than his partner.
Cole pushed the sharp instrument in deeper, grinding it through the meat beneath his skin and scraping against the bone. “I don’t feel anything happening,” he grunted through the pain. Within his body, the tension in his muscles shifted away from the front of his chest and inched down to his feet. “It’s in me,” he said. “I know it is.”
“Was in you,” Rico said as he stepped forward. “We got it out. Remember?”
“No. I can feel it. I even …” But he couldn’t bring himself to say what he’d done. Since Rico and all of the Amriany were also covered in spilled Nymar blood, the stains on Cole’s face didn’t stand out enough for the others to draw conclusions.
All except for Nadya.
She’d stormed that room with him. She’d been there when Hope first jumped him. She was still there now. The only question remaining was just how much she’d seen while the Nymar stragglers swarmed in for their last push and he’d had Hope pinned to the floor. She looked at him with cautious pity and a hint of fear as she told him, “If there was a spore in you, the tip of that stake would have been drawn to it. The spore would have been drawn to it as well. Do you feel that?”
“No.”
“Then you have no spore.” When she reached for the tool in Cole’s hand, she didn’t have to fight to take it away from him. He relinquished it along with a heavy breath as several standard-issue police flashlights threw their beams across the top of the counter.
Once the arrowhead was out of him, Cole looked down to the wound in his chest. It was a clean, deep cut. The ends pinched together a bit, but that could have been the work of the Skinner healing serum in his system. No tendrils emerged to close the gap. He could, however, feel the bands cinching back into place around his muscles. “Paige is with these guys,” he said to Drina. “She’s your best chance of getting Tobar out. Trying to break him out now is just a good way to get us all killed.”
“He’s right,” Rico said. “I don’t know what’s holding these SWAT guys back, but it won’t last forever. Can you get out?”
“Yes,” Gunari said. “Only if we go now.”
Recognizing the commanding tone in his voice, Drina helped Nadya toward the door that led back into the hall.
“Freeze!” the cops said as they cut loose and rushed inside like guard dogs that had finally broken from their leash.
Cole stood up to face Rico and the retreating Amriany. Raising his hands caused his coat to hang like a leather curtain between him and the main entrance. He handed over his weapon and said, “Take this and—”
Shots were fired that hit Cole in both shoulders. Something scraped against his back amid the crackle of electricity. He assumed those were leads of a stun gun, but they were unable to snag within the tough material of his coat.
“On the floor!
“Get out, Rico!” Cole shouted. “Paige is with them. We’ll handle this.”
Rico’s swearing filled the air and then Cole’s earpiece as his footsteps echoed down the hall. A few of the cops screamed at him and struggled to climb over or around the counter to engage in a pursuit. Before they could get through the door Rico had just used, Cole jumped in front of the cops to absorb the next rounds that were fired.
“I won’t forget that,” Rico said. “Call me as soon as you can. Prophet?”
“Right here.”
“Can you get out without being spotted by the cops?”
“Are you kidding me?” the bounty hunter replied. “I’ve been watching the police swarm that building from half a block away.”
“Good. Wha—”
As the cops rushed at him, Cole ripped out his earpiece and crushed it beneath his boot heel.
“What was that?” A heavy hand dropped onto Cole’s shoulder and spun him around. The cop was a stocky man in his late thirties with a clean-shaven face that looked as if it had been sand-blasted from a hunk of solid rock. He was dressed in head-to-toe tactical gear including a vest that resembled the harness Paige had modified to hold werewolf hides. “What did you crush on the floor?” he asked. “Answer me!”
Three more cops in matching gear encircled Cole while several more passed through the doorway into the hall. Cole could only hope that he’d given the others enough time to put their escape plans to use.
“You got any weapons?”
As much as Cole wanted to lie, he sighed, “Yeah. Under the coat. I wasn’t going to shoot any of you. I just needed to protect myself.”
The coat was pulled off him with so much force that Cole wouldn’t have been surprised if his arms were still in the sleeves when it was taken away. “Got a few guns and what looks like some sort of drug kit. Syringes.”
“I can explain those.”
“Shut your mouth and stand still.”
Cole did as he was told as the holster and harness was taken from him. After that, the muzzle of the cop’s assault rifle was jammed into the small of his back.
“Make one wrong move and you’re dead,” the cop promised.
From the front of the room one of the officers shouted, “This looks like Hendricks!”
“What?” the cop behind Cole asked.
“Hendricks from Vice. He’s dead.”
The muzzle of the assault rifle gouged into Cole’s back as a thick arm wrapped around his throat to put him in an uncompromising lock. He was surprised by the lack of panic he felt as he thought about which method he could use to escape the hold. Paige had taught him several over the last few months, and her grip wasn’t much different than the one choking the life out of him now.
Attached to the cop’s vest was a radio that crackled with a voice that reported, “There’s more dead at the loading dock. Looks like a bunch of the dealers and Anderson’s unit.”
“All of Anderson’s unit?”
“Haven’t found them all yet, sir, but there’s two of them in the back of a van. The dealers are toast. Anderson and two of his men are hurt pretty bad. They say the others are somewhere on the premises.”
Cole’s head hung low. “Try the offices.”
“What?” the cop snarled a few inches from his ear. “Is that where you’re holding them?”
“No, I—”
“Shut up!” Keying the radio, he said, “Sweep all the offices.”
The cop nearly pulled Cole’s arms out of their sockets while securing his wrists behind his back. From there Cole was moved toward the front door at the behest of an occasional prod from an assault rifle pounding against his spine. Considering all the dead cops discovered in that room alone, he considered himself lucky to be breathing at all. He felt even luckier when he got close enough to the front door to hold Paige’s eye for more than a second.
She nodded and showed him a shaky smile while the cops jostled past her in their haste to get him out of the building.
Gunshots crackled down the street and tires squealed. By now Cole had heard the FAMAS and Rico’s Sig Sauer enough times to know neither of those guns were being fired. Somehow that didn’t make him feel much better. The parking lot directly outside the building was filled with police cars and two large black SWAT vans. He couldn’t help but shake his head at just how far away he was from the guy who’d researched tactical teams just like this one for use in a video game.
“Top o’ the world, Ma.” Cole sighed.
“Shut your damn mouth,” another man said as he was roughly thrown against a van, where he was searched again. There was an exchange of words and some more scuffling. When Cole was roughly turned around, a pair of new faces stared back at him.
Paige stood beside a man who looked to have spent thirty out of his forty or so years being dragged behind a truck. His pockmarked skin and bristly hair were coarse enough to scrape the paint off the SWAT van in one pass. The eyes he fixed upon Cole were light enough to be either green or gray. His stern expression, illuminated by flashing police lights and headlights trained on the parking lot, made it clear the guy had no qualms about pulling
