The cops entered the house with their hands on the holsters at their hips and swept flashlight beams back and forth along the walls. “Hello?” one of them said. “Anyone here?”
Even as the cops looked directly at the door, Cole could tell they weren’t really seeing it. Their eyes continued to wander along the walls, not even following the lines of symbols etched there.
Slowly, he and Paige went down the stairs as the cops stomped around, and they eventually found their way outside again.
“Next time Rico says I never pay attention to his precious teachings, he can stuff it,” Paige said proudly after reaching the temple.
“What just happened?”
“I restored the runes intended to hide that doorway and everything else in the house. All those cops or anyone else will see is what we saw when we first got here, which is a fat load of nothin’.”
After the night he’d had, that was all the explanation Cole needed. Before taking the last step that would carry him through the beads, he stopped and nodded toward the lab. “What about this place?” he asked. “The stuff in there? The things down in that hallway?”
Paige took the remote that had been hanging from Lancroft’s neck and let her thumb glide over the cover. “I still don’t know if I believe he was hundreds of years old, but he came up with some stuff I’ve never seen before.” The remote disappeared in her fist and then into her pocket. “He wanted it destroyed, so I want to keep it around for a while. Hopefully he knows we’re sifting through all of his crap. If he’s anything like Daniels, that’d be his own personal hell.”
“I’m definitely coming back,” Cole vowed as he looked toward the stark light cast from the examination room. “I’ve still got some things to do here.”
The front door was pushed open, but the footsteps only stomped around for a minute or two before going back outside, which meant Lancroft’s defenses had held up against another set of unknowing eyes. They could hold out a little longer.
Cole stepped through the curtain and emerged in a smaller temple, where he was greeted by an excessively attractive, scantly clad woman with curly pink hair. After a sharp crack of her gum the pink-haired Dryad said, “Hiya. I’m Annie. There’s food in the main room.”
Paige emerged next and kept walking as if crossing hundreds of miles in a flicker of light had already become second nature. She and Cole followed Annie into a cavernous room filled with five large stages. Reading the confusion on Paige’s face, he told her, “This isn’t The Emerald. It’s Steve’s.”
“Do you know all of these places by heart?”
“No,” he replied as he pointed behind the largest stage to where STEVE’S was written in glowing neon.
Turning to Annie, Paige sighed, “Okay. Where’s Steve’s?”
“Dallas. Tristan didn’t have the juice to bring anyone else into St. Louis. We’re running two-for-the-price-of-one lap dances and have enough juice to power the state, so,” she added while holding her arms up and out as if posing for the first step in the YMCA dance, “here you are!”
“Are Rico and Daniels here?” Paige asked.
Annie shook her head in a way that made her pink curls wiggle. “They made it to St. Lou.”
“Both alive?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Perfect. Point me to the buffet.”
Epilogue
The cute news anchor with the short brown hair and pretty round face smiled comfortingly at the camera and announced, “Medical teams across the country have reported success in their most recent efforts to combat the Mud Flu. All symptoms ranging from cough and disorientation to the viscous discharge that gave the sickness its name are being cleared up thanks to a treatment developed by Dr. Angela Oehler. One of our correspondents is with Dr. Oehler now at the Pathology Department of Barnes-Jewish Hospital.”
A blond woman dressed in a white coat shifted nervously in front of all the cameras and said, “After recently isolating the cause of the flu, we’ve formulated a treatment that clears up every symptom in all but the most extreme cases. If anyone else is currently affected by the Mud Flu, please contact your physician or anyone here at Barnes to schedule an appointment.”
“Dr. Oehler claims similar results have been reported at many other hospitals across the country,” the brunette reporter said once she was back on screen. “According to the Centers for Disease Control, the Mud Flu stemmed from an exotic malaria strain brought to the U.S. from a remote region in Ecuador. Hopefully, this marks the end of an epidemic that has claimed a total of sixty-eight lives since the first reported case less than a month ago.”
“You hear that, Rico?” Cole asked as he flipped through the channels of Ned’s TV using a remote that was heavier than most people’s DVD players. “The CDC figured out the Mud Flu!”
“Great,” Rico grunted from the broken couch nearby. All that remained of the wound Lancroft had given him was a deep cut that had required just under a dozen stitches to close. “We do the legwork, our friend at the hospital puts it to use, and the feds take the credit. How much you wanna bet the insurance companies and doctors found a way to charge for immunizations of a plague that’s been wiped out already?”
“Speaking of medications, how was that Memory Water stuff?”
“Made me remember what it’s like to not have a hole punched through my chest. I only took half of what she gave me, though. Gave the rest to Paige so she could try and fix up her arm. Don’t know if she took it, though.”
“Why don’t you take some of those pain pills we found in Ned’s collection?”
“I can handle the pain just fine.”
“Actually,” Cole said, “I was hoping they’d put you to sleep for a while.”
“If I’m sleeping, I can’t work on your little present.”
The big man lay with one leg dangling off the slope-backed couch, and a pile of throw pillows under his back and neck. Rico’s grin was wide enough to display a full set of blocky teeth, and it made Cole more uncomfortable than all three sets of a Nymar’s fangs. “What present?” he asked hesitantly.
“Don’t you remember that case you threw at Daniels while we were leaving Philly?” Rico asked. When Cole furrowed his brow and started to shake his head, Rico propped himself up. Stress lines formed at the corners of his eyes, but he stubbornly refused to ease back down. “If you don’t remember, then I might as well keep it for myself!”
“I remember, I remember,” Cole said as a way to get Rico to stop straining the bandages wrapped around his torso. “Wait. I really do remember now.”
“You know what was inside?”
“No.”
Shifting within the groove he’d worn into the couch, Rico grunted, “Henry’s inside, that’s what. Pieces of him anyway.”
“Oh, hell. I don’t even know why I grabbed it, I just did.”
“Then I want you pullin’ numbers at the next bingo night, because you grabbed enough leather to make one hell of a nice piece of armor. And not just leather,” Rico added. “Full Blood hide. Do you have any idea how hard that is to come by?”
“Yeah,” Cole said while thinking back to those long strips that had been removed from Henry’s back. “I think I do.”
“Lancroft must’ve been tanning it for himself because there ain’t no way a Skinner in his right mind would part with something like that.”
Crossing the living room to the small desk where Ned’s computer was set up, Cole said, “So much for my present, huh?”
“You forgot,” the big man said with a waggle of his eyebrows. “I ain’t anywhere near my right mind. Plus, you earned it more’n I did. Give me a few weeks, maybe a month, and I’ll stitch that leather into something that’ll protect your worthless ass better than anything I ever made for anyone.”