“We’ll see how happy you are about it once the testing starts. On your knees.”
Cole had seen a similar little door leading into a cell beneath the Lancroft house in Philadelphia. His guess had been that the small entrance was created to force a prisoner to crawl if they wanted to get in or out. It wasn’t his area of expertise, but there had to be psychological as well as practical reasons for putting a prisoner into such a compromising position while passing through the bars. “I’ll get in once you back up,” he said. “I don’t know how, but I seem to have gotten a little paranoid over the last few weeks.”
Reluctantly, the guard with the weapon took a step back. As he did, the other guards fanned out on either side of him to form a half circle that Cole would have to break if he intended on going anywhere other than the cell. Since the other guards were armed and he had no quick way of telling how many of them had supernatural tricks up their sleeves, he dropped to his hands and knees and backed into the cell. Every inch of floor he scooted across felt like a bad idea. Unfortunately, his only other choice was to attempt getting killed or beaten into unconsciousness, so he would probably just wake up in that cell anyway.
Fighting now would be pointless.
Dying, even more so.
The guards stepped forward, pushed the door closed and turned a key in a lock that was so well-maintained it didn’t even make the sound of metal moving against metal. After that, the guard closest to the bars reached up to touch the wall. Cole knew he was tracing his finger along some of the runes, just as Rico and Ned had done to activate or deactivate the power within the symbols. Since he didn’t know which runes were being touched or what direction the guard’s fingers were moving, he didn’t have a shot at deactivating them himself. Plus, there was the fact that he would need longer arms and a few more joints to reach that section of the wall.
“What about that phone call?” Cole asked as he stood up to face the men in uniform.
The guard with the sharpened club in his bloody hand held the weapon up and willed the spiked end to sink down until it was a simple baton. “I’ll get right on that.”
“You’d better, or my lawyer will hear about it.”
Either missing or ignoring Cole’s sarcasm, the guard said, “The system doesn’t apply to us, Mr. Warnecki. We make our own, and if we’re not careful, ours will be the only system left.”
“Real philosophical,” Cole grunted. “Can we discuss it further over some food? Maybe some water?”
Leaning forward until his face was almost touching the bars, the guard said, “I’m surprised you’re hungry at all, you Nymar piece of shit. If I were you, I’d stop whining before we bring some of those cops’ buddies in here. They won’t care where you’re being held or what’s going on here as long as they get a chance to tear you apart with their bare hands.”
“I didn’t kill those—”
He was cut off by the sharp clang of a baton against the bars. “I saw what you are. Shut your goddamn mouth and pray we don’t kill you just to cut down on the bloodsucker population.”
Having heard that tone of voice and even similar words from Skinners he knew all too well, Cole realized there was nothing he could do or say at that moment to make any progress. So, rather than waste his breath, he backed up until his shoulders bumped against the smooth cement wall and slid down to sit on the floor. His arms came to a rest upon his knees, and his eyes focused on the guard as though he was staring at him through a sniper’s scope.
The guard had no smart remarks or threats to give. He stepped away from the bars and headed back to the elevator. In a matter of seconds all footsteps were washed out by the rattle of the elevator door and the rumble of machinery that took the car to another floor.
A simple glance to either side was enough for him to see the bunk bed frame with a mattress that was about half an inch thick on one side of the cement room, and a squat metal cylinder that smelled too bad to be anything other than a toilet on the other. The cell across the hall was identical, but contained a skinny little guy who sucked air in through his mouth as if he was trying to consume as much as humanly possible before someone else in the room beat him to his share.
“What’s your name?” the inmate across from him asked.
“Whoever you are,” Cole said, “just leave me alone. I’m sick of introducing myself. I’m sick of this damn place and I’m sick of this whole fucking world.”
“I hear that, bud.”
Another guard walked down the hall and slowed down just long enough to throw Cole a threadbare towel that was presumably too weak to support his weight if he tried to hang himself and a set of paper-thin stained sheets. “You be good, Lambert,” he said while shooting a quick glance at the cell across from Cole’s. He then turned and walked away while talking to one of his coworkers on a small handheld radio.
Going for the most cover he could get, Cole chose the bottom bunk and started flipping his sheets over the lumpy mattress. He waited for any number of comments regarding the living situation or his space on the inmate sexual pecking order, but all he heard was the steady rasp of Lambert’s breath. Something about the way the skinny guy stared at him from across the hall made Cole less than anxious to turn his back on him. The guy might have been barely wide enough to make a dent in his rumpled jumpsuit, but his eyes were sharper and more alert than some of the inhuman predators topping the Skinner watch list. “So,” Cole said. “Lambert, is it?”
“Yeah,” the other guy breathed.
“You prefer to go by any other name?”
“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
Cole nodded slowly to himself. Here it comes.
Rather than try to sidestep the confrontation until it snuck back to bite him when the inmates were within easier reach of each other, Cole grabbed his bars and met the glare coming from the occupant of the other cell. “Just making conversation, okay?”
“So you want to talk now, huh?”
“You don’t want any part of it,” Cole said, “that’s fine.”
Lambert pressed his face against the bars as if he meant to shove his head through them. He looked to be a few inches shorter than Cole and would have seemed even smaller if his thick, spiky clump of black hair had been shaved. Wiry fingers curled into fists and then stretched out again to waggle at the end of hands that looked more like knotted collections of veins and faded tattoos. He watched Cole intently while rubbing his bottom lip against the edges of his teeth. “You’re damn right it’s fine,” he said. “Why so nervous?”
Since Cole couldn’t think of an appropriately tough or funny response, he kept quiet.
A scowl eased across Lambert’s face in the same way a piece of bad pork might work its way through his bowels. Judging by the smell coming from the direction of his cell, it seemed to Cole that might have been the case not long before his arrival. Scraggly eyebrows flicked upward and an appraising moan gurgled from the back of Lambert’s throat. “What’s that on your neck?” he asked. “Some kinda tribal? Ain’t from no gang I ever seen.”
Cole looked down, spotted the traces of black stretching from the base of his throat, and pulled up the collar of his jumpsuit to cover more of it. The Nymar tendrils were common among vampires that had an active spore inside them. Black filaments stretched out and made themselves at home within their host’s chests, but Cole’s spore was gone. Although the markings weren’t moving beneath his skin, they were still more visible now than they’d been a few days ago. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just left over from a bad night.”
“I hear that,” Lambert chuckled while unbuttoning his jumpsuit.
Despite the distance and bars between them, Cole stepped away from the front of his cell. “Uhh, what are you doing?”
The other prisoner grinned widely while continuing to undress. He unbuttoned and peeled away the front of his jumpsuit to reveal a pale sunken chest covered in stringy black hair. Opening the jumpsuit farther, Lambert displayed a set of ribs that looked more like a xylophone covered in skin that had been transplanted from a fish’s belly. “Take a gander at that,” he said.
As much as Cole wanted to resist, he took the gander that had been offered. On Lambert’s ribs, written in a flowing script accented with ladybugs and lip marks, were the words,
Lambert nodded and waggled his eyebrows as if he’d just shown Cole the lost pieces of an ancient text. “Wanna hear about a bad night? I met this lady when I was baked off my ass. I smoked so much weed and drank so much Jim Beam that I got convinced a bunch of blinkin’ streetlights were transmitting code to me. Seriously.”
“That sounds a bit more than just being drunk,” Cole said.
