Vampire Uprising by Marcus Pelegrimas Page B

the path he’d dug beneath the surface, dislodged earthen plates rattled over his squirming back. The motion stopped and one of the plates was shoved aside so he could poke his head up several paces away from either of the werewolves. “He’s right,” Max said to the other Mongrels. “We shouldn’t follow someone like Kayla if she’s not willing to accept us. But we won’t follow the likes of you, Liam. Not anymore.”
    “I’ve never seen anything like you,” Randolph admitted. “Our two kinds have fought many times, but there have never been survivors to go through this sort of change.”
    “That’s not true,” Max said. “The survivors of those battles were always killed after the fight was over. Put down for their own good, we were told.”
    “It’s in our history,” Lyssa told him. “Most of it’s known only to the pack leaders, but it’s there. I saw it for myself in Kansas City. Some of the Mongrels that were wounded while fighting you were killed by Kayla herself. I was tending to my husband after he was wounded by Liam when she came and told me to rest. She thought I was gone, but I watched from a distance and saw her slash his throat. After it was done, she told me he’d died and that we should burn his body immediately.”
    Randolph’s brow lifted slightly above his crystalline eyes. “So she knows about the change?”
    “She knows the rumor,” Max said. “I spoke to her when the humans in KC were still cleaning up the mess Liam made. She knew something would happen, but not what. I think she was hoping to find some missing element that would make a difference between us changing into whatever she feared and changing into a Full Blood.” Looking to Randolph, he asked, “Is there?”
    “Honestly, I don’t know. Most of the times I’ve encounteredMongrels, I’ve been forced to fight back a swarm of them intent on killing me.” Holding up a thick hand before the inevitable argument came, he added, “Whatever the reason for our past conflict, it’s behind us for now.” The wounds on that hand were closing like clay being reshaped by an unseen sculptor. His leg was in much worse condition, but not as bad as it had been a short while ago. “Things are different. Do you know of a Skinner named Jonah Lancroft?”
    “The Mind Singer spoke of him,” Lyssa said. “For a while I thought I’d only dreamt that name. Is he real?”
    “He was, but I lost track of him over sixty years ago. Lancroft was a creator. He made things to help the Skinner cause, and it’s possible he came up with a way to hide his scent from us. There are groups of Skinners meeting in Philadelphia right now. Loose talk among them mentions Lancroft’s name and that he was the one behind the Mud Flu. It’s also said that he was killed by his own kind.”
    “Does Lancroft have a way to complete our conversion into Full Bloods?” Lyssa asked.
    Always quick to pounce on an opportunity, Liam jumped in with, “If anyone would have such a thing, it would have been him.”
    “Their intent is to kill us, not help us become more powerful. The reason I asked about Lancroft is that he was rumored to have created a way to inhibit our ability to heal. The Skinners must rely on antiquated methods of harming us, but we’ve still been able to heal after surviving a fight with them.”
    “Well,” Liam said as he turned the right side of his face toward the others, “more or less.”
    “Liam’s eye may well heal if given enough time,” Randolph said. “Anyone who has seen the Mind Singer knows that some of his wounds never did.”
    “Got his neck snapped somewhere along the line,” Liam said. “Something like that should have either killed poor Henry before he became one of us or cleared up after his first change.”
    “He was a Full Blood, wasn’t he?” Max asked. “Wasn’tthat enough to sustain him?”
    Randolph sighed and turned his back on the others as if he’d either become fascinated by the rugged