“Take it with you,” Cole said. “We’re going to Miami to look in on Paige.”
“No we’re not.”
“She went after the Nymar that walked off with God knows what from Lancroft’s place. Considering the stuff that was identified in there, I hate to think of what could be done with the goodies that nobody knew about. They may even be responsible for what happened after we left. Having that pack tear through so soon after the Nymar left is too much of a coincidence.”
“They could’ve just come because the defenses were dropped,” Rico explained. “Those runes are what kept Lancroft hidden from everyone, including the Full Bloods. I been tellin’ Paige and plenty of others that leaving those things down was a bad idea, but nobody listened.”
Cole grabbed a box of modified bullets and headed for the kitchen. “I’m taking some of this new varnish to give my weapon another treatment while I head back to the Emerald. I thought you were gonna help out, but if you’d rather putz around with your Home Ec projects, I’ll bring Prophet. He can handle himself.”
“You ain’t going anywhere,” Rico snapped. “Either one of ya.”
“Why not?”
The big man threw something onto the table that glanced against one of the paint pans and almost slid off the edge. “Because Paige sent you here for a reason, that’s why not. You got some reading to do.”
Cole approached the table again, looked down and found a set of standard, 8½ by 11, spiral-bound notebooks held together by a thick rubber band. The covers were creased and tattered on the edges. He couldn’t make out what was on the other covers, but the top one bore a picture of a large, droopy-eared hound dog. “What the hell is this?” he asked.
“It’s what Paige wanted you to see. She must really think a lot of you. Either that or she’s … just read it while I work. After that we’ll see what comes next.”
Cole pulled the rubber band from around the notebooks and opened the first one. The first words were, I don’t know what’s happening and that scares me. He’d seen enough of Paige’s hastily scribbled notes to recognize her handwriting, even though this seemed to be a slightly neater version.
That’s not it, the writing continued. I do know what’s happening. That scares me even more.
The notebook was full of her writing. All of them were.
They were Paige’s first journals as a Skinner, and the hound dog one was dated eleven and a half years ago.
Chapter Twelve
University of Illinois Eleven and a half years ago
The girls moved like a pack of wolves skirting the east side of Memorial Stadium, on their way to the residence halls on the other side of Peabody Drive. It was early spring but there was enough of a chill in the air for most of them to don university sweatshirts or layers of fashionably weathered flannel T-shirts bearing faded Pink Floyd album covers or the faces of members of more current bands. The campus was well lit, but none of the girls were concerned with dashing from one pool of yellowed light to another. There were five of them in all. The girl at the front turned around so she was backing onto the street without casting a glance toward the oncoming traffic.
“Holy shit, Paige, look out!” squealed one of the Pink Floyd fans as she grabbed her by the front of her sweatshirt and pulled.
Even with the approaching car’s horn blaring at her, Paige was more amused by the earnest attempt of the other girl’s attempt to save her. “Take it easy, Jenny. You’ll rumple the banana!”
Now that they were on the curb instead of in the street, Jenny looked down at the front of Paige’s sweatshirt. It was baggy and one size too big for her, but had been snug a few years ago when she’d put on her Freshman 15. After losing that weight, Paige kept the shirt and wore it like a second skin. Her tendency to refer to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana as Shampoo Banana always made her roommate giggle and this was no exception.
“You’re going to get yourself killed before we get to the party,” Jenny said.
“Whose party is this anyway?” asked a short girl with straw-colored hair and glasses that seemed more like a pair of windows perched upon her nose. It was a chilly day, so she wrapped her zip-up sweatshirt so tightly around herself that it almost completely hid the picture of Ted Nugent during his Damn Yankees days that was plastered across the front of her T-shirt.
Another one of the girls came up behind her. “You know
Wes.”
“The one with all the tattoos?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Tara’s still in the bad boy phase,” Paige explained while strolling across the street during a lull in traffic.
“Like you’re so much better?” the Damn Yankees fan scolded.
“At least I can keep my mouth shut when screwing someone at three in the morning.”
Taking that as their cue, all of the girls except for Tara chanted, “Wes, Wes, oh God! Yes!” as if it was a cheerleader’s cadence.
Tara winced and pulled the collar of her navy blue sweater up high enough to cover most of her face. “I accidentally rhyme in the middle of a late night quickie and never hear the end of it.”
“You’re in the room right next door to us,” Paige said. “We’d like to hear the end of it so we can get some studying done.”
Rushing up to bump Paige with her shoulder, Tara said sarcastically, “Right. All Margarita Girl here wants to do is study.”
“Finals are coming up soon,” Jenny offered.
“You guys need to lighten up.” Pivoting around to walk backward across a small field of grass on the perimeter of a set of residence halls, Tara added, “Especially Karen. I bet you could be the one screaming by the end of tonight.”
Although the face behind her wide glasses was made to smile, the one she showed the other girls was forced at best. “Sure. Maybe.” That got the others off her back long enough for the rest of the pack to get distracted.
Now that they were close enough to hear music rolling out of one of the smaller halls, they set their eyes on the prize and fell into a strut that made them look like a small girl gang taking over a bar in a campy fifties sexploitation flick. Playing the role to the hilt, Paige swatted the face of the second-string football player guarding the door as she announced, “You can stop wishing for it, boy. The party’s here.”
“About damn time,” the jock said. “Bar’s right down that hall and the food’s upstairs. Just follow the music.”
It wound up being just another loud night in a string of similarly loud college nights. Even though she was taking part in festivities that so many of her peers found enthralling, Paige soon got bored. She drank a few of the margaritas for which she’d become famous, joked around with some guys, deftly avoided their clumsy advances and promised to call the number that had been given to her on a scrap of paper that became a receptacle for her gum.
Wes made an appearance every so often. He was a tall guy who stood out from the rest thanks to a series of intricate tribal tattoos on his neck and forearms. Every so often Paige thought she could see those tattoos shift, but chalked that up to the light in the room or the alcohol in her system.
Finding the rest of her pack was more of a chore than she’d expected. The second floor of the dorm was jammed to capacity with students and townies alike who’d clustered around the free booze and boiled hot dogs like a school of piranha. Jenny was in the upstairs common area on a ripped plastic couch while getting three bottles of Michelob poured down her throat via a length of plastic tubing. Amy was one of the pack’s tagalongs, having been added a few weeks after the start of spring semester. The bright red Huskers jersey given to her by her boyfriend at the University of Nebraska was impossible to miss, but Paige still couldn’t spot her. Amy wasn’t the type to leave a party before being given permission by her friends, so that meant she must have been holed up somewhere out of sight, ditched the sweatshirt, or both. Good for her, Paige thought. Amy’s boyfriend was a self-centered jackass. The rest of the group had been swallowed up
by a crowd that became one sweaty, rattling mass. Time for a breather.
Even though the bar downstairs had been stripped of its goods by a bunch of lower classmen, it seemed the best place to go to clear her head. The door to the room at the end of the hall swung open so Tara could stagger outside. Her clothes had been hastily pulled on after what looked to be one hell of a tumbling session, and her hair was a telltale mess. Before Paige could be spotted, she bolted down the stairs.
Tara was a smoker. She was the kind of smoker who rolled her eyes at any talk of cancer, coughed up phlegm because she was an adult, and had every right to do what she pleased. Anyone who approached her with concerns about secondhand smoke were quickly made to wish they’d just shut their mouth and taken their chances with the carcinogens. Tara was also a screamer. Not in the way that Wes had surely just experienced, but in the way that almost shattered glass if she looked up to find someone standing there when she hadn’t been expecting them. It was all Paige could do to keep from giggling as she circled around the bar to the perfect hiding spot and hunkered down in the darkness to wait for the ideal time to jump out and scare the living shit out of a good friend.
She could hear Tara’s uneven footsteps coming down the stairs and could picture the bleary, dazed expression on her face. Once she got down the stairs to step outside for her smoke, she would be focused on the door and not expecting to get jumped from someone lurking behind the bar.
This was going to be great.
Something rustled in another part of the room. That was either Tara approaching the bottom step or someone else trying to find a quiet corner in the noisy building. Paige wasn’t familiar with all the little noises in the structure, so for all she knew, some of the abundant noise from above was just filtering down.
Then again, Tara might have found a window to puff her smoke through. She might have even broken her routine and lit her cigarette upstairs. The creaking could be anything, and the feet coming down the stairs might belong to anyone. Suddenly, the joy Paige felt at the prospect of scaring Tara out of her mind was dimmed by the possibility of being discovered crouched behind the bar like an idiot. Holding her breath, she placed her hands on the edge of the bar and eased herself up past a row of dusty empty bottles that had probably been sitting there since the last Super Bowl.
Her eyes drew level with the warped top of the bar, making all the broken peanut shells and dried chunks of pizza crust seem like boulders on a miniature alien landscape. A shadow wobbled within the enclosed stairwell, followed by a long sigh and, “Wes, aren’t you coming out here with me?”
Paige ducked under the bar, feeling every bit of dumb giddiness returning. The mood was heightened by the drinks she’d had in her, but was completely obliterated by the sight of the man chewing on Amy’s face.
He was a skinny collection of bones and saggy skin wrapped up in paint-spattered jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt. The only reason she hadn’t seen him before was because he and Amy were completely under the bar where it formed a corner that pointed toward the front door of the building. Nestled in there, they might have gone undiscovered for hours. His arms were covered in thick tribal tattoos, and for a moment Paige thought he was Amy’s impromptu date for the evening. His mouth was wide open and pressed against the lower section of Amy’s jaw. Wide dark eyes glared out from the shadows, waiting to see if he’d truly been discovered.
Nervous fear flooded through her, starting off as something she might feel when walking in on someone else’s intimate moment and gradually turning into the mild dread of discovering a deranged homeless person following her down the block.
Then she saw the blood trickle from the man’s mouth.
Amy twitched, snapped her eyes open and tried to look over at Paige. When she reached out for her, Paige immediately grabbed her hand. The instant Amy’s leg scraped against the floor, she was pulled back by a bony arm that wrapped around her waist. Amy’s cry didn’t make it past her lips before the man tightened his grip on her.
For a moment Paige thought she’d gotten a hold on the other girl. Amy struggled to get away from the man under the bar, squirming in his grasp to expose the three sets of fangs buried in the side of her neck. Blood sprayed from the openings in her flesh, dimming the last bit of light in her eyes. The man holding her took it in with a wet sucking sound before adjusting his bite so the blood sprayed into his mouth.
Although it seemed she was forced to watch that for hours, only a few seconds had passed. Footsteps crossed in front of the bar, so Paige jumped up to catch Tara’s attention. She found herself looking into the face of yet another man with thick tribal tattoos.
“Who’s this?” asked a man who looked to be somewhere in his thirties. He had hair that lay flat against his scalp as if every strand had been glued into place. While most of his tattoos were concentrated at the front of his neck, some thinner strands crept up along a large pointed chin before tapering off just before reaching his lower lip.
Tara stood a few paces away from the bar. Judging by the look on her face, she was all but frozen there. Her skin had paled and was clammy. She kept her arms wrapped around her body as though covering herself after being caught in the shower. One man approached her from the left as Wes came in from the right,
The man with the pointed chin wore an expression that could hardly be called a grin. It was more of a curl of the lip to reveal two sets of fangs sprouting from his upper jaw when he asked, “Have you been holding out on us?”
Wes placed a hand on Tara’s shoulder to hold her in place. “There’s plenty of people on this campus, Evan. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
“The least you could have done was invite us to the party.” Closing his eyes and concentrating on something that slithered past human senses, Evan hissed, “But it seems Hector has already found a party of his own.”
The man under the bar sank his teeth deeper into Amy’s neck. Paige knew if there had been any prayer of her helping Amy, it was gone now. She didn’t know what she could have done, but it made her feel just as bad as if she’d killed the other girl herself. When Hector pulled Amy in tight against his chest, his fangs tore her throat open wide enough for Paige to see the bloody fibers within her. Hector even squeezed Amy’s limp figure to force the last bit of fluid from her veins before the possibility of sharing her was broached.
“You’ve brought them into your confidence,” Evan said in words that built in intensity like a train car that had been cut loose and was rolling toward a house at the bottom of a hill. “You’ve got them coming to you, getting drunk, getting laid, getting unconscious. How the fuck could you not tell us about this party?”
Paige’s back was pressed against the wall. She didn’t want to be near Hector and Amy, but she also didn’t want to make herself any more visible to the others. The men’s tattoos were definitely moving now. The more Hector slurped from the dead husk in his grasp, the more the black markings fluttered beneath his skin. The sight of it hit her on the same nerve as watching a thousand newborn spiders flowing from the cracked thorax of their mother.
“Look,” Wes said. “I told you I’d stake this place out and I did.”
“All you’ve fed us is scraps. The choice cuts are here.” When a group of jocks came down the stairs, they sounded like a herd of elephants. Evan’s eyebrow rose and he watched the bottom of the staircase as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was about to see. Then he shifted his gaze ever so slightly to stare directly at Paige. “Friends of yours?”
Hector let Amy’s body hit the floor so he could wipe the blood from his chin and then lick it off the top of his sleeve.
The jocks were taking their time in getting down the last few stairs while arguing about who would carry the cooler up from their car. Within those few seconds, Tara spotted Paige and showed her an urgent, pleading stare.
She might have been too late or too slow to help Amy, but Paige couldn’t watch another friend get ripped apart. Standing up to her full height, she placed her
hands flat on the top of the bar where her left palm brushed against a corkscrew. As soon as she had a firm grip on the narrow plastic handle, she started to vault over the top of the dented surface. Hector was more than quick enough to stop her by lunging out from his corner to grab her ankle.
As Paige’s chest hit the edge of the bar and her feet were forced down less than an inch from where they’d started, the jocks made it down the stairs. They only had enough time to notice Paige standing behind the bar before another woman lunged all the way from the front door, across the room, and straight at them with her hands outstretched to sink her fingernails into their upper chests.
Shirts were shredded like wet newspaper, right along with several layers of underlying flesh. The woman slammed her weight against the largest of the young men and regained her footing a fraction of a second before she would have dropped to the floor. Once standing, she bared a set of curved fangs that slid from her upper jaw and drove them into the shoulder of the smaller of the two jocks. He opened his mouth to speak but dropped before making a sound. Milky venom still dripped from his wound as she pulled the slender fangs out and pressed her mouth against the other jock’s lips.
Paige’s heart slammed against the inside of her ribs. Her breath felt like it was solidifying in her throat, but she still tried to get to Tara. The grip around her ankle was too strong to shake, so she stabbed Hector’s arm with the corkscrew to loosen it. The curved steel dug straight through the upper layers of skin, only to hit a surface that was solid enough to prevent the tip from going any deeper.
Hector’s strength was incredible. His fingers felt like steel bands that didn’t even twitch when she stabbed him repeatedly with the corkscrew. Even when she dug in as far as she could and twisted, Hector’s only response was a labored snarl. Near the stairs there was a slight rush of movement but no voices calling for help. No grunts, no punches being thrown, and no athletic young men asserting themselves against the invaders. No help for Tara.
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