“I want you to shift that weapon’s shape, Cole,” Waylon said.
“Not until you tell me where you got them.”
“Sit down, then hold the weapons properly and shift their shape.”
Cole made sure his fingers fit between the thorns. The blood staining its grip was old and blackened. “Did you kill someone to get this? Answer me or—”
One of the guards to Cole’s left fired a single shot from his AK-47. The round tore through the meat in Cole’s calf, knocking that leg out from under him and sending him straight down to the stool. His tailbone cracked against the uncushioned seat and his chest knocked against the edge of the table. Before he could slide to the floor, another guard rushed over to him, lifted him onto the stool and then slammed the flat side of his shotgun stock against the back of Cole’s head. The jarring impact knocked his face against the table, but wasn’t hard enough to keep him there.
Waylon reached into an interior jacket pocket to produce a small syringe that was about half the size of a pencil. “Cooperate and I’ll administer this serum to you.”
Recognizing the fluid in that syringe almost immediately, Cole gripped the table and nodded. Even with his body’s ability to produce the serum, the bleeding from his flesh wound would soon cause him to pass out. Since he didn’t want to be at the mercy of these men, he dropped the stakes and allowed two guards to restrain him while the serum was administered. The moment he experienced the cool, familiar rush of it through his leg, he felt better. The tech knelt down to pinch the wound together as both the shotgun and AK barrels were jammed against Cole’s head. The wound itched as it sealed, but that sensation was almost completely lost beneath the comforting light- headedness that followed. Whether that came from the serum or the blood he’d lost, Cole was grateful for the breather.
Following the tech as best he could, he grunted, “That’s better than the stuff we mix at home.”
“Of course,” Waylon said. “Now can we continue?”
Cole sat up, took hold of the stakes and couldn’t help but stare at the flakes of dried blood that fell from the thorns onto his skin.
“You know what to do,” Waylon prodded. “Do it.”
Gazing defiantly into the eyes of the guard who’d shot him, Cole clenched his fist around the weapon and drove the spikes into his palms. Oddly enough, he could actually tell the difference between those and the thorns on his own weapon.
“Now shift its shape,” Waylon commanded.
If he was holding his own spear, it would have been easy. He’d bonded with that weapon to the point that it felt more like a piece of his own body. But the stakes were foreign to him. When he willed the pointed end to curl, it barely twitched.
Waylon looked over to the wall behind Cole, which was dominated by a large window. “Are you getting this?”
He was answered by a few sharp taps from the other side of the thick window.
“Is that all you can do, Cole?”
In another part of the converted visitors’ lounge, machines chirped the rhythm of his heartbeat and whatever other vital signs were being measured by the components stuck to his neck and chest.
“How are you feeling?” the tech asked.
“Tired,” Cole replied.
“Are you having chest pains? Any pressure from the tendrils?”
Hearing someone refer to vampire fragments inside of him as if they were nothing more than kidney stones was strange. Then again, it wasn’t much stranger than the fact that everyone was more concerned about a stick changing shape than the bullet wound in his leg, which had almost healed. Cole reminded himself to get that recipe.
He shook his head and then winced.
“You are, aren’t you?” the tech asked.
Lowering his eyes, Cole nodded and let out a breath he’d been prolonging for the better part of a minute.
Waylon jotted down a note and said, “You can do better than that, Cole. Make that weapon into something you could use.”
Those words caused all of the guards to tense.
Cole kept his head hanging low, mostly as a way to try and make himself look weaker than he truly was. Just because there wasn’t a way to keep Waylon from recording his data didn’t mean he couldn’t screw with that data as much as possible. When he focused on the floor and the lower portion of the room, he spotted more of the Skinner runes etched into the walls. Whether they were protections or some sort of ward, he couldn’t tell. Seeing those symbols gave him an idea, however, which involved playing along with Waylon’s little experiment just enough to make him seem like a worthwhile experiment.
“Can you hear him?” the tech asked. “You need to reshape that weapon.”
Cole grunted and lifted his head, hoping he wasn’t overdoing the theatrics. “Yeah. Just give me a moment.”
Reshaping his own weapon had become a reflex, but it was one that had to be trained. Cole drew on that experience as he willed the stakes in his hands into a new shape. After several moments of strained silence, sweat began to trickle down his forehead. More perspiration came when he thought he might not be able to get the stakes to change shape at all. But then the varnish worked into the stake did its thing. The Nymar blood infused into the mixture bonded with Cole’s blood, allowing a bridge to form between his mental commands and the components in the varnish that had been taken from a shapeshifter.
The stake began to creak. The sharpened end stretched outward into a finer, narrower point.
“Very good,” Waylon said as his pen scratched furiously on his clipboard. “The data we collect today will help more Skinners than you know, Mr. Warnecki.”
When Cole shifted his hands, he worked both thumbs to grind the stakes against his palms as much as possible. The thorns were still embedded in his flesh, and they tugged at his skin while scraping against tender, exposed meat.
“His heart rate is escalating,” the tech reported. “More than normal.”
That came as no surprise to Cole. Even though the stakes continued to sharpen and eventually curve into hooks, he wasn’t feeling the results he was after. And the less he felt in that regard, the longer he’d be locked away inside a building that had probably been shut down and crossed off of any list maintained by the Department of Corrections or anyone else who kept track of large buildings. He clenched his eyes shut, focused harder, and zeroed in on nothing but the image of what he wanted the weapon to do.
Still, nothing more than what Waylon had asked for.
“Good,” the man with the clipboard said. “Now shift them back.”
Sweat rolled down Cole’s face. He’d only managed to find one chink in the prison’s armor, and it was looking like he couldn’t exploit it. As soon as that thought rolled through his mind, he could hear the heart monitor whine into overdrive.
“We might want to slow this down,” the tech said.
Waylon’s voice was cool and crisp. “Is he going into arrest?”
“Not yet.”
“Then keep going. If anything ruptures, we can revive him. Cole, keep those weapons touching the table or I’ll have you shot.”
None of those words sank in. Cole’s entire world had devolved into one task. And when that task drifted further out of reach, he thought of an image that centered him and steered him back on course. More important, it made him want to fight even harder to climb out of the pit into which he’d sunk.
“Bring it back to where it was, Cole.” That wasn’t a request from Waylon. It was a demand backed up by a squad of gunmen.
What he’d tried to do was simple in theory, but wound up being a lot harder than he’d anticipated. One of the thorns waggled within his palm, and when he focused harder, it waggled even more. The stakes shrank back down and straightened out. The thorns remained wedged in his palm, but the waggling one felt more like a loose tooth on the verge of popping out. He gripped both weapons tightly, driving every thorn deeper, and concentrated for one more push.
