“Why’s that?” Rico grunted while straining to get to his pistol. “I’m not the one that killed a bunch of innocent people.”
“No. You’re the ones that made Hope recruit new members. If you hadn’t forced Evan’s hand in this, I could have spent that party fucking and sucking like every other party.” Smiling luridly, she added, “You like hearing me talk like that?”
When Rico’s fingertips brushed against the worn grip of his .45, he curled them until his nails caught in the grooves etched into the handle. “Don’t flatter yourself, girl. I’ve heard dirty talk before and I seen plenty of skinny little bitches like you. It’ll take more than whatever tricks you use on the frat boys to wrap me around any one of your bony little fingers.”
“Really?” she said as she slipped her fingers on top of Rico’s. In one powerful clench, she crushed his hand between hers and the barbed, varnished wooden handle of his weapon. She then grabbed onto the section of the weapon encircling his knuckles and started grinding the weapon against the hand that held it.
Skin tore.
Tendons were shredded.
Sharpened wood scraped against narrow bones.
Rico forgot about the .45 as he kicked his heels against the floorboards and let out a pained, howling wail.
Ned had missed his chance to end the fight before it got any further. He’d gotten the drop on Paige, managed to lift his bat over her skull, but wasn’t able to follow through. There was something in Paige’s eyes that connected with him. She had a spark, familiar to all Skinners, that allowed them to survive and flourish where most people would give in to the insanity of their new world. Some of Ned’s attention was diverted when Rico’s agonized voice exploded from the bedroom. Even for someone with Ned’s experience, hearing a sound like that from a man like Rico was jarring.
Paige put her spark to use and took aim for another shot at him. Ned didn’t hesitate this time and swung the bat like a golf club to knock her .38 aside as it went off. The bullet hissed past his head and she was already rolling away while splinters fell from the hole that had been punched into the ceiling. Somehow, she hung on to her pistol.
In Ned’s opinion, this one definitely had promise.
“Whatever they told you, it’s a lie,” he said.
“You already killed one of them,” Paige said through teeth gritted by pain. “You’ll come after the rest! Including Tara. I can’t allow that. Not after all that’s already happened to her.”
The house’s back entrance was a thick sliding patio door held in place by a latch and steel bar that lay wedged between the door and the other side of the frame. It was pulled open amid the sound of metal being snapped and wood being crushed as the bar was driven into the frame like an oversized nail. Footsteps flooded through the kitchen and living room like a flood of rats that had only been held back by a single rotten barricade. The three Nymar making all that noise wasted no time in swarming the bat-wielding Skinner.
Hope was first to arrive. She wrapped both arms around Ned from behind before he had a chance to turn and face her. “Where’s the other one?” she hissed.
Wes and Evan ran into the living room but were reluctant to make a move against the man that Hope had claimed for herself. Their eyes fixed upon Paige, who’d taken the last few seconds to switch her .38 from her bleeding right hand to her left.
Rico let out another grunt, which was followed by a heavy impact. A second later Tara was the one to cry out. Evan pointed down the hall and snarled, “Kill him.” When Wes bolted down the hall, Evan crossed the room, making certain to give Hope and Ned their space. “You did good, Paige.”
“You’re here. They’re here. Let me and Tara go!”
Ned struggled with Hope, grabbing onto the arm that had snaked around his neck to try and give himself some breathing room. Even Hope seemed surprised when she was unable to choke the life out of him right then and there.
“We’ll see how this pans out before we let anyone go,” Evan said. He held out one hand, palm up, and beckoned to Paige. “Now hand me that gun.”
“Let Tara go first.”
More screams ripped through the house, unrecognizable apart from the fact that they were female. Rico then unleashed a torrent of profanity as solid impacts thumped from one bedroom to another. Paige caught a glimpse of the big man throwing Wes into a wall before the Skinner was slashed across the face by the Nymar’s claws and shoved into the next room.
Evan bent down to reach for Paige’s trembling hands. “Give me that g—”
She cut his threat short by pulling her trigger twice, catching Evan in the stomach, up high near his solar plexus. The Nymar staggered backward while letting out a breath that sounded as if he’d sprung a leak. Several black fibers stretched out of the bullet wound to grip its edges, widening the wound into a single, surprised eye before a chunk of lead was pushed out. By the time the bullet hit the floor, the wound was closing.
Tears emerged at the corners of Paige’s eyes as she bared her teeth and pulled her trigger again and again. Her shots hit Evan in the chest and hip, respectively, sending the Nymar back a few steps without dropping him to the floor. He leered at her hungrily, making fists with both hands as the tendrils patched him up enough to move forward again. He managed to take half a step toward Paige before arching his back and throwing both arms out to either side. His mouth opened and all three sets of fangs extended far enough from the sockets in his gums that the tender, whiter portions of each one stretched down from the pink line of flesh.
A muffled tearing sound bubbled up from the back of Evan’s throat and his fingers trembled like frayed sections of a live wire. The middle portion of his light brown shirt became dark and wet. There was no hole in the material, but it was obvious that one of Paige’s bullets had found its mark. That theory was disproved the moment something arose beneath his shirt, strained the fabric, and finally poked through. The wooden stake was coated in the Nymar’s blood and was sharp enough to cut Evan’s hands when he tried to grab hold of the object that had impaled him.
Evan’s struggle was over in a matter of seconds. He slumped forward to hang off the stake as his bodily fluids flowed out of him. When he finally did drop to his knees, he cleared the way for Paige to see Ned behind him. Somehow, his bat had shifted into a thinner weapon that drove all the way through Evan’s back and out the other side. Ned looked up from the dying Nymar, saw Paige, and croaked, “Run.”
Rico’s hand felt like a mess of chopped meat hanging from his wrist. It was too bloody for him to see how much damage had been done, so he focused on the hand he could actually use. When he renewed his attempts to get to his .45, he heard the commotion from the other side of the house. All of his senses were dulled by the strain of fighting Tara and the blood he’d lost to her. Despite the fact that she was stronger than any Nymar he had faced thus far in his career, Tara hopped away like a scolded pup when Wes stormed into the bedroom, grabbed him and stood him up.
No matter how torn up Rico’s fingers were, they remained locked around his weapon. He could barely feel the varnished wood in his hand when he slashed Wes’s throat with the upper spike. Rico didn’t know how long his grip would hold, so he turned and swung at Tara while he could. The wooden spike ripped across her upper chest, tearing a section of Tara’s shirt and digging a messy gorge a few inches above the slope of her breasts. She screamed, pressed both hands against the ugly wound and staggered away.
Although it would take longer to heal a wound from the Skinner’s weapon, Wes pushed through enough of the pain to grab Rico and throw him into the hallway. Rico’s free hand closed around Wes’s shirt, locking the two of them together as the momentum of their struggle carried them into the adjacent room.
There was next to nothing in there apart from two chairs facing each other and a single box bearing the label of a moving company. Wes staggered backward into the box, clutching the neck wound that was already closing. He kicked over one of the chairs and got his legs entangled with the other. When the Nymar shifted his weight to compensate for the slip, Rico shouted directly into his face. It wasn’t so much of a threat or statement, but an obscene roar that made him sound even more like a wounded animal.
Apart from the strain of his leg muscles, Rico’s entire body was numb. When he grabbed Wes’s shoulder with his left hand, he didn’t even feel it enough to know if he’d trapped anything within his grasp. And when he unleashed a series of straight gut punches using the wooden weapon in his right hand, he felt more like he was clumsily moving a rusty tool instead of anything that grew from his shoulder. Even so, the weapon in Rico’s bloody rasp managed to hack away at the Nymar’s torso.
