Teeth of Beasts (Skinners) (11 page)

The crash of metal against brick clanged through the air, followed by two voices: one screaming and the other snarling.

Cole ran for the Cav but was stopped by the end of a baseball bat jabbed into his stomach.

“You were told to stay put, asshole,” said the guard who’d steamrolled both him and Rico out of the club’s outer lobby. Suddenly Rico was there, pulling the guard back with enough force to knock him straight over the leg he’d positioned behind his ankles.

“Check out what’s goin’ on over there,” Rico said to Cole after forcing the guard to the ground. “I’ll cover you from this side.”

Cole passed the Cav as he ran toward the corner of the building where the screams were coming from. Even if he’d had the steam that was taken from him by the bat’s sharp jab, he still wouldn’t have rounded the corner fast enough to make a difference. The side door was made of thick metal and had been pulled from its top hinge. Dim light spilled from inside the club and was obscured by several figures blocking it at the source.

A few steps before he got through the door, he was nearly flattened by a Nymar wearing nothing but tattered pants and a sleeveless T-shirt that still reeked of the garbage pile from which it had been taken. Long, greasy hair made it difficult for him to decide if it was a man or woman, but the faded, grayish color of the tendrils shaking under its skin told him that the Nymar was starved to the point of panic.

When the Nymar took its next step, Cole reached out to grab the front of its shirt. Its eyes were clouded by thinner tendrils that crept up along the inside of its face as it bared all three sets of fangs. When the Nymar’s own momentum bounced it against the door frame, yellow fluid sprayed from the curved fangs that fit in beside its thicker feeding teeth. Not a stranger to being spit at by those things, Cole turned his face away and didn’t concern himself with the spatter of venom against the side of his neck.

Another Nymar snapped its head forward to sink its teeth into Cole’s forearm. This one had the slender build and fuller lips of a woman, but her skin was every bit as filthy as her companion’s. Frayed denim shorts and a camouflage tank top were draped over her emaciated figure like they were still on a hanger. She strained her eyes to watch Cole as she used every muscle in her jaw to try and dig her teeth even deeper into his arm.

The feeding fangs had cut through first, digging into Cole’s flesh to make way for the curved, snakelike set of teeth that would deliver enough venom to knock him out. He was hesitant to twist his arm away until he felt the third set of shorter, thicker fangs scrape against his skin. Those came up from the Nymar’s lower jaw, and he knew if they
sank in, he would have better luck hacking his arm off at the shoulder than pulling away from her.

He knocked the heel of his palm against the woman’s forehead to loosen her bite enough for him to wrench his arm from her mouth. Blood sprayed across her face and dripped onto her tongue, making the tendrils under her skin quiver with excitement. The intense rush of pain Cole felt was quickly replaced by cold as the healing serum in his system kicked in to repair the damage. He drove his knee squarely into the center of the Nymar’s mass, sending her backward and into another woman with red hair who cowered in a corner directly across from the door.

The redhead had the smoothest skin Cole had ever seen, and her hair spilled over naked shoulders in a series of gentle, wavy lines. When she looked at him with tears streaming down her face, everything became quiet enough for him to hear her voice above everything else.

“They want to hurt me,” she said.

Cole couldn’t let that happen. He grabbed the closest Nymar and balled up his fist with every intention of punching a hole straight through the back of its head. That’s when a third person rushed forward to spur all the Nymar into action. One bony elbow hit Cole in the back and another set of hands shoved him to the floor. He scrambled to his feet but was too late to keep the first two Nymar from grabbing the redhead and carrying her out of the club.

Farther inside the building, women screamed, men shouted, and a DJ used the sound system to beg everyone to stay in their seats while security handled the matter. Cole put all of that behind him so he could chase the Nymar and the redhead. As soon as he set foot in the parking lot, a gunshot exploded through the air. The redhead screamed as she was stuffed into a rust bucket Dodge and all of the Nymar piled in with her. Rico was the one behind the gunfire, and his next bullet sent the long-haired Nymar face-first to the ground.

The expression on Rico’s face didn’t shift in the slightest as he walked forward to pump another couple of rounds into the vampire. Since there was no acidic hiss coming from the wounds, Cole knew the bullets weren’t treated with
the antidote made to poison the Nymar spore. The rounds were more than just lead, however, because when the fallen Nymar arched his back, he revealed a pair of rough holes that had been punched all the way through him and into the pavement. Apparently, the spore didn’t need to be poisoned if the heart was all but liquefied. When either of those things happened, the rest of the Nymar’s body dried up faster than hamburger under a heat lamp.

Cole was in the Cav before the fallen Nymar stopped moving. “Get in!” he shouted to Rico as the Nymar’s Dodge lurched from its space.

At that moment, a Nymar with short, bleached blond hair leaned out through the Dodge’s passenger window to point a shotgun at Rico. It was a double-barreled model with a pistol grip intended to make the weapon compact and easy to hide. It was also illegal to carry a weapon modified that way, but not as illegal as it was to fire that weapon at someone in a parking lot. None of those things stopped the blond Nymar from pulling his trigger and blasting Rico where he stood.

Cole saw it all happen but didn’t have time to do anything about it. Before he could warn the other Skinner, thunder filled his ears and Rico was bouncing off the Cav amid a flutter of material that had been shredded from his jacket. As the Dodge sped away from the club, Rico clawed at the ground next to the Nymar he’d put down.

“Holy shit!” Cole shouted while slamming the Cav into park. Even before the Cav stopped moving, the passenger door was being pulled open.

“Okay,” Rico said as he hauled himself onto the passenger seat. “I guess I had that one comin’.” Noticing the look on Cole’s face, he twisted around to display a tattered section of his jacket that still smoked from the impact of the shotgun blast. The patches of canvas were completely blown away, but the leather beneath them remained. The thicker leather patches were barely scratched. “Let me guess,” he said. “Paige still uses those harnesses instead of stitching together a proper piece of body armor?”

“That’s Half Breed skin?” Cole asked as he cautiously poked the jacket.

Rubbing at a bloody spot at the back of his neck where some of the blast had slipped past his collar, Rico said, “More like five Half Breed skins. Now are you gonna admire my stitching or are you gonna get this heap moving?”

Cole strapped himself in and hit the gas. The Cav was a heap but it took corners well, which made a huge difference in chasing the Nymar through the sleeping town of Sauget. All he had to do to zero in on the other car was roll his window down and listen for the sound of screeching tires and an engine that wheezed more than an asthmatic at a horse show. Between the noise of the Dodge and the honking of the occasional car it ran off the road, he managed to catch up to it before the Nymar reached the highway. Once the gap was closed to a few car lengths, the Dodge tried to lose him by jumping a few curbs. Cole took those turns without an ounce of worry, even as various lights on the dash started blinking. The sound of the car’s underbelly scraping against concrete didn’t bother him, since the damn thing bottomed out on just about every speed bump anyway.

“They’re almost to the interstate,” Rico said as he swung his .45 to point to a sign on the side of the road. “Just get as close as you can and give me a steady shot.”

When one of the Nymar emerged through the Dodge’s side window, Cole braced for another shotgun blast. Instead, it crawled all the way out and jumped at the Cav.

Cole twisted the wheel hard to the right but couldn’t go any farther without taking out a cement bench next to a bus stop. His quick thinking and hesitant maneuvering only caused the airborne Nymar to crash into the driver’s half of the windshield instead of the passenger’s side.

“Get it off!” Cole shouted.

Rico hauled himself out through his own window and sat on the frame with the seat belt wrapped around his left hand and his .45 in the other. The Nymar digging its fingers into the front of the Cav was the female with the short hair and sunken face who’d dragged the redhead from Bunn’s. She had thick black markings snaking up along the sides of her neck toward the edges of her mouth. Scraping her nails into the upper edge of the windshield, she scrambled across the
front of the Cav while screaming something that was lost amid the engine noise and squealing of tires. Cole cranked the wheel in the opposite direction, which was almost enough to send the Nymar flying. She found something to hang onto, however, allowing her to reach out and grab the edge of Rico’s window.

“That’s it,” Rico said as he jammed the Sig Sauer’s barrel against the Nymar’s forehead. “Come to daddy.”

The car in front of him wasn’t trying to get away, so the driver must have expected his partner to make a return flight. Those expectations were blown away, along with a healthy portion of the Nymar woman’s skull, when Rico pulled his trigger.

“Jesus Christ!” Cole shouted in response to the gunshot and the spray of oily blood that coated his windshield like a batch of poorly mixed red and black paints.

Despite losing so much of its skull, the Nymar held on and even kept trying to grab Rico by the throat. One of the Nymar’s eyes was gone, but the other was fixed intently upon its target. Flipping the switch for the wipers, Cole managed to clear a path through the gore that was just wide enough to see the Dodge and a small section of the road in front of him.

Rico shouted incoherently and used the .45 to drill several more holes through the Nymar’s torso. Not only didn’t the thing slow down, but more tendrils emerged from the holes in its head and body like probing fingers curling around the edges of the bullet wounds to pull them shut. Tendrils even tugged at the Nymar’s face, stretching its scalp over the grievous wound like a cheap throw rug on a stained floor. One of Rico’s bullets finally punched through the spore attached to its heart, causing every one of the Nymar’s tendrils to slap against the windshield and its hands to lock upon the Cav.

The Dodge swerved to miss a city bus that ambled across an oncoming intersection, and Cole pounded his foot against the brake. Twisting the wheel so Rico would be forced back into his seat instead of out the window, he prayed that Rico wouldn’t wind up as a messy street stain on a driver’s safety
video. The Cav spun across the intersection, resulting in a loud slapping crunch as its driver’s side pounded into the side of the bus. Both men in the car lurched to that side while the clothes and dehydrated remains of the Nymar scattered across the dented hood.

As the roar died in his ears and the windshield wipers continued to smear more black-stained blood across cracked glass, Cole gripped the steering wheel hard enough to leave a fresh set of grooves in the plastic.

“Damn!” Rico howled from where he was crumpled in his seat. “That was some fucking brilliant driving! You hurt?”

“I don’t think so,” Cole said in disbelief.

“Then come on.” With that, Rico pushed his door open and climbed outside.

Cole’s door was being held shut by a massive chunk of municipal steel, so he fished his spear from the backseat and flopped out through the passenger side. Although the Nymar in the Dodge had avoided the bus, they’d done so just long enough to wrap their car around a parked minivan.

“You assholes better pray that redhead’s all right!” Rico shouted.

Slowly, the Nymar dragged themselves from the car. The first one to hit the street was a female with straw-colored hair pulled into a tail that hung askew behind one ear. She staggered for a few sideways steps and dropped to all fours. Next was the beefy guy with the bleached hair. He wore rumpled brown pants and a blue work shirt with the name “Jerry” stitched into the left pocket.

“So the old man finally called for backup, huh?” Jerry asked as multiple scrapes and gashes from the crash were closed by his tendrils. Judging by the wear and tear that remained on his face, he looked to have been somewhere in his forties when he was turned. At the moment he was too stunned to raise the shotgun he carried.

“Where’s the redhead?” Rico asked.

“I asked you a question, Skinner!”

Extending his arm to point the .45 at Jerry’s chest, Rico said, “And unless you had a chance to reload that shotgun, my question outranks yours.”

Cole stood as steady as he could while the cold rush of healing serum put out the painful fires in his body. The pretty redhead pulled herself from the wreck. Unlike the Nymar or Skinners, she didn’t even show a bruise after having been in the crash. In fact, she was still looking fine in her filmy dancing attire, which became transparent under the stark white streetlights. She was obviously disoriented, but even her staggers were more graceful than a pirouette. Settling against the closest light pole like a feather drifting to rest upon the surface of a lake, she traced a hand across her cheek to completely wipe away a minuscule trickle of blood that ran down the length of her face.

“This is your lucky day,” Rico said to Jerry. “Since the woman’s all right, you get the chance to hobble away from here.”

Cole tightened his grip on the spear. As the thorns sunk into his flesh, he caught sight of a wide-eyed bus driver running around to inspect the front of his vehicle. Sirens blared from down the street, closing in on the intersection from at least two different directions.

“The nymph is coming with us!” Jerry announced as he dropped the shotgun and stretched his fingers out like talons. “We didn’t go through all of this to run away again.” The Nymar looked like he was wearing gloves, but the black on his hands was a thick mass of tendrils beneath his skin, pushing out through his fingers to form short black claws at their tips.