Almost Final Curtain by Tate Hallaway Read Free Book Online Page B

intense at home. You know, after I turned eighteen in October?” He sneaked a look at me, but didn’t wait to see my reaction. “Papa wants me to ‘graduate.’”
    He didn’t mean from college, and I knew it. “But you can’t! You have to kill a vampire to do that.”
    His sharp glance and a nervous check around the room made me realize I hadn’t said that as quietly as I probably should have. I wasn’t too worried. I’d hung around with Taylor’s friends when they talked about ax-murdering trolls encountered in computer games and no one ever looked twice. “I know,” he said, keeping his voice pitched low. “But I can’t hold him off much longer.”
    “You’re going to have to,” I whispered harshly. “You can’t kill my friends.”
    “Now they’re your friends? I thought they were just your ‘people.’”
    I didn’t want to get into petty semantics. I struggled to keep my voice down. “You can’t kill anybody. It’s not right.”
    Nikolai bowed his head, running his fingers through his hair. “I have to do something, soon.”
    “Why don’t you tell your dad the truth? Tell him you don’t want to be a vampire hunter.”
    He looked up at me then, his amber eyes flashing dangerously dark. “Because, Ana,” he said. “That’s not the truth.”
    I pressed my back stiffly into the vinyl of the booth, trying to absorb what Nikolai had just said. When my brain couldn’t process it, I dumbly asked, “Are you saying you want to be a vampire hunter?”
    He went back to fiddling with his place mat, as I tried to remember to breathe. My understanding had always been that Nikolai’s family expected him, as their only son, to take up his father’s paranormal vocation, but that Nik had his own feelings about the whole affair—even before we became involved. Had he changed his mind? I watched him intently, trying to read the answer in his posture, his movements.
    Nikolai scratched the back of his neck, considering. He let out a measured sigh. “Look, I don’t know, Ana. I was serious about what I said to Constantine earlier. Vampires don’t belong here. Ask him and I’m sure he’d tell you he’d rather be home, beyond the Veil. You know as well as I do that their whole culture is based on homesickness.”
    He seemed to want an answer, but all I had was a shrug. That jibed with what little I did know about vampire culture. Elias had told me that they based the hierarchy of their society on what they remembered of the place they’d been stolen from. The First Witch had ripped them from their home, and once on this side, it took a magical death at the hands of someone like Nikolai’s father to send them back.
    Still, I didn’t see vampires lining up to throw themselves on Nik’s psychic blade.
    “So you’re just performing a public service?” I couldn’t quite keep the snark from my tone.
    “Wouldn’t the world be a better place without vampires?”
    I might have had a smarter comeback if I hadn’t had my own doubts about being half vampire. Instead I pulled the paper wrapping from the straw and looked over at the kitchen as if I suddenly cared how long it took them to make my chocolate malt.
    “You see my problem,” Nikolai said, as if my silence meant I agreed with him.
    “But I don’t,” I said. “If it’s really just that simple—that the vampires don’t belong here—why doesn’t the Council of Witches concoct a spell to send them all back? Tidy up their problem, as it were?”
    The waitress came with our drinks. She put out tall glasses and shook the malts from the metal containers. The smile she gave Nik and me was sly, like she thought we were a cute couple.
    Once she left, Nik returned to my question. “I suspect you’re part of the reason.” To my confused look, he added, “No one knows what will happen to you if they do something like that.”
    I shook my head. The ice-cream drink was so thick I used a spoon to take a bite, and then I waved the tip of it at Nik.