“And they really do work?” Paige asked.
Rico nodded and loaded the bullet back into its magazine. “You ever seen a Mongrel drop the way they did back at Bunn’s?”
“But will they work on a Full Blood?” Cole asked.
“Hard to say. I ain’t had a Full Blood to test ’em on yet. Hopefully that’ll change tonight.”
Flipping her right baton to grip its handle, Paige willed it to form a slightly cleaner version of the machete. “And if those don’t have enough snap,” she said while the handle narrowed even farther, to reveal the tooth she’d attached while in Kansas City, “we can do things the old-fashioned way.”
Cole checked his weapon and saw that the melted chips of the Blood Blade had added a metallic glint to the largest spearhead. Even after hearing Rico’s explanation for his Snapper rounds, he would have felt more comfortable if the whole silver bullet thing had worked.
Tristan announced her arrival with a few knocks on the door. She, Shae, Kate, and a few bars of “Baby Got Back” drifted in from the main room before the door was closed again. “Better make this quick,” Tristan said. “The regular girls can keep the crowd busy, but not for long. We’ve stirred them up pretty good.”
Shae and Kate took positions on either side of the room and started humming softly. Although it wasn’t nearly as ornate as the proper temple, the room didn’t look anything close to a revamped storage space once the Dryads got warmed up. The wavy, erratic markings glowed as if they’d been collecting daylight for centuries just to send it into the hanging strings of beads at that moment. Entwining lines of energy curled through the air as they made their way toward the curtain. When the two Dryads began singing in earnest, brilliant green bolts created patterns that were pulled from the same language as the etchings on the walls.
Tristan moved over to Paige and placed something in her hands. “I want you to take this.”
Holding the sickle under her arm to free up her good hand, she accepted the offering. It was a small flask engraved with more of the undulating script. “What’s this?”
“It’s called Memory Water. My sisters and I are the only ones who can make it. Drink this, and it will make your body as it was before your arm was hurt.”
“This can fix that much damage?”
“It doesn’t fix damage,” Tristan said. “It restores you to a point when there was no damage. This should be just enough to heal your arm.”
Paige furrowed her brow and asked, “Why would you give me this?”
“Haven’t you ever gotten an unexpected gift?”
Although her glance in Cole’s direction wasn’t obvious, it wasn’t slick enough to get past Tristan. “Not really,” Paige said.
“Then think of it as a way of helping my sisters. With your arm restored, you’ll be able to fight better. I would have given it to you earlier, but since the raids led by Ponce de Leon, it’s been in very short supply. I had to be sure about you.” When Paige tucked the flask into her pocket, Tristan stepped back and lent her voice to the song.
Chapter 25
For something as remarkable as teleportation, Cole found his journey to be a little disappointing. He didn’t feel his body get disassembled and put back together again. The earth didn’t rumble. There wasn’t even a glowing tunnel for him to fly through at a thousand miles an hour. The beads clung to him like strings of magnets to a suit of chain mail. A breeze hit him in the face, accompanied by the vague scent of mountain air and freshly cut timber. When his foot touched the floor on the other side of the beads, he, Paige, and Rico were somewhere else. There was a taste in his mouth that felt like it had been rinsed by purified water, and since the others smacked their lips as well, they could have tasted it too. Not exactly a high ranking on the yowza meter.
They were still in a dark room with strange symbols on the walls. A bass line was thumping through the building, but came from a much smaller set of speakers. When he tried to bat at the beads he still felt touching his arms and legs, he only swatted air.
“Don’t worry,” Paige said nearby. “I still feel them too.”
It looked as if they were in a house that had been stripped of everything but shades on the large windows next to the front door and a lamp against one wall. The more Cole looked around, the less he saw. One barren hallway led to a pair of empty rooms. There was no furniture to be seen and the small kitchen at the back of the house was completely gutted. In fact, the entire place barely seemed large enough for more than one person to live there. He stepped up to a picture window framed by the light seeping in from the street. Pulling aside the blind gave him a view of a curb lined by parked cars of all colors and states of repair. Only one of them was running, and it was the source of the thumping music he’d heard since his arrival. Someone emerged from a house across the street, got into the car, and was driven away.
“There’s nothing here,” Cole said. “We must be in the wrong place.”
Paige sighed and took the same tour as he had, which she completed in a matter of seconds. “Where the hell are we?”
After fitting his spear into its harness, Cole took the GPS unit from his pocket and turned it on. While it acquired the satellites needed to pull up a map, Paige looked out the front window. Rico paced the room and quickly worked his way over to the lamp sitting by itself on the floor. He turned it on, but the bulb was only powerful enough to cast a dim glow in one corner. Fortunately, Cole didn’t need a light to read the GPS screen. When the map came up, he announced, “We’re in Philadelphia. Looks like a neighborhood called Germantown.”
Now fascinated by the wall at the back of the room, Rico stood with his face less than two inches from the water-stained plaster. “Tell me you see these symbols.”
Cole didn’t want to bother with dirty walls when he could get so much more from Romana, so he ignored the request.
“What symbols?” Paige asked.
“The symbols right here. Or they were right here,” Rico muttered as he dug into one of the inner pockets of his jacket. When Cole finally looked over at him, Rico was grumbling, his face pressed against the wall, before saying, “Ha! Found ’em! That’s the trick. Just gotta keep your eye on the ball.”
Before Cole could question his sanity, the symbols appeared all around him. Actually, they reappeared. “Wait a minute! I saw those when we got here, but I just…”
“Put ’em out of yer mind?” Rico asked. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what these babies make you do. Runes like these give you a splash of discombobulation mixed with a dash of déjà vu. Right, Paige?”
“Huh?”
For once Cole didn’t feel like the stupid one.
“These runes!” Rico said. “They’re the ones I been trying to get you to learn for years, but you were too stubborn to pay attention.”
Now that they’d been seen, the symbols gave off faint trails of black smoke, similar to the scent that had shown up in other Skinner creations, like the ammunition crafted to kill Nymar. Paige followed a line of smoldering symbols etched along the top of the front window, then stepped back and said, “I’ve seen these before.”
“I know,” Rico snapped. “I showed ’em to you before.”
“No, not from you.”
Now that he had a chance to look at them more than a moment, Cole experienced the same kind of frustrated familiarity that was written on Paige’s face. The symbols were indecipherable, but in a familiar way. Then it came to him. “These are like the marks on the inside of Henry’s cell back at Lancroft Reformatory, but there’s something…off about them. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”