“I heard that flu’s actually kind of bad,” Cole said. “You throw up, get this gunk in your throat, and there are even some reports of people getting some kind of dementia.”
“Has anyone died from it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then it’s just another kind of sick,” she said. “The press always has to get worked up about something, so at least they’re not yammering about us. Right now, I just want to go to bed.”
“Are we sparring tomorrow?”
“Spar on your own.”
“You can tighten that sling and go a few rounds. Come on!”
“You heard me,” she shouted while marching from the kitchen.
Cole followed her and said, “I thought you were recovering. What happened to that?”
Paige’s bedroom was messier than usual and, despite the soap she’d made to mask her scent, still carried the fragrance of her skin and the shampoo she treated herself to when she didn’t expect to go out hunting.
“I think you’re forgetting something pretty important here,” he told her.
She squared her shoulders in a way that told him he was very close to regretting having stepped foot into her room. “What did I forget?”
“Your experiment worked. Sure, it may have backfired a little, but you threw down with a Full Blood. That thing should have torn your arm off, but it didn’t. It couldn’t even bite down to the bone! You may be wounded, but you can still fight.”
“Apart from allowing myself to become a chew toy, what the hell am I supposed to do against anything anymore?”
“So that’s it, huh?” he asked. “You’re pissed because you realized you can’t walk through fire after all. Join the rest of us measly humans.”
Paige lunged to grab his shirt. Having already been grabbed, hit, punched, swept, and generally knocked around during countless sparring matches, he knew what to expect. What he didn’t expect was for the impact of her fist against his chest to hit him like an aluminum baseball bat.
“I know all too well that I’m human,” she snarled. “That’s been made perfectly clear to me in more ways than you can imagine. How about you shove your analysis up your ass right along with your goddamn pity!”
“Hey Paige. Look down.”
Her scowl deepened as if her opponent had just tried to tell her that her shoelace was untied. When Cole nodded and looked down first, she followed suit.
The hand she’d used to grab his shirt was her right one, and she’d gotten it to move faster than she’d been able to in days. Her fingers were locked around a clump of his shirt and the sling dangled from her arm as if supported by her rather than the other way around.
“Oh my God,” she breathed.
“You’re shaken up, out of your element, and not feeling too good right now,” he said while patting the dead weight of her fist. “Believe me, I know all about that sort of thing.”
No longer trying to get away from him, Paige slowly flexed her arm as if the muscles had been packed in ice, then lowered it into the sling.
“You could always just twist that arm around and slap it where it needs to go,” Cole offered. “You know, like that constable in Young Frankenstein with the wooden hand?”
The sight of her trying to keep a straight face was one of the prettiest he had seen in a long time. She let her head droop so it bumped against his chest. “God damn it,” she groaned. “I’ve messed up before, but why did I have to mess up like this?”
He wrapped Paige up in his arms and ran his fingers through the tangled, unkempt mess of her hair. “Look at the bright side,” he told her. “If we ever need a light, we can set the tip of your finger on fire. Or if there’s a door we can’t open, we can use you as a battering ram.”
“I get it. You can stop now.”
A heavy knock thumped through the room.
“That’s enough, Cole. No need for sound effects.”
“I didn’t do that,” he said. “Someone’s knocking on our door.”
Another couple of thumps rolled through the restaurant. Paige stepped away and looked down at his feet. “You weren’t stomping on the floor?” she asked.
“No.”
She whipped around so quickly that she almost knocked Cole onto his butt in her haste to get to the panel on the wall next to her door. Once there, she poked at a set of buttons with her left hand. “Someone’s at the front door,” she said while reaching around to take a little .32 caliber revolver from where it had been tucked at the small of her back. “Take this.”
“You really don’t like salesmen, do you?”
Scowling in a familiar Do what I say and be quick about it way, she hurried into the kitchen, where her shotgun was propped against a wall. Cole got a feel for the weight of the pistol and then flipped the cylinder open to double-check that the gun was loaded. He didn’t have time to check what sort of rounds they were, but they all came out of the barrel fast enough to damage human and monster alike.
The windows at the front of the restaurant were boarded up. The main door was latched, bolted, and held shut with steel posts. He stepped up to a slit in one of the windows, which allowed him to get a look outside at the solitary figure standing at the door and a cab that tore out of the parking lot as if the driver had just been tipped off about a shipment of drunk tourists arriving at O’Hare.
“We’re closed,” Cole said through the door.
The voice that came from the other side was strained to the point of cracking. “I need to talk to you.”
Cole’s scars itched, alerting him to the presence of Nymar. Even if the man outside was the only Nymar in the vicinity, he knew there should have been more of a reaction than that. Since Paige hadn’t said anything about the Nymar before, she must not have felt much of anything either. Cole found her in the shadows on the other side of the door with her shotgun aimed at the entrance.
“What do you want?” he asked the visitor.
“I have to talk to the Skinners,” the man replied. “If you’re one, then you’ve got to open this door!”
Cole glanced at Paige again and got a single nod from her. Whatever was on the other side of that door, she was ready for it.
After removing the iron bar from its bracket in the floor and pulling back the bolts, Cole twisted the knob to unlock one of the more traditional mechanisms. When he finally pulled the door open a few inches, he held it there with the side of his foot, as if that could keep out a rowdy drunk, not to mention anything farther away from the human end of the spectrum.
The man outside was dressed in dark cargo pants and boots that could have come off the shelf of any army surplus store. His tattered flannel shirt was open to reveal a bare chest covered in black markings that looked like a massive tribal tattoo. Unlike a tattoo, however, the Nymar’s markings trembled beneath his flesh as the spore attached to the vampire’s heart shifted within its shell. He had a young, slender face with a minimum of whiskers protruding from his chin, and greasy, light-colored hair that hung down to his shoulders. His cheeks were shallow, but not sunken, and his eyes were wide with barely contained panic.
Cole held the .32 out where it could be seen before having to shove it into the other man’s face. “What do you want?”
“Are you Cole?” the Nymar asked. “I need to talk to Cole or Paige. I was told they’re here. I need to talk to them.”
“Who are you?”
Although he appeared to be looking around while self-consciously pulling his shirt closed, it was obvious that his eyes were twitching as much as the tendrils beneath his skin. “Stephanie told me the Skinners were here.”
“Damn it. I’m Cole.”
Even when she wasn’t anywhere in sight, the head of Chicago’s Nymar skin trade still found ways to make things difficult. If the shaky man was sent by Stephanie, he could be anything from an annoying junkie to a suicide bomber.
When the Nymar reached out for him, Cole brought the .32 up and tightened his finger around the trigger almo
st enough to drop the hammer. “Stay where you are!”
The man pressed one hand against the door and the other against its frame. Leaning forward caused his shirt to fall open and his long hair to drop like a set of light brown curtains on either side of his face.
“I said stay put,” Cole warned as he extended an arm to keep him from crossing the threshold.
The man outside gripped the door and frame with enough strength to break them both. His entire body convulsed and pink foam spilled from his mouth with a gurgling heave. Tendrils pressed outward to become swollen ridges upon the Nymar’s torso. When they tore completely through the visitor’s chest, Cole pulled his trigger while jumping back to give Paige a clear shot. Even as the shotgun roared, he doubted it would be enough to do the job.
Chapter 5
The Nymar straightened up, threw his head back and would have screamed if his throat wasn’t already filled with the black appendages that began at his heart and now frantically grasped for something else. Cole’s bullets punched into him but did as much damage as they would to a bowl of pudding. Paige’s shotgun blast hit the Nymar before he could take one step into the restaurant, opening a hole for more tendrils to explode from his chest. Thinner strings poked out of the Nymar’s mouth, followed by larger ones emerging through his neck and wrists.
“Jesus!” Cole shouted as he sent the Nymar staggering backward with a straight kick to his center of mass.
The tendrils looked like eels that had been left out to dry, but felt more like solid muscle as they tried to grab Cole’s ankle and snake their way up his leg. They stretched toward the doorway and then grasped at empty air in a futile attempt to find something to latch on to. The Nymar’s back hit the ground and he stared up at the cloud-smeared sky, pulling one last gulp of humid air into tattered lungs. The tendrils stretched out in all directions before wilting like dozens of legs sprouting from a dead spider.
Once the Nymar stopped moving, sounds from the street pressed harder against Cole’s ears. It was late, but not late enough for them to have complete privacy so close to Laramie Avenue. “Let’s get him inside,” Paige said. “Actually, you get him inside.”
“Is that you acting helpless again?”
“No, it’s me pulling rank on you. Get him inside.”
There wasn’t any way to argue with that, so Cole tucked the .32 in his belt, grabbed the Nymar’s ankles and dragged it through the front door. Every step of the way, Paige kept the shotgun pointed at the mess of tendrils. The barrel rested upon her right arm, her left hand wrapped around the grip. It wasn’t the safest way to carry a loaded gun, but it would suffice for the few steps required to get away from prying eyes.
The Nymar’s arms dangled uselessly and his head wobbled from side to side as Cole pulled him into Rasa Hill. Tendrils hung from his mouth like dark strings of phlegm. The thicker ones sprouting from his chest were almost solid enough to be the tentacles of a sea creature that had died while coming up for air. All the other filaments merely dangled from their various escape routes like wet strings.
After shutting and locking the front door, Paige settled over the Nymar with her shotgun pointed at its heart. “Did you do anything to him?” she asked.
Cole looked up at her as if she’d suddenly become the most unbelievable thing in the room. “Did I do something to him?!”
“Well I’ve never seen anything like that!”
“He said Steph sent him.”
After handing Cole the shotgun, Paige sat at one of the tables and dug her phone out of her pocket. “Hi, Steph,” she said after dialing. “Were you expecting my call?”
While Paige tore into one of the leading members of Chicago’s Nymar community, Cole took a closer look at the one on the floor. He gathered just enough courage to reach down and poke at one of the tentacles protruding from the corpse’s chest. Even though he hadn’t seen many of them outside of a body, Nymar tendrils all seemed to have a fluid, almost delicate quality to them. These were tough, leathery, and becoming coarser by the second. Instead of its spore absorbing every last bit of blood or moisture in its host’s body before crumbling away, this one had been turned into something resembling a tangle of old tree roots.
“Yeah?” Paige said sharply into her phone. “Well if you don’t know who he is, then how the hell are we supposed to find out?”
That was a good question. When Cole heard it, he came up with a solution that seemed way too easy to work. Since he didn’t have anything better to do at the moment, he reached through the drooping tentacles to pat the dead Nymar’s pockets.
“His name’s Peter Walsh,” he announced.
Paige nodded to shut him up and kept talking to the Nymar who ran Chicago’s lucrative Blood Parlors.
Snapping his fingers at Paige because he knew it annoyed the hell out of her, Cole caught her attention and held it. “This guy’s name is Peter Walsh,” he repeated.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” he replied while showing her the dead Nymar’s wallet.
When Paige held out a hand, Cole slapped the wallet into it.
“So,” she said into her phone while looking over the Nymar’s driver’s license, “this guy Peter comes all the way from St. Louis and you send him straight to me? What made you do a thing like that?” After a few seconds she smirked and added, “Of course he’s really here. He said you sent him. Anything else you want to tell me about this guy?”
The only other things in the dead Nymar’s pockets were keys, some money, and a rumpled piece of paper. Cole examined each in turn while Paige continued to send some grief through the digital connection to Rush Street.
“Your Blood Parlors are only open because we allow them to stay that way,” she reminded her. “If Cole and I have to come down there again…Oh you heard I was hurt, did you? Why don’t I just drive on down there and show you how badly I’m hurt? You want to bank on me being too wounded to pull a trigger?” Paige smiled again. If her other arm wasn’t in a sling, she would have put it to work patting herself on the back. “All right, then. I’m listening.”
Cole took the wallet from her and sifted through it. Peter Walsh didn’t have any objections to the intrusion and he didn’t have anything interesting in his wallet. Although, Cole did find it somewhat interesting that a vampire needed a driver’s license, auto insurance, and memberships to several different retail discount clubs.
“Don’t worry,” Paige said definitively, “I will. ’Bye.” She ended the call and stuck her phone back into her pocket. “Steph says this guy just showed up earlier tonight and asked about where he could find the Skinners.”
“Do you believe her?”
“No, because there are Skinners in St. Louis. At least there were the last time I checked.” A twitch showed on Paige’s face, which betrayed the slightest bit of concern. “Maybe I should check again. Steph kept to her story well enough, and with her Blood Parlors doing such good business, she’s got no reason to make a move against us.”
“And if she did, she would just send a bunch of goth kids with guns,” Cole offered. “That’s more her style. Maybe Peter didn’t want to talk to the Skinners in St. Louis. Maybe he only wanted to see us. He did ask for us by name.”
“Steph gave him our names along with our address. She said the guy seemed desperate and he looked sick, so she wanted to make sure he got here quick enough to make a mess. Her words.”
And Cole knew that was just the sort of thing Stephanie would say. He was familiar enough with the Nymar madam to know that driving to Rush Street just to kick in her door would be more trouble than it was worth. If the Chicago Nymar wanted to clean out Rasa Hill, they would have sent a much clearer message.
Paige walked over to Peter’s body and started prodding the various tendrils that had emerged from his wrist and mouth. “Steph was right. He did seem desperate and he certainly was sick. These tendrils are almost solid. They should be squishier. More like a jellyfish.” She was in trainer mode. Her voice to
ok on a calmer quality when she was showing Cole the ropes.
“Do they normally get that big?” he asked.
Shifting her attention to the tentacles hanging out of Peter’s chest, she took hold of one and waggled it as if shaking a dog’s paw. “Yeah, but they don’t become so solid. They need to move around inside a body, not fill it up completely. The spore like to curl up and stay warm, not…this.”
“So what happened?”
Paige stood up and shrugged her shoulders. “Hell if I know. Maybe that’s what he wanted to tell us. I honestly don’t think Steph knows anything either, but we could go talk to her to be sure.”
“He’s from St. Louis,” Cole pointed out. “You said there are Skinners there?”
“Ned Post. He’s been there ever since Rico and I left. To be honest, Ned’s mostly a night watchman but maybe he—”
Suddenly, the Nymar braced himself with both hands against the floor, propped himself up and got to his feet. “It’s in my blood!” he said, his mouth covered in a greasy sludge and the tendrils that had come out of him no longer moving. After hacking up more of the sludge, Peter added, “They’re part of it. They gotta be part of it!”
“What’s in your blood?” Cole asked.
Although Peter tried to breathe, the air merely leaked out through his chest.
When the Nymar looked down at his own mutilated torso, Cole took hold of his chin and forced him to look up again. “Look at me, Peter. A part of what? Who are you talking about?”
Peter drew some resolve from whatever was keeping him going and said, “The nymphs. They’re part of the infection that’s in me. It’ll kill all of us!”
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