gonna attempt that.”
“Not exactly. She told me not to let you feed me anymore. What’s that mean?”
Her next swing snapped to a sharp conclusion with the right-handed weapon pointing directly in front of her. “I’m not the one who said it, Cole.”
“But you know what it means.”
She resumed her exercises, launching into a series of circular swings that turned both weapons into a blur as they struck and parried an invisible opponent.
“Let me see your arm.”
It wasn’t an unfamiliar request, and Paige had long ago given up discouraging him from checking on her from time to time. Allowing her one-sided sparring match to point her in his direction, she extended her right arm and said, “It’s been doing a lot better ever since I’ve been able to get my weapon to make the right shape again. Maybe it’s got something to do with the Breaking Moon. Didn’t you say that Skinners draw from the Torva’ox too?”
Cole wasn’t interested in what she was saying and he didn’t bother looking at the arm she’d offered. “Not that arm.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the other one,” she said with a grin that dissolved as she took her arm back. Standing in a way that kept her left side away from him, she asked, “What’s this about?”
“I thought I’d just gotten used to the pain,” Cole said. “Thought I’d toughened up enough to keep it from bothering me.”
“You have toughened up,” she mused. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed, big boy.” He grabbed her wrist then. Though she pulled against his grip, it took her two tries to break lose. That meant he had indeed been toughening up. “Let go of me,” she snapped.
He felt the tendrils inside him constrict, which sent a jolt of adrenaline through his system, allowing him to snag her again. Knowing he wasn’t going to get much of a chance to examine her, he took advantage of this opportunity by twisting her arm so her wrist was exposed. There was nothing to mar her skin apart from a few little scars that had been there since a childhood run-in with a broken window.
“Happy?” she asked while pulling away and turning her back to him.
“You healed,” he told her. “And since you fought me so much just now, it means you were thinking there was a chance that I might have found something.” Walking around so he could see her face again, Cole asked, “What might I have found, Paige?”
She let out a strained breath. “There wasn’t much of a choice. It was either help you or let you feed the normal way.”
“What do I need help with? You know how much I like to eat.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about! I mean the shit inside of you that Hope’s Shadow Spore flunkie left behind.”
“Yeah,” Cole said. “I just needed to hear you say it. So,” he sighed, “you’ve been feeding me blood when I wasn’t looking?”
“When you’re asleep.”
“Please tell me it was your blood.”
“Yes,” she replied while looking down at her left wrist. “And usually from this arm. How’d you guess?”
“Because I know how you feel about the right. Even though it’s healing, you still look like you want to saw it off sometimes. I’d like to think you’d give me the good stuff instead of blood you might think is tainted somehow.”
“If the blood in my arm is tainted, it’s all tainted. It was a stupid idea to begin with.”
The sun crested the horizon and spread its rays out as if to embrace the landscape below. A cold wind sliced across Cole’s face, bringing with it the taste of fresh dew along with a harsh seasonal chill. “And what was your idea, exactly? Keep those things alive inside of me while I thought I was getting better?”
“I was keeping
“Was it supposed to happen to you?”
Ignoring that, she put her hands on her hips and stared at the sky as if waiting for the sun to challenge her. “We tried taking it out of you. Then I tried handing you over to someone who was supposed to help. That almost got you killed.”
“You didn’t know I would be taken away from that first prison,” Cole reminded her. “Believe me, when we narrow down exactly who in the Vigilant was responsible for that, you’ll have to wait your turn to kick their ass.”
“I still don’t even know if Rico had anything to do with it.”
“He didn’t.”
She looked at him with critical eyes. “Are you sure about that?”
“There’s no good reason to think he joined up with the Vigilant until after I broke out of that place in Colorado. He probably just decided they were the way to go after everything went to hell.”
“Went to hell which time?” she asked with a tired laugh.
For once, Cole didn’t reflect the slightest bit of humor after seeing her smile. “The most recent time,” he said. “If he wanted to hurt me, he would’ve just taken a swing at me in Louisville . . . or worse.”
“Definitely worse,” she said with a nod, “but it would have been face-to-face.”
“So why did you do it, Paige?”
Either she was convinced there was no getting around it anymore or was too tired to try. “It wasn’t much. Just a little of my blood to keep the pain away whenever you were sleeping. After all I’ve done to you, all the pain I caused and shit I’ve put you through, I figured I owed you at least a little bit of comfort.”
“What if I was trying to starve them out? Did you ever think of that? What if I was trying to get a handle on it?” With each question, Cole moved closer. His hands balled into fists out of sheer frustration with her, the conversation and everything else connected to the subject of the broken tendrils wrapped around his innards. “What if I was dealing with it myself?”
“Dealing how? By feeding only when you absolutely had to? Look me in the eyes and tell me you’ve never fed on anyone.”
Images flashed through Cole’s mind. He saw faces an inch away, staring at him in horror as he revealed himself to be the monster that every Skinner swore to destroy. It started with Hope back in Colorado, continued with an inmate when he was incarcerated, and included a few others who’d been cornered or knocked out at a time when he was simply too weak to resist and the tendrils cinched in like piano wire cutting into his intestinal tract. Maybe they’d even crept in to squeeze the arteries connected to his heart where the spore had been, but they somehow knew just how much pressure to apply without killing him. He’d had plenty of time to think of such things when he was alone or just about to drift off to sleep. That brought him back to the present and to the one person who was supposed to be the single constant in his life. “You’ve brought me more than just a little comfort just by being with me,” he told her.
“And you’ve fed,” she whispered, as if the words themselves were forbidden. “You’ll keep feeding until we can find a way to fix you up.”
“You can live with your wound. Why won’t you let me live with mine?”
“Why won’t you let me help you?”
Suddenly, Cole’s voice took a fierce tone: “Because I didn’t ask for it. Why were you ready to kill me when we all thought there was no way to get the spore out of me? Because you didn’t want me to become one of those bloodsuckers? What the hell does it make me, with you feeding me whether I know about it or not?”
“It’s different, Cole. Right now . . . there’s just no more to be done. I even asked Tristan if she could donate more blood to draw the rest of those things out, but she said it wouldn’t do any good. I threatened her to get me some nymph blood, but she held her ground. She said she wouldn’t hand over a piece of herself or her sisters on such a dangerous whim. Her words. The crappy part is that I think she’s right. Those tendrils don’t have a brain attached to them anymore. You seemed hell-bent on letting them rip you apart inside until you snapped and fed again, but I couldn’t stand for either one of those things to happen so I told her I’d take care of you myself.” She
