belong to you.” Glancing around at the guards, he added, “And I’d bet they don’t belong to any of you. Nobody working in a place like this would be far away from their weapon. So whose body did you steal these from?”
“I want you to shift that weapon’s shape, Cole,” Waylon said.
“Not until you tell me where you got them.”
“Sit down, then hold the weapons properly and shift their shape.”
Cole made sure his fingers fit between the thorns. The blood staining its grip was old and blackened. “Did you kill someone to get this? Answer me or—”
One of the guards to Cole’s left fired a single shot from his AK-47. The round tore through the meat in Cole’s calf, knocking that leg out from under him and sending him straight down to the stool. His tailbone cracked against the uncushioned seat and his chest knocked against the edge of the table. Before he could slide to the floor, another guard rushed over to him, lifted him onto the stool and then slammed the flat side of his shotgun stock against the back of Cole’s head. The jarring impact knocked his face against the table, but wasn’t hard enough to keep him there.
Waylon reached into an interior jacket pocket to produce a small syringe that was about half the size of a pencil. “Cooperate and I’ll administer this serum to you.”
Recognizing the fluid in that syringe almost immediately, Cole gripped the table and nodded. Even with his body’s ability to produce the serum, the bleeding from his flesh wound would soon cause him to pass out. Since he didn’t want to be at the mercy of these men, he dropped the stakes and allowed two guards to restrain him while the serum was administered. The moment he experienced the cool, familiar rush of it through his leg, he felt better. The tech knelt down to pinch the wound together as both the shotgun and AK barrels were jammed against Cole’s head. The wound itched as it sealed, but that sensation was almost completely lost beneath the comforting light-headedness that followed. Whether that came from the serum or the blood he’d lost, Cole was grateful for the breather.
Following the tech as best he could, he grunted, “That’s better than the stuff we mix at home.”
“Of course,” Waylon said. “Now can we continue?”
Cole sat up, took hold of the stakes and couldn’t help but stare at the flakes of dried blood that fell from the thorns onto his skin.
“You know what to do,” Waylon prodded. “Do it.”
Gazing defiantly into the eyes of the guard who’d shot him, Cole clenched his fist around the weapon and drove the spikes into his palms. Oddly enough, he could actually tell the difference between those and the thorns on his own weapon.
“Now shift its shape,” Waylon commanded.
If he was holding his own spear, it would have been easy. He’d bonded with that weapon to the point that it felt more like a piece of his own body. But the stakes were foreign to him. When he willed the pointed end to curl, it barely twitched.
Waylon looked over to the wall behind Cole, which was dominated by a large window. “Are you getting this?”
He was answered by a few sharp taps from the other side of the thick window.
“Is that all you can do, Cole?”
In another part of the converted visitors’ lounge, machines chirped the rhythm of his heartbeat and whatever other vital signs were being measured by the components stuck to his neck and chest.
“How are you feeling?” the tech asked.
“Tired,” Cole replied.
“Are you having chest pains? Any pressure from the tendrils?”
Hearing someone refer to vampire fragments inside of him as if they were nothing more than kidney stones was strange. Then again, it wasn’t much stranger than the fact that everyone was more concerned about a stick changing shape than the bullet wound in his leg, which had almost healed. Cole reminded himself to get that recipe.
He shook his head and then winced.
“You are, aren’t you?” the tech asked.
Lowering his eyes, Cole nodded and let out a breath he’d been prolonging for the better part of a minute.
Waylon jotted down a note and said, “You can do better than that, Cole. Make that weapon into something you could use.”
Those words caused all of the guards to tense.
Cole kept his head hanging low, mostly as a way to try and make himself look weaker than he truly was. Just because there wasn’t a way to keep Waylon