Her body swelled against him as she writhed on the floor. Her chin brushed against Cole’s face as he dug his mouth in deeper. Finally, when his throat was all but filled with the oily Nymar blood, he tore himself away and struggled to stand up. Hope lay beneath him, looking up at him longingly while her fingers trailed along the dripping wound. “Now you have another reason why you can’t kill us,” she said. “Soon, every Skinner will have that same reason.”
“Cole!” Rico shouted from the back of the room. “Are you all right?”
The big man was finishing off one of the Nymar that had charged over the counter to greet him and the remaining Amriany. Of the policemen and-women who had been in the room, only a few very confused cops were still standing. They’d finished off the couple Nymar that had stayed behind, then checked with each other, radioed to the ones outside, and started screaming at the solitary figure that stood between them and backup.
Kawosa raised his hands in compliance to the orders being barked at him and dove away from the door. Gunshots rang out, punching holes into the wall and thumping against Kawosa’s hide. The gunfire intensified, causing the shapeshifter to stumble and fall forward. That small victory was taken away as his body flowed into a lean, four-legged canine form and darted toward the back of the room. He raced past Cole, cleared the counter in one jump and scampered away like a fleeting thought.
Gunari had a gun in each hand but was unable to pull either trigger. Instead, he watched the shaggy blur streak past him and gasped, “Ktseena.”
Cole absorbed all of this as if his senses had been extended in every direction. Perhaps it was the blood that gave him that gift because Hope surely didn’t have it. Otherwise, she would have seen Drina come up behind her with what looked to be a thick metal arrow in each hand. The Amriany bared her teeth and dropped both arms to drive an arrowhead into each of Hope’s shoulders.
The way the Nymar rose to her feet meant that she had either pulled herself up by bending the laws of physics or was dragged up by the objects in Drina’s hands. When Hope twisted around to slash as Drina with her claws, she remained attached to the arrows by thin silver chains.
“You bitch!” she snarled. “Whatever this is, I’ll shove it down your throat and pull it out through your fucking ass!”
Without reacting to the vulgar torrent spewing from Hope’s mouth, Drina stepped back and allowed her partners to swarm in around her.
Nadya fired a few rounds at Hope’s feet, taking them out from under her.
Gunari grabbed Hope’s wrists and wrestled her to the ground, forcing the rest of the chain to spool out and be pulled taut from where it was housed within the shafts of Drina’s arrows. She stood over Hope, lowering her arms as more of the chains were pulled into Hope’s torso.
“What the hell?” Rico grunted.
“It’s an old Amriany method for extracting the spores,” Gunari explained. “Keep those police away so she can work.”
But the cops were already backing out of the building through the front door. They kept their weapons drawn but weren’t about to interfere with the procedure. Outside, there were enough people walking back and forth between the chopper and the building to cast a shadow play on the windows.
“What’s happening to her?” Rico asked.
Hope had grabbed onto the chains, only to have her hands burnt by something within the metal. Without enough strength to pull the intrusive implements from her body, all she could do was pound her fists against the ground and continue to spit insults at the hunters surrounding her.
“The metal is treated to become … like a magnet,” Gunari said. His English was fine in conversation, but the specifics of this particular exchange were testing the limits of his syntax. “It is forged specially for the Nymar.”
“Like a Blood Blade for vampires?”
“Yes. The arrowheads are attracted to the Nymar spore. Once inside, they will go to it, cut through everything and not stop until they have found it.”
“Then what?”
“Then,” Drina said, “this.” She tightened her grip on the tools and lifted them straight up. All but a few links of the chains had been swallowed up by Hope’s upper torso and resisted the Amriany’s efforts to extract them. With sustained effort, Drina pulled them loose. She turned both hands in small circles, wrapping the bloody chains around her knuckles until the arrowheads snagged on the upper levels of Hope’s skin.
“Why didn’t you do that to all those other bloodsuckers?” Rico asked.
Gunari scowled. “It is not a method we use very often. Too messy.”
Hope was no longer even a humanlike shell anymore. All she could do was scream and hit the floor until the tiles cracked and bits of broken concrete became wedged in the bloody gashes covering her fists. Her flesh strained like thick rubber as the arrowheads came to the surface. One more pull was all Drina needed to remove them completely, along with the spore that each one had found.
Normally, when Nymar spore were in jeopardy, they tried to nourish themselves on whatever they could find. Something in the Amriany tools held an even greater temptation because the spore latched on to them to wrap tendril after tendril around the charmed shafts as well as the hands that held them.
“This is another reason we do not use them so often,” Gunari said as he reached over to help his partner pull free of the clinging parasite.
Cole couldn’t bear to look at Rico. He couldn’t even bring himself to look at the Amriany. Even with Hope reduced to a flailing, wounded animal, he wasn’t able to look at her. That didn’t leave him with any other option than to turn his back on everyone and stagger toward the front door. “Paige?”
She pushed through the cops that had clustered around the building’s main entrance, her hands empty and concern written across her face. The moment she spotted him in the shadows at the back of the room, she smiled with relief. “Cole! Thank God!”
The look in her eyes and the way she favored her right arm told Cole it was truly her. Spinning around, he used his sleeve to wipe the oily blood from his face. Both spore entangled around Drina’s hands like so much rotten seafood were crumbling into dried ash. When he grabbed one of the silver tools, he had more than enough strength to tear it away from her.
“What are you doing?” Gunari demanded.
“Does this need to recharge or something?” Cole asked. “I need to use it.”
Rico and Nadya straightened up and raised their weapons as the cops at the front of the building moved in.
“It’s all over!” one of the men in tactical black uniforms barked. “Drop your weapons and put your hands over your head!”
“What is it, Cole?” Rico asked.
Locking his eyes on Gunari, Cole said, “Answer my question. Can I use this?”
“Pull the handle at the other end.”
The chain was locked into the silver tube with a bar that passed through the last link to keep it from being pulled out completely. Cole pulled the bar, drew the chain all the way back through the handle until the arrowhead was locked, and then drove the pointed end into his chest. He was barely able to break the skin. Whatever had powered him before either wore off or sapped his strength, staying his hand.
Rico charged forward without lowering his Sig Sauer. “What the fuck are you doing?”
All three Amriany focused their attention on the police and spoke to each other quietly through their earpieces. There were more Nymar in the building. The itch in Cole’s scars which told him that much. But Nymar were no longer the problem. No matter what language they spoke, he knew that the Amriany had to be discussing their chances of getting Tobar away from the authorities so the group could make a clean escape. “Get out of here,” he told them.
Drina approached him cautiously.
“I told you to go!” Cole said. “We came here to keep cops alive, goddamn it.”
“Give me the Talon,” she said calmly.
Paige had yet to get into the building. There were enough cops at the door to hold her back, but she wasn’t making it easy for them.
Rico stood his ground, paying no attention whatsoever to the cops, the guns in their hands, or anything other
