stolen, so we should ditch it. We need a place to stay until Jessup gets here. We take this guy’s room and keep him here for no more than a day, sleep on a real bed, maybe catch up on some news.”
“We’re on the run, buddy,” Lambert said. “That kinda means we gotta rough it.”
“If this doesn’t work, then drive away. Just don’t bother coming back to ask for more help, and good fucking luck convincing Frank to go with you.” With that, Cole stormed out of the car and headed across the parking lot. Even as he strode toward the man in the rumpled suit, he replayed Lambert’s words in his head. They made sense. A lot more sense than what he was about to do. If only good sense could cause the cinching pain in his gut to subside. Either they’d burned through the blood he’d taken from Chop or they were becoming something more than just remains of a dead spore, because he could feel them slicing into his stomach and along the upper portion of his throat.
The man in the business suit looked at him suspiciously and quickened his steps toward a tan car with a sticker on its bumper bearing the name of a rental company. He had keys in hand, flipped through them and found the one that would unlock the trunk.
As Cole got closer, the pain inside his throat cut even deeper, until he could feel a jabbing ache reach up to the back of his eyes.
“Back off, guy,” the man in the business suit said while taking a defensive posture near the open trunk. When Cole kept coming, the man reached in past a suitcase to a tire iron strapped to the spare.
Cole slapped the keys from his hand and grabbed him by the neck. The man had gotten to the tire iron and barely pulled it from the trunk before Cole slammed the back of his head against the edge of the trunk lid. When he placed both hands around the man’s neck, he felt strong enough to push his thumbs all the way through to his spine.
“Don’t have to . . . do this,” the man croaked. “Take . . . car. Money. Take it.”
Cole eased up for a second and looked around. The door to the guy’s room was held open by another suitcase, so he dragged the man away from the car and marched inside. Like any of a hundred rooms he’d rented over the years, there was a TV on a long dresser to his right, table and chairs to the left, and a bed farther in on that same side. Directly ahead was a mirror, sink, and foldable luggage rack. The bathroom was to the left, in the rear corner of the room. While shoving the guy toward the bathroom, Cole made the mistake of letting his eyes linger on the mirror.
The reflection wasn’t the one he was used to.
It wasn’t inhuman, but wasn’t anything he’d seen before.
What rattled him most was the hunger written across his face. A minute ago he was hurting, tired, hunted, and close to panic, but the same man he’d always been. The thing staring back at him now was ruled by a lingering presence that tightened until he thought his insides would rupture. Was this what the Nymar felt? Did it make a difference?
Someone stepped into the room. “Just stay back, Lam,” Cole snarled. “I need to do this.”
“What in the hell are you doing to that fella?”
The voice wasn’t Lambert’s and it wasn’t Frank’s. It came from a big man wearing a leather vest that rattled noisily as he stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. In one hand he carried a bulky revolver, and the other was wrapped around the wooden handle of a small hatchet. Cole’s eyes fixated on the blood dripping from the hatchet handle. Part of his brain was relieved to see the sign of another Skinner, but the rest could only long to taste the drops that hit the carpet.
“Who the hell are you?” Cole demanded.
The man in the vest rushed up to Cole to place the edge of his tomahawk against his neck and crack the side of his pistol against the temple of the man in the suit, who’d been knocked out by a hatchet blow to the head. “Show me your hands, boy.”
Cole lowered the suited man to the floor. “Jessup?”