at a spot just behind her and to one side. Before she could see what had caught her attention, she felt a familiar hand snake around her waist and pull her toward the wall. She held her breath and closed her eyes as she was dragged once more through the dirt.
It was a shorter trip this time. They traveled in a fairly straight line, and as they picked up speed, she heard the muffled grunts of Mongrels straining to complete the equivalent of a sprint while being buried alive. Before that thought could creep her out too badly, Paige was pushed upward and deposited into another room.
This one looked like a modern basement with a section of its cement floor stripped away to reveal dirt through which the diggers could enter. The hand that closed around her wrist to pull her up was smoother and thinner than any of the Mongrels’ paws. Paige batted it away and climbed to her feet.
“Take it easy,” Nadya said.
Blinking the grit from her eyes, Paige saw the Amriany woman in front of her. A stifled grunt drew her attention to a cot in a nearby corner where Milosh lay on his back gripping the stump of his left arm. It was wrapped in several towels that were soaked through with blood. “Weren’t you guys on that jet?” Paige asked.
Nadya shook her head. “We were taken by these Kushtime before reaching it. Gunari tried to tell the pilot to come back, but . . .” Noticing the lost expression on Paige’s face, she sighed and said, “Your Mongrels, we call them Kooshteemay.” Although she slowed down to pronounce that word for her, she wasn’t about to break stride any more than that. “They took us through the ground and away from the jet before the Full Bloods could get to us. Our pilot had to take off because he was being surrounded. Gunari shouted for him to stop. That was the last we heard before the explosion.”
Looking over to Milosh, Paige asked, “What about him?”
Another Mongrel became visible as it shed its cloak. Reappearing next to the cot, it sniffed Milosh and said, “This one’s turned.”
“I can help him,” Paige said. “All I need is my medical kit.”
“And where’s that?” Quinn asked from another part of the room.
It wasn’t until Paige spun around to face her that she saw that the rest of the basement was nothing more than a simple storage space fenced off within a larger room. The last time she’d seen her medical kit was when she’d restocked it for her trip to Canada. Doubting that Burke or Salvatore were up for a run to the Great White North, she turned to Nadya and said, “You guys said you brought your own medical supplies, right?”
“We did,” Nadya replied, “but they were in the plane.”
“Tough luck for him,” Burke said.
“What’s that mean?”
Stepping forward to put herself between Paige and the digger, Quinn said, “You know what that means. It means he’s going to turn into a Half Breed and there’s nothing to do about it but put him down before he is broken.”
“We’re not there yet,” Paige snapped. “He fought and bled right alongside me, and I won’t just stand by and let a partner go when things get hard. Not again!”
“You want to go up top among those Full Bloods?” Quinn asked.
“We’ll have to eventually, right?”
Quinn’s eyes had the glint of polished stones within the smooth, furry contours of her face. Her snout had shrunken, along with the pointed ears that sprang straight up from the top of her head. One by one she checked silently with the other Mongrels. And one by one they nodded back at her. Shifting her focus to Paige, she said, “We can help you get to what’s left of your plane by distracting the Full Bloods. We can’t guarantee they’ll all come after us, and we sure as hell can’t guarantee the Half Breeds will follow. He’s got less than an hour before the process is too far along to stop. If you’re not back here with that medicine or whatever it is you have, we take care of him ourselves.”
Nadya placed a hand on Paige’s shoulder. “Agreed.”
“Once this is done,” the feline Mongrel continued, “we’ve got some things to discuss.”
Paige took a moment to check the remaining magazines for her Beretta. The one already in the pistol was half full, and there was a fresh one in her jacket pocket. “I’m sure you do,” she