Teeth of Beasts (Skinners) (23 page)

“It’s already gotten as far as Chicago?” she asked.

“And farther.”

“Henry’s a Full Blood too,” Paige said. “You don’t mind us going after him?”

“He is a Mind Singer,” Burkis said. “They have always been trouble. He must be dealt with as quickly as possible. You are given this chance to resolve this situation because I do not wish to see so many humans destroyed.”

“No,” Cole grunted. “Just the ones who get in your way.”

Shifting his gaze toward him, the Full Blood snarled, “Just the ones who don’t know their place.”

“And what if we find him?” Cole asked. “Should we give you a call or just squeeze a squeak toy a bunch of times?”

Burkis dropped to all fours and shifted into his barrel-chested running form. His eyes narrowed into slits and his teeth grew long enough to pierce through his cheeks. It was the first time during this meeting that he truly seemed ready to kill either of the Skinners.

One leap carried the werewolf to the top of the gardening supply store. Several people on the street pointed at the large
shape on the roof, but they lost sight of Burkis after his next bounding step. With nothing left to see, the pointers continued along their way.

“You really shouldn’t make doggie jokes when referring to Full Bloods,” Paige sighed as her weapons shrank back down so she could holster them in her boots. “They hate that.”

They drove through the city, waiting for a twitch to let them know they’d found Burkis again, but didn’t have any luck. Considering that Full Bloods held portions of entire continents as their territories and had the speed to patrol them, trying to chase after one was even more pathetic than a dog running after a speeding car. The Skinners made the effort anyway before heading to Ned’s house to regroup.

Daniels had a batch of the new weapon varnish cooking, but it wouldn’t be ready for a few hours.

Ned was gone and Rico wasn’t about to wait for him to return before setting Cole and Paige both up with .45s. They weren’t as nice as his Sig Sauer, but he insisted on trading them for the smaller revolvers Paige carried in her glove compartment.

“I wanna try to make these standard issue,” Rico told her. “Since most of us make our own ammunition, it’s easier to swap shells if we all pack the same caliber.”

“Where’s Ned?” Paige asked.

“Checking on something or other downtown. It’s just as well because I woulda told him to sit this one out anyways. Last thing we need is a blind man dragging us down at that strip club. Last time I was there, me and Cole got knocked into a bus.” Seeing the glare from Paige, Rico quickly amended his statement with, “Sorry.
Half
blind man.”

It was too late to mount a search for the house’s owner, so they stuffed some extra clips into their pockets and drove out to Bunn’s Lounge.

Before the three of them entered the club, Cole examined the outside of the structure at its base for any markings that Stu had mentioned when talking about the A-frame temples. All he had to do was kick away a few tufts of grass to find a chain of strange, curving marks half covered in topsoil.

“Check,” he said. “Now let’s go in to check for any unusual statuary or depictions of naked women.”

“Yeah,” Rico grunted. “What’re the odds of us finding that kinda stuff in there?”

Tristan was good as her word, leaving instructions with the front door security to let them in through an unmarked entrance with no metal detector. Striding into the club wearing a baggy flannel shirt over his harness and a pistol tucked into a new holster at his hip, Cole couldn’t help but grin. If he heard tinny piano music instead of Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” blasting through an expensive sound system, he would have felt like a real gunslinger.

In contrast to the fully lit place with the spotless floors Paige visited earlier that day, the strip club had come alive with pulsing music, obnoxious DJs, strobe lights and the frequent catcall. It was a quarter past one in the morning, which was barely prime time for Bunn’s. The dancers on-stage were pretty, but didn’t quite know how to fully utilize their groove thangs. A crowd was shaping up, however, and almost all the tables were full.

“So you really think this other Skinner will be here?” Cole asked.

“If he isn’t, there’ll be a certain nymph getting her pretty ass kicked.”

Rico strode through the club wearing his patchwork jacket over his firearms and a wide, ugly smile on his face. “I bet we could charge a hell of a lot for that show,” he said. “Besides, it’s not like we’ve got a bunch of other leads to follow.”

Either she wasn’t about to bite her trainer’s head off or she agreed with the statement, because Paige let it slide. Two
of the stages were being used, which meant there were several tables and a whole lot of horny guys between her and the other side of the club. One of the tables was occupied by three dudes wearing University of Missouri shirts who barely looked old enough to drink the beers piled in front of them. The closer Paige got to them, the more obnoxious their attempts at charm became.

One of the dudes reached out to snag her, but was shoved straight back down into his seat by Rico. “You don’t want none of this, boy,” he snarled as another of the Mizzou boys sprang up to face him.

Apparently, that held true for all three of the dudes, and they quickly got back to divvying up their singles.

Pulling a chair up to the table Cole had chosen, Rico dropped into it and declared, “If I don’t get something to drink real quick, there’s gonna be some trouble.”

“The drinks are on me,” Paige said, “if you talked to Stanley Velasco like you said you would.”

“Oh, I did. We got a nice deal all worked out.”

“How bad are we stuck?”

Rico leaned back to tell a waitress what he wanted and then waved off Paige’s question. “Don’t worry about it. The bill’s been paid and we may not live long enough to worry about settling up. Life is good.”

The waitress made a good first impression by returning quickly with an oversized mug of beer and tussled his bristly hair when she took his money.

“All right you horn dogs!” the DJ announced. “Point your eyes center stage and keep them there for our lovely Shae!”

“Ooooh,” Rico mused.

Shae strutted onto the stage wearing a miniskirt that was more of a silk sweatband around her waist and a matching camisole that had been cut just short enough for the bottoms of her breasts to hang below the thin material. She waved at the Skinners’ table and then climbed the brass pole like a cat ascending a carpeted post.

Rico started to say something else, but closed his eyes and let out a breath. Before Cole could brace himself, he was reminded of why the nymphs demanded and received
such outrageously high pay for lap dances. As Shae ground her body against the pole, Cole could feel the friction from his chest all the way down to his groin. She leaned back, pumped her hips against the pole and sent that sensation through him as well. And when she playfully pinched her nipple, everyone seated at stage side cleared their chairs.

Paige wasn’t immune to the effect, but was the first to get back to business. “Hey!” she said. “Did you do anything useful since you’ve been out?”

Between the phantom fingers running beneath his clothes and the beer he’d just downed, Rico looked like he didn’t know what the hell was going on. “Oh,” he said as if he was coming out of a coma. “Yeah. I did a little digging on Jonah Lancroft. I think he’s been around a lot longer than we thought. Either that or the old journals are messed up.”

Shae was crawling around the edge of the stage, sometimes balancing impossibly upon the narrow bar separating her from the front row admirers. Since they were already hooked and gleefully handing over their money, she no longer projected her sensations to the crowd. Without that distraction, the conversation at Cole’s table flowed much quicker.

Settling in with his beer in one hand, Rico said, “There was some con man named Dr. Lancroft traveling around New England around the 1760s. He went from village to village, supposedly slaying vampires. Folks thought he was crazy, but he got results. Sound familiar?”

“There were vampires here in the 1700s?” Cole asked.

“Nymar have been around a lot longer than that. There were some Skinners in the Colonies back then along with Gypsies, trackers, and all sorts of folks who didn’t laugh at the whole vampire and werewolf thing. They weren’t exactly public figures, but they were smart enough to pool their resources for a good long while. A century later Jonah Lancroft built his reformatory as a place to study the monsters and figure out new ways to cause them grief.”

Shae’s heels clacked against the stage as she approached her pole. Knowing there wouldn’t be much time before the conversation would slow down again, Paige said, “You had a point, Rico. Get to it.”

“Skinners are still around,” he stated without taking his eyes from the perky nymph. “We may not see eye-to-eye with all the Travelers, but Gypsies are still around too. The reformatory itself may have collapsed, but there’s a lot of shit buried under there. Any number of right-thinking lunatics from any number of groups who have survived this long could have gone down there to find Lancroft’s journals or research or notes or whatever else.”

“Right-thinking lunatics?” Cole chuckled.

“I’d say we qualify for that title,” Rico said while raising his ridiculously oversized mug. “And I bet the Cahokia Police Department would agree.”

“At least to the lunatic part,” Paige grumbled while rubbing her sore arm.

Cole drummed his fingers as something popped into his head. It was one of those things that didn’t feel right as a thought and surely wouldn’t feel right as a statement. Even so, he decided to let it fly anyway. “What about Henry?”

“What about him?” Paige asked.

“He was in Lancroft Reformatory for God knows how long. He went back there when we were chasing Misonyk out of Chicago. If he’s this Mind Singer now, maybe he’s cleared his thoughts enough to put together something like Pestilence.”

“You mean that psycho with the broken neck who was knocked senseless in the jail cell?” Rico scoffed. “He could barely put together a sentence.”

“I agree,” Paige said. “Henry may be a lot of things, but he’s not a chemist.”

Cole felt a warm hand settle upon his shoulder. Tristan moved in behind him and leaned over to run her fingers along his chest. He’d felt her phantom touch before, but the real thing combined with a soft voice in his ear, was enough to make every nerve ending stand up and salute. “Good to see you again, Cole. I never got to finish that lap dance we started in Wisconsin. Although I should warn you,” she added as she lowered herself onto his lap, “it’s never a good idea to lick the dancers.” Once his face was sufficiently flushed, Tristan acknowledged the rest of the table. “Hello again, Paige. Introduce me to your friend.”

Rico almost knocked his chair over in his haste to get up and introduce himself.

“Ah,” Tristan purred. “Rrrrico.”

Unlike when Cole had rolled his R’s, Rico seemed positively delighted to hear Tristan make the same reference. “I take it Tristan is just a stage name,” he said.

She took a sip of his beer. “A girl’s got to have her secrets.”

“Girl?” Paige grunted. “You mean nymph. She’s a nymph, Rico.”

Tristan seemed more perplexed by her tone than anything else. “Aren’t you the one who convinced the other Skinners to give us a pass?”

“I convinced them to give
you
a pass, and that was just as a favor to Prophet.”

“How is Walter?”

“Fine.”

“Well, you still have my thanks,” Tristan said earnestly. “And I’ll have you know that we haven’t abused your concession one bit. In fact, we’ve been able to get steady work and create a very lucrative business.”

“An entire chain of purple A-frames,” Cole said.

“Us and IHOP.”

“IHOPs aren’t temples,” he pointed out.

Curling an arm around Cole’s head so she could rub his chin, Tristan replied, “That depends on how much you like banana pancakes.”

It took every ounce of will, but Cole somehow kept his mind in focus. “These are temples, Tristan. Paige and I checked on our way in here and we saw the runes or glyphs or whatever you want to call the markings along the bottom of the outside walls.”

When Tristan looked at him, Rico shrugged and told her, “We did our research.”

“What does it matter if these are temples?” the nymph asked. “We’re not forcing anyone to come here, we’re not preventing them from leaving, and we’re not forcing them to worship us. They choose to do all of that on their own.”

Judging by the way her hips shifted just perfectly against his lap, Cole didn’t have any trouble believing her.

“So why build temples?” Paige asked. “Aren’t there already plenty of these dumps all over the country? It’s not like any of you would have trouble landing a job at one of them.”

Tristan lowered her voice and said, “First of all, our temples amplify our talents. They also allow us to live without being sniffed out by every shapeshifter or Nymar out there.”

“They don’t seem to work too well in that regard,” Rico pointed out. “Otherwise there wouldn’t need to be so much extra security around the side door.”

“Those leeches didn’t find us on their own,” Tristan hissed. “You see that man sitting over there?”

Cole and the other two Skinners looked across the club to a section of small round tables scattered in a far corner. It was almost directly between the VIP area Paige had seen in Christov’s video and the door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
next to a huge mirror. A few of those tables were occupied by adventurous couples looking to spice up their love lives, but most were taken by men on their own watching the dancers from afar instead of sitting close enough to smell the perfume. Only one of them didn’t seem overly enticed by the dancers. In fact, the girls making their rounds asking for private dances completely avoided him. The lighting in the club wasn’t very good, but Cole could see the thick, impeccably trimmed whiskers covering the man’s face.

“You mean that guy with the beard?” he asked.

“That’s the one. Do you recognize him?”

Strobe lights created shadows upon the bearded man’s face that shifted in time to the beat of the music. Black lights were absorbed by the coarse texture of his neck and arms. His posture was just straight enough to make him look confident instead of rigid, and he kept one hand flat on the table a few inches away from a glass of what looked to be cola. He wore simple clothes made of thick cotton and the pleasantly neutral expression of someone watching squirrels scamper across a quiet park.

“He look familiar to you, Rico?” Paige asked.

The big man shook his head. “Why should he?”

“Because,” Tristan said, “he’s one of you.”

“He’s the Skinner you told us about?”

Maintaining a playful smile and nodding without looking directly at the table, she said, “I saw the scars myself. He even smells like one of you. Tree sap, gun oil, and blood. Those leeches were following him, and when they realized my sisters were here, they started camping outside our door waiting for their chance to get us. If it wasn’t for the protection of our temple’s glyphs, they would have been able to charge in here and take us by force.”

“What do the Nymar have against nymphs?” Rico asked.

Tristan shifted in Cole’s lap as if about to float across the table. “We’re the reason vampires exist, sweetie.”

“Nymar spore are why vampires exist,” Paige corrected.