Vampire Uprising by Marcus Pelegrimas Page B

a wet sucking sound. He was no surgeon, but the heart was easy enough to spot. It was at the center of the hole dug into the thing’s chest, like a Valentine’s gift dropped there for safekeeping. He leaned in as close as his nose would allow. The smells rising up from the exposed cavity were like a living entity that reached down to tug at the back of his throat. “Looks like a Nymar, all right,” he said. After finding the telltale puncture marks on the sides of the heart as well as the scratches put there when the spore hung on during the removal process, he added, “Yeah. Nymar.”
    “Wait a second. Do that again.”
    “What?”
    “The light. Move it again.”
    Cole had only turned his head so he could give two of his senses a break at the same time. To appease the other Skinner, he waved the light back and forth across the dead Nymar’s upper body.
    “That’s it!” Abel said. “Did you see it?”
    Although his movements gave the corpse’s exposed, ravaged heart a cool strobe effect, Cole found one major difference with the tendrils shooting through the vampire’s arms and legs. At first glance they just seemed thinner than normal. What differentiated them from tendrils on any other Nymar he’d seen was the way they reacted to the light. When the flashlight’s beam was shining directly on them, they shriveled into crooked, almost imperceptible lines. When the beam moved away, the tendrils fattened and spread out until they were almost touching one another.
    Cole moved the beam back and forth a few more times,but the effect was less noticeable with every pass.
    “I wonder if it could do that when it was alive,” Abel said.
    “The tendrils only become gray when they’re drying out. If all the plumbing was still connected, it may cover this thing in some sort of black … cloak?”
    Abel pressed his head against the bars to get as close a look as possible without crawling through the muck. “Pretty smart. I see why Paige kept you around. Well, apart from the obvious reasons. A living Nymar may even be able to control when those tendrils spread out like that. He could damn near go invisible if he was in the shadows.”
    “That’s pushing it, but it might help him stay hidden. There’s something else that’s strange. This thing isn’t tripping much of anything in my scars. What about you?”
    “It’s dead, Cole. Just like damn near everything else down here. That’s why everyone’s upstairs. I bet Lancroft just set this place aside as a dumping ground.”
    Something at the far end of the hall growled at them. More than a simple animal’s snarl, it directed itself at Cole and Abel as surely as if it had known their names.
    “Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Abel grunted.
    Cole dug his phone from his pocket and took a few pictures of the dead Nymar. The tendrils still had some flex to them as he passed the light back and forth, so he got some shots of that as well. “Check the rest of the hall, Abel.”
    “You check it.”
    “Just go!”
    Cole didn’t care if Abel did the job or not. All he really wanted was to get the other Skinner to move away from that little door when he crawled through. There wasn’t a way for him to exit without making himself vulnerable to a quick downward stab, and more than likely, Lancroft had constructed the doors with that very purpose in mind. Either that, he thought, or he was getting too paranoid for his own good.
    Once he was outside, Cole checked on Abel. Nothing else struck him as more peculiar than it had been the last time he was down there. Whatever was caged at the farthest end kept its back against the wall and stared at the Skinners withglittering eyes. It was a shapeshifter. He could tell that much from the way it swelled or contracted, as if its entire skeletal structure was an illusion. Finding out any more than that would have required getting much too close to the thing, and despite their differences, all the Skinners agreed that the creature