Chapter Twenty-Nine
The bedroom looked as if it had been rammed by a small car. Glass from the window lay scattered among broken pieces of the frame on a scuffed floor. What little furniture there was had been destroyed, and blood from both combatants stained the walls like streaks of cast-off paint.
Rico had tagged her several times with the wooden weapon wrapped around his fist. The spikes on either end were slick with Nymar blood, but the wounds they’d created had already closed. What bothered him even more was Tara’s speed. Despite the fact that her movements were clumsy and poorly timed, she could still get at least three blows in before he could follow through with one. He slashed at her with the weapon’s top spike, catching nothing but air. Swinging that hand back along the same path, he watched her pull her head away before the weapon got anywhere close to her. Rather than try for a third swing, he waited until his knuckles were in position and then snapped his fist straight into her mouth.
That one stung.
Thin black filaments spewed from her lip. No matter how quickly the tendrils moved to repair the damage, they weren’t able to save the fangs that Rico’s powerful jab had just knocked out. Within seconds after reeling from that, she came at him again.
The .45 had been knocked from his grasp early in the fight. Tara’s initial flurry was so fast and powerful that Rico didn’t know how the gun had been taken from him or where it had gone. He just knew he had to find it again. She’d already buried her remaining fangs into his chest and was frantically drawing whatever blood she could from the meat under his shirt.
He grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled. All that did was convince Tara to wrap her arms around his torso and mash her face against him even harder. From there his only option was to snake an arm between his body and hers, hoping the weapon on that fist tore into her more than it did him. He realized how bad a plan that was when his fist became wedged in place between their two bodies, harmless as a dried flower pressed between the pages of an old book.
“Son of a bitch,” he snarled.
It was the first time he’d ever felt a Nymar’s heartbeat. To the Nymar spore, the human heart was barely more than a piece of hijacked equipment. It squeezed the muscles, manually circulating fluids to speed the process of conversion and churning blood however it saw fit. The older ones even knew how to play it like an instrument to mimic a human rhythm. With just a bit of attention focused in the right direction, he should have been able to pinpoint which side of the heart the spore was on. This time he felt two separate and distinct patterns.
Suddenly, he understood.
Even for a Nymar that had recently fed, Tara was too fast and too strong. More than that, she showed no signs of letting up.
The markings on her face were too symmetrical compared to the random patterns formed by a creature stretching out wherever it liked within its human shell.
She healed too quickly and was too hungry.
Tara had been multiseeded.
It was a rare thing for a very good reason: Nymar spore were hungry and selfish. They preferred to be the sole inhabitants of their feeding grounds and didn’t play well with others. On those rare occasions when two did latch onto the same heart, they turned their carrier into a genuine nightmare. Nearly every physical attribute was doubled, but they burned out in a quarter of the time. Some say the Nymar could have stayed hidden forever if not for the actions of a few multiseeded members of the species who created a mess that was too big to ignore. If he didn’t turn this fight around real quick, he was in danger of finding himself in the middle of one such mess.
Once Tara saw the error in trying to draw blood from solid muscle, she pulled her teeth out and tried to sink them into his jugular. Rico’s grip on her hair was the only thing preventing her from accomplishing that goal. Her face wound up less than an inch from his neck, giving the moment a somewhat intimate flavor as her quickening breaths created a warm spot on his skin. If he could get his trapped arm loose and turn it even a few degrees, he could open her up like a garment bag. It would be a messy way to end the fight, but very effective.
He managed to pull his hand up an inch or so before the sound of another gunshot from the living room caused her to twitch. Every one of Rico’s muscles strained to keep her fangs away from him. That wouldn’t help for much longer since Tara was now pulling hard enough to rip her own hair out at the roots.
“What’d they do to you, kid?” he asked once he’d dragged enough breath into his lungs.
Her eyes were disappearing beneath the thin tendrils that competed for every millimeter of space within her slight frame. She pushed her body down while twisting her head so she could clamp a hand around his neck to hold him steady as she fed.
The moment he had some wiggle room, Rico pulled his arm free and drove the weapon’s bottom spike between her ribs. He diverted its mass to grow inside toward her heart. Through the connection between him and that weapon, he could feel when he hit pay dirt. The spore was softer than bone, more fluid than muscle, and too mobile to be an organ. Once he found one of them in her, Rico punctured the spore and did his best to tear it apart. Then Tara got really angry.
That was one of the many problems with multiseeded Nymar. They were tougher than hell and close to impossible to put down. Even if one spore was damaged, the other would carry on until the first was healed. Tara straightened up as if she’d completely forgotten about the hunger gnawing at her insides. She looked down at the source of her pain, grabbed Rico’s hand and let out a throaty snarl while forcing him to pull the spike out of her.
He did his best to fight her, but simply wasn’t strong enough. Half a second after the notion crossed his mind to let go of the wooden weapon so he could get to his gun, Tara shifted tactics. Once both hands were clamped around his fist and the spikes were sawing into Rico’s flesh, she squeezed them even tighter. “Looks like this hurts you as much as it hurts me,” she said while eyeing the blood that trickled from between his fingers.
Since she seemed content to try and crush his fingers around the weapon, Rico let her maintain her grip so he could roll onto his back and stretch his other arm out toward the .45.
Her eyes had gone completely black. Rico knew it was the spore looking out at him without allowing the human host to see. “Hope told me that Skinners live to hurt us,” she said. “I’d like to make you hurt.”
“Why’s that?” Rico grunted while straining to get to his pistol. “I’m not the one that killed a bunch of innocent people.”
“No. You’re the ones that made Hope recruit new members. If you hadn’t forced Evan’s hand in this, I could have spent that party fucking and sucking like every other party.” Smiling luridly, she added, “You like hearing me talk like that?”
When Rico’s fingertips brushed against the worn grip of his .45, he curled them until his nails caught in the grooves etched into the handle. “Don’t flatter yourself, girl. I’ve heard dirty talk before and I seen plenty of skinny little bitches like you. It’ll take more than whatever tricks you use on the frat boys to wrap me around any one of your bony little fingers.”
“Really?” she said as she slipped her fingers on top of Rico’s. In one powerful clench, she crushed his hand between hers and the barbed, varnished wooden handle of his weapon. She then grabbed onto the section of the weapon encircling his knuckles and started grinding the weapon against the hand that held it.
Skin tore.
Tendons were shredded.
Sharpened wood scraped against narrow bones.
Rico forgot about the .45 as he kicked his heels against the floorboards and let out a pained, howling wail.
Ned had missed his chance to end the fight before it got any further. He’d gotten the drop on Paige, managed to lift his bat over her skull, but wasn’t able to follow through. There was something in Paige’s eyes that connected with him. She had a spark, familiar to all Skinners, that allowed them to survive and flourish where most people would give in to the ins
anity of their new world. Some of Ned’s attention was diverted when Rico’s agonized voice exploded from the bedroom. Even for someone with Ned’s experience, hearing a sound like that from a man like Rico was jarring.
Paige put her spark to use and took aim for another shot at him. Ned didn’t hesitate this time and swung the bat like a golf club to knock her .38 aside as it went off. The bullet hissed past his head and she was already rolling away while splinters fell from the hole that had been punched into the ceiling. Somehow, she hung on to her pistol.
In Ned’s opinion, this one definitely had promise.
“Whatever they told you, it’s a lie,” he said.
“You already killed one of them,” Paige said through teeth gritted by pain. “You’ll come after the rest! Including Tara. I can’t allow that. Not after all that’s already happened to her.”
The house’s back entrance was a thick sliding patio door held in place by a latch and steel bar that lay wedged between the door and the other side of the frame. It was pulled open amid the sound of metal being snapped and wood being crushed as the bar was driven into the frame like an oversized nail. Footsteps flooded through the kitchen and living room like a flood of rats that had only been held back by a single rotten barricade. The three Nymar making all that noise wasted no time in swarming the bat-wielding Skinner.
Hope was first to arrive. She wrapped both arms around Ned from behind before he had a chance to turn and face her. “Where’s the other one?” she hissed.
Wes and Evan ran into the living room but were reluctant to make a move against the man that Hope had claimed for herself. Their eyes fixed upon Paige, who’d taken the last few seconds to switch her .38 from her bleeding right hand to her left.
Rico let out another grunt, which was followed by a heavy impact. A second later Tara was the one to cry out. Evan pointed down the hall and snarled, “Kill him.” When Wes bolted down the hall, Evan crossed the room, making certain to give Hope and Ned their space. “You did good, Paige.”
“You’re here. They’re here. Let me and Tara go!”
Ned struggled with Hope, grabbing onto the arm that had snaked around his neck to try and give himself some breathing room. Even Hope seemed surprised when she was unable to choke the life out of him right then and there.
“We’ll see how this pans out before we let anyone go,” Evan said. He held out one hand, palm up, and beckoned to Paige. “Now hand me that gun.”
“Let Tara go first.”
More screams ripped through the house, unrecognizable apart from the fact that they were female. Rico then unleashed a torrent of profanity as solid impacts thumped from one bedroom to another. Paige caught a glimpse of the big man throwing Wes into a wall before the Skinner was slashed across the face by the Nymar’s claws and shoved into the next room.
Evan bent down to reach for Paige’s trembling hands. “Give me that g—”
She cut his threat short by pulling her trigger twice, catching Evan in the stomach, up high near his solar plexus. The Nymar staggered backward while letting out a breath that sounded as if he’d sprung a leak. Several black fibers stretched out of the bullet wound to grip its edges, widening the wound into a single, surprised eye before a chunk of lead was pushed out. By the time the bullet hit the floor, the wound was closing.
Tears emerged at the corners of Paige’s eyes as she bared her teeth and pulled her trigger again and again. Her shots hit Evan in the chest and hip, respectively, sending the Nymar back a few steps without dropping him to the floor. He leered at her hungrily, making fists with both hands as the tendrils patched him up enough to move forward again. He managed to take half a step toward Paige before arching his back and throwing both arms out to either side. His mouth opened and all three sets of fangs extended far enough from the sockets in his gums that the tender, whiter portions of each one stretched down from the pink line of flesh.
A muffled tearing sound bubbled up from the back of Evan’s throat and his fingers trembled like frayed sections of a live wire. The middle portion of his light brown shirt became dark and wet. There was no hole in the material, but it was obvious that one of Paige’s bullets had found its mark. That theory was disproved the moment something arose beneath his shirt, strained the fabric, and finally poked through. The wooden stake was coated in the Nymar’s blood and was sharp enough to cut Evan’s hands when he tried to grab hold of the object that had impaled him.
Evan’s struggle was over in a matter of seconds. He slumped forward to hang off the stake as his bodily fluids flowed out of him. When he finally did drop to his knees, he cleared the way for Paige to see Ned behind him. Somehow, his bat had shifted into a thinner weapon that drove all the way through Evan’s back and out the other side. Ned looked up from the dying Nymar, saw Paige, and croaked, “Run.”
Rico’s hand felt like a mess of chopped meat hanging from his wrist. It was too bloody for him to see how much damage had been done, so he focused on the hand he could actually use. When he renewed his attempts to get to his .45, he heard the commotion from the other side of the house. All of his senses were dulled by the strain of fighting Tara and the blood he’d lost to her. Despite the fact that she was stronger than any Nymar he had faced thus far in his career, Tara hopped away like a scolded pup when Wes stormed into the bedroom, grabbed him and stood him up.
No matter how torn up Rico’s fingers were, they remained locked around his weapon. He could barely feel the varnished wood in his hand when he slashed Wes’s throat with the upper spike. Rico didn’t know how long his grip would hold, so he turned and swung at Tara while he could. The wooden spike ripped across her upper chest, tearing a section of Tara’s shirt and digging a messy gorge a few inches above the slope of her breasts. She screamed, pressed both hands against the ugly wound and staggered away.
Although it would take longer to heal a wound from the Skinner’s weapon, Wes pushed through enough of the pain to grab Rico and throw him into the hallway. Rico’s free hand closed around Wes’s shirt, locking the two of them together as the momentum of their struggle carried them into the adjacent room.
There was next to nothing in there apart from two chairs facing each other and a single box bearing the label of a moving company. Wes staggered backward into the box, clutching the neck wound that was already closing. He kicked over one of the chairs and got his legs entangled with the other. When the Nymar shifted his weight to compensate for the slip, Rico shouted directly into his face. It wasn’t so much of a threat or statement, but an obscene roar that made him sound even more like a wounded animal.
Apart from the strain of his leg muscles, Rico’s entire body was numb. When he grabbed Wes’s shoulder with his left hand, he didn’t even feel it enough to know if he’d trapped anything within his grasp. And when he unleashed a series of straight gut punches using the wooden weapon in his right hand, he felt more like he was clumsily moving a rusty tool instead of anything that grew from his shoulder. Even so, the weapon in Rico’s bloody rasp managed to hack away at the Nymar’s torso.
Wes grabbed Rico’s neck amid the punches and began to squeeze. His grip remained strong and his fingernails dug into the skin covering Rico’s throat, straining it to the point of tearing it open. One more punch from Rico forced the Nymar’s grip to slacken.
With all the blood coming from Rico’s flayed palms and fingers, his weapon was covered with a layer of gore thick enough to make it look like something that had truly formed from his own flesh. The hole he’d dug into Wes’s stomach was massive. Rico jammed the weapon in as deep as it would go and showed the Nymar an ugly, blocky smile as he willed the charmed wood to stretch up toward an infected heart. Since the weapons were bound to their Skinners by blood, Rico’s responded quicker than his own fingers. The wooden spike snapped up, out, and then diverted as much of its mass as possible to form a series of branches that punctured and tore just about everything within Wes’s chest cavity. In moments the spore was reduced to pulp. Rico drank in the sig
ht of Wes’s vacant stare as he lost the last bit of strength he had.
Paige turned toward the front door and shouted, “Tara! We’re leaving!”
Tara emerged from one of the rear bedrooms, glancing back and forth between Paige and the wounds that her tendrils were slowly knitting back together.
Hacking up a strained breath, Ned was unable to utter a single word. Hope had shifted her hands to grab his chest and rake through his shirt using black claws that had emerged from the tips of her fingers. When those claws sank in, his eyes widened and the bat slipped from his hand.
A steely calm drifted onto Paige’s face, settling in beneath the tears and dirt that covered her like a cheap mask. “Tara,” she said. “Get out of here. Now.” The moment Tara backed away, Paige shifted her attention to Ned. Hope was taking her time with him, slowly peeling him open while feeding through the holes her fangs had drilled into the base of his neck. Paige picked up the bat, which had been frozen into a long, gnarled stake. Shifting it around to grab the handle, she winced as its thorns bit into her palm. After adjusting her grip so her fingers fit around the thorns as best they could, she held the stake out in a trembling, two-handed grip. “You too, Hope,” she said. “Out.”
The Nymar’s eyes wandered up to her, and the corners of her mouth curled into a grin without allowing her fangs to come away from Ned’s flesh.
“Out!”
When Hope tightened her hold, she looked as if she was hugging Ned from behind. She even let out a soft, throaty moan while pulling another drink from his veins.
Vampire Uprising Page 34