as well, they could have tasted it too. Not exactly a high ranking on the yowza meter.
They were still in a dark room with strange symbols on the walls. A bass line was thumping through the building, but came from a much smaller set of speakers. When he tried to bat at the beads he still felt touching his arms and legs, he only swatted air.
“Don’t worry,” Paige said nearby. “I still feel them too.”
It looked as if they were in a house that had been stripped of everything but shades on the large windows next to the front door and a lamp against one wall. The more Cole looked around, the less he saw. One barren hallway led to a pair of empty rooms. There was no furniture to be seen and the small kitchen at the back of the house was completely gutted. In fact, the entire place barely seemed large enough for more than one person to live there. He stepped up to a picture window framed by the light seeping in from the street. Pulling aside the blind gave him a view of a curb lined by parked cars of all colors and states of repair. Only one of them was running, and it was the source of the thumping music he’d heard since his arrival. Someone emerged from a house across the street, got into the car, and was driven away.
“There’s nothing here,” Cole said. “We must be in the wrong place.”
Paige sighed and took the same tour as he had, which she completed in a matter of seconds. “Where the hell are we?”
After fitting his spear into its harness, Cole took the GPS unit from his pocket and turned it on. While it acquired the satellites needed to pull up a map, Paige looked out the front window. Rico paced the room and quickly worked his way over to the lamp sitting by itself on the floor. He turned it on, but the bulb was only powerful enough to cast a dim glow in one corner. Fortunately, Cole didn’t need a light to read the GPS screen. When the map came up, he announced, “We’re in Philadelphia. Looks like a neighborhood called Germantown.”
Now fascinated by the wall at the back of the room, Rico stood with his face less than two inches from the water-stained plaster. “Tell me you see these symbols.”
Cole didn’t want to bother with dirty walls when he could get so much more from Romana, so he ignored the request.
“What symbols?” Paige asked.
“The symbols right here. Or they were right here,” Rico muttered as he dug into one of the inner pockets of his jacket. When Cole finally looked over at him, Rico was grumbling, his face pressed against the wall, before saying, “
Before Cole could question his sanity, the symbols appeared all around him. Actually, they reappeared. “Wait a minute! I saw those when we got here, but I just…”
“Put ’em out of yer mind?” Rico asked. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what these babies
“Huh?”
For once Cole didn’t feel like the stupid one.
“These runes!” Rico said. “They’re the ones I been trying to get you to learn for years, but you were too stubborn to pay attention.”
Now that they’d been seen, the symbols gave off faint trails of black smoke, similar to the scent that had shown up in other Skinner creations, like the ammunition crafted to kill Nymar. Paige followed a line of smoldering symbols etched along the top of the front window, then stepped back and said, “I’ve seen these before.”
“I know,” Rico snapped. “I showed ’em to you before.”
“No, not from you.”
Now that he had a chance to look at them more than a moment, Cole experienced the same kind of frustrated familiarity that was written on Paige’s face. The symbols were indecipherable, but in a familiar way. Then it came to him. “These are like the marks on the inside of Henry’s cell back at Lancroft Reformatory, but there’s something…off about them. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
Rico squatted down to some of the lower symbols and stretched a hand out behind him. “Paige, got a mirror?”
“Sure, Rico. It’s in the bottom of my purse next to the gum and mascara.”
“Okay, then. Cole! Gimme that GPS thing.”
Reluctantly, he handed Romana over.
Rather than marvel at the improved touch technology or any of the optional extras in the programming package, Rico switched it off and held the device up to the wall so the symbols were reflected on the black screen.
“Hey! Those are exactly like the symbols at the reformatory!”
“The ones in Henry’s cell would have been to keep something in,” Rico explained. “These are to keep something out. One’s written forward and the other one’s backward. Nice and easy. If I knew exactly what each of these markings here meant, I could even tell you who this was written for.”
“So those runes you taught Paige really work?” Cole asked.
Rico ground his teeth together as if every fiber of his being wanted to say something but he just couldn’t get the words out.
“No,” Paige said. “They don’t.”
“She’s right,” Rico sighed. “The runes I know work okay sometimes, but not like these. It’s a lost art. There used to be something else, some other element that really put the zip in these things. It may be something from back in the day when Skinners were friendlier with the Gypsy clans, or it could just be something that got lost in translation over the years. I learned a good chunk of the runic language from books and old journals, but not how to give them that old pep. I’m sure the MEG guys have read every book on ghosts and demons front to back, but that don’t mean they can summon or even communicate with ’em.”
“Maybe we can call someone who does know,” Cole offered. “Like someone from back in the old days?”
“Don’t think so,” Rico chuckled. “The old days I’m talkin’ about are somewhere back in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. But one thing’s for sure,” he added as he dug a little spiral notepad from his jacket, “these were put here by a Skinner who knows his shit. They’re keeping this place sealed off from certain things comin’ in, and since we got here without too much trouble, I’d say we ain’t the target. Those symbols along that other wall over there are what’s screwin’ with our perception.” Rico removed a pen from the spiral rings of the notebook and tapped it against his chin. “All this stuff is protecting and hiding something, though. Give me a few minutes and I should be able to get us in.”
“In where?” Cole asked.
“I don’t know, but I bet it’s good.”
Cole and Paige patrolled the house with their weapons drawn, waiting for someone or something to find them. After searching the cramped, empty house for thirty long minutes, they longed for the distraction of finding someone, even Henry kicking down the front door. But they were still taken by surprise when they found a lumpy figure sitting with his back pressed against the back wall of a closet in the house’s only bedroom.
Extending her sickle in one hand while keeping the machete closer to her body, Paige whispered, “Is that you, Daniels?”
“Y-Yes.”
When he heard the muffled voice, Cole rushed into the room behind Paige, with his spear at the ready. Sure enough, Daniels sat in the closet with all of his equipment piled around him. “I searched this room when we got here,” he said. “I looked in that closet. Where the hell were you?”
“I…was hesitant to step through the curtain when you three disappeared,” the Nymar told him. “I needed a minute to…collect myself.”
“Didn’t you hear us in the other room?”
Daniels nodded meekly, but pushed himself farther back into the dark. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”
Paige lowered herself to one knee and watched him carefully. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why are you sorry?”
“Back in Kansas City…I destroyed the Blood Blade.”
“That’s done,” she said with strained patience and a hint of resentment. “You were trying to work on the ink, I was rushing you and—”
“No! I didn’t want to break the blade apart like that! I only wanted to take some more samples, but he made
