Paige shook her head and calmly avoided a collision by less than an inch. “I suppose they’re about due. Last one I ever read about was … damn, I don’t even know. Ninety years ago? More? How long do you think that Nymar was sitting in that cell in Lancroft’s basement before his chest was ripped open?”
Rico looked straight ahead but didn’t see the highway or the other cars Paige was narrowly avoiding. Either that or he was unaffected by such common threats to his life. “You think the old man had that Nymar trapped as a way to keep the species from changing?”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“It sure isn’t. And Lancroft would wanna keep that carrier alive to study it.” The way Rico snapped his fingers and sat up, all he was missing was the oversized lightbulb above his head. “He mighta used that sucker to develop the Mud Flu! I’ll be damned!”
“Since I’m already damned,” Cole grunted, “would you mind focusing on me until this thing stops burrowing inside of my goddamn chest?”
“Don’t be such a drama queen,” Paige said. “As soon as I get us somewhere safe, you’ll be the center of attention. How’s that sound?”
“Where are we going?”
She answered the question, but her voice was drowned out by a groan that emanated from Cole’s gut and filled his entire body. His jaw was clenched shut so tightly that he didn’t even know if any sound was able to leak out. The spore had found a new place to dig and was exploring freely between his lungs. Alternating between not being able to breathe and not wanting to nudge the burrower inside of him, he gripped the bench seat and stomped his foot so hard against the floorboard that he thought he might stop the car Flintstones style.
Rico turned around and lunged over the passenger seat to grab him, but Cole didn’t even feel the big man take hold. He was falling into the abyss that he’d been trying so hard to avoid. What he felt next didn’t hurt as bad as the last wave, but only because it sent him into unconsciousness.
“Hang on!” Rico shouted. “Just a little longer!”
Cole might have been able to cling to the waking world, but at that moment he just didn’t want to.
His senses returned as if they were attached to a dimmer switch, slowly filling him up before becoming harsh. The pressure he felt on his chest was warm and not too heavy. It shifted slightly, reminding him of a pleasant series of dreams he’d been having ever since he grew closer to Paige. The pain inside him had stopped moving. A sharp pinch jabbed inside his chest. Nothing new. It helped that there was still enough fog in his head for him to view the discomfort from a distance.
“He’s waking up.”
That was Rico’s voice.
Or maybe not.
It was definitely a male. Now that his vision was clearing, Cole could tell the weight on his chest was a figure and the figure was definitely not male. If not for the shorter hair, he might have thought it was Paige. The curves were the same. Just letting his eyes wander along the swell of her breasts and the tight musculature of her arms and shoulders made him think of so many things. Then he remembered Paige’s hair. She’d cut it.
“Oh,” Cole sighed. “It is you.”
“Yeah,” Paige said. “It’s me.”
“What are you doing?”
She reached for something over her head. Maybe she’d gotten him somewhere like a hospital or some sort of safe house that had the equipment needed to remove the spore. He hadn’t heard about any equipment like that, but that didn’t mean Skinners didn’t have it. They had a lot of cool things he didn’t know about.
Paige was straddling his chest.
She was looking down at him.
She wasn’t about to let anything happen to him.
It felt nice.
“Cole,” She said.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
The piece of equipment in her hand extended to a point while giving off a low creaking sound. When he focused on it, he realized it was the stake she’d taken from Lancroft’s place to replace the sickle she’d lost in her fight with him. The weapon only had a few coats of varnish worked into the grain, and the thorns were still freshly cut to bond with her. It would take a while for her to craft it into anything nearly as versatile as her old baton, but her will was strong enough to narrow the whittled-down point into something sharp enough to punch a hole through him as well as the floor beneath him. Judging by the way she poised her arm above him, that’s exactly what she intended to do.
Cole forced his eyes open and fought to see through them. It took him long enough to wake up under normal circumstances, but his current state only added more layers of muck to slog through before he finally could see clearly. The surge of adrenaline snapped him to the point where he made out every carved line on the stake in Paige’s hand as well as every glistening tear running down her cheeks.
“Whoa!” he said. “What the …
A pair of thick hands pushed his shoulders to the floor and held him there. “Damn it, Paige. I told you we shoulda done this when he was still out.”
“I know what you told me,” she said.
“You want me to do it?”
Her face took on a ferocity that Cole had only seen directed at an attacker. Even being on the periphery of that wasn’t the most comfortable place. “No!” she snarled. “If it’s gotta be done, I’m the one that’s going to do it.” As she shifted her eyes back to Cole, the fiery quality melted away and was replaced by a soft, chocolaty color he’d admired so many times before.
“The spore is attaching to your heart, sweetie,” she said. “We gave you all the antidote we can give you. We injected you with enough serum to put you on cloud nine for a week. None of it’s doing any good. That Nymar was right. There’s something different about this one.”
“But if I had a sample,” someone squawked from another part of the room, “there are tests to be done and maybe—”
“Can you run the tests before this thing takes root?” Rico asked.
A rounded face looked down at Cole. It scrunched up in a contemplative scowl, allowing his mouth to hang open and one of his top fangs to slide lazily from his gums. A few strands of hair hung down, which he swiped back with one hand to plaster it onto a scalp already marked by black tendrils crossing from one side to another like a tattoo of a bad comb-over.
“Daniels?” Cole muttered.
The Nymar had worked with the Skinners on several occasions, trading his services as a scientist and status as a vampire for protection from the Chicago bloodsuckers who already had it out for him due to several matters that Daniels never wanted to talk about. Normally, the Nymar was one of the more pleasant of his species. Today, however, he looked at Cole as if he was a sample, and couldn’t do so for more than a second. “Don’t know,” he said. “How long has it been since he was seeded?”
“Maybe an hour,” Rico said.
“There’s no markings showing up yet,” Daniels replied hopefully. “That’s a good sign.”
Paige hadn’t taken her eyes off of him. “Check his chest.”
Daniels’s hands were soft and squishy compared to the ones that had been dragging or pushing him around. Since Cole’s coat was already off and his shirt open, all Daniels needed to do was pull aside a few flaps of material to get a look at the skin underneath. He set a pair of glasses on the end of his nose and studied him for a second. “Ahhhh. There they are.”
“How bad is it?” When nobody acknowledged the question, Cole struggled to get out from under the weight that held him in place. “I’m the one with the thing in his chest so tell me how fucking bad it is!”
Daniels’s eyes flicked up to look at him before darting down again. “Hold on,” was all he said before disappearing from sight.
Any other time, Cole wouldn’t have complained about Paige’s face and upper body being the only things he could see. The stake in her hand took some of the fun out of it, however. “What the hell did I miss?”
