Nymar before, she must not have felt much of anything either. Cole found her in the shadows on the other side of the door with her shotgun aimed at the entrance.
“What do you want?” he asked the visitor.
“I have to talk to the Skinners,” the man replied. “If you’re one, then you’ve got to open this door!”
Cole glanced at Paige again and got a single nod from her. Whatever was on the other side of that door, she was ready for it.
After removing the iron bar from its bracket in the floor and pulling back the bolts, Cole twisted the knob to unlock one of the more traditional mechanisms. When he finally pulled the door open a few inches, he held it there with the side of his foot, as if that could keep out a rowdy drunk, not to mention anything farther away from the human end of the spectrum.
The man outside was dressed in dark cargo pants and boots that could have come off the shelf of any army surplus store. His tattered flannel shirt was open to reveal a bare chest covered in black markings that looked like a massive tribal tattoo. Unlike a tattoo, however, the Nymar’s markings trembled beneath his flesh as the spore attached to the vampire’s heart shifted within its shell. He had a young, slender face with a minimum of whiskers protruding from his chin, and greasy, light-colored hair that hung down to his shoulders. His cheeks were shallow, but not sunken, and his eyes were wide with barely contained panic.
Cole held the .32 out where it could be seen before having to shove it into the other man’s face. “What do you want?”
“Are you Cole?” the Nymar asked. “I need to talk to Cole or Paige. I was told they’re here. I need to talk to them.”
“Who are you?”
Although he appeared to be looking around while self-consciously pulling his shirt closed, it was obvious that his eyes were twitching as much as the tendrils beneath his skin. “Stephanie told me the Skinners were here.”
“Damn it. I’m Cole.”
Even when she wasn’t anywhere in sight, the head of Chicago’s Nymar skin trade still found ways to make things difficult. If the shaky man was sent by Stephanie, he could be anything from an annoying junkie to a suicide bomber.
When the Nymar reached out for him, Cole brought the .32 up and tightened his finger around the trigger almost enough to drop the hammer. “Stay where you are!”
The man pressed one hand against the door and the other against its frame. Leaning forward caused his shirt to fall open and his long hair to drop like a set of light brown curtains on either side of his face.
“I said stay put,” Cole warned as he extended an arm to keep him from crossing the threshold.
The man outside gripped the door and frame with enough strength to break them both. His entire body convulsed and pink foam spilled from his mouth with a gurgling heave. Tendrils pressed outward to become swollen ridges upon the Nymar’s torso. When they tore completely through the visitor’s chest, Cole pulled his trigger while jumping back to give Paige a clear shot. Even as the shotgun roared, he doubted it would be enough to do the job.
Chapter 5
The Nymar straightened up, threw his head back and would have screamed if his throat wasn’t already filled with the black appendages that began at his heart and now frantically grasped for something else. Cole’s bullets punched into him but did as much damage as they would to a bowl of pudding. Paige’s shotgun blast hit the Nymar before he could take one step into the restaurant, opening a hole for more tendrils to explode from his chest. Thinner strings poked out of the Nymar’s mouth, followed by larger ones emerging through his neck and wrists.
“Jesus!” Cole shouted as he sent the Nymar staggering backward with a straight kick to his center of mass.
The tendrils looked like eels that had been left out to dry, but felt more like solid muscle as they tried to grab Cole’s ankle and snake their way up his leg. They stretched toward the doorway and then grasped at empty air in a futile attempt to find something to latch on to. The Nymar’s back hit the ground and he stared up at the cloud- smeared sky, pulling one last gulp of humid air into tattered lungs. The tendrils stretched out in all directions before wilting like dozens of legs sprouting from a dead spider.
Once the Nymar stopped moving, sounds from the street pressed harder against Cole’s ears. It was late, but not late enough for them to have complete privacy so close to Laramie Avenue. “Let’s get him inside,” Paige said. “Actually, you get him inside.”
“Is that you acting helpless again?”
“No, it’s me pulling rank on you. Get him inside.”
There wasn’t any way to argue with that, so Cole tucked the .32 in his belt, grabbed the Nymar’s ankles and dragged it through the front door. Every step of the way, Paige kept the shotgun pointed at the mess of tendrils. The barrel rested upon her right arm, her left hand wrapped around the grip. It wasn’t the safest way to carry a loaded gun, but it would suffice for the few steps required to get away from prying eyes.
The Nymar’s arms dangled uselessly and his head wobbled from side to side as Cole pulled him into Rasa Hill. Tendrils hung from his mouth like dark strings of phlegm. The thicker ones sprouting from his chest were almost solid enough to be the tentacles of a sea creature that had died while coming up for air. All the other filaments merely dangled from their various escape routes like wet strings.
After shutting and locking the front door, Paige settled over the Nymar with her shotgun pointed at its heart. “Did you do anything to him?” she asked.
Cole looked up at her as if she’d suddenly become the most unbelievable thing in the room. “Did I do something to him?!”
“Well I’ve never seen anything like that!”
“He said Steph sent him.”
After handing Cole the shotgun, Paige sat at one of the tables and dug her phone out of her pocket. “Hi, Steph,” she said after dialing. “Were you expecting my call?”
While Paige tore into one of the leading members of Chicago’s Nymar community, Cole took a closer look at the one on the floor. He gathered just enough courage to reach down and poke at one of the tentacles protruding from the corpse’s chest. Even though he hadn’t seen many of them outside of a body, Nymar tendrils all seemed to have a fluid, almost delicate quality to them. These were tough, leathery, and becoming coarser by the second. Instead of its spore absorbing every last bit of blood or moisture in its host’s body before crumbling away, this one had been turned into something resembling a tangle of old tree roots.
“Yeah?” Paige said sharply into her phone. “Well if you don’t know who he is, then how the hell are we supposed to find out?”
That was a good question. When Cole heard it, he came up with a solution that seemed way too easy to work. Since he didn’t have anything better to do at the moment, he reached through the drooping tentacles to pat the dead Nymar’s pockets.
“His name’s Peter Walsh,” he announced.
Paige nodded to shut him up and kept talking to the Nymar who ran Chicago’s lucrative Blood Parlors.
Snapping his fingers at Paige because he knew it annoyed the hell out of her, Cole caught her attention and held it. “This guy’s name is Peter Walsh,” he repeated.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” he replied while showing her the dead Nymar’s wallet.
When Paige held out a hand, Cole slapped the wallet into it.
“So,” she said into her phone while looking over the Nymar’s driver’s license, “this guy Peter comes all the way from St. Louis and you send him straight to me? What made you do a thing like that?” After a few seconds she smirked and added, “Of course he’s really here. He said you sent him. Anything else you want to tell me about this guy?”
The only other things in the dead Nymar’s pockets were keys, some money, and a rumpled piece of paper. Cole
