Vampire Uprising

Chapter Four

“Who the hell are these guys?” Cole asked as yet another batch of new arrivals walked into the basement through the glowing curtain of beads. The Dryads called the room a Skipping Temple because it could be used as a waypoint to shuttle someone to a further spot like a stone skipping across the top of a lake. Ever since Lancroft had been killed, nobody was skipping much farther than his basement.

Since the Skinners didn’t have membership cards, they identified themselves by holding out their hands to show the distinctive scars on their palms made by the thorns in their weapons. Those scars were more than just conversation pieces. Elements from the varnish that made the weapons powerful enough to combat supernatural creatures mingled with a Skinner’s blood, tainting it with traces of the Nymar and shapeshifter components within the mixture. Cole learned firsthand that the scars itched in the presence of Nymar, burned when shapeshifters were in the vicinity, and made his hands cramp when a heavy rain was on the way. That last part could have been a product of his age but he preferred to blame the scars.

Paige sifted through a pile of weapons stored in an old locker that looked as if it had been pulled out of a bus stop. Holding a wooden stake in one hand and a rusted cleaver in the other, she only glanced up long enough to take a quick look and reply, “I dunno who they are. Why don’t you ask them?”

“It’s three in the morning. How much longer do I have to meet and greet these people?”

“Stop whining, Cole. We were here when all the Lancroft shit hit the fan, so we’re the ones everyone’ll want to talk to.”

“Rico and Daniels were here too,” Cole whined. “How’d they get out of this?”

“Daniels is tweaking that ink. Ever since you put it through a successful field test, he’s been all giddy about it. As far as Rico goes, if you want to drag him back here by the ear, be my guest.”

The new arrivals almost got past Cole before he realized he hadn’t seen all of their hands. When he tried to get a look to confirm the other ones, he felt the itch in his palms grow into a bone-deep irritation. With so many Nymar and shapeshifter spare parts rattling around in that basement, his scars had been acting up since he arrived. But there was no mistaking when he was that close to a live vampire.

“Son of a bitch!” Cole shouted as he instinctively reached for the spear strapped to his back. “Nymar!”

Two of the four new arrivals sighed and nodded while holding their unscathed hands out to show they were empty. One was a tall man with a scalp that was shaved clean. A long brushy beard hung well past his chin and split in two separate directions toward the bottom. Now that Cole was closer, he could see the black markings of Nymar tendrils just under the man’s skin that led all the way to a spore attached to his heart, which caused his bloodsucking tendencies. The tendrils formed different patterns within each Nymar, and his were collected in thick clumps around the base of his neck like a collar that stretched up toward his ears in a dark, slowly swaying wave. He was almost Cole’s height but shrank a little as his shoulders slumped with tired resignation.

“Well, Bobby?” the other Nymar snapped. She was an inch taller than the bald one, but wasn’t talking to him. Staring daggers at the Skinner directly in front of her, she asked, “Aren’t you going to say something?”

The Skinner on the receiving end of her glare was slightly taller than average and thin as a rail. Simple rumpled clothes hung off a lean frame, and impatience filled his reddened eyes. Scratching burnt orange hair with callused hands, he wheeled around and replied, “I will if you give me a chance!” Turning around to face front again, he asked, “Is this the Lancroft house? In Philly?”

“No,” Cole replied. “It’s some other stop along the Spirit Bead Expressway. Of course it’s the Lancroft house!”

“No need to get lippy. That’s Paul,” he said while pointing to the bald Nymar. Nodding to the woman, he said, “And that’s Trudy.”

Dropping her angry grimace, Trudy extended a hand marked by dark tendrils on her wrists that tapered out and became lighter while maintaining a visible presence all the way to her fingertips. “Call me Tru.”

“Great,” Cole said. “You saved me a syllable when I ask my next question. Why are you here, Tru?”

“They’re with us,” Bobby replied.

“What about him?”

Until Cole nodded in his direction, the fourth member of the mixed party seemed content to blend with the background. Considering the background was a curtain of beads crackling with mystic natural force, blending in there was quite a feat. The only distinguishing characteristic the guy had was the web of scars on his hands. Other than that, he was the shortest of the bunch, had light hair and three knives strapped to his belt. It was yet another sign of Cole’s new outlook on life that three blades worn in plain sight wasn’t enough to make someone stand out anymore.

“That’s M,” Bobby said.

“M? Like the boss in the James Bond movies?”

Hearing that brought a bland smile to the man’s lips. “Yeah,” M said to Cole. “I like that. Like in the Bond flicks.”

“It’s short for Mathias,” Paul announced.

Cole smirked. “Oh, like Johnny Mathias?” It wasn’t the first time he was the only one laughing at his own jokes. Normally, he only had to tolerate dry stares from Paige, but now there was an entire room full of unimpressed people to make him squirm.” ‘Chances Are’? What about the Christmas album? That’s the good stuff, right?”

Without a hint of emotion, Bobby asked, “Don’t you mean Johnny Mathis?”

“Yeah,” Cole said, officially giving up on the attempt at humor. “That’s what I meant. What can I do for you guys?”

“We came to see if there’s anything left for us to take from the Lancroft haul. Ain’t that why everyone’s here?”

Someone bolted down the stairs from the main floor. Cole couldn’t see through the people milling around in the workroom, but he recognized Abel’s voice when it screeched, “One of you might wanna get up here!”

All of the eyes in the workshop turned to Paige. The ones in the Skipping Temple and the room where Henry had been dissected found Cole.

“It’s those assholes from down the street,” Abel continued. “They just trashed Jory’s car.”

Paige hopped off her stool, claiming the wooden stake by sticking it into the vacant holster strapped to her boot next to a baton that she’d crafted personally and carried all through the Lancroft incident. Her face was brighter than it had been for a while when she said, “Took them long enough!”

Cole hurried to catch up as she and Abel climbed the stairs to the main floor. The pale glow from the streetlights coming through the front windows seemed colder at that time of night. Across the street the dudes in the jerseys and T-shirts were laughing to each other and filling the air with obnoxious music and the slap of enthusiastic high fives.

In its prime, Jory’s car had been an ‘08 Sonata with a decent sound system. When it had been driven to the Lancroft house, it was a better-than-average vehicle with a refurbished sound system. Now it was a dirty sedan with a broken front window, a dented hood, and a few words scratched into the passenger door by a key. One of those words wasn’t even spelled correctly.

“F-U-K yourselves?” Cole recited.

“Yeah!” Madman 69 shouted as he strutted toward the house with two of his buddies backing him up. “And if you don’t want us messing up anything worse than this, you’ll tell us what the hell you pricks are doing in the old man’s house.”

Paige stepped forward to mark herself as the spokesperson of the group and also to test to see if any of the idiot neighbors would back down. So far they were either too drunk or too stupid to do so. “First you threaten us and then you’re concerned about your neighbor? Make up your mind.”

“That,” Madman said as he jabbed a finger at the car, “is for throwing the bottle at our house. You broke one’a our windows, so we break one’a yours.” Stepping even closer, he added, “C’mon. You can tell me. What’s goin’ on in there? You got some kind of tunnels under that place?”

“What makes you say that?”

“There’s only one car parked outside, but there’s shitloads of different people walkin’ in and out so you gotta be comin’ and goin’ some other way. We heard there were some tunnels runnin’ under this whole city and that the old man had a way in. If you can get us in, maybe we can work something out. I’ll forget about our little argument, nobody else will know what you got goin’ on in that house …”

“You don’t even know what’s going on in that house,” Cole said.

“Sure, but maybe I’m a concerned citizen who’ll call the cops. You want that?”

Now it was Abel’s turn to step up. “You won’t call the cops and we both know why.”

That put a dent in Madman’s facade. He tried to scowl at the Skinners but couldn’t quite pull it off. “Let us get a look at them tunnels or clear out. You do one of those real quick or we’ll clear you out ourselves.”

Paige allowed Madman one moment of glory. She even granted him the chance to strut away amid the hoots and hollers of his cronies before gritting her teeth and saying, “Let’s go turn that place upside down.”

“What?” Cole asked. “I thought we were trying to keep a low profile.”

“And we can’t do that if some mutated frat house is watching us.” Turning to him, she patted Cole’s chest and said, “This is another part of the job. We’re in new territory here. These assholes are testing us. We need to squash this kind of shit before anyone worse than these guys gets any ideas.”

“This isn’t Tombstone and those guys aren’t a real threat to us.”

“One’s a Nymar.” When Abel saw the perplexed look on Cole’s face, he asked, “Didn’t you see the markings on the dude waiting at the curb? Didn’t you feel the itch?”

“This whole place gives me an itch,” Cole grumbled.

“He’s right,” Paige said. Shifting to the kung fu master voice, she told him, “One must feel the subtle differences in the breeze before one may appreciate the wind.”

Abel shot a quick glance across the street, where Madman, a guy in an Anthrax concert shirt, and the shifty fellow who hadn’t left the curb were all gathered. If he squinted hard enough, Cole could just make out the thick black markings snaking up one side of the shifty one’s face. At first glance the tendrils had looked like just another stray piece of shadow cast from the nearby trees.

“Selina drove Jory down to meet with a friend of ours in the Philly PD,” Abel explained. “They’re checking up on those idiots across the street and we’re not going to do anything until they get back. We can’t risk—”

“I’ll tell you what we can’t risk,” Paige said as she grabbed Abel’s shirt with her right hand. Although that entire arm was still stiff after nearly being petrified by a concoction of tattoo ink mixed with melted fragments of the Blood Blade bonded to shapeshifter plasma, she’d been working to bring it back into full use. Her skin was soft to the touch, but stiff as hardened leather underneath newly risen scars. “We can’t risk being made to look weak in front of anyone, especially a Nymar.”

Cole put his back to the house across the street. “She’s right.”

“Oh, big surprise,” Abel snickered. “You agree with her.”

“Paige. Let him go.”

Reluctantly, she did.

The moment Abel caught his breath, it was stolen from him as Cole picked up right where she’d left off. Grabbing two handfuls of the other man’s shirt, he shoved him up the steps and through Lancroft’s front door. “I know this isn’t exactly Thanksgiving dinner, but we’re all here to take advantage of a major win, right?”

“Yeah,” Abel replied.

“Seems pretty rare that so many of us are all in one place, but there’s no reason anyone else should know that. All we need is one Nymar spreading the word that we’re a bunch of petty little kids snipping at each other before they’ll all get it in their heads that maybe Skinners aren’t anything to worry about after all. I’ve seen how Nymar jump on any sort of weakness, and that won’t go well for anyone.”

Abel shrugged and agreed halfheartedly under his breath.

Touching his shoulder was all Paige needed to do for Cole to let him go. “Aren’t all of you bored with looking through this crap?” she asked anyone within earshot. “How about we cross the street and remind those assholes why they should think before shooting their big mouths off. Give the Nymar a good story to pass around to his buddies.” Turning toward the door to the basement, she found no fewer than three Skinners huddled there and several more watching from the kitchen and bedrooms like a bunch of schoolkids trying to get a good view of a fight. “How many sets of armor have we found?”

One of the Skinners at the top of the basement stairs told her, “Five. There were more, but they’ve already been taken. Three of those are spoken for, though.”

“Fine. Five,” Paige said. “That’s enough for me, Cole and Abel here plus a few more. Who else wants to go tell the neighbors they’re making too much noise?”

Volunteers were not in short supply.