Vampire Uprising

Chapter Thirty-Four

The door opened into a room that stretched out for about ten feet on either side. Less than six feet in front of him was the back of a counter and a window that looked out to a larger room that had the appearance of a lobby or display area. At the moment every square inch of that tiled floor was covered by cops, overturned furniture, broken glass, Nymar, or spilled blood. It was impressive, considering the room on the other side of the window was large enough to hold several cars and a few desks with plenty of space for customers to wander freely and peruse whatever the front company was supposed to sell. The front windows were blacked out, but powerful searchlight beams still managed to get in through narrow gaps in the paint around the edges of the glass.

Cole picked out half a dozen Nymar, based solely on markings he could see on exposed skin or wounds that were too serious to be on a human being without putting them permanently out of a fight. What disturbed him the most was all the officers clustered at the front door. The armed figures in bulky gear were backlit by headlights and watching what happened inside. They all seemed to be held back by a solitary man standing at the doorway wearing raggedy clothes over a wiry frame.

“There you are,” Cole snarled as he set his sights on Kawosa’s back. Jabbing a finger at him, he told Nadya, “Stay here and cover that skinny bastard. If he makes any sudden moves or starts to change into something, shoot him.”

“My bullets won’t do much to a shapeshifter.”

“Then aim for the head. Maybe you’ll knock him out long enough for me to get to him.”

She wasn’t happy about it, but took a position in the doorway and sighted along the top of the FAMAS.

The Nymar in that room were increasingly easy to spot, wearing their affliction on their sleeves by baring their fangs and hissing like animals. Clawed hands were wrapped around pistols taken from the dead, and when the cops put a bullet into them, they straightened up to allow the mashed hunk of lead to be ejected from their bodies by greasy black tendrils.

Cole gripped his spear, hopped over the counter and into the battle. When he was targeted by the closest vampires, he tucked his chin against his chest and twisted his body around so the shots fired at him thumped against his coat. The impacts hurt like hell, but mundane rounds couldn’t even scratch the hardened Full Blood leather. A second later something larger than a bullet slammed into his right side.

Hope tackled Cole as if she’d been launched by a catapult. Her shoulder pounded against his ribs and her arms wrapped around him like a pair of steel bands. If he hadn’t been fast enough to get his spear around to buy himself an inch or two of breathing room, the life would have been squeezed out of him in a matter of seconds.

“There’s more Skinners here,” Hope shouted. “Find them!”

A few Nymar separated from the group. One of them clung to the ceiling, so it got to Nadya first. Although Cole couldn’t check on the Amriany, he heard the FAMAS chattering and saw the muzzle flash from the corner of his eye.

Once again, strength rushed through his body. It was enough to pry Hope off, but left him too unsteady to stay upright. He dropped to one knee, using the spear as a crutch to prevent him from keeling over.

“Don’t worry about the police,” Hope sneered while popping lightly to her feet. “The ones that aren’t under our control are dead on their feet.”

Cole turned to take a better look at the cops. Sure enough, many of them had a slick coating of venom on their faces. If any of that crap had gotten into their eyes, they were susceptible to suggestion as well as disoriented and groggy. Cole reached up to feel his own face, hoping to explain some of the strangeness going on inside of him. The only thing he found was some blood and a whole lot of sweat.

Approaching him while craning her neck to look at the rest of the room, Hope took in the carnage as if she was enjoying a movie. “I’m torn on what to do with you,” she said. “Our coordinated efforts have come together nicely to either put your kind into the ground or in the sights of your own authorities. It’s tempting to let them have you. Still, I do enjoy the taste of Skinner blood. You all have such a nice blend running through your veins.”

She crouched down slowly as chaos closed in around her.

Nadya emptied her last few rounds into whatever was attacking her.

Cops who’d expended their ammunition swung blindly at anything that moved, while others fired at their partners because of the temporary mind control forced on them by the venom. Nymar exploded from the shadows, dropped from the ceiling, or struggled with the few officers who’d managed to keep their wits about them. The only calm within the storm were Cole and Kawosa. The shapeshifter stood in the doorway, quietly talking to the anxious officers waiting to barge in while occasionally motioning to the room behind him as if the bedlam was just another busy day at the office.

Cole remained still because he was too weak to waste what energy he had left. He’d had enough training and been through enough hell to recognize the anticipation in Hope’s eyes as a ruse meant to lull him into committing to a wild attack. When she switched direction like a cobra swaying back and forth, the hunger in her eyes spiked. He knew what came after that.

The markings on her face pulsed in a way he’d never seen on a Nymar. They covered the sides of her head like a pair of hands gripping her between them. Her attack came so quickly that Hope didn’t even seem to move. She simply flickered from one spot to another, confirming that the two spore attached to her heart could truly work in lethal concert. Somehow, Cole was able to move fast enough to intercept her.

His muscles felt as if they were being shredded from his bones, but they pulled his body down and brought his arms up in short, powerful motions that allowed him to jab the spear into her chest. He knew he’d missed her heart, but when she landed, the metallic spearhead was completely buried inside her torso.

Hope gripped the spear and snarled at him. Unlike the previous Nymar to be caught that way, she had the power to wrench it out and shove him back. “You can’t kill me with your weapons,” she said. “No Skinner can.”

Her mouth continued to move, but Cole wasn’t listening to what she said. His strength was fading so quickly that he barely had enough juice in his batteries to process the sights flooding into his eyes or the sounds filling his ears. Something pounded against the floor just enough for him to feel the impacts. A fast, chopping rhythm washed through the building, which soon distinguished itself as the roar of helicopter blades. Paige had arrived, but every fiber in Cole’s body told him that he couldn’t hold out until she got to him.

He needed to fend for himself.

He needed to feed.

As Hope began to recover from being impaled, Cole swung his spear at her throat. She leaned away from that with ease but underestimated how quickly he could follow it up. The forked end of the spear twirled around almost as fast as the blades of the helicopter outside the building, and she ducked under it before her head was taken from her shoulders. A deep gash was torn across her jugular, and before she could place her hand to the wound, Cole was on her.

What his leap lacked in finesse, it made up for with sheer power. Every joint in his legs felt as if it had snapped loose. His groin muscles strained to the point of tearing. As soon as he got his hand on Hope’s neck, however, all of that discomfort went away. He rode her down until her back hit the floor, slipping his hand up under Hope’s chin and driving the back of her skull against cement and tile. The thumping impact resounded through his ears as he clamped his mouth upon the open wound on her neck.

He didn’t know what he was doing.

The rational part of his brain had been shoved too far back into his subconscious to be heard.

His teeth scraped uselessly against the torn flaps of Hope’s skin, so he jammed his face in closer and probed the wound with his tongue. A tremble moved through her body as he licked and sucked, adding another layer of disgust to the many that were already heaped on top of him. Hope’s blood trickled into his mouth at first. Once his tongue found a stronger flow coming from one of her severed arteries and directed the fluid into his mouth, the pain in his muscles lessened. All of the tearing he’d felt before simply faded as if the twine cinched around his innards had been loosened or cut.

Then the tastes hit him.

The coppery sweetness of blood mingled with something bitter and pungent. Each gulp was sweet and then sour. Something in him pushed through the latter just to get more of the former.

“What are you doing?” Hope groaned. “Are you feeding from me?” She tried to squirm away, but Cole’s entire body reacted to hold her in place. Despite his best efforts, she was able to draw enough strength from both of her Nymar spore for her to gain some purchase on the floor. “This is even more interesting than I’d anticipated.”

Nadya may have had a chance to reload the FAMAS, but that wouldn’t explain the multiple bursts of gunfire erupting from different angles. Other voices came from the hallway, speaking in some sort of European dialect Cole couldn’t place. Someone yelled for the damn Gypsies to speak English. He didn’t need more than one guess to figure out who that was. At the same time, voices chattered through his earpiece, trying to get his attention, asking where he was and what he was doing.

Even though she seemed capable of getting away, Hope remained within Cole’s grasp. “So you were unable to prevent the seeding, even after somehow ridding yourself of the spore,” she said in a breathy voice that was the only one Cole cared to hear. “This alone was worth the trouble of making sure I saw you and your partners again. This changes everything.”

Her body swelled against him as she writhed on the floor. Her chin brushed against Cole’s face as he dug his mouth in deeper. Finally, when his throat was all but filled with the oily Nymar blood, he tore himself away and struggled to stand up. Hope lay beneath him, looking up at him longingly while her fingers trailed along the dripping wound. “Now you have another reason why you can’t kill us,” she said. “Soon, every Skinner will have that same reason.”

“Cole!” Rico shouted from the back of the room. “Are you all right?”

The big man was finishing off one of the Nymar that had charged over the counter to greet him and the remaining Amriany. Of the policemen and-women who had been in the room, only a few very confused cops were still standing. They’d finished off the couple Nymar that had stayed behind, then checked with each other, radioed to the ones outside, and started screaming at the solitary figure that stood between them and backup.

Kawosa raised his hands in compliance to the orders being barked at him and dove away from the door. Gunshots rang out, punching holes into the wall and thumping against Kawosa’s hide. The gunfire intensified, causing the shapeshifter to stumble and fall forward. That small victory was taken away as his body flowed into a lean, four-legged canine form and darted toward the back of the room. He raced past Cole, cleared the counter in one jump and scampered away like a fleeting thought.

Gunari had a gun in each hand but was unable to pull either trigger. Instead, he watched the shaggy blur streak past him and gasped, “Ktseena.”

Cole absorbed all of this as if his senses had been extended in every direction. Perhaps it was the blood that gave him that gift because Hope surely didn’t have it. Otherwise, she would have seen Drina come up behind her with what looked to be a thick metal arrow in each hand. The Amriany bared her teeth and dropped both arms to drive an arrowhead into each of Hope’s shoulders.

The way the Nymar rose to her feet meant that she had either pulled herself up by bending the laws of physics or was dragged up by the objects in Drina’s hands. When Hope twisted around to slash as Drina with her claws, she remained attached to the arrows by thin silver chains.

“You bitch!” she snarled. “Whatever this is, I’ll shove it down your throat and pull it out through your fucking ass!”

Without reacting to the vulgar torrent spewing from Hope’s mouth, Drina stepped back and allowed her partners to swarm in around her.

Nadya fired a few rounds at Hope’s feet, taking them out from under her.

Gunari grabbed Hope’s wrists and wrestled her to the ground, forcing the rest of the chain to spool out and be pulled taut from where it was housed within the shafts of Drina’s arrows. She stood over Hope, lowering her arms as more of the chains were pulled into Hope’s torso.

“What the hell?” Rico grunted.

“It’s an old Amriany method for extracting the spores,” Gunari explained. “Keep those police away so she can work.”

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 those 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 someone 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.

And still, because I am a Skinner and know of no other way, I continue to fight. Is it wrong for me to desire a word of thanks or gesture of gratitude? Is it wrong to want the solace given to any common soldier who bleeds for home and country?

I suppose it is too much to ask. And so, from this day hence, I will never ask again.

Cole set his jaw in a firm line, clenched his fists and allowed his strength to bleed into his grip upon nothing instead of using it to make a break for it. Freedom didn’t do him any good if there was nowhere left to run.