Vampire Uprising (12 page)

“And?”

“And one of the ladies attached to one of those asses pointed me in the right direction to catch up with the Skinners that arrived just before I did. It took some fast footwork and a taxi ride that damn near required a change of pants before it was done, but I caught up to them.”

“Did you recognize them?”

Paige focused her attention on the traffic in front of her. Although it was bad at that time of day, it was unusual for her to focus that much on driving. The Chicago blood running through her veins allowed her to control a motor vehicle
without being restricted by fear of losing life or limb. “Yeah,” she said after cutting off a black Toyota. “I did. Bobby was one of them.”

“And the other?”

“The other wasn’t Tru. I followed them for as long as I could and broke off before I was spotted. It didn’t take long for them to disappear among all the other bloodsuckers.”

“Miami’s a big Nymar town?”

“Are you kidding me? All those half-dressed hotties looking to dance, hook up, or party? I wouldn’t be surprised if a Nymar founded that city. It’s bad enough those Canadians are working with Nymar so closely, but having Bobby smuggle in a new one after making sure our backs were turned makes this a whole new game.”

“We work with Daniels pretty closely,” Cole reminded her. “He’s Nymar.”

“I know Daniels. I don’t know Bobby well enough to cut him that kind of slack. So what am I supposed to make of those pictures you sent me?”

“They’re pictures of that dead Nymar I found in the basement. Last time you were down there, were any of the cells open?”

“No,” she replied without hesitation.

“This one was about halfway down the row.”

Paige didn’t have to think long before saying, “The only cells that had much of anything in them were toward the end of the hall. Nobody touched the thing at the far end, did they?”

“No. This Nymar had a lot more tendrils in it even after the spore had been taken out. Tendrils that reacted to light. They’d swell up and turn the skin black. Also, I didn’t feel anything in my scars. I know it was dead, but I was right there and should have felt something, right?”

“Yes. That part could be bad.”

“Also, I think Bobby and M went through some of those jars that were piled up in all those milk crates. I took samples to see if we could figure out what they wanted.”

They drove in silence for a while. A triple play of Aerosmith
was on the radio, so both of them relaxed during their stop-and-go journey across town. Cole knew he hadn’t heard everything that had happened in Miami. Paige was in too good a mood for there to have been a fight, but she was holding something back. Since he was holding back a few details of his own, he figured he’d let the matter drop. The silence was comfortable and easy. After the final swaying notes of “Dream On” had faded away, Paige reached out to shut them off with a twist of the radio knob.

“I’m going back, Cole.”

“Back to Philly? It’ll just be more of the same. If those locals are setting something up with the Nymar, we shouldn’t go back alone. Let’s bring Rico. We can say he’s just taking his turn claiming some of that Lancroft crap. We’ll have to warn him about Henry, though.”

“No. Rico’s not coming with me, and neither are you. I’ll probably head back to Philly sooner or later, but I meant I’m going back to Miami. There’s something I need to double-check. You’re going back to Raza Hill and staying in Chicago. We’ve been gone for too long. Steph was just getting the Nymar organized here when we left for KC, and kept organizing while we were in St. Louis. Who knows what she’s got going on by now. She and the rest of her girls need to see a Skinner presence around here again. Make the rounds. Show yourself around town. Bust some heads if anyone’s stepping out of line. Let’s face it, with Steph and Ace in the area, someone’s bound to be stepping out of line.”

“If you’re not taking me along, then at least tell me you’re taking someone.” Cole’s eyes drifted to her arm. Since her injury in Kansas City, Paige had been able to move it a lot better and even found some creative uses for the hardened tissue impeding her movement. The sling was long gone, but the scars made it clear she wasn’t functioning at one hundred percent. “You really shouldn’t be on your own, Paige.”

Despite flying down a rare stretch of open road, she shifted her focus away from the windshield and to her passenger. “You don’t even know what I’m doing. Why the hell
should you tell me how I should go about doing it?”

He had plenty to say to that, but held it back. At the moment he was so pissed off that he no longer even wanted to hear her voice.

“They’re back in town.”

Steph had plenty of smiles in her repertoire. Most of them were sincere, but in a way that most smiles weren’t supposed to be. She had the grin that she put on for her customers at the Blood Parlor, which was prospering in its location on Rush Street. That was always a crowd pleaser since it was accompanied by one or more of her girls coming in to take customers off to a room to enjoy the pleasures of feeling Nymar teeth ease into their necks or wrists. There was the hungry smile that allowed all three sets of her fangs to slide out from beneath her gums. That was her favorite, since it was the predatory equivalent of stripping naked and showing yourself to a lover before the much anticipated next act. And then there was the one that came to her now.

Her smooth face was illuminated by an earnest display of joy when she asked, “Are you talking about the Skinners?”

Standing in the doorway to her office, Ace nodded. He was a skinny guy who looked to have been somewhere in his late twenties when he’d been turned. Although he still looked youthful, there was too much experience in his eyes for him to properly carry the baggy jeans and netted shirt he insisted on wearing. The narrow patch of hair sprouting from his chin, and the heart shaved into the side of his head,
didn’t help his case much. “Come on,” he said. “You can hear them now if you want.”

Steph hopped up and practically skipped around her desk to follow him down a hallway that led to the back rooms of her parlor. Little stone gargoyles lined the walls, each of them holding electric candles in clawed hands. The walls were painted dark red. Newly purchased black carpeting rubbed her bare feet. Muted, moody music played from hidden speakers to complete the parlor’s effect. So far the people who paid to have the Nymar feed on them loved every last one of the clichéd gothic touches. They especially liked seeing Steph in a good mood. One of the men, a stockbroker in his early forties, scooted all the way to the edge of an overstuffed couch in the waiting room just to get a look at her as she left her office. Fully aware that she was on display in a lavender nightie that stopped just short of covering the ruffles of her cream-white panties, she looked back at him and kissed the air. That was enough to convince him to spring for the deluxe package.

Most of the rooms branching off the hallway were small, luxurious bed chambers that came complete with closed-circuit video cameras hidden behind sculptures and wall sconces. They were all wired into the room full of monitors that the Blood Parlor’s managers were now entering. The security room was all sharp edges and glowing reminders of what century it truly was. Ignoring the assorted depravities being displayed on the screens, Steph and Ace went immediately to a laptop set up on one metal desk in the corner of the room. On that screen was a display mapping the time and pitch of scratchy sounds being played through the computer’s speakers. Ace selected a time stamp he’d already highlighted and pressed the button for it to play.

When she heard Cole and Paige having their conversation on the way back from Pinups, Steph pressed her hands to her mouth to hold back a giggle. “So this is from their car?” she asked through her fingers.

“Sid rigged it while they were gone the last time.”

After pausing the recorded conversation, Steph asked, “Where did they go?”

“Hell if I know. We’ve been following them like you wanted for a while. They were out of town for that shit in Kansas City and then again awhile after that.”

“See? I told you it was a good idea to keep track of them! Especially since that skank with the billy clubs started cracking down on my girls.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ace droned. “I wanted to clean them out way before then, but you said it would be too much trouble.”

“Well forget that,” she said after crossing her arms over her proudly displayed cleavage. “Word’s being spread on CP that the Skinners won’t be such a threat for much longer.”

“Did that come from Toronto?”

“Oh yeah. Cobb wrote the post himself.” Steph’s painted lips curled into half a grin as she looked down at the laptop and stroked the right mouse button as if teasing a customer’s anatomy. “This is priceless. I still don’t know how Paige got access to our security feeds, but she always knew when the good stuff was happening in this place. Let’s see how she likes it.”

“Probably did it when she and that other guy stormed in here after we opened.” Ace tapped the Internet browser on his cell phone and hit the link to ChatterPages.net. Ninety-nine percent of the population used the social networking site to post family pictures and play games, between writing updates about what they had for dinner. Although veiled as a fetish fan group, the ChatterPage used by the Nymar was run like a science and alerted its nationwide members about things ranging from Skinner movements and Full Blood sightings to the juiciest, most poorly guarded feeding spots in most major cities. Ace didn’t have to scroll down very far before finding the most recent postings from Cobb38, the page’s founding member. “Holy shit! Someone found the Shadow Spore?”

“Took it right out from under the Skinners’ noses. On top of that, most of the Skinners in the country are either in Philadelphia for some reason or going back and forth from
there right now. That means all of them are distracted.”

“It’s not all of them we need to worry about. Cobb never knew exactly what the Chicago Skinners were doing.”

“No, but we do.” Tapping the mouse button again, Steph allowed the conversation stolen from the Cav to roll for another minute before sighing, “Just listen to them. Sounds like two crazy kids who just climbed out of bed long enough to realize the other one’s not perfect. So cute.”

“That was just recorded about twenty minutes ago,” Ace said. “It should still be a while before they make it back to that shithole restaurant they live in.”

“Are Sid and Rita down there?”

Smirking in a way that allowed the tips of his feeding fangs to poke out from their sheaths, Ace said, “They never left.”

“Good. Give them the go-ahead.”

It was late morning on a weekday, which meant the section of West Twenty-fifth and Laramie was mostly deserted. People drove by, and a few walked along the dirty sidewalk, but none of them cast more than half a glance at the boarded windows and locked door of the old restaurant marked only by a broken sign with enough remaining letters to spell
RAZA HILL
. Anyone from that section of town hardly noticed it was there anymore. The place was too shabby to rob and just clean enough to escape official notice.

Although there was plenty of space inside, the Skinners used only a few rooms at the building’s core. The basement was their private gym and sparring area. What had once been offices were now used for storage and Paige’s bedroom. The kitchen was self-explanatory. A few of the ovens still worked, along with the large stainless steel fridge. The walk-in freezers were shut down, however. One was full of broken furniture and the other was sealed for sanitary reasons. Cole slept in the one with the broken furniture.

“Yeah, Jason,” he said into the phone he kept trapped between his shoulder and the side of his face. “I’m working on
it right now.”

The voice that came through the digital connection to Seattle was patient and only slightly distracted. “What happened to those concepts you were going to e-mail me? The ones with the shapeshifting death-match players. You were supposed to be working on those all month.”

What Cole wanted to say was that he’d been distracted with things like a mind-controlling Full Blood and a Skinner from a hundred years ago making the entire country sick with Mud Flu. The best he could come up with was, “I’m still working on that too.”

“You’ve got some great ideas, Cole. I know I’ve asked you this before, but—”

“No,” Cole snapped. “I’m not planning on moving back to Seattle.”

“Then what I’d like to do is offer to buy you out.”

“Buy what out? The only thing I do for Digital Dreamers anymore is consultant work and some private contracting.”

“The ideas for the shapeshifting stuff,” Jason said with a sigh that Cole knew went along with a slow hand gliding over a scalp covered by thinning hair. “All the guys around here have been watching the stuff online about those werewolf sightings in Kansas City and the more recent ones in Indiana.”

Cole stopped his typing and sat bolt upright. “Indiana? What happened in Indiana?”

“Just more of the same crap that’s been coming in from all over the place after the riots in KC. There’s been a few local news specials, but now the cable networks are getting in on it. Everyone from CNN to Animal Planet have some sort of wild dog or werewolf feature coming up. The point is that we want to strike while the iron is hot and get a major werewolf project in the works before people lose interest.”

Cole had plenty of werewolf projects rolling around in his head, but only a few of them were the sort of thing he might discuss with Jason. Just as he was about to use one of them to try and salvage some of his old career, the
phone beeped to let him know someone else was calling. He looked at the screen to find the word
PROPHET
blinking back at him. Poking the Ignore button, he went back to his old friend from another life. “Maybe I can come back to Seattle,” he said.

“Seriously? When?”

“The way things may be working out here …”

Prophet beeped in again with a text message that Cole didn’t bother to read.