you saw in Canada—”
“He was,” Cole snapped. “There’s no doubt about it. Maybe this is just like a meeting or some time of the moon cycle when the Full Bloods gather and…I don’t know…howl.”
Paige shook her head while checking the gun in the glove compartment. “You don’t get it, Cole. Full Bloods don’t stake out patches of woods or stretches of mountain ranges. One Full Blood has been seen at different ends of this country and up into Canada only days apart. When they hit their stride, they move so fast that you can barely even see them. You can just feel it as they go by. Each one could stake a claim that’s a couple thousand miles wide.”
“Sounds like tall tales to me,” Cole grumbled. “All hunters get that way after a while. I had uncles that used to hunt bears, and the tougher one was, the more they exaggerated when they told the stories. They really believed what they were saying, though. Same thing with fishermen. The easy ones to catch are just little fish. The ones that put up a fight are monsters.”
Rather than try to argue, Paige simply emptied the rounds from the pistol into her hand. “We’ll need to reload this with the heavier ammo. These Nymar rounds are just greasy lead to a shapeshifter.”
“What did you mean when you said those dens were planted?” Cole asked.
Paige snapped her eyes to the road and pointed to the upcoming corner. “Turn right there and take another at Rockhill.” After the first turn was completed, she went back to digging through the glove compartment. “Half Breeds make their dens wherever they can. They sniff out a hole, a basement, anyplace they can sleep while the sun’s out. When there are too many Half Breeds to fit in one den, they either fight with each other or find a new one. They don’t divvy up a city like this.”
“Maybe they’re not part of the same pack,” Cole offered. “One got loose, tore up some people, and moved on. Then the new ones made a den of their own.”
“If they’re spreading naturally like that, why aren’t they clumped closer together?” Paige asked. “Half Breeds are stupid and hungry. They don’t strategically pick a different feeding ground each night. Not many animals do. When they find good pickings somewhere, they stay there until the food’s gone or until it’s too dangerous to go back.” After she’d finished reloading the pistol, she said, “Pull over.”
“Where?”
“Just stop. I need to show you something.”
Cole pulled into a gas station and parked next to an overpriced, motorized air pump that was missing its hose.
Twisting around to the backseat, Paige removed a road atlas from the previous year. “Look here,” she said while flipping to the map for Kansas City. “Here’s Penn Valley Park. Here’s North Terrace Park. This is Blue Valley Park, one of the spots that Rob showed me where there were a few supposed pit bull attacks.”
“Rob?” Cole muttered.
“Officer Stanze.”
“First name basis, huh?”
Shaking her head and waving at Cole the way she would shoo a fly, Paige pointed to another spot on the map. “This is where we’re going now. Forest Hill Cemetery. What do you notice about all these spots?”
Cole squinted down at the map and watched Paige use the tip of her finger to connect all the dots scattered throughout the city. “Kind of looks like a rectangle,” he said.
She nodded. “There are other spots as well, but none of them are as close as they should be to another one. Just the fact that so many popped up so close to all these people is strange. Usually, when Half Breeds get together and hunt, they’re spotted and are either killed by us or taken down by regular people.”
“People who take down Half Breeds don’t sound too regular to me.”
“Half Breeds are fast and mean, but they can be shot. It takes a whole mess of bullets or possibly getting run down by a car, but it can be done. Full Bloods…not so much. Since the cops don’t know they’re dealing with a fast moving creature that likes to burrow and hide underground, there’s probably other dens that nobody’s even found yet.”
“Maybe the Half Breeds want to hit a spot with the most people.”
Paige studied the map carefully. “All Half Breeds do is eat and run. Full Bloods are the ones who think and plan.”
“And they can create Half Breeds whenever they want. This reminds me of a game that my boss was working on a couple years ago.”
“Everything reminds you of some game,” Paige snapped as she closed up the atlas. “Get moving.”
Cole pulled back into the stream of traffic and resumed his course. “It was an RTS. That’s real-time strategy, for those who don’t know.”
“I know what it is. I played Dueling Warlords through most of high school.”
“Really? That’s kind of sexy. I just picture you in a school uniform allocating resources, managing an army, and sending out attack forces—”
“Was there a point to this?” Paige asked.
It took a second for Cole to shake the imagery from his head, and it would have been a lot easier to do if a bit more time had passed since he’d actually seen Paige in pigtails. Finally, he said, “If you want to take over a fortified spot on the map, you set up your units wherever you can all around that spot. If you can sneak some bombs into the middle of enemy territory, that’s even better. Could this be something like that? I mean, planting a Half Breed den in the middle of so many people could cause more deaths than a bomb. And considering a portion of the victims will turn into more Half Breeds…”
“That could make things a lot worse for a long time,” Paige said with a nod. “Take Rockhill to Sixty-eighth Street and go left. So if that Full Blood from the pictures wanted to do a whole lot of damage, planting Half Breeds is a hell of a way to do it. If we don’t clean out every last den, Half Breeds will roll through this city like an army.”
Cole raised his eyebrows and said, “The last time we saw that Full Blood in Wisconsin, it said it was going to reclaim its territory. Maybe it meant KC.”
“Or maybe this is just the first spot it’s marking as its own.” Shaking her head, she added, “It won’t do us any good to try and think the way those things do. You’d have better luck figuring out what motivates a tornado. Let’s just stick to what we know. The parks seem like a natural choice for dens, but Rob told me this cemetery is where the first sighting came from.”
“Plenty of holes get dug around there.”
“Yep. There are also caretakers who would pick up on something like a hole that doesn’t belong or strange animals coming and going from it. If I don’t find something on my own, at least I’ll have someone to ask.”
“While we’re there, why don’t we just clean them out?” Cole asked. “We’ve got guns and some better ammo. Let’s hit them while they’re sleeping.”
“I think Officer Stanze liked me, but not enough to give me a pass if we get hauled in for shooting up his city. Even if we forget about the guns, the last thing we need to do is get a bunch of those things worked up and have one get away.”
“Then what the hell are we here for?” Cole snapped while tightening his grip on the steering wheel. “People are already dead! I thought we came to help.”
Paige didn’t get angry and she didn’t lose her patience. She simply placed a hand on his shoulder and replied, “We are here to help. Just ask yourself something. How long would a game last if you went charging into a fight before you knew what you were up against?”
Gritting his teeth, he replied, “Not very long.”
“Right. We’re scoping things out and taking a head count right now. Please tell me you’d do the same thing if you would have thought it over for a few more seconds.”
“Yeah,” Cole sighed. “I guess I would’ve gotten there eventually.”
“Good. We’ve got weapons and tactics that have been working for a couple hundred years or so. I can immunize you against werewolf bites, treat Nymar infections, and even heal some ugly wounds, but we’re not invincible. We need to think. That way, when it’s time to fight, we stand a better chance of winning. Trust me, that time’s coming soon enough.”