“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 almost 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.