Teeth of Beasts

Chapter 18

They drove through the city, waiting for a twitch to let them know they’d found Burkis again, but didn’t have any luck. Considering that Full Bloods held portions of entire continents as their territories and had the speed to patrol them, trying to chase after one was even more pathetic than a dog running after a speeding car. The Skinners made the effort anyway before heading to Ned’s house to regroup.

Daniels had a batch of the new weapon varnish cooking, but it wouldn’t be ready for a few hours.

Ned was gone and Rico wasn’t about to wait for him to return before setting Cole and Paige both up with .45s. They weren’t as nice as his Sig Sauer, but he insisted on trading them for the smaller revolvers Paige carried in her glove compartment.

“I wanna try to make these standard issue,” Rico told her. “Since most of us make our own ammunition, it’s easier to swap shells if we all pack the same caliber.”

“Where’s Ned?” Paige asked.

“Checking on something or other downtown. It’s just as well because I woulda told him to sit this one out anyways. Last thing we need is a blind man dragging us down at that strip club. Last time I was there, me and Cole got knocked into a bus.” Seeing the glare from Paige, Rico quickly amended his statement with, “Sorry. Half blind man.”

It was too late to mount a search for the house’s owner, so they stuffed some extra clips into their pockets and drove out to Bunn’s Lounge.

Before the three of them entered the club, Cole examined the outside of the structure at its base for any markings that Stu had mentioned when talking about the A-frame temples. All he had to do was kick away a few tufts of grass to find a chain of strange, curving marks half covered in topsoil.

“Check,” he said. “Now let’s go in to check for any unusual statuary or depictions of naked women.”

“Yeah,” Rico grunted. “What’re the odds of us finding that kinda stuff in there?”

Tristan was good as her word, leaving instructions with the front door security to let them in through an unmarked entrance with no metal detector. Striding into the club wearing a baggy flannel shirt over his harness and a pistol tucked into a new holster at his hip, Cole couldn’t help but grin. If he heard tinny piano music instead of Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” blasting through an expensive sound system, he would have felt like a real gunslinger.

In contrast to the fully lit place with the spotless floors Paige visited earlier that day, the strip club had come alive with pulsing music, obnoxious DJs, strobe lights and the frequent catcall. It was a quarter past one in the morning, which was barely prime time for Bunn’s. The dancers on-stage were pretty, but didn’t quite know how to fully utilize their groove thangs. A crowd was shaping up, however, and almost all the tables were full.

“So you really think this other Skinner will be here?” Cole asked.

“If he isn’t, there’ll be a certain nymph getting her pretty ass kicked.”

Rico strode through the club wearing his patchwork jacket over his firearms and a wide, ugly smile on his face. “I bet we could charge a hell of a lot for that show,” he said. “Besides, it’s not like we’ve got a bunch of other leads to follow.”

Either she wasn’t about to bite her trainer’s head off or she agreed with the statement, because Paige let it slide. Two of the stages were being used, which meant there were several tables and a whole lot of horny guys between her and the other side of the club. One of the tables was occupied by three dudes wearing University of Missouri shirts who barely looked old enough to drink the beers piled in front of them. The closer Paige got to them, the more obnoxious their attempts at charm became.

One of the dudes reached out to snag her, but was shoved straight back down into his seat by Rico. “You don’t want none of this, boy,” he snarled as another of the Mizzou boys sprang up to face him.

Apparently, that held true for all three of the dudes, and they quickly got back to divvying up their singles.

Pulling a chair up to the table Cole had chosen, Rico dropped into it and declared, “If I don’t get something to drink real quick, there’s gonna be some trouble.”

“The drinks are on me,” Paige said, “if you talked to Stanley Velasco like you said you would.”

“Oh, I did. We got a nice deal all worked out.”

“How bad are we stuck?”

Rico leaned back to tell a waitress what he wanted and then waved off Paige’s question. “Don’t worry about it. The bill’s been paid and we may not live long enough to worry about settling up. Life is good.”

The waitress made a good first impression by returning quickly with an oversized mug of beer and tussled his bristly hair when she took his money.

“All right you horn dogs!” the DJ announced. “Point your eyes center stage and keep them there for our lovely Shae!”

“Ooooh,” Rico mused.

Shae strutted onto the stage wearing a miniskirt that was more of a silk sweatband around her waist and a matching camisole that had been cut just short enough for the bottoms of her breasts to hang below the thin material. She waved at the Skinners’ table and then climbed the brass pole like a cat ascending a carpeted post.

Rico started to say something else, but closed his eyes and let out a breath. Before Cole could brace himself, he was reminded of why the nymphs demanded and received such outrageously high pay for lap dances. As Shae ground her body against the pole, Cole could feel the friction from his chest all the way down to his groin. She leaned back, pumped her hips against the pole and sent that sensation through him as well. And when she playfully pinched her nipple, everyone seated at stage side cleared their chairs.

Paige wasn’t immune to the effect, but was the first to get back to business. “Hey!” she said. “Did you do anything useful since you’ve been out?”

Between the phantom fingers running beneath his clothes and the beer he’d just downed, Rico looked like he didn’t know what the hell was going on. “Oh,” he said as if he was coming out of a coma. “Yeah. I did a little digging on Jonah Lancroft. I think he’s been around a lot longer than we thought. Either that or the old journals are messed up.”

Shae was crawling around the edge of the stage, sometimes balancing impossibly upon the narrow bar separating her from the front row admirers. Since they were already hooked and gleefully handing over their money, she no longer projected her sensations to the crowd. Without that distraction, the conversation at Cole’s table flowed much quicker.

Settling in with his beer in one hand, Rico said, “There was some con man named Dr. Lancroft traveling around New England around the 1760s. He went from village to village, supposedly slaying vampires. Folks thought he was crazy, but he got results. Sound familiar?”

“There were vampires here in the 1700s?” Cole asked.

“Nymar have been around a lot longer than that. There were some Skinners in the Colonies back then along with Gypsies, trackers, and all sorts of folks who didn’t laugh at the whole vampire and werewolf thing. They weren’t exactly public figures, but they were smart enough to pool their resources for a good long while. A century later Jonah Lancroft built his reformatory as a place to study the monsters and figure out new ways to cause them grief.”

Shae’s heels clacked against the stage as she approached her pole. Knowing there wouldn’t be much time before the conversation would slow down again, Paige said, “You had a point, Rico. Get to it.”

“Skinners are still around,” he stated without taking his eyes from the perky nymph. “We may not see eye-to-eye with all the Travelers, but Gypsies are still around too. The reformatory itself may have collapsed, but there’s a lot of shit buried under there. Any number of right-thinking lunatics from any number of groups who have survived this long could have gone down there to find Lancroft’s journals or research or notes or whatever else.”

“Right-thinking lunatics?” Cole chuckled.

“I’d say we qualify for that title,” Rico said while raising his ridiculously oversized mug. “And I bet the Cahokia Police Department would agree.”

“At least to the lunatic part,” Paige grumbled while rubbing her sore arm.

Cole drummed his fingers as something popped into his head. It was one of those things that didn’t feel right as a thought and surely wouldn’t feel right as a statement. Even so, he decided to let it fly anyway. “What about Henry?”

“What about him?” Paige asked.

“He was in Lancroft Reformatory for God knows how long. He went back there when we were chasing Misonyk out of Chicago. If he’s this Mind Singer now, maybe he’s cleared his thoughts enough to put together something like Pestilence.”

“You mean that psycho with the broken neck who was knocked senseless in the jail cell?” Rico scoffed. “He could barely put together a sentence.”

“I agree,” Paige said. “Henry may be a lot of things, but he’s not a chemist.”

Cole felt a warm hand settle upon his shoulder. Tristan moved in behind him and leaned over to run her fingers along his chest. He’d felt her phantom touch before, but the real thing combined with a soft voice in his ear, was enough to make every nerve ending stand up and salute. “Good to see you again, Cole. I never got to finish that lap dance we started in Wisconsin. Although I should warn you,” she added as she lowered herself onto his lap, “it’s never a good idea to lick the dancers.” Once his face was sufficiently flushed, Tristan acknowledged the rest of the table. “Hello again, Paige. Introduce me to your friend.”

Rico almost knocked his chair over in his haste to get up and introduce himself.

“Ah,” Tristan purred. “Rrrrico.”

Unlike when Cole had rolled his R’s, Rico seemed positively delighted to hear Tristan make the same reference. “I take it Tristan is just a stage name,” he said.

She took a sip of his beer. “A girl’s got to have her secrets.”

“Girl?” Paige grunted. “You mean nymph. She’s a nymph, Rico.”

Tristan seemed more perplexed by her tone than anything else. “Aren’t you the one who convinced the other Skinners to give us a pass?”

“I convinced them to give you a pass, and that was just as a favor to Prophet.”

“How is Walter?”

“Fine.”

“Well, you still have my thanks,” Tristan said earnestly. “And I’ll have you know that we haven’t abused your concession one bit. In fact, we’ve been able to get steady work and create a very lucrative business.”

“An entire chain of purple A-frames,” Cole said.

“Us and IHOP.”

“IHOPs aren’t temples,” he pointed out.

Curling an arm around Cole’s head so she could rub his chin, Tristan replied, “That depends on how much you like banana pancakes.”

It took every ounce of will, but Cole somehow kept his mind in focus. “These are temples, Tristan. Paige and I checked on our way in here and we saw the runes or glyphs or whatever you want to call the markings along the bottom of the outside walls.”

When Tristan looked at him, Rico shrugged and told her, “We did our research.”

“What does it matter if these are temples?” the nymph asked. “We’re not forcing anyone to come here, we’re not preventing them from leaving, and we’re not forcing them to worship us. They choose to do all of that on their own.”

Judging by the way her hips shifted just perfectly against his lap, Cole didn’t have any trouble believing her.

“So why build temples?” Paige asked. “Aren’t there already plenty of these dumps all over the country? It’s not like any of you would have trouble landing a job at one of them.”

Tristan lowered her voice and said, “First of all, our temples amplify our talents. They also allow us to live without being sniffed out by every shapeshifter or Nymar out there.”

“They don’t seem to work too well in that regard,” Rico pointed out. “Otherwise there wouldn’t need to be so much extra security around the side door.”

“Those leeches didn’t find us on their own,” Tristan hissed. “You see that man sitting over there?”

Cole and the other two Skinners looked across the club to a section of small round tables scattered in a far corner. It was almost directly between the VIP area Paige had seen in Christov’s video and the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY next to a huge mirror. A few of those tables were occupied by adventurous couples looking to spice up their love lives, but most were taken by men on their own watching the dancers from afar instead of sitting close enough to smell the perfume. Only one of them didn’t seem overly enticed by the dancers. In fact, the girls making their rounds asking for private dances completely avoided him. The lighting in the club wasn’t very good, but Cole could see the thick, impeccably trimmed whiskers covering the man’s face.

“You mean that guy with the beard?” he asked.

“That’s the one. Do you recognize him?”

Strobe lights created shadows upon the bearded man’s face that shifted in time to the beat of the music. Black lights were absorbed by the coarse texture of his neck and arms. His posture was just straight enough to make him look confident instead of rigid, and he kept one hand flat on the table a few inches away from a glass of what looked to be cola. He wore simple clothes made of thick cotton and the pleasantly neutral expression of someone watching squirrels scamper across a quiet park.

“He look familiar to you, Rico?” Paige asked.

The big man shook his head. “Why should he?”

“Because,” Tristan said, “he’s one of you.”

“He’s the Skinner you told us about?”

Maintaining a playful smile and nodding without looking directly at the table, she said, “I saw the scars myself. He even smells like one of you. Tree sap, gun oil, and blood. Those leeches were following him, and when they realized my sisters were here, they started camping outside our door waiting for their chance to get us. If it wasn’t for the protection of our temple’s glyphs, they would have been able to charge in here and take us by force.”

“What do the Nymar have against nymphs?” Rico asked.

Tristan shifted in Cole’s lap as if about to float across the table. “We’re the reason vampires exist, sweetie.”

“Nymar spore are why vampires exist,” Paige corrected.

“Yes, but haven’t you ever wondered why there aren’t Nymar dogs or Nymar snakes? Or I should say, why there aren’t Nymar dogs or snakes anymore?”

“Yes,” Cole said. “I have always wondered that.” He shifted to get a look at her face, and Tristan adjusted accordingly. As her body curled in his lap, Cole’s hands supported her. “My brain just works like that.”

Gazing at him as if she’d found a new favorite student, Tristan said, “Nymar spore used to inhabit whatever bodies they could find. Anything with blood flowing through it was good enough. They’d get inside, lay dormant until their systems adjusted to the animal’s body, and then attach to its heart to do what they do. Somewhere along the line, a Nymar got lucky enough to taste the blood of a nymph. One of the stories is that an infected cat curled at the feet of its mistress and lapped up some of her blood when she pricked her finger. After that,” she said in a silky voice that rolled through Cole’s ear as phantom fingers slid down the front of his entire body, “the Nymar became so infatuated that it climbed out of the cat and into any animal that could get closer to that nymph. It’s supposed to have infected her lover, who could get all the alone time he wanted. Her attentions were so wondrous that all Nymar decided to attach to human hearts, just for the chance of getting that close to a nymph again.”

When Tristan shifted back into her normal voice, Cole felt a jolt worse than if he’d accidentally stared directly into one of the nearby strobes.

“Some of the more colorful details were probably exaggerated, but the core of it is true,” she said. “A Nymar’s thirst for human blood above all others stems from that first sip from a nymph. That’s why the few of us that are left must protect ourselves, and why the Nymar will not stop once they’ve found us.” Tickling Cole’s chin, she added, “Deep down inside, they know we’re the sweetest tasting things on this earth.”

“I can vouch for that,” Cole said before he could stop himself.

Losing the singsong quality of her voice as if she’d flipped a switch, Tristan said, “That Skinner over there brought the Nymar to this club, but it’s not why he came. Like those leeches, he came for us.”

“Why does he want you?” Rico asked.

Paige locked her eyes on Tristan so she could watch the nymph carefully as she said, “Maybe it has something to do with how this one can be here after being on the other side of the country less than an hour before.”

For the first time since they’d met, Tristan looked genuinely stunned. Even so, she recovered with a pretty smile and a cute little upward curl of an eyebrow. “That’s part of it. When he arrived, he asked to use us as a way to reach the entire world at once. When we refused, he asked to run some tests on one of my sisters.” Grimacing as if the words themselves were fetid upon her tongue, she added, “He wanted samples from them. When we refused that, he kidnapped two of my sisters and threatened to kill them if we didn’t do what he asked. Ever since then he comes here every other night and sits there like an arrogant bastard, writing in his notebook and collecting our sweat with cotton swabs.”

“Why doesn’t Christov do anything about this?” Paige asked.

“Because I didn’t tell him the whole story,” Tristan replied. “All he’d do is try to send Mikey or one of the others after him, and that would only get my sisters killed. I don’t need bouncers. I need Skinners.”

Cole’s first impulse was to agree to do whatever Tristan wanted. More than anything, he wanted to do what she wanted and it didn’t matter what it was. But before he could roll with those instincts, he took a moment to question what had put them there. And that one bit of questioning was all it took for him to say, “You were lucky to get that first pass from us. Just because we sat here and listened to you doesn’t mean we’re just another group of admirers.”

“What?” Tristan asked.

“Yeah,” Paige said quickly. “What?”

“I haven’t done my research on nymphs, but I’ve seen enough to get the gist of it. You get your way and have a few sexy tricks up your sleeve, which are boosted by this temple or whatever. We’re not drones. If you have a proposition to make, then make it. We don’t do anything just because you snapped your fingers.” Seeing the hurt expression on Tristan’s face, Cole couldn’t help but add, “Not to be mean or anything, but…”

Paige reached over and rubbed his arm. “Valiant effort, young one.” To Tristan, she said, “How about we start with what that old guy was so interested in.”

Rico pushed away from the table and took his almost empty mug with him. “And I’ll start by introducing myself. If this guy is a Skinner, I wanna know about it. If he ain’t, then I got a real problem with someone sayin’ they are when they ain’t. And if he is, no wait…I’ll be right back.”

“Leave the beer,” Paige said. “You’ve had enough.”

As he crossed the room to the bearded man’s table, Rico couldn’t help but notice Shae making her rounds. Very few words were exchanged before the older man got up, grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her toward the employees’ entrance. Within seconds after that, Rico was close enough to hear the bearded man say, “Sing for me,” to the frightened nymph.

Rico clamped a hand on the old man’s shoulder and squeezed with enough force to crush a beer can. “Ain’t exactly the best time to get yer rocks off, pops.”

Up close, the bearded man had the presence of a washed-out photograph. His skin was rough and leathery and his clothes had the musty smell of the most unpopular section of a library. When he looked at Rico, he seemed more confused than anything else. “You should be helping me. I’m one of you. See?” He swung his other hand up to show a palm that was so scarred, it looked as if it had been stitched together from numerous shreds of torn skin. “These nymphs have a part to play in destroying the filth that have hunted us for too long. Help me.”

“Why don’t you help yourself by letting her go?”

The bearded man lost his patience in an instant. Pulling Shae closer, he picked up the stick that had been propped against his table and snarled, “Do you know who I am? I made every Skinner what they are today!”

“Lemme guess,” Rico chuckled. “You’re Jonah Lancroft?”

“Then you do know. Enough damage has been done by those who would sully our craft. Unhand me and help put these Dryad whores to work before it’s too late.”

Rico blinked and tried to replay the last few sentences in his head to make sure the beer hadn’t hit him harder than he’d thought.

“I have no time to waste,” the old man said as he shook loose of Rico’s grip. “This place will have to be sacrificed along with you. Henry, give the Mongrels what they want.”

Rico pressed the barrel of the .45 against the man’s elbow and said, “Let go before you lose an arm!”

They’re coming, Dr. Lancroft!

The voice rattling inside Rico’s head was quickly wiped out by the hacking cry of the waitress who’d brought him his beer. She screamed at him through a mouthful of sludge and tried to pull his gun away as if she’d lost all fear of it going off in her face.

The music faded for a second and was replaced by an updated mix of Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.” Right on cue, Kate strode onto the stage wearing a plaid skirt, glasses, and her red hair tied in pigtails. Strictly speaking, the outfit was more of a “hot for student” sort of thing, but none of the patrons seemed to mind. In fact, their cheers were so loud that nobody could hear the slam of tables being upended throughout the club or guards rushing toward the rowdy customers. Cole had been struggling to catch sight of Rico through the milling crowd and wriggling dancers when he heard a voice that was part scream and part gurgle. More shouting followed as people backed away from the instigators of the brawls that had all sprung up at the same time. More and more of the customers and employees showed traces of watery sludge dripping from their eyes or thicker mud flowing from their mouths.

Cole jumped to his feet, lifting Tristan up with him. “Shit! Where did they come from?”

“I think they can come from just about anywhere,” Paige replied as she stood up and drew the baton from her left boot. “Henry’s got to be close.”

“He’s always close.”

At first the fights were treated like any other scuffle in such a deep pool of testosterone. People moved away from those swinging the punches, while others welcomed the chance to dive in and get their hands dirty. That all changed when people looked closer at the groaning faces at the center of the disturbance. Blank faces caked with mud all turned away from Cole and Paige to fix upon the back of the room. Then the people who weren’t infected tried to get away from those who were, sparking more and more fights like little fires crackling around an inferno.

“These dudes are sick!” someone yelled.

When someone else shouted, “It’s that Mud Flu shit!” distemper grew into panic.

Rico didn’t want to kill anyone, but he also wasn’t about to let himself be overrun by the growing mob converging on him. He fired a shot intended to frighten the Mud People away, but all that did was change panic into a riot.

“God damn it,” Paige snarled. “Try to draw some of them over here.”

She and Cole screamed at the Mud People, but they wouldn’t listen. They closed in on Rico, held back mainly by the uninfected customers who fought to get to the front door. He was a capable enough fighter to stay afloat for years in that kind of a fight, so he craned his neck to try and get a look at his partners. Unable to see them, he settled for being heard.

“That old man grabbed Shae!”

Only a couple minutes had passed since the first punch was thrown. That was enough time for the crowd within the club to get ugly, and more than enough time for a pack of Mongrels to make the run from St. Louis. As soon as Cole felt the burn in his scars, he heard the commotion of people being knocked away from the front door to make room for a group of new arrivals to get inside. Cole recognized one shabbily dressed woman immediately and stood with Tristan behind him. “That’s Malia!”

As Mikey led a few other bouncers to greet the Mongrels, more of the shapeshifters forced their way inside.

“We came for them,” Malia said, pointing a long finger at the Skinners.

Mikey stepped between the intruders and the rest of the club, but was met by a sharp punch from Allen’s bony, human-sized fist. Since the Mongrel’s punch did about as much damage as a cat’s batting paw, Mikey grinned and grabbed Allen by the front of his shirt to shove him toward the door. The other bouncers fell in behind him, but were soon facing claws instead of fists.

“Damn it,” Paige snarled as she headed for the door. “Make this quick, Cole. Get them outside before getting too rough.”

But it was too late. The Mongrels knocked the bouncers down like bowling pins. Malia pinned Mikey to the floor and crouched on his chest while slowly shifting into her leopard form. “The Mind Singer was right,” she growled. “They’re all in one place.”

“Yeah,” Cole said as he drew his weapon from its harness. “Tough luck for you.”