Free Vampire Uprising by Marcus Pelegrimas Page A

to acquire the feel of day. Just shy of 3:30 A.M., every obscene comment from Madman and his bros echoed down the street. Every clink of empty bottles hitting the sidewalk rattled through the air accompanied by the perpetual thump of a cheap radio set up somewhere within the messy house.
    The Skinners didn’t try to sneak up on them. Cole, Paige, and Abel led a group of seven more that fanned out to form a wall in front of Madman’s water-damaged front porch. The house’s owner, along with most of the guys from the party, came outside to meet them. Drunken insults and threats were spat at them, but the Skinners weren’t there to talk. Cole and Abel wore military surplus jackets that came down past their waists and had tanned werewolf hides stitched into the lining. Paige wore her own black harness, which covered her torso and was strapped in place like a bulletproof vest. She’d had no trouble finding Half Breed skins to zip into the harness for padding that could stop anything the drunken idiots had to offer.
    “What the fuck do you want?” Madman asked.
    Spotting the Nymar instantly, Cole extended a hand to point at his target. “Him first.”
    The guy had pockmarked skin, spiked brown hair, and wore a shirt with the collar torn out to show his markings,as if the tendrils were expensive tattoos. With so many Skinners in front of him, he no longer seemed anxious to display his ink.
    “What do you want with Finn?” Madman asked.
    “I just want to make sure he gets a good look at what’s about to happen.” With that, Cole stepped forward with the aggression that had been building inside of him since the first guy in a football jersey knocked him aside in the tenth grade. The fact that he now had armed killers to back him up was simply glorious.
    The inside of the house was exactly what had been advertised on the outside. Couches with stuffing flowing from tears in the upholstery formed a pit around a big TV showing the final table of a poker tournament. Crushed beer and pop cans were strewn on the floor along with enough empty pizza boxes to build a very flimsy and greasy fort. Cole had barely taken four steps inside before all hell broke loose.
    Madman rushed up behind him, but was immediately overpowered by the Skinners. Cole walked all the way back to the bedrooms, following the itch in his palms that had brought him this far. There were more Nymar inside. Having them this close to the Lancroft house was not a good sign.
    The first door he encountered was closed, so Cole opened it. Inside that room, a Nymar wearing nothing but dark blue boxers climbed out from under the sheets of a twin bed. The tendrils marking his skin were fat and dark, meaning he’d recently fed on the one substance that the spore attached to his heart would crave. Judging by the state of the other man, slumped in a corner with blood running from slashed wrists, Cole was certain he’d found the vampire’s snack.
    “This isn’t exactly feeding in public,” Cole said, “but we’re doing a surprise insp—”
    He was cut short when the Nymar used a portion of his enhanced speed to reach beneath the mattress to grab a .44 that had been stashed there. The gunshot exploded within the room, spitting a round that hit Cole in the upper chest a few inches from his collar. Part of his brain was still trying to come up with a funny way to insult the Nymar who’d just killed him. That thought rattled in his brain as he losthis footing, bounced off a wall and dropped to the floor. He couldn’t breathe. A blurred jumble of dark shapes was smeared across his eyes. His ears were filled with muffled, thumping movement inside the house and a piercing ringing left by the .44.
    The Nymar landed on top of Cole as if he’d been dropped from a helicopter hovering above the house. As the vampire pressed down on him with more weight than his scrawny body should have had, the coppery stink on the Nymar’s breath washed over him. Eyeing him hungrily, the