As Astin and another Nymar emerged from the back room with their guns drawn, the guards that Tara brought with her raised their weapons.
“Give me the address to those apartments,” Tara said calmly.
“His spore research will be important for all of us. When it’s done, it’s mine.”
“Agreed.”
Steph told her where to find Daniels in Schaumberg.
“Thanks,” Tara said as she started walking toward the door. Before leaving the bar, she glanced over her shoulder and said, “Just so you know, if you still feel this rebellious when the bigger orders start coming . . . you might want to pick out your favorite wall because I’ll do the nailing myself.”
Chapter Nineteen
Las Vegas, Nevada
Morning
They weren’t kept prisoner within the massive temple, but none of them had the energy to leave. The beds in their suites were contained within crooked, driftwood frames. Huge, overstuffed cushions could barely be called mattresses, but they gave Cole the best night’s sleep he’d had in a long time. Even though he and Paige shared a bed, they were too exhausted to take full advantage of it. When they woke up, however, he climbed between her legs and worked up an appetite. There hadn’t been many times for them to be alone together without passing out from exhaustion or needing to sleep off some kind of injury. Her body was warm and familiar beneath his scarred palms. She closed her eyes, leaned back and accepted him inside of her without the slightest bit of hesitation.
Over the last several months, Cole had been betrayed and rescued by her. He’d stood by her side and they fought on opposite ends of the country. Sometimes he thought he had a better chance of translating the Dryad glyphs through sheer luck than understanding what was going on inside of her head. And then there were times when he knew she felt the same way about him. The simple fact was that it would be impossible to know why she did every little thing she did. He sure as hell didn’t intend on sitting her down and explaining all of his actions to her. Now that their lives depended on it, they had to trust each other implicitly. Times like these, when he was allowed to clasp his hands in hers and pin her to the flowing surface of a luxury bed while pumping into her at whatever pace he desired were one of the many payoffs of that trust.
He returned it by allowing her to roll on top of him, straddle his hips, and do whatever she pleased for as long as they could afford. He knew she wasn’t about to hurt him, but she came close a few times. Those few, brief tastes of pain that came from her teeth or nails scraping against his skin were worth every second. After that, he and Paige shared a long hot shower and indulged in some scented soaps that were probably more expensive than all of their clothing combined.
Breakfast was served in a dining room lit only by a wall of solid glass built to either catch the sun’s rays or the electric glow of the Strip. Cole felt the former on his face as he piled sausages, eggs, French toast sticks, and a heaping portion of corned beef hash onto a large, light green platter. Before he could ask for Tabasco sauce, he found three flavors on a smaller table along with utensils. The meal was still warm in his belly when he and the others headed back into the main room of the Hub.
Nobody was surprised to find the club only slightly less busy now than when they arrived. Even if the rest of the planet crumbled, there would still be plenty of people drawn to the dancing nymphs. It had been that way for thousands of years, so why should it stop now?
Alyssa and Lexi were on hand to greet them. Both wore short dresses that showed plenty of leg without being too revealing. Even so, the nymphs attracted plenty of attention from the customers as they walked over to greet the disheveled Skinners. “Was everything all right?” Lexi asked.
“It was great,” Waggoner beamed. “Maybe I’ll stay here for another few weeks.”
Just as Cole was about to make a comment about resisting temptation, he felt a cinching pain in his gut that cut all the way down to his spinal cord. Normally, the clenching tendrils inside eased up after a few hours of sleep, but not this time. They tightened, held, and then tightened some more. “I agree,” he said in a strained voice. “We should get going.”
As before, Tristan made her entrance without a lot of fanfare. She wore a simple dress made of a filmy green material enhanced with a minimum of small jewels sewn into the fabric. Her face was timeless, beautiful and free of makeup. Her posture didn’t seem as forced as it had been the other day, and her voice was almost up to its normal clarity when she asked, “Have you changed your mind on your destination?”
Paige reached under her jacket to tighten the straps on her holster without being noticed. It would take more than a few armed customers to create a distraction powerful enough to make a difference inside the Hub, but none of the Skinners were about to take chances. “No. Why do you ask?”
“I’ve made contact with our temple in Trizs,” she replied, pronouncing the last word with a roll of the tongue that every human within earshot could feel at the nape of their neck. “There’s already trouble there.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The Amriany must have been discovered as they were on their way to meet you. They’ve been fighting since late afternoon their time.”
Cole looked at his watch. “Is that yesterday or today?”
“It’s been about four hours,” Tristan told him with a patient smirk. “The Amriany are holding their position, but it’s rough. There’s another temple several hundred miles from there, but it’s even farther from where you need to go once you arrive. I just thought I’d warn you before sending you into a war zone. Or, you could go to the other temple.”
“This is the first time in months that we’ve been out of a war zone,” Paige said. “Might as well stick to the plan. Besides, if we’re trying to win some points with the Amriany, abandoning them to fight when they were waiting for us wouldn’t do the trick.”
“All right, then.” With that, Tristan nodded once to Alyssa, who put on a smile that lit her up like a fireworks display.
The young blond nymph’s face brightened with a beaming smile as she raised both arms in the air. No further prompting was needed before her name was spoken by a sultry voice through the loudspeakers. Unlike most clubs, this one didn’t need an overly boisterous DJ. There was only an announcement of who was next up so the fans of that particular girl could fight for a front row seat before she made it to her spot. Alyssa stepped onto a large circular stage with two poles connected by a set of uneven parallel bars. As she cast off the little jacket she’d been wearing, she was hit by a beam of light reflected in myriad directions by the sequins sewn into her light blue thong and bikini top.
“Damn,” Waggoner breathed. “Now I really don’t wanna leave.”
The lights dimmed for a second, then flared back up to the driving beats of ZZ Top’s “Legs.” Alyssa strutted perfectly to that bass line before ascending one of the poles to climb along a cross bar. From the first crackle of electric guitar, the beads hanging from the rail behind her began to glow. As the light became more and more powerful, the crowd reacted as if it was just a part of the show.
“All right,” the sultry announcer said. “Who wants to join Alyssa for a special VIP party?”
“That’s your cue,” Tristan said. “When they call the numbers, just act surprised and go on up.”
The announcer made a point of aiming the spotlight at Starr as she pranced to the booth holding a large velvet bag that was supposed to be filled with numbers corresponding to tickets that every customer was given as they’d entered the club. The booth door opened and Starr went inside.
Energized from his breakfast and all the activity that led up to it, Cole approached Tristan without feeling the weight of the gear he carried in the bags strapped over both shoulders and hanging from one hand. “You doing okay?” he asked.
The Dryad turned to face him and him alone, fixing Cole with a set of eyes that singled him out amid an entire city of distractions. “Almost.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For asking you to sacrifice so much just to help us.”
“Many others have sacrificed much more,” she told him while reaching out to place a hand tenderly upon his arm. In her silence, Tristan no longer looked like a Dryad who might very well have been alive long enough to tempt sailors to the edges of maps scribbled on stained parchment. She’d never told him her age, but the longer Cole knew her, the more depth he saw in her eyes. It could very well be that hers was a sun that didn’t blind a man who gazed at it for too long. Instead, that man was granted a good look at a real celestial wonder.
“When you need to come back, either go to the club where we’re sending you or any of the other temples,” she said. “I’ll leave word with all of them in that region to grant you passage back home.”
“Should I drop your name to Chuna?”
“It wouldn’t help.” And then she leaned forward to place both hands on his face and hold him steady as she kissed him. It was a lingering, gentle kiss placed upon his lower lip, and when it was done, she held him in place to whisper, “You can’t let her feed you anymore, Cole. No matter how much it hurts. You can’t let her keep those things alive while the Nymar are watching.”
“What?”
“Think about it.”
As Cole’s ears filled with the sound of rushing blood, the air around him sprang to life in a pure white halo. A spotlight swept over him and the rest of the group, idly making its way along that portion of the room. The announcer called out some numbers, named a group that was supposed to be there for some stranger’s bachelor party. Whatever names or numbers were given, Cole was sure there were enough to cover everyone in the group. Tristan hadn’t screwed up any flight plans yet and he doubted she’d start now.
“Just don’t think too hard,” she said while gently rubbing his cheek. “The answers will be there when you get a moment to take a breath.”
“What do I do until then?” he asked.
She pointed him toward a stage glowing with light coming from spotlights as well as an intensifying green radiance emanating from the beaded curtain hanging from the ceiling. That same color pulsed constantly throughout the club as beautiful women stepped through other curtains hanging throughout the Hub. Some could have been entering the room from backstage, while others could have been coming in from anywhere else in the world. “Try to stay alive long enough to put the Memory Water to use,” she told him. “I don’t know what you’ve got in mind or if any plan can work at this point, but I learned a long time ago to never underestimate a Skinner.”
Cole had never felt as vulnerable as when he’d been about to step away from the comforting sphere of Tristan’s embrace. “What if we just screw things up even worse than they are now?”
“It would be quite a feat to make them any worse.”
Suddenly, he wasn’t so comforted anymore. “You remind me of the other brunette in my life.”
She patted his cheek, perhaps just a bit too hard, as if to pay a second tribute to Paige. “That’s the good thing about being on the bottom of the mountain. Nowhere to go but up.”
The numbers had all been read, the spotlight had found them, and the crowd was cheering them on. Paige and Waggoner bowed their heads and walked toward the stage while Cole waved and pumped his fists as if he truly had won the jackpot. Just another wild day in Vegas.
Chapter Twenty
Trizs, Hungary
Cole had taken a long jump through a Dryad bridge only once before. Unlike the mildly dizzying couple of steps that characterized most trips, his first international trip felt like plummeting through space with a giant fan at his back to push him along even faster. That was due to the nature of the bridge, which had also put the unhealthy tone into Tristan’s skin. This time he felt as if he’d closed his eyes and stepped off the edge of the stage into a pit. There was no sound or any sensation apart from the yawning in his gut that made him certain he was about to hit a brick wall at any second.
After several minutes of that, he staggered through another curtain, accompanied by the uneven bass line of a song he didn’t recognize. The others were there as well, holding their heads and opening their mouths wide as if on an airplane and trying to get their eardrums to pop. Whatever music he heard in his head was merely an echo from the Hub, resonating in the thrum of passing through the Dryad bridge. The bass lines were really there, however. All the pounding notes and reverberations weren’t in time to any music, but instead came from outside the thin walls of what Cole could now see was a substandard strip club.
“Holy shit!” Waggoner said as he looked outside through the smoked glass of a narrow window.
The other man must have been one of the first ones through, because Paige and Cole were still trying to get their heads to stop rattling. Another thump filled the small building, causing glasses to rattle behind a dirty bar and cheap imitation crystals to knock against each other while dangling from a ceiling made to look like a night sky.
Cole rubbed his temples and looked around. The curtain was set up only a few inches in front of a wall adorned with vaguely familiar Dryad glyphs written in chipped white paint covering a corner of the club. Two raised platforms on that side of the room were barely high enough to be called stages, and the poles leaning precariously in the middle didn’t look secure enough to hold a child. Two men wearing heavy coats waved furiously at the Skinners and spoke in voices that were partially lost amid the commotion.
Now that he knew someone was yelling at him, he could make out the haggard voices shouting in a Slavic dialect. He might not have known what the men were saying, but he could read flailing arms well enough to know he was supposed to come down from the stage. As soon as he hopped over the edge of the platform, glass shattered and a piercing shriek filled the room. Cole recognized that shriek well enough to drop the moment his feet touched the floor. Paige had been around gargoyles as well, which meant she was quick to follow his lead and pull Waggoner down seconds before the flapping creatures crashed through the window and circled crazily near the ceiling.
As his wits slowly returned, Cole enjoyed the view of tracked-in dirt, cigarette butts, and loose change littering the club’s floor. Warped boards rattled against each other as one of the locals made his way over to the side of the stage. “You speak English?” the man asked.
“Yeah.”
“You are Skinners from America?”
Before Cole could answer, he accidentally locked eyes with one of the creatures stuck to the ceiling with a set of hooklike talons. The gargoyle had stretched its flat body so it could survey the club using the narrow black eyes wedged near the front of its body. Those were the sharper of its two sets of eyes, the ones it used in flight. The gargoyle let go of the ceiling to slice through the air like a piece of paper taking a pendulous path toward the floor. “Above you!” he shouted.
The man had the solid build of a farmer, complete with muscles that were too big and bulky to have been sculpted in a gym. He swung himself around while spouting words in his native tongue, which had the sharp tone and rough edges of profanity. Although he had a rifle in his hands, he knew better than to fire a shot at the gargoyle. Instead, he used the stock of the weapon to swat the creature away. Since none of the creature’s blood was spilled, the others flapped near the ceiling like oversized bats. Disturbing, but no immediate threat.
“Milosh is outside with the others,” the man with the rifle said.
“What’s going on here?” Paige asked.
“Same thing as everywhere. The wolves are staking their claim and we are in their way.”
Cole’s scars had been burning since the moment he stepped through the beads, but now they flared up enough for him to reflexively reach for the spear strapped to his back. The man with the rifle didn’t need an early warning system to tell him there was trouble nearby. The rasping snarls coming through the broken window did that job well enough. The two dan
cers who’d been near the stage, who had the flawless beauty of nymphs, hurried to seek shelter behind the bar as the bartender pulled a shotgun from where he’d stashed it. Both he and the man with the rifle fired at the window, sending a curious Half Breed away.
“That won’t hold them for long,” the man with the rifle said. “You must leave now and take those things with you.”
“Care to lend us a hand?” Waggoner asked.
The man looked at him and let out a single, scoffing breath. “If you need my help, then you won’t be any use to Milosh.”
Paige stood up, brushed herself off, and pulled the Beretta from under her jacket. Her other hand wrapped around the wooden weapon holstered in her boot, which she gripped tight enough to cause blood to well up between her fingers. “Where are they?”
“Step outside and look down the road. If you miss them, you are blind.” When a burst of automatic gunfire set off a chorus of vicious howls, he added, “And deaf.”
“Is there a back door to this place?”
The man pointed in the direction the nymphs had gone and then placed the rifle stock on his shoulder so he could sight along the top of its barrel. While stepping toward the window, he fired three careful shots that were much too high to be aimed at any werewolf. Cole took a quick look in that direction to confirm his suspicion. The shots had been fired at a pair of gargoyles flapping their skinny, bony arms to gain some altitude using the thin layers of skin stretched on their bony frame. Hooked talons scraped at the darkened sky when one of the shots caught one through the middle of its body. The creature didn’t make a sound until it dove straight down and the wind passed between the layers of its flesh. A small group of Half Breeds that had been approaching the club dug their claws into the dirt and snarled at the rifleman. Some of the blood from the wounded gargoyle spattered upon their backs, which didn’t distracted them at all until the creature glided into their line of sight. One Half Breed attacked the gargoyle, tearing its thin body to shreds. The scent of one gargoyle’s blood brought down the others that had been circling overhead.
Extinction Agenda Page 21
