covered in thick black tendrils. His eyes locked on Cole and he leapt out from cover.
Cole wasn’t anxious to wade into the gunfire no matter what kind of armor he wore. On the other hand, he also wasn’t about to stay put to provide a snack for the first Nymar to reach him. Switching his spear to his left hand, he drew his .45 and turned so his shoulder and back were facing the Nymar’s end of the hall. “Prophet, move!” he shouted while firing in the general direction of the stairs.
While the Nymar didn’t seem to be afraid of Cole’s pistol, they did take a moment to regroup when he, Rico, and most of the Amriany opened fire at the same time. Drina’s FAMAS made the most impressive chatter as it spat its rounds straight past Cole and into the Nymar that had come at him. He took advantage of the opportunity and hurried to meet with Rico. The Nymar writhed on the floor, clawing at wounds that hissed in reaction to what must have been an Amriany version of the antidote used by the Skinners. The vampire dropped to one knee, clawed at the floor, struggled to move, and finally resigned himself to lifting his gun to fire at Cole. He sent one round thumping into tanned Full Blood leather before Cole impaled him with the metallic end of his spear.
Drina moved forward while firing her FAMAS in three-shot bursts. “Move into the cell!”
“Which cell?” Rico shouted.
Drina and the other three Amriany responded by rushing toward the next-to-last cell at the end of the hall.
While the Amriany fell back, the Nymar surged forward. Five of them filled the hallway. Cole knew there were more, but they must have been hanging back to form a second wave. Three of the Nymar tossed their weapons while closing the distance between them and the Skinners. A few sprouted black claws from the ends of their fingers, and the rest stayed behind to reload their guns.
Cole looked over to Rico to see if he was hurt or had any other instructions. Gripping a pistol in each hand, the big man nodded once and ran out from behind his cover as a primal howl erupted from the back of his throat. What Cole felt next was something that reached down to his toes and dragged him from the temporary safety of his alcove. The closest thing he would ever be able to relate it to was the wild look on the faces of soldiers in Civil War movies who threw themselves into a charge across open ground. Every piece of good sense should have told him to stay put. At the moment that sort of thing was simply washed away by the fight that had become all-encompassing and powerful enough to shove him away from temporary safety.
The Skinners reached the first Nymar within a few powerful strides and both groups collided amid a flurry of bullets, claws, fangs, and sharpened wood. Cole had barely felt the spear shift within his left hand, but it was almost full size by the time he drove it straight into the chest of a Nymar wearing nothing but sneakers and an old set of shorts. The gleaming metallic spearhead cut through the Nymar’s ribs like butter and became wedged before he could pull it back. With his right hand, he pulled the trigger of the .45 and sent a few rounds into the cluster of tendrils within the Nymar’s chest.
The flailing thing at the end of Cole’s spear trapped the wooden weapon in his side. Cursing directly into Cole’s face, he pulled the spearhead out and shoved the Skinner with enough force to slam his back against the brick wall. Cole fired another shot, but his target had already scrambled along the wall using sharpened claws and frantic speed to suspend the laws of gravity. Once there, the Nymar ducked below a backward swing from the spear intended to separate him from his head.
Meanwhile, Rico’s breaths were more like primitive grunts forced out of his lungs as he pumped round after round into the Nymar that attempted to swarm him. Focusing both guns on a tall woman with a ripped gray sweater and solid black eyes, he fired again and again into her chest. When she continued to rake at his eyes, he turned away and said, “Something’s wrong with them, Cole! The treated rounds ain’t working!”
Watching the Nymar in the shorts scurry into the shadows of the alcove he’d used for cover less than a minute ago, Cole saw the vampire’s tendrils swell into thick bands that were almost wide enough to give him a solid black color. Once the Nymar was fully in the shadows, the tendrils allowed it to blend almost seamlessly into the darkness. “It’s like the one I found in that other cell,” he said.
Prophet stuck his head out from the spot where the Amriany had led him. “Not that cell!
“What?” Rico snapped.
Between the gunfire, the hissing Nymar, and the close confines of the hallway, it was becoming impossible for Cole to tell what the hell was going on. One of the Nymar jumped on him from behind and raked both sets of claws across his shoulders toward his neck. His coat had a large enough collar to offer some protection, but he knew even that wouldn’t save him for long. The Nymar’s claws were supernatural weapons, which meant they would eventually get through the leather just as they would if the hide were still attached to a Full Blood.
Even with all the other noise around him, Cole could still hear the thrum from upstairs and feel the surge of power from the temple above. Reinforcements had arrived.
“Both of you get in here,” Prophet shouted. “Now!”
The Nymar in the stairwell stepped out, raised their weapons and fired. Cole was overtaken by a rush of adrenaline as he lowered his head and hurried into the alcove, where something waited for him. He couldn’t see the vampire at first, but soon caught sight of a shadow that separated itself from the rest.
Rather than try to stab it, Cole swept the weapon back and forth in arcs that went high and low. His first swing sent a shower of sparks from the metal-treated spearhead, which made a quick source of light that helped him figure out where the Nymar was. By the time he swung the forked end of the weapon, the Nymar had sprung up to grab onto the wall with both sets of claws and then launch itself down onto him.
He barely brought his spear up fast enough to catch the Nymar before its claws took his face off. The shaft thumped solidly into the Nymar’s torso while it tried to slash at him with his claws. Cole angled the spear so the Nymar’s weight sent it toppling from the alcove and into the hall. As soon as it was down, he drove the spearhead straight into its chest.
The source of their power and hunger for blood was an eel-like spore attached to the heart. Simply staking the heart would do some damage, but not enough to put the Nymar down for good. This time, however, the Nymar barely seemed to react to being impaled. Its body pivoted around the tip of the spear so its feet could force his body upward. Once it was standing, the Nymar grabbed the spear handle in an attempt to pull it out. Cole leaned against his weapon, scraping the vampire against the wall so its heels skidded against the floor. When the gunfire started up again, he used the Nymar as a living blockade while crossing to the other side of the hall.
“Hope you got a plan over there,” Cole shouted.
Rico answered by leaning into the hall and opening up with the Sig Sauer. He wasn’t alone. Both Drina and Tobar stepped out as well, adding their own gunfire to the storm raging up and down the hallway. Tobar’s pistol didn’t throw nearly as many rounds through the air, but the sound of them reminded Cole of a truck hitting the ground after being dropped from a third-floor parking garage. A barechested Nymar woman caught one of those rounds between her small breasts and the impact slammed her against the wall. When she reached a dark patch between light sources, her tendrils widened to make her more of a person-shaped blob within the shadows. Tobar’s aim was good enough for the next round to carve a tunnel through her that destroyed her heart and liquefied anything attached to it.
“Hit the lights,” one of the Nymar said from the stairwell. The others responded by shifting their fire upward until most of the recessed bulbs within their range had been shattered.
Cole had seen things turn invisible before, but this was something else. The Nymar’s tendrils allowed them to blend into the darkness with a practical camouflage that, combined with their speed and climbing ability, made them a whole new kind of dangerous.
Some of the light from the other end of the hall made it to Cole’s position, but it wasn’t enough. The vampires simply became part of the darkness and crept in on the Skinners like death itself. Drina fired her assault rifle, lighting up the corridor in a fiery strobe that illuminated a Nymar for a fraction of a second while also burning the image of the others into Cole’s retinas.
“This place is ours now, Skinners,” one of the Nymar hissed.
“Rico?” Cole asked while holding his spear at the ready.
“Get over here,” he called out from a cell farther down the hall.
Cole felt as if the weight of the cement floor above him, along with the little house above that, was pressing down on the back of his neck. It was completely dark at the far end of the hallway, but he could still make out a few shapes moving like wraiths through a dream. There was movement upstairs as well, as he joined Drina and Rico at
