“Cover me,” Rico said as he drew his pistol, then pressed a shoulder against the wall and descended.
Cole aimed at a spot ahead of Rico, searched for any motion along the hallway and prayed he could differentiate between a threat and some innocent rat scurrying from one hiding spot to another. Prophet was right beside him with his own pistol held in a two-handed grip.
“Who’s down there?” Rico called out. “You need help?”
Cole could hear at least two different voices echoing from farther down the hall. Having been down there enough times to picture the layout in his head, he guessed that the speakers were somewhere between the far end of the hall and the cell containing the body of the Nymar with the strange markings.
Continuing to the bottom, Rico struck a defensive crouch as soon as he could get a clean look down the hall. “Cole, you know these guys?”
Cole’s heart thumped in his chest as he moved down the stairs. At the bottom he found a pair of figures standing in the hall. One was a man of average height with a stocky build and muscular frame. Even in the shadows his skin had a dusky hue. The other was a woman who’d sought cover in one of the many alcoves along the hallway. Her paler skin stood out against the dark blond hair that seemed to shine in the sparse light thrown off by bulbs encased in glass and wire casing. A backward baseball cap kept her hair from her eyes, allowing her to sight along the barrel of what looked to be a FAMAS assault rifle. It was an ugly weapon with an extended barrel and a structure along the top that looked like an oversized handle. The only reason Cole recognized it was because he preferred using that weapon to spray 7.5mm rounds all over any map in the Sniper Ranger death matches that had all but consumed his old life in Seattle. The man carried a small cannon in one hand, which he pointed at Rico as he thumbed back the hammer.
“Cole?” Rico said as he shifted nervously within the line of fire of the two they’d come upon.
“Never seen them before,” he replied. “But there were a lot of people coming through here. They could still be—”
“They’ll be dead unless they lower those weapons,” Prophet barked with an edge to his voice that had been put there during years of storming through fugitives’ doors and demanding full compliance with whatever warrant he was serving at the time.
Not only did his warning have an effect on Cole, but it did its job with the other two as well. Both the man and woman lowered their guns without relinquishing their grips. It might not have taken much for them to get into firing position again, but tensions had eased for the moment.
“You’re Skinners?” the woman asked.
“That’s right,” Rico replied. “And my guess is that you ain’t. You also ain’t Nymar, so who the hell are you?”
The man extended a hand toward the woman. Only then did she take her left hand off the bottom of the FAMAS so the rifle was allowed to hang down at her side by the strap that kept it attached to her shoulder. The man then peeled open the front of his sandy brown jacket to reveal a double rig holster strapped beneath his arms. “I am Tobar,” he said with a thick, vaguely Russian accent. “This is Adrina.”
The last time he’d heard someone speak in that accent, Cole recalled, he was sitting in the office of the man who owned Bunn’s Lounge. Bunn’s had been the pinnacle of Dryadcentric adult entertainment in the St. Louis area, but was now a charred shell with a Condemned sign stuck to its front door. The club owner kept in touch with Cole and Paige, but only to scream unintelligible insults into their voice mail in hopes of getting some compensation for the damage done by a rampaging pack of local Mongrels.
“Do you know Christov?” Cole asked.
The other two were a ways down the hall, but Cole could see the questioning looks they shot at each other.
“They’re not Christov’s,” Rico said as he tucked his combat model Sig Sauer .45 away. “They’re Gypsies.”
Even clearer than the confusion they’d displayed before, both of the strangers down the hall now showed angry resentment on their faces. “And you are ignorant Americans,” Adrina said.
Tobar strode forward and displayed a set of perfectly white teeth marred by a few perfectly aligned gaps. “More like cowboys, Drina. These three probably think we all are fortune-tellers and thieves. Is that it?”
Now Cole could see through Tobar’s jovial act. He was testing them and probably ready to follow up on whatever insult he’d taken from Rico’s words. Stepping forward and putting on a friendly, oblivious smirk, Cole said, “I’m just trying to match accents. The only Gypsies I’ve ever seen are in old movies. Same with cowboys, though. I don’t get out much.”
Tobar studied Cole carefully. Adrina did the same. “We’re called Amriany,” he said. “It’s no secret among you Skinners, but none of you seem to care about us unless you’re stealing the weapons made by our finest craftsmen.”
“Those Blood Blades weren’t stolen,” Rico was quick to say.
“Then you crafted them yourself?”
“No. We heard they were available and sent someone to pick them up. It’s not our fault one of your people was careless enough to lose two of the damn things.”
“One of our people,” Adrina snapped. “You talk like you know anything about our people.”
“Okay, okay,” Cole said. “You guys have some sort of grudge. We get it. How about you settle it some other time? Right now, why don’t you tell us how the hell you got here. Did you use the Skipping Temple?”
“The Dryad Bridge?” Adrina asked as if referring to a back road that led straight to the armpit of the universe. “Hardly. Unlike you Skinners, we don’t rely on the creatures we hunt to go about our business.”
“Really? Is that why you’re here sneaking around the basement of one of the Skinner elders?”
Rico chuckled and gave Cole an approving nod. “He’s got a point. What brings you two to this neck of the woods? Slumming?”
Just as Rico was hitting his stride, another man and woman stepped out from alcoves at the end of the hall. They were smaller in stature than the two who’d already made themselves known and kept their arms at their sides where they could be seen. “We came to take back what was stolen from our clans throughout the last several generations,” the man said. He walked down the hall, entering a pool of dim yellow light to reveal an athletic frame wrapped in the same sort of simple, rough clothing worn by the others. In fact, all four of the Amriany were filthy. Their clothes were covered in dirt and their faces were smeared with it, but it wasn’t a sign of neglect or even poverty. The dirt was fresh.
“Who the hell is that?” Prophet asked.
“It’s all right,” Rico told him. “Amriany travel in groups and never show their true numbers right away. You see one or two, and there’s always more lurking around somewhere. Kind of like—”
“Watch how you finish that sentence,” the man at the far end of the hall warned. “Before you call us something you regret, know our names. I am Gunari, and this,” he said while motioning to the second woman to reveal herself in that hallway, “is Nadya. Were you friends of Jonah Lancroft?”
“I was with him right until the end,” Cole said.
“Then perhaps you know how much he stole from us over the years. If not for Amriany knowledge, he would never have gotten the runes to protect this place or imprison the beasts he captured. I doubt he would have been able to hunt any of the demons he did without borrowing from us.”
“Lancroft was a hell of a Skinner,” Rico said. “You won’t convince me he was a hack. Why don’t we skip whatever else you were gonna say along those lines and get down to how you got here.”
“Our methods are our own,” Tobar replied.
“Okay. Then why the hell are you in the U.S.? Just to reclaim some property?”
It didn’t take a master of human behavior to figure how the conversation would go from there. In a matter of a few syllables Rico had the other four screaming at him from the other end of the hallway. Accusations flew back and forth, but nobody reached for their weapons. On the contrary, everyone was more willing to set their guns down so they could use their bare hands. Cole had never been more grateful to hear his phone ring. The tone wasn’t very loud, but the acoustics in the hall did wonders.
“Who the hell is that?” Rico asked.
Cole looked at the phone’s screen and said, “It’s MEG.”
“I didn’t even think that phone would get reception down here.”
“Neither did I.”
“Go ahead and take it.” Glaring at the other four, Rico added, “I can handle these guys on my own.”
