The inside of the house was exactly what had been advertised on the outside. Couches with stuffing flowing from tears in the upholstery formed a pit around a big TV showing the final table of a poker tournament. Crushed beer and pop cans were strewn on the floor along with enough empty pizza boxes to build a very flimsy and greasy fort. Cole had barely taken four steps inside before all hell broke loose.
Madman rushed up behind him, but was immediately overpowered by the Skinners. Cole walked all the way back to the bedrooms, following the itch in his palms that had brought him this far. There were more Nymar inside. Having them this close to the Lancroft house was not a good sign.
The first door he encountered was closed, so Cole opened it. Inside that room, a Nymar wearing nothing but dark blue boxers climbed out from under the sheets of a twin bed. The tendrils marking his skin were fat and dark, meaning he’d recently fed on the one substance that the spore attached to his heart would crave. Judging by the state of the other man, slumped in a corner with blood running from slashed wrists, Cole was certain he’d found the vampire’s snack.
“This isn’t exactly feeding in public,” Cole said, “but we’re doing a surprise insp—”
He was cut short when the Nymar used a portion of his enhanced speed to reach beneath the mattress to grab a .44 that had been stashed there. The gunshot exploded within the room, spitting a round that hit Cole in the upper chest a few inches from his collar. Part of his brain was still trying to come up with a funny way to insult the Nymar who’d just killed him. That thought rattled in his brain as he lost his footing, bounced off a wall and dropped to the floor. He couldn’t breathe. A blurred jumble of dark shapes was smeared across his eyes. His ears were filled with muffled, thumping movement inside the house and a piercing ringing left by the .44.
The Nymar landed on top of Cole as if he’d been dropped from a helicopter hovering above the house. As the vampire pressed down on him with more weight than his scrawny body should have had, the coppery stink on the Nymar’s breath washed over him. Eyeing him hungrily, the Nymar peeled Cole’s jacket open.
His jacket.
Cole was dazed and battered, but the jacket’s lining had kept the bullet from breaking through. Unfortunately, the Nymar had already found a way in.
“She said you’d come running,” the Nymar hissed while looking down at him. “Just didn’t think it’d be this quick.”
When the Nymar settled, pinning him to the floor, there was nothing Cole could do about it. Seeing the top set of feeding fangs slip out from beneath his gums, however, sent a jolt of adrenaline through his body. He rolled onto his side, reached over one shoulder, grabbed the spear from its harness and drove it straight down into the base of the Nymar’s neck.
The spear was in its compact form, so it was almost as thick as a baseball bat. Thorns sprouting from the handle punctured Cole’s palm, allowing him to tap into the shape-shifting powers imbued into the weapon.
The Nymar stretched his head back and opened his mouth wide. Thinner, curved fangs slid down along the inner edge of the feeding fangs, and a thick, stout set on his lower jaw snapped out like a trap that had been sprung. Before Cole could will the spear to change its shape, the Nymar grabbed to pull it out from where it had been lodged.
“Wha … what’s going on?” the man with the slit wrists groaned.
More gunshots blasted through the house, but Cole focused on the voices in the next room. One of them was Paige, and she was quickly drowned out by the blast of a shotgun.
Just as Cole was getting the spear to extend deeper into the Nymar’s torso, the .44 was angled to point at his head. He stared up at the pistol while both of the Nymar’s eyes widened in anticipation.
The Nymar was pinning all but one of his arms to the floor, so Cole flipped the spear around with a snap of his wrist, bringing around the end that was carved into a set of forked points. From there he willed the weapon to extend to its full length with a voice that filled the inside of his skull with a frantic scream. The spear responded by almost doubling in length, as if loaded with a spring. The forked end caught the Nymar’s wrist, shoving the gun away from Cole’s face a fraction of a second before it went off with a blast that sent a piercing shriek through Cole’s ears. When the forked end of the spear snapped shut around the Nymar’s arm, it did so with enough power to slice down to bone.
The Nymar couldn’t jump away from Cole fast enough. He dropped the .44 and scampered toward the bed like his boxers had been put to a torch. His hand was still stuck, however, and Cole wasn’t about to let go.
After pulling in a few cautious breaths, he was certain the Skinner-crafted armor had held up under the second shot. Trying to get up was enough to throw him into a world of hurt, but the Nymar’s flailing efforts to escape actually helped pull him to his feet. As soon as his legs were under him, Cole tightened his grip on the spear and swung the Nymar into a wall.
“Please!” someone shouted from the living room. “Just get out of here! I’m sorry about the car!”
The Nymar turned toward Cole and opened his mouth to show the murky venom dripping from curved upper fangs. Cole twisted away so the paralytic substance was spat onto his borrowed jacket instead of his face. Before the Nymar could come up with another trick to tip the scales back in his favor, Cole reeled him in. When the Nymar stumbled toward him, Cole drove one leg straight out to bury his foot in the vampire’s midsection, dropping him to his knees with a huffing grunt.
“Cole? Where’d you go?”
Standing over the Nymar with his spear in a bloody grip, he responded, “In here, Paige.”
She hurried into the bedroom wielding her baton. “You found another one?”
“Yeah. I think he’s got something to say.” Giving the spear a little twist, Cole bent the Nymar’s hand in the wrong direction and said, “Isn’t that right?”
The young man with the slashed wrists rushed forward. Even though Paige held him back, he still reached for the Nymar and pleaded, “Let him go. He didn’t hurt me, I swear!”
Pushing the man back, Paige bought herself enough time to drop her baton into the holster on her boot. She grabbed one of the man’s hands and inspected his bloody wrists. “He didn’t? Than what’s this?”
“It’s a game we play, that’s all.”
The cuts made across his veins and had been partially wrapped by shreds of thin material. Studying his eyes, she asked, “Are you on something?”
“Just some weed and pills. They grow it here. In the basement. I only took it for our games. That’s all. We weren’t hurting anyone!”
“He shot me!” Cole said.
“Because you stormed in here!”
“Cops!” one of the Skinners shouted from the living room.
“Okay, Cole,” she said calmly. “Let him go. It’s all over.”
Even though he wanted to rid himself of the Nymar currently attached to his spear, the weapon didn’t seem ready to let him go. Part of the reason might have been the large portion of Cole’s brain that wanted to take the Nymar’s gun hand for a souvenir.
“It’s all over,” Paige repeated. Raising her voice to shout in the direction of the living room, she asked, “Are we through here?”
“We’re through, we’re through!” someone squealed loud enough to fill the next room.
“Cops are coming,” Abel calmly announced.
Cole still couldn’t get the spear to open, so he did the next best thing and glared down at the Nymar as if trapping him there was his only purpose in life. “If the cops want to see something,” he shouted, “tell them to look in the basement and forget about our visit tonight!”