Cole raced to the window but stopped short of jumping out. The Full Blood landed awkwardly and crumpled on the side where the spearhead had been broken off. He regained his footing, then ran a few paces and leapt high enough to disappear into the shadows of the western horizon. Lowering his weapon, Cole said, “He’s gone. Is Daniels all right?”
Paige started to respond but stopped when they heard frantic knocking on the door.
“Shit,” Cole growled as he forced himself to look at what Liam had left behind. Daniels was a bloody mess and Paige hovered over him. “Is he gonna make it?”
Daniels’s eyes were wide open. His mouth moved as if he was forming words, but he couldn’t put any breath behind them. When he tried to inhale, a soft yet horrible sucking sound came from the flaps of shredded skin under the Nymar’s chin. As he slowly turned to look at him, the tattered remains of his throat and windpipe pulled apart even farther.
At more knocking from the front door, Paige snarled, “Get rid of whoever’s out there!”
Cole went to the door and opened it to find two of his neighbors peeking in from the hallway. One of them, a man with gray hair that looked as if it had been blown onto his scalp by a cotton candy machine, asked, “What on earth happened in there? Where’s the man who ran down the hall?”
The other person at the door was an old lady with a towel wrapped around her head and moisturizing cream on her face. “I think we scared him away, Kenneth,” she said. “I’ll call the police.”
“Don’t bother,” said someone else in the hallway, whom Cole couldn’t see. “I already called them.”
“Kenneth, call an ambulance, I think these kids are hurt really bad.”
Cole nearly jumped when Daniels crawled over and grabbed his leg. He saw Paige clutching her arm, but she turned her back to him before he could see much else. “Just give us some room,” he said to the people in the hallway. “Everybody stay back.”
Just as he got the door shut, the spark in Daniels’s eyes returned and the Nymar wedged the back of his head against the floor. Propping his lower body up while arching his spine caused the gaping wound to yawn open. For lack of anything better to do, Cole placed his hand on Daniels’s stomach and forced him back down again.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Paige said in a harsh whisper. “I’ll get our stuff.”
“We’re just gonna leave him here?” Cole asked.
“Just give him a minute.” When Paige tried to leave, she was blocked by the people who had gathered in the hall.
“You need any help in there?” Kenneth asked. “The manager called for an ambulance.”
“We’re taking him to the hospital,” Paige replied.
“What about you?” the old woman asked. “You don’t look so good. What happened to your arm?”
Cole wanted to know the answer to that as well, but couldn’t get it before Paige forced her way out of the room. “Damn it,” he grumbled as the faint echo of sirens reached his ears.
Daniels’s eyes were open and frantically darting back and forth. He reached up to touch his throat, but Cole stopped him. Before he could offer any comforting words, he flinched at the sight of black, oily filaments reaching out through the hole in Daniels’s neck to pull the gaping wound shut. When the loose flaps of torn skin were more or less together, the filaments knitted a glistening web to close the gap. Within a second or two Daniels was able to pull in a few haggard breaths.
Cole slipped his arms under the Nymar and helped him sit up. “You still with us?”
“Y-Yes.”
“Can you stand?” Turning to see a gaggle of strangers slowly pushing through the doorway, Cole quickly added, “Doesn’t matter. We gotta go.”
Daniels not only made it to his feet, but draped an arm over Cole’s shoulder and shuffled along beside him.
“We’re going to the hospital,” Cole announced to the group. “He won’t make it unless we go right now.”
The people who’d wandered into the room looked as if they were going to protest, but changed their minds when they got a look at the black mess holding Daniels’s throat together. As the crowd parted to let them pass, someone asked, “Should he be moved? The ambulance will be right here.”
All Cole could think to say was, “I’m a paramedic! I know what I’m doing, so just get the hell out of my way!”
Fortunately, nobody asked for ID. A few people asked if they could help, but Cole pushed past them and dragged Daniels toward a stairway that led down to the parking lot.
Once they were in the stairwell, he asked, “Do you need anything?”
“Just give me a minute,” Daniels replied.
After making it halfway to the ground floor, the doorway behind them flew open and slammed shut as quick steps rattled down the stairs. Cole turned and saw Paige racing to catch up to them with cases and bags hanging from both shoulders and gripped in both hands. “I’ve got everything but the test tubes and lab crap.”
“I need…” Daniels gulped and sucked in a breath. When he spoke again, his voice was clearer than it had been even a few seconds ago. “I need to—”
“Save your breath, buddy,” Cole said. “He probably needs to feed.”
But Daniels shook his head and growled, “I need my burner and that equipment! It’s expensive!”
“Oh for crap’s sake, I’ll get you more equipment,” Paige said. “It sounded like that Full Blood was going to get the Half Breeds moving again. He mentioned tearing down a city, so he must be headed back to KC, and if we don’t get out of here, we’ll be stuck talking to cops.”
Daniels was so pale that even his markings had turned gray. He was still covered in blood, but his neck looked less like it had been ripped apart than smeared with motor oil and tomato sauce. “Fine,” he said meekly. “Let’s go.”
Cole played the part of getaway driver. He got the Cav started and backed out of his space as Daniels settled into the backseat. Paige slumped into the passenger seat, cradled her right arm, and stifled a gasp.
“Let’s see your arm,” Cole demanded. “And don’t tell me it’s fine. I know better.”
Paige cleared her throat and placed her left hand over her new markings. She must not have liked what she felt there, because she pulled her hand back and shook it as if she’d accidentally touched the belly of an eel. “That ink worked, but something’s wrong,” she muttered.
“I know. Let me see.”
Daniels lunged forward as if he’d stopped just short of launching himself through the windshield. “You used the ink?
“Let me see it!” The tone in Cole’s voice left little room for back talk. Also, he’d slammed his foot on the brake and made it clear he wasn’t about to drive another inch before he got what he’d asked for.
Angry at first, Paige raised her right arm and then turned her head away as if she didn’t even want to look at it.
Having braced himself for the worst, Cole was somewhat relieved at what he saw. The lines on Paige’s forearm were just deep scratches highlighted by black lines and dried blood. The skin around those scratches was a strange shade of gray, but was already a better color than it had been a few minutes ago. He took hold of her wrist in one hand and used the other to delicately wipe some of the blood away. “Does that hurt?”
“No,” she said with a wince.
“Yes it does. How bad is it?”
Daniels leaned forward again so he could squint down at her arm. “Do you feel the substance interacting with your muscle tissue?”
Paige yanked her arm away then and glared at each of them in turn. “Yes, Daniels, I can feel it interacting with the muscle, and yes, Cole, it hurts! I fucked up, all right? What else do you want me to tell you?”
Cole realized there wasn’t a lot he could do for either of them, and could do a whole lot less if the sirens he heard got any closer. When he saw the hotel manger jog out the front door toward the parking lot, he drove for the highway. If he’d steered in the other direction, he would have rammed into the emergency vehicles screaming toward the hotel.
For a moment it looked as if a cop car might try to follow him. Instead, it stayed put to block the entrance to the hotel parking lot so the ambulance had easier access. Shifting all the way around so he could look into the backseat again, Cole said, “Someone’s going to tell those cops about us. They may even post someone further along the highway.”
“I didn’t leave enough real info at the front desk for anyone to find us,” Paige pointed out. “Besides, anyone in the hotel will tell them we’re just wounded victims.”
“Some more wounded than others,” Cole grumbled.
Paige stared at him with enough intensity to burn through the car’s engine block. “I heard that.”
“Interesting,” Daniels said. “Did the ink improve your hearing?”
“Sit back and conserve your strength,” she said. “Don’t you need to feed?”
Daniels shrugged. “I can wait. The Nymar spore expended some extra energy, but that doesn’t translate directly into blood usage any more than running excessively hard would force you to eat a meal immediately afterward. It’s a somewhat independent entity that will improve with some rest, which is—”
“Great,” Paige cut in. “Then just sit back before I open up another wound for that thing to sew back up.”
“Hey!” Cole barked. “If you hadn’t jumped the gun back there—”
“If I hadn’t jumped the gun, that Full Blood would have stuck around to kill everyone in that hotel!” Paige said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, this ink actually worked!”
For the next few seconds the only sound in the car was the rumble of the engine and the movement of the tires rolling over I-29. Paige had reflexively used her right hand to grab the dashboard during a swerve to avoid a motorcycle, which gave Cole a good look at the rock-hard muscles of her forearm. They weren’t much bigger, but appeared to be more solid and defined. As if to prove that beyond a doubt, the dashboard had cracked in several places under her hand. The blackness of the ink was no longer in the bloody lines where the tattooing machine had made its mark, but had soaked down to further darken the fibers below.
“Holy shit,” he breathed as he tried to watch the road while also looking at her. “That stuff really did work. Did you actually punch that Full Blood?”
“I think so,” Paige said. “I sure couldn’t put much of a dent into Burkis.”
“You said it hurt,” Daniels pointed out. “How bad is it?”
Never one to admit she was wounded, Paige pulled her arm back and turned toward her passenger-side window. When her fist slid off the dashboard, it dropped into her lap like a dead weight. “Feels like it was dipped in acid.”
“On the surface? Where you used the machine to administer the substance?”
“No. More on the inside.”
Daniels leaned forward again, and this time reached for her with both hands. “May I?”
Paige glared at him, then her expression softened and she nodded. That’s when Cole noticed that she was either unwilling or unable to lift her arm toward Daniels’s hands.
The Nymar slid his fingers along her forearm before pressing it harder with his thumbs. Paige pulled in a few sharp breaths, and Cole knew it took a lot to get that much of a reaction from her. “The muscle is shifting, but slowly,” Daniels said. “Very slowly.”
“Then it’s probably wearing off,” Paige said.
Daniels leaned back among all the stuff piled in the backseat. When Cole looked at him in the mirror, he saw the Nymar nervously shake his head.
“What about your weapon?” Cole asked Paige.
“I grabbed them both, and yours is here too,” she replied.
“No, I mean the weapon you held in your right hand was different. Did you do that on purpose?”
She looked down at the crude weapon lying across her knees. Wincing when she closed her fist around the handle, she quickly switched it to her left hand. Only then did the weapon creak and flow into a finely etched sickle that matched her other one. “It’s fine,” she grunted. “I can hurt a Full Blood, so that’s what we’re gonna do. Just drive.”
Cole knew better than to try to argue. The fire in her eyes wasn’t quite the same as usual, but the idea behind it was the same: fight now, talk later.
It was a relatively short drive to Kansas City and traffic was at a minimum. Once they got close enough to see downtown silhouetted against the night sky, Paige glanced at Daniels and asked, “Which of your cases has the Blood Blade?”
“You gave that to me for use in creating the ink,” Daniels replied uneasily. “I needed to melt pieces of it down to create the compound. Each dose requires a piece of the blade to provide the ingredient I couldn’t replicate.”
“Right, so give me what’s left.”
“It’s right here,” Daniels replied as he patted one of the satchels containing their essential belongings.
“Give it here. We’re gonna need it.”
The Nymar grumbled and fussed for a few seconds, before extending his arm to hand her a plastic Baggie with a zip seal across the top. Inside the bag was what appeared to be large flakes of silver confetti.
“What the hell is this?” Paige asked.
Daniels immediately retreated as far back into his seat as he could. “You told me to prepare the ink, so I prepared it. You told me to get everything ready so you could mix up as much of it as you could whenever you wanted, so I did!”
“And you said you weren’t even ready to test it yet!” she shot back. “What if it didn’t work and we’re stuck with some black crap and a bag full of shavings?”
“That wasn’t enough to stop you from using it!” The moment those words came out of his mouth, Daniels clamped it shut. Cole didn’t see the look Paige was shooting at the Nymar, but he could imagine it. Daniels tapped him on the shoulder. “Could you help me out here?” he asked.
Cole turned toward Paige to keep her from pulling Daniels’s head off, but was cut short when she flipped the plastic bag out in front of him. Not one of the silver pieces in it was bigger than a penny. “Seriously, Daniels?” he roared. “What the hell!”
Flattening himself against the backseat, Daniels gripped the cushion as though he feared he’d be ejected from the car at any moment. “You left me in that room all day and all night! I wanted to feel useful, so I prepared as many doses as I could.”
Cole snatched the bag from her and swung his hand back as if he didn’t only want to show the metal chips to Daniels, but force him to eat them. “This is what you consider useful?”
“Also…maybe…I got bored.”
After handing the bag to Paige, Cole nodded and gripped the steering wheel. “That’s it. I don’t care whose life he saved. Baldy dies tonight.”
For the first time since they’d left the hotel, Cole saw a glimpse of the Paige he truly knew. She tucked the bag into a pocket and sighed. “If you boys keep fighting, I won’t take you to see the big scary animals.”
“That’s another thing,” Cole grunted. “How are we supposed to find those things anyway?”
“Something tells me finding them won’t exactly be the hard part.”