Marcus Pelegrimas - Teeth of Beasts

“He said there’s been a lot of dead Half Breeds turning up all over the place,” she replied, while ignoring the suggestive tone in Cole’s voice. “KC seems pretty clear, but after all the stuff that’s been on the news or plastered all over HomeBrewTV.com, most of the country considers the KCPD to be the authorities on freaky looking dogs.”

“Are a lot of them turning up outside of KC?”

“Yeah. Turning up dead. Even if half of the reports are just misidentified road kill, Stanze says there are still plenty more coming in that are similar to the ones from KC. He’s been pretty helpful, but I doubt even he knows how much footage the cops are sitting on so they can try and figure it out. A Full Blood smashed one of their cruisers. Somebody had to have gotten evidence of that.” Paige rubbed her sore arm and finished her drink. Finally, she crumpled the can in her good hand, missed a three-point shot at the trash can, and stood up. “Everyone’s all worked up about this Mud Flu thing, so maybe that’ll be enough to distract the public eye from KC for a little while.”

“I heard that flu’s actually kind of bad,” Cole said. “You throw up, get this gunk in your throat, and there are even some reports of people getting some kind of dementia.”

“Has anyone died from it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then it’s just another kind of sick,” she said. “The press always has to get worked up about something, so at least they’re not yammering about us. Right now, I just want to go to bed.”

“Are we sparring tomorrow?”

“Spar on your own.”

“You can tighten that sling and go a few rounds. Come on!”

“You heard me,” she shouted while marching from the kitchen.

Cole followed her and said, “I thought you were recovering. What happened to that?”

Paige’s bedroom was messier than usual and, despite the soap she’d made to mask her scent, still carried the fragrance of her skin and the shampoo she treated herself to when she didn’t expect to go out hunting.

“I think you’re forgetting something pretty important here,” he told her.

She squared her shoulders in a way that told him he was very close to regretting having stepped foot into her room. “What did I forget?”

“Your experiment worked. Sure, it may have backfired a little, but you threw down with a Full Blood. That thing should have torn your arm off, but it didn’t. It couldn’t even bite down to the bone! You may be wounded, but you can still fight.”

“Apart from allowing myself to become a chew toy, what the hell am I supposed to do against anything anymore?”

“So that’s it, huh?” he asked. “You’re pissed because you realized you can’t walk through fire after all. Join the rest of us measly humans.”

Paige lunged to grab his shirt. Having already been grabbed, hit, punched, swept, and generally knocked around during countless sparring matches, he knew what to expect. What he didn’t expect was for the impact of her fist against his chest to hit him like an aluminum baseball bat.

“I know all too well that I’m human,” she snarled. “That’s been made perfectly clear to me in more ways than you can imagine. How about you shove your analysis up your ass right along with your goddamn pity!”

“Hey Paige. Look down.”

Her scowl deepened as if her opponent had just tried to tell her that her shoelace was untied. When Cole nodded and looked down first, she followed suit.

The hand she’d used to grab his shirt was her right one, and she’d gotten it to move faster than she’d been able to in days. Her fingers were locked around a clump of his shirt and the sling dangled from her arm as if supported by her rather than the other way around.

“Oh my God,” she breathed.

“You’re shaken up, out of your element, and not feeling too good right now,” he said while patting the dead weight of her fist. “Believe me, I know all about that sort of thing.”

No longer trying to get away from him, Paige slowly flexed her arm as if the muscles had been packed in ice, then lowered it into the sling.

“You could always just twist that arm around and slap it where it needs to go,” Cole offered. “You know, like that constable in Young Frankenstein with the wooden hand?”

The sight of her trying to keep a straight face was one of the prettiest he had seen in a long time. She let her head droop so it bumped against his chest. “God damn it,” she groaned. “I’ve messed up before, but why did I have to mess up like this ?”

He wrapped Paige up in his arms and ran his fingers through the tangled, unkempt mess of her hair. “Look at the bright side,” he told her. “If we ever need a light, we can set the tip of your finger on fire. Or if there’s a door we can’t open, we can use you as a battering ram.”

“I get it. You can stop now.”

A heavy knock thumped through the room.

“That’s enough, Cole. No need for sound effects.”

“I didn’t do that,” he said. “Someone’s knocking on our door.”

Another couple of thumps rolled through the restaurant. Paige stepped away and looked down at his feet. “You weren’t stomping on the floor?” she asked.

“No.”

She whipped around so quickly that she almost knocked Cole onto his butt in her haste to get to the panel on the wall next to her door. Once there, she poked at a set of buttons with her left hand. “Someone’s at the front door,” she said while reaching around to take a little .32 caliber revolver from where it had been tucked at the small of her back. “Take this.”

“You really don’t like salesmen, do you?”

Scowling in a familiar Do what I say and be quick about it way, she hurried into the kitchen, where her shotgun was propped against a wall. Cole got a feel for the weight of the pistol and then flipped the cylinder open to double-check that the gun was loaded. He didn’t have time to check what sort of rounds they were, but they all came out of the barrel fast enough to damage human and monster alike.

The windows at the front of the restaurant were boarded up. The main door was latched, bolted, and held shut with steel posts. He stepped up to a slit in one of the windows, which allowed him to get a look outside at the solitary figure standing at the door and a cab that tore out of the parking lot as if the driver had just been tipped off about a shipment of drunk tourists arriving at O’Hare.

“We’re closed,” Cole said through the door.

The voice that came from the other side was strained to the point of cracking. “I need to talk to you.”

Cole’s scars itched, alerting him to the presence of Nymar. Even if the man outside was the only Nymar in the vicinity, he knew there should have been more of a reaction than that. Since Paige hadn’t said anything about the Nymar before, she must not have felt much of anything either. Cole found her in the shadows on the other side of the door with her shotgun aimed at the entrance.

“What do you want?” he asked the visitor.

“I have to talk to the Skinners,” the man replied. “If you’re one, then you’ve got to open this door!”

Cole glanced at Paige again and got a single nod from her. Whatever was on the other side of that door, she was ready for it.

After removing the iron bar from its bracket in the floor and pulling back the bolts, Cole twisted the knob to unlock one of the more traditional mechanisms. When he finally pulled the door open a few inches, he held it there with the side of his foot, as if that could keep out a rowdy drunk, not to mention anything farther away from the human end of the spectrum.

The man outside was dressed in dark cargo pants and boots that could have come off the shelf of any army surplus store. His tattered flannel shirt was open to reveal a bare chest covered in black markings that looked like a massive tribal tattoo. Unlike a tattoo, however, the Nymar’s markings trembled beneath his flesh as the spore attached to the vampire’s heart shifted within its shell. He had a young, slender face with a minimum of whiskers protruding from his chin, and greasy, light-colored hair that hung down to his shoulders. His cheeks were shallow, but not sunken, and his eyes were wide with barely contained panic.