In its prime, Jory’s car had been an ‘08 Sonata with a decent sound system. When it had been driven to the Lancroft house, it was a better-than-average vehicle with a refurbished sound system. Now it was a dirty sedan with a broken front window, a dented hood, and a few words scratched into the passenger door by a key. One of those words wasn’t even spelled correctly.
“F-U-K yourselves?” Cole recited.
“Yeah!” Madman 69 shouted as he strutted toward the house with two of his buddies backing him up. “And if you don’t want us messing up anything worse than this, you’ll tell us what the hell you pricks are doing in the old man’s house.”
Paige stepped forward to mark herself as the spokesperson of the group and also to test to see if any of the idiot neighbors would back down. So far they were either too drunk or too stupid to do so. “First you threaten us and then you’re concerned about your neighbor? Make up your mind.”
“That,” Madman said as he jabbed a finger at the car, “is for throwing the bottle at our house. You broke one’a our windows, so we break one’a yours.” Stepping even closer, he added, “C’mon. You can tell me. What’s goin’ on in there? You got some kind of tunnels under that place?”
“What makes you say that?”
“There’s only one car parked outside, but there’s shitloads of different people walkin’ in and out so you gotta be comin’ and goin’ some other way. We heard there were some tunnels runnin’ under this whole city and that the old man had a way in. If you can get us in, maybe we can work something out. I’ll forget about our little argument, nobody else will know what you got goin’ on in that house …”
“You don’t even know what’s going on in that house,” Cole said.
“Sure, but maybe I’m a concerned citizen who’ll call the cops. You want that?”
Now it was Abel’s turn to step up. “You won’t call the cops and we both know why.”
That put a dent in Madman’s facade. He tried to scowl at the Skinners but couldn’t quite pull it off. “Let us get a look at them tunnels or clear out. You do one of those real quick or we’ll clear you out ourselves.”
Paige allowed Madman one moment of glory. She even granted him the chance to strut away amid the hoots and hollers of his cronies before gritting her teeth and saying, “Let’s go turn that place upside down.”
“What?” Cole asked. “I thought we were trying to keep a low profile.”
“And we can’t do that if some mutated frat house is watching us.” Turning to him, she patted Cole’s chest and said, “This is another part of the job. We’re in new territory here. These assholes are testing us. We need to squash this kind of shit before anyone worse than these guys gets any ideas.”
“This isn’t Tombstone and those guys aren’t a real threat to us.”
“One’s a Nymar.” When Abel saw the perplexed look on Cole’s face, he asked, “Didn’t you see the markings on the dude waiting at the curb? Didn’t you feel the itch?”
“This whole place gives me an itch,” Cole grumbled.
“He’s right,” Paige said. Shifting to the kung fu master voice, she told him, “One must feel the subtle differences in the breeze before one may appreciate the wind.”
Abel shot a quick glance across the street, where Madman, a guy in an Anthrax concert shirt, and the shifty fellow who hadn’t left the curb were all gathered. If he squinted hard enough, Cole could just make out the thick black markings snaking up one side of the shifty one’s face. At first glance the tendrils had looked like just another stray piece of shadow cast from the nearby trees.
“Selina drove Jory down to meet with a friend of ours in the Philly PD,” Abel explained. “They’re checking up on those idiots across the street and we’re not going to do anything until they get back. We can’t risk—”
“I’ll tell you what we can’t risk,” Paige said as she grabbed Abel’s shirt with her right hand. Although that entire arm was still stiff after nearly being petrified by a concoction of tattoo ink mixed with melted fragments of the Blood Blade bonded to shapeshifter plasma, she’d been working to bring it back into full use. Her skin was soft to the touch, but stiff as hardened leather underneath newly risen scars. “We can’t risk being made to look weak in front of anyone, especially a Nymar.”
Cole put his back to the house across the street. “She’s right.”
“Oh, big surprise,” Abel snickered. “You agree with her.”
“Paige. Let him go.”
Reluctantly, she did.
The moment Abel caught his breath, it was stolen from him as Cole picked up right where she’d left off. Grabbing two handfuls of the other man’s shirt, he shoved him up the steps and through Lancroft’s front door. “I know this isn’t exactly Thanksgiving dinner, but we’re all here to take advantage of a major win, right?”
“Yeah,” Abel replied.
“Seems pretty rare that so many of us are all in one place, but there’s no reason anyone else should know that. All we need is one Nymar spreading the word that we’re a bunch of petty little kids snipping at each other before they’ll all get it in their heads that maybe Skinners aren’t anything to worry about after all. I’ve seen how Nymar jump on any sort of weakness, and that won’t go well for anyone.”
Abel shrugged and agreed halfheartedly under his breath.
Touching his shoulder was all Paige needed to do for Cole to let him go. “Aren’t all of you bored with looking through this crap?” she asked anyone within earshot. “How about we cross the street and remind those assholes why they should think before shooting their big mouths off. Give the Nymar a good story to pass around to his buddies.” Turning toward the door to the basement, she found no fewer than three Skinners huddled there and several more watching from the kitchen and bedrooms like a bunch of schoolkids trying to get a good view of a fight. “How many sets of armor have we found?”
One of the Skinners at the top of the basement stairs told her, “Five. There were more, but they’ve already been taken. Three of those are spoken for, though.”
“Fine. Five,” Paige said. “That’s enough for me, Cole and Abel here plus a few more. Who else wants to go tell the neighbors they’re making too much noise?”
Volunteers were not in short supply.
Chapter Five
It was a time of night that was starting to acquire the feel of day. Just shy of 3:30 A.M., every obscene comment from Madman and his bros echoed down the street. Every clink of empty bottles hitting the sidewalk rattled through the air accompanied by the perpetual thump of a cheap radio set up somewhere within the messy house.
The Skinners didn’t try to sneak up on them. Cole, Paige, and Abel led a group of seven more that fanned out to form a wall in front of Madman’s water-damaged front porch. The house’s owner, along with most of the guys from the party, came outside to meet them. Drunken insults and threats were spat at them, but the Skinners weren’t there to talk. Cole and Abel wore military surplus jackets that came down past their waists and had tanned werewolf hides stitched into the lining. Paige wore her own black harness, which covered her torso and was strapped in place like a bulletproof vest. She’d had no trouble finding Half Breed skins to zip into the harness for padding that could stop anything the drunken idiots had to offer.
“What the fuck do you want?” Madman asked.
Spotting the Nymar instantly, Cole extended a hand to point at his target. “Him first.”
The guy had pockmarked skin, spiked brown hair, and wore a shirt with the collar torn out to show his markings, as if the tendrils were expensive tattoos. With so many Skinners in front of him, he no longer seemed anxious to display his ink.
“What do you want with Finn?” Madman asked.
“I just want to make sure he gets a good look at what’s about to happen.” With that, Cole stepped forward with the aggression that had been building inside of him since the first guy in a football jersey knocked him aside in the tenth grade. The fact that he now had armed killers to back him up was simply glorious.