Teeth of Beasts (Skinners) (31 page)

For something as remarkable as teleportation, Cole found his journey to be a little disappointing. He didn’t feel his body get disassembled and put back together again. The earth didn’t rumble. There wasn’t even a glowing tunnel for him to fly through at a thousand miles an hour. The beads clung to him like strings of magnets to a suit of chain mail. A breeze hit him in the face, accompanied by the vague scent of mountain air and freshly cut timber. When his foot touched the floor on the other side of the beads, he, Paige, and Rico were somewhere else. There was a taste in his mouth that felt like it had been rinsed by purified water, and since the others smacked their lips as well, they could have tasted it too. Not exactly a high ranking on the yowza meter.

They were still in a dark room with strange symbols on the walls. A bass line was thumping through the building, but came from a much smaller set of speakers. When he tried to bat at the beads he still felt touching his arms and legs, he only swatted air.

“Don’t worry,” Paige said nearby. “I still feel them too.”

It looked as if they were in a house that had been stripped of everything but shades on the large windows next to the front door and a lamp against one wall. The more Cole looked around, the less he saw. One barren hallway led to a pair of empty rooms. There was no furniture to be seen and the small kitchen at the back of the house was com
pletely gutted. In fact, the entire place barely seemed large enough for more than one person to live there. He stepped up to a picture window framed by the light seeping in from the street. Pulling aside the blind gave him a view of a curb lined by parked cars of all colors and states of repair. Only one of them was running, and it was the source of the thumping music he’d heard since his arrival. Someone emerged from a house across the street, got into the car, and was driven away.

“There’s nothing here,” Cole said. “We must be in the wrong place.”

Paige sighed and took the same tour as he had, which she completed in a matter of seconds. “Where the hell are we?”

After fitting his spear into its harness, Cole took the GPS unit from his pocket and turned it on. While it acquired the satellites needed to pull up a map, Paige looked out the front window. Rico paced the room and quickly worked his way over to the lamp sitting by itself on the floor. He turned it on, but the bulb was only powerful enough to cast a dim glow in one corner. Fortunately, Cole didn’t need a light to read the GPS screen. When the map came up, he announced, “We’re in Philadelphia. Looks like a neighborhood called Germantown.”

Now fascinated by the wall at the back of the room, Rico stood with his face less than two inches from the water-stained plaster. “Tell me you see these symbols.”

Cole didn’t want to bother with dirty walls when he could get so much more from Romana, so he ignored the request.

“What symbols?” Paige asked.

“The symbols right here. Or they were right here,” Rico muttered as he dug into one of the inner pockets of his jacket. When Cole finally looked over at him, Rico was grumbling, his face pressed against the wall, before saying, “
Ha!
Found ’em! That’s the trick. Just gotta keep your eye on the ball.”

Before Cole could question his sanity, the symbols appeared all around him. Actually, they reappeared. “Wait a minute! I saw those when we got here, but I just…”

“Put ’em out of yer mind?” Rico asked. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what these babies
make
you
do. Runes like these give you a splash of discombobulation mixed with a dash of déjà vu. Right, Paige?”

“Huh?”

For once Cole didn’t feel like the stupid one.

“These runes!” Rico said. “They’re the ones I been trying to get you to learn for years, but you were too stubborn to pay attention.”

Now that they’d been seen, the symbols gave off faint trails of black smoke, similar to the scent that had shown up in other Skinner creations, like the ammunition crafted to kill Nymar. Paige followed a line of smoldering symbols etched along the top of the front window, then stepped back and said, “I’ve seen these before.”

“I know,” Rico snapped. “I showed ’em to you before.”

“No, not from you.”

Now that he had a chance to look at them more than a moment, Cole experienced the same kind of frustrated familiarity that was written on Paige’s face. The symbols were indecipherable, but in a familiar way. Then it came to him. “These are like the marks on the inside of Henry’s cell back at Lancroft Reformatory, but there’s something…off about them. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

Rico squatted down to some of the lower symbols and stretched a hand out behind him. “Paige, got a mirror?”

“Sure, Rico. It’s in the bottom of my purse next to the gum and mascara.”

“Okay, then. Cole! Gimme that GPS thing.”

Reluctantly, he handed Romana over.

Rather than marvel at the improved touch technology or any of the optional extras in the programming package, Rico switched it off and held the device up to the wall so the symbols were reflected on the black screen.

“Hey! Those are exactly like the symbols at the reformatory!”

“The ones in Henry’s cell would have been to keep something in,” Rico explained. “These are to keep something out. One’s written forward and the other one’s backward. Nice and easy. If I knew exactly what each of these markings here meant, I could even tell you who this was written for.”

“So those runes you taught Paige really work?” Cole asked.

Rico ground his teeth together as if every fiber of his being wanted to say something but he just couldn’t get the words out.

“No,” Paige said. “They don’t.”

“She’s right,” Rico sighed. “The runes I know work okay sometimes, but not like these. It’s a lost art. There used to be something else, some other element that really put the zip in these things. It may be something from back in the day when Skinners were friendlier with the Gypsy clans, or it could just be something that got lost in translation over the years. I learned a good chunk of the runic language from books and old journals, but not how to give them that old pep. I’m sure the MEG guys have read every book on ghosts and demons front to back, but that don’t mean they can summon or even communicate with ’em.”

“Maybe we can call someone who does know,” Cole offered. “Like someone from back in the old days?”

“Don’t think so,” Rico chuckled. “The old days I’m talkin’ about are somewhere back in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. But one thing’s for sure,” he added as he dug a little spiral notepad from his jacket, “these were put here by a Skinner who knows his shit. They’re keeping this place sealed off from certain things comin’ in, and since we got here without too much trouble, I’d say we ain’t the target. Those symbols along that other wall over there are what’s screwin’ with our perception.” Rico removed a pen from the spiral rings of the notebook and tapped it against his chin. “All this stuff is protecting and hiding something, though. Give me a few minutes and I should be able to get us in.”

“In where?” Cole asked.

“I don’t know, but I bet it’s good.”

Cole and Paige patrolled the house with their weapons drawn, waiting for someone or something to find them. After searching the cramped, empty house for thirty long minutes, they longed for the distraction of finding someone, even Henry kicking down the front door. But they were still
taken by surprise when they found a lumpy figure sitting with his back pressed against the back wall of a closet in the house’s only bedroom.

Extending her sickle in one hand while keeping the machete closer to her body, Paige whispered, “Is that you, Daniels?”

“Y-Yes.”

When he heard the muffled voice, Cole rushed into the room behind Paige, with his spear at the ready. Sure enough, Daniels sat in the closet with all of his equipment piled around him. “I searched this room when we got here,” he said. “I looked in that closet. Where the hell were you?”

“I…was hesitant to step through the curtain when you three disappeared,” the Nymar told him. “I needed a minute to…collect myself.”

“Didn’t you hear us in the other room?”

Daniels nodded meekly, but pushed himself farther back into the dark. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”

Paige lowered herself to one knee and watched him carefully. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why are you sorry?”

“Back in Kansas City…I destroyed the Blood Blade.”

“That’s done,” she said with strained patience and a hint of resentment. “You were trying to work on the ink, I was rushing you and—”

“No! I didn’t want to break the blade apart like that! I only wanted to take some more samples, but he made me do it! He made me do it and then he made me think I wanted to do it. I sort of knew what was going on, but then I didn’t. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it.”

Paige dropped her weapons, grabbed the Nymar by the front of the shirt and pulled him sharply to his feet. “Who made you do it?”

“Henry,” Daniels squeaked. “The Mind Singer. It’s what he does. He spoke to me, whispered into my brain while you were in Kansas City and told me to destroy the Blood Blade. When I was chipping off samples of the blade I just…kept going.”

“And he didn’t tell you to get rid of the pieces?” Cole asked.

Daniels looked over to him, back at Paige, and back again until his movements became an insistent shake of his head. “Once it was done, Henry was happy. I wanted to tell you, but I just couldn’t get myself to say the words until now. I wanted to say that he was in my head, but I just couldn’t and I don’t know why! I’m so sorry! Henry wanted the blade destroyed and then he made me forget about it. I’m so sorry.”

“Why haven’t you said this before?” Cole asked. “Surely there had to be times when Henry had his guard down.”

“I didn’t even remember what I did until now!” Daniels insisted.

“And how do we know you’re not still talking for him?” Paige added. “We’re probably closer to Henry now than we’ve ever been. It makes sense that he would want to throw us off track.”

“It’s the runes,” Rico said from the doorway of the next room, where he’d been standing in case his partners needed backup. He tucked the Sig Sauer into the holster under his arm and said, “The runes are keeping Henry out of this place. Working with a Mind Singer may come in handy, but Lancroft ain’t stupid. If he didn’t keep someplace safe from the freak, he wouldn’t be the one in charge. Is there a way you can test to see if Henry can hear you or not?”

“Already did,” Daniels replied. “If I usually even think about destroying the Blood Blade, I’d forget why I brought it up. I didn’t this time, so you must be right.”

Wheeling around to return to the room and the wall he’d been studying, Rico said, “Man, I
got
to find out what’s in this house.”

Daniels shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “There’s always been something I wanted to tell you, but I could never put my finger on it.”

When Cole charged across the room, it wasn’t because of anything he saw or sensed. It was plain, gut-level rage. Leaning into the closet, grabbing hold of Daniels and pulling him out, he slammed the balding little man against the nearest solid surface so there was no escape when he asked, “Did you intentionally screw up the ink Paige used on her arm?”

“Cole, he—”

“I’m not asking you, Paige! I’m asking him!”

She refrained from saying another word. It was one of the few times he’d ever seen her back down so easily.

Daniels tried to clear his windpipe by stretching his neck and craning his chin above Cole’s arm before he was choked into unconsciousness. When he tried to speak, his fangs drooped from their sockets and his tongue flicked out to wet his lips. “I wouldn’t do a thing like that! Paige…she saved my life. More than once, she—”

“Maybe you didn’t do it on purpose,” Cole interrupted while thumping Daniels solidly against the wall. “Maybe Henry told you to do it. Maybe you remember it now.”

“But Henry didn’t know details like that. All he asked was basic things like—”

“Like what? Hurt the Skinners? Hurt Paige? Is that basic enough for Henry?”

No longer struggling to breathe, Daniels hung from Cole’s arm like a dirty shirt on a clothesline. “I don’t remember.”

“Try.”

From behind him, Paige said, “That’s enough, Cole. He told me the ink wasn’t ready. I was the one who pushed for it. I was the one who used it, so I’m the one who messed up my arm.”

“I already heard that from you, Paige. I want to hear it from him.” Narrowing his eyes, Cole glared at Daniels in a way that he’d never looked at another living thing. He didn’t see a man who’d helped them out of life and death situations. He didn’t see a fellow geek who had the best collection of action figures outside of a museum. He didn’t even see a guy in a tough spot who had a girlfriend waiting at home for him. All he saw was someone who wouldn’t draw another breath if he didn’t choose his next words very, very carefully.

Slowly, Daniels shook his head. “I tried to tell her not to use that stuff. I worked on it day and night.”

“Except when you were chipping the Blood Blade into pieces.”

Daniels didn’t have anything to say to that. He clenched his eyes shut, almost as if he welcomed the pressure of Cole’s forearm against his throat.

Touching Cole’s shoulder, Paige said, “It’s okay. If Daniels wanted to hurt me, he would have given me that stuff way before I took it. Lord knows I would have been stupid enough to inject it.”

That didn’t make things easier, but it made sense. Plus, the touch Cole felt was from her right hand brushing against the side of his neck. Paige’s skin was soft, and the muscles were moving like something other than a clunky prosthetic. Finally, he eased back and allowed Daniels to breathe.

Even after he’d been freed, Daniels didn’t move away. “I’m sorry,” he said while rubbing his throat. “I don’t blame you for not believing me, but if there’s anything I can do to—”

“Forget it,” Cole said. “I just…I had to make sure.” He turned away to look out a small window set up high in the wall, as if to overlook something as tall as a dresser. Other than the cheap shades on the window, there were only more runes scrawled in an orderly set of rows along the middle of the wall. Outside, a little woman walked a big dog on one side of a deserted street. The night sky hung over it all like a black canopy faded by the city’s glow, and the black scent from the wall hung in front of it.