“You are Russian,” Milosh said from the passenger seat. “So nobody cares what you think.” He was a stocky man with a full beard that would have spread like a bandito mask across the bottom of his face if not for the two scars running along his cheeks to part the whiskers like smoke.
The driver shot Milosh a piercing glare, which became friendlier when he shifted his eyes toward the Skinners. “Since he is a Czech pig with no manners, I will introduce myself. I am George.”
“And that,” Milosh cut in, “is Paige and Cole. The other one, I do not know.” Settling back into his seat, he grunted, “Pig, indeed.”
“So what happened back there?” Paige asked.
George and Milosh both looked into the closest mirror they could find as it they thought there might be werewolves nipping at the SUV’s bumper. “Ever since the Breaking Moon,” Milosh explained, “the Vitsaruuv have all been crazy.”
“Like they were ever sane,” George grunted.
“They are changed now. The ones with the tusks. They showed up in America first, but now they are here. Even the Kushtime are changed.”
George glanced back at the Skinners. “He means Mongrels.”
Milosh nodded and carried on. “At first we thought the Weshruuv all move over to America.”
“And you didn’t mind that, huh?” Paige asked. “As long as the Full Bloods are gathered on our turf, you guys just don’t care?”
“Maybe you forget that I was there during the Breaking Moon!” Milosh roared. “Drina and Gunari were killed when that insane Weshruuv brought our plane down. Tobar is still behind bars in your country! He may be dead for all we know.” Milosh shifted in his seat. The left sleeve of his jacket had been cut off and stapled shut because there was no arm inside it. He’d lost it to Minh when they fought in Atoka, but the Amriany seemed less concerned about that than he did about his next question. “Is he dead?”
Paige looked over to Cole, deferring to him since he’d taken it upon himself to keep up on the research. As much as he wanted to say otherwise, Cole replied, “I don’t know. The prisons were hit hard when the Half Breeds showed up. There just wasn’t enough time to move everyone and—”
“And a foreigner being held captive doesn’t matter to your police,” Milosh said.
“Lots of men and women were killed when those things started to swarm everywhere,” Cole replied tersely. “The Half Breeds were hungry, and prisons were just big buildings full of meat to them. Hospitals got hit just as badly. Lots of lives were lost, just like they’re being lost everywhere else. You want to focus on what we’re doing here or would you rather spout off some more?”
“You must excuse him,” George said. “He makes everything so political. All Czechs are like that.”
“You want to know what all Russians are like?” Milosh asked.
And, as further proof that the world was indeed going crazy, Paige took the role of peacemaker. “So you and your men were attacked outside of that club. I take it that wasn’t random?”
Drawing a knife from a shoulder holster that had been modified to carry it instead of a gun, Milosh said, “No. Not random. Someone knows our networks. Our codes. Everything they might need to guess where we might be and what we might be doing.”
Cole winced and pushed himself as far back into his seat as the cushions would allow before saying, “I hate to ask this, but is there any chance that one of your people is leaking the information? Like . . . maybe someone who was captured and questioned?”
Judging by the wariness in his voice and the lack of a knife shoved in his general direction, Cole suspected that Milosh had considered the possibility as well. “Tobar doesn’t know enough to have caused this kind of damage. And even if he did, he wouldn’t have lived long enough to have gotten it to the right people.”
“Who the hell are the right people?” George snapped. “The Full Bloods? They’re not people. They’re animals!”
“You’ve only dealt with one of them,” Milosh scolded. “Esteban isn’t like the others.”
Paige and Cole both sprung to attention. “What do you know about Esteban?” she asked.
“My country’s in his territory. Has been for over a century. He’s an animal that prefers to walk on all fours and would rather eat five children before bothering to bring down a grown man.”
“I don’t care which Full Blood it is,” Cole said. “They’re not the kind to take prisoners and they sure aren’t the kind to question anyone about anything. They don’t have to. That sounds more like a Nymar tactic.”
Milosh grimaced as if he’d suddenly gotten a taste of sour milk. “Old tactics don’t mean shit anymore. All of the animals have started playing by different rules.”
“No,” Cole said sternly. “They’ve just upped their game. The Full Bloods have their own thing going and it’s on a much bigger scale than sniffing out each specific thorn in their side. They’ve started engaging the military and winning. If you haven’t had that sort of thing over here yet, it’s only a matter of time.”
“Cole’s right,” Paige added. “You have to see what’s going on back home to get just how little the Full Bloods need subtlety right now.”
The Amriany in the front seats shared a few quick but loaded glances before Milosh nodded and began using the tip of his blade to pick something out from beneath a fingernail.
“Maybe it has been happening here,” George said while looking at them in the rearview mirror.
“Jesus Christ almighty,” Milosh growled. “It has been happening. No maybes about it.” When he wheeled around, he used his knife as the world’s most dangerous pointer. “You Skinners don’t give a damn about the rest of us. That’s the problem.”
“We’ve been kind of busy!” Paige said.
“You’re goddamn right you have. Unleashing God knows what!”
“Since when did you become so religious?” Cole asked.
The question was so simple and spoken so calmly that it threw the volatile hunter for a loop. Having reset his temperament, Milosh placed his knife flat on his knee so he could steady himself using the back of George’s seat as the SUV rattled over a stretch of rough road. “I know what happened during the Breaking Moon. I’m not talking about that. By then it was too late to do much more than contain the storm. I’m talking about all the years before when you Skinners insisted on doing things your own way by tearing apart the monsters and making them a part of you. Then you made them a part of your cities! Then your whole damn country!”
“What in the hell is he talking about?” Cole asked.
“He’s talking about the reason Skinners and Amriany have been working separately for so long,” George said. When all he got was silence from the backseat, he asked, “Don’t you know your own history?”
“Spare me the old-school feuding bullshit,” Paige grunted with a wave of her hand. “This isn’t the time for it.”
“No,” Milosh told her. “Now is definitely the time because those differences from the past still hold up today. If you bothered reading anything from your own Jonah Lancroft or anyone else’s journals from centuries past, you’d know that we warned you something like this would happen.”
“I read a lot of Lancroft’s journals,” Cole said. “And he didn’t mention specifics about any feud between Skinners and Amriany.”
Milosh grumbled something in his own language as he flopped back around to sit in his seat without contorting to look at the people behind him. Finally, he said, “The Amriany have been warning since the first settlers went to hunt Full Bloods in the New World that using vampire blood and werewolf skin was a mistake. It’s unnatural and it’s disgraceful.”