Volunteers were not in short supply.
Chapter Five
It was a time of night that was starting to acquire the feel of day. Just shy of 3:30 A.M., every obscene comment from Madman and his bros echoed down the street. Every clink of empty bottles hitting the sidewalk rattled through the air accompanied by the perpetual thump of a cheap radio set up somewhere within the messy house.
The Skinners didn’t try to sneak up on them. Cole, Paige, and Abel led a group of seven more that fanned out to form a wall in front of Madman’s water-damaged front porch. The house’s owner, along with most of the guys from the party, came outside to meet them. Drunken insults and threats were spat at them, but the Skinners weren’t there to talk. Cole and Abel wore military surplus jackets that came down past their waists and had tanned werewolf hides stitched into the lining. Paige wore her own black harness, which covered her torso and was strapped in place like a bulletproof vest. She’d had no trouble finding Half Breed skins to zip into the harness for padding that could stop anything the drunken idiots had to offer.
“What the fuck do you want?” Madman asked.
Spotting the Nymar instantly, Cole extended a hand to point at his target. “Him first.”
The guy had pockmarked skin, spiked brown hair, and wore a shirt with the collar torn out to show his markings, as if the tendrils were expensive tattoos. With so many Skinners in front of him, he no longer seemed anxious to display his ink.
“What do you want with Finn?” Madman asked.
“I just want to make sure he gets a good look at what’s about to happen.” With that, Cole stepped forward with the aggression that had been building inside of him since the first guy in a football jersey knocked him aside in the tenth grade. The fact that he now had armed killers to back him up was simply glorious.
The inside of the house was exactly what had been advertised on the outside. Couches with stuffing flowing from tears in the upholstery formed a pit around a big TV showing the final table of a poker tournament. Crushed beer and pop cans were strewn on the floor along with enough empty pizza boxes to build a very flimsy and greasy fort. Cole had barely taken four steps inside before all hell broke loose.
Madman rushed up behind him, but was immediately overpowered by the Skinners. Cole walked all the way back to the bedrooms, following the itch in his palms that had brought him this far. There were more Nymar inside. Having them this close to the Lancroft house was not a good sign.
The first door he encountered was closed, so Cole opened it. Inside that room, a Nymar wearing nothing but dark blue boxers climbed out from under the sheets of a twin bed. The tendrils marking his skin were fat and dark, meaning he’d recently fed on the one substance that the spore attached to his heart would crave. Judging by the state of the other man, slumped in a corner with blood running from slashed wrists, Cole was certain he’d found the vampire’s snack.
“This isn’t exactly feeding in public,” Cole said, “but we’re doing a surprise insp—”
He was cut short when the Nymar used a portion of his enhanced speed to reach beneath the mattress to grab a .44 that had been stashed there. The gunshot exploded within the room, spitting a round that hit Cole in the upper chest a few inches from his collar. Part of his brain was still trying to come up with a funny way to insult the Nymar who’d just killed him. That thought rattled in his brain as he lost his footing, bounced off a wall and dropped to the floor. He couldn’t breathe. A blurred jumble of dark shapes was smeared across his eyes. His ears were filled with muffled, thumping movement inside the house and a piercing ringing left by the .44.
The Nymar landed on top of Cole as if he’d been dropped from a helicopter hovering above the house. As the vampire pressed down on him with more weight than his scrawny body should have had, the coppery stink on the Nymar’s breath washed over him. Eyeing him hungrily, the Nymar peeled Cole’s jacket open.
His jacket.
Cole was dazed and battered, but the jacket’s lining had kept the bullet from breaking through. Unfortunately, the Nymar had already found a way in.
“She said you’d come running,” the Nymar hissed while looking down at him. “Just didn’t think it’d be this quick.”
When the Nymar settled, pinning him to the floor, there was nothing Cole could do about it. Seeing the top set of feeding fangs slip out from beneath his gums, however, sent a jolt of adrenaline through his body. He rolled onto his side, reached over one shoulder, grabbed the spear from its harness and drove it straight down into the base of the Nymar’s neck.
The spear was in its compact form, so it was almost as thick as a baseball bat. Thorns sprouting from the handle punctured Cole’s palm, allowing him to tap into the shape-shifting powers imbued into the weapon.
The Nymar stretched his head back and opened his mouth wide. Thinner, curved fangs slid down along the inner edge of the feeding fangs, and a thick, stout set on his lower jaw snapped out like a trap that had been sprung. Before Cole could will the spear to change its shape, the Nymar grabbed to pull it out from where it had been lodged.
“Wha … what’s going on?” the man with the slit wrists groaned.
More gunshots blasted through the house, but Cole focused on the voices in the next room. One of them was Paige, and she was quickly drowned out by the blast of a shotgun.
Just as Cole was getting the spear to extend deeper into the Nymar’s torso, the .44 was angled to point at his head. He stared up at the pistol while both of the Nymar’s eyes widened in anticipation.
The Nymar was pinning all but one of his arms to the floor, so Cole flipped the spear around with a snap of his wrist, bringing around the end that was carved into a set of forked points. From there he willed the weapon to extend to its full length with a voice that filled the inside of his skull with a frantic scream. The spear responded by almost doubling in length, as if loaded with a spring. The forked end caught the Nymar’s wrist, shoving the gun away from Cole’s face a fraction of a second before it went off with a blast that sent a piercing shriek through Cole’s ears. When the forked end of the spear snapped shut around the Nymar’s arm, it did so with enough power to slice down to bone.
The Nymar couldn’t jump away from Cole fast enough. He dropped the .44 and scampered toward the bed like his boxers had been put to a torch. His hand was still stuck, however, and Cole wasn’t about to let go.
After pulling in a few cautious breaths, he was certain the Skinner-crafted armor had held up under the second shot. Trying to get up was enough to throw him into a world of hurt, but the Nymar’s flailing efforts to escape actually helped pull him to his feet. As soon as his legs were under him, Cole tightened his grip on the spear and swung the Nymar into a wall.
“Please!” someone shouted from the living room. “Just get out of here! I’m sorry about the car!”
The Nymar turned toward Cole and opened his mouth to show the murky venom dripping from curved upper fangs. Cole twisted away so the paralytic substance was spat onto his borrowed jacket instead of his face. Before the Nymar could come up with another trick to tip the scales back in his favor, Cole reeled him in. When the Nymar stumbled toward him, Cole drove one leg straight out to bury his foot in the vampire’s midsection, dropping him to his knees with a huffing grunt.
“Cole? Where’d you go?”
Standing over the Nymar with his spear in a bloody grip, he responded, “In here, Paige.”
She hurried into the bedroom wielding her baton. “You found another one?”
“Yeah. I think he’s got something to say.” Giving the spear a little twist, Cole bent the Nymar’s hand in the wrong direction and said, “Isn’t that right?”
The young man with the slashed wrists rushed forward. Even though Paige held him back, he still reached for the Nymar and pleaded, “Let him go. He didn’t hurt me, I swear!”
Pushing the man back, Paige bought herself enough time to drop her baton into the holster on her boot. She grabbed one of the man’s hands and inspected his bloody wrists. “He didn’t? Than what’s this?”
“It’s a game we play, that’s all.”
The cuts made across his veins and had been partially wrapped by shreds of thin material. Studying his eyes,
