stuff had seen him through most of the punishment heaped upon him in the days following his capture. It was also supposed to help make sure he wasn’t infected when a Nymar tried to seed him. The antidote he’d been given after he was bitten should have done the same thing. He had found out the hard way, however, that neither the serum nor the antidote did much of anything against Shadow Spore. He’d been seeded by one of those striped bastards, and the process of getting the spore out of him was something he relived in brutal detail everytime he closed his eyes and allowed himself to lapse into unconsciousness.
The spore was gone, but something remained inside of him.
It cinched around his insides, constricting until he thought he would burst, tightening until he prayed for something vital inside his body to rupture and be done with it. He had plenty of time to think about that lovely image when he was carted off to the cage that would be his home.
Colorado State Penitentiary looked like one of the buildings at a college campus. It was several stories tall, had a well-maintained lawn, was coated in clean stone and labeled by stern metal letters that looked as if they’d been typewritten upon the front of the structure. Hedges and sidewalks marked the perimeter of a large parking lot. Unlike those buildings of higher learning, this one was filled with 756 beds encased in fortified steel and occupied by violent offenders who required attention known as Security Level 5. It was a maximum security facility that could be the last bit of earthly hell he would know before being sent to the real deal at the end of a rusty shiv or a broken fork smuggled out of the cafeteria by one of his criminally disturbed neighbors.
Cole was processed for what felt to him like the hundredth time, given yet another jumpsuit to wear, and shoved down one of many drab hallways that had filled his most recent days. When he attempted to look up at the walkways above him or at any of the cells on either side, his head was viciously turned forward and he was warned to keep his eyes on the floor. If he attempted to glance at the bars to his left, he was shoved forward, with the accompanying clatter of the chains secured to his wrists and ankles. By now, he’d forgotten what it was like to move his arms or legs without the extra weight of cuffs around them. The rattle of stainless steel links were as familiar to him as the strained wheezing of his own breath.
But even after all the shocks his system had taken lately, none of them compared to the one he got when he saw the inside of his cell.
“This is it?” he asked.
“What did you expect? A hotel suite?”
“That’s a hospital bed.”
“Right, and you’re going to lay down on it.”
Cole studied the bed carefully, as if that was enough to make it change into something else. The walls were concrete, and covered with chipped, light green paint. He’d been locked up once in a holding cell with a toilet that wasn’t much more than a curved metal shelf with plumbing sticking out of the wall. One of those may have been installed in the farthest wall of this cell at one time, but all that remained was a patch of cracked wall and some pipes cut and sealed with cement.
“Is this for some sort of examination?” Cole asked.
“Lie down.”
There was no way to get out of the prison and nowhere to run, even if he did make it that far, so he climbed onto the bed and stretched out.
Someone in medical scrubs walked into the cell, accompanied by more guards. Cole could hear every scrape of her paper-covered sneakers against the floor and every lid she popped off needles attached to IV tubes before she cleaned them off.
“How many other prisoners are in here?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” a guard replied while strapping him to the table. The man resembled the others who had brought him this far. Similar uniform, similar body armor, similar helmet, similar boots, similar hate-filled eyes.
“What is this?” Cole asked. Panic flooded through his body as he started to wonder if Colorado administered its death penalty through lethal injection. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know if Colorado had the death penalty. “Don’t I get a lawyer? A phone call? At least tell me what’s in this goddamn needle!”
If an explanation was given, Cole didn’t hear it. Once the drugs were pumped from the IV bag into his arm, he didn’t see or hear anything either.
Cole dreamt in a cold torrent of slush that filled his head and leaked out in a series of thrashing muscle spasms and incoherent screams.
He didn’t feel like he was falling or lying down. Instead, he was just suspended inside himself with only disembodied voices to fill his days.
Days, or maybe weeks.
Could have been years.
Whatever length of time it was ended abruptly when his consciousness started turning end over end. Although he couldn’t see the walls of his dark cell, he knew they were spinning around him. The steady, thumping rhythms that had been his only source of reference sped up and then slowed down.
Memories drifted away.
Sounds came closer while falling back at the same time.
There was a pressure that seemed more real than anything else in his world.
Something wailed and beeped.
Beeping. Just like the first games his dad had bought for his old Atari 2600. Clumsy tones that were the best those early programmers could do and were music to his adolescent ears. Beeping. Squawking. Digitized warbles that eventually became something close to voices. By the time he was in college, his games had acquired real voices and music. That had been a true landmark for a kid who so rarely went outside.
The pressure still came from somewhere, and the voices were getting clearer. If he focused hard enough, he might be able to make out what they said.
“Somebody get in here!”
More pressure, along with a pinch. He was no longer spinning. His head was wrapped in something cool and soft.
“Back away, motherfucker!”
That was definitely not from any game Cole had grown up with. Neither was the snarling hiss that was close enough to send a few drops of bitter venom over his lip and into the stubble that had claimed his chin.
Consciousness exploded in a surge of adrenaline that snapped his eyes wide open so he could see a Nymar’s head poking up from the collar of a standard guard uniform. It was a round clean-shaven face with no telltale black markings. Even without seeing the tendrils moving beneath the man’s skin, the two sets of fangs extending from his upper jaw gave him away. One set were the feeders that slid down over the normal canine teeth, and the others were a curved, slender pair that fit along the inner edges of the first set. Venom dripped from the curved fangs as the vampire hissed at the guards. At least, he assumed there were more guards, since he couldn’t lift his head enough to see.
Cole switched immediately into survival mode. He tried to sit up, but the Nymar pressed him right back down again using the hand that was already clamped around his throat to dig sharpened nails into his flesh. That explained the pressure and pinching he’d dreamt about. The real guards were shouting their threats, but the man with the round face didn’t pay them any mind. He simply looked down at Cole, lowered his face to within a few inches of his and snarled, “Tara sends her best.”
Tara was one of Paige’s friends dating back more than eleven years. During a nightmare that had laid the foundation of Paige becoming a Skinner, Tara was turned into a Nymar. More than that, she’d been double-seeded. Two spores were attached to her heart, making her stronger, hungrier, and more vicious as a reward for surviving the process. Perhaps this was payback for him killing the Nymar that had created her. At the moment he could only be concerned with drawing his next breath.
He saw a slender arm wrapped around the Nymar’s throat. Although the medical tech wasn’t strong enough to choke a vampire, she was able to jab a needle into his neck and push the plunger. When the toxin went into him, the Nymar only tightened his grip. Cole grabbed his wrist with both hands and fought to sit up. This time he was stopped by a fiery pain that blazed over the entire front of his torso. “Son of a bitch!” he grunted.
The Nymar grinned wider and pressed until his fingernails broke the skin of Cole’s neck. Using his free hand to grab the medical tech, he pulled her closer and bit into her jugular.
