Wild Blood by Nancy A. Collins Page A

stuck!”
    Skinner wondered what was going on. First there had been unendurable pain, but now he felt like he was a thousand miles away, watching everything from the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. It was what he imagined junkies felt when they shot up. His fear and pain were gone and in their place was something he could only describe as ecstasy. And then the Change was on him.
    Mother screamed like a woman as Rope wrapped his forearms under his friend’s armpits and yanked him free with a wet popping sound. Mother’s face was gray with shock as he clutched the front of his blood-smeared pants, his lips pulled into a rictus grin. The tattooed man said something under his breath—whether a curse or a call to God was moot—as the thing on the shower room floor got to its feet.
    It stood on its crooked hind legs and cocked its elongated head to one side. Its fur shone like moonlight on a still lake as it flexed its talons and rolled its stooped shoulders. It shook the beads of water from its silvery coat and licked its wrinkled snout with a long pink tongue. Upon seeing Mother whimpering and shivering like a newly whelped pup, it narrowed its golden eyes and growled.
    Rope stepped forward, positioning himself between the beast and his friend. He pulled a sharpened cafeteria spoon with a taped handle from its hiding place inside his shirt and lunged at the creature, burying the shiv in its chest.
    The creature howled as bright red blood jetted from the wound and swiped at Rope’s head with its claws, slicing open his face. The mute screamed wordlessly as he fell to his knees and frantically tried to put his eye back in its socket.
    The thing stepped past him and reached for Mother, propped against the wall, one hand still cupping his crushed genitals. “No,” the big man wept, his tears mingling with the tattooed one at the corner of his eye. “Please …”
    The creature grabbed a handful of Mother’s hair and pulled him to his feet as if he weighed as much as a kitten. The creature that, moments before, had been Skinner Cade found the smell of his enemy’s tears exciting.
    â€œPlease don’t kill me,” Mother begged.
    The thing’s teeth snapped shut on Mother’s throat. Blood, hot and fresh, spurted into its mouth, and it found it good.
    A muscular, denim-clad arm wrapped around the creature’s throat, yanking it free of its meal. It was Rope, coming to the aid of his homey, despite the fact one eye was dangling by an optic nerve and the right side of his face had been sliced down to the bone. The mute had the creature in a chokehold and was trying to crush its wind-pipe. And had he been battling a gangly teenager from Seven Devils, Arkansas, he probably would have succeeded.
    Instead, the monster grabbed Rope’s wrist and easily flipped the mute over its shaggy shoulder, twisting his arm a quarter turn as he struck the floor. There was a loud snapping sound, like that of a green tree branch being broken. Rope opened his ruined mouth and issued a shriek only his killer could hear. The werewolf gave the mute’s arm a final wrench, snarling in triumph as the limb came off in its claws.
    The last thing Rope saw before he bled to death on the floor of the Los Lobos County Prison Farm was the beast that was once Skinner Cade hunkered down on its haunches, gnawing his still-twitching right arm like a soup bone.

Chapter Nine
    Caged.
    Everywhere he looked, there were gray walls and no way out. Everything stank of human sweat and other secretions. Mingled with the physical odors were far less tangible, yet equally real scents—those of frustration, anger, hate and desperation. They impregnated the walls of the correctional facility like a toxic perfume, and made his fur stand on end and his teeth ache.
    As he skulked about on the catwalks that connected the upper tiers of the cell block, he heard some of the humans return from dinner. He dropped to his