to smolder. Water sprayed against the back of Cole’s head and poured off his shoulders as he leaned down to tug at the collar of the Nymar lying on the ground. The man’s shirt was open at the neck to reveal a plain white undershirt wet enough to be plastered to his chest and bloody enough for the stains to soak almost all the way through.
“This guy’s human!” Cole shouted.
Rico stood so he could see both of his two partners. The lights were still on inside the little security office, so it wasn’t difficult to keep track of Paige. “What? Just come on!”
“The others show their markings in this light. Some are already drying up! This one’s just bleeding and it’s just red blood. He’s human!”
Cole was still looking down at the sucking chest wounds when Rico grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him to his feet. “It don’t matter if he’s a robot sent from the future,” he said. “We gotta go.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The security office was about half the size of one of the private bedrooms. It was packed to the rafters with television monitors, desks, a few cabinets, and enough computer equipment to record all the activities of Steph’s girls and their clients, store it, and broadcast it to pay sites all across the Internet. If ignorance was bliss, the subscribers to those sites who were ignorant about the true nature of vampires had been spending the last few years blissfully lapping up anything connected to a sexy face with pointed teeth. Even as the Blood Parlor burned, the computers hummed and chugged to spit out their last bits of programming. All of them, that is, apart from the ones that were empty cases placed to hide the escape hatch used for a quick getaway.
Paige stood at the entrance, hesitantly peeking through the opening, which was narrower than the computer towers used to hide it. When she stuck her head into the dark, she was barely able to pull it out before it was taken off by a quick burst of gunfire. “Yep,” she said. “There’s still a few down there.”
Rico and Cole headed to the back of the room and stood with her. While Rico watched the hall to make sure no stragglers were going to take one last shot at them, Cole took in the sight of all of the technical hardware within the office. “There could be some valuable stuff in here,” he said.
As Paige looked at him, one more gunshot was fired from the bottom of whatever was on the other side of the narrow hatch. “You want to start hacking computers? Sure. Go right ahead. I’ll make sure the Nymar or cops don’t get us, and Rico will take care of the fire. Take your freaking time.”
As she spoke, Cole moved among the computers. “Thought you’d be a little more concerned about the dead people we’re leaving behind. Not Nymar. People.”
“Nothing we can do about them now. We stick to the plan.”
“Amen to that, sister!” Rico said as he holstered the Sig Sauer and pushed past both of them. When a few shots blasted from the first floor, Rico answered them with a suicidal yell and a blast from the shotgun he’d saved for the occasion.
“Steph may be a lot of things, but she’s not stupid,” Paige said. “These computers are probably already wiped out by now.”
“It’s not that easy to just—”
Silencing him with a wave of her hand that occupied the top of the charts for Cole’s biggest pet peeves in his new life, Paige took another peek through the hatch. “Let’s just get the hell out of here. Those bodies and everything else in here will burn before anyone can stop it anyway.”
Behind them, from what must have been the top of the stairs leading up from the bar, a group of men shouted orders back and forth as high pressure water hoses were sprayed at the source of the fire. Sirens blared and someone on a loudspeaker urged a crowd to please step away from the fire engine.
“God damn it,” Paige muttered.
Leading the way through the hatch, she had to fight to keep her footing on a ramp that led straight down to a black wall. After moving the hidden door into place behind him, Cole slid sideways down the angled surface. At the bottom of the ramp was another ramp, angled just as steeply in the opposite direction and went deeper than the first floor. Rico was already down there, using his back to prop open what looked to be a heavier sliding door. He held the shotgun at waist level to cover the space in front of him, but the sweat on his brow and the strained expression on his ugly face was enough to let Paige and Cole know they needed to hurry. After they rushed past him, Rico hopped aside and let the door slam shut with a solid thump. “I lost sight of ‘em,” he said, “but it ain’t like there’s a lot of places they could have gone.”
Cole had figured that much out on his own. A musty passage of wooden beams and red brick stretched out before him that reeked of Chicago history. Dirty floorboards rattled beneath the Skinners as they hurried along a wide corridor lit by yellowed bulbs in outdated fixtures that must have been built beneath the city block over sixty years ago. On both sides of the passage were thick wooden racks that might well have held vats of mildly toxic beer for one of Al Capone’s birthday parties. When he turned around to get a quick look at the door they’d just used, all he could see was a cracked brick wall.
The Skinners ran in a triangle formation. Paige took the point and wasn’t about to be overtaken by the other two. Rico kept up for fifty yards or so of the straightaway but got winded a lot quicker when the corridor twisted and turned through a series of low passages and heavy doors that had to be lifted, pushed aside, or ducked under in order to proceed. After rounding a quick sequence of three turns, they came upon another straight section of tunnel that had the same wooden cave feel as the entrance. By now Cole was certain they were underground. The air smelled like mildew and damp soil. Sounds of traffic were muffled to a degree that could only be obtained by tons of concrete and packed earth.
The Nymar who’d clouded his mind upstairs stood at the farthest end of that passage. Even from a distance, Cole could see that her eyes were fixed on them. He couldn’t feel a mental haze yet, but a distinctly foreign touch of another presence was reaching into his head. Paige drew her baton and willed it to turn into its bladed form as she quickened her pace to get to the Nymar.
The scars on Cole’s palms started to itch. That meant there were Nymar in the vicinity that hadn’t been modified by the new spore. Since the drops in his eyes had worn off, he focused on that feeling, used it to zero in on where the vampires might be hiding, then ran to catch up to Paige.
The Nymar that gripped onto the ceiling directly above him had remained hidden thanks to the inky blackness of its camouflaged skin and the thick shadows filling the curved upper portion of the tunnel above the Skinners’ heads. It reached down to grab Cole’s collar and pull him off his feet. “Should have taken your chances in the fire,” it hissed.
Even though he could feel the vampire’s breath against his face, Cole had no idea if it was male or female. What little he could see of its body blended into the shadows and was further hidden by the dust shaken loose from all the activity above the tunnels at street level.
He pointed his gun at the Nymar, but the weapon was viciously torn from his hand. He kicked both legs but felt nothing solid beneath him, so he curled his lower body up to make it easier to reach his spear.
“No, no,” the Nymar whispered as it sank its claws into his flesh.
A pair of thick arms he knew had to be Rico’s wrapped around his waist to pull him down, but no matter how hard Rico pulled, he couldn’t break the Nymar’s grip. “He’s got you by the neck!” Rico snarled. “You gotta break out of that so I can get you down.”
Cole tried to respond but could barely draw enough breath to keep moving. Rico was right. The Nymar’s thin bony arm had encircled his throat just beneath the chin, and its other hand was grabbing his shoulder to sink its claws in through a canvas section of his coat. As his vision became smeared by a wave of murky darkness, he saw that Paige had made it to the end of the hall.
She didn’t even bother looking back.
As soon as Paige closed the distance between them, she took a swing at the Nymar woman she knew was Hope and hit nothing but empty air.
“I don’t know what surprises me more,” Hope said as she leaned back to let the weapon sail by. “The fact that you’ve become a Skinner or the fact that it’s taken this long to find you.”
Rather than try to follow the Nymar’s flickering movements, Paige looked directly into eyes that were green
