Vampire Uprising (13 page)

“We have an opening for a designer that could carry over into a lead position,” Jason said.

Not only did Cole forget about the text, but he almost dropped the phone. “Why tell me this?” he asked hopefully.

“Because word’s gotten around that the next
Hammer Strike
will be without the guy who made the first one and the fans aren’t happy.”

“That many fans know about me?”

“Well, they did after someone let it slip just how much you did for this company while you were here.”

“Jason, that’s a hell of a nice thing you did. I knew you’d—”

“Wasn’t me,” Jason said. “It was Nora.”

“Nora?”

The phone beeped again, but Cole didn’t even hear it. “Nora?” he asked. “As in, the girlfriend who I thought was my ex a few times already Nora?”

“That’s the one,” Jason replied in a tone that was the closest thing to a grin his voice could convey. “I don’t know how much luck you’ll have with the whole girlfriend thing, but she’s been doing a hell of a good job in paving the way for your return. The fact that you’re still responsible for a ton of royalties ain’t hurting your cause either.”

Hearing the executive of Digital Dreamers, Inc. try to purposely use incorrect grammar was almost as bad as hearing his drunken attempt to rap during the infamous Christmas Party Karaoke Incident of ‘02. When the phone beeped again, he turned it over as if expecting to see photos from that December night all those years ago. Instead, what he got
was a text message that read:
GET OUT OF THERE IDIOT!!!!!!!

Cole glanced toward the next room but couldn’t see much more than a sliver of the kitchen through the freezer door. Rays of light coming in from the front half of the restaurant were given form by the smoke rolling in toward his living quarters. That’s when the smell hit him. Something was burning. If he and Paige hadn’t been so concerned with more unnatural threats, they might have replaced the batteries in the smoke detectors instead of yanking them off the ceiling and throwing them into a corner when they’d started chirping.

The first thing Cole grabbed was the harness containing his spear. That went onto his back, freeing up his hands to stuff a few essentials into a satchel that he slid over his head and one arm. Keys and wallet joined a shoe polish tin filled with the newly refined varnish containing the Blood Blade fragment in his pockets. Lastly, he snapped his laptop shut, jerked it from the power strip he’d installed in the freezer wall, and left the rest behind. Smoke rolled through the front of the restaurant, but he still couldn’t see any flames. After walking through the swinging doors leading to the dining room, he heard the crackling rush of a fire.

Cole rushed back through the kitchen and into the storeroom to get to the rear entrance. Ramming into the metal door with his shoulder, he bounced off before grabbing the bar that released the lock. A second later the piercing cry of the security buzzer went off. Naturally, Paige remembered to keep
those
alarms in working order. The shattering of glass and the rolling crackle of a fire was almost enough to drown out the electric shriek as he stumbled out to the back lot. Breathless and confused, he wheeled around to take a look at the restaurant. There wasn’t much to see other than dirty brick and trash cans. From the front of the structure, however, black smoke drifted on the wind and tongues of flame peeled along the edges of the old building.

“What the hell happened?” he asked a man who stood in the parking lot waving a phone at someone.

The man whipped around and snarled at Cole, baring two
upper sets of fangs. “You overstayed your welcome in this city,” Sid growled. “That’s what happened.”

Two cars were parked in the front lot, angled to make sure nobody else could approach Raza Hill without jumping a curb and damaging the underside of their vehicle on one of many cement barriers. Another pulled up, and before it came to a stop, Steph jumped out and clapped her hands with giddy delight. She wore large retro sunglasses and a long coat that had been hastily thrown on over her nightie, which made her look like someone rousted from bed and forced outside due to the fire instead of someone who’d arrived to watch it burn.

“What did I miss?” she asked.

The girl who jogged over to greet her looked to be somewhere in her late teens. The tendrils under her skin snaked along her arms to collect at her wrists, marking her as a Nymar that had been drinking blood for a good long time. Her dark hair was pulled into pigtails, which further marked her as one of the girls under Steph’s employ. A denim skirt laced up the side was short enough to display a whole lot of leg with tendrils running up the backs like a seam in nonexistent stockings. “Jason and some of the others are shooting up a diner and some gas stations about a mile from here, so that should keep the cops busy. Once that gas station goes up, the fire department will have their hands full too.”

“Nice,” Ace said as he stepped out from the driver’s side of the car. “How long’s this been burning?”

“I told him to wait until you got here, but he got antsy.”

“That’s fine,” Steph snapped. “How long?”

“Only a minute or two. It’s really starting to kick in now, though. Should be a good one.”

“Are they both in there?”

“That junker Chevy wasn’t in the lot, so probably not,” Rita said. “I know at least one of them’s inside, though.”

Steph leaned against the hood of her car and beamed as if watching her youngest child in its first school play.

There wasn’t much of an alley on the left side of the building. A tall chain fence studded with unevenly spaced boards encircled all but the front of the lot and got to within eight feet of the structure. Weeds had reclaimed the bottom of the fence, and the rest of the ground was covered with gravel, garbage, or broken glass. The flames made a steady roar that wasn’t quite loud enough to cover the crunch of footsteps made by a Nymar who shuffled toward the back corner of the building.

He was dressed in an old army surplus jacket that was too big to fit him properly but perfectly concealed all of the instruments of chaos stuffed into the inner pockets. In one hand was a beer bottle with a wet rag sticking out of the top. With his other hand, he flicked open a Zippo lighter, waved it under his nose so he could savor the scent of its fluid, and then rolled his thumb against the rough little wheel to make a spark. He never took his eyes off the triangular flame as he brought it close enough to the rag to set it alight.

The Nymar pulled in another breath, held it, then pivoted on the balls of his feet to face the man that had crept up to within ten feet of him.

Coming down the alley, Prophet cursed under his breath and broke into a dead run to charge at the Nymar. His intention had been to get to the arsonist before the next cocktail hit the side of the restaurant. In that respect, he succeeded. He wasn’t feeling too good about the victory, however, since the lit firebomb was tossed at him instead.

The bottle hit Prophet’s shoulder and bounced off to sail so close to his face that he could hear the crackle of the flame on its rag. There was another
whoosh
as the bottle hit the ground behind him to create a large, burning puddle that sent a blast of heat washing over the back portion of his body. As Prophet rammed into him, the arsonist raised both arms to absorb the impact and then slapped both hands onto Prophet’s back and shoulder to divert him into a brick wall.

Prophet hit solidly and skidded along the side of the restaurant. Rolling around so his back was pressed against solid cover, he reached for the shoulder holster under his jacket. The .38 was an older model that was light in his hand
and came out quickly. He aimed at the Nymar’s center of mass as the arsonist rushed straight at him.

The gunshot cracked through the air, drawing the eyes of all three Nymar in the front parking lot. “Who fired that?” Ace asked.

Rita dropped into a low stance that made her look as if she was in a set of starting blocks. “Someone else must have been around when the torch was being lit.”

Suddenly, an inhuman howl arose from the opposite end of the building. “That’s Sid!” Rita said.

Steph grinned and rubbed her hands together. “Looks like we caught both of them in there after all. You two see if anyone needs a hand and I’ll do crowd control.”

Several cars were clogging Laramie Avenue and groups of pedestrians either stopped to watch the fire or were taking pictures of it with their phones. A few of the less voyeuristic of the bunch actually approached the cars blocking the entrance to Raza Hill.

“Could you help us?” Steph asked the people who were close enough.

Her strained voice and thrown-together outfit brought one man in his late forties rushing toward her to ask if there was anything he could do. The question was still fresh on his lips when Steph grabbed him and threw him toward Ace, who sank his feeding fangs along with the lower set of teeth into the man’s neck. When the Good Samaritan tried to pull away, he only widened the gash in his veins and hastened the flow of blood into Ace’s mouth. Rita latched onto the other side and helped drain the guy in a matter of seconds.

“Make this quick,” Steph said. “Our distraction won’t hold up much longer.”

Strengthened by the blood covering the lower portion of her face, Rita dashed across the parking lot in a flicker of movement that took her to the last known location of her partner. Ace was flushed with color and swelling with newly awakened muscles. He darted halfway across the parking lot before springing up to a section of the roof that had yet to be touched by the fire.

Of the people who were close enough to see the fangs in Steph’s mouth, all but one ran away. That man shuffled backward while holding his camera phone in front of him to take a video of the Nymar. The last thing he filmed was Steph lunging forward to clamp her jaws around his jugular and then crush the phone in a powerful grip.

People screamed.

A gun was fired.

Cars screeched on Laramie Avenue and Twenty-fifth Place.

Cole’s home was burning.

And yet, all he wanted was to keep his laptop from being smashed. There simply was no accounting for the priorities of a frantic mind. When Sid came at him, his first impulse was to turn so the Nymar didn’t smash the computer. The Lancroft files were there, along with everything he’d done for Digital Dreamers. All of the new stuff he hadn’t sent in or backed up to another system was on that drive. If he was to have any chance at getting back to a normal life again, it was in that machine.

And then, in the time it took for Sid to reach for him and extend his upper set of fangs, Cole was forced to admit something vital to his continued existence: this
was
his normal life. After that, it was a simple matter of holding the laptop in front of him to shield himself from Sid’s attack. Once that was deflected, he gripped the laptop in both hands and pounded the metal case against Sid’s temple. It wasn’t enough to drop the Nymar, but it gave him some breathing space.

Sid’s jaw opened to the point of hyperextending, and his fangs stretched out as if they’d developed a hungry mind of their own. He lashed out with one hand to nearly crack the laptop in half. Cole jumped away and ducked under a follow-up swipe of claws that had sprouted from beneath the Nymar’s fingernails. Sid’s other hand came around to shred the front of Cole’s shirt along with a portion of underlying skin.

The claws stung, but Cole’s system had been producing the Skinner healing serum on its own for long enough to
deal with it. Rather than worry about blood loss, he used the pain to fuel his movements. “You’ve been working out,” he said while dropping the laptop’s remains so he could draw the spear from its harness.

Sid wasn’t interested in talking. He surged forward amid a flurry of claws, leaving Cole no option but to try and block as many of them as he could. Sid’s foot swept out and across in a quick motion that hit his ankle like a cement post and dropped him to the ground with an impact that emptied his lungs and turned his surroundings into a blurred mess of sight and sound. Light from above was eclipsed as Sid loomed over him and slashed at his face. Cole rolled to one side, allowing the claws to clip the back of his head and carve a set of grooves into the concrete. Better prepared for the next swing, he held the spear diagonally in front of him. When he twisted to block, however, the wooden shaft wound up clamped in the Nymar’s grip.

As Sid leaned down, the overpowering stench of blood rolled from his mouth in a coppery wave. His tongue emerged from between crusted lips, catching the venom that dripped from his curved set of snakelike fangs. Cole closed his eyes, turned his head and drove a foot straight up toward Sid’s groin. The kick landed a bit lower than he’d hoped, but was still enough to knock the Nymar off balance and force him to spit most of his venom onto the ground.

The venom was meant to be injected into a victim through the curved fangs, to slow them down for easier feeding. If spit into the eyes, it made a human sluggish and open to suggestion. In the hands of a particularly talented Nymar, it could get worse than that. Cole knew as much firsthand. What he felt on his arm was something more than the normal venom. It burned like a piece of supercooled metal before soaking in and numbing his skin.

“So you’re hopped up in more ways than one, huh?” Cole mused as he pushed away from Sid and rolled to his feet. “I’d like to hear all about that.”

Sid’s mouth hung open as he swayed from side to side. Rather than watch the Nymar’s eyes, Cole watched his
shoulders. That way he didn’t fall for the head fake Sid attempted before rushing him. Holding the spear in front of him like a bar, he pressed it lengthwise against Sid’s chest and diverted the Nymar’s momentum to send him flying into a collection of trash cans. From there, Cole raised the compact weapon and was about to lunge when a pair of strong little hands grabbed him from behind and pulled him down to his knees. A bony arm snaked around his throat and grabbed the forked end of the spear with the other hand. It was Rita. Pressing her mouth against his ear, she hissed, “You’re done in this town, Skinner.”