“And we ain’t about to forget that,” Rico said.
Jabbing a finger over to the big man, Ned wheeled around and barked, “Shut up!” When he spoke to Paige again, it was in a tempered but commanding voice. “We don’t have much time before we have to worry about police coming to check on all the noise over here, so listen up. Hope will come after you, Paige. If not her, it’ll be one of the others as soon as they find out what you know about us.”
“Then I’ll tell them everything,” she said. “It’s not like you did jackshit when I needed you or when Tara needed you. Even Karen … she’s probably …”
“Karen’s fine,” Ned told her.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. “She came by the hospital a few times after you and Tara ran away. She may have been trying to be sneaky, acting like she didn’t know what happened, but she asked too many of the wrong questions and I caught up with her on the way out. Someone was there to pick her up. She left. I made sure she got away safely and haven’t seen her since.”
It seemed that was the last thing holding Paige up. Once that had been taken away from her, every ounce of fear, fatigue, and confusion sank in like a weight pressing her down. Without the strength to lift her arms, the weapon in her hands tapped against the floor.
“So,” Ned said as he tentatively approached her, “what now?”
Paige shook her head, her head still lowered. “I don’t know. I guess they’ll come after me. Hope’s gone. Tara will be gone too.”
“How do you know that?” Rico asked. “You weren’t gonna meet up with her somewhere?”
“No. The only plan was finding you guys before you killed her. Hope found us first, and when they told me you’d killed the one who killed Amy that night at the party, I thought you’d come after us next. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d make it out of here before one of you or one of them finished me off.” She started to look up at Ned but quickly clenched her eyes shut. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t keep the tears from flowing. When that happened, she dropped down to sit with her arms propped on her knees her hands pressed against her face, leaving crimson smears on her skin. “I mean … what the hell am I supposed to do against this? I can’t fight you. I can’t fight
Ned stopped just outside of her reach and lowered himself to one knee. “Nymar,” he told her. “They’re Nymar.”
“Great. You’ve told me that already. Mind telling me whose blood is this?” she asked after looking down at her hands and using the back of one to try and clean her face. “How did this stick change shape? How many more days do I have until someone pops out from somewhere to tear me apart?”
“They may find you again or they may not.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No,” Ned replied. “But you may feel better once you learn how to defend yourself.”
Paige’s arms dangled along the top of her knees as she looked up at the older man with bloodshot eyes. “You’re going to teach me how to swing a stick?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Come on, Ned,” Rico said from the kitchen. “Think about this.”
“What do I need to think about? She’s a fighter. She’s got the spark in her eye. Besides, she’s already seen enough to be useful to us. With a little bit of training, she can—”
“She can what?” Rico snapped. “Kill us in our sleep? Find out even more about us and then turn that shit over to some multiseeded Nymar bitch?”
“It won’t happen that way,” Ned insisted. “We’ll keep an eye on her.”
Paige might have needed the elongated stake to help get up again, but she didn’t need it to remain standing. Once she had her balance, she threw the weapon down so it clattered against the floor near its owner’s feet. “None of us will have to worry about any of this bullshit. I’m out of here.”
“You won’t be able to shake this, Paige,” Ned said as he scooped up his weapon and stood up. “You’re not one of those people who can convince yourself this didn’t happen or that what you saw can be explained away. Your eyes are open. I know, because I looked straight into them.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want you to become a Skinner.” Despite the look that got from both her and Rico, Ned continued unabated. “I want you to keep that fire inside you alive. It’s the same drive that got you out of that hospital in one piece and out on the street until you tracked us down. Do you know that nobody—not the cops or the Nymar—have found us here until now?”
Reluctantly, Paige said, “Well, you did give me a card.”
“Now I want to give you the means to put that fire of yours to use. There aren’t a lot of us around and we need all the good fighters we can possibly get. Hope and Evan were members of a small group in a small town. There are larger groups out there, doing much worse things in bigger cities. You don’t even know about the other creatures out there, Paige. There are things preying on people like your friends that make the Nymar look like insects. Your instinct is to fight them. That’s something that can’t be taught. What
“Fuck that,” Rico snarled. “That girl walked in here tryin’ to kill us! Have you forgotten that already?”
Ned grinned as the weapon in his hands re-formed into its unassuming broom handle shape. “And she got closer than the cult in Topeka. That says a lot.”
“Yeah,” Rico scoffed. “She’s a real bloodhound. I ain’t letting those freak jobs in Topeka get away with what they did and I ain’t about to forget about this. You wanna train this one? It’s on your head. Keep her the hell away from me.”
“Are you forgetting what kind of things hang over your head, Rico? Can you seriously look at her and say you’re so much better than her?”
“Don’t flip that ‘he who is without sin’ crap at me,” Rico grunted. “I’m not talking about who gets to cast the first stone. I’m talkin’ about who can be trusted. I proved myself a long time ago. That one there,” he said while jabbing a gnarled, bloody finger at Paige, “has proved that she’ll jump sides at the first line of sweet talk whispered into her ear. You want your first lesson, girl? Bloodsuckers are real good at sweet talk. If yer too stupid to have figured that out after dealing with assholes like Wes, then you ain’t gonna be any use to us!”
“So if you train me, does that mean I get to spar with him?” Paige asked. “More than likely,” Ned replied.
“Then sign me up,” she said with a tired, halfhearted grin. “It’d be worth it just to kick his ass a few times.”
Rico’s cold scowl was all he needed to let them know what he thought of that.
“There may be a better fit for your initial training,” Ned told her. “I need to get back to those sightings in the Everglades, but Gerald is free. I think you two should get along just fine.”
Chapter Thirty
“So,” Cole said once he finally got a chance to speak, “that means Hope’s been chasing Paige for over ten years? I suppose that was a long way to go for that information. She could have just told me there was a history there.”
Rico sat in the driver’s seat with his elbow propped against the steering wheel. The car was parked, so he devoted his attention to picking at a stubborn strand of beef jerky with a toothpick as he replied, “That ain’t the whole reason she wanted to tell you that story, and it ain’t why you needed to hear it.”
They sat along East Fiftieth Avenue, a stretch of road in a section of the city filled with industrial parks and fenced lots of building supplies behind large, two-level storage units. It was just past two in the morning and the air was cold enough to grate against Cole’s eyeballs as it leaked in through the poorly insulated car windows. As much as he wanted to stop being angry with Paige, he simply couldn’t bring himself to that point.
The few other cars that passed them after Rico had first come to a stop were just as anxious to remain unseen
