the end of the hall. Nobody touched the thing at the far end, did they?”
“No. This Nymar had a lot more tendrils in it even after the spore had been taken out. Tendrils that reacted to light. They’d swell up and turn the skin black. Also, I didn’t feel anything in my scars. I know it was dead, but I was right there and should have felt something, right?”
“Yes. That part could be bad.”
“Also, I think Bobby and M went through some of those jars that were piled up in all those milk crates. I took samples to see if we could figure out what they wanted.”
They drove in silence for a while. A triple play of Aerosmith was on the radio, so both of them relaxed during their stop-and-go journey across town. Cole knew he hadn’t heard everything that had happened in Miami. Paige was in too good a mood for there to have been a fight, but she was holding something back. Since he was holding back a few details of his own, he figured he’d let the matter drop. The silence was comfortable and easy. After the final swaying notes of “Dream On” had faded away, Paige reached out to shut them off with a twist of the radio knob.
“I’m going back, Cole.”
“Back to Philly? It’ll just be more of the same. If those locals are setting something up with the Nymar, we shouldn’t go back alone. Let’s bring Rico. We can say he’s just taking his turn claiming some of that Lancroft crap. We’ll have to warn him about Henry, though.”
“No. Rico’s not coming with me, and neither are you. I’ll probably head back to Philly sooner or later, but I meant I’m going back to Miami. There’s something I need to double-check. You’re going back to Raza Hill and staying in Chicago. We’ve been gone for too long. Steph was just getting the Nymar organized here when we left for KC, and kept organizing while we were in St. Louis. Who knows what she’s got going on by now. She and the rest of her girls need to see a Skinner presence around here again. Make the rounds. Show yourself around town. Bust some heads if anyone’s stepping out of line. Let’s face it, with Steph and Ace in the area, someone’s bound to be stepping out of line.”
“If you’re not taking me along, then at least tell me you’re taking someone.” Cole’s eyes drifted to her arm. Since her injury in Kansas City, Paige had been able to move it a lot better and even found some creative uses for the hardened tissue impeding her movement. The sling was long gone, but the scars made it clear she wasn’t functioning at one hundred percent. “You really shouldn’t be on your own, Paige.”
Despite flying down a rare stretch of open road, she shifted her focus away from the windshield and to her passenger. “You don’t even know what I’m doing. Why the hell should you tell me how I should go about doing it?”
He had plenty to say to that, but held it back. At the moment he was so pissed off that he no longer even wanted to hear her voice.
Chapter Eight
“They’re back in town.”
Steph had plenty of smiles in her repertoire. Most of them were sincere, but in a way that most smiles weren’t supposed to be. She had the grin that she put on for her customers at the Blood Parlor, which was prospering in its location on Rush Street. That was always a crowd pleaser since it was accompanied by one or more of her girls coming in to take customers off to a room to enjoy the pleasures of feeling Nymar teeth ease into their necks or wrists. There was the hungry smile that allowed all three sets of her fangs to slide out from beneath her gums. That was her favorite, since it was the predatory equivalent of stripping naked and showing yourself to a lover before the much anticipated next act. And then there was the one that came to her now.
Her smooth face was illuminated by an earnest display of joy when she asked, “Are you talking about the Skinners?”
Standing in the doorway to her office, Ace nodded. He was a skinny guy who looked to have been somewhere in his late twenties when he’d been turned. Although he still looked youthful, there was too much experience in his eyes for him to properly carry the baggy jeans and netted shirt he insisted on wearing. The narrow patch of hair sprouting from his chin, and the heart shaved into the side of his head, didn’t help his case much. “Come on,” he said. “You can hear them now if you want.”
Steph hopped up and practically skipped around her desk to follow him down a hallway that led to the back rooms of her parlor. Little stone gargoyles lined the walls, each of them holding electric candles in clawed hands. The walls were painted dark red. Newly purchased black carpeting rubbed her bare feet. Muted, moody music played from hidden speakers to complete the parlor’s effect. So far the people who paid to have the Nymar feed on them loved every last one of the cliched gothic touches. They especially liked seeing Steph in a good mood. One of the men, a stockbroker in his early forties, scooted all the way to the edge of an overstuffed couch in the waiting room just to get a look at her as she left her office. Fully aware that she was on display in a lavender nightie that stopped just short of covering the ruffles of her cream-white panties, she looked back at him and kissed the air. That was enough to convince him to spring for the deluxe package.
Most of the rooms branching off the hallway were small, luxurious bed chambers that came complete with closed-circuit video cameras hidden behind sculptures and wall sconces. They were all wired into the room full of monitors that the Blood Parlor’s managers were now entering. The security room was all sharp edges and glowing reminders of what century it truly was. Ignoring the assorted depravities being displayed on the screens, Steph and Ace went immediately to a laptop set up on one metal desk in the corner of the room. On that screen was a display mapping the time and pitch of scratchy sounds being played through the computer’s speakers. Ace selected a time stamp he’d already highlighted and pressed the button for it to play.
When she heard Cole and Paige having their conversation on the way back from Pinups, Steph pressed her hands to her mouth to hold back a giggle. “So this is from their car?” she asked through her fingers.
“Sid rigged it while they were gone the last time.”
After pausing the recorded conversation, Steph asked, “Where did they go?”
“Hell if I know. We’ve been following them like you wanted for a while. They were out of town for that shit in Kansas City and then again awhile after that.”
“See? I told you it was a good idea to keep track of them! Especially since that skank with the billy clubs started cracking down on my girls.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ace droned. “I wanted to clean them out way before then, but you said it would be too much trouble.”
“Well forget that,” she said after crossing her arms over her proudly displayed cleavage. “Word’s being spread on CP that the Skinners won’t be such a threat for much longer.”
“Did that come from Toronto?”
“Oh yeah. Cobb wrote the post himself.” Steph’s painted lips curled into half a grin as she looked down at the laptop and stroked the right mouse button as if teasing a customer’s anatomy. “This is priceless. I still don’t know how Paige got access to our security feeds, but she always knew when the good stuff was happening in this place. Let’s see how she likes it.”
“Probably did it when she and that other guy stormed in here after we opened.” Ace tapped the Internet browser on his cell phone and hit the link to ChatterPages.net. Ninety-nine percent of the population used the social networking site to post family pictures and play games, between writing updates about what they had for dinner. Although veiled as a fetish fan group, the ChatterPage used by the Nymar was run like a science and alerted its nationwide members about things ranging from Skinner movements and Full Blood sightings to the juiciest, most poorly guarded feeding spots in most major cities. Ace didn’t have to scroll down very far before finding the most recent postings from Cobb38, the page’s founding member. “Holy shit! Someone found the Shadow Spore?”
“Took it right out from under the Skinners’ noses. On top of that, most of the Skinners in the country are either in Philadelphia for some reason or going back and forth from there right now. That means all of them are distracted.”
“It’s not all of them we need to worry about. Cobb never knew exactly what the Chicago Skinners were doing.”
