Paige walked calmly across the street, and it was all Cole could do to keep his voice down to a whisper when he said, “Those cops had to know there was more going on in there.”
“I know. Keep walking.” When Cole took a quick glance over his shoulder, she snapped, “Don’t look. Just keep walking. Selina and Jory know some cops around here, but it looks like they’ve got a better arrangement than I thought.”
It felt like miles before they were finally on the other side of the street. “I think they’re working with the Nymar,” he said in an overly deliberate whisper.
Paige stopped just after stepping onto the curb in front of Lancroft’s house and went against the order she’d just given. “Who?” she asked while looking back at Madman’s house. “The cops or Jory’s crew?”
“Maybe both. The Nymar doing the float and flow mentioned something about a woman telling him we’d be coming.”
“You mean Selina?”
“I don’t know,” Cole replied quickly. “He just said ‘she’ told them we’d come running and that she also told the Nymar about Lancroft being in that house. I tried to get more out of him but didn’t have time. Then that cop made it sound like he knew something was going to happen as well.”
“Why would they expect us to go over there, unless …” Paige spun on her heels so she was once again facing the Lancroft house. “Unless we were being pulled away from the only thing in this neighborhood valuable enough to convene a Skinner summit meeting.”
She strode into the house, pushed open the door and shoved past the Skinners waiting in the living room. Her mouth was pressed into a tight line and her eyes burned with an intensity Cole knew all too well. Rather than try to get in her way, he did his best to watch her back as she climbed down the stairs to the basement.
“You think the locals were trying to draw us away from here?” Cole asked once they hit the small brick-walled room at the bottom of the stairs. A doorway led into the workshop where half a dozen Skinners from almost as many places were going through boxes of weapons collected or made by Lancroft himself.
“There’s some good stuff in those files,” she said quietly. “And then there’s the basement below this one. The creatures in some of those cages downstairs may be more valuable than anything else. Even the dead things have their uses to Skinners who know their craft. Since the only thing that’s been preventing anyone from carting away too much for themselves is the agreement we made when we opened this place up, there’s plenty of reasons for someone to want some time alone in here.”
“Plus,” Cole chuckled, “there’s the stuff we stashed before everyone started arriving.”
“Yeah,” she said with a comfortable smile. “That too.” As easily as it had come when she looked at him, her smile disappeared when she looked back into the workroom. “I thought the right thing to do would be to take what we needed and let everyone else pick from the rest. Some of the others were bound to get snippy and squabble over some stuff, but I wasn’t interested in being the mommy around this house. Maybe I’m the dumb one for thinking this could go smoothly at all.”
Cole held her face in his hands, slipping his fingers beneath the newly clipped slopes of hair framing her cheeks. “We’ve been here the whole time,” he told her. “There’s no way to catalogue this crap, and even if there were, these are the people we would have called to do the cataloguing, right?”
“Yeah.” Suddenly, Paige’s face lit up and she pulled away from him so she could get another look into the next room. “Cataloguing! Did you ever print that sign-out sheet you were talking about?”
“The one you said was a stupid idea because it was treating Skinner weaponry and artifacts like rental movies?”
“That’s the one.”
“Yes I did.”
“Has anyone been using it?”
“They’d better!”
“Or there’ll be a late fee?” she chided while jogging through the workroom, stopping a few paces shy of the Skipping Temple. “Do you smell that?”
Compared to the smells that had filled Madman’s place, the scent of freshly cut timber was a blessing. Cole nodded quickly.
Taking a quick look at her watch, Paige cursed under her breath and ran into the room covered in wall-to-wall Dryad script. Although the ancient markings were as beautiful as they were mysterious, the nymph sitting in the corner poking out a text message on her phone was the only thing Paige wanted to see. “When did you get here, Jordan?”
Dressed in a baggy shirt and cutoff sweat shorts, Jordan looked up from her phone and smiled. The hair she flipped over one ear was chestnut brown with amber highlights. By anyone’s standards, she was a knockout. Because she was a lower level Dryad more commonly known as a nymph, even the curves of her ear were sexy enough to hold a human’s attention once she fixed her eyes upon them. Cole had met her before, while rescuing Jordan from being worked to death by Jonah Lancroft, but he still had to brace himself to keep from being mesmerized by the sight of her perfection. When the nymph straightened her back and shifted to the edge of her seat, it became clear that she was gloriously unsupported beneath her shirt. He cleared his throat and tried to do the same for his mind.
“My shift just started,” Jordan said. “Will you be needing us much longer? Every hour I’m away from the club means less money in my pocket.”
“Shouldn’t be much longer,” Paige replied. “Did someone just come through here?”
“Sure. It was off the usual schedule, but I just got here. My pipes are in good shape, so I bent the rules a little. Seemed like the ones who went through were in a hurry.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know. The only Skinners I know by name are you and Cole. Hi, Cole. I see you squirming over there.”
“Hi, Jordan.”
Uninterested in the nymph’s attempts to make Cole even more uncomfortable, Paige said, “I need to know who came through.”
“All I can tell you is where they went.”
Paige’s eyes lit up and she leaned forward expectantly. “Where?”
“Florida. They got here in a rush and needed to leave quickly. The only club that had enough juice stored up to transport them on short notice was in Miami. Always plenty of juice in Miami.”
The Dryads used spiritual energy gleaned from the emotions or excitement within living things. Humans were the richest source of that energy, and the oldest, most reliable way to get a human excited was to appeal to their baser instincts. The nymphs had been doing the same act for years, tempting mankind through everything from belly dancing to songs sung in forest clearings on summer nights. More recently they’d been making a killing at strip bars scattered throughout the country. Money was the least of what they harvested from their customers, but no harm was done.
Cole had already picked up the clipboard resting against the wall and was scanning the front page. When he shook his head and put the board down, Paige shifted from one foot to another as if getting ready to bolt and just needed to be pointed in the right direction. “Did they take anything out of here?” she asked.
“Sure,” Jordan said. “Everyone’s taking stuff out of here. Isn’t that the point of all this?”
“Can you send me to where they went?”
Smirking while blowing a few strands of auburn hair away from a mouth that glistened with the color of ripe raspberries, she replied, “You know I can.”
“Then do it. Cole, stay here and see if you can find out what was taken.”
“I’m coming with you.”
When Jordan stood up and started to hum, the melody of her voice carried throughout the entire room. It rustled beneath Cole’s skin like a passing ghost that brushed its fingers along his spine as it went looking for another attic to haunt. In a matter of seconds the symbols on the walls thrummed with latent power.
“I want to go with you, Paige,” Cole insisted. “We can figure out the rest later.”
She placed a hand on him, and this time there was nothing close to a smack tagged onto the gesture. “If the locals or any other Skinners are involved in something dirty, they’ll be quick to cover it up.”
