Vampire Uprising

Chapter Eighteen

Rico drove down I-94 toward Chicago behind the wheel of a light blue Dodge Neon borrowed from one of the dancers at Shimmy’s. That was strange enough, but the fact that Paige insisted on sharing the backseat with him instead of being up front where she could watch the road made Cole even more suspicious.

“Did you tell Rico what I asked?”

“After what just happened, you’re still worried about Shampoo Banana?” Cole asked.

“He did, Paige,” Rico said from the front of the car. “And I handed over the notebooks.”

“Did you read them?” When she didn’t get an answer right away, Paige grabbed Cole’s shoulders and forced him to look directly at her. “Did you read them?”

Pulling out of her grip, he replied, “I read the first one, but I want to know what the hell happened back there! How do you disappear to Miami and then just stroll back in and expect to talk about some goddamn notebooks?”

“There wasn’t much to find in Miami. The same two that came through before were there again. This time they forced the nymphs at that club to send a group to Philly and then killed them once the bridge was open. I got through before it closed, mopped up the ones that were left in Lancroft’s basement and called ahead to get us out through another club.”

“What about the ones who killed the nymphs?” Rico asked.

“Gone. I poked around for a while, but they knew I was there.” To Cole, she explained, “You can barely walk across a street in Miami without being spotted by three or four bloodsuckers. Most of them are busy biting tourists or feeding on any number of willing freak jobs, but they’ve still got their eyes on the street. Skinners pretty much wrote off that whole city, and the fact that two of them strode through it without a care in the world tells me a lot.”

“Bobby’s switched sides?” Rico asked.

“Looks that way,” she told him. “Smuggling another Nymar into Lancroft’s place was a big enough giveaway, but this is worse. There’s something more going on. You guys weren’t the only ones hit by a Nymar firing squad tonight. Damn near anyone who came through Philly to fill up their shopping carts in that basement was targeted.”

“I heard about some of that from MEG,” Cole said. “I bet Stephanie’s really laughing her ass off after putting Raza Hill to the torch.”

“She won’t be laughing for long,” Paige said earnestly. “Pinups was tapped out on the power needed to bring us back straight into Chicago, but we’ll be back home before long. As soon as we’re there, we’ll be heading straight to Rush Street and wiping the smiles off of those assholes’ faces.”

“About damn time,” Cole said.

“As far as those notebooks go, it’s important that you read them, Cole.”

“Well, I didn’t bring them along, if that’s what you’re about to ask next. And before you get upset about that—” Stopping himself as the frustration started to build, Cole took a breath and placed his hand on her knee. “I was worried about you, Paige. That’s all.”

“I’m fine. See?”

“Yeah, now I do. It’s just that … you know … after what happened in KC, I want to make sure nothing happens to you.”

Paige slumped like one of the toys on Ned’s shelf. Her head lolled forward for a moment before she straightened up again. “What happened, happened. It happened once, but that doesn’t mean I need your protection or expect you to be worried whenever I’m out of your sight. Just because we had sex, I don’t want you to get all protective and stupid on me.”

“Hel-lo!” Rico said.

“Not now,” she snapped.

“If I’m protective,” Cole said through gritted teeth, “it’s because I care about you as a partner and a friend. It’s got nothing to do with …” As much as he wanted to continue that sentence as planned, he couldn’t get the words out in one smooth line. “All right,” he admitted. “The sex part may have something to do with it.”

Rico snarled behind the wheel like a dad who’d caught two kids groping each other in the backseat on the way to a Homecoming dance. Much like those kids, Cole and Paige ignored him.

When she spoke again, the harsh tone in her voice was gone. Her eyes darted self-consciously toward the front seat and she shifted her back to Rico as if that would somehow prevent him from hearing what she had to say. “I may not be around all the time to—”

“I wish you’d stop saying that!” Cole snapped.

“And since I may not be around, you need to keep your head on straight so you can not only think about what to do next, but when to do it. There are things in motion that could affect us all in a big way real soon.”

“You mean like the Full Bloods working with Mongrels to run away with whatever the hell was locked up at the end of the hallway in Lancroft’s dungeon?”

Despite everything that was going on, Cole couldn’t help but get a little bit of pleasure from the shocked look on Paige’s face. “Are you sure about that?” she asked.

“I put Ned’s drops in my eyes to help find the Nymar when the lights went out. I could see those other scents down there as well.”

“The Amriany crawled in through some Mongrel tunnels,” Rico added. “They had a nice little system using some handy equipment. We might wanna think about knocking off something like that for ourselves.”

“Where’d they go from there?” she asked.

“Don’t know yet. Prophet’s with ‘em, but I haven’t heard back. I was about to give him a call.”

“Well, it’s another hour or so before we get to Chicago. See if you can find him. Once we get there, I doubt we’ll have much time to take a breath.” As if demonstrating her point, Paige pulled in a lungful of air and lowered her head. She busied her hands with the process of fishing a small tin of silver-tinted varnish from her pocket and applying it to the edge of one of her batons. Having the Blood Blade fragments melted into the varnish gave the weapon a steely texture, which meant it couldn’t be shifted into as many shapes as before. The trade-off was an edge that could cut through anything from cement and iron bars to Full Blood hide and was thin enough to keep from setting off metal detectors with any more frequency than a few coins at the bottom of someone’s pocket.

“What’s going on with you, Paige?” Cole asked. “Did something else happen in Miami?”

Working the foul-smelling paste into her baton, she asked, “How far did you get with those notebooks?”

The only thing worse than reading about the Nymar attack Paige had experienced was seeing the pain resurface on her face as she thought about it. “I got through the party where your friends were jumped.”

“Amy?”

“She was … I got to the part with her.”

Paige took another deep breath, tightened her grip on her weapon and took some bit of solace from the familiar pinch of the handle’s thorns against her palm. “I don’t know how long I was out after they started feeding on us. When I think back to that night, it’s all just a blur of sharp teeth, black tattoos, claws, and—”

“You don’t have to do this now, Paige. I’ll get to it.”

“No,” she insisted. When her fingers were sliced open as they grazed the edge of the wooden blade of the machete, she barely seemed to notice. Although her left hand could get the baton to shift into multiple shapes, her right could barely manage the machete’s basic form. “After the attack, there wasn’t much of an investigation. The cops came and asked a bunch of questions, but there wasn’t a lot to find. Amy’s body was gone by the time anyone knew something was going on downstairs, so nobody even thought to look for her right away. The rest of it was chalked up to drunk assholes being drunk assholes.”

“I thought that whole dorm would have known you were in trouble.”

“Nope,” she sighed. “Wes blocked the front door, so everyone either stayed where the music was or found another way to get to the first floor. Just another loud night at the Residence Hall. I don’t know. Maybe someone else did know something was happening, but it didn’t matter.”

“What did they do to you?” he asked. The question had come out no matter how badly he’d wanted to choke it down.

“I remember someone finding me,” she said softly. “I may have walked upstairs on my own or maybe someone helped me. I’d … lost so much blood that I could barely see straight. Somehow, I got to a hospital. Now that I think of it, there may have been an ambulance. I remember sirens. Yeah,” she said as her eyes took on a fresh intensity and her grip tightened around the handle of her weapon. “There were sirens, and they didn’t come from any cops.”