Extinction Agenda (23 page)

“Guided?”

She nodded. “We brought some bodies back with us. Figured you’d want to be there when we examine them.”

“Right, but first things first.” Stepping forward, Paige extended a hand, smiled, and introduced herself.

The woman was hesitant before letting out a tired breath. “I’m so sorry about that,” she said in a voice tinted by an accent Cole couldn’t quite place. “I’m Sophie, and this,” she added while sweeping a hand to another of the Amriany who was just as disheveled as the others who were in the fight outside the club, “is Emil.”

Emil was short and wiry, with a scraggly clump of black hair sprouting at odd angles beneath a cap that came down just enough to protect the upper portions of his ears. He still had his weapons strapped over his shoulders, only they were more within Cole’s area of expertise. The Benelli M-4 was a twelve-gauge semiautomatic shotgun, and the MP-5 was a submachine gun crafted by Heckler & Koch used by many branches of the military around the world. Considering what he’d heard about the Amriany methods for crafting metals, he could only guess what they could do with hardware like that. Smirking as if he could read the envy in Cole’s eyes, Emil eased the guns onto a table and shook his hand. “I get to be the pack mule tonight,” he said.

“Been there,” Cole told him. “How’d those things do against the Half Breeds?”

“You stay around here for much longer and you’ll see for yourself.”

There was some more firepower strapped onto Emil, but Cole didn’t get a chance to see it before it was all wrapped up and carried away.

“Are you hungry?” Sophie asked. “There’s still some dinner left. We also can make some tea.”

Paige spoke for all of the Skinners when she said, “We ate a late breakfast. Was that just an hour or two ago? I don’t even know.”

“Must be nice being favored by the Dryad. That’s something my people wouldn’t know too much about.”

“Don’t get defensive. It’s something new for us too. Before that we were driving ourselves around in beater cars and sneaking onto airplanes to travel with livestock and shipments of auto parts.”

Somehow, Waggoner had found his way back to the kitchen and back again. “Yeah,” he grunted through a mouthful of what looked like bread. “I’ve heard you guys are the ones with the private jets. How’d you manage that?”

“Old money,” Sophie replied. “Come with me. Let’s talk in more comforting surroundings.”

Her choice of words was more than accurate. Although the chairs weren’t big on padding and the floors creaked beneath their feet, the fireplace crackling in the corner of a large room filled with bookshelves and wooden racks of rifles and shotguns was very comforting indeed.

Paige grinned and approached the fire with her hands outstretched. “Did you say something about tea?”

For a moment, Sophie watched Paige make herself comfortable. After taking deeper stock of the Skinners, she signaled for one of the younger Amriany. “Bring us all some tea.”

“All right,” Cole said. “Real warm in here. Nice place. Real civilized. But we didn’t come all this way for tea.”

“So I’ve heard. I will start by telling you there should have been no reason for those Vitsaruuv to come to that village, and even less reason for them to pace in one spot until we got there. Someone knew we would be there and wanted those things to hit us when we arrived.” There were five Amriany in the room other than Sophie, and they all had their weapons within easy reach. “Before we go any further, you’ll tell us who could have known we would be there.”

“This is your country,” Paige said. “We heard all about it on the ride over. We also heard about why you guys want to keep us so far away from you, so how are we supposed to know about local problems?”

Sophie held up both hands to concede the point. “There’s also the matter of the Jekhibar. It was stolen from us, so I trust you’re here to return it.”

“We didn’t steal it,” Cole pointed out.

One of the other Amriany said something in their own language. Cole couldn’t translate it, but he could read the disgust in that one’s face well enough to get the gist of it.

“We’ve got more than enough going on back home to keep us busy,” he said. “Stealing from you isn’t a priority. At least, it hasn’t been ever since I’ve been around.”

“And were you around when the Blood Blades were brought to your country?”

Suddenly, Cole regretted opening his big mouth. Judging by the looks on Paige’s face, he wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines.

“That’s what I thought,” Sophie said.

“We’ve got the Jekhibar,” Paige told her. “That’s part of why we came. We think we can use the power stored in it to knock the Full Bloods down a few pegs. And not just Esteban, but all the Full Bloods. Even the ones in your neck of the woods.”

Milosh staggered into the room carrying a bottle in one hand and a hunk of bread in the other. “If you think you can loot us for more, then you’re mistaken!”

“Enough!” George said. It was the first thing he’d said since leaving the SUV, and his words appeared to carry plenty of weight among the others. “We’ve already let them know how much we don’t appreciate what Skinners do or have done. They’ve heard it. But they haven’t come all this way just to try and steal from us. They need to speak to a Chokesari.”

Either Milosh wasn’t drinking alcohol or he sobered up very quickly when he heard that. “Why does he need to talk to a metalsmith?”

“Because they’re the ones who make the Blood Blades and they’re the ones who work with the Jekhibar,” Sophie replied.

Paige nodded. “Then that’s who we need to see. When can you set it up?”

The Amriany began speaking among themselves in harsh voices that Cole still couldn’t understand. Sophie calmed them down by striding over to the fireplace and placing her hands on a long sword that looked too pristine to be anything but ceremonial. One hand rested upon a blade adorned with meticulously carved symbols, and the other brushed against a handle fashioned from superbly polished wood. Although the Amriany didn’t fall completely silent, they settled down so she could be heard without having to shout.

“This,” she said reverently, “is how things used to be. When our two peoples were one. Before the maiden voyage to the New World. Before your founders communed with the native tribes in what is now called America. Before the discontent within our ranks became a chasm that would split Amriany from those who would become Skinners, we used to work together to create what was needed to keep the shadows at bay.”

Cole couldn’t take his eyes off the sword on the mantel. There were no thorns in the handle, but the craftsmanship and coloration of the varnish were all too familiar to anyone who wielded a Skinner weapon. Both elements, wood and metal, entwined beautifully to create a weapon unlike anything he’d seen. And considering all he’d seen over the past year or two, that was saying a lot.

“Since we have split,” Sophie continued, taking her hand away from the sword, “both of our peoples have guarded our secrets carefully. There have been infractions on both sides making this not only reasonable, but necessary.” Before anyone could refute that, she squared her shoulders to the room in an unspoken challenge to anyone who might interrupt her. None came. “Because of this, it is no simple matter to just bring a Skinner to see one of our Chokesari. They have been forging our steel for generations and were rare even when the Amriany were not. Without them, there can be no Blood Blades, and if even one metalsmith is lost, their entire craft will be threatened.”

Any Skinner understood as much without needing further explanation. Everything from their fighting methods and recipes for mixing the varnish, which allowed their weapons to bond with its bearer or change shape to their will, was passed along through one Skinner teaching another. The few written records of exactly how to brew Nymar antidote, mix weapon varnish, or carve a weapon itself were sparse and closely guarded. It was a subtle system that made it crucial for Skinners to guard their partners almost as staunchly as they guarded themselves.

“Do you honestly think we came all this way to kill one of your blade forgers?” Paige asked.

Sophie’s eyebrows rose as she coolly regarded her and Cole. “Maybe it’s not something you’d do consciously. But we’ve heard about a group that may fracture your structure just as the Skinners fractured ours all those years ago.”

Straightening into a more defensive posture, Waggoner drew a deep breath to fuel what would surely be a whole lot of unfriendly words.

“Hold it,” Cole said preemptively. “The Vigilant have set themselves up in strongholds around the country. Our country,” he added when he reminded himself of where he was. “They’ve even made a move against the military by breaking me and others out of prison. That’s been on the news! It’s got to be plastered all over official records in police and government agencies all over the place, so it’s not like it’s too hard for someone to piece together enough to know that the Skinners are having some internal conflicts at the moment.”

“Internal conflicts,” Milosh grunted. “I love the American sweet talk.”

“How’s this for sweet talk?” Waggoner snarled. “Up. Yer. Ass.”

Even though that wasn’t as bad as Cole had anticipated, he jumped in before it could be spiced up anymore. “The point is, it’s understandable why these guys might not be so anxious to escort us straight into their hidden base or whatever.”

“Yes,” Paige said. “But we’re the ones at a disadvantage here. We’re on your turf while ours is burning, and the longer we’re away, the more it’ll burn.” Pointing to Milosh, she said, “I was with him in Atoka. Nadya and I were the ones to risk our asses running through a field of Full Bloods to keep him from turning into a Half Breed. If he can’t vouch for me after all of that, I don’t know what else you want from us.”

When Sophie looked over to him, it didn’t take long for Milosh to nod his approval. “My issue isn’t with you,” she said, “or Cole. It’s with the company you keep. We know you work with Nymar, and we can’t afford to have the American vampires infecting any more of ours with the Shadow Spore. For all we know, they could be watching you. Or,” she added while focusing on Waggoner, “using you as spies.”

“Having a bit of an uprising here, huh?” Cole chided. Although he’d thrown the comment out offhandedly, he could tell by the looks on the Amriany faces around him that he’d struck one hell of a nerve.

Sophie’s next words came very deliberately and weighed heavily as she spoke them. “The European Nymar have been taking lessons from the Americans. Already, several police officials as well as military personnel have been killed in a way that would implicate Amriany involvement.”

Paige chuckled. “Now there’s some classic sweet talk. So your Nymar are stepping out of line. That just means now is the time to act before things get as bad here as they are back home.”

“The Full Bloods were always going to return,” George said. “That’s never been a question. Esteban is only the first.”

“Which is why we all need to figure out a way to keep it from getting worse,” Paige insisted. “The Nymar can be dealt with just as long as there are people willing to take them on. Unless things change where the Full Bloods are concerned, we could be looking at extinction. Not just Skinners. Humans.”

Sophie placed a hand on the mantel, less than an inch away from the sword. After looking around to the other Amriany, she spoke a few words in their language, got a few words back from each one, then shifted her attention back to the Skinners. “You’ll have your meeting with the Chokesari.”

Cole let out a tired breath. It might have been a small victory, but it felt good to have one at all.

Chapter Twenty-Two

T
he Amriany proved to be gracious hosts, offering their guests a place to sleep and food to eat. Due to the instant time change they’d experienced in their unusual travel method, the Skinners were barely able to fall asleep long enough for it to be considered a nap. The rest of the time was spent varnishing weapons, cleaning guns, and limbering up with the normal exercise routines. Paige mixed up some more healing serum and prepared a batch of the tattooing ink she’d invented. Even though Cole had given the stuff its first successful field test when fighting Lancroft, she was still unable to use it. Daniels couldn’t be sure if the good ink would interact with whatever remained of the bad ink that still might be trapped in her wounded arm, and she wasn’t about to risk it by being as impatient as he’d been when her arm was wounded in the first place.

Cole had just finished taking inventory on what Daniels sent along with him when he found Paige standing outside going through a series of steps with her weapons, intended to strengthen her arm. He stood behind her and to one side, taking in the sight of her lithe body going through its well-practiced motions against a backdrop of a red and orange sky. Being so far away from a big city, his breaths were like a spray of cold water cleaning the grit from lungs infected by too many years of urban living. “Tristan told me something interesting before we left,” he said.

Paige’s weapons were in their blunted form, but she swung them as if they’d sprouted the deadly blades that had cut short so many werewolves’ lives. “Let me guess. Pole climbing tips? Be sure to let me know when you’re 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
you
alive, Cole. And in case you haven’t noticed, you weren’t getting any better.” Bringing up one of her weapons, she tightened her grip until the sickle blade formed into an implement she might use to take on a Full Blood. When she looked over at the weapon, it seemed as if the blade’s appearance was more of a surprise to her than it was to Cole. She snapped her arm down to send the weapon into the ground. A second later the other weapon was driven into the dirt directly beside it. “That wasn’t supposed to happen to you.”

“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 pressed her fingers to her temples and rubbed while muttering, “I never should have said anything about it to anyone.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know, Cole. A while ago. And take that angry look off your face. She didn’t like keeping a secret from you, but trusted me to know what I was doing.”

“She specifically told me to stop letting you feed me,” he reminded her. “Why do you think that is?”

Paige sighed and reached down to pick up her weapons. There were signs of life coming from the Amriany house as well as the rest of the little homes scattered nearby. Once the weapons were shrunk back down to their smallest size, she placed them into the holsters on her boots. “She’s probably worried about them growing.”

“
Growing?”
Suddenly, Cole felt the need to sit down. Since there wasn’t anyplace for him to do so, he squatted so he could put his elbows on his bent knees. “Growing into what? A full Nymar?”

“I doubt it but I’m not sure. The plan was to get those things out of you before that happened. Be honest with me. Was it such a bad idea for me to do what I did? I mean, you don’t appear to be hurting nearly as much, and you barely even seem to think about the tendrils anymore. Maybe just a little bit of blood from a willing donor is all you need. I’m more than willing.”

“That’s not the point! The point is that you did it without telling me!”

“Would you have accepted it if I’d offered?” she asked. After a few seconds of silence between them, Paige said, “Didn’t think so. Part of that may be my fault. You know what I went through before I was a Skinner, and you would have never asked me to do something like this. And after the uprising, anything to do with Nymar kinda leaves a bad taste in our mouths.”

“I don’t want to become one of those things, Paige,” he whispered. “Sometimes I can still feel that spore rooting around inside of me. It’s . . .”

“Yeah. I know. It’s another reason I took the choice away from you. I’ve been asking anyone I know if there’s a way to fix someone in your condition, but I can’t ask around too much. Between the IRD and those Vigilant creeps, there are a whole lot of heavily armed paranoid people who don’t need much of an excuse to kill a vampire in their ranks.”

“Oh Christ. Do you think Rico mentioned it to Jessup or any of those others in Louisville?”

“No,” she said with absolute certainty. “If he had, you wouldn’t have been allowed to leave that place without a fight. And since we got out more or less like any other Skinner, I’m thinking Rico hasn’t crossed over into paranoid asshole territory. Well, no farther than when he threw a college kid through a window for having a tattoo and fake fangs one Halloween a few years ago. That also gives me a lot of hope that he hasn’t fully signed on with the Vigilant in general.”

Cole laughed at the vivid image he’d been given.

“I don’t know a way to cure you,” she continued, “and handing you over to outsiders didn’t work out so good. Daniels has been working on it ever since I almost staked you in his apartment, and if you knew of any way to get rid of those things, I’m sure you would have told me. You’ve told me of a few times when you were hurting and that time in prison when you fed, which means there must be other times in both categories that you didn’t tell me about. Am I right?”

Once again Cole didn’t have a good answer for her. “So what would have happened if I never found out what you were doing? You just spring it on me when those tendrils get big enough to turn me into a proper Nymar?”

“That wouldn’t have happened. Without a spore, the most they could do would be to get bigger or strangle you from the inside.”

“Oh, that’s a relief,” Cole growled.

“We’ll find a way out of this. I promise.”

“And what if we don’t?”

“Then you can nibble on me in your sleep. Or,” Paige added with a smirk, “you could try it when you’re awake.”

For once Cole didn’t even begin to rise up to that occasion. As much as he loved it when she smiled that way, there was something else that made it impossible for him to enjoy the moment or the offer attached to it. “Let’s just not let it come to that, okay?”

“It’ll get worse if you don’t feed,” she said. “It may not get as bad as if you had an actual spore inside you, but it’ll get worse. Daniels studied the tendrils on his own way before this happened, and he says they reflexively tighten when they go without blood from a source other than their host for too long.”