Tru and the Nymar who was with Bobby in the video. The one captured by the webcam had similar hair to Trudy’s, but was definitely shorter and skinnier. Even the way she walked was different, in that the one on the video had a definite stride while Tru walked more like someone waiting to step out of someone else’s way. Aside from that, the tendril markings were all wrong.
“You seriously think that’s Tru?” Cole asked.
“Sure. As far as I can tell, or at least as far I can see on this piece of shit monitor.”
“When all else fails, blame the equipment.” Before taking one step away from the computer, Cole put that section of video into a separate file and e-mailed it to himself. After that he secured the computer and headed for a narrow trapdoor in the corner. Although the entrance to the dissection room had been hidden by Skinner runes placed by Lancroft, the smaller door was hidden by every means possible. Apart from more runes, there were subtle techniques to hide the markings, which ranged from painting over them to arranging the equipment racks to make it seem like a door didn’t even belong in that corner. All of those techniques would have been enough to keep the door a secret if Lancroft himself weren’t forced into revealing it during the battle that ended his life. When Cole walked toward it, he was grabbed by Abel.
“Where are you going?”
Cole shook loose of the grip, walked through the door and down the stairs to a brick hallway that looked to have been charred by a flamethrower. “Checking to see what those other two were after.”
Tagging along like an anxious puppy, Abel said, “I’m surprised you and Paige didn’t already comb through all of this good enough to know what’s here.”
“We’ve been busy.”
“Yeah, I just bet you have.”
The snide tone in Abel’s voice was easier to pick up than the markings on the mysterious Nymar woman’s face. Cole let it slide, however, since he’d already spotted something out of place farther down the hall. He jogged past bulbs fit into sockets every fifteen to twenty feet along the wall. Alcoves on either side widened into anything from storage spaces to small cells sealed off by thick, rune-encrusted bars. Some of the cells had doors built in that forced anything bigger than a child to crawl on all fours to pass through, while others were simply one-way storage units. The things imprisoned there had died there. As of yet, the Skinners that claimed the Lancroft house hadn’t figured out how to cut through to those remains.
Cole’s sights were set on one of the smaller cages. Its little square gate was open, so he reached over his shoulder and grabbed his spear to prepare himself for what might be loose. He tried to remember what was in that cell but couldn’t pick it out amid all the other things he’d discovered underneath that single, empty shell of a house.
“Shit, is one of those cages open?” Abel asked.
“Looks like it.”
Gripping the spear in both hands, Cole felt the familiar pinch of its thorns piercing his flesh as he extended the weapon to its full length. The main spearhead had been treated with one of the innovations recently created by Daniels, which used melted fragments of the Blood Blade to form a new type of metallic coating. Apart from making the spearhead nice and shiny, it gave it more of a bite, to do serious damage to any shapeshifter. He only hoped that extra punch would be enough to put down whatever was in that cage.
When he arrived at the bars, Cole angled the spear down to point at the little door. Abel stepped up beside him, holding a wooden version of a short scimitar at the ready. Blood welled between his fingers, showing that his thorns cut just as deep as anyone else’s. “Is it still in there?” Abel asked.
“Can’t tell.”
Digging into his pocket, Abel removed a small flashlight attached to a keychain. With a click of a button, a pale blue light filled the brick alcove. The cramped interior of the cage had feces crusted on the walls, dozens of small animal carcasses on the floor, and the body of what looked to be a short man laid out on his back. One leg was propped up and the other was skewed to one side. Both arms were splayed out in a cruciform position, and his head was angled in such a way that his wide, clouded eyes caught the light being shone into the cage. Despite having all the basic parts, the thing wasn’t human. Black, uneven claws extended from his fingers. His musculature was swollen well out of proportion to his stature, and thick black veins ran beneath almost every inch of his skin.
“This thing was cut open recently,” Cole said. “I would have remembered seeing this before.”
“Looks like a Nymar. See the markings?”
“Yeah, but there’s something different about it.”
“You sure?”
It was a simple question, but sparked a whole lot of uneasiness in Cole’s gut. He was rarely sure about anything anymore. All he could rely on was a motivational tool that had taken him from a desk job at a mid-range video game company to the basement of a monster hunter who might have been alive since before the nineteenth century. He’d come this far, he told himself, so he might as well keep going.
“Give me that light,” Cole said as he reached back to Abel.
The other Skinner slapped the key chain into Cole’s hand without taking his eyes from the body lying in the squalid little cell.
Cole crouched down and shone the beam on the Nymar carcass. Its chest was pulled open, but not in the same way as Henry’s victims back when the crazed Full Blood still had his taste for vampire spores. Before he crawled in there with the dead thing, Cole used the spear to reach between the bars and jab the carcass. Having been coated with the new varnish, the spearhead was sharp enough to puncture its flesh with little effort.
“Is that the new Blood Blade treatment for the weapons?” Abel asked.
“Yes.”
“When the hell do we get some of that stuff?”
“Just shut up, okay?”
While Abel grumbled about having last year’s weapon model in his hand, Cole dropped to all fours and crawled into the cell. He scraped through the opening, thinking about how much he didn’t like Abel and how little he trusted him. Then he thought about how stupid he’d been to turn his back on that guy while entering a cell designed to keep things trapped for extremely long stretches of time.
Once inside, Cole was instantly struck with how much smaller the room felt. Its floors were rough and soggy due to layers upon layers of filth and decay left behind by its inhabitants, wandering rodents, or whatever slop might have been tossed in for food. Considering the looks of the thing on the floor, however, the rodents could very well have been the food.
“What is it?” Abel asked.
Holding the light closer to the thing’s exposed arms, Cole picked out gray tendrils beneath the flesh. Thinking back to some of the lessons Paige had taught him, he eased the flap of skin on its chest open using the tip of his collapsed spear. It came open with a wet sucking sound. He was no surgeon, but the heart was easy enough to spot. It was at the center of the hole dug into the thing’s chest, like a Valentine’s gift dropped there for safekeeping. He leaned in as close as his nose would allow. The smells rising up from the exposed cavity were like a living entity that reached down to tug at the back of his throat. “Looks like a Nymar, all right,” he said. After finding the telltale puncture marks on the sides of the heart as well as the scratches put there when the spore hung on during the removal process, he added, “Yeah. Nymar.”
“Wait a second. Do that again.”
“What?”
“The light. Move it again.”
Cole had only turned his head so he could give two of his senses a break at the same time. To appease the other Skinner, he waved the light back and forth across the dead Nymar’s upper body.
“That’s it!” Abel said. “Did you see it?”
Although his movements gave the corpse’s exposed, ravaged heart a cool strobe effect, Cole found one major difference with the tendrils shooting through the vampire’s arms and legs. At first glance they just seemed thinner than normal. What differentiated them from tendrils on any other Nymar he’d seen was the way they reacted to the light. When the flashlight’s beam was shining directly on them, they shriveled into crooked, almost imperceptible lines. When the beam moved away, the tendrils fattened and spread out until they were almost touching one another.
Cole moved the beam back and forth a few more times, but the effect was less noticeable with every
