Most of the crowd panicked and scattered like a flock of birds flushed from a bush. The four that remained came at Rico and Cole with ultraquick steps or leapt to collide with them amid a flurry of scraping black claws. All four of the newly revealed Nymar were marked by the thick tendrils Cole had seen on the one in Lancroft’s dungeon. Unlike the creature that had been left on that floor to die, these spore were alive and well within their hosts, and it was clear they provided more than simple camouflage on a shadowy night. As the stripes widened, the Nymar became stronger and faster. Cole could feel the impact of their fists and forearms even as he blocked them with his spear. As far as that was concerned, he’d barely been quick enough to draw the weapon before the first Nymar was upon him.
Rico’s Sig Sauer thumped once, its powerful blast muffled by the body of the Nymar in front of him. A hole erupted from the vampire’s back and was quickly closed by ribbonlike tendrils. Without pausing to acknowledge the slightest bit of discomfort from the gunshot wound, that Nymar pulled back one clawed hand and drove the sharp talons straight down into Rico’s shoulder.
Where anyone else might have panicked, Rico wrapped his free arm around the Nymar’s torso. That way, when he reached the front of the Blood Parlor, his momentum drove the Nymar through the thick glass of the front door and carried him inside.
On the street, people had divided into two camps. The first group stopped to see what was happening after retreating a safe distance, and the second group was intent on putting the Blood Parlor behind them whether they had a car or just a pair of frantic feet to make it happen. What surprised Cole most when he got a chance to notice the crowds from the corner of his eye was the fact that more of them seemed frightened by the spear in his hands than the gun in Rico’s. Welcome to Chicago.
The coat held up better than expected when a Nymar scratched and scraped at it as if she didn’t quite know how to use the claws that stretched out from her fingers. Having been through more than his share of ineffectual sparring sessions, Cole recognized inexperience well enough. He twisted the spear sideways and used it as a crowbar to lever the Nymar off him before she started doing any real damage. As soon as she was pried loose, he used the metallic tip to open a gash straight across the upper edge of her breastbone. When she fell, Cole swapped the spear for his .45 and fired two shots into her heart.
She was still reaching up for him when the convulsions started, but the antidote on the bullets had no reaction to her spore. She bared all three sets of fangs in a feral warning gesture as Cole descended to drive his spear into her chest. His aim was true, and soon all of her muscles strained to prolong the inevitable. Cole was getting used to the sight of it, which was the hardest thing for him to accept. Even so, he moved on.
Something tugged at his shoulder, so he twisted around with his elbow in what would have been a vicious blow if there had been anyone there to catch it. Instead, his arm became snagged in what felt like a mix of heavy rubber bands and wet silk that led back to the Nymar he’d shot. He grabbed the slick black strands and pulled them from where they’d gotten snagged in his coat by hooklike claws. The Nymar screamed in pain as her body was reduced to a dried husk.
Paige was at the front door of the bar, holding onto another Nymar by his collar. The machete was in her other hand, and from what Cole could tell, it was buried in the Nymar’s gut all the way to its hilt. Inside the club, a man held a machine gun that could have fit inside a shoe box with a minimum of disassembling. Recognizing the powerful MAC-10, Cole ran straight at Paige to wrap her up within the flap of his coat in what was either going to be his last act of well-intentioned stupidity or one of the coolest superhero moments of his life.
Bullets thumped on the Full Blood hide like hail bouncing off a leather tent. The impacts hit the Skinners hard enough to raise several bruises and welts along their arms, shoulders, and backs, but none of the rounds made it through. Just as Cole was about to give voice to the excitement he felt after flicking death in the nose, one of the last rounds in the MAC-10?s clip nipped a piece from the top of his left ear.
“Thanks,” Paige said as she allowed the Nymar to finally slide off the end of her machete. “Movin’ on.”
The man with the MAC-10 was Astin. He owned the bar beneath the Blood Parlor, and the last time Cole had checked, hadn’t been seeded with the Nymar spore. He still worked his primped hair and smooth dark skin as if that was the only weapon he needed. Of course, the MAC-10 didn’t hurt. Moving behind the bar so he could reload, Astin turned toward a set of stairs leading to the upper floor and shouted, “They’re here! They’re here!” in a Middle Eastern accent that would have sounded cultured even if he’d been calling out bingo numbers.
Paige pushed away from under Cole’s coat and charged like a bull through a red cape. He followed. The bar was filled with the bright glow of house lights that even made the neon beer signs harder to see. Gaudy but similarly bright red light was cast from upstairs, giving the group of Nymar that rushed into the bar even more of a demonic appearance. None of them showed any visible markings, and so far none had sparked the slightest hint of a warning from Cole’s scars.
The first one to make it to the bottom of the stairs was greeted by a storm of lead that knocked the young man completely off his feet. Black tendrils spewed up from the bullet holes amid a spray of oily Nymar blood. Rico stood up from behind an overturned table, pinning the Nymar he’d used as a battering ram to the floor with his free hand. “They all got that new shit in ‘em!” he shouted. “The stuff from Lancroft’s place!”
The Nymar to descend from the second floor grabbed onto the walls and tore out chunks of plaster as they pulled themselves up to drop onto the Skinners like bombs. Cole fired again and again, hitting one of the Nymar in a chest bared to expose a webbed pattern of black tendrils that shrank down to almost invisible lines once the vampire hit the brighter light of the downstairs room. Even after being hit several times with the treated rounds, the Nymar kept coming.
Cole’s aim improved as his hands stopped shaking. He no longer had to try and convince himself he was in one of his games, as he had the first few times he fired at a living thing. He’d been brought around to the line of thought that if Nymar were indeed living, it was better to remedy that situation before one of them tore his head off and drank from the stump. From then on, putting the vampires down had become a whole lot easier.
Paige buried her machete into the side of one Nymar’s neck with enough force to knock it over. When it gripped the horrific wound with both hands, she fired at another Nymar. Enough of her rounds hit home to get it out of her way as she vaulted the bar and placed the blood-smeared edge of her machete against Astin’s throat. “Where’s Stephanie?”
Astin’s skin was the color of perfectly ground cappuccino. He opened his mouth to reveal perfect white teeth and the upper two sets of Nymar fangs. “She came looking for you earlier,” he replied. “Must’ve missed her.”
Sirens blared in the distance. They were too far away for Cole to see the police cars rolling down East Superior, but he knew it wouldn’t take them long to arrive. “You had a plan for getting out of here, right?” When he didn’t get a response, he moved over to where Rico was huddled with his back against another overturned table. “What’s the goddamn escape plan?”
“Don’t need one,” Rico said while slapping a fresh magazine into the Sig Sauer.
“So we just go to jail for shooting this place up? Sounds on par with everything else that’s been going on.”
“The bloodsuckers always have escape routes. We follow the rats into their own holes and go from there.”
As if on cue, footsteps rumbled overhead and stomped down another set of stairs toward the rear of the building.
“See?” Rico said through his blocky grin. “And how much you wanna bet the head bitch herself is leading that charge?”
At the bar, Paige used her machete to force Astin to turn with her as she looked in the direction of those footsteps. “What did she do to you?”
Astin smiled as if he was talking to a sultry voice over a $3.99 per minute phone call when he replied, “Nothing I didn’t want.”
“These Nymar are different. Explain now or I cut you open, pull that spore out through the hole and figure it out myself.”
Astin’s smile abruptly lost its confidence. “The spore’s different. Stephanie got it from some other Nymar who came into town the other night.”
“Where’s the other Nymar?”
“Don’t know. They stopped by, made their delivery, and left. The man with her was a Skinner,” he added venomously. “Seemed like he had a whole list of cities he wanted to hand over to us.”
Now that she was closer, Paige could just make out the thin lines creeping up from beneath Astin’s collar. Light beamed across his face, so she shoved him into a narrow strip of shadow created by a tall shelf of presumably expensive liquor. The shaded section of his face was quickly marred by tendrils that widened until they were slightly
