Vampire Uprising

Chapter Eight

“They’re back in town.”

Steph had plenty of smiles in her repertoire. Most of them were sincere, but in a way that most smiles weren’t supposed to be. She had the grin that she put on for her customers at the Blood Parlor, which was prospering in its location on Rush Street. That was always a crowd pleaser since it was accompanied by one or more of her girls coming in to take customers off to a room to enjoy the pleasures of feeling Nymar teeth ease into their necks or wrists. There was the hungry smile that allowed all three sets of her fangs to slide out from beneath her gums. That was her favorite, since it was the predatory equivalent of stripping naked and showing yourself to a lover before the much anticipated next act. And then there was the one that came to her now.

Her smooth face was illuminated by an earnest display of joy when she asked, “Are you talking about the Skinners?”

Standing in the doorway to her office, Ace nodded. He was a skinny guy who looked to have been somewhere in his late twenties when he’d been turned. Although he still looked youthful, there was too much experience in his eyes for him to properly carry the baggy jeans and netted shirt he insisted on wearing. The narrow patch of hair sprouting from his chin, and the heart shaved into the side of his head, didn’t help his case much. “Come on,” he said. “You can hear them now if you want.”

Steph hopped up and practically skipped around her desk to follow him down a hallway that led to the back rooms of her parlor. Little stone gargoyles lined the walls, each of them holding electric candles in clawed hands. The walls were painted dark red. Newly purchased black carpeting rubbed her bare feet. Muted, moody music played from hidden speakers to complete the parlor’s effect. So far the people who paid to have the Nymar feed on them loved every last one of the clichéd gothic touches. They especially liked seeing Steph in a good mood. One of the men, a stockbroker in his early forties, scooted all the way to the edge of an overstuffed couch in the waiting room just to get a look at her as she left her office. Fully aware that she was on display in a lavender nightie that stopped just short of covering the ruffles of her cream-white panties, she looked back at him and kissed the air. That was enough to convince him to spring for the deluxe package.

Most of the rooms branching off the hallway were small, luxurious bed chambers that came complete with closed-circuit video cameras hidden behind sculptures and wall sconces. They were all wired into the room full of monitors that the Blood Parlor’s managers were now entering. The security room was all sharp edges and glowing reminders of what century it truly was. Ignoring the assorted depravities being displayed on the screens, Steph and Ace went immediately to a laptop set up on one metal desk in the corner of the room. On that screen was a display mapping the time and pitch of scratchy sounds being played through the computer’s speakers. Ace selected a time stamp he’d already highlighted and pressed the button for it to play.

When she heard Cole and Paige having their conversation on the way back from Pinups, Steph pressed her hands to her mouth to hold back a giggle. “So this is from their car?” she asked through her fingers.

“Sid rigged it while they were gone the last time.”

After pausing the recorded conversation, Steph asked, “Where did they go?”

“Hell if I know. We’ve been following them like you wanted for a while. They were out of town for that shit in Kansas City and then again awhile after that.”

“See? I told you it was a good idea to keep track of them! Especially since that skank with the billy clubs started cracking down on my girls.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ace droned. “I wanted to clean them out way before then, but you said it would be too much trouble.”

“Well forget that,” she said after crossing her arms over her proudly displayed cleavage. “Word’s being spread on CP that the Skinners won’t be such a threat for much longer.”

“Did that come from Toronto?”

“Oh yeah. Cobb wrote the post himself.” Steph’s painted lips curled into half a grin as she looked down at the laptop and stroked the right mouse button as if teasing a customer’s anatomy. “This is priceless. I still don’t know how Paige got access to our security feeds, but she always knew when the good stuff was happening in this place. Let’s see how she likes it.”

“Probably did it when she and that other guy stormed in here after we opened.” Ace tapped the Internet browser on his cell phone and hit the link to ChatterPages.net. Ninety-nine percent of the population used the social networking site to post family pictures and play games, between writing updates about what they had for dinner. Although veiled as a fetish fan group, the ChatterPage used by the Nymar was run like a science and alerted its nationwide members about things ranging from Skinner movements and Full Blood sightings to the juiciest, most poorly guarded feeding spots in most major cities. Ace didn’t have to scroll down very far before finding the most recent postings from Cobb38, the page’s founding member. “Holy shit! Someone found the Shadow Spore?”

“Took it right out from under the Skinners’ noses. On top of that, most of the Skinners in the country are either in Philadelphia for some reason or going back and forth from there right now. That means all of them are distracted.”

“It’s not all of them we need to worry about. Cobb never knew exactly what the Chicago Skinners were doing.”

“No, but we do.” Tapping the mouse button again, Steph allowed the conversation stolen from the Cav to roll for another minute before sighing, “Just listen to them. Sounds like two crazy kids who just climbed out of bed long enough to realize the other one’s not perfect. So cute.”

“That was just recorded about twenty minutes ago,” Ace said. “It should still be a while before they make it back to that shithole restaurant they live in.”

“Are Sid and Rita down there?”

Smirking in a way that allowed the tips of his feeding fangs to poke out from their sheaths, Ace said, “They never left.”

“Good. Give them the go-ahead.”

It was late morning on a weekday, which meant the section of West Twenty-fifth and Laramie was mostly deserted. People drove by, and a few walked along the dirty sidewalk, but none of them cast more than half a glance at the boarded windows and locked door of the old restaurant marked only by a broken sign with enough remaining letters to spell RAZA HILL . Anyone from that section of town hardly noticed it was there anymore. The place was too shabby to rob and just clean enough to escape official notice.

Although there was plenty of space inside, the Skinners used only a few rooms at the building’s core. The basement was their private gym and sparring area. What had once been offices were now used for storage and Paige’s bedroom. The kitchen was self-explanatory. A few of the ovens still worked, along with the large stainless steel fridge. The walk-in freezers were shut down, however. One was full of broken furniture and the other was sealed for sanitary reasons. Cole slept in the one with the broken furniture.

“Yeah, Jason,” he said into the phone he kept trapped between his shoulder and the side of his face. “I’m working on it right now.”

The voice that came through the digital connection to Seattle was patient and only slightly distracted. “What happened to those concepts you were going to e-mail me? The ones with the shapeshifting death-match players. You were supposed to be working on those all month.”

What Cole wanted to say was that he’d been distracted with things like a mind-controlling Full Blood and a Skinner from a hundred years ago making the entire country sick with Mud Flu. The best he could come up with was, “I’m still working on that too.”

“You’ve got some great ideas, Cole. I know I’ve asked you this before, but—”

“No,” Cole snapped. “I’m not planning on moving back to Seattle.”

“Then what I’d like to do is offer to buy you out.”

“Buy what out? The only thing I do for Digital Dreamers anymore is consultant work and some private contracting.”

“The ideas for the shapeshifting stuff,” Jason said with a sigh that Cole knew went along with a slow hand gliding over a scalp covered by thinning hair. “All the guys around here have been watching the stuff online about those werewolf sightings in Kansas City and the more recent ones in Indiana.”

Cole stopped his typing and sat bolt upright. “Indiana? What happened in Indiana?”

“Just more of the same crap that’s been coming in from all over the place after the riots in KC. There’s been a few local news specials, but now the cable networks are getting in on it. Everyone from CNN to Animal Planet have some sort of wild dog or werewolf feature coming up. The point is that we want to strike while the iron is hot and get a major werewolf project in the works before people lose interest.”

Cole had plenty of werewolf projects rolling around in his head, but only a few of them were the sort of thing he might discuss with Jason. Just as he was about to use one of them to try and salvage some of his old career, the phone beeped to let him know someone else was calling. He looked at the screen to find the word PROPHET blinking back at him. Poking the Ignore button, he went back to his old friend from another life. “Maybe I can come back to Seattle,” he said.

“Seriously? When?”

“The way things may be working out here …”

Prophet beeped in again with a text message that Cole didn’t bother to read.

“We have an opening for a designer that could carry over into a lead position,” Jason said.

Not only did Cole forget about the text, but he almost dropped the phone. “Why tell me this?” he asked hopefully.

“Because word’s gotten around that the next Hammer Strike will be without the guy who made the first one and the fans aren’t happy.”

“That many fans know about me?”

“Well, they did after someone let it slip just how much you did for this company while you were here.”

“Jason, that’s a hell of a nice thing you did. I knew you’d—”

“Wasn’t me,” Jason said. “It was Nora.”

“Nora?”

The phone beeped again, but Cole didn’t even hear it. “Nora?” he asked. “As in, the girlfriend who I thought was my ex a few times already Nora?”

“That’s the one,” Jason replied in a tone that was the closest thing to a grin his voice could convey. “I don’t know how much luck you’ll have with the whole girlfriend thing, but she’s been doing a hell of a good job in paving the way for your return. The fact that you’re still responsible for a ton of royalties ain’t hurting your cause either.”

Hearing the executive of Digital Dreamers, Inc. try to purposely use incorrect grammar was almost as bad as hearing his drunken attempt to rap during the infamous Christmas Party Karaoke Incident of ‘02. When the phone beeped again, he turned it over as if expecting to see photos from that December night all those years ago. Instead, what he got was a text message that read: GET OUT OF THERE IDIOT!!!!!!!

Cole glanced toward the next room but couldn’t see much more than a sliver of the kitchen through the freezer door. Rays of light coming in from the front half of the restaurant were given form by the smoke rolling in toward his living quarters. That’s when the smell hit him. Something was burning. If he and Paige hadn’t been so concerned with more unnatural threats, they might have replaced the batteries in the smoke detectors instead of yanking them off the ceiling and throwing them into a corner when they’d started chirping.

The first thing Cole grabbed was the harness containing his spear. That went onto his back, freeing up his hands to stuff a few essentials into a satchel that he slid over his head and one arm. Keys and wallet joined a shoe polish tin filled with the newly refined varnish containing the Blood Blade fragment in his pockets. Lastly, he snapped his laptop shut, jerked it from the power strip he’d installed in the freezer wall, and left the rest behind. Smoke rolled through the front of the restaurant, but he still couldn’t see any flames. After walking through the swinging doors leading to the dining room, he heard the crackling rush of a fire.

Cole rushed back through the kitchen and into the storeroom to get to the rear entrance. Ramming into the metal door with his shoulder, he bounced off before grabbing the bar that released the lock. A second later the piercing cry of the security buzzer went off. Naturally, Paige remembered to keep those alarms in working order. The shattering of glass and the rolling crackle of a fire was almost enough to drown out the electric shriek as he stumbled out to the back lot. Breathless and confused, he wheeled around to take a look at the restaurant. There wasn’t much to see other than dirty brick and trash cans. From the front of the structure, however, black smoke drifted on the wind and tongues of flame peeled along the edges of the old building.

“What the hell happened?” he asked a man who stood in the parking lot waving a phone at someone.

The man whipped around and snarled at Cole, baring two upper sets of fangs. “You overstayed your welcome in this city,” Sid growled. “That’s what happened.”

Two cars were parked in the front lot, angled to make sure nobody else could approach Raza Hill without jumping a curb and damaging the underside of their vehicle on one of many cement barriers. Another pulled up, and before it came to a stop, Steph jumped out and clapped her hands with giddy delight. She wore large retro sunglasses and a long coat that had been hastily thrown on over her nightie, which made her look like someone rousted from bed and forced outside due to the fire instead of someone who’d arrived to watch it burn.

“What did I miss?” she asked.

The girl who jogged over to greet her looked to be somewhere in her late teens. The tendrils under her skin snaked along her arms to collect at her wrists, marking her as a Nymar that had been drinking blood for a good long time. Her dark hair was pulled into pigtails, which further marked her as one of the girls under Steph’s employ. A denim skirt laced up the side was short enough to display a whole lot of leg with tendrils running up the backs like a seam in nonexistent stockings. “Jason and some of the others are shooting up a diner and some gas stations about a mile from here, so that should keep the cops busy. Once that gas station goes up, the fire department will have their hands full too.”

“Nice,” Ace said as he stepped out from the driver’s side of the car. “How long’s this been burning?”

“I told him to wait until you got here, but he got antsy.”

“That’s fine,” Steph snapped. “How long?”

“Only a minute or two. It’s really starting to kick in now, though. Should be a good one.”

“Are they both in there?”

“That junker Chevy wasn’t in the lot, so probably not,” Rita said. “I know at least one of them’s inside, though.”

Steph leaned against the hood of her car and beamed as if watching her youngest child in its first school play.

There wasn’t much of an alley on the left side of the building. A tall chain fence studded with unevenly spaced boards encircled all but the front of the lot and got to within eight feet of the structure. Weeds had reclaimed the bottom of the fence, and the rest of the ground was covered with gravel, garbage, or broken glass. The flames made a steady roar that wasn’t quite loud enough to cover the crunch of footsteps made by a Nymar who shuffled toward the back corner of the building.

He was dressed in an old army surplus jacket that was too big to fit him properly but perfectly concealed all of the instruments of chaos stuffed into the inner pockets. In one hand was a beer bottle with a wet rag sticking out of the top. With his other hand, he flicked open a Zippo lighter, waved it under his nose so he could savor the scent of its fluid, and then rolled his thumb against the rough little wheel to make a spark. He never took his eyes off the triangular flame as he brought it close enough to the rag to set it alight.

The Nymar pulled in another breath, held it, then pivoted on the balls of his feet to face the man that had crept up to within ten feet of him.

Coming down the alley, Prophet cursed under his breath and broke into a dead run to charge at the Nymar. His intention had been to get to the arsonist before the next cocktail hit the side of the restaurant. In that respect, he succeeded. He wasn’t feeling too good about the victory, however, since the lit firebomb was tossed at him instead.

The bottle hit Prophet’s shoulder and bounced off to sail so close to his face that he could hear the crackle of the flame on its rag. There was another whoosh as the bottle hit the ground behind him to create a large, burning puddle that sent a blast of heat washing over the back portion of his body. As Prophet rammed into him, the arsonist raised both arms to absorb the impact and then slapped both hands onto Prophet’s back and shoulder to divert him into a brick wall.

Prophet hit solidly and skidded along the side of the restaurant. Rolling around so his back was pressed against solid cover, he reached for the shoulder holster under his jacket. The .38 was an older model that was light in his hand and came out quickly. He aimed at the Nymar’s center of mass as the arsonist rushed straight at him.

The gunshot cracked through the air, drawing the eyes of all three Nymar in the front parking lot. “Who fired that?” Ace asked.

Rita dropped into a low stance that made her look as if she was in a set of starting blocks. “Someone else must have been around when the torch was being lit.”

Suddenly, an inhuman howl arose from the opposite end of the building. “That’s Sid!” Rita said.

Steph grinned and rubbed her hands together. “Looks like we caught both of them in there after all. You two see if anyone needs a hand and I’ll do crowd control.”

Several cars were clogging Laramie Avenue and groups of pedestrians either stopped to watch the fire or were taking pictures of it with their phones. A few of the less voyeuristic of the bunch actually approached the cars blocking the entrance to Raza Hill.

“Could you help us?” Steph asked the people who were close enough.

Her strained voice and thrown-together outfit brought one man in his late forties rushing toward her to ask if there was anything he could do. The question was still fresh on his lips when Steph grabbed him and threw him toward Ace, who sank his feeding fangs along with the lower set of teeth into the man’s neck. When the Good Samaritan tried to pull away, he only widened the gash in his veins and hastened the flow of blood into Ace’s mouth. Rita latched onto the other side and helped drain the guy in a matter of seconds.

“Make this quick,” Steph said. “Our distraction won’t hold up much longer.”

Strengthened by the blood covering the lower portion of her face, Rita dashed across the parking lot in a flicker of movement that took her to the last known location of her partner. Ace was flushed with color and swelling with newly awakened muscles. He darted halfway across the parking lot before springing up to a section of the roof that had yet to be touched by the fire.

Of the people who were close enough to see the fangs in Steph’s mouth, all but one ran away. That man shuffled backward while holding his camera phone in front of him to take a video of the Nymar. The last thing he filmed was Steph lunging forward to clamp her jaws around his jugular and then crush the phone in a powerful grip.

People screamed.

A gun was fired.

Cars screeched on Laramie Avenue and Twenty-fifth Place.

Cole’s home was burning.

And yet, all he wanted was to keep his laptop from being smashed. There simply was no accounting for the priorities of a frantic mind. When Sid came at him, his first impulse was to turn so the Nymar didn’t smash the computer. The Lancroft files were there, along with everything he’d done for Digital Dreamers. All of the new stuff he hadn’t sent in or backed up to another system was on that drive. If he was to have any chance at getting back to a normal life again, it was in that machine.

And then, in the time it took for Sid to reach for him and extend his upper set of fangs, Cole was forced to admit something vital to his continued existence: this was his normal life. After that, it was a simple matter of holding the laptop in front of him to shield himself from Sid’s attack. Once that was deflected, he gripped the laptop in both hands and pounded the metal case against Sid’s temple. It wasn’t enough to drop the Nymar, but it gave him some breathing space.

Sid’s jaw opened to the point of hyperextending, and his fangs stretched out as if they’d developed a hungry mind of their own. He lashed out with one hand to nearly crack the laptop in half. Cole jumped away and ducked under a follow-up swipe of claws that had sprouted from beneath the Nymar’s fingernails. Sid’s other hand came around to shred the front of Cole’s shirt along with a portion of underlying skin.

The claws stung, but Cole’s system had been producing the Skinner healing serum on its own for long enough to deal with it. Rather than worry about blood loss, he used the pain to fuel his movements. “You’ve been working out,” he said while dropping the laptop’s remains so he could draw the spear from its harness.

Sid wasn’t interested in talking. He surged forward amid a flurry of claws, leaving Cole no option but to try and block as many of them as he could. Sid’s foot swept out and across in a quick motion that hit his ankle like a cement post and dropped him to the ground with an impact that emptied his lungs and turned his surroundings into a blurred mess of sight and sound. Light from above was eclipsed as Sid loomed over him and slashed at his face. Cole rolled to one side, allowing the claws to clip the back of his head and carve a set of grooves into the concrete. Better prepared for the next swing, he held the spear diagonally in front of him. When he twisted to block, however, the wooden shaft wound up clamped in the Nymar’s grip.

As Sid leaned down, the overpowering stench of blood rolled from his mouth in a coppery wave. His tongue emerged from between crusted lips, catching the venom that dripped from his curved set of snakelike fangs. Cole closed his eyes, turned his head and drove a foot straight up toward Sid’s groin. The kick landed a bit lower than he’d hoped, but was still enough to knock the Nymar off balance and force him to spit most of his venom onto the ground.

The venom was meant to be injected into a victim through the curved fangs, to slow them down for easier feeding. If spit into the eyes, it made a human sluggish and open to suggestion. In the hands of a particularly talented Nymar, it could get worse than that. Cole knew as much firsthand. What he felt on his arm was something more than the normal venom. It burned like a piece of supercooled metal before soaking in and numbing his skin.

“So you’re hopped up in more ways than one, huh?” Cole mused as he pushed away from Sid and rolled to his feet. “I’d like to hear all about that.”

Sid’s mouth hung open as he swayed from side to side. Rather than watch the Nymar’s eyes, Cole watched his shoulders. That way he didn’t fall for the head fake Sid attempted before rushing him. Holding the spear in front of him like a bar, he pressed it lengthwise against Sid’s chest and diverted the Nymar’s momentum to send him flying into a collection of trash cans. From there, Cole raised the compact weapon and was about to lunge when a pair of strong little hands grabbed him from behind and pulled him down to his knees. A bony arm snaked around his throat and grabbed the forked end of the spear with the other hand. It was Rita. Pressing her mouth against his ear, she hissed, “You’re done in this town, Skinner.”

Cole pulled as hard as he could but was unable to get the spear away from her.

Having leapt to his feet after recovering from his involuntary flight, Sid grinned at the sight of Cole being wrapped up by the spindly girl in pigtails. “Skinners are done everywhere,” he said.

“Actually, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that sort of thing,” Cole replied.

“The funniest thing is that you brought all of this on yourselves,” Rita said. “You’re the ones who wouldn’t work with us, and now you’re the ones who gave us a way to wipe all of you pricks off the map.”

Cole struggled against the arms holding him, but she wasn’t budging. She even knew just how hard to press against his throat without killing him or knocking him out. The edges of his vision were clouding, but it didn’t look like he’d miss the evisceration that Sid obviously had in mind.

More shots were fired.

Flames were claiming Raza Hill.

In the parking lot, people were shouting.

“Why not stop fighting it?” Rita whispered. Her lips brushed against his ear and her soft bangs tickled Cole’s skin. “Just say the word and I’ll give you a freebie before Sid guts you. There are guys all over town who would love me to pay such special attention to them.”

Sid stood his ground, waiting for the signal to proceed.

When Cole tried to reclaim his spear, Rita pulled it back. “Poor baby. Last time you laid down the law, you were so tough. Now look at you. About to die carrying a broken stick.”

“That’s right. The last time I kicked your ass, the varnish was still fresh on this thing,” Cole mused. Focusing all of his will into a single purpose, he twisted the spear and extended it to its full length until the gleaming spearhead drove directly into Sid’s chest. He then collapsed the other end of the weapon so it could be pulled from Rita’s grasp. After finally pulling out of Rita’s stranglehold, he twisted the spear even more to pry a loud scream from the back of Sid’s bloodstained throat.

During one of their sparring sessions, Paige told him that the inside of a Nymar was a lot like an insect; a fluid mass of simple organs designed to process one food source, all wrapped up in a strong exoskeleton. The core of any Nymar’s being was the spore attached to their heart. Because the weapon was bonded to him at a blood level through the thorns in its handle, Cole could feel the spore inside Sid’s chest rubbing frantically against the spearhead. As Sid dropped to his knees, Cole pulled the weapon out of him and pivoted around to take a swing at Rita. From then on he only needed to rely on his training, experience, and the rush of adrenaline pumping through his system.

After backing away from or ducking under the first series of Cole’s attacks, Rita hopped over him and grabbed onto the overhang of Raza Hill’s roof. Hot tongues of flame had heated that section of the building, forcing her to drop down again and hurry to her fallen comrade. Instead of comforting or helping Sid in any way, she dug under his shirt to remove the 9mm pistol tucked there. Sid might have been overconfident in his unearthly abilities, but Rita wasn’t too proud to fall back on the basics. She fired a quick shot at Cole that hissed several feet wide of its target. Before she could pull the trigger again, he was snapping the forked end of the spear around to slice through a good section of meat along her arm. If not for the black tendrils that spewed from the wound to pull it shut, she might have been forced to drop the gun. Even with the spore’s self-preservation reflex, she wasn’t able to fire accurately before her arm was pinned to the wall between the tines of Cole’s weapon.

“Who sent you?” he demanded. “Steph?”

Unable to use the gun, Rita dropped it and ripped herself from where she’d been trapped, without a thought to all the skin shredded along the way. Her entire forearm was almost peeled to the bone, but she was free.

“You’d better run far away, Skinner,” she said. “Tell that to your skank partner too! Time for Nymar to hunt you again!” With that, she jumped above the spear’s range and ran away as soon as her feet made contact with the ground.

Cole grabbed the 9mm and followed Rita toward the alley. Before he rounded the next corner, a figure in a battered army surplus coat was herded into his view.

“This son of a bitch won’t stay down!” Prophet said while firing another couple rounds at the arsonist.

Rita was nowhere to be found. Rather than take a chance on upsetting the Nymar by just shooting it, Cole tucked the 9mm under his belt, and holding the spear in both hands, rushed the son of a bitch who’d lit the fire that had all but consumed Raza Hill.

From the ground it looked as if the entire roof was on fire. Standing up there amid the flames, however, Ace could see that most of them rose up from broken windows or spots where the arsonist’s mixture had seeped into the structure. It wouldn’t be long before the job was done, however. The roof sagged and buckled under his feet as he gazed down at the Nymar caught between Prophet and Cole. It was time for the boss man to step in and make things right.

As soon as he landed in a spot that gave him a clear view of his targets, Ace pulled a thin, perfectly balanced throwing knife from his custom-made Italian boot. After that, all that remained was for him to pick the spot where he would stick it between Cole’s shoulder blades. Ace cocked his hand back, only to have the knife plucked from it and his wrist twisted at a very uncomfortable angle.

“Lights out, dipshit,” Paige said as she jammed a syringe into one of the thicker tendrils in his arm and pressed the plunger.

The Skinners called the stuff now flowing through Ace’s body an antidote. To him or any Nymar, it was liquid pain that flowed to the vampire spore and dried it up on contact. Ace’s knees shattered into dried bone and flakes of dead skin, and by the time he dropped onto his side, the only thing holding him together was his fancy silk shirt.