Chicago The following morning
The tunnels beneath Rush Street branched off in several places, but it was easy to figure out the one the Nymar had used. Not all of them could walk on walls, which meant they left a trail in the gritty dust covering the floor. Paige scouted ahead and Rico helped Cole walk while carrying the ceiling-hugging Nymar over one shoulder. It was slow going but sped up once Paige doubled back to report that the rest of the Nymar had cleared out. The Skinners branched away from the beaten path, found a dead end, and holed up there for the next few hours.
Cole sat with his back against yet another dirty brick wall, pulling in breaths that felt like wet cement and letting them out in gasps. It helped to take shallower gulps of air, but his eyesight remained blurred around the edges.
“How you doin’ over there?” Rico asked.
“Still hurts.”
“How bad?”
“Like there’s a fucking rock swimming around in my chest and nuzzling my heart! That bad enough for you, Doctor?”
The big man leaned against a wall with half an unlit cigarette clenched between his teeth. He held the Sig Sauer in his right hand, casually pointing it at the Nymar who’d hung Cole from the ceiling. All this time, Rico had been studying the Nymar’s face, paying close attention to the markings that ran up along both cheeks. Whenever the Nymar moved, Rico used his boot, fist, or the side of the pistol to crack it in the head. If not for the strips of burlap and knotted trash bags he’d found to bind her ankles and wrists, the bloodsucker still might have gotten away.
“The spore’s still movin’?”
Cole thought that if he had any psychic ability whatsoever, the focus in his glare would have popped Rico’s head wide open. “Yes. I need more antidote. Maybe some serum.”
“You’ve had enough of both to do the job. Paige is fine. You should be too.” Biting down on the cigarette as if he meant to chew it as a snack, Rico squatted so he could stare into the Nymar’s eyes while using the Sig Sauer to pin her head to the wall she was leaning against. “What did you do to him?”
“You know wh-what I did,” she stammered.
“Why isn’t the spore dying?”
“Maybe your friend is too weak to fight it.”
Rico pulled in a deep breath. When he let it out, his face became colder than a mask cut into an iceberg. “You know we’re Skinners, right?” he asked while jamming the barrel of his gun against one of the Nymar’s eyes.
“Y-Yes.”
“Then you know what we do to any bloodsuckers we find feeding in public.”
Her markings fluttered beneath her skin, making her face seem like a bad television signal. When she opened her mouth to speak, the top set of fangs stretched out reflexively. “I know.”
“Good,” Rico said calmly. But any semblance of calm instantly drained from him when he leaned against the pistol and clamped his free hand around her throat. “You don’t have any fucking idea what we do to Nymar that try to kill us. If you did, you would have never made a stupid fucking move like the one you made tonight. Were you one of the ones that burnt our place down?”
“No! I don’t—”
Rico took his hand away from her throat, reached into his jacket and pulled out a knife that he snapped open with a flip of his wrist. The clattering handle fell into place to reveal a three inch blade that he stuck up under the ridge of her eyebrow to draw a trickle of oily blood. “I can go two ways from here. Down to flip your eye out or straight in to gouge your brain. That second one takes some effort, but I’ve got a whole lot of pent-up energy that’s in need of direction.”
The Nymar flailed against her bonds until she finally snapped one wrist free. Rico took the fight from her by poking the blade in a little more. She couldn’t blink. She couldn’t move. She could no longer even shift her weight out of fear of moving the blade inside her.
Cole watched the process silently. He wanted to protest, but a wave of pain from the living kidney stone moving within his chest erased that impulse completely. He managed to pull himself up, swallow the urge to launch himself into a coughing fit, and pull the spear from its harness. Dropping to one knee as the lump sought refuge somewhere in the vicinity of his left lung, he drove the metallic spearhead into the floor near the Nymar’s leg and snarled, “Tell me what you did!”
“You’d better do what he says, honey,” Paige said as she jogged around the corner and approached the dead end. “Every one of your friends is gone.”
“Nobody’s gonna help you,” Rico said. “That means I get to help myself.” He only moved the blade a fraction of a millimeter, but that was enough to get the Nymar’s legs scraping against the floor.
“There’ll be more coming,” the Nymar said.
Cole’s voice was a haggard croak when he asked, “Who’ll be coming?”
“Hope and the others with her.”
“Do you mean the rest of those Toronto assholes like Bobby and Tru?” Paige asked.
“They’re the ones who make the rounds, but any of the Nymar who’ve joined the evolution will be happy to come along.”
“Bunch of goddamn bloodsuckers think they’re revolutionaries?” Rico scoffed.
The Nymar wasn’t squirming so much anymore. Either she’d accepted her fate or the threadlike tendrils slipping out from between her eyeball and socket were comforting her in some way. The black filaments snaked out along Rico’s blade, wrapping around it to try and pull it out of her. “Not revolution,” she said. “Evolution. If we don’t get what we want from that one, we’ll get it from another one of you and add it to what we took from Lancroft.”
“Get what from us?”
By now the tendrils snaking from the Nymar’s eye had formed a thick coating around the tip of Rico’s blade. He tried to move it again, but her eyeball was protected by the black barricade. If she felt any discomfort from the ordeal, her spore must have taken care of that too.
Paige stormed over. As her shadow was cast across the Nymar’s face, the tendrils there widened to form a slender striped pattern flowing directly toward the blade in her eye socket. “Give me a good target, Rico,” she said while digging an antidote syringe from a leather case in her pocket.
“Surely.”
Once he’d levered the blade down a bit, Paige held the needle over the mass of tendrils. “I knew you bloodsuckers could be ruthless, but now you’re turning multiseeding into common practice?” Always the teacher, she looked over to Cole and said, “She’s got more than one spore.”
“I don’t give a shit if she’s got more than one head!” Cole replied. “Get this thing out of me!”
“Hope’s leading this group and she’s not from around here,” Paige said to the Nymar. “What’s she doing?”
“You won’t have any luck with that needle, you stupid bitch,” the Nymar spat.
“I’ve been meaning to make absolutely sure of that. Where else would she and the others go?”
“You’re the ones that need to find somewhere to go! The cops are working for us now and they’re out for your heads. After they see what you left behind in the Blood Parlor, you pricks will be at the top of their wanted lists.”
Paige shrugged casually and jabbed the skinny needle into the tendrils. Judging by the way the Nymar screamed, those were some very tender strands. It was all Rico could do to hold her down before she bucked hard enough to force his blade all the way to the back of her skull.
“Talk or I pump this shit in,” Paige warned.
“Go ahead, you stupid Skinner whore!”
“I’m not kidding!”
“Neither am I!” the Nymar screamed. “Fuck yourself and your mother!”
Rico tightened his grip on her neck. “You should become real helpful real fast or we’ll lose interest. We got better things to do than screw around.”
“Suck your friend’s dick,” she snarled. “At least he’ll get some fun before the spore takes root.”
“Fine,” Paige said as she pressed the plunger of the needle down.
The Nymar tensed and pulled in a sharp breath. Her eyelids fluttered as much as they could considering her predicament, but soon she let out a breath and started to laugh. “Told you to do better than that, bitch.”
Paige pressed the plunger down even harder to drain the last drop of antidote from the syringe. When it didn’t make a difference, she looked over to Rico and said, “Now we know for certain this stuff doesn’t work on the new ones.”
“All right,” the big man grunted. “Plan B. I stick this blade all the way into your brain and then cut your heart out. Thanks to all that black spaghetti inside of you, I’m betting you’ll feel every second of it.” He pressed the blade in just far enough to puncture her eyeball. The flow of milky fluid was quickly stymied by black filaments, but the expression on the Nymar’s face made it clear she could still feel plenty of what was happening.
“Hope and the others went to a bunch of different cities,” she said so quickly that her words ran together in a barely comprehensible stream. “They made deliveries, set things up, arranged it so different Skinners could all be hit just like you were.”
“What did they deliver?” Paige demanded.
“Blood stolen from Jonah Lancroft. Old Nymar spores from when we were different. From older evolutions. Nymar change and adapt. We develop immunities like humans with viruses. It changes us, and the spores change. That’s why your poisons don’t work on ones like me. Hope gave us samples that came before you had the shit in those needles. The older spore were different from us, so the poison doesn’t work.”
“What cities did Hope visit?”
“I don’t know them all. Please! Take the knife out so I can think.”
“Think now,” Paige warned, “or forever hold your peace.”
“They came here,” the Nymar sputtered. “Here and … and … and Miami! They went to Miami.”
“Already know about that one. What’s another?”
“Sacramento.”
Paige cocked her head to one side and narrowed her eyes. “You sure about that? Keep in mind, we’re taking you with us to wherever we decide to go. If it turns out to be a wash, we’ll make this shit look like a party.”
“Okay, not Sacramento. Hope did go to San Antonio.”
“Too far.”
Something that may have been sweat appeared on the Ny-mar’s face. Her nervous impulse forced her to try and blink, which only made things worse. The sensation of her eyelid scraping against the knife caused her to kick and thrash, which in turn wiggled the blade inside her skull even more. Rico held her down but wasn’t able to keep her still. Cole wasted no time in flipping his spear around so the forked end trapped one of the Nymar’s shoulders and kept her more or less in place.
“Just fucking kill me!” the Nymar screamed.
“Not until you—”
“Denver and Boston! Hope went to Denver and Boston and some other places but I don’t know where! Philadelphia, I think. For Christ’s sake, just—”
Paige jammed her machete into the Nymar’s chest. Its charmed metallic edge allowed her to cut straight through the breast plate and the infected heart beneath it. A few more quick, plunging stabs caused the vampire to arch her back. Before she could blink, her skin was already starting to flake away. When Rico pulled his knife out, the tendrils that had held on to the blade fell away like glue that dried into a brittle crust.
Cole had seen plenty of Nymar killed from exposure to the antidote, but this one was something new. Paige held on to the machete’s handle and twisted it violently from side to side. A few seconds later the Nymar caught a second wind. She kicked and thrashed against the ground until Paige stabbed her a few inches to the right of the first wound. The violent convulsions restarted as the other half of the Nymar’s body flopped uselessly. Her screams were contorted and strained. Some of her fingernails were torn off against the floorboards, leaving bloody stains on either side of her.
Since nobody else was making a move, Cole aimed his .45 and emptied it into her chest. Antidote rounds or not, there wasn’t enough left of her heart for anything to cling to after that.
“Maybe she had more than two spores,” Paige said.
“You mean like Henry?” Cole asked as his gun hand started to tremble.
Paige knelt down to get a closer look at the Nymar’s face. The vampire was still twitching but was now just being moved by the thing beneath her skin. All the remaining tendrils receded and the normal process of a Nymar death followed from there. “Not like Henry,” she said. “He was a Full Blood. A shapeshifter has a whole different system that made it impossible for any of the spore to fully attach. This is different. This is two spores attaching to the same heart. It’s rare and very, very dangerous.”
“Maybe that tiger stripe shit makes it easier for ‘em,” Rico offered.
“Could be. She did mention evolution.”
“She may have mentioned a few more things if we’d kept her alive,” Cole wheezed. A simple inhalation turned into a painful gurgle as he was hit by enough pain to drop him to the floor. “Jesus! How come Paige is up and around and I’m …?”
She didn’t need to hear the rest of the question. Her hand wandered to the wound on her neck, which was already mostly shut. The healing serum in her system and the extra dose she’d administered to herself had seen to that. “Did you give him anything for that, Rico?”
“Of course I did! It just ain’t doin’ much more than slowin’ it down.”
“Doesn’t feel very slow to me!” Cole said.
Crouching down beside him, Paige opened his coat and moved her hands under his shirt. “Even just a little antidote should have been enough to squash one of those things. How does this feel?”
The only answer Cole could give was a wailing groan as Paige’s fingers touched a portion of his chest that felt as if it had rotted all the way down to his spinal column.
She sighed. “It’s not as bad as I thought. Hasn’t attached yet. When it stops hurting, you’re in trouble. That means it’s settling in.”
“When the fuck does that happen?”
“Hopefully never. Once it settles in, it’ll be too late to help you.”
“Do you believe that evolution shit?” Rico asked. “Did Lancroft really have old spores tucked away in that basement?”
Every other noise in the brick corridor faded away.
“I don’t know,” Paige whispered. Suddenly, her face showed something Cole had never seen before. There was genuine fear, uncertainty, and panic in her eyes as she pulled his shirt up to check his chest. “There aren’t any tendrils showing up yet. He’s still got his color. It should have taken root or died by now, Rico. What the hell is happening to him?”
Rico’s tone cut through the confusion that had rolled into the room like a fog. “That Nymar was too scared to lie,” he said sharply. “We already know we’re dealing with a new kind of spore our antidote doesn’t hurt. Come to think of it, all the Nymar we killed with that striped shit on ‘em was from destroying the heart with our weapons or bullets. The antidote on the rounds don’t do shit, so we might as well switch to hollow points.”
“That’s for later,” Paige said. “What about now? What about him?”
“The spore hasn’t taken hold yet so that’s all we care about. Did you find a way for us to get out of here or not?”
It took Paige a moment to think all the way back to what she’d been doing a few minutes ago. She nodded. “Yeah, I found a route that leads under a place that’s either a laundry or clothes store on Erie. Maybe State Street.”
“Were cops there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then lead the way and make sure it’s clear. I’ll take Cole.”
“But what about—”
“Shut it, Bloodhound!” Rico barked. “Do what I told you to do. There ain’t nothin’ else for us right now. We gotta get out of here. That’s it. When that’s done, we’ll see about the rest.”
Although visibly upset, annoyed, and scared, Paige nodded. “You need help with him?”
“No. Just go.”
She stood up, locked her eyes on Cole for a long couple of seconds, glanced at the gritty remains of the dead Nymar, and then ran down the hall.
“Come on, soldier,” Rico grunted. “On your feet.”
“You … call me Champ … or Tough Guy,” Cole snarled as a lump the size of a golf ball moved freely within his chest cavity, “and I’ll shoot you.”
“Don’t blame you one bit, sport.”
Although the single chuckle that bubbled up from his throat hurt almost as much as getting punched by a set of brass knuckles, Cole was grateful for it.