Marcus Pelegrimas - Blood Blade

“Or,” Paige added in a cool, level tone, “you could always leave.”

“Just walk out of here and try to buy a cheap ticket to Seattle with whatever’s left in my wallet, huh? I don’t even have my own luggage. I’ve been wearing your friend’s clothes since I bolted from that cabin.” Suddenly he winced, and added, “I’m sorry. I just meant that…”

“I know what you’re saying,” Paige said with a sigh. “I could arrange for another plane ticket.”

Cole nodded while she filled his glass with whiskey. As much as he wanted to down the liquor, he waited for her to sip from her own glass first. Only then did he allow himself to drink. He wasn’t normally a whiskey sort of guy, but the stuff did a hell of a good job loosening the knot that had been tied in his chest.

“You’re dying to ask questions. Where do you want to start?” Paige asked.

“What did you inject me with?”

“Vitamins…mostly. Also,” she added, “it was an immunization. After getting into a fight with the thing in that cabin, there was a chance of you…catching something.”

Cole’s eyes widened and he straightened up. “Like a disease?”

“Sort of.”

“How will I know if I have it or not?”

“Since you haven’t keeled over yet, I’d say you should be fine. Apparently, that thing didn’t tear you up too badly or draw too much blood.”

“I could’ve told you that much,” he grumbled.

Paige shrugged and topped off their drinks. “Better safe than sorry. Do you have another question?”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Paige Strobel, just like I told you before. Gerald and I worked together for a while. In fact, he was supposed to be the one moving into this place instead of me.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

Paige kept her eyes down. She reached for the whiskey, but didn’t pick it up. “That’s a little harder to explain.”

“What about Brad? Was he in the same line of work?”

She nodded. “All three of us work for the same cause.”

“Oh Lord,” Cole moaned, “Is this a religious thing? I was going to guess a drug ring, with all the syringes and smuggling contacts, but…I honestly don’t know which would be worse at this point.”

“It’s not either of those. Why don’t I approach this another way?” Paige placed her hands flat on the counter, straightened her arms and then shook her head as if silently agreeing to an unpopular decision. Finally, she asked, “Why did you come here?”

The scowl on Cole’s face dissolved the moment he heard that question. He let out a breath and then looked up to watch Paige’s face as he said, “Gerald’s dead. So is Brad. Gerald wanted me to come here and tell you about what happened personally, before you got the news from…well…I guess you may have already talked to the cops since it took so damn long for me to get here.”

After a brief pause, Paige said, “Go on.”

He recounted what had brought him to Canada, and Paige listened to every word. When he got to the part of his story involving that night at the cabin, he reflexively picked up his shot glass.

“I don’t know what it was,” he said. “At first I thought it was a bear, then I thought it was a wolf. But it wasn’t any of those things. It was huge. I’ve never even heard of anything like it. One guy shot it, but that didn’t do anything. Gerald and Brad tried to kill it. They lasted longer than most anyone, but I guess that thing finally got to them too.”

“You guess?”

“I was knocked around pretty good,” he sighed. “I woke up the next morning. There was blood everywhere. Brad was dead, but Gerald was outside. He was hurt really bad.”

He paused to see if he needed to give her a moment before continuing. Paige was listening intently, so he went on.

“Gerald told me to call you. He said that I should come to see you in person to tell you what happened. He also told me to tell you that Brad was killed fighting a Full Blood. Does that mean anything to you?”

Paige kept staring straight at him, then finally looked away and nodded.

“He gave me a card and I called the number using his phone. You must know the rest.”

“How was he in the end?” she asked.

Cole felt as if his words were anchored down so heavily that it took extra effort to pull them up. “I don’t think he was in much pain. It was so cold—”

“That’s not what I mean,” she snapped. “Did he seem strange? Did he look strange?”

“Strange?”

Paige scraped at the base of her throat and said, “Black marks here. Maybe they looked like ink?”

“Yes,” Cole replied as the image was suddenly brought into sharp focus. “Yes, he did have marks like that!”

“Was he holding anything that looked like this?” With a quick flourish of her hand, Paige removed a small vial from her pocket. It was the size of a stick of lip balm, but was actually one glass tube inside another. The inner capsule was filled with dark liquid and there was a layer of cloudy water separating it from the outer tube. Two small bumps extended from one side that tapered down to a pair of small, clear pins connecting the outside of the vial to the inner capsule.

“He had something in his hand, but it was broken,” Cole said without taking his eyes from the peculiar object resting in Paige’s grasp. Just then, he noticed the scarring on her palm. It wasn’t quite as bad as what had been on Gerald’s hands, but was very similar. “I guess it could have been something like that. Some of the broken glass stuck in his hand did look like those two things on the side of that tube.”

“And he got better,” Paige said more to herself than to him.

“Yeah. He did.”

“What happened after that?”

“Gerald died before I left. I don’t know for sure, but it looked like he injected himself with something.” This time, Cole didn’t need to watch closely to see a reaction.

“Thank God,” she said while letting out a breath and lowering her head.

“I mentioned he was dead, right?” Cole asked. “He looked better, but he was dead by the time I left.”

“I know.” Looking up, Paige showed him a relieved if somewhat tired smile. “At least he’ll stay that way. This,” she said, showing him the glass tube in her hand, “is called a Resurrection Vial. It’s used to give someone a bit more time if they think that…well…if things get bad. The only problem is that the stuff in this vial may cause some pretty bad side effects. Once someone’s done what they needed to do with their extra time, they inject themselves with the antidote and nature takes its course.”

“You mean they kill themselves?”

Paige shook her head. Although she seemed a bit frustrated, there was plenty of relief to dull the edge that had been in her voice before. “If they’re using the vial, they’re already going to die. If they don’t use the antidote, they’ll be turned into something else that will kill them off and turn them into something else.”

Cole stayed still for a moment as he tried to think about what he should do next. Although he’d come to Chicago to put what had happened in Canada to rest, the whole thing just kept growing into something more. Talking to Paige hadn’t helped. In fact, meeting her had only presented even more information that he couldn’t sort out. Instead of trying to make sense of anything else, he decided to stay confused. “All right,” he said. “That’s it. I’m leaving. Thanks for the plane tickets and whatever you shot me up with, but I’ll just find my own way home.”

Paige got to her feet and moved around the counter to stand between him and the front door. “Don’t leave, Cole. Please.”

“I’ve seen more than enough to keep me up at night, and I did what I promised to do for Gerald. I’ll leave your bloody knife here and then I’m through. So long. Have a nice life.”