Those words slapped Paige in the face hard enough to keep her quiet.
After putting the syringe away and rolling the bundle up again, Ned tucked it under his arm and approached the door. He stood with his hand on the knob and his foot against the bottom edge in a way that would allow him to keep it from being opened if anyone else tried to join them. “We’ve killed three of those Nymar since we arrived,” he said. “And still, whenever they show themselves again, there’s three in the group other than Wes. Until now we’ve had the leader pegged as a man who looks to be in his thirties with slicked-back hair. He leads the charge on nights like the one you experienced, but that woman always follows. We never thought she was the leader.”
“Why? Because she’s a she?” Paige rubbed her arm, which now warmed as the serum passed through her system. “If you guys aren’t wise to that trick by now, your Skinners might as well pack it up and go home. This stuff kinda burns. Are there any side effects or anything? What if I’m allergic?”
“The only side effect to one dose is the burning. At least, as far as we know. If the Nymar had gotten too deep into you, you would’ve known by now.”
“How?” Paige asked.
“You’d be dead.” Smirking at the way he’d knocked the attitude from her, he added, “You’re fine. Get up, stretch your legs with a walk over to that bed and pick up my card. Don’t bother with the address. If you want to call me, use the phone number, but dial the last four digits in reverse order.”
Paige wasn’t about to take her eyes off of him. She continued nursing her arm, trying not to let the discomfort from her wounds show on her face. After giving her another approving nod, Ned opened the door and left.
Once she’d lost sight of him through the door’s window, she pulled her burning arm in close to her body. Her neck hurt. Her side hurt. Her back hurt where she’d been knocked against the wall. Her head hurt for the same reason. Thoughts of scooting under the covers and curling into a ball drifted through her mind, accompanied by memories of random faces, songs, or anything else that had comforted her over the years.
Suddenly, everything hit her stomach like a load of rancid meat. She hated being pushed into a spot where there was nothing left to do but cry. “Fuck that,” she angrily grunted as she pulled herself up and struggled to free her legs from the snare of intricately tucked sheets and blankets. “Fuck that and fuck them.”
Her legs ached but she moved them anyway.
Everything else ached, but she clenched her teeth against it and turned the pain into kindling that made the flame in the center of her body burn even hotter. The first step she took was crooked and would have become a stumble if she hadn’t clenched her hand into a fist and pounded it against her upper thigh. She reached for the bandages at her neck with every intention of ripping them off, but paused before digging her nails into her skin. Instead, she left the gauze alone so she could snatch the business card from where it was lying at the foot of the other bed.
“You’re up?” someone said at the same time as the door was hastily opened. “That’s so great!”
The young woman who rushed through the door wasn’t wearing her Damn Yankees shirt anymore, but still had the same bouncy curl in her straw-colored hair. Oversized glasses would have dominated a cute face if not for the wide, beaming smile beneath them. She clutched her purse tightly until she got close enough to toss it onto a chair and tackle Paige with a hug.
“Still a little sore, Karen,” Paige grunted.
“Oh, sorry!” Backing away, she shrugged and placed a hand over her mouth as she lowered her voice and said “Sorry” again.
“It’s okay. How are you?”
“I’m fine. I feel terrible about what happened. When I heard, I rushed down here as fast as I could. Did Amy really take off somewhere?”
Paige looked at Karen and saw more than a friend dressed in new jeans and a faded peasant blouse. She saw a girl who still lived in the world that might as well have stopped existing for her a few nights ago. It was a warm, friendly place where the worst things that could come after you were other human beings. Even those tended to keep their distance more often than not. There was an openness to Karen’s face that looked like a childhood home as seen in the rearview mirror of a car speeding in the opposite direction.
“You just now heard about this?” Paige asked.
Karen folded her hands and nodded timidly. “I … I never liked those kinds of parties, but I wanted to be with you guys. I stayed for a while, but it just got to be too much so I left early.” Lowering her head only lined up her eyes with more of Paige’s bandages, so she turned to the side as she said, “I snuck out and had someone drive me back home. When I heard about what happened, I felt horrible. I should have been there with you.”
Before Paige knew what she was doing, she had Karen wrapped up in a hug that strained several of her bandaged wounds. She couldn’t remember the last time she cried, but felt the tears coming now. Clenching her eyes shut against the bitter droplets as she loosened her hold, she said, “Don’t apologize for missing out on what happened. I’m just glad one of us made it out of there as … as the same person that went in.”
“You’ll be the same too, Paige,” Karen replied while gently embracing her friend again. “All you need is time to heal. I’ll help any way I can. You and Tara will be better.”
“I don’t even know where Tara is, sweetie.”
“She’s in a room on the second floor.”
“What?”
Karen nodded. “She’s being examined.”
“Examined?”
“They were looking at some marks on her neck.”
Holding Karen at arm’s length, Paige asked, “What marks? What did they look like?”
“They were just lines. I couldn’t see much, but her skin was pale. The nurses were looking at her then, so the doctors are probably with her by now.”
“What room is she in?” Before Karen could answer, Paige spun her around and pushed her toward the door. “Never mind that. Just take me to her.”
“Hey! Watch what you’re—”
“You need to take me to her!” After nearly charging through the door before allowing it to open, Paige asked, “Did you see some other guy with her? An older man with rough skin and—”
She stopped as soon as she saw Ned at a nurse’s station farther down the hall. Karen was headed in that same direction, walking toward a bank of elevators a few paces away from Ned’s spot. Grabbing her once again, Paige redirected her almost hard enough to send her staggering into a wall. “Not that way.”
“Should you even be out of bed?”
“I’m fine. There’s the stairs. You said Tara was on the second floor?”
“Right, but take it easy!”
Paige didn’t let her go until they’d gotten past the heavy metal door leading to the stairwell. They had a few flights of stairs to negotiate, and Paige descended them as quickly as she could. The first time she stumbled, she felt Karen’s hands on her back and shoulder for support.
“What’s the hurry? Tara’s not going anywhere. You probably shouldn’t either.”
“Just take me to her, okay? Please?”
Karen’s sigh echoed within the concrete stairwell, and Paige kept up with her. As they approached the second floor and she heard the slap of her feet hitting the floor along with the sound of Karen’s flats, she realized her feet were bare. Looking down, she prayed she wouldn’t find one of those terrible, backward paper gowns wrapped around her body. Instead, she saw lilac pajama pants bearing the hospital logo and a plain gray T-shirt. Someone put her in those clothes soon after she’d gotten to the hospital, and she didn’t even remember it.
The door at the next landing was a heavy one that opened to a hall similar to the one they’d left behind. Rows of larger windows to her right looked in on examination rooms filled with families going through either the best or worst days of their lives.
“She was over this way,” Karen said a
s she marched down the hall. Most of the people they encountered had enough on their minds to overlook the two young women. “But we might not be able to see her. The man outside her room said she wouldn’t be able to have visitors.”
“What man?” Paige asked. “Was it an older guy named Ned?”
“I don’t know,” Karen replied.
“His name was on his shirt. He works here. Did he try to inject you with something?”
Karen didn’t know what to say to that, so she slipped into a soothing tone as she assured Paige everything was all right. That tone couldn’t have had a less soothing effect as Paige stomped along beside her. The hall bent around a corner, widening into a row of doors being visited by several nurses, orderlies, and people in street clothes trying to find their relatives as quickly as they could. Karen stopped to check a few of the rooms and eventually found the one she was after. Before she could step inside, however, the door opened and Paige was confronted by Tara, although her friend’s face was only vaguely familiar.
Tara’s skin was pasty and had a wet sheen that glistened beneath the stark hospital lights. Thin black markings stretched up from beneath the collar of a shirt bearing the hospital logo and stopped a few inches under her ear. They weren’t nearly as large as the markings on Wes, Hope, Evan, or Hector, but were just as dark and trembled excitedly beneath her flesh.
“Tara?” Paige said. “Are you okay?”
“There were doctors,” Tara replied drearily. “They wanted to tell me something.”
When her friend’s voice faded into a strained version of the one she knew, Paige got frustrated and anxious. “What’s wrong with you? What are those markings? Talk to me!”
Karen peered over Paige’s shoulder and tried to say something but was overcome by sobs that made it difficult for her to breathe.
“Not now, damn it!” Paige said as she wheeled around to deal with her. “We need to think before—”
But Karen wasn’t looking at either of her friends. She stared past them both, through the doorway and into Tara’s room. There were four bodies in there, stacked like bundles of soiled laundry between the two beds. Paige only saw the heads and feet at first, so she stepped farther into the room, to stand next to Karen, who had wandered in to look down at the gruesome find with both hands clasped over her mouth. Two of the bodies were dressed in white coats and the others wore baggy scrubs. All of them were covered in blood, un-moving and staring at different angles through eyes glazed over and frozen in an expression of terror.
Tara wandered past the other two girls and knelt beside the bodies. Reaching out to swipe her fingers against the coat of a woman who had a thin face and stringy blond hair, she scraped off some of the blood that had dried there and brought it to her lips. “Paige,” she said as she opened her mouth to reveal a set of fangs sprouting from her upper jaw. “I think I’m in trouble.”
Chapter Twenty
Corner of North Rush and East Huron Streets
Chicago
Present Day
Paige’s story had been interrupted several times with road trip necessities such as stops for gas, a pause to pick up some fast food, and the occasional phone call. Despite all of that, it seemed to Cole as if her voice never stopped. When she wasn’t speaking, Paige switched between refusing to look him in the eye and showing him more emotion than he’d thought her capable of displaying. She wasn’t finished when they reached Chicago but seemed to have run out of steam for the moment.
“So that woman you followed to Miami …?” he asked.
She nodded. “It was Hope.”
Rico shifted in the front seat after slapping the car into Park. “Enough story time, kids. We’ve got work to do.”
Although he couldn’t see the Blood Parlor from where Rico had parked, Cole knew it wasn’t far away. “What’s the plan?”
“We go in,” Paige said as she swapped out the ammunition in her pistol with a load that consisted strictly of rounds treated with the Nymar antidote, “and burn them down.”
“Just the three of us?” Cole asked. “I get it that we can’t let what happened to Raza Hill slide, but going in for payback now could get us killed. There’s more going on than just—”
“This ain’t got a damn thing to do with payback,” Rico said in a roar that filled the interior of the car and rattled the deepest bones in Cole’s body. “It’s not vengeance and it ain’t keeping the peace. This is strictly gangland shit.”
When Cole looked over to Paige for some level reasoning, he got a response that was spoken in a cold, emotionless tone. “We always try to keep things from going this way, but when they do, they need to be dealt with. If too many dangerous people step too far over the line, they need to get their feet stomped as quickly as possible.”
“Haven’t you heard a word anyone’s been saying?” Cole snapped. “MEG’s been calling, there’s crap all over the news. What we’ve seen ourselves is more than enough to tell us this situation is already way out of our control. Trying to lay down the law now is like tossing a bottle of water onto a fucking forest fire!”
“We won’t be the only ones making a move like this,” Rico assured him. “I’ve been talking to some of the others and they’re all tracking down any Nymar that may have a clue about what’s going on.”
“Are we coordinating with any other groups for this?” Cole asked.
Paige tucked a .45 into the holster under her arm and double-checked the weapons wedged into the modified holsters on her boots. “Nope.”
“They think they got us on the run,” Rico said. “That gives us an advantage.”
Cole nervously checked his own weapons while grunting, “They do have us on the run. We ran all the way to Philly and then Wisconsin.”
“Right. They’ve probably written us off and are getting ready to roll on whatever they got planned next. We hit them hard. Make them pay for burning us and then start peeling the skin off of some bloodsucker that might know where the next batch of shit is going down. Lather, rinse, repeat, and we’ll work our way to the top of this chain.”
Stuffing some extra magazines into his coat pockets, Cole muttered, “What if we get killed before making it to the second floor of that Blood Parlor?”
“Then our work is done,” she said calmly. “At least we won’t have to worry about this crap anymore. You wanted to go after these guys when Raza Hill was burning, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Cole replied.
“Now we’re doing it. If we wait any longer, they’ll implant spores in more than enough humans to make up for the Nymar that have been killed already. And those won’t be the kinky, voluntary seedings they normally use. These will be young, healthy people snatched off the streets or out of their cars so they can be dragged away and violated without being able to do a goddamn thing about it. That’s why I wanted you to read those journals, Cole. So far you’ve seen the Nymar under control, and even then, they still manage to come off as sexy assholes with fangs who are into the kinky stuff.
“You know what they are? They’re rapists. They control someone, tear them open and stick themselves in while someone else is forced to take it.” Something glistened at the corner of Paige’s eye, but was swallowed up as she narrowed her vision until she was glaring out at him and the rest of the world through slits. “When that spore gets inside someone that wants it, it makes them into something different than what they were. It makes them hungry and vile. When it wraps around the heart of someone who doesn’t want it, it keeps raping them from the inside out until their soul has no choice but to give in and just let it happen.”
She practically kicked her door open and joined Rico on the sidewalk. They were parked near an eight-story building on a corner where the structures were geared more toward business than pleasure. Straight lines, striated levels of color, and simple planters holding little bits of greenery were the norm. To the north, neon light spilled onto the sidewalks and loud music blended with voices that struggled to be heard over it. T
he hour was late, but not nearly late enough for the streets to be empty. There was a chill in the air that Cole could barely even feel on the parts of him that weren’t wrapped up in the new coat. His thoughts had been divided across too many fronts, but Paige had done a good job of narrowing them to a few cognitive avenues that were less friendly than the grittiest of Chicago’s alleyways.
Since the dancer who’d loaned them the car didn’t seem worried about getting it back, Rico didn’t spend much time getting it situated before joining them on the sidewalk. He tucked away a sawed-off shotgun in a harness that hung under the opposite arm from his trusty Sig Sauer and draped his leather jacket over the rig. The end of the shotgun barrel hung down below the laced side of the jacket, so he let that arm hang down to cover it. “Shit,” he growled as his cell phone chirped from another pocket. He grabbed it as though he meant to crush it in his callused paw of a hand, but flipped it open instead. “It’s Prophet.”
Paige strode up Rush Street, glaring at nearby pedestrians with a set of eyes that were sharper than any weapon at her disposal. Anyone who happened to look at the Skinners quickly looked away. “We’re not going in there to bargain with anyone or make threats, Cole.”
“Yeah, I kinda figured.”
“Every Nymar in that place will come at us. Steph must know we weren’t killed in that fire, so she’ll want to finish the job.”
“There were cameras around the perimeter of the Blood Parlor last time we were here,” Cole pointed out. “They may have seen us already.”
“Then let’s get in there.”
“All righty,” Rico said as he snapped his phone shut and pocketed it. “Prophet’s still with the Amriany. He says they’re following Bobby to San Antonio.”
“You think the Amriany are working with Bobby and Paul and those others?”
“Either that,” Rico said, “or those Gypsies are tracking them just like we are.”
Paige bent slightly at the waist and plucked the metaledged baton from its holster. “When we’re done here, if we don’t find any other leads, we’ll catch up with Prophet.”
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