Marcus Pelegrimas - Vampire Uprising

“This’ll buy you two days of surveillance.”

“With a man like you on the job, that should be plenty.”

Prophet tucked the money away and walked around to the other side of the truck. Despite the dented frame, the interior was in pristine condition. He sat behind the wheel with his keys poised in front of the ignition and asked, “Will I need to worry about some pissed-off Skinner coming after me for this?”

“If you’re sloppy enough to get caught, you deserve to get your ass kicked.”

“You guys ain’t exactly normal, you know. Do you have any spray or some other concoction that allows you to see when someone’s following you?”

“No, but if one of the others uses something like that, be sure to save some for us.”

Prophet turned the key and pumped his foot on the gas pedal. “Listen to that engine. It’s sweet enough to make me forget about working with difficult, foul-smelling, violent assholes like yourself.”

“Foul-smelling?”

“You think you can work around that much dead shit and not get any on you?”

Rolling down his window, Cole looked out toward the spot where he’d buried Henry. It was a pleasant night in the latter portion of a hard summer, and the wind carried the river’s scent along with it. Although he hadn’t known Henry as much more than a crazy, rampaging freak, he thought the Full Blood would have approved.

“You think this is a good spot for a bunch of houses?” Prophet asked while looking at the same spot that had captured Cole’s attention.

“Why? You planning on sinking some roots next to a dead werewolf?”

“No, but some construction company might find that thing. I doubt they’ll make any sense of it, but still …”

“It’ll be just one more weird discovery that gets lost in the shuffle of all the other weird shit that’s been cropping up. We’ve seen people shrug off stranger stuff than that.”

“What’s this we crap? I’m the closest thing to a normal person you deal with on a regular basis, and we don’t stumble upon the kind of thing I just helped plant in a hole back there.”

Cole wanted to dispute that, but a psychic bounty hunter truly was the closest thing to a normal person that he dealt with anymore. Just as he was about to get dragged down by that particular revelation, something else sprang to mind. “What about the MEG guys? Stu’s more normal than you by a mile.”

“Okay,” Prophet said. “Call them up and tell them about the possibility of Henry’s spirit tearing the hell out of whoever might disturb this spot. Wait for their happy squealing to die down and then tell me how normal they are.”

“Check and mate.”

When Cole was dropped off at the house formerly owned by Jonah Lancroft, he was greeted by a small party of neighbors and a few vaguely familiar faces. He only recognized the neighbors because the large men wearing football jerseys and polo shirts under denim jackets and flannel shirts had been camped out on their porch across the street and halfway down the block for the last several days. It was a cool night, but not enough to warrant the amount of layers they were sporting. So far the neighbors had been content to watch the Lancroft house with what they surely thought were intimidating scowls etched onto their faces. Now they strutted across the street and climbed the curb as if storming the beaches at Normandy.

When he’d been a video game designer, those men might have put a fright into him. After what he’d seen in the last several months, however, it would take a lot more than that. Judging by the impatient expressions on the faces of the Skinners gathered on Lancroft’s front step, they were equally unimpressed.

“What’s going on here?” Cole asked the neighbors as he climbed down from Prophet’s truck. “Block party?”

The man at the front of the group had a shaved head, clean face, and a gut that marked him as the source of a good portion of the empty beer bottles scattered along his side of the street. He wore an Eagles jersey. It was a custom order, unless the NFL had drafted someone named Madman and given him the number 69. “Yeah,” he said as he shifted a cocky eye toward Cole. “Welcome to the fucking neighborhood. Maybe you should have a word with your bitches over there. They’re not too friendly.”

If Paige was within earshot, there was about to be one hell of a block party indeed. Fortunately for everyone involved, she wasn’t. The Skinners in attendance were some of the local crew. Jory was a big guy who looked to be somewhere in his fifties. He was solidly built and hadn’t spoken more than half a dozen words to Cole since introducing himself. His face looked as if it had been molded from too much clay behind a curtain of gray whiskers sprouting from his chin.

Abel was a skinny kid in his mid-twenties with a Mohawk long enough to cover half his scalp.

At the head of the Skinner group was a short blond woman whose face was too tanned for its own good. Her eyes were always bright, but were practically flaring after hearing herself referred to as one of the “bitches.” Before she could say anything about it, though, she was shoved aside by another woman.

If the blonde’s eyes were flaring, Maddy’s were about to explode in their sockets. “What did you call us?” she demanded. Her dark brown hair formed a single braid that hung down past her shoulder blades. The structure of her face struck Cole as Asian, but her accent and complexion could have been Cuban or maybe Puerto Rican. When she was through laying into Madman 69, her hand was drifting toward the leather harness wrapped around her waist that kept her weapon pressed against the small of her back.

One of the other neighbors wore a sweatshirt with the collar and sleeves torn off in a fashion that might have been trying to fool people into thinking he was a beast. All it really did was put him at the top of the list of suspects who’d thrown all the little skinny cans of energy drink next to the empty beer bottles on the lawn. “Just chill, bro,” he said while ambling over to pull Madman back, as if he was sparing the Skinners a grisly fate. “Let ‘em think it over.”

And just when it seemed the storm was about to pass, the dude in the sweatshirt looked over to the dark-haired woman and said, “These ladies know where to find us when they get lonely.”

The blonde knew better than to get in Maddy’s way, so she stepped aside. Cole was barely fast enough to put himself between her and the neighbors. “Come on, now,” he said. “We don’t really want to make a big deal out of this, do we?”

Maddy glared at him as if she still had every intention of drawing her weapon. Her dark green eyes narrowed and she grit her teeth when she told him, “Step aside before you get the same thing I’m about to give them.”

“Ooooh,” Madman sighed. “Sounds great. Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” With that, he led the rest of his boys across the street and down the block.

Once the neighbors’ laughing had sufficiently faded, Cole asked, “What the hell was this about?”

Maddy moved her hand from behind her back and shoved Cole back with it. “Those pricks came by to see what’s going on in our house.”

“Hey, Cole!” Prophet shouted from the curb. “Everything all right?”

“Yeah, we’re fine. You can take off.”

Like any other man with a functioning brain and any experience with the opposite sex, Prophet knew when to clear out of a bad situation. If that meant abandoning a friend, so be it. He pulled away and drove down the street.

When she leaned to look past Cole, Maddy’s braid swung behind her. If not for the fact that she seemed ready to strangle him with it, he would have found it very appealing. She and the rest of the Skinners were covered in several layers of sweat that had soaked through dirty clothes. Maddy wore a dark gray wife beater that clung to her gritty skin like a coat of paint. Even though Cole was able to keep his eyes from wandering, she looked disgusted with him all the same. “You take that Full Blood meat out of here?” she asked.