Vampire Uprising (46 page)

“Paige was checking on some things too,” Cole said as he turned to her. “What did you find out?”

Using her left hand to flip her hair back, Paige fit the earpiece in place with the other in a series of short, practiced movements. “Now’s not the time for that. Let’s get off the street and I’ll fill you in as we go.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Rico said enthusiastically.

The five of them crossed the street and headed for cover provided by the semis parked in the nearby lot. From there they wove between the darkened hulks until Cole signaled for them to stop. “Camera,” he whispered while pointing to a single black box mounted under the building’s gutter.

Drina’s hand drifted to her earpiece. She tapped it twice, paused for a moment and then tapped it again. About a second later Cole heard the distinct sound of a metal door on the other side of the building being kicked in. Hurried footsteps scraped from different sections of the lot as well as on the building’s roof, quickly followed by angry voices.

“You have your distraction,” Drina said.

Rico smirked, picked up a rock that he’d trapped beneath his foot and said, “Good. Then nobody should take much notice of this.” With that, he threw the rock at the camera. It didn’t hit hard enough to smash the device, but cracked the lens while also turning it toward the street and away from
the lot. Making certain to walk in the newly created blind spot, he led the way toward a side door that wasn’t marked by anything more than a small handle set into a thick steel surface.

Before Rico could touch that handle, he was pushed aside by Drina. “There’s another alarm. Step away before you set it off.”

He raised his hands and did as he was told.

She fished some tools from her jacket pocket and put them to use in the short amount of time it took the others to settle in around her. Though Cole had a vague idea of what was involved in deactivating an alarm system, she might as well have been performing brain surgery. The last time he’d seen anything like it was when Paige had snuck into the back entrance of Steph’s Blood Parlor the first time they visited the place.

He looked over to his partner, and when Paige noticed that she was being watched, she flashed him a quick smile.

“Get ready,” Drina said. The next tool she used was a little plastic gun that looked better suited for attaching price tags to shoes. After a few pumps on the long trigger and a couple twists of the gun itself, something clicked and the door came open. She held it in place so the others could file in.

Rico entered first, stepped to one side and drew the Sig Sauer from the holster under his shoulder. “Where are the cops supposed to be, Paige?”

Stepping inside next, Cole said, “Forget about that. Let’s find the computer terminals. They’ll probably be close to their own power source since this place doesn’t look like it’s wired too well. Also, if the Nymar are waiting for trouble, I doubt they’d keep their system up front where it was easy to get to.”

While following Cole down the left side of a T junction leading away from the door, Rico asked, “How can you be sure?”

“Because there were no lights on in the other corner of the building and there are over here. This Cobb38 guy is supposed to be coordinating things, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then the computers are probably still on. You got any better guess, then feel free to tell us.” Directly in front of Cole was a narrow hallway lit by a set of fluorescent bulbs along the entire ceiling. Evenly spaced doors ran on both sides of the hall. Suddenly, the second door on the right swung open and a man stepped out. As luck would have it, he turned his back to them and started walking without so much as a glance at the Skinners or their escort. Cole took advantage of the distraction provided by the Amriany up front by rushing toward the man.

He was a good old-fashioned Nymar. Black markings stretched up from beneath the collar of a thin cable-knit sweater, and the grease in his veins sent a familiar itch through Cole’s scars. When he drew his pistol, the Spetznaz holster moved the slide back and chambered the first round. It was a smooth, metallic sound that caught the Nymar’s ear and spun him around just in time to look down the business end of Cole’s .45.

“Any more in there with you?” he asked.

The Nymar was only an inch shorter than Cole, but glared at him as if he was the one with the cards stacked in his favor. It was plain to see that he wasn’t about to start talking, but that didn’t bother Cole half as much as the other warning that rippled beneath his hands to send a heat up through both arms.

Without taking his eyes off of the Nymar, Cole asked, “Any of you guys feel that?”

“Yeah,” Rico replied. “There’s a shapeshifter around here.”

Grabbing the Nymar by the throat, Cole shoved him back into the room he’d just left and knocked the barrel of his .45 against the guy’s head loud enough to make a dull
crack.
“Where’s your computer room?”

“What computer room?” the Nymar asked.

“The room where you keep your fucking computer! Where
is it?”

The Nymar lost his confident grin as well as a good portion of the color in his face. “Down the hall on the left. I was just headed there.”

Rico stepped up to send a quick jab into the Nymar’s ribs. “You expectin’ any Half Breeds?”

“What?”

“We know they’re here. Them or a Full Blood, and since they ain’t tearing this place apart, that means you must already know about ‘em. What’s going on? You keeping them locked up somewhere like those assholes in Tijuana who thought they could train ‘em as guard dogs?”

“My partners will find them,” Drina said. “Let’s just do our part so we can help them quicker.”

“Computer,” Cole snarled. “Take us to it.”

The Nymar led the way across the hall as gunfire erupted from the front section of the building. After one of the longest walks he’d ever taken, Cole found himself across in a room that smelled like stale coffee, new plastic, and air that had been blown through a hot processor. If two-day-old pizza and spilled, overcaffeinated soda was added to the mix, he might have thought he’d been transported back to the offices of Digital Dreamers, Inc.

“Right over there,” the Nymar said while pointing to the wall on the far side of the room.

Cole tightened his grip on the guy’s collar and pushed him forward. “Prophet, sit at the keyboard. Type what I tell you to type and do it slowly so I can see everything that happens.” Dropping his voice to a snarl that surprised even himself, he added, “I know every sort of red flag you can send, Trojan you can unleash, signal you can give, or any other thing you might be able to do here. I can also hack into this terminal and get what I want on my own, but if you save me that time and trouble we’ll thank you by giving you a head start before we put down every last one of you fuckers. Got me?”

The Nymar nodded, accidentally bumped his head against the barrel of Cole’s gun and stammered, “Y-Yes. I understand.”

“How do we reach Cobb38?”

The Nymar started rattling off Internet addresses and passwords. Prophet sat at the keyboard until Cole gave him the okay before touching so much as one smooth plastic square. It turned out that the Nymar communication network
operated through a ring of websites and e-mail accounts that were only connected by a few members who passed information from source to source. Once Cole had committed some of the details to memory, he wanted to try to get a member of the inner ring of the network to send something to him. Every e-mail came with tags and source codes that could point him in the right direction when looking for the source, and hopefully a flesh-and-blood Cobb38. With enough time he knew he might even be able to send something to Cobb that would truly mess up his day, as well as his entire system. That dream was quashed when Rico shouted at him from his post at the doorway.

“Looks like Gunari is pushing them toward us!”

“Pull up another e-mail, Walter,” Cole said quickly. “One of the ones addressed to Cobb’s whole system. Add my e-mail address to the list of senders and send out a generic reply so it’s placed into the circulation. Drina, you and Rico buy us a minute and then head back out.”

“What about Paige?” Rico asked.

“Me, her, and Walter will stay here to wrap this up. Just go!”

Either Rico was surprised by the forceful tone in Cole’s voice or he truly did respect him more as a partner, because the big man nodded once and motioned for Drina to help him carry out the orders they’d been given.

“Done,” Prophet said as he tapped the last key.

Cole didn’t need to do much more than shift his eyes to get a look at Paige. She stood in the middle of the room, between two cheap folding tables that looked like those professional wrestlers used as landing pads when jumping from the top ropes. Apart from the computer setup and tables, there wasn’t much of anything else within the room. Paige met his glance with an intensity that made it seem they were secluded from the rest of the world. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the good kind of intensity, and it sure as hell wasn’t a good kind of seclusion.

“What do you want to do from here?” he asked.

“You seem to be doing pretty well,” Paige replied. “I’ll follow your lead.”

“Prophet, take this.”

The bounty hunter stood up and had to act fast in order to catch the Nymar prisoner that was shoved toward him. Old instincts combined with job skills nicely enough for him to take control of the prisoner by twisting one arm behind the Nymar’s back and shoving him face first against the computer desk. “What should I do with him?”

“Find out whatever you or your boss needs to know about these Denver assholes,” Cole said. “Right after you find out where the cops are that’re being set up for a fall. If he acts like he doesn’t know about any cops, kill him.” Shifting to look down at the squirming Nymar, he added, “Use those antidote rounds I gave you. They should do the trick.”

“What’s next, Cole?” Paige asked.

Releasing the .45′s slide so he could safely holster the pistol, he snapped it back into the holster on his belt and drew the spear from where it had been strapped to his back. “Next, you tell me who the fuck you are, because you’re sure as hell not my partner.”

An angry twitch drifted across Paige’s face as she backed away. Although the fierceness in her eyes seemed like the woman Cole knew, their color was off by a few shades of brown and they were just a little too vivid to be natural. They shifted to a more sedated hue as she said, “Of course. You have feelings for this one. That would explain the inconsistencies.”

“Who are you?” Cole demanded.

Instead of the muted crackle of broken bones or the internal ripping of muscle and sinew that went along with other shapeshifters’ transformation, Paige’s change sounded more like a breath pulled in through a constricted throat. Familiar features dissolved and her skin pressed in around a narrowing frame. Even as her body’s curves faded like a dream and her clothes turned into rags, her eyes remained the same.

The figure that stood in front of Cole was vaguely familiar to him. Thinking back to the drive from where they’d met up with the Amriany, he realized it was the figure he’d first mistaken for Paige on the side of the road. Tightening his grip on the spear, he took comfort from the trickle of warm blood between his fingers. The bite of the thorns into his palms gave a much needed burst of adrenaline through his veins. “You’re a Full Blood?”

“My name is Kawosa and I am no Full Blood. No more than a king is merely a citizen.”

“Why can’t you guys just talk like everyone else?”

“And why can’t humans ever ask the first question on their minds without trying to dress it up with a lot of chatter and threatening gestures?”

“Where’s Paige?”

“Where did you last see her?”

“You must have known what she looked like or you wouldn’t have been able to change into her. It’s gotta be something like that, right?”

More gunshots ripped through the building, followed by Amriany voices calling back and forth. Somewhere within the building, doors were thrown open and different voices were added to the mix. Cole’s earpiece chirped once and Rico’s voice followed.

“This place is crawlin’ with those goddamn striped bloodsuckers. Someone else is coming and my money’s on them bein’ cops. What the hell happened, Paige? Didn’t you call these guys off?”

Kawosa’s eyes rolled around in their sockets as if he was following a pattern of lights dancing in front of his eyes. After they settled in the direction of his right ear, he pulled the device out, tossed the earpiece to the floor and smashed it under his foot as if it was a tick that had been lodged in his flesh.

Looking at his own hands, just to make sure the weapon was still in them, Cole said, “You’re a shapeshifter, so I know this weapon will hurt you. Tell me what happened to Paige.”

“I took her from your thoughts when you first laid eyes on me.”

“Shit. Another Mind Singer?”

“Oh, no. I can only read what lies on your surface, but that’s all I ever need. It’s rare your species ever uses much of anything deeper than that. Tell me, when did you know I wasn’t your Paige?”

“The moment you got in the car.”

“I doubt that very much.”

The expression on the shapeshifter’s face was so confident and so extremely arrogant that Cole wanted nothing more than to knock it off of him. With the firefight outside and no sign from the real Paige, he figured it couldn’t hurt to buy himself a few more seconds for reinforcements to arrive. “Her arm was wounded in Kansas City,” he said. “Yours wasn’t scarred. It wasn’t even stiff.”

Kawosa absently rubbed that arm. “And the eyes, right?” Despite the fact that Cole didn’t respond, Kawosa nodded serenely. “It’s always the eyes when it comes down to someone a human cares about. You’d think I would know that by now, wouldn’t you? The fact of the matter is that you care deeply for this woman. That’s why you envision her in such pristine condition.”

“Pristine, huh?” Cole chuckled. “You seriously need to do more research on someone before you try to mimic them.”