Vampire Uprising

by Marcus Pelegrimas

  Kawosa smirked. “That would be a nice little way to make things difficult, wouldn’t it? The almighty Full Bloods have to live with a fault.” Bringing his tone down from the taunting edge it had acquired, he shook his head. “I’m not that crafty. Leave it to the higher powers to come up with torments that cut so deep. To be honest, I’ve always seen your few flaws as a boon to your kind.”

  “How so?”

  “If every Full Blood had absolute power and could so easily find one another, what would prevent you from tearing through entire continents chasing each other around?” Using his hands and twitching fingers to illustrate his point, he continued, “All of your brothers and sisters, scampering over the globe, knocking down what the humans have taken so long to build. The ones like you would be forced into a life of defense and war, while the ones like Liam would be given the opportunity to consolidate his gifts into something far worse. Whether you agree or not, that is the way of things.”

  “You’re fond of humans?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “One of them locked you in a box belowground. If they haven’t figured out you’re missing already, more of them will undoubtedly come to try and put you right back into that box or another that’s even worse. Now,” Randolph added as he stared out in the direction that Liam had gone, “the humans that didn’t even know about us until so recently will kill us the first chance they get.”

  Kawosa faced in that direction as well. “Humans are a source of endless amusement. Throughout the generations, I have found them to be both devious and gullible. Optimistic, yet hardened. Musical and grating. Even when they know better than to trust, they still want to see what they could be missing if they strayed. No matter how much there is to fear, they never hesitate to walk away from the path.”

  “Yes,” Randolph sighed. “Liam enjoys that aspect of them very much as well.”

  “You spend a lot of time concerning yourself with him.”

  “I know. That’s why I want to leave this territory of mine.”

  “Leave? And go where?”

  “Whoever is answering Liam’s call to arms can have my territory, and I will stake a claim in theirs.”

  “Simple swap,” Kawosa mused.

  “Nothing simple about it and you know that.”

  “I also know that some very interesting times are coming. This has always been a land of strife and confusion. In recent years,” Kawosa added enthusiastically, “doubly so. The Half Breeds are growing. The humans are regressing. Up is down. Fire is water. Even the Nymar have broken out of the stale shell they’ve inhabited for far too long.”

  Randolph watched the other being with a mix of caution and reverence. Even as some of Kawosa’s words degraded into babble, he wasn’t about to make the mistake of completely discounting their source. “You can sense a change within the leeches?”

  Clamping his lips in a gnarled grimace, Kawosa lifted his chin and re-formed his face into something with nostrils that stretched back like a pair of offset, toothless mouths. “Ohhh yes. They evolve like anything else, but their spore is internal and slow to adjust. They can only taste through their host’s mouth and see through clouded eyes. I don’t know if it was the Skinners or the Amriany, but one of the groups figured this out, and Lancroft was one of the first to capture one of the evolved Nymar before they had a chance to spread their gift.

  “The leeches haven’t had as much reason to change as the Half Breeds, so they become lazy. If there’s one thing I can spot, one thing I can smell, one thing I can feel, it’s laziness inside someone’s heart. Laziness makes the humans so easy to manipulate. Their legends are full of whining about being deceived by the likes of me, when all they needed to do was not give in to the temptations being offered.”

  “You sound like Liam.”

  “And what’s so bad about that?”

  “He’s insane.”

  After considering that a moment, Kawosa replied, “We all have our quirks. If you’ve been able to deal with him thus far, why do you need my help with any other Full Bloods? I would think you’d be grateful to acquire another’s scent.”

  “Whoever is coming so far to respond to Liam’s call will not be the sort that is willing to hand over anything to anyone. If not for our kind’s deficiency, I could have found the rest of us during all my years of searching. Instead, I must piece a picture together by looking at the voids instead of the solids. Once I have acquired their scent, I ask you to convince the new arrivals that it is best for them to stay here.”

  “Surely they will ask where you have gone. No doubt they won’t have any trouble figuring it out. What should I say to that?”

  “Say what you like,” Randolph told him. “Just grease the wheels for this to happen. This is what I ask in return for breaking you out of Lancroft’s prison.”

  “Haven’t I been helpful enough to repay that debt?”

  “We haven’t asked you to do anything you wouldn’t have freely done on your own. That is no way to repay a debt. What I ask of you is also well within the scope of your normal affairs, but it is important enough to me for it to carry more weight.”

  Kawosa nodded slowly. “I think I can arrange something. But don’t tell me that is your only request. What of the matter you mentioned before? Was that a genuine concern or has it been replaced by your newfound wanderlust?”

  “That matter stands, but now is not the time to discuss it any further. Once I have settled in my new territory, if you still feel inclined to grant me that favor, I am sure you can find me. Are you certain those wretches can pick up the scent we’re after?” Randolph asked.

  “Oh yes. They just need some time. As far as they’re concerned, the single task I have given them is the only one there is. What happens when they find the one you’re looking for?”

  “Perhaps I’ll have a companion when I take my journey.” Randolph sighed, then the muscles in his brow tensed just enough for an internal darkness to make itself known upon his features. “Or perhaps one more death will be added to all of the others that are to come.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chicago

  The following morning

  The tunnels beneath Rush Street branched off in several places, but it was easy to figure out the one the Nymar had used. Not all of them could walk on walls, which meant they left a trail in the gritty dust covering the floor. Paige scouted ahead and Rico helped Cole walk while carrying the ceiling-hugging Nymar over one shoulder. It was slow going but sped up once Paige doubled back to report that the rest of the Nymar had cleared out. The Skinners branched away from the beaten path, found a dead end, and holed up there for the next few hours.

  Cole sat with his back against yet another dirty brick wall, pulling in breaths that felt like wet cement and letting them out in gasps. It helped to take shallower gulps of air, but his eyesight remained blurred around the edges.

  “How you doin’ over there?” Rico asked.

  “Still hurts.”

  “How bad?”

  “Like there’s a fucking rock swimming around in my chest and nuzzling my heart! That bad enough for you, Doctor?”

  The big man leaned against a wall with half an unlit cigarette clenched between his teeth. He held the Sig Sauer in his right hand, casually pointing it at the Nymar who’d hung Cole from the ceiling. All this time, Rico had been studying the Nymar’s face, paying close attention to the markings that ran up along both cheeks. Whenever the Nymar moved, Rico used his boot, fist, or the side of the pistol to crack it in the head. If not for the strips of burlap and knotted trash bags he’d found to bind her ankles and wrists, the bloodsucker still might have gotten away.

  “The spore’s still movin’?”

  Cole thought that if he had any psychic ability whatsoever, the focus in his glare would have popped Rico’s head wide open. “Yes. I need more antidote. Maybe some serum.”

  “You’ve had enough of both to do the job. Paige is fine. You should be too.” Biting do
wn on the cigarette as if he meant to chew it as a snack, Rico squatted so he could stare into the Nymar’s eyes while using the Sig Sauer to pin her head to the wall she was leaning against. “What did you do to him?”

  “You know wh-what I did,” she stammered.

  “Why isn’t the spore dying?”

  “Maybe your friend is too weak to fight it.”

  Rico pulled in a deep breath. When he let it out, his face became colder than a mask cut into an iceberg. “You know we’re Skinners, right?” he asked while jamming the barrel of his gun against one of the Nymar’s eyes.

  “Y-Yes.”

  “Then you know what we do to any bloodsuckers we find feeding in public.”

  Her markings fluttered beneath her skin, making her face seem like a bad television signal. When she opened her mouth to speak, the top set of fangs stretched out reflexively. “I know.”

  “Good,” Rico said calmly. But any semblance of calm instantly drained from him when he leaned against the pistol and clamped his free hand around her throat. “You don’t have any fucking idea what we do to Nymar that try to kill us. If you did, you would have never made a stupid fucking move like the one you made tonight. Were you one of the ones that burnt our place down?”

  “No! I don’t—”

  Rico took his hand away from her throat, reached into his jacket and pulled out a knife that he snapped open with a flip of his wrist. The clattering handle fell into place to reveal a three inch blade that he stuck up under the ridge of her eyebrow to draw a trickle of oily blood. “I can go two ways from here. Down to flip your eye out or straight in to gouge your brain. That second one takes some effort, but I’ve got a whole lot of pent-up energy that’s in need of direction.”

  The Nymar flailed against her bonds until she finally snapped one wrist free. Rico took the fight from her by poking the blade in a little more. She couldn’t blink. She couldn’t move. She could no longer even shift her weight out of fear of moving the blade inside her.

  Cole watched the process silently. He wanted to protest, but a wave of pain from the living kidney stone moving within his chest erased that impulse completely. He managed to pull himself up, swallow the urge to launch himself into a coughing fit, and pull the spear from its harness. Dropping to one knee as the lump sought refuge somewhere in the vicinity of his left lung, he drove the metallic spearhead into the floor near the Nymar’s leg and snarled, “Tell me what you did!”

  “You’d better do what he says, honey,” Paige said as she jogged around the corner and approached the dead end. “Every one of your friends is gone.”

  “Nobody’s gonna help you,” Rico said. “That means I get to help myself.” He only moved the blade a fraction of a millimeter, but that was enough to get the Nymar’s legs scraping against the floor.

  “There’ll be more coming,” the Nymar said.

  Cole’s voice was a haggard croak when he asked, “Who’ll be coming?”

  “Hope and the others with her.”

  “Do you mean the rest of those Toronto assholes like Bobby and Tru?” Paige asked.

  “They’re the ones who make the rounds, but any of the Nymar who’ve joined the evolution will be happy to come along.”

  “Bunch of goddamn bloodsuckers think they’re revolutionaries?” Rico scoffed.

  The Nymar wasn’t squirming so much anymore. Either she’d accepted her fate or the threadlike tendrils slipping out from between her eyeball and socket were comforting her in some way. The black filaments snaked out along Rico’s blade, wrapping around it to try and pull it out of her. “Not revolution,” she said. “Evolution. If we don’t get what we want from that one, we’ll get it from another one of you and add it to what we took from Lancroft.”

  “Get what from us?”

  By now the tendrils snaking from the Nymar’s eye had formed a thick coating around the tip of Rico’s blade. He tried to move it again, but her eyeball was protected by the black barricade. If she felt any discomfort from the ordeal, her spore must have taken care of that too.

  Paige stormed over. As her shadow was cast across the Nymar’s face, the tendrils there widened to form a slender striped pattern flowing directly toward the blade in her eye socket. “Give me a good target, Rico,” she said while digging an antidote syringe from a leather case in her pocket.

  “Surely.”

  Once he’d levered the blade down a bit, Paige held the needle over the mass of tendrils. “I knew you bloodsuckers could be ruthless, but now you’re turning multiseeding into common practice?” Always the teacher, she looked over to Cole and said, “She’s got more than one spore.”

  “I don’t give a shit if she’s got more than one head!” Cole replied. “Get this thing out of me!”

  “Hope’s leading this group and she’s not from around here,” Paige said to the Nymar. “What’s she doing?”

  “You won’t have any luck with that needle, you stupid bitch,” the Nymar spat.

  “I’ve been meaning to make absolutely sure of that. Where else would she and the others go?”

  “You’re the ones that need to find somewhere to go! The cops are working for us now and they’re out for your heads. After they see what you left behind in the Blood Parlor, you pricks will be at the top of their wanted lists.”

  Paige shrugged casually and jabbed the skinny needle into the tendrils. Judging by the way the Nymar screamed, those were some very tender strands. It was all Rico could do to hold her down before she bucked hard enough to force his blade all the way to the back of her skull.

  “Talk or I pump this shit in,” Paige warned.

  “Go ahead, you stupid Skinner whore!”

  “I’m not kidding!”

  “Neither am I!” the Nymar screamed. “Fuck yourself and your mother!”

  Rico tightened his grip on her neck. “You should become real helpful real fast or we’ll lose interest. We got better things to do than screw around.”

  “Suck your friend’s dick,” she snarled. “At least he’ll get some fun before the spore takes root.”

  “Fine,” Paige said as she pressed the plunger of the needle down.

  The Nymar tensed and pulled in a sharp breath. Her eyelids fluttered as much as they could considering her predicament, but soon she let out a breath and started to laugh. “Told you to do better than that, bitch.”

  Paige pressed the plunger down even harder to drain the last drop of antidote from the syringe. When it didn’t make a difference, she looked over to Rico and said, “Now we know for certain this stuff doesn’t work on the new ones.”

  “All right,” the big man grunted. “Plan B. I stick this blade all the way into your brain and then cut your heart out. Thanks to all that black spaghetti inside of you, I’m betting you’ll feel every second of it.” He pressed the blade in just far enough to puncture her eyeball. The flow of milky fluid was quickly stymied by black filaments, but the expression on the Nymar’s face made it clear she could still feel plenty of what was happening.

  “Hope and the others went to a bunch of different cities,” she said so quickly that her words ran together in a barely comprehensible stream. “They made deliveries, set things up, arranged it so different Skinners could all be hit just like you were.”

  “What did they deliver?” Paige demanded.

  “Blood stolen from Jonah Lancroft. Old Nymar spores from when we were different. From older evolutions. Nymar change and adapt. We develop immunities like humans with viruses. It changes us, and the spores change. That’s why your poisons don’t work on ones like me. Hope gave us samples that came before you had the shit in those needles. The older spore were different from us, so the poison doesn’t work.”

  “What cities did Hope visit?”

  “I don’t know them all. Please! Take the knife out so I can think.”

  “Think now,” Paige warned, “or forever hold your peace.”

  “They came here,” the Nymar sputtered. “Here and … and … and Miami! They
went to Miami.”

  “Already know about that one. What’s another?”

  “Sacramento.”

  Paige cocked her head to one side and narrowed her eyes. “You sure about that? Keep in mind, we’re taking you with us to wherever we decide to go. If it turns out to be a wash, we’ll make this shit look like a party.”

  “Okay, not Sacramento. Hope did go to San Antonio.”

  “Too far.”

  Something that may have been sweat appeared on the Ny-mar’s face. Her nervous impulse forced her to try and blink, which only made things worse. The sensation of her eyelid scraping against the knife caused her to kick and thrash, which in turn wiggled the blade inside her skull even more. Rico held her down but wasn’t able to keep her still. Cole wasted no time in flipping his spear around so the forked end trapped one of the Nymar’s shoulders and kept her more or less in place.

  “Just fucking kill me!” the Nymar screamed.

  “Not until you—”

  “Denver and Boston! Hope went to Denver and Boston and some other places but I don’t know where! Philadelphia, I think. For Christ’s sake, just—”

  Paige jammed her machete into the Nymar’s chest. Its charmed metallic edge allowed her to cut straight through the breast plate and the infected heart beneath it. A few more quick, plunging stabs caused the vampire to arch her back. Before she could blink, her skin was already starting to flake away. When Rico pulled his knife out, the tendrils that had held on to the blade fell away like glue that dried into a brittle crust.

  Cole had seen plenty of Nymar killed from exposure to the antidote, but this one was something new. Paige held on to the machete’s handle and twisted it violently from side to side. A few seconds later the Nymar caught a second wind. She kicked and thrashed against the ground until Paige stabbed her a few inches to the right of the first wound. The violent convulsions restarted as the other half of the Nymar’s body flopped uselessly. Her screams were contorted and strained. Some of her fingernails were torn off against the floorboards, leaving bloody stains on either side of her.