But the cops were already backing out of the building through the front door. They kept their weapons drawn but weren’t about to interfere with the procedure. Outside, there were enough people walking back and forth between the chopper and the building to cast a shadow play on the windows.
“What’s happening to her?” Rico asked.
Hope had grabbed onto the chains, only to have her hands burnt by something within the metal. Without enough strength to pull the intrusive implements from her body, all she could do was pound her fists against the ground and continue to spit insults at the hunters surrounding her.
“The metal is treated to become … like a magnet,” Gunari said. His English was fine in conversation, but the specifics of this particular exchange were testing the limits of his syntax. “It is forged specially for the Nymar.”
“Like a Blood Blade for vampires?”
“Yes. The arrowheads are attracted to the Nymar spore. Once inside, they will go to it, cut through everything and not stop until they have found it.”
“Then what?”
“Then,” Drina said, “this.” She tightened her grip on the tools and lifted them straight up. All but a few links of the chains had been swallowed up by Hope’s upper torso and resisted the Amriany’s efforts to extract them. With sustained effort, Drina pulled them loose. She turned both hands in small circles, wrapping the bloody chains around her knuckles until the arrowheads snagged on the upper levels of Hope’s skin.
“Why didn’t you do that to all those other bloodsuckers?” Rico asked.
Gunari scowled. “It is not a method we use very often. Too messy.”
Hope was no longer even a humanlike shell anymore. All she could do was scream and hit the floor until the tiles cracked and bits of broken concrete became wedged in the bloody gashes covering her fists. Her flesh strained like thick rubber as the arrowheads came to the surface. One more pull was all Drina needed to remove them completely, along with the spore that each one had found.
Normally, when Nymar spore were in jeopardy, they tried to nourish themselves on whatever they could find. Something in the Amriany tools held an even greater temptation because the spore latched on to them to wrap tendril after tendril around the charmed shafts as well as the hands that held them.
“This is another reason we do not use them so often,” Gunari said as he reached over to help his partner pull free of the clinging parasite.
Cole couldn’t bear to look at Rico. He couldn’t even bring himself to look at the Amriany. Even with Hope reduced to a flailing, wounded animal, he wasn’t able to look at her. That didn’t leave him with any other option than to turn his back on everyone and stagger toward the front door. “Paige?”
She pushed through the cops that had clustered around the building’s main entrance, her hands empty and concern written across her face. The moment she spotted him in the shadows at the back of the room, she smiled with relief. “Cole! Thank God!”
The look in her eyes and the way she favored her right arm told Cole it was truly her. Spinning around, he used his sleeve to wipe the oily blood from his face. Both spore entangled around Drina’s hands like so much rotten seafood were crumbling into dried ash. When he grabbed one of the silver tools, he had more than enough strength to tear it away from her.
“What are you doing?” Gunari demanded.
“Does this need to recharge or something?” Cole asked. “I need to use it.”
Rico and Nadya straightened up and raised their weapons as the cops at the front of the building moved in.
“It’s all over!” one of the men in tactical black uniforms barked. “Drop your weapons and put your hands over your head!”
“What is it, Cole?” Rico asked.
Locking his eyes on Gunari, Cole said, “Answer my question. Can I use this?”
“Pull the handle at the other end.”
The chain was locked into the silver tube with a bar that passed through the last link to keep it from being pulled out completely. Cole pulled the bar, drew the chain all the way back through the handle until the arrowhead was locked, and then drove the pointed end into his chest. He was barely able to break the skin. Whatever had powered him before either wore off or sapped his strength, staying his hand.
Rico charged forward without lowering his Sig Sauer. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Put the guns down!” the SWAT team member shouted.
All three Amriany focused their attention on the police and spoke to each other quietly through their earpieces. There were more Nymar in the building. The itch in Cole’s scars which told him that much. But Nymar were no longer the problem. No matter what language they spoke, he knew that the Amriany had to be discussing their chances of getting Tobar away from the authorities so the group could make a clean escape. “Get out of here,” he told them.
Drina approached him cautiously.
“I told you to go!” Cole said. “We came here to keep cops alive, goddamn it.”
“Give me the Talon,” she said calmly.
Paige had yet to get into the building. There were enough cops at the door to hold her back, but she wasn’t making it easy for them.
Rico stood his ground, paying no attention whatsoever to the cops, the guns in their hands, or anything other than his partner.
Cole pushed the sharp instrument in deeper, grinding it through the meat beneath his skin and scraping against the bone. “I don’t feel anything happening,” he grunted through the pain. Within his body, the tension in his muscles shifted away from the front of his chest and inched down to his feet. “It’s in me,” he said. “I know it is.”
“Was in you,” Rico said as he stepped forward. “We got it out. Remember?”
“No. I can feel it. I even …” But he couldn’t bring himself to say what he’d done. Since Rico and all of the Amriany were also covered in spilled Nymar blood, the stains on Cole’s face didn’t stand out enough for the others to draw conclusions.
All except for Nadya.
She’d stormed that room with him. She’d been there when Hope first jumped him. She was still there now. The only question remaining was just how much she’d seen while the Nymar stragglers swarmed in for their last push and he’d had Hope pinned to the floor. She looked at him with cautious pity and a hint of fear as she told him, “If there was a spore in you, the tip of that stake would have been drawn to it. The spore would have been drawn to it as well. Do you feel that?”
“No.”
“Then you have no spore.” When she reached for the tool in Cole’s hand, she didn’t have to fight to take it away from him. He relinquished it along with a heavy breath as several standard-issue police flashlights threw their beams across the top of the counter.
Once the arrowhead was out of him, Cole looked down to the wound in his chest. It was a clean, deep cut. The ends pinched together a bit, but that could have been the work of the Skinner healing serum in his system. No tendrils emerged to close the gap. He could, however, feel the bands cinching back into place around his muscles. “Paige is with these guys,” he said to Drina. “She’s your best chance of getting Tobar out. Trying to break him out now is just a good way to get us all killed.”
“He’s right,” Rico said. “I don’t know what’s holding these SWAT guys back, but it won’t last forever. Can you get out?”
“Yes,” Gunari said. “Only if we go now.”
Recognizing the commanding tone in his voice, Drina helped Nadya toward the door that led back into the hall.
“Freeze!” the cops said as they cut loose and rushed inside like guard dogs that had finally broken from their leash.
Cole stood up to face Rico and the retreating Amriany. Raising his hands caused his coat to hang like a leather curtain between him and the main entrance. He handed over his weapon and said, “Take this and—”
Shots were fired that hit Cole in both shoulders. Something scraped against his back amid the crackle of electricity. He assumed t
hose were leads of a stun gun, but they were unable to snag within the tough material of his coat.
“On the floor! Now!”
“Get out, Rico!” Cole shouted. “Paige is with them. We’ll handle this.”
Rico’s swearing filled the air and then Cole’s earpiece as his footsteps echoed down the hall. A few of the cops screamed at him and struggled to climb over or around the counter to engage in a pursuit. Before they could get through the door Rico had just used, Cole jumped in front of the cops to absorb the next rounds that were fired.
“I won’t forget that,” Rico said. “Call me as soon as you can. Prophet?”
“Right here.”
“Can you get out without being spotted by the cops?”
“Are you kidding me?” the bounty hunter replied. “I’ve been watching the police swarm that building from half a block away.”
“Good. Wha—”
As the cops rushed at him, Cole ripped out his earpiece and crushed it beneath his boot heel.
“What was that?” A heavy hand dropped onto Cole’s shoulder and spun him around. The cop was a stocky man in his late thirties with a clean-shaven face that looked as if it had been sand-blasted from a hunk of solid rock. He was dressed in head-to-toe tactical gear including a vest that resembled the harness Paige had modified to hold werewolf hides. “What did you crush on the floor?” he asked. “Answer me!”
Three more cops in matching gear encircled Cole while several more passed through the doorway into the hall. Cole could only hope that he’d given the others enough time to put their escape plans to use.
“You got any weapons?”
As much as Cole wanted to lie, he sighed, “Yeah. Under the coat. I wasn’t going to shoot any of you. I just needed to protect myself.”
The coat was pulled off him with so much force that Cole wouldn’t have been surprised if his arms were still in the sleeves when it was taken away. “Got a few guns and what looks like some sort of drug kit. Syringes.”
“I can explain those.”
“Shut your mouth and stand still.”
Cole did as he was told as the holster and harness was taken from him. After that, the muzzle of the cop’s assault rifle was jammed into the small of his back.
“Make one wrong move and you’re dead,” the cop promised.
From the front of the room one of the officers shouted, “This looks like Hendricks!”
“What?” the cop behind Cole asked.
“Hendricks from Vice. He’s dead.”
The muzzle of the assault rifle gouged into Cole’s back as a thick arm wrapped around his throat to put him in an uncompromising lock. He was surprised by the lack of panic he felt as he thought about which method he could use to escape the hold. Paige had taught him several over the last few months, and her grip wasn’t much different than the one choking the life out of him now.
Attached to the cop’s vest was a radio that crackled with a voice that reported, “There’s more dead at the loading dock. Looks like a bunch of the dealers and Anderson’s unit.”
“All of Anderson’s unit?”
“Haven’t found them all yet, sir, but there’s two of them in the back of a van. The dealers are toast. Anderson and two of his men are hurt pretty bad. They say the others are somewhere on the premises.”
Cole’s head hung low. “Try the offices.”
“What?” the cop snarled a few inches from his ear. “Is that where you’re holding them?”
“No, I—”
“Shut up!” Keying the radio, he said, “Sweep all the offices.”
The cop nearly pulled Cole’s arms out of their sockets while securing his wrists behind his back. From there Cole was moved toward the front door at the behest of an occasional prod from an assault rifle pounding against his spine. Considering all the dead cops discovered in that room alone, he considered himself lucky to be breathing at all. He felt even luckier when he got close enough to the front door to hold Paige’s eye for more than a second.
She nodded and showed him a shaky smile while the cops jostled past her in their haste to get him out of the building.
Gunshots crackled down the street and tires squealed. By now Cole had heard the FAMAS and Rico’s Sig Sauer enough times to know neither of those guns were being fired. Somehow that didn’t make him feel much better. The parking lot directly outside the building was filled with police cars and two large black SWAT vans. He couldn’t help but shake his head at just how far away he was from the guy who’d researched tactical teams just like this one for use in a video game.
“Top o’ the world, Ma.” Cole sighed.
“Shut your damn mouth,” another man said as he was roughly thrown against a van, where he was searched again. There was an exchange of words and some more scuffling. When Cole was roughly turned around, a pair of new faces stared back at him.
Paige stood beside a man who looked to have spent thirty out of his forty or so years being dragged behind a truck. His pockmarked skin and bristly hair were coarse enough to scrape the paint off the SWAT van in one pass. The eyes he fixed upon Cole were light enough to be either green or gray. His stern expression, illuminated by flashing police lights and headlights trained on the parking lot, made it clear the guy had no qualms about pulling the trigger of the M-16 in his hands.
When Paige reached out for Cole, she was held back by the SWAT guy who’d taken him into custody. “I don’t give a shit what kind of pull you have,” he snapped. “This one’s in our custody now.”
The man with the M-16 and pockmarked face replied, “He’s all yours. We’re willing to cooperate.”
“If you would’ve been so generous before, maybe the rest of these assholes wouldn’t have gotten away!”
The man with the pockmarks kept his mouth shut and stepped back.
“You need to go with them, Cole,” Paige said.
Suddenly, the sight of her wasn’t so comforting. “What? That’s how you fixed this?”
“Just trust me. Go with them.”
“Go where?” Cole asked.
“If I had my way, you’d be goin’ into a fuckin’ box and buried under six feet of dirt for all those cops you killed,” the SWAT officer said. In a harsh whisper he added, “And if it weren’t for them news crews, I’d do the job myself without losing a damn bit of sleep over it.”
Cole was pulled away from the van and shoved toward another one parked ten feet away. He nearly fell on his face after two steps, finding out only then that someone had locked shackles around his ankles while he’d been looking at Paige. He looked at her again, still waiting for her to step in and play whatever card she’d been saving for him.
“You set this up!” Cole said once he realized that card wasn’t coming. “What happens now? Huh?”
Catching up to him, she explained, “I didn’t have a choice, Cole. We all got set up too well for me to do anything else. There’s another one in town somewhere.”
“Another what?”
“One like Hope. If things didn’t turn out like this, more would have died. I’m sorry.”
Cole was turned away from her and forced into the van. His stomach flipped and it became increasingly difficult to maintain his balance. Cars and vans filled the street beyond a perimeter the cops had set up. He didn’t recognize all the letters painted on those vehicles, but they had to have represented most or all of the local news stations. In the time it took for him to figure out that much, lights from a dozen different cameras were pointed his way.
Muscles strained against the metal restraints as well as the hands that shoved Cole into the back of the van. His senses were overloaded with everything from camera lights and venomous words to the scents of recent gunfire and exhaust fumes from the vans that were about to take him into a cell or possibly a shallow grave on the way to the police station.
“She would have killed you, Cole,” Paige shouted to him. “If it wasn’t Hope, it would have been the other one. I couldn’t let that happen to so
meone else that I …” She had trouble getting her next few words out but was also being jostled by the police officers taking over the scene, as well as the soldiers who’d been with her in that helicopter. When Cole was seated in the van and getting his shackles bolted through a steel ring between his feet, she spoke again. All he could hear was, “It was Tara! I won’t let her—”
The helicopter’s rotors powered up, washing out Paige’s voice in an all-encompassing roar.
Cole could still taste oily blood in the back of his throat. When he moved his arms, he felt certain he could pull the chains apart in a few good tries and there was enough healing serum in his system to absorb some punishment from the cops along the way.
He could get out of that van if he wanted.
At that moment, knowing what Paige had done, he just didn’t want to.
As the van doors slammed shut, sealing him in a steel box full of chains, shotguns, and an angry SWAT team mourning friends they thought he’d killed, Cole found solace in words from another man who’d become an enemy to his own people.
Is it too much to ask to receive a little gratitude? Jonah Lancroft had written in one of the journal entries that had stuck with Cole long after he’d read them. I’ve purged villages of evil, only to be chased out by the same frightened simpletons who’d begged for help from a deity that in all likelihood doesn’t exist. If God does exist, why wouldn’t He be far from here, creating new miracles while his former ones eke out a life of their own? If there is a God, I believe we are not forgotten by Him. We are simply allowed to live on our own and enjoy the gifts we have been given. Why, then, must so many choose to be blind to the evils that so obviously exist and can be seen, felt, and heard every day and night?
I have withdrawn into a life of quiet research, founding my reformatory as a place to keep monstrosities away from those they may harm. I have spent years studying ways to improve my fellow Skinners and give them a fighting chance against demons that have proven to be more resilient and adaptable than those who kid themselves into thinking they are the favored ones on this earth.
If we are made in God’s image, then I do not want to pray. Those words would only be seen as weakness and turned against me, just as my pleas and confessions have been thrown into my face by the select few with whom I’d mistakenly aligned myself.
Vampire Uprising s-4 Page 40
