She reached out with her right hand to swat the wall beside the doorway. Finding the switch, she flipped it and bathed the room in the soft glow of a single lamp. It was a woman’s bedroom, filled with mirrors, a couple small dressers, and a queen-sized bed. The woman in the bed was middle-aged and wore an oversized T-shirt that had twisted around her as she squirmed and tried to crawl to the other side of the mattress.
Mullet had one foot on the floor and the other propped upon the edge of the bed. He reached out with both hands, clawing at the blankets and mattress in his frenzy to get at the woman. One hand slapped against her shin and thick fingers closed around her ankle in a grip that brought a pained yelp to the woman’s lips.
With Mullet reeling the woman in, Paige only had enough time to land one blow. She drove the end of her sickle’s blade into Mullet’s hip, leaned back and pulled. The Nymar snarled loudly and hung on. Even as he was dragged toward Paige’s side of the bed, he brought the woman along with him. She stretched out and managed to grab hold of her nightstand. It wasn’t heavy enough to keep her from moving but worked nicely as an anchor once it became wedged against the side of the bed. Now that she had something to hold onto, the woman pulled herself away from Mullet and kicked his head with her loose foot.
Paige dug her other weapon’s blade into Mullet’s side. “Come on now,” she growled. “Wouldn’t you rather have a girl who’s ready and willing?”
Once the frightened woman scrambled out of his reach, Mullet slid off the bed and twisted around to face the Skinner. Paige’s weapons tore through his flesh, which brought an angry snarl from the back of his throat. Hungry, desperate, and now wounded, the Nymar let out a sound that wasn’t even close to human. The black markings on his neck and wrists stood out as though the tendrils inside of him were about to emerge from his flesh and wrap around the first warm body they could find.
After a few wild swings with his fists and some jerky twists from his upper body, Mullet ripped free of Paige’s weapons. The soft light from the lamp made the foamy drool dangling from his lips seem more like something that had been excreted from an insect and hardened onto his face. Now that his full attention was on her, the Nymar alternated between trying to grab her and knock her out. The look in his eyes made it clear that he would feed upon whatever pieces he could tear off.
Paige was only human, so she couldn’t move her arms at Mullet’s speed. She stood her ground, kept her eyes focused upon the Nymar’s center of mass and whipped her weapons around to block as many incoming swipes as she could. After batting one of Mullet’s arms away, she prepared to block the next. Paige shifted her weight, bobbed her head, and leaned to dodge whatever she couldn’t block.
The Nymar’s hands and forearms met Paige’s weapons with a steady stream of thumps that echoed through the bedroom. After clubbing Paige’s shoulder with a two-armed swing, he knocked her back half a step and attempted to pull the weapons from her hands. Paige was able to twist both sickles away before they were taken, but not before Mullet snuck a punch through her guard.
His fist felt like a chunk of cement pounding against her stomach, and Paige folded around it while letting out a pained grunt. A second shot came right after that one and landed heavily on Paige’s back. Because she’d hunkered down and braced for it rather than trying to get away, she caught most of the impact on muscle and bone instead of her neck or face. If she’d been dressed for a fight instead of an orgy, she would have been wearing something heavier than a football jersey over a corset. As it was, Mullet’s fingernails cut straight through the layer of nylon to rake through the skin of her shoulder and start a flow of blood running down her back.
The instant she felt the warm trickle on her skin, Paige pulled away and snapped her left weapon up. The Nymar had been coming in to feed and wasn’t even trying to block her strike, allowing the top of her weapon to crack solidly against his jaw. Mullet reared back and sent a spray of blackened fluid through the air to spatter upon the ceiling. Rather than come at Paige again, he sent a wild kick into her midsection that bounced her off a dresser. Mullet rolled off the bottom of the bed and landed on all fours. From there, the Nymar whipped around, lunged over the top of the mattress, and grabbed the woman who’d been trying to hide in the corner farthest from the door.
“Get over here, bitch,” he snarled as he pulled the woman by her hair.
His eyes were glassy and clouded. His grip nearly crushed her arm. When she kicked and beat her fists against him, the woman only bruised herself. As her hair began to rip from her scalp, she seemed ready to tear it all out just to get away. A hand closed around her throat just under her chin. She grabbed and scratched at it but only managed to peel away a few layers of dead skin to reveal something dark, solid, and uncompromising beneath it.
The woman screamed and scraped her feet against the floor. She pulled and strained with every muscle in her body. No matter what she did or how hard she fought, she was unable to get away from the hungry Nymar that now came at her with venom dripping from the one curved fang that hadn’t been cracked during the brawl.
Suddenly, there was movement at Mullet’s neck. Something slipped around his throat and dug into the thick mass of muscles and tendons. The blade didn’t do any damage, but it pulled his head back before he could sink his teeth in.
Paige appeared over Mullet’s shoulder and growled with the strain of pulling the Nymar another inch or so from his intended meal. Just as he was about to lift the woman up to his fangs, Paige pulled back one more time. Muffled gunshots thumped from next door, but that didn’t keep Paige from using her sickle to force his head back a little more. Her left hand was wrapped around a syringe, and she dropped it like a hammer onto the black marking that ran down the side of Mullet’s neck. The moment the needle broke his skin, Paige sent the antidote through the tendril and directly to the spore attached to his heart. His grip on the woman was weaker than a baby’s before the needle could be removed. Just to be safe, Paige dragged Mullet across the bed and dumped him onto the floor.
The trembling apartment owner stood with her hand pressed against her sweat-soaked nightshirt and watched as Paige bolted from the room. The monster who’d nearly ripped both women apart lay convulsing near the bedroom door. His limbs seized up and his pale gray skin settled upon his bones while something within his chest shuddered one last time.
Paige had just gone after Mullet when Cole attacked Sid with his spear. Unlike the times he’d sparred with Paige or swung the weapon at empty air, he wasn’t just practicing a set of motions or concentrating on his stance. He was tearing through skin, scraping against bone, and the target was fighting back.
After getting stabbed three or four times in a row, Sid trapped the spear against his side and dropped his other arm straight down on the middle of the weapon. Any other stick would have snapped under the impact of the Nymar’s fist. Cole’s spear not only stayed in one piece, but tore open a long gash as it was pulled away. The Nymar howled in pain, flung himself back and tripped over a pile of boxes.
More fear than blood pumped through Cole’s veins, but it was instinct that got him clamoring over the boxes to where Sid had landed. No innards could be seen within any of Sid’s gaping wounds. There was just a writhing black mass that stretched little tendrils to the edges of each fissure to pull them shut. Cole drove the spear straight down toward the spore attached to the Nymar’s heart, but Sid batted it away.