Vampire Uprising

by Marcus Pelegrimas

  “I can tell you there’s a reason those four places were saved for last,” Cole said.

  Rico studied him with a critical eye. The other was pinched shut in a grimace of pain as he reached under his jacket to examine a wound he’d picked up somewhere during the night. “How do you know that?”

  “Because otherwise the thing Hope was setting up would have happened by now. It would have been lumped in with all the smaller incidents instead of being saved for the next act, whatever that may be. I know what you’re thinking, and yes, this is coming from the part of my brain that plots video games. It still makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  Although he obviously hated to admit as much, Rico nodded.

  “We might be able to defuse some of this, though,” Cole continued. “Paige happens to be friends with a cop in Kansas City. Maybe even real good friends.”

  “Not that good, Cole,” she replied sternly. “I told you that already. Besides, Stanze’s just a city police officer. And in case you need me to remind you, it’s the wrong city.”

  “Stanze’s a smart guy. Plus, he’s got to be in someone’s sights since he’s the one other departments have been going to regarding all the wild dog attacks, right?”

  Although Paige’s nod started off like Rico’s, it was soon accented by a crooked little smile. “Right.”

  “You’re the one who’s so close to Stanze, so why don’t you have a chat with him and see what he can tell us. At the very least, he might know how to get a message to any undercover cops in those four cities to let them know what they might be in for.”

  “What do you want her to do?” Rico asked. “Have her cop buddy type up a memo in regards to Skinners and any Skinnerlike activities?”

  “He could figure out something and get it to the right people. If anyone’s got a shot,” Cole added, “Stanze would do better than one of us.”

  “He’s right,” Paige said. “I’ll try to get to him right away. In fact, it might be better if I saw him in person. Tristan, can you get me to KC?”

  The Dryad closed her eyes and swayed ever so slightly in perfect harmony with what had seemed like so much random background noise. Before long she stood up and said, “We should be able to send all of you out of here, but only once, whether it’s together or separate. After that you’ll have to take your chances with the temples wherever you may wind up.”

  Sifting through the contact list on her phone, Paige said, “Might as well get me out to KC now. Catching up to Stanze shouldn’t be too tough, whether he’s on the clock or off.”

  Tristan opened the door to show a stunningly beautiful brown-haired dancer wearing a tight pinstripe suit from the Naughty Secretary collection. “Elle, make sure Paige gets to Kansas City as soon as possible. What about the rest of you?”

  “I’m not going anywhere except by car,” Daniels said as he hopped to his feet. “If you want me to examine these spore remains, then I’ll need to do it at my apartment.”

  “Fine,” Paige said. “Go ahead.”

  “You might not want to go out there,” Elle warned. “Those Nymar are trying to get to the back rooms. I think they know you guys are here.”

  “Lead them here,” Cole said. “Make sure nobody follows and give us some privacy.”

  “You sure you’re up for that?” Paige asked.

  “We want to see why they’re here, right? Rico and I should be able to take two Nymar.”

  “Actually,” Elle said, “there’s three of them now.”

  “Three. Fine. Whatever. Just go on to KC and get the ball rolling.”

  Either Paige didn’t know what to make of the sharpness to Cole’s voice or didn’t want to get into it at that point, because she agreed to the proposition despite whatever else was bothering her. Even though Elle didn’t follow her, she couldn’t leave the utility room fast enough.

  “Is everything all right with you?” Tristan asked Cole when Paige had left.

  “I’m fine,” he assured her quickly. “Just …” After taking a moment to soften his demeanor with a deep breath and a strained, vaguely confident smile, he said, “Could you just get the Nymar back here before they call for reinforcements?”

  Daniels was happy to leave the utility room with his kit and plastic Baggies full of samples taken from the spore removed from Cole’s chest. Since he was still of the male persuasion, he was even happier to be escorted by Tristan to the back exit of the club as she sent a human dancer to fetch the club’s vampire guests.

  Now that he was alone with Cole, Rico slammed the door shut and wheeled around to face him. “Whatever’s going on between you and Paige has gotta be set to the damn side. You hear me, boy?”

  “You know I don’t like being called that.”

  “Yeah? And I don’t like having to rely on a partner that’s got his head somewhere other than where it needs to be. So you two got some bump ‘n’ grind time in. That’s abundantly clear. Now you’re worried about her goin’ off and letting some cop crawl down the front of her pants?”

  “That’s not what—”

  “The hell it isn’t,” Rico snarled in a voice quiet enough to remain inside the room, but powerful enough to shake Cole down to the soles of his feet. “You gotta straighten that shit out one way or another. Paige ain’t the kind to get too close to just anyone, and she sure as hell ain’t the slut you’re thinking she is.”

  Cole jumped up so quickly that it reminded him how weak his system still was. Even so, he kept his back straight and his chin up when he stood toe-to-toe with the bigger man. “Nobody calls her that. Not you. Not a Full Blood. Not even God himself. You hear me?”

  Scowling as he took stock of Cole all over again, Rico said, “Yeah. Then you think she’s got something for this cop?”

  “He can have her. Maybe she’ll try to get him killed for a change.”

  “She’s keeping you alive, asshole. But if you got infected by a Half Breed, she’d put you down even quicker than when it looked like you were gonna turn into a bloodsucker. Just because she did you in the nice way, don’t think that puts you above the rules of the game.”

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Really? Is there? You wanna share? You wanna curl up with some hot cocoa and tell me all about your fucking feelings? Tough. You hear them voices? That’d be those Nymar headed back this way. How about we take care of business here and then continue the therapy later?”

  From the instant he found himself alone with Rico in that room, Cole had known the conversation would head this way. The only problem was, his mouth didn’t come equipped with one of those huge, red, plastic-encased Abort buttons that were next to every guided missile panel in James Bond movies. Damn, his mouth needed one of those buttons sometimes.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The three Nymar were feeling cocky when a redhead in high heels and a nightie led them to the club’s back rooms. More than likely it was a combination of the human dancer’s charms and the high that all Chicago Nymar were running on that night. No matter how confident they felt, the vampires didn’t have a prayer when they stepped into the utility room. One of them was still wearing the self-satisfied look on his face when Cole’s spear pierced his heart. Rico kept the second one quiet by knocking him down and stepping on his mouth.

  When the third one started hissing in a threatening manner, Cole flipped his spear around so the Nymar’s chin was wedged in the forked end. He was a greasy looking idiot with a gold T hanging from a chain around his neck that must have been forged somewhere in the darkest fashion days of the eighties. “What’s your name?” Cole asked.

  “M-My name?”

  Rather than repeat himself, Cole tightened his grip on the weapon so the thorns sank deeper into his palms. It took only a thought for him to cause the forked ends to extend, curl slightly around the Nymar’s throat and tighten.

  As soon as he felt the pressure, the Nymar sputtered, “Dave … David! It’s David, okay? My name’s David!”

  Tighteni
ng the wooden snare a bit more, Cole twisted the spear to angle the Nymar’s face toward the floor. “Take a look at your friends there, David. What do you think they’d tell you if you asked how patient we are tonight?”

  “How’d you know where to find us, Dave?” Rico asked. When he didn’t respond, Rico flipped out the blade he’d sunk into the eye socket of the Nymar at the tunnels. “I already tortured one of you today,” he said while holding the knife close enough to Dave’s face for him to smell the oily blood that remained on the sharpened steel. “One more’d just be a bonus.”

  “Steph and Ace’ve been recruiting for weeks. She kept most of the newbies around the Blood Parlor and they were all out looking for you. One of them saw you drive away from the parlor, and another saw that same car driving here. Hope wanted us to make sure the seeding took root. Then we’d get our Shadow Spore.” His eyes darted toward Cole and his nostrils flared with a quick inhalation. “What happened with that, anyway?”

  “Still want to file your report?” Cole asked as he angled the spear so the forked end grew sharper than a pair of scissors and fit snugly under Dave’s chin. “What about now?”

  “So Steph knew we were coming?” Rico asked.

  Dave nodded as best he could. “We didn’t know the exact time, but Steph knew you’d show up at the parlor eventually. So did Hope. She said she knew Paige real well.”

  “What about those cops? Were they on Steph’s payroll?”

  “They were just cops.” Dave squirmed and made the mistake of moving his hands more than an inch. He paid for it by getting Rico’s fist buried in his gut. “Some of us approached them as informants,” the Nymar wheezed. “I got a card in my pocket.”

  Rico flipped Dave’s jacket open and dug around in the pockets. He came up empty, but found something when he patted down the heavy cotton shirt the Nymar wore over a dark red T-shirt. After nearly ripping the pocket off completely, Rico was satisfied that the card was the only thing in there. Only then did he finally take a look at what was printed on the muted white paper. He showed it to Cole, then tucked it away inside his own shirt pocket. “That’s from one of the cops at the parlor tonight?” he asked.

  “That’s the one who sent the cops,” Dave replied. “Some lieutenant or captain, I don’t know. Whoever Ace and Steph were talking to.”

  “Sounds like this has been in the works for a while,” Cole pointed out.

  “Maybe a month or two,” Dave said.

  “But it’s only been a little while since Lancroft’s place in Philly was raided. There’s no way you could get all of this and the cops on board in that amount of time.”

  Dave was getting nervous. The sweat trickling from his brow was tainted by the same oily substance found in their blood. It allowed him to maneuver within the spear’s grip, but it also caused a reaction with the weapon’s varnish that made the forked end twitch against his jugular. “We’ve been stringing the cops along for months. Some of them got hooked on the girls. Some stayed out in their cars or tried to act casual in Astin’s bar. Others just swung by to give Steph and Ace some shit. All we had to do was keep them interested so when the time came it was easy to convince him to send some badges down to wait for you guys. When they started to lose interest, all we needed to do was feed them bits and pieces here and there. Drop a few anonymous tips. Let a few of the scared customers go instead of reining them in. It ain’t hard to keep cops looking at you.”

  “And when the shooting started, you camouflaged them using that striped shit?” Rico asked.

  For a second the Nymar seemed confused. “You mean the Shadow Spore. Yeah. We only just got that. We were all supposed to get altered, but there wasn’t enough time for everyone to get a taste. With everything that’s been happening between us and you Skinners, Hope and Cobb decided to use the Shadow Spore to put everything into motion.”

  “Who’s Cobb?” Rico asked. The Nymar that had been under his foot was coming around and glaring up at the Skinners. Rico wiped the snarl off the vampire’s face by stomping his head against the floor hard enough to put his lights out for a good long while. From there, he clamped a hand against Dave’s face and slammed him against the closest wall.

  “I don’t mind doing the legwork for an important job, but I’m getting bored with slapping you fuckholes around,” he said. “It’s been a long night, so tell me the rest before I decide to spice this up by carving my name into your face. How are the Nymar coordinating these attacks?”

  “There’sh a webshite,” Dave said, his lips crushed and pursed together by Rico’s hand. “It’sh run by Cov Thirtyeigsh.”

  “What was that?” Cole asked. “Did you say a website?”

  Once Rico gave his mouth a chance to move, Dave said, “Y-Yes. It’s a message board run by a guy named Cobb. Cobb38. That’s his screen name.”

  “Who the fuck is that?” Rico snarled.

  “I don’t know. All I know is a screen name.” Dave brightened as if he’d found his lifeline. “I can show you how to get to him. Just take me to—”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Rico snapped.

  Cole dug the phone from his pocket and pulled up the Web browser. Between the hell his body had been through and the sense of panic that came from being wanted for killing several police officers, it was a true struggle to keep his hands steady. “Don’t give me any shit about needing to be on a certain computer. Just tell me how to find Cobb.”

  “If I tell you … you’ll let me go?”

  Rico raised his knife and showed the blade to Dave. “How about for every bit of good info you give us, I cut off one less piece from your bloodsucking carcass?”

  Dave talked.

  Maybe he thought he could walk away from Pinups.

  Maybe he already knew he was never going to leave that utility room. The stench of dead Nymar was thick enough to clog Cole’s senses, and he was still nauseous from the stink of oily tendrils reaching up through his sinuses while hugging him from the inside out.

  When Dave was finished talking about Cobb’s website, Rico held him in place and asked, “You got any more antidote, Cole?”

  “No. Most of it’s in me.”

  “Then finish him off the hard way.”

  Cole knew it was useless to tell the big man to do the deed himself, and there was no reason to ask why the job had been given to him. Skinners did what needed to be done, no matter how dirty the job was. When he picked up his spear and drove it through Dave’s chest, he figured he was being taught that Paige had simply been doing her duty as well.

  “Damn,” Rico said as Cole wiped off his spearhead on the clothes wrapped around Dave’s lifeless body. “That was cold.”

  “Sorry. Did you intend on bringing him along so he could screw with us, or let him go so he could warn the others and tell Cobb to change everything on his entire network?”

  “I just thought you’d need a little more convincing. Give Paige a call and see where she’s at with her cop buddy.”

  Cole wasn’t certain that Rico even had a phone. They were pretty much standard issue for anyone in the modern world, but Rico wasn’t always modern. Rather than question the big man on his views of technology, he took out his own cell phone, hit Paige’s speed dial number, and tossed it to him while it rang.

  Poking his nose into the hall, Cole found Tristan standing watch just outside the door. Several dancers hurried back and forth between the stage entrance and dressing rooms, but deferred to the Dryad’s Queen Bee status with a quick nod as they passed her by.

  “Any more assholes out there?” he asked.

  Without batting a perfectly formed eyelash, Tristan replied, “Just the regular ones. Are you boys through yet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you leave a mess?”

  “Nothing a broom, dustpan, and some trash bags can’t handle. We’ll take the unconscious one with us and dump him somewhere far from here. That is, unless you want us to make sure he doesn’t come back?”

  Trista
n considered the Skinner’s offer for all of two seconds before shaking her head. “No. They didn’t see me or my sisters here. No need for any more death tonight.”

  “Whatever. Think we could get a ride to Denver?”

  “I can arrange that.” Tristan moved even closer to Cole and placed a hand on his forearm. Since he was a human male and she was a member of a species that served as the template for the ultimate ethereal female, that simple touch was enough to separate him from the world as well as his reality. “Please tell me you’re done with this kind of bloodshed.”

  “We’ve got what we need from the ones we already questioned. I don’t think any of us are in the mood to talk to another one.”

  “Good. I need you to tell me one thing, Cole.”

  “Name it,” he replied before he could think any better of the decision.

  She smiled, deflecting the knee-jerk appeasement with grace. “I need you to tell me you’re innocent of what they’re accusing you of on TV.”

  Even though Tristan didn’t make a threat or even hint at anything along those lines, Cole somehow felt that a lie would be detected instantly by those softly contoured ears or those deep, colorful eyes. Before his baser instincts dragged him any further down into that sweetly scented trap, he told her, “It was a setup. Those cops were set up as targets and we were set up to knock them down. If we didn’t do it, I’m guessing the Nymar would have made it look like we did and then fed the same shit to the press.”

  After taking a moment to size him up the old-fashioned way, the Dryad nodded and said, “I believe you. What I said before about not using our bridges still goes. Until this legal mess gets straightened out, we’ll only be able to transport Skinners when it’s absolutely necessary. You and Paige are different, though. I owe you two more than I can repay, which means you can come and go through our temples as often as I can.”

  “What about Prophet?”

  Tristan smiled with so much warmth that it cheapened her previous attempts. “He’s a cutie,” she said. “He had plenty of chances to make things tough for me, but worked to smooth them out instead. He’s got a free pass too.” Placing her hand on Cole’s arm, she quickly added, “But don’t tell him I said that. Just tell him he can come and check with us if he needs to.”