weren’t about to come back after being discovered, she left them to it.
As much as he wanted to hose himself off and change his clothes, Cole was only allowed a few extra minutes in the bathroom of the first gas station Paige could find on her way back to the interstate. She volunteered to drive all the way to Kansas City, which would only be a slightly longer trip thanks to the extra miles they’d gone past Omaha. Cole figured they’d get back around midnight, and he wanted to spend those hours resting. After some restless shifting in his seat, it became clear he wouldn’t be able to get to sleep.
“What’s wrong with you?” Paige asked.
He glanced over to find her face illuminated by light from the dashboard as well as the glow of the semi she was passing. “I can’t sleep. I think I’m hurt. You got any of that serum?”
“You’re not hurt,” she replied with a little shake of her head.
“Excuse me? Were you the one dragged underground and nearly suffocated?”
“No, but you’re flopping around like a fish, which means you didn’t break anything. You’re not bleeding and I didn’t see any wounds. Anything smaller than that should be cleared up by the serum that’s already in your system. Just shut up and close your eyes.”
“I guess you know best, huh?”
She looked at him again, furrowed her brow, and sighed. “How were you hurt?”
Cole reached for the lever on the side of his seat and shoved the backrest down. “Forget it,” he grunted as he stretched out and crossed his arms.
“Mind if I turn the radio on?”
“Yes.”
She gave him a few minutes to pout and then found some classic rock.
“Filling up on gas again?” Cole grumbled as he rubbed his eyes. “I must’ve been out longer than I thought.”
“Even longer than that,” Paige said. “We’re here.”
“Back at KC? No way.”
“Not KC. The hotel. If that ink isn’t ready to be used, I’ll beat Daniels until that squid attached to his heart crawls out through his ears.”
The hotel’s parking lot was more than half full of SUVs and cars with out of state plates. Paige used her room key to unlock a side door so she could walk inside without having to go past the front desk. Even though he’d just woken from at least a four-hour nap, Cole nearly collapsed onto the bed the moment he saw it.
Paige went to a phone situated on a table that had a TV remote bolted to it and poked out Daniels’s room number. After a few seconds she said, “We’re back…It doesn’t matter where we went. Are you done with your homework?” Somehow, Paige’s eyes had yet to droop after all the driving she’d done. Suddenly they grew a little wider. “That sounds good enough. We’ll be right over.” When she hung up, she froze with her hand still on the receiver. “You feel that?”
Cole shook his head.
“Your scars,” Paige said. “Aren’t they burning?”
“That’s kind of the problem with KC right now, isn’t it? Daniels is right down the hall and we don’t even know how many Half Breeds are around.”
Reluctantly, Paige said, “Yeah, I guess.”
“Could the Mongrels have made it here already?”
“They could have beat us here, actually. What are you doing?”
Freezing with one foot in the bathroom, Cole said, “I’m still filthy from—”
“You can shower later,” she said curtly. “If we don’t get that ink ready to use, dragging Daniels along this far would have been a huge waste.”
“But, if it’s not ready…”
Paige already had the door open. “He’s always like this toward the end of a project. He wants to work it all out before someone tests it, but you’ve gotta have someone test it before you know what needs to be worked out. He’s a smart guy and has come a long way, so we’ll just test it for ourselves. Besides, didn’t Prophet tell you I needed to yell at someone to finish?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Then that’s what I’m gonna do.” Pulling open the door, she stepped into the hallway and waited for him. “Come on. You’re the new guy, so you get the first needle.”
“Wow. I’m honored.” At that moment he couldn’t tell for certain whether or not Paige was kidding. Since it was too late to run away now, he just followed her to Daniels’s room. Along the way, he felt heat run up from his scars all the way to his elbows. It wasn’t as bad as when the Half Breeds were within eyeshot, but enough to make him feel as though he’d been injected with cayenne peppers.
After knocking a few times, Paige positioned her face directly in front of the peephole and waved. On the other side of the door, latches were flipped and knobs were turned to unlock everything. “Sorry we took so long, Daniels. You’ll never believe what we’ve been doing.”
When the door opened, Cole could only see Daniels’s bald, blackened dome over Paige’s head. Another wave of heat slithered beneath the bones of Cole’s shoulders. He turned to look for its source but could only see a man at the far end of the hall whose hair looked more like soot growing from his scalp. The man leaned forward and raced down the hall in a flurry of powerful strides.
Before Cole could react, the skinny man was upon him. He slapped a hand against the small of Cole’s back and shoved him into Daniels’s room and against another door frame, where Cole landed on the bathroom floor. When Paige spun around to face the man, he knocked her into a luggage rack. She scrambled to her feet but wasn’t quick enough to avoid being grabbed by the neck.
“All in one spot,” Liam said in his guttural brogue. “How convenient.” Holding Paige at arm’s length, he glared at Cole with the crystalline eyes of a Full Blood.
Although Cole realized what he was dealing with fairly quickly, Daniels was even quicker. The Nymar flew through the air with all three sets of fangs bared in a show of ferocity that made him seem an entirely different creature from the guy he and Paige had been dealing with so far. His jump wasn’t exactly graceful, but Daniels managed to scrape his curved venomous fangs into Liam’s upper arm before he caught a blindingly fast backhand that sent him bouncing off the top of a dresser.
Paige bared her teeth and brought her knees up close to her chest. Frustration showed in her eyes the moment she grabbed for her weapon, only to realize that she’d kicked her boots off in the other room. Grabbing onto the man’s wrists with both hands, she kicked and flailed in a continuous flow of punishing attacks. Her heels smashed against Liam’s knees and shins. She pulled her legs up to kick at his groin and landed at least a few blows that should have gotten the job done. As it was, the skinny man hardly flinched.
“She’s a real pistol,” Liam said as both of Paige’s heels landed simultaneously below his waist. “I like that.”
Having brought the .44 up from the car, Cole snatched the revolver from under his belt and pointed it at Liam. “Here’s another pistol. Let her go before I unload it in your goddamn face.”
The skinny man flicked his eyebrows up and moved Paige aside to show Cole part of the crooked smile he wore. His free arm swiped out and just managed to clip the end of the gun’s barrel to send it flying from Cole’s hand.
“I’m appearing in this form to show you that I am a man of reason,” Liam said. “I was going to offer to let her go in exchange for the location of every Skinner you know, but since it was this easy to find you two, I don’t believe I need to deal.”
Until now he had seemed amused. He examined Paige as if she was a Thanksgiving turkey while she balled up her fists and punched him as if tenderizing a slab of frozen beef. Even as she dug her nails into his wrists, Liam simply peeled his lips back to show a set of human teeth widening out and stretching down to form sharpened stakes in his mouth.
“Or maybe I won’t kill you, luv,” he said in a cockney accent that grew along with his hair and teeth. “I could turn you into one of those poor wretches. Wouldn’t that be perfect? After every brittle bone in your human body snaps, you can run with the rest of the wild dogs that are so eager to rip this city to shreds.” His lips tightened against his teeth as his hand tightened around Paige’s throat. The fight drained from her in less than a second. One second after that, Liam’s eyes snapped wide open and he let out a stifled growl.
Not only had Daniels made it back to the Full Blood, but he’d sunk his fangs deep into the meaty part of his
