Vampire Uprising

Chapter Six

Paige walked calmly across the street, and it was all Cole could do to keep his voice down to a whisper when he said, “Those cops had to know there was more going on in there.”

“I know. Keep walking.” When Cole took a quick glance over his shoulder, she snapped, “Don’t look. Just keep walking. Selina and Jory know some cops around here, but it looks like they’ve got a better arrangement than I thought.”

It felt like miles before they were finally on the other side of the street. “I think they’re working with the Nymar,” he said in an overly deliberate whisper.

Paige stopped just after stepping onto the curb in front of Lancroft’s house and went against the order she’d just given. “Who?” she asked while looking back at Madman’s house. “The cops or Jory’s crew?”

“Maybe both. The Nymar doing the float and flow mentioned something about a woman telling him we’d be coming.”

“You mean Selina?”

“I don’t know,” Cole replied quickly. “He just said ‘she’ told them we’d come running and that she also told the Nymar about Lancroft being in that house. I tried to get more out of him but didn’t have time. Then that cop made it sound like he knew something was going to happen as well.”

“Why would they expect us to go over there, unless …” Paige spun on her heels so she was once again facing the Lancroft house. “Unless we were being pulled away from the only thing in this neighborhood valuable enough to convene a Skinner summit meeting.”

She strode into the house, pushed open the door and shoved past the Skinners waiting in the living room. Her mouth was pressed into a tight line and her eyes burned with an intensity Cole knew all too well. Rather than try to get in her way, he did his best to watch her back as she climbed down the stairs to the basement.

“You think the locals were trying to draw us away from here?” Cole asked once they hit the small brick-walled room at the bottom of the stairs. A doorway led into the workshop where half a dozen Skinners from almost as many places were going through boxes of weapons collected or made by Lancroft himself.

“There’s some good stuff in those files,” she said quietly. “And then there’s the basement below this one. The creatures in some of those cages downstairs may be more valuable than anything else. Even the dead things have their uses to Skinners who know their craft. Since the only thing that’s been preventing anyone from carting away too much for themselves is the agreement we made when we opened this place up, there’s plenty of reasons for someone to want some time alone in here.”

“Plus,” Cole chuckled, “there’s the stuff we stashed before everyone started arriving.”

“Yeah,” she said with a comfortable smile. “That too.” As easily as it had come when she looked at him, her smile disappeared when she looked back into the workroom. “I thought the right thing to do would be to take what we needed and let everyone else pick from the rest. Some of the others were bound to get snippy and squabble over some stuff, but I wasn’t interested in being the mommy around this house. Maybe I’m the dumb one for thinking this could go smoothly at all.”

Cole held her face in his hands, slipping his fingers beneath the newly clipped slopes of hair framing her cheeks. “We’ve been here the whole time,” he told her. “There’s no way to catalogue this crap, and even if there were, these are the people we would have called to do the cataloguing, right?”

“Yeah.” Suddenly, Paige’s face lit up and she pulled away from him so she could get another look into the next room. “Cataloguing! Did you ever print that sign-out sheet you were talking about?”

“The one you said was a stupid idea because it was treating Skinner weaponry and artifacts like rental movies?”

“That’s the one.”

“Yes I did.”

“Has anyone been using it?”

“They’d better!”

“Or there’ll be a late fee?” she chided while jogging through the workroom, stopping a few paces shy of the Skipping Temple. “Do you smell that?”

Compared to the smells that had filled Madman’s place, the scent of freshly cut timber was a blessing. Cole nodded quickly.

Taking a quick look at her watch, Paige cursed under her breath and ran into the room covered in wall-to-wall Dryad script. Although the ancient markings were as beautiful as they were mysterious, the nymph sitting in the corner poking out a text message on her phone was the only thing Paige wanted to see. “When did you get here, Jordan?”

Dressed in a baggy shirt and cutoff sweat shorts, Jordan looked up from her phone and smiled. The hair she flipped over one ear was chestnut brown with amber highlights. By anyone’s standards, she was a knockout. Because she was a lower level Dryad more commonly known as a nymph, even the curves of her ear were sexy enough to hold a human’s attention once she fixed her eyes upon them. Cole had met her before, while rescuing Jordan from being worked to death by Jonah Lancroft, but he still had to brace himself to keep from being mesmerized by the sight of her perfection. When the nymph straightened her back and shifted to the edge of her seat, it became clear that she was gloriously unsupported beneath her shirt. He cleared his throat and tried to do the same for his mind.

“My shift just started,” Jordan said. “Will you be needing us much longer? Every hour I’m away from the club means less money in my pocket.”

“Shouldn’t be much longer,” Paige replied. “Did someone just come through here?”

“Sure. It was off the usual schedule, but I just got here. My pipes are in good shape, so I bent the rules a little. Seemed like the ones who went through were in a hurry.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. The only Skinners I know by name are you and Cole. Hi, Cole. I see you squirming over there.”

“Hi, Jordan.”

Uninterested in the nymph’s attempts to make Cole even more uncomfortable, Paige said, “I need to know who came through.”

“All I can tell you is where they went.”

Paige’s eyes lit up and she leaned forward expectantly. “Where?”

“Florida. They got here in a rush and needed to leave quickly. The only club that had enough juice stored up to transport them on short notice was in Miami. Always plenty of juice in Miami.”

The Dryads used spiritual energy gleaned from the emotions or excitement within living things. Humans were the richest source of that energy, and the oldest, most reliable way to get a human excited was to appeal to their baser instincts. The nymphs had been doing the same act for years, tempting mankind through everything from belly dancing to songs sung in forest clearings on summer nights. More recently they’d been making a killing at strip bars scattered throughout the country. Money was the least of what they harvested from their customers, but no harm was done.

Cole had already picked up the clipboard resting against the wall and was scanning the front page. When he shook his head and put the board down, Paige shifted from one foot to another as if getting ready to bolt and just needed to be pointed in the right direction. “Did they take anything out of here?” she asked.

“Sure,” Jordan said. “Everyone’s taking stuff out of here. Isn’t that the point of all this?”

“Can you send me to where they went?”

Smirking while blowing a few strands of auburn hair away from a mouth that glistened with the color of ripe raspberries, she replied, “You know I can.”

“Then do it. Cole, stay here and see if you can find out what was taken.”

“I’m coming with you.”

When Jordan stood up and started to hum, the melody of her voice carried throughout the entire room. It rustled beneath Cole’s skin like a passing ghost that brushed its fingers along his spine as it went looking for another attic to haunt. In a matter of seconds the symbols on the walls thrummed with latent power.

“I want to go with you, Paige,” Cole insisted. “We can figure out the rest later.”

She placed a hand on him, and this time there was nothing close to a smack tagged onto the gesture. “If the locals or any other Skinners are involved in something dirty, they’ll be quick to cover it up.”

“Then stay here so we can both do a search. After that, we can—”

“No. The search needs to be done now. If someone told those Nymar across the street to rile up the neighbors to draw us away from here, then it was probably to clear a path for whoever came and went in between the scheduled songs or jumps or whatever the hell we’re supposed to call this stripper subway.”

“Good one. I think I just decided what I’m calling it from now on.”

Jordan poked the keys on her phone and stuck it into one of the microscopic pockets in her sweat shorts. “They’re ready for you on the other side.”

All Paige had to do was tilt her face upward to get Cole to come closer to her. The crooked line of her nose cast a funny shadow on her face when the glow from the wall hit her. Despite the recent escalation in their partnership, he still hadn’t noticed all the little scars she’d collected throughout her tenure as a Skinner. And even though her hair had been cut within the last week, it was already getting unruly around the edges.

“Most of these guys are good enough,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean we’ll assume they’re above stealing some better gear. You’re smart. Come up with a way to figure out what was taken from here that was so important to the people who broke the schedule that they couldn’t take a number like everyone else.”

“And you’ve got to hang back when you find them,” Cole said. “If you need backup, call and let me know.”

“So you’re keeping tabs on me?”

“No, I’m your partner. Even when you decide to shoot your mouth off to the wrong people.”

“Fair enough.”

He couldn’t hear Jordan’s voice, but he could feel the energy building within the beads like a static charge that rippled ahead of a thunderstorm. As Paige backed up, she nodded at something behind him. He turned and saw Abel standing in the doorway leading to the workshop. There was more crackling before Jordan let out a string of ethereal notes and Paige was gone. Paige didn’t emerge on the other side of the curtain. All that was left was the scent of the Dryad energy and the clatter of the beads knocking against each other like any other outdated decorative room divider. Jordan sat back down, crossed her legs and resumed texting.

The Dryads assured him that walking through the beads when they weren’t active was perfectly safe. Even so, Cole maneuvered around them cautiously, placing one shoulder against the wall and stepping past as quickly as possible. He went to Jordan and asked, “What did the people look like?”

“The ones who were in such a hurry to leave?”

“Yeah.”

“There were four of them. Two were Nymar. I thought that was strange and tried telling someone about it, but they said it was okay.”

“Was one of the Nymar a woman and the other some bald guy with a long beard?” Jordan nodded immediately. “You got it. One of the guys was tall with red hair.”

“And the other one carried a bunch of knives.”

Relaxing into her corner again, Jordan shifted her attention back to the little keyboard on her phone. “That’s them.”

“Where’d they go once they got here?”

“They split up. The woman and the redhead went into …” Rather than acknowledge the dissection room by name, she waved as if the room where Henry’s remains had been kept was a festering sore growing in one corner. “The other two headed that way with the rest,” she explained while pointing toward the workroom.

“That’s great, Jordan,” Cole said. “Thanks.”

“Anytime, sweetie.”

“What’s going on here?” Abel asked him. “Who broke the transport schedule?”

“Oh, now you notice, huh?”

“What do you mean? I can smell the pine, so I know someone went through. Was it Paige? Where is she?”

“Why don’t you ask your cop buddies outside?”

Abel smirked and started picking something from between his teeth. “We told you we had some friends on the force.”

“But there’s plenty more you didn’t tell us, right?”

When Cole walked to the smaller doorway in the other corner, his path was quickly blocked by the lankier Skinner. “What’s up your ass?” Abel asked. “If you got some kinda problem, just spill it.”

“Those cops were expecting something to happen,” he said. “The Nymar inside that house across the street were expecting something too. For that matter, how is it that you didn’t know there were Nymar camped out across the street?”

“In case you haven’t had a look around, there’s mason jars full of Nymar blood, venom, spit, and probably a few goddamn stool samples in the next room. My palms haven’t itched this bad since I hit puberty. How the hell are we supposed to feel when a few more Nymar sneak in across the street?”

“This is your town, Abel. None of you guys have let anyone forget it since you got here. And, I might add, you got here way after me and Paige arrived.”

“If you must know, Jory needed all of us to deal with a bunch of Half Breeds tearing through Lima, Ohio. We don’t need to check in with you, those geeks at MEG, or any other goddamn body before we make a move to defend our territory. You got something to say about that?”

“Not really. I’ve got more important things to do.” Cole shoved past him and walked into the starkly lit room that was dominated by a large table and several racks of equipment suited for jobs ranging from surgery to welding. There was a computer set up along the far wall, which was his first stop.

“You gotta understand where I’m coming from, man,” Abel said while tagging along behind him. “I’m tight with my partners. Skinners gotta be that way since we don’t exactly work well in big teams. Plus, you gotta expect to catch some flak from the rest of us.”

Cole’s fingers flew over the computer’s keyboard to access a set of hidden files that he’d placed after the house was turned into Grand Central Station. “Really? Why’s that?”

“You, Paige, and Rico all got first dibs on this stuff. While we all appreciate what you’ve done, we should’ve all gotten a chance to carve off a piece of that freak before Rico came in to take him away.”

Cole’s fingers paused momentarily. He’d known that Paige must have said something to the others about the empty space on the examination table where Lancroft’s prize catch had been. Since Rico hadn’t wanted to participate in what he knew was going to be a mess, he went back to his own business and left the infighting to the rest of what he called the “more sociable” Skinners. Pinning the disappearance of Henry’s body on him seemed the best way to shut the others up about it. Even when he was in another state, Rico wasn’t someone people wanted to question.

“Be honest,” Abel said once Cole resumed typing, “Rico split some of that Full Blood meat up with you and Paige, right? If you got some of it stashed, it’s only fair to at least let us know. I mean, coming in and taking that carcass away when the rest of us were followin’ the rules laid down from you Chicago folks just ain’t sporting.”

“Well, that’s Rico for ya.”

“What the hell are you doing?”

The computer’s display was split into two sections. One of them was a small window in the corner where Cole’s interface was located and an image of the examination room as seen from the top of the computer’s table filled the rest of the screen. A time stamp at the bottom rolled backward as Cole held down a button. “This computer’s got a camera attached to it.”

“It does?”

“Yes,” he said, since he’d been the one to attach it. “That way, we can see who comes and goes through here to get to the valuable stuff.”

“You didn’t go back far enough. That freak was dragged out of here at least—”

“I’m not looking for that.”

“So what are you looking for?”

Rolling backward through the video until he found the image of someone walking directly past the computer, Cole played it at normal speed. “That’d be it.”

Abel leaned in to see. “That’s the dude from Toronto. Bobby.”

“Right, but that’s not the same Nymar he had with him the last time.”

“Sure it is.”

The image on the screen wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough for him to pick out the differences between Tru and the Nymar who was with Bobby in the video. The one captured by the webcam had similar hair to Trudy’s, but was definitely shorter and skinnier. Even the way she walked was different, in that the one on the video had a definite stride while Tru walked more like someone waiting to step out of someone else’s way. Aside from that, the tendril markings were all wrong.

“You seriously think that’s Tru?” Cole asked.

“Sure. As far as I can tell, or at least as far I can see on this piece of shit monitor.”

“When all else fails, blame the equipment.” Before taking one step away from the computer, Cole put that section of video into a separate file and e-mailed it to himself. After that he secured the computer and headed for a narrow trapdoor in the corner. Although the entrance to the dissection room had been hidden by Skinner runes placed by Lancroft, the smaller door was hidden by every means possible. Apart from more runes, there were subtle techniques to hide the markings, which ranged from painting over them to arranging the equipment racks to make it seem like a door didn’t even belong in that corner. All of those techniques would have been enough to keep the door a secret if Lancroft himself weren’t forced into revealing it during the battle that ended his life. When Cole walked toward it, he was grabbed by Abel.

“Where are you going?”

Cole shook loose of the grip, walked through the door and down the stairs to a brick hallway that looked to have been charred by a flamethrower. “Checking to see what those other two were after.”

Tagging along like an anxious puppy, Abel said, “I’m surprised you and Paige didn’t already comb through all of this good enough to know what’s here.”

“We’ve been busy.”

“Yeah, I just bet you have.”

The snide tone in Abel’s voice was easier to pick up than the markings on the mysterious Nymar woman’s face. Cole let it slide, however, since he’d already spotted something out of place farther down the hall. He jogged past bulbs fit into sockets every fifteen to twenty feet along the wall. Alcoves on either side widened into anything from storage spaces to small cells sealed off by thick, rune-encrusted bars. Some of the cells had doors built in that forced anything bigger than a child to crawl on all fours to pass through, while others were simply one-way storage units. The things imprisoned there had died there. As of yet, the Skinners that claimed the Lancroft house hadn’t figured out how to cut through to those remains.

Cole’s sights were set on one of the smaller cages. Its little square gate was open, so he reached over his shoulder and grabbed his spear to prepare himself for what might be loose. He tried to remember what was in that cell but couldn’t pick it out amid all the other things he’d discovered underneath that single, empty shell of a house.

“Shit, is one of those cages open?” Abel asked.

“Looks like it.”

Gripping the spear in both hands, Cole felt the familiar pinch of its thorns piercing his flesh as he extended the weapon to its full length. The main spearhead had been treated with one of the innovations recently created by Daniels, which used melted fragments of the Blood Blade to form a new type of metallic coating. Apart from making the spearhead nice and shiny, it gave it more of a bite, to do serious damage to any shapeshifter. He only hoped that extra punch would be enough to put down whatever was in that cage.

When he arrived at the bars, Cole angled the spear down to point at the little door. Abel stepped up beside him, holding a wooden version of a short scimitar at the ready. Blood welled between his fingers, showing that his thorns cut just as deep as anyone else’s. “Is it still in there?” Abel asked.

“Can’t tell.”

Digging into his pocket, Abel removed a small flashlight attached to a keychain. With a click of a button, a pale blue light filled the brick alcove. The cramped interior of the cage had feces crusted on the walls, dozens of small animal carcasses on the floor, and the body of what looked to be a short man laid out on his back. One leg was propped up and the other was skewed to one side. Both arms were splayed out in a cruciform position, and his head was angled in such a way that his wide, clouded eyes caught the light being shone into the cage. Despite having all the basic parts, the thing wasn’t human. Black, uneven claws extended from his fingers. His musculature was swollen well out of proportion to his stature, and thick black veins ran beneath almost every inch of his skin.

“This thing was cut open recently,” Cole said. “I would have remembered seeing this before.”

“Looks like a Nymar. See the markings?”

“Yeah, but there’s something different about it.”

“You sure?”

It was a simple question, but sparked a whole lot of uneasiness in Cole’s gut. He was rarely sure about anything anymore. All he could rely on was a motivational tool that had taken him from a desk job at a mid-range video game company to the basement of a monster hunter who might have been alive since before the nineteenth century. He’d come this far, he told himself, so he might as well keep going.

“Give me that light,” Cole said as he reached back to Abel.

The other Skinner slapped the key chain into Cole’s hand without taking his eyes from the body lying in the squalid little cell.

Cole crouched down and shone the beam on the Nymar carcass. Its chest was pulled open, but not in the same way as Henry’s victims back when the crazed Full Blood still had his taste for vampire spores. Before he crawled in there with the dead thing, Cole used the spear to reach between the bars and jab the carcass. Having been coated with the new varnish, the spearhead was sharp enough to puncture its flesh with little effort.

“Is that the new Blood Blade treatment for the weapons?” Abel asked.

“Yes.”

“When the hell do we get some of that stuff?”

“Just shut up, okay?”

While Abel grumbled about having last year’s weapon model in his hand, Cole dropped to all fours and crawled into the cell. He scraped through the opening, thinking about how much he didn’t like Abel and how little he trusted him. Then he thought about how stupid he’d been to turn his back on that guy while entering a cell designed to keep things trapped for extremely long stretches of time.

Once inside, Cole was instantly struck with how much smaller the room felt. Its floors were rough and soggy due to layers upon layers of filth and decay left behind by its inhabitants, wandering rodents, or whatever slop might have been tossed in for food. Considering the looks of the thing on the floor, however, the rodents could very well have been the food.

“What is it?” Abel asked.

Holding the light closer to the thing’s exposed arms, Cole picked out gray tendrils beneath the flesh. Thinking back to some of the lessons Paige had taught him, he eased the flap of skin on its chest open using the tip of his collapsed spear. It came open with a wet sucking sound. He was no surgeon, but the heart was easy enough to spot. It was at the center of the hole dug into the thing’s chest, like a Valentine’s gift dropped there for safekeeping. He leaned in as close as his nose would allow. The smells rising up from the exposed cavity were like a living entity that reached down to tug at the back of his throat. “Looks like a Nymar, all right,” he said. After finding the telltale puncture marks on the sides of the heart as well as the scratches put there when the spore hung on during the removal process, he added, “Yeah. Nymar.”

“Wait a second. Do that again.”

“What?”

“The light. Move it again.”

Cole had only turned his head so he could give two of his senses a break at the same time. To appease the other Skinner, he waved the light back and forth across the dead Nymar’s upper body.

“That’s it!” Abel said. “Did you see it?”

Although his movements gave the corpse’s exposed, ravaged heart a cool strobe effect, Cole found one major difference with the tendrils shooting through the vampire’s arms and legs. At first glance they just seemed thinner than normal. What differentiated them from tendrils on any other Nymar he’d seen was the way they reacted to the light. When the flashlight’s beam was shining directly on them, they shriveled into crooked, almost imperceptible lines. When the beam moved away, the tendrils fattened and spread out until they were almost touching one another.

Cole moved the beam back and forth a few more times, but the effect was less noticeable with every pass.

“I wonder if it could do that when it was alive,” Abel said.

“The tendrils only become gray when they’re drying out. If all the plumbing was still connected, it may cover this thing in some sort of black … cloak?”

Abel pressed his head against the bars to get as close a look as possible without crawling through the muck. “Pretty smart. I see why Paige kept you around. Well, apart from the obvious reasons. A living Nymar may even be able to control when those tendrils spread out like that. He could damn near go invisible if he was in the shadows.”

“That’s pushing it, but it might help him stay hidden. There’s something else that’s strange. This thing isn’t tripping much of anything in my scars. What about you?”

“It’s dead, Cole. Just like damn near everything else down here. That’s why everyone’s upstairs. I bet Lancroft just set this place aside as a dumping ground.”

Something at the far end of the hall growled at them. More than a simple animal’s snarl, it directed itself at Cole and Abel as surely as if it had known their names.

“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Abel grunted.

Cole dug his phone from his pocket and took a few pictures of the dead Nymar. The tendrils still had some flex to them as he passed the light back and forth, so he got some shots of that as well. “Check the rest of the hall, Abel.”

“You check it.”

“Just go!”

Cole didn’t care if Abel did the job or not. All he really wanted was to get the other Skinner to move away from that little door when he crawled through. There wasn’t a way for him to exit without making himself vulnerable to a quick downward stab, and more than likely, Lancroft had constructed the doors with that very purpose in mind. Either that, he thought, or he was getting too paranoid for his own good.

Once he was outside, Cole checked on Abel. Nothing else struck him as more peculiar than it had been the last time he was down there. Whatever was caged at the farthest end kept its back against the wall and stared at the Skinners with glittering eyes. It was a shapeshifter. He could tell that much from the way it swelled or contracted, as if its entire skeletal structure was an illusion. Finding out any more than that would have required getting much too close to the thing, and despite their differences, all the Skinners agreed that the creature at the end of the hall was best left alone where it was.

On their way back up the stairs, Cole asked, “What’s the word with the cops? Is there going to be a problem?”

“Nah. Selina straightened it out. A few of the officers know about Nymar, and they’re glad to let us take care of ‘em. Since there were two feeding on someone in that house, we got a pass. Still, tell Paige to rein it in when she gets back.”

“Tell her yourself.”

Abel chuckled all the way up the stairs. Although Cole tried ignoring him when he asked some of the others in the workshop about where Paul and M had gone, the greasy smile plastered on Abel’s face made that task next to impossible.

“I remember Paul coming through,” a Skinner from the West Coast said. “He was a quiet guy who’d come alone to poke through the house.”

“Where did they go?” Cole asked.

Pointing to a stack of crates filled with old baby food jars containing a multitude of fluids that most definitely should not be fed to babies, he replied, “M went straight for that pile there and left with half a milk crate full of stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Don’t know. Without Lancroft’s journals, a lot of this is being filed in the unknown category.”

“And they just walked out with it?”

“M’s supposed to be with Paul, and Paul is a Skinner,” the guy pointed out. “Why would I stop him? Is there some sort of pecking order I don’t know about?”

“No,” Cole grunted. Of all the things that were bugging him, not one of them had to do with the guy from the West Coast. In fact, most of the Skinners who’d drifted in had been content to take a few supplies or one of the old weapons and be on their way. The ones that grated on Cole’s nerves the most were the ones that refused to leave.

As if picking up on his chance to grate some more, Abel asked, “Where’s Paige?”

“Not sure,” he lied.

“You’re not sure? You don’t keep track of your partner?”

“No,” Cole snapped. “Do you?”

When Cole walked over to the crates of jars along the opposite wall, Abel stuck with him. “Jory and Selina are pretty close,” Abel said, “but not like you and Paige.”

The words didn’t bug Cole so much as the creepy way Abel said them. Crouching down to pull some of the crates away from the wall so he could get to the back stacks, he found a few that weren’t quite in line with the rest.

Either Abel was used to being ignored or he took Cole’s silence as an invitation to continue. “From what I seen, you two are real close.”

“And what have you seen?”

“You know. The way you look at her. That sappy shit when you touched her hair.”

Cole gnashed his teeth. He’d forgotten about the hair thing. His phone rang, saving him the trouble of continuing the conversation. When he saw who was calling, it was even easier to pretend the other man didn’t exist. “Hey, Paige,” he said into the phone. “Where are you?”

Screaming over the thumping tones of a remixed version of Duran Duran’s “Rio,” she replied, “Some club in Miami. Did you find anything?”

“I think so. There’s some kind of—”

“I can barely hear you. Are you finished with everything over there?”

Abel grinned and nodded as if he’d paid five bucks to sit on a sticky chair and watch the show. “Yeah,” Cole grunted. “I’m through here.”

“Then head to Chicago.”

“Actually, there are a few loose ends I should wrap up here.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’m headed home now. When you’re about to leave, give me a call and I’ll pick you up at the subway station.”

“Will do. ‘Bye.” He hung up, put the phone in his pocket, and found Abel still looking at him with that same grin. There was a renewed speed in Cole’s movements when he picked a sample jar from each of the crates that looked as if they’d recently been moved.

“So,” Abel sneered, “you’re hittin’ that, right?”

“Shut the hell up.”

Abel smirked as if his clumsy attempt at slang was too cool for the room. “You two aren’t just close. You’re like, close. You screwing her or what?”

Once again Cole’s silence didn’t deter the other man in the slightest.

“Not that I blame you,” Abel continued. “She’s got a sweet little ass. Kind of a butter face, but—”

“Wait,” Cole said as he straightened up and turned to face the other Skinner. “What the hell did you just say?”

“Butter face. You know, like she’s got a nice body, but her—”

His fist slammed into Abel’s jaw as if it had a mind of its own. After taking a moment to think, he did the right thing and hit Abel again, this time with enough force to knock the little prick onto his ass.