at the end of the hall and rushed toward them.
There was plenty of noise within the building to mask his footsteps as he jogged toward the door. Although he could wrap his mind around any number of inhuman terrors that might be waiting for him in the next room, he still didn’t know how he was going to deal with the police. Apart from not shooting them, his choices seemed pretty limited. A humorless grin drifted onto his face as he brought his gun up to eye level and extended his other hand toward the door. The way the odds were stacked, he probably wouldn’t need to worry about much of anything beyond the next half hour, so it didn’t make sense to plan much further than that. The pain within his chest tightened as though a length of dental floss was being drawn taut after being wrapped around all of his major organs. The muscles he was about to use all flushed with heat as his throat became drier than the floor of an old kiln. A tickling sensation sprang up near the base of his spine, and he was hungrier than he’d ever been.
Cole meant to shove the door open but wound up knocking it off one of its hinges and leaving it askew in its frame. Compared to the stark lighting of the hallway, the space directly in front of him was a single shadowy mass. Several bare bulbs hung from the ceiling to reveal a loading dock or some sort of industrial storage space. Pallets covered in dusty tarps formed a wall to his left. Two vans were parked to his right with their noses pointed toward a pair of large garage doors covered by steel shutters. The lights hung from the ceiling amid a thick webbing of girders and beams, topped by the slanted roof of the building itself. He took all of this in within his first few steps. That was more than enough time to notice the Nymar that swarmed in on him from all sides like a colony of centipedes.
Since police departments didn’t generally hire from the superhuman wall-crawling labor pool, Cole fired at every overhead Nymar he spotted. One slender figure wrapped its arms around a beam and looked down at him with wide unblinking eyes. Cole aimed carefully and fired again. His shot sparked against the beam but got close enough to shake the Nymar loose. The vampire hit the floor on its back. Now that he was beneath the lights, the solid black hue of its skin melted into thick stripes. Cole meant to hold the Nymar beneath his foot long enough to get to his spear, but his heel dropped heavily onto the Nymar’s upper chest to snap its collarbone with a solid wet crunch.
While he shifted his aim to the shape dropping down to get behind him, he pulled his coat open and reached for the weapon harness. One shot punched through the Nymar’s ribs, the next clipped its ear, and the one after that was a clean miss. The vampire wore only a pair of black pants, keeping as much of its shadowy skin exposed as possible. His bare feet slapped against the concrete floor, putting an extra kick behind the breath he used to spit a wad of venom at Cole’s face.
The toxic substance hit his hand and neck, cooling them on impact and forcing him to look away when the next wave of gunfire erupted. Most of those shots erupted from a Sig Sauer and a FAMAS submachine gun.
“How many times I gotta tell you to stop goin’ for those head shots?” Rico snarled as he moved to Cole’s side. With a few more pulls of his trigger, the big man carved a large and very messy hole through the spitting Nymar’s chest. It fell straight back with cracks forming in its flesh before it hit the floor.
As Rico and Cole moved forward, Drina and Gunari fanned out to either side. Even while hobbling on a wounded leg, Nadya joined her fellow Amriany by finding the first piece of solid cover and running behind it.
“Goddamn Gypsies,” Rico growled as he fired at a shotgun-wielding Nymar that stepped out from behind one of the stacks of pallets. “First chance to hide and they run for it.”
Overhead, electricity crackled through the uppermost fixtures nestled above the beams to bring several rows of fluorescent bulbs to life. A few seconds later the other half of the room was illuminated, exposing the Nymar that were sneaking down from where they’d been hidden.
“I think you can thank the Gypsies for that,” Cole chided.
Rico squeezed off a few quick rounds to put down one long-haired Nymar that stuck her head around the corner. “Don’t call them Gypsies,” he said. “They don’t like that.”
Cole emptied his last few rounds into a group of Nymar gathering near large doors that must have opened onto one of the truck-filled lots outside the building. Even though he could see the reaction of the antidote infused into the bullets on two of the Nymar that were hit, the ones with the Shadow Spore barely flinched. The standard issue vampires staggered away, allowing their enhanced partners to close the distance between themselves and the Skinners.
“Cops are headed your way,” Prophet said through the earpiece.
“Shit,” Cole grunted.
Rico reloaded his Sig Sauer with practiced efficiency, but had given up on trying to take deliberate shots. “I know. I heard.”
“Not that. My phone’s ringing.” After digging out the cell, Cole glanced at the screen. “It’s Paige.”
“Better take it. She’s been known to get snippy if you ignore her calls.”
Even in the middle of a war zone, Cole had to chuckle at that one.
“We’re only about fifteen minutes away,” Paige said. Her voice was straining to be heard over the roar of several loud engines.
“Are you on a helicopter?”
“Yeah. I’m telling you, these guys are serious.”
“Well so are the Nymar,” Cole said as three of the vampires coordinated their efforts to form a quick firing line and unleash a salvo in his direction.
“When I get there, you’re gonna have to trust me,” Paige said.
“What’s the plan?”
“Just follow my lead and trust me. Please, Cole.”
When his .45 ran dry, he holstered the gun and gripped his spear in both hands. “Someone was here impersonating you. Called himself Kawosa or something like that. Ring any bells?”
“Great. Another thing coming after us. Never heard of him.”
“How long before you get here?”
“Shouldn’t be long,” she replied. “Are you going to be okay?”
“As good as always.”
“Just hang in there and—”
“Follow your lead,” Cole interrupted as a pair of Nymar leapt from their positions behind a parked van to bounce off the walls and launch themselves at him. “Got it.” The last syllable was still in his mouth when he held the spear up to block the first incoming Nymar. The vampire’s hair streamed over her shoulders and she bared two sets of fangs at him. Apparently, she wasn’t worried about poisoning him, so she left the curved pair sheathed beneath her gums.
His spear caught her across the chest. Cole took advantage of her momentum by pivoting to send her flailing into a stack of pallets. Still hesitant to use anything without a trigger, Rico blasted another airborne Nymar with a torrent of .45 caliber slugs that sent it bouncing off a cement pillar and to the floor. “Get to the garage doors,” he said while running to finish off the Nymar he’d taken down. “Spread the word to the Amriany.”
Gunari and Drina had moved their fight through the open section of the room. They held their own well enough to force the Nymar to form a small cluster there. Every few seconds the Nymar sent a few out at a time, like larger versions of the tendrils that crept through their own bodies.
Cole rushed at the Nymar he’d bounced off a post, snarling viciously as he impaled the creature at the end of his spear. This wasn’t one of the Nymar infected with the Shadow Spore, which made it easier to find a soft spot with the metal tip of his spear. “Where are the cops?” he asked.
“They’re already here,” she replied. “Are you deaf?”
“I mean the cops you were going to frame us for killing. Where are they?”
“Are you going to … let me go?” she grunted.
“If you tell me quickly, yes.”
“There’s two in one of the offices and more in one of the vans,” she told him. “But you’re too late to do anything about them. They’re dead and one of your weapons is still sticking out of a body. I don’t know what kind of shit you smear all over those sticks, but I bet it’s real distinctive on any tests the cops might run on the wounds.”
“Where’d you get one of our weapons?”
The Nymar showed Cole a tired smirk as the light in her eyes faded. Black tendrils crept out from the spot where she’d been impaled to grip the spear like several weak little fingers trying unsuccessfully to coax the weapon
