beat him to his share.
“What’s your name?” the inmate across from him asked.
“Whoever you are,” Cole said, “just leave me alone. I’m sick of introducing myself. I’m sick of this damn place and I’m sick of this whole fucking world.”
“I hear that, bud.”
Another guard walked down the hall and slowed down just long enough to throw Cole a threadbare towel that was presumably too weak to support his weight if he tried to hang himself and a set of paper-thin stained sheets. “You be good, Lambert,” he said while shooting a quick glance at the cell across from Cole’s. He then turned and walked away while talking to one of his coworkers on a small handheld radio.
Going for the most cover he could get, Cole chose the bottom bunk and started flipping his sheets over the lumpy mattress. He waited for any number of comments regarding the living situation or his space on the inmate sexual pecking order, but all he heard was the steady rasp of Lambert’s breath. Something about the way the skinny guy stared at him from across the hall made Cole less than anxious to turn his back on him. The guy might have been barely wide enough to make a dent in his rumpled jumpsuit, but his eyes were sharper and more alert than some of the inhuman predators topping the Skinner watch list. “So,” Cole said. “Lambert, is it?”
“Yeah,” the other guy breathed.
“You prefer to go by any other name?”
“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
Cole nodded slowly to himself. Here it comes.
Rather than try to sidestep the confrontation until it snuck back to bite him when the inmates were within easier reach of each other, Cole grabbed his bars and met the glare coming from the occupant of the other cell. “Just making conversation, okay?”
“So you want to talk now, huh?”
“You don’t want any part of it,” Cole said, “that’s fine.”
Lambert pressed his face against the bars as if he meant to shove his head through them. He looked to be a few inches shorter than Cole and would have seemed even smaller if his thick, spiky clump of black hair had been shaved. Wiry fingers curled into fists and then stretched out again to waggle at the end of hands that looked more like knotted collections of veins and faded tattoos. He watched Cole intently while rubbing his bottom lip against the edges of his teeth. “You’re damn right it’s fine,” he said. “Why so nervous?”
Since Cole couldn’t think of an appropriately tough or funny response, he kept quiet.
A scowl eased across Lambert’s face in the same way a piece of bad pork might work its way through his bowels. Judging by the smell coming from the direction of his cell, it seemed to Cole that might have been the case not long before his arrival. Scraggly eyebrows flicked upward and an appraising moan gurgled from the back of Lambert’s throat. “What’s that on your neck?” he asked. “Some kinda tribal? Ain’t from no gang I ever seen.”
Cole looked down, spotted the traces of black stretching from the base of his throat, and pulled up the collar of his jumpsuit to cover more of it. The Nymar tendrils were common among vampires that had an active spore inside them. Black filaments stretched out and made themselves at home within their host’s chests, but Cole’s spore was gone. Although the markings weren’t moving beneath his skin, they were still more visible now than they’d been a few days ago. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just left over from a bad night.”
“I hear that,” Lambert chuckled while unbuttoning his jumpsuit.
Despite the distance and bars between them, Cole stepped away from the front of his cell. “Uhh, what are you doing?”
The other prisoner grinned widely while continuing to undress. He unbuttoned and peeled away the front of his jumpsuit to reveal a pale sunken chest covered in stringy black hair. Opening the jumpsuit farther, Lambert displayed a set of ribs that looked more like a xylophone covered in skin that had been transplanted from a fish’s belly. “Take a gander at that,” he said.
As much as Cole wanted to resist, he took the gander that had been offered. On Lambert’s ribs, written in a flowing script accented with ladybugs and lip marks, were the words, Sweet Sarah Sunshine.
Lambert nodded and waggled his eyebrows as if he’d just shown Cole the lost pieces of an ancient text. “Wanna hear about a bad night? I met this lady