“There,” Paige said to Cole. “See why I insist on keeping him around?”
“What else have you heard about the Nymar that you haven’t been telling me?” Cole asked.
“The last I heard from Rico, he was still in Toronto. He meant to check in on those guys before he got sidetracked to St. Louis when all that Lancroft business hit. He’s already heard about what happened and wants in. After we get out of Chicago, you’ll meet up with him.”
“I’m not letting you go to Miami on your own, Paige.”
She took out her phone, pressed a few buttons and then put it away again. “When you find Rico, show him the picture I just sent.”
Before Cole could ask, he felt a rattle from the phone in his pocket. “No matter what’s going on, you can still send a hum through my pants,” he said with a tired smirk.
She wasn’t laughing, but her expression did get warmer around the edges.
Cole dug out the vibrating phone and saw the picture Paige had sent him. It was a hastily taken shot of Bobby and the Nymar woman that had snuck into the Lancroft house.
“Tell him where I went and to tell you about shampoo banana.”
Cole squinted as if that would somehow make things clearer. When he looked over to Prophet, the bounty hunter seemed just as confused as he was. “Did she say shampoo banana?”
“Yes she did,” Paige told him. “And tell him I know he’s got the hound dog notebook and that you should have it now. He’ll know what that means. Do you still have the Lancroft journals?”
“I e-mailed what I could to myself but … shit! My hard drive! It’s back at Raza Hill! Damn it, I knew I should’ve brought that along no matter what!”
“Calm down,” Paige said. “What about the paper copies?”
Patting the satchel he’d thrown over his shoulder on his way out of his freezer, he said, “Right here.”
“See if you can get all of that to Ned’s house. We need to keep them somewhere safe and that’s the safest place I know.”
“Aren’t you gonna check in with the other Skinners?” Prophet asked. “What if this kind of shit’s happened to them? Maybe you can get some help.”
“Our main priority is to keep things from getting any worse.” With a sigh, Paige admitted, “If we give the Nymar a chance to hit us this badly again, they’ll gain too much momentum. This is exactly why we stay in small groups and as mobile as possible, Cole. It was a mistake for me to get too comfortable in this city.”
“Great,” he said. “Living in a gutted restaurant and sleeping on a cot was your version of getting comfortable.”
She walked up to him and held his face in her hands. After pulling him down so they were close enough to bump foreheads, Paige said, “Walter, give us a minute.”
Prophet moved away to join the people who were watching the thinning cloud of smoke filling the air to the southwest.
“Something big is happening,” she whispered. “It may be something that’s been brewing for a while.”
“Why do I get the feeling that there’s a lot more you’re not telling me?”
“Because there is. I don’t have the time to get into it right now but you need to know the whole story. You deserve to know.” Lowering her eyes, she said, “After you hear all of it, if you want to get away from me and all of this shit I’ll understand.”
“Paige, with everything that’s already—”
Her hands clamped around him harder and her eyes bored right through him. The voice she used had an edge that was sharper than any weapon in the Skinner arsenal. “You can still get away if you want. You may have to lay low for a while, but you know enough now to have a chance on your own.”
“And what if that’s not what I want to do?”
“Then you can stand with me. I just want you to know who you’re standing with. What’s happened between us has been worth all the shit we’ve had to go through to get to it. If anything happens to me, just know that I had a hell of a good time with you.”
“We could still fit in another good time, you know. Just a quick one.”
When she pulled his face a little closer, Cole swore she was coming in for a kiss. Instead, she gave him a gentle, tapping head butt. “That’s just what I needed to hear,” she said with an easy laugh. “At least everything hasn’t gone to hell in the last hour. Go find Rico. Show him that picture. You remember what to tell him?”
“Yeah, yeah. Shampoo banana. Hound dog notebook.”
Paige pulled him in and kissed him on the mouth. It was a hard, lingering kiss that was over way too soon. Walking around to the Cav’s driver side, she climbed in and fished around inside the glove compartment. “Here,” she said while tossing him the .44 revolver she kept in the car.
Between wanting to keep the gun hidden and not wanting it to go off accidentally, Cole nearly tripped over himself twice in his haste to catch it. By the time the .44 was in his possession, Paige had the Cav’s motor running.
“Get your hard drive and anything else you can scavenge from Raza Hill. But don’t stay too long,” she said while pulling away.
Prophet ambled over to him as Cole was doing his best to casually stuff a gun under his belt along with the .38 he’d taken from Sid. “You need a ride?”
“Sure. There’s a bar down the street that always looked pretty interesting. First round’s on me.”
“Isn’t there something more important to do? Like something about the vampires that burned your house down?”
“Screw it. If things are just going to get worse anyway, I might as well cushion my system for it.”
Slapping Cole on the shoulder, Prophet said, “Makes sense to me.”
Chapter Ten
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Later that night
The Lancroft house was quiet. Most of the Skinners had come and gone, taking whatever they could find and leaving before being challenged by locals or anyone else. Selina and Jory were taking their turn in the basement, overseeing the flow of traffic and cataloguing whatever they could.
Bobby and M were in the dissection room, removing each tool from its tray so they could look behind every surface and tear down as much of the desk and equipment racks as humanly possible in case there were any more trapdoors or switches to be found. M sighed. “Those Chicago assholes must’ve taken the journals. That’s all there is to it.”
“Given enough time, we should be able to piece together what we need with the journals we already have,” Bobby said. “Lancroft sent plenty of the technical stuff to those of us he trusted, but what’s missing is his personal notes and experimental procedures. There may have been lists of what was here, but he could also have just kept an inventory in his head.”
“Or stashed it somewhere else.”
“That’s why we keep looking. If we don’t find it soon, we’ll recruit more help from the ones Lancroft mentioned in those lists.”
After pulling out a drawer from a steel rack of trays next to the empty examination table, M stuck his arm into the space and felt along the interior of the metal structure. “What about that bullshit they handed us about the freak’s body going missing? You think Rico really got it?”
“If he did, we would’ve heard about it a long time ago.”
Suddenly, both Skinners perked up like a pair of dogs that had heard the same high-pitched whistle. A fraction of a second later the entire house filled with the sounds of movement as everyone with scars on their palms mobilized at the same time.
Bobby raced into the Skipping Temple. “Did anyone deactivate those protection runes?”
“We had to,” Selina replied as she entered from the workshop doorway. “So your Nymar buddies wouldn’t get fried the moment they stepped through that curtain.”
“Tell Paul to brace himself. The runes are going back up whether he gets fried or not.”
Of the flowing symbols etched into the temple walls, a small percentage were blocky and sharper than the rest. While most of the Skinners couldn’t read them, they
knew they’d been put there by Lancroft as opposed to the more artistic hands of a Dryad. Bobby went to some of the symbols near the doorway to the workshop and began tracing them with his finger. Doing so in the proper order and direction activated the ritualistic energies stored within the runes. Before he could complete the process, he knew it was too late.
Upstairs, several Skinners rushed toward the back door, which opened to a small yard that wasn’t even big enough for a decent swing set. They shouted among themselves before the door was smashed in with the force of a runaway car.
“God damn it,” Bobby said as he finished tracing the last rune. A crackle of energy rippled through the wall but didn’t make it much farther than the stairs leading to the main floor. “The circuit’s broken. Something busted the runes upstairs. Go see what it is.”
M pulled two of the knives hanging from his belt. The varnished wooden blades became razor sharp as the small thorns in the handle punctured his palm. Even with the weapons in hand, he wasn’t anxious to get up the stairs. “We know what’s up there. Didn’t you feel it?”
“Yes, I felt it! Go up and help the others. I’ll try to get as much as I can out of here before that thing finds its way down here. Whatever you do, make sure nothing gets down those stairs!”
“How do you suppose I keep a Full Blood from going down some stairs?”
Bobby grabbed him by the shirt and threw him into the workshop. “We’re Skinners, for Christ’s sake! This is what we do. Get up there and fucking do it!”
With those words ringing through his ears, there wasn’t much else for M to do. He gripped the knives so the blades ran down along the inside of his forearms and followed the last few Skinners to the first floor. With the crashing of bodies hitting the walls and floors, followed by screams of pain and cries of battle, he might as well have been charging into a war.
At the top of the stairs three Skinners huddled with their weapons in hand. One was Jory, Maddy was another, and the last was one of the new arrivals that M didn’t recognize. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked.
“That thing found us,” Jessup said as he waved one of his weapons toward the kitchen. They were carved into large wooden hooks, and blood seeped between his fingers as one of them shortened into a thick machete. The other straightened and split at the end to form a barbed, narrow V. “There’s more of ‘em too. I can feel it.” With that, he charged into the fray.
The kitchen was a tiny room with barely enough room to maneuver, thanks to the outdated, broken appliances protruding from beneath grease-spattered counters. Not only had the back door been pulled from its frame, but several chunks of the wall around it were missing as well. Framed in that jagged opening, Liam stood in his upright form. Even while hunkering down upon thickly muscled haunches, he was just shy of seven feet tall. Powerful arms hanging from massive shoulders swung at the Skinners who slashed him with their weapons. His right eye socket was a tangle of scar tissue, but the left one blazed even brighter to make up for it. After digging a bloody trench through Abel’s chest, he bared a mouthful of daggerlike fangs and roared into the house.
Jessup shoved past one Skinner from southern California who’d lost an arm upon Liam’s arrival and leapt over another who was curled up on the floor. Swinging with the wooden machete, he clipped Liam’s elbow and caught the answering slash between the V of his other weapon. Rather than try to hold onto the werewolf, Jessup dug in and drove the V-shaped weapon all the way down to Liam’s elbow.
Blood flowed from Liam’s arm and a flap of skin came loose when he pulled away. He crouched down and cradled the flayed limb against his chest while snapping at the Skinner with a set of jaws more powerful than a hydraulic press.
Seeing the callused mass in Liam’s right eye socket, M circled around to the blind side and attacked the Full Blood’s rib cage in a series of quick stabs using both of his wooden knives. They made it through the wiry mesh of fur but didn’t penetrate more than a quarter of an inch of flesh. M was familiar enough with his weapons to expect as much and made up for the quality of strikes with sheer quantity. Very soon he’d chopped deeper and blood sprayed from the werewolf’s side in a fine mist.
“Close in on the bastard!” Jessup shouted.
Some of the Skinners that were on the floor a few moments ago had healed enough to answer his call. Abel was one of them. He pressed a hand against the wound in his chest that had already stopped bleeding thanks to the serum in his bloodstream. As he climbed to his feet and gritted his teeth against the pain of nerve endings being plugged back into his nervous system, the window to his left shattered inward. Lyssa’s long feline body flowed through the broken frame in a graceful jump that sent her flying straight at him. Abel managed to raise his curved weapon up to block the leaping attack and open a long gash along the Mongrel’s underbelly. Too late to get away from the Skinner, Lyssa clamped on to him with both front paws and snapped her head forward in an attempt to peel his face from his skull.
A gunshot blasted through the kitchen, sending a bullet past Abel’s ear and thumping into Lyssa’s chin. Her teeth had come so close to their target that Abel felt them take a chunk away from the tip of his nose. As soon as the Mongrel flopped onto her side, she shifted into her human form and crawled away.
More gunshots followed as the West Coast Skinners took aim at the biggest clay pigeon in the room.
“No!” Jessup shouted. “You’ll just—”
“Yes!” Liam growled as he rose up to his full height and bumped the back of his head against the ceiling. “Yes, yes, yes!”
The bullets pounded against his chest, only to become entangled within his fur and glance off the near impenetrable hull of his flesh. Rage burned in his eye and thick ropes of saliva hung from his chin when he stretched out both arms as if to embrace his attackers. The wounded patch on his arm was still messy, but the flap of skin was held in place by a thick paste of blood. When one bullet dug into that wound, it caused Liam’s eye to glaze over and his claws to move in a series of horrific, blindingly fast swings.
Jessup and most of the Skinners that had rushed up the stairs in the first wave did their best to slash at the Full Blood while keeping their heads and limbs connected to their torsos. Abel, Selina, and Maddy dealt with the Mongrel that struck in hit-and-run attacks that brought her from one end of the house to the other.
“This is our chance!” Jessup shouted over the chaos that had become his entire world. “All of us together can take this Full Blood down!”
“That’s the spirit!” Liam roared as he sent one of the West Coast Skinners into the ceiling with a powerful upward swipe of his arm.
The next wave to surge up from the basement were clad in leather armor from Lancroft’s personal collection and brought extra pieces of armor ranging from vests to cloaks along with them. Whenever they had a chance, the more vulnerable Skinners took turns falling back to pull on the first bit of protection they could find. Some of them were saved by Lancroft’s handiwork and others were quickly ripped into pieces and thrown against several walls.
“Ready?” Jessup shouted as he prodded Liam with the twin points of his V-shaped weapon.
A few of the Skinners moved with him, but the rest were too busy just trying to stay alive. After deflecting a few incoming swipes and ducking under a snapping set of hellish jaws, Jessup again shouted, “Ready?” The other Skinners near Liam backed up while taking a few swings to provide some cover, so Jessup shouted, “Go!”
Everyone in the kitchen closed in around Liam, gripping their weapons in bloody fists. They screamed like barbarians storming a castle gate, and Liam responded in kind. Instead of trying to defend against all of the incoming attackers, he grabbed the closest one’s head in his hands, crushed his skull with enough force to drive his claws into her brain, and swung the twitching body at the others. Having cleared a partial path, Liam moved toward the front half of the house.
In the front bedroom, Abel and Selina traded blows with Lyssa. The feli
ne Mongrel kept her center of gravity low and gripped the floor with talonlike claws. Her wide, triangular head bobbed and snapped from side to side to avoid Abel’s blades and Selina’s wooden pike. As soon as Maddy entered the room, the Mongrel put her down with a savage blow that severed the hamstring in her right leg. Between that and the pain of the wound, Maddy was out cold when she hit the floor. When both remaining Skinners came at her at once, Lyssa jumped to the side, grabbed onto the wall and sprung at them from another angle. Her claws ripped through half of Selina’s face and her body knocked Abel to the floor.
“Down,” Abel said calmly as he took a blind horizontal swing.
Ignoring the pain from the shallow tears running all the way down her cheek, Selina pressed herself to the cheap tan carpet as her partner’s knife whistled through the air above her. Although the blade didn’t hit anything, the one in Abel’s other hand raked across Lyssa’s side and sent the Mongrel scampering into the farthest corner.
Abel sidled along his wall, keeping the Mongrel in front of him and his partner to his right. He eased a hand to his belt, touched the hilt of the third knife sheathed there, drew it and tossed it in a snapping motion. The blade turned once in the air and stuck into the wall after missing the Mongrel by less than an inch.
“We gotta keep this thing in here with us,” Selina said. “It sounds like everyone else has enough on their plate without something else to worry about.”
Vampire Uprising s-4 Page 12
