Marcus Pelegrimas - The Breaking

The pressure still came from somewhere, and the voices were getting clearer. If he focused hard enough, he might be able to make out what they said.

“Somebody get in here!”

More pressure, along with a pinch. He was no longer spinning. His head was wrapped in something cool and soft.

“Back away, motherfucker!”

That was definitely not from any game Cole had grown up with. Neither was the snarling hiss that was close enough to send a few drops of bitter venom over his lip and into the stubble that had claimed his chin.

Consciousness exploded in a surge of adrenaline that snapped his eyes wide open so he could see a Nymar’s head poking up from the collar of a standard guard uniform. It was a round clean-shaven face with no telltale black markings. Even without seeing the tendrils moving beneath the man’s skin, the two sets of fangs extending from his upper jaw gave him away. One set were the feeders that slid down over the normal canine teeth, and the others were a curved, slender pair that fit along the inner edges of the first set. Venom dripped from the curved fangs as the vampire hissed at the guards. At least, he assumed there were more guards, since he couldn’t lift his head enough to see.

Cole switched immediately into survival mode. He tried to sit up, but the Nymar pressed him right back down again using the hand that was already clamped around his throat to dig sharpened nails into his flesh. That explained the pressure and pinching he’d dreamt about. The real guards were shouting their threats, but the man with the round face didn’t pay them any mind. He simply looked down at Cole, lowered his face to within a few inches of his and snarled, “Tara sends her best.”

Tara was one of Paige’s friends dating back more than eleven years. During a nightmare that had laid the foundation of Paige becoming a Skinner, Tara was turned into a Nymar. More than that, she’d been double-seeded. Two spores were attached to her heart, making her stronger, hungrier, and more vicious as a reward for surviving the process. Perhaps this was payback for him killing the Nymar that had created her. At the moment he could only be concerned with drawing his next breath.

He saw a slender arm wrapped around the Nymar’s throat. Although the medical tech wasn’t strong enough to choke a vampire, she was able to jab a needle into his neck and push the plunger. When the toxin went into him, the Nymar only tightened his grip. Cole grabbed his wrist with both hands and fought to sit up. This time he was stopped by a fiery pain that blazed over the entire front of his torso. “Son of a bitch!” he grunted.

The Nymar grinned wider and pressed until his fingernails broke the skin of Cole’s neck. Using his free hand to grab the medical tech, he pulled her closer and bit into her jugular.

“Why isn’t he dead yet?” one of the guards asked.

“Sh-Shadow Spore,” Cole said. While the Nymar was feeding, his attention was too divided to keep Cole down. “Antidote doesn’t work on them,” he wheezed.

The guards were still baffled, so Cole took matters into his own hands by managing to sit up and drive his arms forward with enough power to snap the restraints around his chest. Without the tendrils that had been left behind, he wouldn’t have had the strength to do it. Now, with their innate power and a hunger that had gotten worse over his time in custody, he was able to grab the reinforced collar of the Nymar’s uniform and pull him away from the tech. Rather than drag the Nymar straight back, he eased its mouth away and then wrapped his other arm around its forehead to try and lift its feeding fangs out of the tech without tearing her flesh. Once the Nymar felt himself being separated from his meal, a thicker set of fangs emerged from his lower jaw to try and sink into her for good. If those were allowed to puncture the tech’s skin, Cole knew he might as well let him drink. The alternative would be to rip the Nymar off while taking most of her neck along with him.

“Somebody do something !” he shouted.

Blood sprayed from the tech’s opened vein. The Nymar’s hiss took on a deeper, almost demonic tone as his eyes became solid black orbs. Cole pulled back with all of his weight, forcing the Nymar away from the tech so she could hit the floor in a heap. The Nymar was quick to pull away from him, but now that the hostage was clear, guards surged into the room to turn confusion into chaos.

Cole found himself wanting to dive into that chaos and ride it out until it was over. That’s what Skinners did. Even though he’d managed to break his restraints, there was something stabbing him in the stomach that turned every movement into a lesson in agony. When he reached down to try and pull out the blade that had impaled him, the only thing he found was a bloodstain that was quickly spreading across the front of his hospital gown. Desperately, he ripped the material away until he could see fresh stitches marking an incision that had been cut from his chest all the way down to within eight inches of his groin.

“We know where you are, Skinner!” the Nymar raged. “We’ll know where all of you are! We’ll find you!”

Guards had surrounded the Nymar on all sides. Before he could spout any more threats, all of the guards pulled the triggers of the shotguns they carried. Cole’s ears exploded with the combined thunder of all of those weapons, followed by a high-pitched ringing that filled his brain. The pain filling his wounded belly dropped him back down onto the bed. By the time the scent of burnt gunpowder hit the back of his throat, he was being held down again and jabbed with more needles. This time, however, the darkness didn’t come.

Two more gunshots thumped through the roar filling Cole’s head. When he spoke, his own voice was the only thing that didn’t sound like it was three hundred miles away.

“What happened to me?” he shouted.

Although the guards who approached him seemed to hear what he’d asked, they didn’t reply. Through the bed and floor, Cole could feel the impact of more scuffling, which quickly subsided. Two guards dragged the Nymar away, and the only way he identified the bloody mess as such was from the uniform wrapped around the pulpy remains infused with severed, twitching tendrils.

“What’s happening?” Cole demanded.

But all he got from the remaining guards was a shotgun barrel pointed at him as another one tried to refasten the restraints. Since the padded leather belts had been pulled from their moorings, two guards stood watch over him with their shotguns constantly at the ready.

The tech was alive, but had to be carried out due to all the venom pumped into her system through the Nymar’s fangs. There was no way of telling how the vampire had gotten into the prison, but some of the venom spat into someone’s eyes could have given him enough control over that person to do the trick. By the time most of the mess was cleaned up, the blaring whine in Cole’s ears had decreased to an annoying ring.

Someone entered the room. He was dressed in a cheap brown suit that wasn’t cut well enough to hide the gun holstered under his left arm. Tall, athletically built, and pale, he had the look of an ex-cop or soldier who had been busted down to desk detail. “Is he still awake?” the man asked one of the guards.

“Yes,” Cole replied. “He is. What the hell did you do to him?”

The man spoke to the guard posted at the door in a clipped whisper. He then turned to Cole, smiled in condescendingly lukewarm fashion and approached the guard who stood closest to the bed. “You’ve been entrusted to this facility by your friend, Paige Strobel.”

“She told me to go with you guys back in Denver, so I did.”

“You didn’t have much choice, now did you?”