Marcus Pelegrimas: The Breaking

Striding beside her, Rico kept his arms hanging at his sides as if he was walking down an Old West boardwalk with the intention of facing his doom at sundown. His jacket was the sort of battered garment that would have been worn with pride by any self-respecting biker. Several dozen Half Breeds had died to either create or patch up that jacket over the years and it still wasn’t complete. Strips of canvas were stitched in to fill the remaining gaps, and leather cords were laced up both sides so he could expand or tighten the jacket as the occasion demanded. For the moment, it was loose enough to accommodate his shoulder holster and the bulk of extra shotgun shells stuffed into his pocket. It wasn’t long enough, however, to do much to hide the Mossberg.

Steve carried three guns, all .45s, holstered beneath a baggy raincoat. Although he didn’t seem to handle the weapons with much expertise, he assured both Skinners that he knew how to make them sing. That was good enough for Paige, especially since he’d survived the last few weeks, when so many Skinners had been picked off by Nymar who blended into the darkness and moved faster than the now outdated variety of vampire. “How many are inside?” he asked.

“Don’t know.”

Looking at the front of the house, Rico glanced back and forth between both front doors at the top of a single, narrow set of stairs leading up from the sidewalk. “Do you even know which side it’s on?”

“I figured we’d each take one,” she replied. “Shouldn’t be long before we figure out which is which.”

“Good plan,” Rico grunted.

“Thanks.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“I know.” Facing the corner where she’d parked the car, Paige casually reached for the Beretta holstered at her hip. “If you’ve got a preference, tell me now.”

The house wasn’t much to look at, but was well-maintained. Despite the fact that the outside was weather-beaten and battered, the simple curtains in the windows were clean and drawn shut tightly enough to keep the inside tucked away and out of sight. There wasn’t a single feature to differentiate one half from the other. Even the windows on both sides were dark in the exact same way. “I’ll take the right,” he said with a shrug.

“You’ll also take the new guy.” After glancing back and forth to make certain the sidewalk in front of the house and its closest neighbors was empty, Paige held her pistol in a two-handed grip with the barrel pointed at the ground and added, “Either of you needs help, just yell. Remember, we’re looking for any Nymar and a computer setup.”

“I was listening during the ride over,” Steve whined. “I know what you’re looking for.”

“Good. Then let’s find it.”

Paige approached the door on the left, placed her shoulder against the wall and leaned to try and look through the window. There was a small gap between the frame and the edge of the curtain, which wasn’t enough for her to see much of anything inside other than a few lights deeper within the place. Once Rico approached his door, she stepped over and opened hers with a straight kick that slammed her heel a few inches below the knob. It gave way with the crackle of splintering wood and the creak of an old dead bolt being dislodged from its housing.

The room was almost pitch-black, illuminated only by the scant bit of light spilling out from a short hallway that led to the back rooms. Her eyes had adjusted quickly enough to make out the blocky shapes of furniture in her path and a television set on a stand to her left. Bundles lay on the floor in a way that let her picture the homeowner casually dropping them while heading deeper into the house. Raising her Beretta to sight along the top of its barrel, she stepped over the bundles and waited for someone to answer the simultaneous break-ins. The response came in the form of one of those bundles reaching up to grab her.

“Son of a bitch!” she snapped.

Rather than fight the thick fingers wrapped around her ankle, Paige moved her free leg out to the side and planted it to steady her balance. She maintained a grip on the Beretta while staring down at the face of a Nymar that almost completely blended in with the shadows filling the living room. Even when the vampire opened its mouth to hiss at her, she could see only the faint reflection of dim light off fangs.

In the months since they’d put the Skinners in the sights of every law enforcement agency in America, the Nymar had been learning to use the gifts given to them by the Shadow Spore. These included claws that could draw blood through hollow feeding tubes and tendrils directly beneath their skin that could expand in darkness and contract in light to give them natural camouflage both in the shadows and among humans. Because the Shadow Spore was a strain unknown to modern hunters until a few months ago, it was immune to the antidote used to kill Nymar, and didn’t trigger the itch in the Skinners’ scars that served as an early warning system.

In the near dark, Paige couldn’t make out what the rest of the Nymar’s body was doing. When it swept her legs from beneath her and she fell to the floor, she fired two shots directly into its face. Her antidote rounds didn’t react to the vampire’s blood, but they did punch a few messy holes through its skull, which were instantly plugged by oily black tendrils. She knew that even if its brain was blown completely through the back of its head, the spore could maintain enough control to keep the body moving. It was quite a sight.

Paige swung her back leg around to kick it in the face. Her foot pounded against the Nymar’s chin, snapping its head to one side with a sickening wet crunch. Now that her eyes had adjusted well enough to make out the vampire’s figure, she was able to slam her heel into its stomach to force the air from its lungs. It was still camouflaged too well for her to tell if the Nymar was male or female. Blackened skin was wrapped around a bare torso that had curves slight enough to be an athletic version of either gender. The impact forced the Nymar away, giving Paige a chance to jump to her feet and look down the hall toward the sound of approaching footsteps.

Two more figures stomped out of one of the other rooms. Because of the sudden light when the door opened, Paige couldn’t tell whether they were human or if their tendrils had merely become too thin for her to see. Fortunately, they removed the guesswork by snarling at her, revealing sets of fangs extending from their upper and lower jaws. One pumped a shell into a sawed-off shotgun, while the other sighted along the top of a semiautomatic pistol.

Dropping to one knee to present a smaller target, Paige fired. She couldn’t rely on the antidote rounds or the brute power of ballistics, so she compensated by hitting each of them with no fewer than five shots each. The extended magazine in her Beretta had three shots left, which she fired into the Nymar on the floor as it sunk its claws into her leg.

When she tried to pull her ankle from its grasp, she only succeeded in dragging the wounded Nymar an inch or two closer. Its facial features and body structure were that of a male. The Beretta had claimed one of his eyes, along with a sizable chunk of his temple, but those wounds were already filled with tendrils resembling fresh tar that had been poured into a pothole. Paige kicked and pulled, but still couldn’t free herself before the Nymar reached out with its other hand to drag her down again. She hit the floor on her hip, and the Nymar crawled like a scurrying millipede and was able to dig into her right arm with his claws. Those sharpened nails could shred through most nonmetallic materials, but weren’t strong enough to do more than scrape against the hardened exterior of her arm.