Rico answered by leaning into the hall and opening up with the Sig Sauer. He wasn’t alone. Both Drina and Tobar stepped out as well, adding their own gunfire to the storm raging up and down the hallway. Tobar’s pistol didn’t throw nearly as many rounds through the air, but the sound of them reminded Cole of a truck hitting the ground after being dropped from a third-floor parking garage. A barechested Nymar woman caught one of those rounds between her small breasts and the impact slammed her against the wall. When she reached a dark patch between light sources, her tendrils widened to make her more of a person-shaped blob within the shadows. Tobar’s aim was good enough for the next round to carve a tunnel through her that destroyed her heart and liquefied anything attached to it.
“Hit the lights,” one of the Nymar said from the stairwell. The others responded by shifting their fire upward until most of the recessed bulbs within their range had been shattered.
Cole had seen things turn invisible before, but this was something else. The Nymar’s tendrils allowed them to blend into the darkness with a practical camouflage that, combined with their speed and climbing ability, made them a whole new kind of dangerous.
Some of the light from the other end of the hall made it to Cole’s position, but it wasn’t enough. The vampires simply became part of the darkness and crept in on the Skinners like death itself. Drina fired her assault rifle, lighting up the corridor in a fiery strobe that illuminated a Nymar for a fraction of a second while also burning the image of the others into Cole’s retinas.
“This place is ours now, Skinners,” one of the Nymar hissed. “Every place is ours.”
“Rico?” Cole asked while holding his spear at the ready.
“Get over here,” he called out from a cell farther down the hall.
Cole felt as if the weight of the cement floor above him, along with the little house above that, was pressing down on the back of his neck. It was completely dark at the far end of the hallway, but he could still make out a few shapes moving like wraiths through a dream. There was movement upstairs as well, as he joined Drina and Rico at the end of the hall, which was lit by a few of the dim, recessed bulbs. Behind him, claws scratched against brick and one Nymar closed to within a few yards of his back before being deterred by a few well-placed shots from Rico’s Sig Sauer.
“We’re getting the hell out of here!” the big man said. “The temple upstairs went off again. I don’t know how the hell they’re getting the nymphs to help them, but there’s more on the way.”
“I know,” Cole gasped as he dashed into the broken cell. “I heard it too, but what then? Should we really give this place up?”
“They have better tactical positioning,” Nadya said, “as well as superior numbers. Now is not the time to fight. If we stay here, it will be the time to die.”
“She’s right,” Rico admitted. “I don’t like giving this place over to the bloodsuckers, but we got caught with our pants down. They’re shipping in backup and all we got is the ass end of a goddamn hallway.”
“So the plan is to huddle together in a small room?” Cole asked as more lights in the hallway were taken out.
“You can huddle if you like,” Gunari said as he grabbed hold of a metal spike in each hand. “We are leaving.”
The Amriany spikes were slightly curved and about eighteen inches long. He gripped them by handles that fit around his wrists, dropped to his knees and stuffed both arms into a hole Cole hadn’t noticed until that moment. Digging the spikes into the sides of the hole, Gunari pulled himself underground in a series of quick, wriggling movements. The other two Amriany in the cell with Rico and Prophet prepared their own spikes, and when Drina backed into the small room, she strapped her FAMAS over her head and around one shoulder so she could follow suit.
“You said you had a way out of here,” Rico said to Nadya. “This is it?”
“It’s how we came in,” she replied. Now that Gunari’s legs and feet had disappeared within the hole, she knelt down and stuck her arms into the cramped tunnel. “We will help you leave the same way or you can stay here. Your choice.” With that, she pulled in a deep breath and dove into the freshly turned soil.
“This is a Mongrel tunnel,” Tobar explained. Scrambling claws closed in on them, so he fired a few times to keep them at bay. “They know about Lancroft’s dungeon, and so do the Nymar. This place is lost. To stay is suicide and we do not approve of suicide.” Unwilling to explain himself any further, Tobar dove into the hole.
Drina was next and she didn’t even flinch as more gunfire erupted at the far end of the hall. “I can take one of you now and escort the rest,” she said.
“Take Prophet,” Rico said. “Cole and I will follow on our own.”
“But there is a proper way for following the Mongrel tunnels to make sure you come up on the other side.”
Ducking out of the cell to take a glimpse down the hall, Rico grunted, “Yeah, yeah. Squirming through a hole. I think we can handle it.”
“Fine.” Looking at Prophet, Drina said, “When I’m almost out of sight, grab my foot and I will pull you through.” Without waiting another moment, she stuck both arms into the hole and dug in using the curved spikes.
“You two ain’t coming, are you?” Prophet asked.
Showing him a wide, blocky grin, Rico dropped his voice to a snarling whisper and said, “That’s what I like about you, Walter. Very astute.”
“So what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Keep an eye on these guys. Stay with them for as long as you can. Tell them I said for you to go on without us. If they let you, find out where they’re based or how many more Amriany are in the area. If they dump you somewhere, just try to—”
“She’s waiting on me now,” Prophet snapped. “I know how to track someone. I am a professional, you know.”
Filling both meaty hands with .45s, Rico aimed at the hallway just outside the cell door. “Shit! Here they come!” he shouted while unleashing a fiery torrent from both barrels.
Prophet didn’t need any more incentive to jump face first into the dirt. After being kicked in the face by the foot Adrina offered, he grabbed onto her ankle and was immediately pulled underground as if towed by a truck.
Cole stood with his back in a corner, angled so he could see through the door and toward the direction of the gunfire. “Damn. The temple just went off again. This place is gonna be swarming with these fuckers real soon. Sounds like we’ve got something working on our side, though. A lot of that shooting isn’t directed at us, so they must be shooting at someone else.”
“I was wondering if you’d picked up on that. Also, the Nymar aren’t coming down the hall so much anymore. Whoever’s upstairs is making a bigger splash than us. What’re you doing?”
Leaning his head back, Cole held a recycled Visine bottle over his eyes and squeezed a single drop into each one. A rush of cold flowed through his eyeballs and sent a chill all the way to the back of his skull. “It’s Ned’s drops. The ones that allow us to see scents. They worked real well for tracking Nymar before and they should do fine now.”
“There ain’t a lot of that stuff left. Don’t use it all up.”
Cole blinked so the drops could soak in. When he looked into the darkened hall again, he saw the outline of a figure crouched directly in front of the door, watching in the calm security of someone who believes they’re unseen. He stuffed the little plastic bottle into his coat pocket, picked up his spear and ran straight ahead. Once the sentinel knew it had been spotted, it sprung at him in a flurry of claws and teeth.
Rico followed him from the cell. “Hand that stuff over.”
The Nymar had been quick enough to avoid getting impaled through the chest, but it still picked up a nasty wound along the top of its shoulder and along its neck. With most of the Nymar’s body covered in inky black camouflage, it was tough for Rico to see more than a shifting blob in the shadows. Cole swung at it, scraping the metallic ends of his weapon against the brick to send a shower of sparks to the floor. The Nymar leapt backward, hissed at the Skinners and darted toward the staircase.