Ned stopped just outside of her reach and lowered himself to one knee. “Nymar,” he told her. “They’re Nymar.”
“Great. You’ve told me that already. Mind telling me whose blood is this?” she asked after looking down at her hands and using the back of one to try and clean her face. “How did this stick change shape? How many more days do I have until someone pops out from somewhere to tear me apart?”
“They may find you again or they may not.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No,” Ned replied. “But you may feel better once you learn how to defend yourself.”
Paige’s arms dangled along the top of her knees as she looked up at the older man with bloodshot eyes. “You’re going to teach me how to swing a stick?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Come on, Ned,” Rico said from the kitchen. “Think about this.”
“What do I need to think about? She’s a fighter. She’s got the spark in her eye. Besides, she’s already seen enough to be useful to us. With a little bit of training, she can—”
“She can what?” Rico snapped. “Kill us in our sleep? Find out even more about us and then turn that shit over to some multiseeded Nymar bitch?”
“It won’t happen that way,” Ned insisted. “We’ll keep an eye on her.”
Paige might have needed the elongated stake to help get up again, but she didn’t need it to remain standing. Once she had her balance, she threw the weapon down so it clattered against the floor near its owner’s feet. “None of us will have to worry about any of this bullshit. I’m out of here.”
“You won’t be able to shake this, Paige,” Ned said as he scooped up his weapon and stood up. “You’re not one of those people who can convince yourself this didn’t happen or that what you saw can be explained away. Your eyes are open. I know, because I looked straight into them.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want you to become a Skinner.” Despite the look that got from both her and Rico, Ned continued unabated. “I want you to keep that fire inside you alive. It’s the same drive that got you out of that hospital in one piece and out on the street until you tracked us down. Do you know that nobody—not the cops or the Nymar—have found us here until now?”
Reluctantly, Paige said, “Well, you did give me a card.”
“Now I want to give you the means to put that fire of yours to use. There aren’t a lot of us around and we need all the good fighters we can possibly get. Hope and Evan were members of a small group in a small town. There are larger groups out there, doing much worse things in bigger cities. You don’t even know about the other creatures out there, Paige. There are things preying on people like your friends that make the Nymar look like insects. Your instinct is to fight them. That’s something that can’t be taught. What can be taught is the means to win the fight. We can teach you that.”
“Fuck that,” Rico snarled. “That girl walked in here tryin’ to kill us! Have you forgotten that already?”
Ned grinned as the weapon in his hands re-formed into its unassuming broom handle shape. “And she got closer than the cult in Topeka. That says a lot.”
“Yeah,” Rico scoffed. “She’s a real bloodhound. I ain’t letting those freak jobs in Topeka get away with what they did and I ain’t about to forget about this. You wanna train this one? It’s on your head. Keep her the hell away from me.”
“Are you forgetting what kind of things hang over your head, Rico? Can you seriously look at her and say you’re so much better than her?”
“Don’t flip that ‘he who is without sin’ crap at me,” Rico grunted. “I’m not talking about who gets to cast the first stone. I’m talkin’ about who can be trusted. I proved myself a long time ago. That one there,” he said while jabbing a gnarled, bloody finger at Paige, “has proved that she’ll jump sides at the first line of sweet talk whispered into her ear. You want your first lesson, girl? Bloodsuckers are real good at sweet talk. If yer too stupid to have figured that out after dealing with assholes like Wes, then you ain’t gonna be any use to us!”
“So if you train me, does that mean I get to spar with him?” Paige asked. “More than likely,” Ned replied.
“Then sign me up,” she said with a tired, halfhearted grin. “It’d be worth it just to kick his ass a few times.”
Rico’s cold scowl was all he needed to let them know what he thought of that.
“There may be a better fit for your initial training,” Ned told her. “I need to get back to those sightings in the Everglades, but Gerald is free. I think you two should get along just fine.”
Chapter Thirty
Denver, Colorado Present day
“So,” Cole said once he finally got a chance to speak, “that means Hope’s been chasing Paige for over ten years? I suppose that was a long way to go for that information. She could have just told me there was a history there.”
Rico sat in the driver’s seat with his elbow propped against the steering wheel. The car was parked, so he devoted his attention to picking at a stubborn strand of beef jerky with a toothpick as he replied, “That ain’t the whole reason she wanted to tell you that story, and it ain’t why you needed to hear it.”
They sat along East Fiftieth Avenue, a stretch of road in a section of the city filled with industrial parks and fenced lots of building supplies behind large, two-level storage units. It was just past two in the morning and the air was cold enough to grate against Cole’s eyeballs as it leaked in through the poorly insulated car windows. As much as he wanted to stop being angry with Paige, he simply couldn’t bring himself to that point.
The few other cars that passed them after Rico had first come to a stop were just as anxious to remain unseen as the Skinners keeping watch on the second building within the closest fenced-in lot. According to the latest word he’d gotten from the local news sites, the Denver PD was being kept occupied by a string of fires set in random spots around the city well away from Fiftieth Avenue.
Rolling down the window, Rico said, “Love that mountain air.”
“Yeah. Joining the Skinners has really given me a chance to travel and see the sights. Too bad I get to see every damn city in the middle of the night.”
“And you wonder why Paige didn’t have any trouble jamming a blade through your chest? The more you gripe, the more I get behind that idea myself.”
The car that rolled up to them was easy enough to miss. It was just battered enough to blend in with the others on the road, slow enough to flow with the rest of the sparse traffic, and turned sharply enough to get close before Rico could do much about it. The big man did already have his Sig Sauer resting on his lap and ready to fire up through his window. Fortunately for the passenger of the other car, the Skinners weren’t so easily spooked.
“Stanley’s not gonna believe you guys are really here,” Prophet said as he leaned his elbow out the other car’s window. “He actually giggled when I told him we were closing in on these guys tonight. The man’s got scars from a war and two different street fights, but he giggled.”
“What’s he think?” Rico asked indignantly. “That we weren’t gonna hold up our end of the bargain? Your boss bailed me and Cole here out of that cell in St. Louis and we said we’d do this. What made him think it would go any other way?”
“Well, there was that voice mail you left where you told him he could stick his favor up his ass.”
“That don’t count,” Rico replied without missing a beat.
“Who’s with you?”
“It’s just me and Cole.”
“Where’s Paige?” Prophet asked.
“Warning the cops that they’re being set up by these informants they think they got.”