Vampire Uprising (17 page)

Kawosa backed into the darkness from which he’d come. He shifted his blank reflective eyes toward the floor as the bricks started to buckle and split. Dirt and subterranean filth spewed up like pus from an old wound once Max concentrated his efforts on the section of floor beneath the bars. Those bricks, either strengthened by the warding runes or powered by some other force, held firm. They did, however, need a solid foundation. Once that was removed, they shifted and slid within the churning ground until the bars were the only thing holding them in place.

Randolph looked at Kawosa again, finding the creature’s eyes closer to the top of the cell and encased in a lean shape that bristled with coarse fur.

“Can you break the plane of the bars?” Kawosa asked.

“With the bricks of your cell disrupted, the runes should be weakened enough for you to—”

“That’s not what I asked. Can you break the plane of the bars?”

Hunkering down on all fours, Randolph leaned so his snout was almost touching the old iron. “We don’t have time for this.”

“All this world has for me are its curiosities. Meeting you this way is a surprise. I like surprises. I want more of them.”

“If I were to start performing tricks for your amusement, then that would be a very big surprise indeed. You can stay here until the Skinners figure out a way to cut you apart, but if you want to leave, let’s bloody well leave.”

The smile Kawosa showed was crooked and verging on childish, which made it a disturbing addition to a face such as his. Rather than test his luck with the bars, he sank his claws into the earth beneath the broken floor and pulled himself under the upturned dirt. It was a short crawl through decades-old filth before his lean frame emerged inside the cell next to his old residence. By the time he pulled himself completely out of the hole, Kawosa was a wiry man with skin the color of scorched desert rock. He wore a tattered leather loincloth and a collar around his neck that might have once been attached to a shirt or some sort of tunic. Long stringy hair hung in front of his face but wasn’t enough to obscure his rich, chocolate-brown eyes.

“The tunnel continues from there,” Randolph said as he eased back into his dense, shaggy human form. “Once we’re outside we run. Can you run?”

“We’ll soon see.”

“Yes we will. Max, lead the way.”

The tunneling Mongrel had watched silently for this long, and was more than happy to dive back into the earth to leave the brick prison behind.

Randolph stared down the hall and locked eyes with the Skinners who were recovering from their fight with the canine hybrid. When one of them sounded the charge, the Full Blood followed in Kawosa’s wake.

“Come on!” Paul said. The few stray drops of shapeshifter blood that he hadn’t drank were quickly lapped up by a wildly flopping tongue. He’d never tasted the blood of a Mongrel and it flowed through him like raw volcanic energy.

Tru had drunk from the Mongrel as well and was so affected by it that she couldn’t form words. All she did was race to join her partner, since he was running to what might
be another of the newly discovered delicacies.

Jory wasn’t so eager. He took a moment to fish a small syringe from a compartment stitched into the side of his weapon’s scabbard and injected a dose of serum into his arm. Even as the healing began, he jogged while the other two threw themselves into a dead run. “Hold up!” he shouted. “Did anything get loose down there?”

The chaos upstairs subsided so quickly that the ensuing silence seemed more shocking than an explosion.

“We don’t know yet,” Tru replied. “What the hell was just standing there?”

“I thought it was a Full Blood,” Paul said. “Looked like one, but then it changed into something different.”

Jory’s fingers curled in to brush against the scars on his palm. “That was a Full Blood. Just never seen it in that form before. It’s gone now. Let’s get out of here.” He led the way back upstairs and through the dissection room. Even before he made it out of the Skipping Temple, he could tell there was more trouble on its way. Without looking back, he grunted, “Cops.”

“I think those lights are just from the walls,” Tru said.

“Yeah, the green ones. Not those,” Jory replied as he pointed to one of the small windows along the top of the workshop wall. The windows were rectangular and barely large enough for a child to fit through, but the metal basins outside them caught more than dead leaves and small animals. It also reflected some of the red and blue lights from the street.

“Tell the nymph to be ready,” Jory shouted while running up the stairs that led to the kitchen.

“The nymph can hear you,” Jordan shouted back. “And it’s ready. The only bridge I could get right now was to … are you listening to me?”

“Just keep it open,” Paul said. “So long as it leads away from this place we should be fine.”

Before either of the Nymar got concerned enough to venture into the part of the house that had become a war zone, Skinners began filing into the basement. Bobby was first
down the stairs, helping someone who was too wounded to move on his own. The rest came down in a stream of bloody bodies and a few limp corpses. Abel was last to step upon the top stair, and quickly traced some of the runes near the door.

“Is that going to keep the cops from seeing what’s up there?” Jessup asked from the landing at the bottom of the steps.

“Doesn’t even matter,” Abel replied in a haggard wheeze. “Half the neighborhood must’ve heard the shots, and Lord only knows what anyone saw if they looked over the back fence. Just get the hell out of here before we’re all dragged away.”

By then the first Skinners were marching through the curtain. Jessup went into the dissection room and picked up the thing that had literally been pried from Jonah Lancroft’s dying hand. It was a small box with a simple control on it that was linked to explosives set up throughout the basement.

“Everyone’s out,” he said to Jordan. “Your turn.”

“What about the Full Blood? Are you going to let the cops find it?”

“It took off and so did the Mongrel. Just move.”

She didn’t need to hear any more than that before approaching the curtain and placing one foot through. “Are you coming?”

“Hell yes,” Jessup said as he pressed the button that triggered the first muffled thump of C4 from the bottom of the stairs. “Ain’t nowhere else for me to go now.”

Chicago, Illinois

After all that had happened, Cole was amazed to find Raza Hill so quiet. The building was a blackened husk spattered by foam and water that glistened with reflected streetlights and the glare from passing cars. The parking lot was empty, but there was plenty of evidence that it had been full not too long ago. Everything from fresh tire marks to candy wrappers marked the most activity at the old restaurant since its final dinner rush. Sections of the perimeter were cordoned off by police tape, but nobody was around to enforce the stern words written in large, blocky font upon a yellow background.

“What did you expect?” Prophet asked as he stuck his hands in his pockets and shifted on his feet to get a look down the alley. “An armed guard posted at some run-down, burned-up hole in the ground?”

“Considering all that happened? I thought we might have more trouble than this getting so close,” Cole replied. “Just keep your eyes open and let me know if anyone’s coming.”

“Sure. After the fire, the shooting, the stabbing, the dead vampires, and everything else, I’m sure folks’ll be flocking to this place.”

“Are the Nymar bodies still out there?”

“Just the clothes. I think one of the fire trucks ran them
over. Looks like some poor bastard who got crushed by a steamroller in one of them cartoons. How come it’s so hard to find those good cartoons anymore?”

“Too violent,” Cole said as he fished the hard drive from the wreckage of his old computer. From there he went to the restaurant’s side entrance and pulled it open with an expectant wince. When no alarms sounded and nobody shouted through a bullhorn for him to freeze, he opened the door the rest of the way and went inside.

Prophet, on the other hand, followed along as if strolling through a store that didn’t carry anything in his size. “Violent? You know what you see on every damn channel anymore? Anime. That Japanese stuff is some violent shit.”

“You’re thinking of hentai.”

“No, that’s the sexy shit.”

“You think big-eyed girls with purple hair getting worked over by sea creatures is sexy?”

At that moment Prophet had the big eyes going but not the purple hair. “What in the name of hell are you watching? I’m talking about
Dragonball Z
or
Pokémon.
That kind of anime, you sick bastard.”

The interior of the restaurant was charred and stank from the combined odors of what had been scorched in the fire and the chemicals used to put it out. After using Raza Hill as a home base since the beginning of his days as a Skinner, it now felt as if he was creeping around inside someone else’s house after sneaking in through a carelessly unlocked door. Although the dining room and kitchen were trashed, his walk-in freezer was in fairly good shape. There just wasn’t a lot in there for him to waste his time collecting.

“You could probably go back to living here before too long, you know,” Prophet said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Nobody thought this place was anything but some condemned rat trap anyway. Hell, that’s why there wasn’t such a fuss when it went up. Those Nymar melted or ran away, so with all the other fires that were set around town tonight, I doubt most of the cops or firemen even remember responding to a call here.”

Having already moved to Paige’s room, Cole glanced around at the clothes scattered on the floor and hanging from furniture. He had a tough time figuring out what part of the mess had been made during the fire or the partially collapsed roof and what had been there before the first whiff of smoke drifted through the air. Skipping the clothes completely, Cole shifted his focus to equipment, weapons, and supplies.

“So did you catch any flak from running away with that freak’s body?” Prophet asked. “A little, but I’m sure more’s on the way.”

“How much longer are you gonna be in here?”

“Why? Is someone coming?”

“No. I’m getting sick of breathing ash into my lungs.”

Cole wanted to insist on staying longer but couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to justify it. Before long he realized he was just trying to hang onto one more home that needed to drift away. His phone chirped. He was carrying barely enough things to keep one of his arms occupied when he glanced at the caller ID and said, “Yeah, Rico. What’s up?”

“Please tell me you’re not in Philly.”

“No, I’m in Chicago. Things aren’t too great here, though.”

“You didn’t hear about Philly?”

Cole had spent enough time with the other Skinner to differentiate between the edge in Rico’s voice now and the one that was usually there. Stopping before crossing the threshold out of the building, he asked, “What happened?”

“A pack of Full Bloods tore through the Lancroft place about half an hour ago.”

“A pack?”

“Full Bloods and Mongrels,” Rico said. “That’s what Jessup told me. They killed three Skinners, wounded damn near everyone else, and forced him to level the place.”

“Holy shit? They pushed the button?”

“Sounded like it wasn’t as big a boom as we thought it would be, but it must have sealed off the basement. If you’re near a computer, you can see it for yourself.”

Pressing his elbow against the pocket where his hard drive
resided, Cole said, “That might take a while.”

“Where’s Paige?”

“Not here, and she’s not in Philly either. She took off after someone in Miami. Didn’t she tell you about it?”

“Last I heard she was putting Prophet back to work. How’d that pan out?”

“So far so good. I’m supposed to meet up with you. Paige had some things I needed to tell you. Or … you needed to tell me. Everything’s kind of a blur.”

“Not even in your section of the country and still giving orders.” Rico chuckled. “That’s our Bloodhound. You taking the Stripper Subway?”

“She’s got you calling it that too?”

“I was gonna call it the Pussy Pipeline.”

“Wow. The Subway sounds a lot better now. You back in St. Louis?”

“Should be in a few hours. That enough time for you to get here?”

“Yeah,” Cole said. “Is it all right if I bring a guest?”

“Long as it’s not Prophet.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. See you in a bit.” Cole hung up and tucked the phone away. Since Prophet was staring expectantly at him, he said, “Rico says hi.”

Sirens wailed from down the street. When the cruisers flew past Raza Hill, Prophet let out a relieved sigh and asked, “We done here?”

“I guess so.”

They went to Prophet’s van. During the drive to Pinups, Cole scrolled through some websites using his phone. By the time they arrived, he’d gotten his fill of news reports regarding the happenings in Philadelphia. The press seemed to be split as to whether the violence at the Lancroft house was the result of a gang fight or some sort of “fiery dispute between neighbors.”

Normally, trips to strip bars were exciting, magical affairs where all the women smelled like candy and were more than willing to fulfill the degenerate thoughts that drifted through every man’s head. With all the trips he’d been making lately, however, Cole had come to think of them merely as destinations
to be reached. This one had some nice scenery, but there were still other matters that needed his attention. Some men’s minds, however, drifted in other directions.

“This place have a buffet?” Prophet asked.

“No time for that. Just head for the VIP section.”

Before he could set the parking brake, Prophet was waved around the building to park in the employee lot next to Paige’s Cav. A bouncer held the door open for them, grinning anxiously and focusing his attention on the bounty hunter.

“So where are you guys from?” the young burly kid asked. Cole’s reply was only, “Cicero.”