That’s when the lights went out.
“Fire’s spreading!” Rico shouted as he stepped out of the room he’d been clearing. “Can’t get out through the bar!”
The woman at the far end of the hall shifted her solid black eyes just enough to look past the Skinners and the vampires who swarmed them. As if acknowledging Rico’s statement, she turned and headed back into the security office.
Because of the fire, complete darkness was unable to get a grip on the Blood Parlor. Flashes of bright orange and brilliant white chewed through a thickening wall of smoke, creating a churning roar that subtly masked the muffled sirens approaching from Rush Street. In the flickering light cast by the blaze, the remaining Nymar sprouted their tiger-stripe camouflage as if their bodies were being embraced by the acrid smoke. They all flowed toward the security office, which was exactly where Paige and Rico were headed.
“Come on!” Rico said as he turned to where Cole was stooping down to get a look at one of the figures on the floor. “We’ve only got one shot at getting out of here without having to wade through a whole lotta cops!”
Suddenly, a Nymar exploded from the security office. He had the wide shoulders and barrel chest of a man who drew a salary just for being huge and could have kept the friskiest of the Blood Parlor’s customers in line. Less than half a second before Rico could react, Paige shot the Nymar in the chest and then sent him to the floor with a straight kick that landed at the guy’s belt level.
“Cole!” she shouted. “Get over here now!”
Although he could feel the heat pressing in on him from the waiting room, Cole didn’t let it push him from his spot. “You guys should see this!”
“See what? This whole fucking place is done!” Rico bellowed.
Overhead, a piece of metal snapped and the sprinkler system started raining rusty water onto the hall. Flames licked at the other end of the hall, and the set of bedroom doors closest to the waiting room were already beginning to smolder. Water sprayed against the back of Cole’s head and poured off his shoulders as he leaned down to tug at the collar of the Nymar lying on the ground. The man’s shirt was open at the neck to reveal a plain white undershirt wet enough to be plastered to his chest and bloody enough for the stains to soak almost all the way through.
“This guy’s human!” Cole shouted.
Rico stood so he could see both of his two partners. The lights were still on inside the little security office, so it wasn’t difficult to keep track of Paige. “What? Just come on!”
“The others show their markings in this light. Some are already drying up! This one’s just bleeding and it’s just red blood. He’s human!”
Cole was still looking down at the sucking chest wounds when Rico grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him to his feet. “It don’t matter if he’s a robot sent from the future,” he said. “We gotta go.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The security office was about half the size of one of the private bedrooms. It was packed to the rafters with television monitors, desks, a few cabinets, and enough computer equipment to record all the activities of Steph’s girls and their clients, store it, and broadcast it to pay sites all across the Internet. If ignorance was bliss, the subscribers to those sites who were ignorant about the true nature of vampires had been spending the last few years blissfully lapping up anything connected to a sexy face with pointed teeth. Even as the Blood Parlor burned, the computers hummed and chugged to spit out their last bits of programming. All of them, that is, apart from the ones that were empty cases placed to hide the escape hatch used for a quick getaway.
Paige stood at the entrance, hesitantly peeking through the opening, which was narrower than the computer towers used to hide it. When she stuck her head into the dark, she was barely able to pull it out before it was taken off by a quick burst of gunfire. “Yep,” she said. “There’s still a few down there.”
Rico and Cole headed to the back of the room and stood with her. While Rico watched the hall to make sure no stragglers were going to take one last shot at them, Cole took in the sight of all of the technical hardware within the office. “There could be some valuable stuff in here,” he said.
As Paige looked at him, one more gunshot was fired from the bottom of whatever was on the other side of the narrow hatch. “You want to start hacking computers? Sure. Go right ahead. I’ll make sure the Nymar or cops don’t get us, and Rico will take care of the fire. Take your freaking time.”
As she spoke, Cole moved among the computers. “Thought you’d be a little more concerned about the dead people we’re leaving behind. Not Nymar. People.”
“Nothing we can do about them now. We stick to the plan.”
“Amen to that, sister!” Rico said as he holstered the Sig Sauer and pushed past both of them. When a few shots blasted from the first floor, Rico answered them with a suicidal yell and a blast from the shotgun he’d saved for the occasion.
“Steph may be a lot of things, but she’s not stupid,” Paige said. “These computers are probably already wiped out by now.”
“It’s not that easy to just—”
Silencing him with a wave of her hand that occupied the top of the charts for Cole’s biggest pet peeves in his new life, Paige took another peek through the hatch. “Let’s just get the hell out of here. Those bodies and everything else in here will burn before anyone can stop it anyway.”
Behind them, from what must have been the top of the stairs leading up from the bar, a group of men shouted orders back and forth as high pressure water hoses were sprayed at the source of the fire. Sirens blared and someone on a loudspeaker urged a crowd to please step away from the fire engine.
“God damn it,” Paige muttered.
Leading the way through the hatch, she had to fight to keep her footing on a ramp that led straight down to a black wall. After moving the hidden door into place behind him, Cole slid sideways down the angled surface. At the bottom of the ramp was another ramp, angled just as steeply in the opposite direction and went deeper than the first floor. Rico was already down there, using his back to prop open what looked to be a heavier sliding door. He held the shotgun at waist level to cover the space in front of him, but the sweat on his brow and the strained expression on his ugly face was enough to let Paige and Cole know they needed to hurry. After they rushed past him, Rico hopped aside and let the door slam shut with a solid thump. “I lost sight of ‘em,” he said, “but it ain’t like there’s a lot of places they could have gone.”
Cole had figured that much out on his own. A musty passage of wooden beams and red brick stretched out before him that reeked of Chicago history. Dirty floorboards rattled beneath the Skinners as they hurried along a wide corridor lit by yellowed bulbs in outdated fixtures that must have been built beneath the city block over sixty years ago. On both sides of the passage were thick wooden racks that might well have held vats of mildly toxic beer for one of Al Capone’s birthday parties. When he turned around to get a quick look at the door they’d just used, all he could see was a cracked brick wall.
The Skinners ran in a triangle formation. Paige took the point and wasn’t about to be overtaken by the other two. Rico kept up for fifty yards or so of the straightaway but got winded a lot quicker when the corridor twisted and turned through a series of low passages and heavy doors that had to be lifted, pushed aside, or ducked under in order to proceed. After rounding a quick sequence of three turns, they came upon another straight section of tunnel that had the same wooden cave feel as the entrance. By now Cole was certain they were underground. The air smelled like mildew and damp soil. Sounds of traffic were muffled to a degree that could only be obtained by tons of concrete and packed earth.
The Nymar who’d clouded his mind upstairs stood at the farthest end of that passage. Even from a distance, Cole could see that her eyes were fixed on them. He couldn’t feel a mental haze yet, but a distinctly foreign touch of another presence was reaching into his head. Paige drew her baton and
willed it to turn into its bladed form as she quickened her pace to get to the Nymar.
The scars on Cole’s palms started to itch. That meant there were Nymar in the vicinity that hadn’t been modified by the new spore. Since the drops in his eyes had worn off, he focused on that feeling, used it to zero in on where the vampires might be hiding, then ran to catch up to Paige.
The Nymar that gripped onto the ceiling directly above him had remained hidden thanks to the inky blackness of its camouflaged skin and the thick shadows filling the curved upper portion of the tunnel above the Skinners’ heads. It reached down to grab Cole’s collar and pull him off his feet. “Should have taken your chances in the fire,” it hissed.
Even though he could feel the vampire’s breath against his face, Cole had no idea if it was male or female. What little he could see of its body blended into the shadows and was further hidden by the dust shaken loose from all the activity above the tunnels at street level.
He pointed his gun at the Nymar, but the weapon was viciously torn from his hand. He kicked both legs but felt nothing solid beneath him, so he curled his lower body up to make it easier to reach his spear.
“No, no,” the Nymar whispered as it sank its claws into his flesh.
A pair of thick arms he knew had to be Rico’s wrapped around his waist to pull him down, but no matter how hard Rico pulled, he couldn’t break the Nymar’s grip. “He’s got you by the neck!” Rico snarled. “You gotta break out of that so I can get you down.”
Cole tried to respond but could barely draw enough breath to keep moving. Rico was right. The Nymar’s thin bony arm had encircled his throat just beneath the chin, and its other hand was grabbing his shoulder to sink its claws in through a canvas section of his coat. As his vision became smeared by a wave of murky darkness, he saw that Paige had made it to the end of the hall.
She didn’t even bother looking back.
As soon as Paige closed the distance between them, she took a swing at the Nymar woman she knew was Hope and hit nothing but empty air.
“I don’t know what surprises me more,” Hope said as she leaned back to let the weapon sail by. “The fact that you’ve become a Skinner or the fact that it’s taken this long to find you.”
Rather than try to follow the Nymar’s flickering movements, Paige looked directly into eyes that were green orbs peeking out from the mesh of black tendrils seeping out from the outer edges of their sockets. That sight alone was enough to bring her back to that bloody night in Urbana all those years ago.
“What’s the matter?” Hope asked. “You don’t want to rush back and protect him? It seems you’ve been hardened in the years since the last time we met.”
Bringing her machete up so the treated edge caught some of the tunnel’s dim light, Paige said, “You don’t know the half of it.”
Hope cocked her head to one side as the black mesh in her eyes peeled back to show more of their vivid green. “One word from me and he’s dead.”
“You did all this to bring us here. You want to say your piece? Then say it. It won’t be long before the cops find the same passage we did.”
“They’ll find nothing apart from the officers that you killed.”
“What officers?” When the Nymar would only smile, Paige drew her gun and took aim at her. “What officers, Hope? Tell me.”
“I don’t know all of the unnecessary details like names or ranks, but there have been police within our Blood Parlors for some time.”
“Stephanie takes orders from you?”
“It’s not like that. As you Skinners so gleefully point out whenever you feel the need to push us down, the notion of a national, organized Nymar structure is a lie intended to give overactive imaginations something to play with. I and several others have merely suggested a course of action that will change things for the better.”
“You’ve sparked an uprising.”
Even though Hope’s features had an otherworldly factor that surpassed the typical Nymar, the flicker of satisfaction crossing her face was easy to read. “I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way, but I suppose you could call it that.”
Shifting only slightly so her voice would carry behind her, Paige shouted, “Is Cole down yet?”
“No!” Rico grunted. “But he’s still kicking.”
“If the bloodsucker on the ceiling doesn’t let go in three seconds, kill it.”
“You don’t think I been tryin’ that? Every time I get close to touching this bastard, it nearly pops Cole’s head off!”
Paige squared her shoulders so she was facing Hope directly. “Let. Him. Go.”
“Only if you do me a favor. You seem to have grown close to the shapeshifters. I know for a fact that the pack of Mongrels in Kansas City owes you a favor, and there’s been rumors that a Full Blood in St. Louis even helped you on at least one occasion. I want to meet with them.”
“Why?”
“Because one of them may know about a certain prisoner that was liberated from Lancroft’s dungeon. We intended to get him out ourselves, but the measures protecting his cell were too strong. We went back after the entire structure had been weakened but he was already gone.” Pausing as the activity on the street above grew louder, Hope allowed the black mesh of tendrils to close in again until they’d completely covered the green centers of her eyes. “Better make your choice quickly. The police are out in force, and I know at least three different safe passages through these tunnels. What about you?”
“I won’t do a damn thing to help you.”
“That’s a shame. After how you kept so still and quiet the night of that party, I thought you knew how to behave when you’re beaten. Sure I can’t convince you to make the rational choice again?”
Paige raised both weapons. “I don’t have much use for rational things anymore. You’re gonna let him go and then you’ll—”
Hope’s eyes snapped toward the Nymar clinging to the ceiling and she hissed what could have been a code word. When Paige rushed at her, Hope grabbed the machete just beneath the treated metallic edge and stopped it in mid swing. The .45 in Paige’s other hand went off, but not before Hope twisted her hand so the bullet punched into the brick wall behind the Nymar’s shoulder. Now that she controlled both of Paige’s arms, Hope opened her mouth to display all of her fangs except for the curved pair used to administer venom. What would come next was inevitable, and she wanted Paige to feel every second of it.
Cole didn’t know how the Nymar remained attached so firmly to the ceiling. At times he swore he could feel both of its hands scraping against him as Rico tried to pull it down. Even though the big man hadn’t been able to convince the Nymar to let him go, he hadn’t stopped trying to get a grip around the arm that was cinched to Cole’s throat. Suddenly, the Nymar reached out with a loop of fiber that was lowered over his head, to pull it back almost to the snapping point.
“Play time is over,” she hissed in the most human tone she’d used so far. “Time for supper.” With that, she latched onto the side of Cole’s neck and drove in all three sets of fangs right down to the gum line.
“Son of a bitch!” Rico snarled.
The fangs drilled into Cole as the Nymar’s tongue slid against his skin. Quick, excited breaths spilled from her nostrils, and when he tried to turn away, the upper set of feeding fangs shifted painfully against the tendons and fibers within his neck. He reached up to try and grab her anywhere he could but his hands merely slid off the slick, sweaty surface of her skin. This time, however, Rico was the one to slap his arm away.
“Move it or lose it, boy,” he said. Once Cole’s swinging body and flailing limbs shifted, Rico fired his Sig Sauer up into the ceiling as well as at the Nymar clinging to it. “You ain’t leaving me any choice, asshole,” he said between shots. “You’re letting go even if I gotta take my partner out along the way!”
Those words were just another layer of sound beneath the Nymar’s muffled grunts filling Cole’s ears. She pulled the blood from him in powe
rful gulps that dimmed every one of his senses. Rico’s bullets forced the vampire to shift her weight, and Cole renewed his efforts to pull free. The set of lower fangs were in him as well, those thicker spikes moving within his neck felt like one of his bones being wiggled by an intrusive set of needle-nose pliers.
“Stop! Stop!” was all he could say. It wasn’t much, but at the moment it was the only word in his vocabulary.
Perhaps he was dropping from the ceiling, or perhaps his body had finally seen fit to lapse into unconsciousness. All of his senses became so acute that he could hear Paige struggling at the far end of the hall. He could hear the stomp of fireman’s boots in the Blood Parlor and the wail of sirens in the background. Something moved inside his neck, slid along the tender wound and pushed deeper into him.
“That’s more like it,” Rico growled amid the crunch of knuckles against flesh.
Cole could see every crack in the ceiling and feel every ridge of the boards beneath him. He realized he was lying on the floor and Rico was down there with him, doling out a beating to the Nymar.
“You can kill me if you like,” the Nymar said.
“You’re goddamn right I can,” Rico said as he paused just long enough to remove the broken fang wedged into his fist. “I’ll get to you in a second, Cole. Just stay awake, you hear?”
“There’s something still in me,” Cole said.
“That’s just the pain talkin’.”
“No,” Cole gulped. “I can feel it. There’s something moving.”
“You mean like a little rock you swallowed? Working its way down?”
Cole’s eyes widened and he nodded. The pain from that motion felt as if someone had stuck a hot poker into the open wound on his neck. “That’s it!” he said, pushing through the agony. “What the hell is it?”
“The bitch seeded you. Let me give you a little something to boost your system.” After patting his pockets, he grunted, “I’m out. You got your kit on you?”
Vampire Uprising Page 24