Paige knew he wasn’t down for the count. She also knew she couldn’t move at more than half speed as she turned and hobbled along the side of the road. More cars were either gawking at the flaming wreck or slowing to ease past it. Drivers shouted at each other, her, and possibly Rico, but she couldn’t bother with any of that. It took all of her focus to block them out while tearing off a piece of her shirt and crouching down to dab at the blood on the pavement. Praying she wasn’t just cleaning up her own mess, she let out a relieved breath when she found something that was even better than what she’d hoped to collect. She couldn’t be absolutely certain, but the little piece of rounded flesh looked like an earlobe. It was still warm after being cut from Kawosa’s head, so she wrapped it up and tucked it safely into a pocket. From there, she resumed moving along the shoulder of the expressway toward a spot where the slope of the ground rose up to meet the guardrail. Her arm hung at her side, throbbing with more pain than she’d felt since it was first poisoned. She needed to get more healing serum. She needed to get somewhere safe enough to make a phone call. But more than either of those things, she just needed to get the hell away from Rico.
“Screw it,” she grunted as she grabbed onto the rail and swung her legs over.
Motorists shouted for her to stop. They told her help was on the way.
Paige couldn’t stop.
There was no help on its way.
Chapter Three
Colorado State Penitentiary
Canon City, Colorado
Three weeks ago
Nine cops were dead, and those were only the ones that had been killed in Denver on the night that Cole, Rico, Prophet, and the Amriany shot their way through a warehouse being used by the Nymar. Across the country, more cops had died in similar raids or were murdered in silence and left with Skinner weapons in their bodies. It didn’t take long for those crimes to be tied together and pinned onto what was quickly labeled a cell of home-grown terrorists. Thanks to the news coverage focused on the blood-soaked Denver warehouse, Cole’s capture was heralded as the death of that cell.
Riding away from the warehouse that night in a SWAT van had been one of the most terrifying moments of his thirty-four years on this planet. That was no small thing, considering all the horrific things he’d seen in those years. First there was the speedy ascension of dancing reality shows to the top of the ratings, followed by the slow death of old fashioned rock ’n’ roll. Once he got his first look at a real werewolf, his world had gotten even worse.
Training to be a Skinner was a painful process where he was ground into someone cold enough to drive a sharpened piece of wood into another living thing, occasionally interrupted by those very same living things trying to rip his head off. After that he’d seen shapeshifters of all flavors, as well as vampires, nymphs, and even a Chupacabra. Somehow, those creatures had been easier to handle than the scalding glares of the cops who rode with him in the van that night.
They all wanted to kill him.
If the stories were to be believed—and there was no good reason for the cops not to believe them—they had every right to kill him in the most gruesome way possible.
But by some miracle, he had been shackled to his seat and driven straight to the nearest jail cell. Apart from several choice words snarled at him through many sets of gritted teeth, he arrived without incident.
He was processed and thrown into a cage.
After standing in front of a judge barely long enough to feel the courtroom beneath his state-issued canvas shoes, he was given a jumpsuit and thrown into a smaller cell.
There were no visits from lawyers, no questions from the authorities. Just hours upon hours of solitude, within three stark gray walls and a set of iron bars, during which he was made aware of one simple fact: cop killers lived on borrowed time. But he was no cop killer. He’d been smacked around by Full Bloods, shot, hit with blunt sticks, cut with all manner of blades, and bitten by vampires.
That last part was what stuck with him the most.
Cole’s time as a Skinner had been extensive enough for his