Tara studied her with eyes darkened by threadlike filaments that crept in on all sides to meet at her pupils. “You obviously haven’t felt it.”
“Let me guess. It was something that cleared some of that double-seeded craziness from your brain?” Seeing she’d struck a nerve, Steph bounced her legs excitedly upon the balls of her feet. “Seems like only yesterday you were climbing the walls and shaking like a junkie when the blood from your last kill was still dripping from your lips. Now you sit there looking all smart and forming complete sentences.”
“Hope said the Breaking Moon would let my body catch up to both spores inside of me. All I had to do was live long enough to see it.” Holding up her hand to show Steph as well as herself that it wasn’t shaking, she added, “Looks like she was right.” Placing her hand upon the table as if it had suddenly turned into a lead weight, she asked, “You haven’t felt any difference with your spores?”
“No.”
“Are there any other double-seeded Nymar in the city?”
“No, but that’s not all of what you wanted to talk about.” When Tara stiffened, Steph said, “I’m in a line of work that benefits from knowing when someone is beating around the bush. Some people walk right up and tell you they want to get their dick sucked and then get bitten by a girl wearing a miniskirt with her hair in pigtails.”
“Who doesn’t?” grunted one of Tara’s guards.
“But most of my customers,” she continued, “probably the best ones, need a little coaxing. They come up to you, but don’t quite know what to say. Or maybe they don’t want to say it . . . for whatever reason. I doubt you’re nervous about anything.”
“It’s the Skinners,” Tara snapped before she was led any further along that road.
“Gotchya. Someone on the rise like you doesn’t want to know how important it is for someone like me to help you.”
Tara sighed again. It was shorter than the others. More embarrassed than disgusted. “Have you heard from them or not?”
“No.”
“Do you know where they may be? Specifically?”
Without doing the first thing to hide how much she was enjoying herself, Steph replied, “Like I already said. Just what I pieced together from the news.”
“Do you have anything of theirs they left behind?”
“Like what? An address book? Something they touched so you can get vibes off it? Don’t laugh. I actually have a regular customer who thinks we can do that kind of shit. God bless those stupid movies for making the rest of the planet think we’re superheroes.”
One more sigh from Tara. This time it was a short, intolerant exhalation that had been trapped for too long within an angry body. “What about anyone who might know where they are?” She snapped her black, violated eyes up to lock onto Steph and stun the Nymar into silence. “Think there might be any chance of you knowing someone like that?”
“There are tons of Nymar in Chicago.”
“And on the outskirts, but only one who works for the Skinners. Only one who mixes up the Skinner’s poisons and builds new weapons for them to use to kill us. Only one who’s been getting away with that kind of thing for . . . how many years?”
Knowing it was useless to lie, Steph adjusted her posture so she was sitting properly in her chair. “His name is Daniels.”
“There we go.”
“How long did Hope know about him?”
“I don’t know,” Tara replied. “That was back when I was crawling the walls and licking my lips.”
“Right. Sorry about that. I was just—”
“I know,” Tara cut in. “And if there was any hint that you’d found him by now, you’d already be nailed to a wall, hanging upside down so you could taste everything that leaked out of you before it dripped into a pot on the floor.”
Normally, Steph didn’t respond very well to threats. The only people who’d talked to her like that on a regular basis had been burned from their home and nearly torn apart. But things had changed in the Nymar pecking order. Tara wasn’t at the top, but she had influence that spread much farther than Chicago. As much as it galled her to do so, Steph choked down what she’d wanted to say and slowly stood up. “I may know where you could look for him.”
“Where?”
“He used to live in an apartment in the ’burbs. We think he relocated a while ago, but we haven’t been able to nail it down. Daniels was paranoid back when he mixed drinks to knock out the kids who came wandering into the clubs we used to run in the nineties. Ever since he broke away from us and ran to kiss Skinner ass, he’s been worse.”
“How much worse?”
“Worse as in full-on conspiracy theories, electronic security, false identities.” She chuckled and added, “The last time Ace spotted him, Daniels was wearing some kind of goofy disguise. Pathetic, really.”
“Was Ace able to follow Daniels back to where he lived?”
Reluctantly, Steph said, “No.”
“That is pathetic.” Tara stood up and stepped away from the table. Her guards hadn’t moved from their spots, but she didn’t seem concerned with them. “Is he paying you? Did you let him live as some sort of deal you had with the Skinners?”
“I told you, I’m not sure if—”
“I didn’t have to ask around very long to find out you steered a man from New York to Daniels around the time of the riots in Kansas City. Even supplied him with a few hitters to tear down some apartment buildings. Did that slip your mind or was there a good reason you failed to mention it?”
Steph chewed on the side of her tongue for a moment before saying, “Daniels mixes poison for them, but it’s nothing they can’t do without him. He does more work against the Full Bloods than against us. Killing him would have brought too much heat from the Skinners. More heat than setting their house on fire.”
“That heat doesn’t matter anymore. Can Daniels lead us to the Skinners or not?”
“If he doesn’t know where they are, he’ll be able to reach them. Paige and Cole are on his speed dial. But it’s not a good idea to just go crashing in there,” she warned. “He’s got protection. He’s still valuable to the Skinners and knows it.”
“Paige and Cole aren’t a threat,” Tara said.
“Can you guarantee that?”
Tara raised an eyebrow, which was enough to put a confident edge into her words when she said, “Just because we came out on top after the uprising doesn’t mean we can sit back and relax. The Skinners and every other human have their backs to the wall, which means now is the time to make the moves necessary to put the Nymar where they should always have been.”
“Things are good for us right now,” Steph said evenly. “Why push it?”
“Because the shapeshifters are ripping through humans like wet newspaper. When they’re done, they’ll come for us. If we’re not ready when that happens, we’ll take even heavier damages.”
“Daniels is too important to be killed. He was researching the spore, trying to find a way to survive on less blood without getting strung out. It’s been a few years. Who knows what else he may have come up with in that time?”
Tara’s eyes narrowed and she motioned toward one of her guards. “Tell me where he is. Now.”
Steph knocked her fist against the table, which was the signal for Astin to come out from the back room, “I don’t take orders from you.”
As Astin and another Nymar emerged from the back room with their guns drawn, the guards that Tara brought with her raised their weapons.
“Give me the address to those apartments,” Tara said calmly.
“His spore research will be important for all of us. When it’s done, it’s mine.”