“No, but we do.” Tapping the mouse button again, Steph allowed the conversation stolen from the Cav to roll for another minute before sighing, “Just listen to them. Sounds like two crazy kids who just climbed out of bed long enough to realize the other one’s not perfect. So cute.”
“That was just recorded about twenty minutes ago,” Ace said. “It should still be a while before they make it back to that shithole restaurant they live in.”
“Are Sid and Rita down there?”
Smirking in a way that allowed the tips of his feeding fangs to poke out from their sheaths, Ace said, “They never left.”
“Good. Give them the go-ahead.”
It was late morning on a weekday, which meant the section of West Twenty-fifth and Laramie was mostly deserted. People drove by, and a few walked along the dirty sidewalk, but none of them cast more than half a glance at the boarded windows and locked door of the old restaurant marked only by a broken sign with enough remaining letters to spell RAZA HILL . Anyone from that section of town hardly noticed it was there anymore. The place was too shabby to rob and just clean enough to escape official notice.
Although there was plenty of space inside, the Skinners used only a few rooms at the building’s core. The basement was their private gym and sparring area. What had once been offices were now used for storage and Paige’s bedroom. The kitchen was self-explanatory. A few of the ovens still worked, along with the large stainless steel fridge. The walk-in freezers were shut down, however. One was full of broken furniture and the other was sealed for sanitary reasons. Cole slept in the one with the broken furniture.
“Yeah, Jason,” he said into the phone he kept trapped between his shoulder and the side of his face. “I’m working on it right now.”
The voice that came through the digital connection to Seattle was patient and only slightly distracted. “What happened to those concepts you were going to e-mail me? The ones with the shapeshifting death-match players. You were supposed to be working on those all month.”
What Cole wanted to say was that he’d been distracted with things like a mind-controlling Full Blood and a Skinner from a hundred years ago making the entire country sick with Mud Flu. The best he could come up with was, “I’m still working on that too.”
“You’ve got some great ideas, Cole. I know I’ve asked you this before, but—”
“No,” Cole snapped. “I’m not planning on moving back to Seattle.”
“Then what I’d like to do is offer to buy you out.”
“Buy what out? The only thing I do for Digital Dreamers anymore is consultant work and some private contracting.”
“The ideas for the shapeshifting stuff,” Jason said with a sigh that Cole knew went along with a slow hand gliding over a scalp covered by thinning hair. “All the guys around here have been watching the stuff online about those werewolf sightings in Kansas City and the more recent ones in Indiana.”
Cole stopped his typing and sat bolt upright. “Indiana? What happened in Indiana?”
“Just more of the same crap that’s been coming in from all over the place after the riots in KC. There’s been a few local news specials, but now the cable networks are getting in on it. Everyone from CNN to Animal Planet have some sort of wild dog or werewolf feature coming up. The point is that we want to strike while the iron is hot and get a major werewolf project in the works before people lose interest.”
Cole had plenty of werewolf projects rolling around in his head, but only a few of them were the sort of thing he might discuss with Jason. Just as he was about to use one of them to try and salvage some of his old career, the phone beeped to let him know someone else was calling. He looked at the screen to find the word PROPHET blinking back at him. Poking the Ignore button, he went back to his old friend from another life. “Maybe I can come back to Seattle,” he said.
“Seriously? When?”
“The way things may be working out here …”
Prophet beeped in again with a text message that Cole didn’t bother to read.
“We have an opening for a designer that could carry over into a lead position,” Jason said.
Not only did Cole forget about the text, but he almost dropped the phone. “Why tell me this?” he asked hopefully.
“Because word’s gotten around that the next
“That many fans know about me?”
“Well, they did after someone let it slip just how much you did for this company while you were here.”
“Jason, that’s a hell of a nice thing you did. I knew you’d—”
“Wasn’t me,” Jason said. “It was Nora.”
“Nora?”
The phone beeped again, but Cole didn’t even hear it. “Nora?” he asked. “As in, the girlfriend who I thought was my ex a few times already Nora?”
“That’s the one,” Jason replied in a tone that was the closest thing to a grin his voice could convey. “I don’t know how much luck you’ll have with the whole girlfriend thing, but she’s been doing a hell of a good job in paving the way for your return. The fact that you’re still responsible for a ton of royalties ain’t hurting your cause either.”
Hearing the executive of Digital Dreamers, Inc. try to purposely use incorrect grammar was almost as bad as hearing his drunken attempt to rap during the infamous Christmas Party Karaoke Incident of ‘02. When the phone beeped again, he turned it over as if expecting to see photos from that December night all those years ago. Instead, what he got was a text message that read: GET OUT OF THERE IDIOT!!!!!!!
Cole glanced toward the next room but couldn’t see much more than a sliver of the kitchen through the freezer door. Rays of light coming in from the front half of the restaurant were given form by the smoke rolling in toward his living quarters. That’s when the smell hit him. Something was burning. If he and Paige hadn’t been so concerned with more unnatural threats, they might have replaced the batteries in the smoke detectors instead of yanking them off the ceiling and throwing them into a corner when they’d started chirping.
The first thing Cole grabbed was the harness containing his spear. That went onto his back, freeing up his hands to stuff a few essentials into a satchel that he slid over his head and one arm. Keys and wallet joined a shoe polish tin filled with the newly refined varnish containing the Blood Blade fragment in his pockets. Lastly, he snapped his laptop shut, jerked it from the power strip he’d installed in the freezer wall, and left the rest behind. Smoke rolled through the front of the restaurant, but he still couldn’t see any flames. After walking through the swinging doors leading to the dining room, he heard the crackling rush of a fire.
Cole rushed back through the kitchen and into the storeroom to get to the rear entrance. Ramming into the metal door with his shoulder, he bounced off before grabbing the bar that released the lock. A second later the piercing cry of the security buzzer went off. Naturally, Paige remembered to keep
“What the hell happened?” he asked a man who stood in the parking lot waving a phone at someone.
The man whipped around and snarled at Cole, baring two upper sets of fangs. “You overstayed your welcome in this city,” Sid growled. “That’s what happened.”
Two cars were parked in the front lot, angled to make sure nobody else could approach Raza Hill without jumping a curb and damaging the underside of their vehicle on one of many cement barriers. Another pulled up, and before it came to a stop, Steph jumped out and clapped her hands with giddy delight. She wore large retro sunglasses and a long coat that had been hastily thrown on over her nightie, which made her look like someone rousted from bed and forced outside due to the fire instead of someone who’d arrived to watch it burn.
“What did I miss?” she asked.
The girl who jogged over to greet her looked to be somewhere in her late teens. The tendrils under her skin snaked along her arms to collect at her wrists, marking her as a Nymar that had been drinking blood for a good long time. Her dark hair was pulled into pigtails, which further marked her as one of the girls under Steph’s employ. A denim skirt laced up the side was short enough to display a whole lot of leg with tendrils running up the backs like a
