While the Amriany fell back, the Nymar surged forward. Five of them filled the hallway. Cole knew there were more, but they must have been hanging back to form a second wave. Three of the Nymar tossed their weapons while closing the distance between them and the Skinners. A few sprouted black claws from the ends of their fingers, and the rest stayed behind to reload their guns.
Cole looked over to Rico to see if he was hurt or had any other instructions. Gripping a pistol in each hand, the big man nodded once and ran out from behind his cover as a primal howl erupted from the back of his throat. What Cole felt next was something that reached down to his toes and dragged him from the temporary safety of his alcove. The closest thing he would ever be able to relate it to was the wild look on the faces of soldiers in Civil War movies who threw themselves into a charge across open ground. Every piece of good sense should have told him to stay put. At the moment that sort of thing was simply washed away by the fight that had become all-encompassing and powerful enough to shove him away from temporary safety.
The Skinners reached the first Nymar within a few powerful strides and both groups collided amid a flurry of bullets, claws, fangs, and sharpened wood. Cole had barely felt the spear shift within his left hand, but it was almost full size by the time he drove it straight into the chest of a Nymar wearing nothing but sneakers and an old set of shorts. The gleaming metallic spearhead cut through the Nymar’s ribs like butter and became wedged before he could pull it back. With his right hand, he pulled the trigger of the .45 and sent a few rounds into the cluster of tendrils within the Nymar’s chest.
The flailing thing at the end of Cole’s spear trapped the wooden weapon in his side. Cursing directly into Cole’s face, he pulled the spearhead out and shoved the Skinner with enough force to slam his back against the brick wall. Cole fired another shot, but his target had already scrambled along the wall using sharpened claws and frantic speed to suspend the laws of gravity. Once there, the Nymar ducked below a backward swing from the spear intended to separate him from his head.
Meanwhile, Rico’s breaths were more like primitive grunts forced out of his lungs as he pumped round after round into the Nymar that attempted to swarm him. Focusing both guns on a tall woman with a ripped gray sweater and solid black eyes, he fired again and again into her chest. When she continued to rake at his eyes, he turned away and said, “Something’s wrong with them, Cole! The treated rounds ain’t working!”
Watching the Nymar in the shorts scurry into the shadows of the alcove he’d used for cover less than a minute ago, Cole saw the vampire’s tendrils swell into thick bands that were almost wide enough to give him a solid black color. Once the Nymar was fully in the shadows, the tendrils allowed it to blend almost seamlessly into the darkness. “It’s like the one I found in that other cell,” he said.
Prophet stuck his head out from the spot where the Amriany had led him. “Not that cell! This one!”
“What?” Rico snapped.
Between the gunfire, the hissing Nymar, and the close confines of the hallway, it was becoming impossible for Cole to tell what the hell was going on. One of the Nymar jumped on him from behind and raked both sets of claws across his shoulders toward his neck. His coat had a large enough collar to offer some protection, but he knew even that wouldn’t save him for long. The Nymar’s claws were supernatural weapons, which meant they would eventually get through the leather just as they would if the hide were still attached to a Full Blood.
Even with all the other noise around him, Cole could still hear the thrum from upstairs and feel the surge of power from the temple above. Reinforcements had arrived.
“Both of you get in here,” Prophet shouted. “Now!”
The Nymar in the stairwell stepped out, raised their weapons and fired. Cole was overtaken by a rush of adrenaline as he lowered his head and hurried into the alcove, where something waited for him. He couldn’t see the vampire at first, but soon caught sight of a shadow that separated itself from the rest.
Rather than try to stab it, Cole swept the weapon back and forth in arcs that went high and low. His first swing sent a shower of sparks from the metal-treated spearhead, which made a quick source of light that helped him figure out where the Nymar was. By the time he swung the forked end of the weapon, the Nymar had sprung up to grab onto the wall with both sets of claws and then launch itself down onto him.
He barely brought his spear up fast enough to catch the Nymar before its claws took his face off. The shaft thumped solidly into the Nymar’s torso while it tried to slash at him with his claws. Cole angled the spear so the Nymar’s weight sent it toppling from the alcove and into the hall. As soon as it was down, he drove the spearhead straight into its chest.
The source of their power and hunger for blood was an eel-like spore attached to the heart. Simply staking the heart would do some damage, but not enough to put the Nymar down for good. This time, however, the Nymar barely seemed to react to being impaled. Its body pivoted around the tip of the spear so its feet could force his body upward. Once it was standing, the Nymar grabbed the spear handle in an attempt to pull it out. Cole leaned against his weapon, scraping the vampire against the wall so its heels skidded against the floor. When the gunfire started up again, he used the Nymar as a living blockade while crossing to the other side of the hall.
“Hope you got a plan over there,” Cole shouted.
Rico answered by leaning into the hall and opening up with the Sig Sauer. He wasn’t alone. Both Drina and Tobar stepped out as well, adding their own gunfire to the storm raging up and down the hallway. Tobar’s pistol didn’t throw nearly as many rounds through the air, but the sound of them reminded Cole of a truck hitting the ground after being dropped from a third-floor parking garage. A barechested Nymar woman caught one of those rounds between her small breasts and the impact slammed her against the wall. When she reached a dark patch between light sources, her tendrils widened to make her more of a person-shaped blob within the shadows. Tobar’s aim was good enough for the next round to carve a tunnel through her that destroyed her heart and liquefied anything attached to it.
“Hit the lights,” one of the Nymar said from the stairwell. The others responded by shifting their fire upward until most of the recessed bulbs within their range had been shattered.
Cole had seen things turn invisible before, but this was something else. The Nymar’s tendrils allowed them to blend into the darkness with a practical camouflage that, combined with their speed and climbing ability, made them a whole new kind of dangerous.
Some of the light from the other end of the hall made it to Cole’s position, but it wasn’t enough. The vampires simply became part of the darkness and crept in on the Skinners like death itself. Drina fired her assault rifle, lighting up the corridor in a fiery strobe that illuminated a Nymar for a fraction of a second while also burning the image of the others into Cole’s retinas.
“This place is ours now, Skinners,” one of the Nymar hissed. “Every place is ours.”
“Rico?” Cole asked while holding his spear at the ready.
“Get over here,” he called out from a cell farther down the hall.
Cole felt as if the weight of the cement floor above him, along with the little house above that, was pressing down on the back of his neck. It was completely dark at the far end of the hallway, but he could still make out a few shapes moving like wraiths through a dream. There was movement upstairs as well, as he joined Drina and Rico at the end of the hall, which was lit by a few of the dim, recessed bulbs. Behind him, claws scratched against brick and one Nymar closed to within a few yards of his back before being deterred by a few well-placed shots from Rico’s Sig Sauer.
“We’re getting the hell out of here!” the big man said. “The temple upstairs went off again. I don’t know how the hell they’re getting the nymphs to help them, but there’s more on the way.”
“I know,” Cole gasped as he dashed into the broken cell. “I heard it too, but what then?
Should we really give this place up?”
“They have better tactical positioning,” Nadya said, “as well as superior numbers. Now is not the time to fight. If we stay here, it will be the time to die.”
“She’s right,” Rico admitted. “I don’t like giving this place over to the bloodsuckers, but we got caught with our pants down. They’re shipping in backup and all we got is the ass end of a goddamn hallway.”
“So the plan is to huddle together in a small room?” Cole asked as more lights in the hallway were taken out.
“You can huddle if you like,” Gunari said as he grabbed hold of a metal spike in each hand. “We are leaving.”
The Amriany spikes were slightly curved and about eighteen inches long. He gripped them by handles that fit around his wrists, dropped to his knees and stuffed both arms into a hole Cole hadn’t noticed until that moment. Digging the spikes into the sides of the hole, Gunari pulled himself underground in a series of quick, wriggling movements. The other two Amriany in the cell with Rico and Prophet prepared their own spikes, and when Drina backed into the small room, she strapped her FAMAS over her head and around one shoulder so she could follow suit.
“You said you had a way out of here,” Rico said to Nadya. “This is it?”
“It’s how we came in,” she replied. Now that Gunari’s legs and feet had disappeared within the hole, she knelt down and stuck her arms into the cramped tunnel. “We will help you leave the same way or you can stay here. Your choice.” With that, she pulled in a deep breath and dove into the freshly turned soil.
“This is a Mongrel tunnel,” Tobar explained. Scrambling claws closed in on them, so he fired a few times to keep them at bay. “They know about Lancroft’s dungeon, and so do the Nymar. This place is lost. To stay is suicide and we do not approve of suicide.” Unwilling to explain himself any further, Tobar dove into the hole.
Drina was next and she didn’t even flinch as more gunfire erupted at the far end of the hall. “I can take one of you now and escort the rest,” she said.
“Take Prophet,” Rico said. “Cole and I will follow on our own.”
“But there is a proper way for following the Mongrel tunnels to make sure you come up on the other side.”
Ducking out of the cell to take a glimpse down the hall, Rico grunted, “Yeah, yeah. Squirming through a hole. I think we can handle it.”
“Fine.” Looking at Prophet, Drina said, “When I’m almost out of sight, grab my foot and I will pull you through.” Without waiting another moment, she stuck both arms into the hole and dug in using the curved spikes.
“You two ain’t coming, are you?” Prophet asked.
Showing him a wide, blocky grin, Rico dropped his voice to a snarling whisper and said, “That’s what I like about you, Walter. Very astute.”
“So what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Keep an eye on these guys. Stay with them for as long as you can. Tell them I said for you to go on without us. If they let you, find out where they’re based or how many more Amriany are in the area. If they dump you somewhere, just try to—”
“She’s waiting on me now,” Prophet snapped. “I know how to track someone. I am a professional, you know.”
Filling both meaty hands with .45s, Rico aimed at the hallway just outside the cell door. “Shit! Here they come!” he shouted while unleashing a fiery torrent from both barrels.
Prophet didn’t need any more incentive to jump face first into the dirt. After being kicked in the face by the foot Adrina offered, he grabbed onto her ankle and was immediately pulled underground as if towed by a truck.
Cole stood with his back in a corner, angled so he could see through the door and toward the direction of the gunfire. “Damn. The temple just went off again. This place is gonna be swarming with these fuckers real soon. Sounds like we’ve got something working on our side, though. A lot of that shooting isn’t directed at us, so they must be shooting at someone else.”
“I was wondering if you’d picked up on that. Also, the Nymar aren’t coming down the hall so much anymore. Whoever’s upstairs is making a bigger splash than us. What’re you doing?”
Leaning his head back, Cole held a recycled Visine bottle over his eyes and squeezed a single drop into each one. A rush of cold flowed through his eyeballs and sent a chill all the way to the back of his skull. “It’s Ned’s drops. The ones that allow us to see scents. They worked real well for tracking Nymar before and they should do fine now.”
“There ain’t a lot of that stuff left. Don’t use it all up.”
Cole blinked so the drops could soak in. When he looked into the darkened hall again, he saw the outline of a figure crouched directly in front of the door, watching in the calm security of someone who believes they’re unseen. He stuffed the little plastic bottle into his coat pocket, picked up his spear and ran straight ahead. Once the sentinel knew it had been spotted, it sprung at him in a flurry of claws and teeth.
Rico followed him from the cell. “Hand that stuff over.”
The Nymar had been quick enough to avoid getting impaled through the chest, but it still picked up a nasty wound along the top of its shoulder and along its neck. With most of the Nymar’s body covered in inky black camouflage, it was tough for Rico to see more than a shifting blob in the shadows. Cole swung at it, scraping the metallic ends of his weapon against the brick to send a shower of sparks to the floor. The Nymar leapt backward, hissed at the Skinners and darted toward the staircase.
Cole tossed the plastic bottle to Rico. “Sounds like a war going on upstairs. What the hell is going on?”
Now that he’d put the drops in, Rico blinked and looked at him with eyes that had acquired a dim yellow glow. “How about we go and find out?”
Cole followed the trail left by a set of lingering scents leading to the cell at the end of Lancroft’s dungeon. Instead of seeing the strange, shapeshifting creature that had been there before, all he could make out was a cracked floor and an empty space with two trails drifting through the air like neon smoke. One of them was a color that shifted across the spectrum unlike anything he’d ever seen before, but the other was a distinctive burnt orange he and Paige had identified thanks to samples found in Lancroft’s basement.
“A Full Blood was down here,” he said to Rico. “Maybe it let out whatever was in here before.”
Jogging down the hall, Rico lined up a shot and dropped another Nymar. “Great. Looks like this pit really is lost. The shooting’s stopped. Let’s just hope we’re not walking into another ambush.”
“That’d be close to impossible with these drops in,” Cole pointed out.
“But there’s something else workin’ against us. You notice anything strange about your scars?”
“Aw, hell,” Cole said as his fingertips grazed one of his palms. “They’re not itching anymore.”
“So it ain’t just me gettin’ old and numb. The only ones that’re left are some of those striped bastards, and they don’t even set off our early warning system. Looks like the bloodsuckers are after something more than just turning a new color.”
“It was like that when I found the thing in that other cell before, but I thought that was just because it was dead. Aw, hell. This isn’t good.”
On their way to the stairs the only other sources of Nymar scent they found were a few piles of dried ash left behind after enough of the poisoned rounds had found their mark on the more traditional vampires. Cole tucked the spear through the loops inside his coat, scooped up an AK-47 dropped by one of the dead attackers and climbed the stairs two at a time.
The lights were on in the dissection room, which were complimented by dark red trails of Nymar scent that appeared like wisps of greasy smoke drifting through the starkly lit space and leading directly to a Nymar who leaned against the table where Henry’s body had been kept. The bloodsucker that had been gravely wounded by his spear before making its retreat. Its arm hung from a few tendrils that reached from inside its body to stitch
the wound shut. When the Nymar hissed part of an obscenity at Rico, he sent three quick shots into its heart. When he could tell the antidote infused in the rounds wasn’t reacting to the Nymar’s blood, he kept firing until the spore was obliterated.
“I don’t know how much longer!” someone said from the Dryad Skipping Temple. “Just be ready to go when I say!”
Despite the urge to rush into the next room, Cole held the AK-47 at the ready and stalked toward the narrow door. The power radiating from the Dryad symbols in the floor, walls, and ceiling glowed enough on their own. The drops in his eyes gave them an additional bright green shimmer. Standing in that glow, with a phone in one hand and a smoking .45 in the other, Paige gave the other two Skinners a quick upward nod by way of greeting. “About time you got up here,” she said.
“Paige!” Cole sighed. “Where the hell have you—”
She cut him off with a single upraised finger while lifting the phone to her ear and saying, “Okay. Now.”
The Dryad symbols glowed brighter as a pulse of energy filled every last one of them and rippled through the swaying beaded curtain.
“I cleared this room but there’s more Nymar on the way,” she said while sticking the phone into the pocket of her jeans. “Let’s get out of here and save the explanations for later.”
“Fine by me,” Rico said as he approached the beads and stepped through.
Paige waved at Cole impatiently, which was more than enough to get him moving. He felt a few of the beads knock against the side of his face, caught a whiff of pine-fresh goodness and then found himself in a room half the size of the Skipping Temple and covered with twice as many symbols. The curtain was flanked by a woman on each side. One was topless and the other wore gray slacks and a form-fitting T-shirt. Both sang in a pitch that rattled through the entire room.
The drops in Cole’s eyes did not react well to the neon that assaulted him when Paige shoved him into the next room. All of the nymph clubs were starting to look alike to him, but the stage setup and position of the bar seemed familiar. Just to be certain, he glanced over to a brightly lit buffet that smelled of lasagna and overheated goulash. “We’re in Shimmy’s?” he asked.
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