Lisa was dropped into a pit that reeked of decay and feces, and was shoved inside until the earth pressed against her cheek. At first she thought the shape beneath her was a log. When the log shifted and let out a shuddering breath, she realized her mistake.
She heard the rustling of a thick coat and felt a claw scrape against her face. Although the thick bony finger didn’t move, the claw twisted to curl delicately along her chin. Too weak to protest, she allowed her head to be moved again, and whimpered at the pain sent through her torso, to die in her numbed legs.
The creature looked down at her. As it drew closer, the black fur covering its face was sucked back into its pores to reveal distorted human features. A white patch sprouted from a deep scar that ran along the bridge of his nose and straight down to his left cheek. “Be quiet now,” he said. The words came quickly and were sharpened by a leering cockney accent. “I can make it hurt worse, you know.”
“Please don’t,” Lisa gasped. “Whatever you want to…just…please don’t.”
“Your mates seemed to like you. If they got the salt to come this far, maybe you’ll have some more comp’ny down there.”
Cars raced along a nearby street. Sirens drifted through the air like pets that started barking after a burglar had already cleaned out the house. The beast lifted his scarred nose to the fragrant air, pulled it in and mused, “Maybe they’ll find you. Maybe they won’t. It don’t matter now, luv. If I was you, I’d get comfy down there with your new friends. Always nice to have an ear to bend, eh?”
As he began to cover the pit’s opening with chunks of solid earth, he sighed and grumbled, “Good an’ quiet in there. I envy you, luv. Damn humans can’t go anywhere or do anything without makin’ noise. As for the lights, there’s no escaping them.”
“Please stop,” Lisa sobbed. “I want to…go home. I won’t tell.”
Something twitched inside Lisa’s body. It writhed, flailed, wrapped around her innards and squeezed a pained grunt out of her.
As dirt was heaped over the pit’s opening to blot out the distant sirens, different sounds skittered into her ears. One of the other bodies stuffed into that hole grunted a few unintelligible syllables. Muscles tore loose and became wet mulch, only to be stuck together again. Bones strained to the breaking point, held, and then snapped within their quivering, tortured shells.
Sickness poured in from where she’d been bitten and seeped into her bones, tugging at the very frame of her body to shape her into something else.
One of the others choked on a pained cry.
When Lisa Wilson realized she was too broken to stick her hand out through the dirt wall piled in front of her, she cried too.
Chapter 5
Chicago
It was well past two in the morning, but there were plenty of night owls riding the Eisenhower Expressway. Paige was behind the wheel of the Cav and he sat beside her. With the amount of fidgeting he’d been doing, he probably could have jogged across town in less time than it took to drive.
“What’s that smell?” he asked.
Paige took a quick sniff, which turned into a grimace. “About four weeks’ worth of greasy little hamburgers.”
“Not that.”
“Then those fried tacos you insist on buying by the dozen.”
“Not those either. It smells like vinegar and…sweat?”
Chuckling while weaving between a few slow cars with Iowa plates, she said, “That brings us back to those tacos.”
Cole unbuckled his seat belt so he could twist all the way around and reach into the backseat. “No, seriously! It’s stronger back here.” After digging through all the garbage, newspapers, and supply kits in back, he found a cheap black plastic trash bag that gave off the offending odor in waves. “Good Lord, Paige, what’s in this bag?”
“Some critter I scraped off the road. Since you like those fried tacos so much, I thought you might be able to make your own if you just had the right meat.”
“Leave those tacos alone! You never even tried any! This isn’t really…?”
“No, it’s nothing like that. Remember the Mongrel that tracked you down when you first got here?”
“Jackie, the cat lady. I remember her.”
Looking over to him, Paige asked, “What’s with the sloppy grin? Do you already know where I’m going with this?”
“No, I’m just remembering what she looked like under all that fur. I mean, when she was visible.”
Paige shook her head and let her eyes settle back onto the expressway. “Yeah, well you remember how she could bend light or something to turn almost invisible?”
Cole nodded. “She had some sort of grease or oil in her fur. That stuff came in real useful once we got some of it for ourselves. You still have that crap? Good Lord, it’s been months since you wiped that stuff up!”
“This isn’t the exact same stuff. I sent some of it to a friend of mine and he was able to make more. Apparently, it’s not too hard to reproduce. The only thing is, the artificial stuff doesn’t last very long unless it’s soaked into something. Once it gets on your skin or out in the open air, it evaporates real quick.”
“When did you do all this?” Cole asked.
“While you were typing and hunched over that laptop for the last couple of weeks.”
He plopped back into his seat and placed the bag on the floor between his feet. “So what’s in here?”
“A little something that should help me get inside the Blood Parlor to back you up. I’ve been told the security there is pretty tight.”
“By the way, are you going to tell me what a Blood Parlor is?”
“It’s a place where the Nymar can feed on humans so it’s not out in the open.”
“And…we encourage this?”
“Not exactly, but we can’t stop it.” Veering off to the exit that led to the Kennedy Expressway, Paige said, “Nymar like to talk about being these big vampire kingpins, but they don’t run much of anything, apart from their mouths. There’s a lot of them and they can be dangerous, so Skinners have been keeping them in check. Part of that is making a few deals that work out for the greater good. One of those deals is us allowing them to feed on willing participants and make a living doing it. Well, I guess you could call it an un-living.”
Paige laughed at her own joke, but cut it off once she saw Cole dryly looking back at her.
“Stephanie and Ace run a good chunk of these places,” she continued. “It’s basically a prostitution ring with teeth.”
“What kind of people pay to get bitten?”
“Normal folks pay to have a lot kinkier things done to them. You should know that. Aren’t you the one who spends so much time on the Internet?”
Without a good answer to that, Cole just shrugged.
“Blood Parlors started off as fancy names for blocks of hotel rooms that Nymar rented so their paying customers could have some privacy,” Paige continued. “The hotel rooms were traded up for suites and the suites for blocks of rooms at the fancier places downtown. A month or so ago Ace and Stephanie bought the upper floor of a building on North Rush Street.”
“Lots of good bars up there.” When he saw Paige glance over at him, Cole said, “What? I get out every now and then.”
“You’re right about the bars,” she said. “There are also some clubs and plenty of other places to attract the sort of creeps who might want to pay to get bitten on the neck by sluts wearing black lace and garter belts.”
“That does sound kind of intriguing.”
“There’s an ATM along the way. I’m sure Steph would offer a nice discount so you could lay back, close your eyes, and let some parasite tear into your arteries. Who knows? A friend of one of the Nymar we’ve had to put down might be the one drinking from you. I’m sure they’ll pull out before you run dry.”