Read Online Teeth of Beasts (Skinners) by Marcus Pelegrimas - Free Book Online Page A

He sat down with his back against the rear bumper and stretched his legs out. Soon, Abby was cross-legged in front of him and dabbing at the gashes around his ear with a towel moistened by water she’d poured from a plastic squeeze bottle.
    “Those look worse than they are,” he said.
    “I know. Scalp wounds bleed a lot.”
    “How many staplers did you throw at Stu to learn that?”
    She laughed and splashed some bottled water onto a towel. “Only about seven or eight, and they were gushers. So…that stuff in the woods was pretty weird, huh?”
    “It sure was,” Cole chuckled. “But it was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”
    “Fun?”
    “Keep in mind, I’ve been driving for days and got fired by my best friend. Before that was Kansas City, so yeah, this was fun.”
    Trading the wet towel for a packet of bandages, she told him, “It was amazing to see something like that Chupacabra up close. After that, I was terrified.”
    “I felt the same way when I first saw a Full Blood.”
    “They’re a lot worse than that thing in your trunk, right?”
    Cole couldn’t answer that question right away because he was too busy laughing. When he caught a breath, he told her, “If a Full Blood was within two hundred miles of this place, that little bastard in my trunk wouldn’t have poked its head out of its hole. Come to think of it, does MEG always get a lot of calls about Chupacabra sightings?”
    “Not like this one. Usually there are a few slaughtered chickens on a farm or a couple missing hound dogs, but this one was picking off small animals for weeks. I really would have liked to learn more about it. I brought a tracker and everything. We could have tagged it and followed it from here. Over the course of a few months, we might have learned its migration patterns or possibly even found a whole nest of them. I really wish you would have given me a chance to do my job.”
    “Your job?” Cole asked as he climbed to his feet. “You seriously wanted to watch it move on a computer screen like just another blip?”
    Abby stood up and looked at him as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. “That’s why we came here. That’s what we do. MEG finds these things so we can prove they exist.”
    “And then what? Clip something into its hair, go back to your office and take notes as it runs from one spot to another? And when the blip stays in one spot for a while, do you flip a coin to decide whether it’s sleeping or digging a pit trap to cripple anyone or anything that comes along?”
    “You almost fell into a hole,” she said. “Let’s not blow that out of proportion. If you’d twisted your ankle, would you have blamed that on an animal too?”
    “I almost fell into a trap, not just a hole. Either those rocks at the bottom were put there on purpose or they’re from the smallest cave-in I’ve ever heard of. And that creature led me straight to it! When I fell in, it circled back to get me. Weren’t you watching when this happened?”
    Anger flashed across Abby’s face, quickly followed by uncertainty and nervousness. “I’ve never seen anything like this, Cole. Some pretty weird things happen on our investigations, but I’ve never had an entity crawl onto my back and try to rip off a piece of me to save for later.”
    Cole placed his hands on her arms to rub them comfortingly. “I know what you mean. I haven’t been at this for long, but the Skinner training program just runs at a faster pace than MEG’s. Also, things have been kind of crazy lately.”
    “I know,” Abby said. “I’ve seen the pictures. One video that was supposed to have been taken by someone’s cell phone is of a big thing on four legs running down an interstate.” Letting out a tired laugh, she added, “Just goes to show how far some people will go to ride upon such strange coattails.”
    “Actually,” Cole sighed, “that one’s probably real.”
    The color that had started to return to Abby’s face