Forged From Ash (6 page)

Moving as if she was being lifted by unseen hands, the blond Nymar stood up and brushed away the last hint of blood from the spot where the bullet wound had been. “My name’s Drea and that’s Seth.”

“You’re the ones that sent the distress call?” Sayers asked.

Drea nodded. “We were hoping one of the local militias would pick it up, but I guess you guys will do.”

“Hey,” Rico grunted. “If you don’t like the looks of us, we can be moseyin’ along.”

The spark in Seth’s eyes brightened as he said, “If your way of answering a distress call is by shooting the place up before you know who’s inside, then you’re not much help anyways!”

Rico’s teeth ground together, and before he could respond to the skinny Nymar, he heard Sayers request a word in private. The two men stepped to the other side of the room where they could lower their voices while still keeping the Nymar close enough to be shot if they made a wrong move.

“What the hell was that?” Sayers asked in a harsh whisper. “If that girl wasn’t a Nymar, she’d be dead right now.”

“I knew she was a Nymar before I fired a damn shot. You think I’m stupid?”

“No…we’ve just had limited experience with these things.”

“Yeah, the Half Breeds have been the main attraction lately, but these assholes have been laying low and biding their time. Just be glad they’re old school. Shadow Spores don’t register on the ol’ scars.” Seeing the confused look on the Lieutenant’s face, Rico added, “You really ain’t seen much where Nymar are concerned. Someone’s gotta circulate a memo or somethin’.”

“What about that body outside? Is it one of those…things?”

“Nope, but I do want to get a better look at it. There’s blood leading from this door, which means whoever took him out could have done it in here. There are more Nymar hiding somewhere close. I can feel ‘em.”

“Something happened for them to send that distress call,” Sayers said. “And since they knew there was a chance that someone like us might respond, it must have been pretty damn bad.”

Slowly, the anger in Rico’s face died down. “Another thing you should know about these guys is that they can hear well enough to know what we’re saying even if we’re in another room altogether.”

“Shit,” the Lieutenant grumbled. “I’ll see what I can do about that memo.” Turning to face the Nymar directly, he announced, “You obviously know who we are or at least what we are, and we know what you are, so let’s cut straight to the part where you tell us what’s going on here.”

“Maybe he should leave,” Drea said as she stared holes through Rico’s head.

“You upset about that little love tap I gave ya?” he asked while patting the holstered Sig Sauer.

“No. Assholes like you are the ones that held us here to be tortured like animals.”

“What do you mean? There are Skinners here?”

She nodded. “Skinners set this place up. Skinners dragged a bunch of innocent people from their homes. Our kind and humans, too.”

“These Skinners,” Sayers asked, “were they escorted by Army personnel?”

Drea shook her head. “I don’t think they’re hooked up with any of the military like you, but they might have someone feeding them information because they always knew when to lay low before any armored trucks or tanks rolled through town.”

“How many are there?” Sayers asked. “And where are they? Should we expect anyone to come along?”

“One or two only come around here every couple of days.”

“Let me guess,” Rico said. “When it’s feeding time?”

Drea’s mouth shut into a tight line, but Seth was more than willing to pick up the slack. “Don’t act like you don’t know! I bet you’re the rat who’s feeding information to these guys from inside the IRD.”

“Do you, pretty boy?”

Seth nodded. “Yeah. That’s why you shot Drea. So she wouldn’t talk.”

“She’s been talking pretty well,” he pointed out. “And the reason I shot her was because she’s a piece of shit bloodsucker.”

“And,” Sayers added, “he knew she could recover from it.”

Rico shrugged. “That too.”

Jutting his chin defiantly at the Skinner as if he was about to spit at him, Seth said, “He’s not much different than the ones who put this place together. We’ll say more, but only to the IRD. That Skinner can piss off.”

“He’s with me,” Sayers said. “Anything you want to say, you can—”

“No, no,” Rico interrupted. “It’s all right.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I can step outside and let these two say their piece. Most Nymar ain’t nothing but a bunch of whiny bitches anyway. Listenin’ to them cry gives me a headache.”

Every muscle in Sayers’s body tensed as he brought his assault rifle up to his shoulder and took a step back. “All right, then. If you see any hostile movement at all in this room or hear anything, it means these two have overstepped their bounds. Even if they get me, they don’t have what it takes to stand up to the rest of my unit.”

Neither of the Nymar seemed particularly frightened by the threat, and Rico had stepped out of the office before it had fully left the Lieutenant’s mouth.

The Skinner wasn’t worried about missing much of anything in there. While he and Sayers may have butted heads about a few things now and then, he knew the Lieutenant wasn’t about to withhold any vital mission intel. Also, Sayers was too freaked out by the Nymar in general to keep a Skinner in the cold when it came to the finer details. As for the Nymar getting over on him, Sayers wouldn’t have lasted this long in the IRD if that could happen.

Relaxing his grip on the gauntlet, Rico allowed the weapon’s thorns to sit loosely within the holes they’d dug into his palm. That way, he could feel more of what his scars were telling him without being distracted by the sting. There were more Nymar somewhere in the vicinity but not close enough to worry about just yet. He kept his guard up as he hopped down from the loading dock and approached the body propped against the crates.

The four bloody gouges in the dead man’s chest were relatively fresh. Two were much deeper than the rest. Reminding himself just how little Sayers knew about Nymar, Rico tapped his earpiece and said, “Watch yourself. At least one of ‘em might be able to grow claws.”

Sayers gave him one click to acknowledge the warning, probably trying to be stealthy. Rico knew the Nymar had more than likely heard him, which was just fine since it let them know they weren’t in the presence of idiots.

Next, Rico squatted down to the dead man’s level and started reaching for his wrist. Before he got there, he drew the Sig and tapped it against the man’s cheek. He placed the largest spike of his gauntlet under the man’s chin and pushed just hard enough to break the skin. Having barely punctured the corpse’s flesh, he removed the spike and held his hand over the man’s wound. In Rico’s experience, it was never a good idea to take dead at face value. There was no reaction from getting tapped or stuck and nothing reacting with his scars, so he was fairly confident this one was down for the count.

The next thing Rico checked was the man’s hands. The right palm was mildly scarred but the left one was covered with a roadmap of overlapping tissue put there by thorns from a wooden weapon. Not only was the dead man a southpaw, but he was a Skinner as well. Placing one hand under the man’s chin, Rico lifted his face so he could get a direct look at it. The guy wasn’t at all familiar.

Rico glanced over to the office where Sayers was still conducting his interrogation. The blond Nymar seemed to have become chatty, so that was good. He didn’t keep his hopes up that she was giving him anything useful, but she was at least buying some more time for Rico to check a few more things. Grabbing the dead man by the hair, Rico pulled his head forward and down before snagging the corpse’s shirt collar with his gauntlet and stretching it out until he could see the back of the guy’s neck. There was another scar there; a horizontal line cut by two shorter diagonals. It wasn’t a wound and sure as hell wasn’t from a Skinner weapon. It had been placed there by a branding iron, and just seeing it made Rico want to reach back to touch his own neck. Slamming the dead man against the pile of crates, he stood up and walked toward the back of the warehouse.

Without looking into the first office being used by Sayers, he went straight to the second one where Pretty Boy had been found. Apart from a bunch of shredded papers and two broken swivel chairs, there was nothing inside that room. He stayed there, removed the gauntlet from his hand and dug the dead man’s cell phone from his pocket. His thumb left bloody smears on the touch screen as Rico sifted through the notifications set to trigger an alarm.

Feeding Time was every three days at 0600.

There was a meeting scheduled for 0815 in two days.

Other than that, the phone contained nothing but a bunch of pictures taken of several different Nymar dressed in dirty jumpsuits similar to the ones worn by Drea and Seth. Most of them were emaciated and not very happy about being photographed. Others were messed up a whole lot worse. So messed up that Rico winced and moved on to searching other portions of the phone. Since there was no cell service, there were no calls or texts to find. There were some hastily typed notes and a few cryptic lists, but Rico decided to sift through those some other time. Things in the next room seemed to be heating up. The muffled voices he could hear through the wall connecting the two offices were quickly growing in volume. Rico left one office and approached the other, which allowed him to hear the tail end of one sentence.

“…got to move NOW!” Seth said. He stood with feet planted, chest bowed out and both fists clenched.

Sayers had his assault rifle at his shoulder and ready to fire. “Stand down,” he ordered. “We’ll do what we can.”

“You don’t understand,” Drea said. Although she placed a hand on Seth’s chest to try and move him back, the younger Nymar was chomping at the bit to make a move. “We were lucky to get as far as we did,” she continued. “There are still more of us being held captive, and the people responsible will kill us all if they think they’ve lost control.”

“Oh, I understand plenty,” Rico said as a way to announce his presence. “From where I’m standin’, it seems the guys who locked you up still have plenty of control.”

“Really?” Seth growled as his fangs slipped down from where they were housed in his jaw. “Then maybe you should take another look at your friend out there, Skinner. We killed him, and we can kill you too!”

Rico lunged forward without a second thought about putting himself within the Nymar’s striking distance or into Sayers’s line of fire. He grabbed Seth’s bony wrist, twisted it to get a look at the underside of his arm and then bent it against its joint to force the kid to one knee. “YOU didn’t kill that man or anyone else,” he said.

Drea came at him in a hurry, just as Rico had been expecting. Letting go of Seth, he snatched one of her wrists and twisted it using the same hold he’d put on her friend. Instead of twisting all the way, he stopped when he saw the writhing black markings leading from the bottom of her arm all the way to the top of her hand. Wrenching her around, Rico said, “Take a note, Lieutenant. This is your killer. If she was sweet talking you before, just remember that that’s how they operate. They’re all soft promises and sexy voices until you’re close enough for them to feed.” To drive his point home, Rico squeezed her wrist until a set of pointed black protrusions poked out from beneath her fingertips.

“You’re goddamn right I killed him!” Drea said as soon as Rico let her go. “I even told that to him already,” she added while flipping her other hand toward Sayers. “And you’re wrong if you think the rest of those pricks are still in control of us.”

“Oh yeah,” Rico said. “You’re runnin’ the show. You managed to get one lucky shot, probably when your sissy friend over there was distracting him by batting his eyelashes. If you’re the masters of your fate, why haven’t you left this building?”

“We sent a distress signal. That means we need help.”

“Help for what?” Sayers asked. “If you wanted to escape, all you had to do was walk outside.”

“That’s exactly what we should do,” Seth snapped. “These assholes aren’t about to do anything for us.”

Rico stepped up to the skinny Nymar and clamped a hand around his neck. “You got some real fucking nerve! Before the shapeshifters tore everything down, it was the Nymar who took it upon themselves to shred through cops, soldiers, innocents and Skinners alike!” As he spoke, he lifted Seth to his tiptoes and shook him. Even as Drea tried to pull him back with supernaturally strong hands, he continued his tirade. “The Shadow Spore were created to be nothing less than a goddamn nightmare. After you did your damage and lapped up as much blood as you could stomach, the whole chicken shit bunch of you disappeared. What was the plan for the last couple of years? Hide until it’s safe enough to poke yer fucking heads out?”

Seth gurgled in a way that made it impossible to discern whether he was attempting to speak or simply trying to breathe.

“Let’s hear it,” Rico demanded. “You wanna talk so tough? You gotta be able to back it up! And your little blondie pal can scratch me all she wants. She won’t be able to put me down before I take care of you.”

“Stand down,” Sayers demanded.

Those words drifted through Rico’s head like something heard while he was submerged in restless waters.

“I said stand down, Specialist!”

No matter how much Rico had resisted the military conditioning forced upon him by riding with the IRD, hearing his title barked at him from a superior officer cut through everything else. Waiting just long enough to make it clear he wasn’t obeying as a knee-jerk reaction, Rico opened his hand to allow Seth to pull away. The skinny Nymar coughed and hacked while turning his back to everyone else.

Drea stood less than a foot away from the Skinner as she hissed, “You proved you’re the big badass. Happy now?”

Examining the scratches on his forearm and then watching as Seth composed himself, Rico said, “More or less.”

Sayers lowered his rifle and removed the commanding edge from his voice when he said, “He does make a valid point, though.”

“Oh does he?” Seth spat.