Skinners branched away from the beaten path, found a dead end, and holed up there for the next few hours.
Cole sat with his back against yet another dirty brick wall, pulling in breaths that felt like wet cement and letting them out in gasps. It helped to take shallower gulps of air, but his eyesight remained blurred around the edges.
“How you doin’ over there?” Rico asked.
“Still hurts.”
“How bad?”
“Like there’s a fucking rock swimming around in my chest and nuzzling my heart! That bad enough for you, Doctor?”
The big man leaned against a wall with half an unlit cigarette clenched between his teeth. He held the Sig Sauer in his right hand, casually pointing it at the Nymar who’d hung Cole from the ceiling. All this time, Rico had been studying the Nymar’s face, paying close attention to the markings that ran up along both cheeks. Whenever the Nymar moved, Rico used his boot, fist, or the side of the pistol to crack it in the head. If not for the strips of burlap and knotted trash bags he’d found to bind her ankles and wrists, the bloodsucker still might have gotten away.
“The spore’s still movin’?”
Cole thought that if he had any psychic ability whatsoever, the focus in his glare would have popped Rico’s head wide open.
“You’ve had enough of both to do the job. Paige is fine. You should be too.” Biting down on the cigarette as if he meant to chew it as a snack, Rico squatted so he could stare into the Nymar’s eyes while using the Sig Sauer to pin her head to the wall she was leaning against. “What did you do to him?”
“You know wh-what I did,” she stammered.
“Why isn’t the spore dying?”
“Maybe your friend is too weak to fight it.”
Rico pulled in a deep breath. When he let it out, his face became colder than a mask cut into an iceberg. “You know we’re Skinners, right?” he asked while jamming the barrel of his gun against one of the Nymar’s eyes.
“Y-Yes.”
“Then you know what we do to any bloodsuckers we find feeding in public.”
Her markings fluttered beneath her skin, making her face seem like a bad television signal. When she opened her mouth to speak, the top set of fangs stretched out reflexively. “I know.”
“Good,” Rico said calmly. But any semblance of calm instantly drained from him when he leaned against the pistol and clamped his free hand around her throat. “You don’t have any fucking idea what we do to Nymar that try to kill us. If you did, you would have never made a stupid fucking move like the one you made tonight. Were you one of the ones that burnt our place down?”
“No! I don’t—”
Rico took his hand away from her throat, reached into his jacket and pulled out a knife that he snapped open with a flip of his wrist. The clattering handle fell into place to reveal a three inch blade that he stuck up under the ridge of her eyebrow to draw a trickle of oily blood. “I can go two ways from here. Down to flip your eye out or straight in to gouge your brain. That second one takes some effort, but I’ve got a whole lot of pent-up energy that’s in need of direction.”
The Nymar flailed against her bonds until she finally snapped one wrist free. Rico took the fight from her by poking the blade in a little more. She couldn’t blink. She couldn’t move. She could no longer even shift her weight out of fear of moving the blade inside her.
Cole watched the process silently. He wanted to protest, but a wave of pain from the living kidney stone moving within his chest erased that impulse completely. He managed to pull himself up, swallow the urge to launch himself into a coughing fit, and pull the spear from its harness. Dropping to one knee as the lump sought refuge somewhere in the vicinity of his left lung, he drove the metallic spearhead into the floor near the Nymar’s leg and snarled, “Tell me what you did!”
“You’d better do what he says, honey,” Paige said as she jogged around the corner and approached the dead end. “Every one of your friends is gone.”
“Nobody’s gonna help you,” Rico said. “That means I get to help myself.” He only moved the blade a fraction of a millimeter, but that was enough to get the Nymar’s legs scraping against the floor.
“There’ll be more coming,” the Nymar said.
Cole’s voice was a haggard croak when he asked, “Who’ll be coming?”
“Hope and the others with her.”
“Do you mean the rest of those Toronto assholes like Bobby and Tru?” Paige asked.
“They’re the ones who make the rounds, but any of the Nymar who’ve joined the evolution will be happy to come along.”
“Bunch of goddamn bloodsuckers think they’re revolutionaries?” Rico scoffed.
The Nymar wasn’t squirming so much anymore. Either she’d accepted her fate or the threadlike tendrils slipping out from between her eyeball and socket were comforting her in some way. The black filaments snaked out along Rico’s blade, wrapping around it to try and pull it out of her. “Not revolution,” she said. “Evolution. If we don’t get what we want from that one, we’ll get it from another one of you and add it to what we took from Lancroft.”
“Get what from us?”
By now the tendrils snaking from the Nymar’s eye had formed a thick coating around the tip of Rico’s blade. He tried to move it again, but her eyeball was protected by the black barricade. If she felt any discomfort from the ordeal, her spore must have taken care of that too.
Paige stormed over. As her shadow was cast across the Nymar’s face, the tendrils there widened to form a slender striped pattern flowing directly toward the blade in her eye socket. “Give me a good target, Rico,” she said while digging an antidote syringe from a leather case in her pocket.
“Surely.”
Once he’d levered the blade down a bit, Paige held the needle over the mass of tendrils. “I knew you bloodsuckers could be ruthless, but now you’re turning multiseeding into common practice?” Always the teacher, she looked over to Cole and said, “She’s got more than one spore.”
“I don’t give a shit if she’s got more than one head!” Cole replied. “Get this thing out of me!”
“Hope’s leading this group and she’s not from around here,” Paige said to the Nymar. “What’s she doing?”
“You won’t have any luck with that needle, you stupid bitch,” the Nymar spat.
“I’ve been meaning to make absolutely sure of that. Where else would she and the others go?”
“You’re the ones that need to find somewhere to go! The cops are working for us now and they’re out for your heads. After they see what you left behind in the Blood Parlor, you pricks will be at the top of their wanted lists.”
Paige shrugged casually and jabbed the skinny needle into the tendrils. Judging by the way the Nymar screamed, those were some very tender strands. It was all Rico could do to hold her down before she bucked hard enough to force his blade all the way to the back of her skull.
“Talk or I pump this shit in,” Paige warned.
“Go ahead, you stupid Skinner whore!”
“I’m not kidding!”
“Neither am I!” the Nymar screamed. “Fuck yourself and your mother!”
Rico tightened his grip on her neck. “You should become real helpful real fast or we’ll lose interest. We got better things to do than screw around.”
“Suck your friend’s dick,” she snarled. “At least he’ll get some fun before the spore takes root.”
“Fine,” Paige said as she pressed the plunger of the needle down.
The Nymar tensed and pulled in a sharp breath. Her eyelids fluttered as much as they could considering her predicament, but soon she let out a breath and started to laugh. “Told you to do better than that, bitch.”
Paige pressed the plunger down even harder to drain the last drop of antidote from the syringe. When it didn’t make a difference, she looked over to Rico and said, “Now we know for certain this stuff doesn’t work on the new ones.”
“All right,” the big man grunted. “Plan B. I stick this blade all the way into your brain and then cut your heart out. Thanks to all that black spaghetti inside of you, I’m betting you’ll feel every second of it.” He pressed the blade
