Rico’s face barely changed. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Paige told me to tell you that. Actually,” Cole said, “she told me to tell you to tell me about shampoo banana.”
“Give him some time, big man,” Prophet told Rico. “There was a fire. He inhaled a lot of smoke. There was a fight. You know, the usual shit. He’s rattled.”
Rico’s hardened expression remained, but he shifted his face toward the road ahead. “Lots of fires popping up lately. Lots of fighting going on. Plenty of dying too. The usual shit. That don’t give us permission to slip into bouts of nostalgia.”
“Nostalgia?” Cole grunted. “Try psychobabble! I have no idea what’s going on anymore. Just when I think I’m getting a handle on this Skinner crap, everything gets tossed out the window! Paige takes off, insists on me coming here and passing off some kind of goddamn fruity hair care product as a password.”
“Did she also tell you about the notebook?”
“Yeah. A hound dog notebook.”
Rico nodded and turned onto the highway that led out of Sauget, Illinois, and into St. Louis. “Tell me about what happened in Chicago, and when we get back to Ned’s house I’ll fill you in on shampoo banana.”
“Could you two please stop saying that?” Walter pleaded. “It makes me feel like I’m stuck in some kind of shitty kid’s show.”
For the first time since they’d left the Emerald, Rico grinned. It was an ugly display of large, blocky teeth, but went a long way in easing the confused tension that had filled the SUV. Cole and Prophet told him about the fire and ensuing fight while Rico drove down Interstate 40 and into the Central West End.
The driveway they pulled into was a short walk from Dressel’s Pub, a place that served a plethora of beers and some of the best homemade potato chips Cole had ever tasted. The house connected to that driveway was a charming, if slightly run-down old home filled with crooked shelves piled high with obscure books and pieces of junk that could very well have been collected from some of the most twisted garage sales in the world. The walls were marked with runes meant to protect the inhabitants from harm. Too bad they hadn’t been able to stretch their influence far enough to keep the house’s previous owner alive.
When Rico walked in, he peeled off his jacket and tossed it across the room, where it landed on a slump- backed couch in front of a good-sized TV. Despite all the additional shelves, jars of bits and pieces collected from creatures thought to be extinct or impossible, and weapons belonging to the Skinners who’d come and gone through that building, Cole’s eyes were drawn to one thing: a chipped cement frog sitting on the edge of one shelf, dangling its skinny crossed legs over the side. The paint was faded to a sea-foam green and the eyes were obviously cheap marbles. Cole patted the frog’s knee and thought back to the grizzled old Skinner that had paid good money for the ugly knickknack. “I miss Ned.”
“Yeah, me too,” Rico said as he pounded up the stairs to one of the equally cluttered bedrooms.
A set of pans were on the dining room table. They were the kind used for paint rollers and had been in the same spot the last time Cole was there. As before, they contained a small amount of silvery liquid that looked as if it was just on the verge of hardening into a solid. All he had to do was step up close enough to smell the stuff to know it was the new varnish Daniels had created using melted chips from the Blood Blade. On the other side of the pans, previously hidden from his view, were a few .45 caliber rounds with the same metallic sheen worked into four veins that ran along the lead tip. Cole picked up the bullet, held it up to the light and muttered, “I’ll be damned. Took all this time for one of us to make a silver bullet. Does it work?”
“You’re damn right it works,” Rico said as he stormed back into the room.
“Daniels said the Blood Blade fragments wouldn’t bond with the lead,” Cole pointed out.
“It ain’t bonded with the lead. I injected it into hollow point rounds. Some of it leaks through enough to coat the bullet to let it punch through a shapeshifter’s hide. Once it’s in, the rest should be released into its body when the bullet cracks to pieces. Haven’t had a chance to test it for real yet. I’m working on something else right now.”
“Take it with you,” Cole said. “We’re going to Miami to look in on Paige.”
“No we’re not.”
“She went after the Nymar that walked off with God knows what from Lancroft’s place. Considering the stuff that was identified in there, I hate to think of what could be done with the goodies that nobody knew about. They may even be responsible for what happened after we left. Having that pack tear through so soon after the Nymar left is too much of a coincidence.”
“They could’ve just come because the defenses were dropped,” Rico explained. “Those runes are what kept Lancroft hidden from everyone, including the Full Bloods. I been tellin’ Paige and plenty of others that leaving those things down was a bad idea, but nobody listened.”
Cole grabbed a box of modified bullets and headed for the kitchen. “I’m taking some of this new varnish to give my weapon another treatment while I head back to the Emerald. I thought you were gonna help out, but if you’d rather putz around with your Home Ec projects, I’ll bring Prophet. He can handle himself.”
“You ain’t going anywhere,” Rico snapped. “Either one of ya.”
“Why not?”
The big man threw something onto the table that glanced against one of the paint pans and almost slid off the edge. “Because Paige sent you here for a reason, that’s why not. You got some reading to do.”
Cole approached the table again, looked down and found a set of standard, 8? by 11, spiral-bound notebooks held together by a thick rubber band. The covers were creased and tattered on the edges. He couldn’t make out what was on the other covers, but the top one bore a picture of a large, droopy-eared hound dog. “What the hell is this?” he asked.
“It’s what Paige wanted you to see. She must really think a lot of you. Either that or she’s … just read it while I work. After that we’ll see what comes next.”
Cole pulled the rubber band from around the notebooks and opened the first one. The first words were,
The notebook was full of her writing. All of them were.
They were Paige’s first journals as a Skinner, and the hound dog one was dated eleven and a half years ago.
Chapter Twelve
The girls moved like a pack of wolves skirting the east side of Memorial Stadium, on their way to the residence halls on the other side of Peabody Drive. It was early spring but there was enough of a chill in the air for most of them to don university sweatshirts or layers of fashionably weathered flannel T-shirts bearing faded Pink Floyd album covers or the faces of members of more current bands. The campus was well lit, but none of the girls were concerned with dashing from one pool of yellowed light to another. There were five of them in all. The girl at the front turned around so she was backing onto the street without casting a glance toward the oncoming traffic.
“Holy shit, Paige, look out!” squealed one of the Pink Floyd fans as she grabbed her by the front of her sweatshirt and pulled.
Even with the approaching car’s horn blaring at her, Paige was more amused by the earnest attempt of the other girl’s attempt to save her. “Take it easy, Jenny. You’ll rumple the banana!”
Now that they were on the curb instead of in the street, Jenny looked down at the front of Paige’s sweatshirt. It was baggy and one size too big for her, but had been snug a few years ago when she’d put on her Freshman 15. After losing that weight, Paige kept the shirt and wore it like a second skin. Her tendency to refer to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana as Shampoo Banana always made her roommate giggle and this was no exception.
