smaller Full Blood coming after them. Minh’s dark red fur was slicked back against the low narrow frame of her four-legged form. As her paws grabbed the dirt to propel her onward, her head pumped back and forth like a racehorse in the home stretch. Only one or two more of those strides was all that would be needed for her to get within striking distance of Nadya. A few seconds after that, Paige knew she would be the one feeling her body cut down by the Full Blood’s claws.
She twisted in an attempt to take a shot with her Beretta. Before she could pull her trigger, however, something sprang up from the ground to grab onto Minh’s front paw. It clamped around Minh’s ankle and tightened its grip enough to be pulled almost completely from the earth by the Full Blood’s momentum. The digger reached up with his free hand, grabbed Minh’s shoulder and sank the pointed end of his beak into her back. That forced a yelp from her, which quickly turned into an angry snarl. As Paige turned back around to look where she was going, the blurred form of a cloaked Mongrel bolted past her to hit Minh squarely in the ribs. All three shapeshifters rolled to the side, biting and tearing amid a growing cloud of dust.
Knowing better than to waste time counting her blessings, Paige worked her aching legs harder and focused on the little buildings at the edge of the airstrip. Along the way, she and Nadya encountered several Half Breed carcasses in various mangled poses after being ripped apart by what could have either been a Mongrel or a wood chipper. Paige hurdled those and quickened her pace after making it around the edge of the closest building and getting within sight of the jet wreckage.
There was more of the Gulfstream left than she’d anticipated. The jet lay on its side with one wing reaching toward the sky and the other smashed into scrap metal beneath the bulk of its body. Fires crackled at various points along the fuselage and black smoke rolled up from the cracked tail section. As the stench of burnt plastic and charred steel hit her, Paige slowed to a jog and stopped.
“Where’s the medical kit stored?” she asked.
Nadya came up alongside her and stopped, to bending down to place her hands on her knees. “There was one in the cockpit and another in the passenger cabin near the door.”
“You mean the door that’s flat against the cement?”
Looking up to see which side the plane was laying on, Nadya replied, “Yes. That side.”
“Then we’re headed to the cockpit.”
Both women ran along the airstrip, doing their best to ignore the heat from the fires and the constant threat of being stricken down by a force of nature on four legs. The closer they got to the downed plane, the more it looked like a giant creature that had been frozen while stretching an arm up from a turbulent, smoky sea. The nose cone was cracked open and split against the runway, leaving the tail section several feet off the ground. Although that made it easier for Paige to get to the cockpit, the mangled frame and shattered windows provided a formidable barrier between her and the pilot’s seat.
Half of the curved canopy at the front of the plane was completely gone and was mostly impassable due to the mangled structure. Using whatever footholds she could find, she climbed up the Gulfstream’s nose cone.
“What do you see?” Nadya asked from ground level.
Looking through a crooked frame of shattered glass or plastic, Paige spotted a control panel that had been reduced to a tangled mess of broken, exposed wires and cracked dials. Along with the throttle and flight control levers, it was wrapped around the slumping body of a young man who looked to have been cut in half by a set of rough pincers. “Just a lot of wrecked controls,” Paige said. “Where’s the kit?”
“Do you see where the pilot would be sitting?”
Trying not to meet the dead man’s final, desperate, pleading gaze, Paige replied, “Yeah.”
“The kit should be down near his left hand.”
The pilot’s left hand was nowhere to be found. When she forced herself to look at the section Nadya had described, she realized that the pilot’s left leg had also been sheared away by the crash, or by the Full Blood that had surely followed it. Swearing under her breath, she pulled herself up to clear the