“You’re here. They’re here. Let me and Tara go!”
Ned struggled with Hope, grabbing onto the arm that had snaked around his neck to try and give himself some breathing room. Even Hope seemed surprised when she was unable to choke the life out of him right then and there.
“We’ll see how this pans out before we let anyone go,” Evan said. He held out one hand, palm up, and beckoned to Paige. “Now hand me that gun.”
“Let Tara go first.”
More screams ripped through the house, unrecognizable apart from the fact that they were female. Rico then unleashed a torrent of profanity as solid impacts thumped from one bedroom to another. Paige caught a glimpse of the big man throwing Wes into a wall before the Skinner was slashed across the face by the Nymar’s claws and shoved into the next room.
Evan bent down to reach for Paige’s trembling hands. “Give me that g—”
She cut his threat short by pulling her trigger twice, catching Evan in the stomach, up high near his solar plexus. The Nymar staggered backward while letting out a breath that sounded as if he’d sprung a leak. Several black fibers stretched out of the bullet wound to grip its edges, widening the wound into a single, surprised eye before a chunk of lead was pushed out. By the time the bullet hit the floor, the wound was closing.
Tears emerged at the corners of Paige’s eyes as she bared her teeth and pulled her trigger again and again. Her shots hit Evan in the chest and hip, respectively, sending the Nymar back a few steps without dropping him to the floor. He leered at her hungrily, making fists with both hands as the tendrils patched him up enough to move forward again. He managed to take half a step toward Paige before arching his back and throwing both arms out to either side. His mouth opened and all three sets of fangs extended far enough from the sockets in his gums that the tender, whiter portions of each one stretched down from the pink line of flesh.
A muffled tearing sound bubbled up from the back of Evan’s throat and his fingers trembled like frayed sections of a live wire. The middle portion of his light brown shirt became dark and wet. There was no hole in the material, but it was obvious that one of Paige’s bullets had found its mark. That theory was disproved the moment something arose beneath his shirt, strained the fabric, and finally poked through. The wooden stake was coated in the Nymar’s blood and was sharp enough to cut Evan’s hands when he tried to grab hold of the object that had impaled him.
Evan’s struggle was over in a matter of seconds. He slumped forward to hang off the stake as his bodily fluids flowed out of him. When he finally did drop to his knees, he cleared the way for Paige to see Ned behind him. Somehow, his bat had shifted into a thinner weapon that drove all the way through Evan’s back and out the other side. Ned looked up from the dying Nymar, saw Paige, and croaked, “Run.”
Rico’s hand felt like a mess of chopped meat hanging from his wrist. It was too bloody for him to see how much damage had been done, so he focused on the hand he could actually use. When he renewed his attempts to get to his .45, he heard the commotion from the other side of the house. All of his senses were dulled by the strain of fighting Tara and the blood he’d lost to her. Despite the fact that she was stronger than any Nymar he had faced thus far in his career, Tara hopped away like a scolded pup when Wes stormed into the bedroom, grabbed him and stood him up.
No matter how torn up Rico’s fingers were, they remained locked around his weapon. He could barely feel the varnished wood in his hand when he slashed Wes’s throat with the upper spike. Rico didn’t know how long his grip would hold, so he turned and swung at Tara while he could. The wooden spike ripped across her upper chest, tearing a section of Tara’s shirt and digging a messy gorge a few inches above the slope of her breasts. She screamed, pressed both hands against the ugly wound and staggered away.
Although it would take longer to heal a wound from the Skinner’s weapon, Wes pushed through enough of the pain to grab Rico and throw him into the hallway. Rico’s free hand closed around Wes’s shirt, locking the two of them together as the momentum of their struggle carried them into the adjacent room.
There was next to nothing in there apart from two chairs facing each other and a single box bearing the label of a moving company. Wes staggered backward into the box, clutching the neck wound that was already closing. He kicked over one of the chairs and got his legs entangled with the other. When the Nymar shifted his weight to compensate for the slip, Rico shouted directly into his face. It wasn’t so much of a threat or statement, but an obscene roar that made him sound even more like a wounded animal.
Apart from the strain of his leg muscles, Rico’s entire body was numb. When he grabbed Wes’s shoulder with his left hand, he didn’t even feel it enough to know if he’d trapped anything within his grasp. And when he unleashed a series of straight gut punches using the wooden weapon in his right hand, he felt more like he was clumsily moving a rusty tool instead of anything that grew from his shoulder. Even so, the weapon in Rico’s bloody rasp managed to hack away at the Nymar’s torso.
Wes grabbed Rico’s neck amid the punches and began to squeeze. His grip remained strong and his fingernails dug into the skin covering Rico’s throat, straining it to the point of tearing it open. One more punch from Rico forced the Nymar’s grip to slacken.
With all the blood coming from Rico’s flayed palms and fingers, his weapon was covered with a layer of gore thick enough to make it look like something that had truly formed from his own flesh. The hole he’d dug into Wes’s stomach was massive. Rico jammed the weapon in as deep as it would go and showed the Nymar an ugly, blocky smile as he willed the charmed wood to stretch up toward an infected heart. Since the weapons were bound to their Skinners by blood, Rico’s responded quicker than his own fingers. The wooden spike snapped up, out, and then diverted as much of its mass as possible to form a series of branches that punctured and tore just about everything within Wes’s chest cavity. In moments the spore was reduced to pulp. Rico drank in the sight of Wes’s vacant stare as he lost the last bit of strength he had.
Paige turned toward the front door and shouted, “Tara! We’re leaving!”
Tara emerged from one of the rear bedrooms, glancing back and forth between Paige and the wounds that her tendrils were slowly knitting back together.
Hacking up a strained breath, Ned was unable to utter a single word. Hope had shifted her hands to grab his chest and rake through his shirt using black claws that had emerged from the tips of her fingers. When those claws sank in, his eyes widened and the bat slipped from his hand.
A steely calm drifted onto Paige’s face, settling in beneath the tears and dirt that covered her like a cheap mask. “Tara,” she said. “Get out of here. Now.” The moment Tara backed away, Paige shifted her attention to Ned. Hope was taking her time with him, slowly peeling him open while feeding through the holes her fangs had drilled into the base of his neck. Paige picked up the bat, which had been frozen into a long, gnarled stake. Shifting it around to grab the handle, she winced as its thorns bit into her palm. After adjusting her grip so her fingers fit around the thorns as best they could, she held the stake out in a trembling, two-handed grip. “You too, Hope,” she said. “Out.”
The Nymar’s eyes wandered up to her, and the corners of her mouth curled into a grin without allowing her fangs to come away from Ned’s flesh.
“Out!”
When Hope tightened her hold, she looked as if she was hugging Ned from behind. She even let out a soft, throaty moan while pulling another drink from his veins.
Paige stuck the Nymar’s arm using the stake that was still coated in Evan’s blood. “I said get the fuck out!”
Hope glared angrily at Paige and tore her arm out from the stake without seeming to notice the damage it caused. Paige’s response was to pull the weapon back and drive it in again. Hope’s face twisted with pain and she looked up to speak. Before she could say a word, Paige angled the sharpened end of the weapon to drive it in farther and twist.