point, because she agreed to the proposition despite whatever else was bothering her. Even though Elle didn’t follow her, she couldn’t leave the utility room fast enough.
“Is everything all right with you?” Tristan asked Cole when Paige had left.
“I’m fine,” he assured her quickly. “Just …” After taking a moment to soften his demeanor with a deep breath and a strained, vaguely confident smile, he said, “Could you just get the Nymar back here before they call for reinforcements?”
Daniels was happy to leave the utility room with his kit and plastic Baggies full of samples taken from the spore removed from Cole’s chest. Since he was still of the male persuasion, he was even happier to be escorted by Tristan to the back exit of the club as she sent a human dancer to fetch the club’s vampire guests.
Now that he was alone with Cole, Rico slammed the door shut and wheeled around to face him. “Whatever’s going on between you and Paige has gotta be set to the damn side. You hear me, boy?”
“You know I don’t like being called that.”
“Yeah? And I don’t like having to rely on a partner that’s got his head somewhere other than where it needs to be. So you two got some bump ‘n’ grind time in. That’s abundantly clear. Now you’re worried about her goin’ off and letting some cop crawl down the front of her pants?”
“That’s not what—”
“The hell it isn’t,” Rico snarled in a voice quiet enough to remain inside the room, but powerful enough to shake Cole down to the soles of his feet. “You gotta straighten that shit out one way or another. Paige ain’t the kind to get too close to just anyone, and she sure as hell ain’t the slut you’re thinking she is.”
Cole jumped up so quickly that it reminded him how weak his system still was. Even so, he kept his back straight and his chin up when he stood toe-to-toe with the bigger man. “Nobody calls her that. Not you. Not a Full Blood. Not even God himself. You hear me?”
Scowling as he took stock of Cole all over again, Rico said, “Yeah. Then you think she’s got something for this cop?”
“He can have her. Maybe she’ll try to get him killed for a change.”
“She’s keeping you alive, asshole. But if you got infected by a Half Breed, she’d put you down even quicker than when it looked like you were gonna turn into a bloodsucker. Just because she did you in the nice way, don’t think that puts you above the rules of the game.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Really? Is there? You wanna share? You wanna curl up with some hot cocoa and tell me all about your fucking feelings? Tough. You hear them voices? That’d be those Nymar headed back this way. How about we take care of business here and then continue the therapy later?”
From the instant he found himself alone with Rico in that room, Cole had known the conversation would head this way. The only problem was, his mouth didn’t come equipped with one of those huge, red, plastic-encased Abort buttons that were next to every guided missile panel in James Bond movies. Damn, his mouth needed one of those buttons sometimes.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The three Nymar were feeling cocky when a redhead in high heels and a nightie led them to the club’s back rooms. More than likely it was a combination of the human dancer’s charms and the high that all Chicago Nymar were running on that night. No matter how confident they felt, the vampires didn’t have a prayer when they stepped into the utility room. One of them was still wearing the self-satisfied look on his face when Cole’s spear pierced his heart. Rico kept the second one quiet by knocking him down and stepping on his mouth.
When the third one started hissing in a threatening manner, Cole flipped his spear around so the Nymar’s chin was wedged in the forked end. He was a greasy looking idiot with a gold T hanging from a chain around his neck that must have been forged somewhere in the darkest fashion days of the eighties. “What’s your name?” Cole asked.
“M-My name?”
Rather than repeat himself, Cole tightened his grip on the weapon so the thorns sank deeper into his palms. It took only a thought for him to cause the forked ends to extend, curl slightly around the Nymar’s throat and tighten.
As soon as he felt the pressure, the Nymar sputtered, “Dave … David! It’s David, okay? My name’s David!”
Tightening the wooden snare a bit more, Cole twisted the spear to angle the Nymar’s face toward the floor. “Take a look at your friends there, David. What do you think they’d tell you if you asked how patient we are tonight?”
“How’d you know where to find us, Dave?” Rico asked. When he didn’t respond, Rico flipped out the blade he’d sunk into the eye socket of the Nymar at the tunnels. “I already tortured one of you today,” he said while holding the knife close enough to Dave’s face for him to smell the oily blood that remained on the sharpened steel. “One more’d just be a bonus.”
“Steph and Ace’ve been recruiting for weeks. She kept most of the newbies around the Blood Parlor and they were all out looking for you. One of them saw you drive away from the parlor, and another saw that same car driving here. Hope wanted us to make sure the seeding took root. Then we’d get our Shadow Spore.” His eyes darted toward Cole and his nostrils flared with a quick inhalation. “What happened with that, anyway?”
“Still want to file your report?” Cole asked as he angled the spear so the forked end grew sharper than a pair of scissors and fit snugly under Dave’s chin. “What about now?”
“So Steph knew we were coming?” Rico asked.
Dave nodded as best he could. “We didn’t know the exact time, but Steph knew you’d show up at the parlor eventually. So did Hope. She said she knew Paige real well.”
“What about those cops? Were they on Steph’s payroll?”
“They were just cops.” Dave squirmed and made the mistake of moving his hands more than an inch. He paid for it by getting Rico’s fist buried in his gut. “Some of us approached them as informants,” the Nymar wheezed. “I got a card in my pocket.”
Rico flipped Dave’s jacket open and dug around in the pockets. He came up empty, but found something when he patted down the heavy cotton shirt the Nymar wore over a dark red T-shirt. After nearly ripping the pocket off completely, Rico was satisfied that the card was the only thing in there. Only then did he finally take a look at what was printed on the muted white paper. He showed it to Cole, then tucked it away inside his own shirt pocket. “That’s from one of the cops at the parlor tonight?” he asked.
“That’s the one who sent the cops,” Dave replied. “Some lieutenant or captain, I don’t know. Whoever Ace and Steph were talking to.”
“Sounds like this has been in the works for a while,” Cole pointed out.
“Maybe a month or two,” Dave said.
“But it’s only been a little while since Lancroft’s place in Philly was raided. There’s no way you could get all of this
Dave was getting nervous. The sweat trickling from his brow was tainted by the same oily substance found in their blood. It allowed him to maneuver within the spear’s grip, but it also caused a reaction with the weapon’s varnish that made the forked end twitch against his jugular. “We’ve been stringing the cops along for months. Some of them got hooked on the girls. Some stayed out in their cars or tried to act casual in Astin’s bar. Others just swung by to give Steph and Ace some shit. All we had to do was keep them interested so when the time came it was easy to convince him to send some badges down to wait for you guys. When they started to lose interest, all we needed to do was feed them bits and pieces here and there. Drop a few anonymous tips. Let a few of the scared customers go instead of reining them in. It ain’t hard to keep cops looking at you.”
“And when the shooting started, you camouflaged them using that striped shit?” Rico asked.
For a second the Nymar seemed confused. “You mean the Shadow Spore. Yeah. We only just got that. We were all supposed to get altered, but there wasn’t enough time for everyone to get a taste. With everything that’s
