Bloodfever by Karen Marie Moning Read Free Book Online

answers. I was sick of not getting any. I was surrounded by egotistical, unpredictable, moody, pushy jackasses, and my feeling was if you can’t beat them, join them. I was confident I, too, could be a pushy jackass. I just needed a little practice.
    I wanted to know more about Barrons. I wanted to know if he lived in this building or not. I wanted to know more about his mysterious garage. He’d slipped up not long ago, and mentioned something about a vault three floors beneath it. I wanted to know what a man like him stored in an underground vault.
    I began with the store. The front half was just what it seemed, an eclectic and well-stocked bookstore. I dismissed it and moved to the rear half. The first floor was as impersonal as a museum, liberally and exorbitantly fitted with antiquities and artwork, but nothing that betrayed any real glimpse into the mind of the man who’d acquired the many artifacts. Even his study, the one room I expected to offer some personal portrayal of the man, presented only the cool, impersonal reflection of a large wood-framed mirror that occupied the wall between cherry bookcases, behind the ornate fifteenth-century desk. There was no bedroom, kitchen, or dining room on the first floor.
    Every door on the second and third floors was locked. They were heavy, solid wood doors with complicated locks that I couldn’t force or pick. I started out stealthily jiggling the doorknobs because I was afraid Barrons might be in one of the rooms, but by the time I got to the third floor, I was giving them good hard shakes and pissed-off kicks. I’d awakened tonight to find myself in the dark. I was tired of being in the dark. I was tired of everyone else having control of the lights.
    I stomped back downstairs and outside to the garage. The rain had abated but the sky was still dark with thunderclouds, and dawn was a promise I wouldn’t have believed, if I’d not lived through twenty-two years of them. Down the alley to my left, Shades restlessly shaped and reshaped the darkness at the edge of the abandoned neighborhood.
    I flipped them off. With both hands.
    I tested the garage door. Locked, of course.
    I went to the nearest blacked-out window and smashed it in with the butt of my flashlight. The tinkle of breaking glass soothed my soul. No alarm went off. “Take that, Barrons. Guess your world isn’t so perfectly controlled, after all.” Perhaps it was warded like the bookstore, against other threats, not me. I broke out the jagged edges so I wouldn’t get cut, hoisted myself over the sill, and dropped to the floor.
    I flipped on the light switches by the door then just stood there a minute, grinning like an idiot. I’ve seen his collection before, even ridden in a few of the cars, but the sight of them all together, one gleaming fantasy after another, is a total rush to somebody like me.
    I love cars.
    From sleek and sporty to squat and muscley, from luxury sedan to high-performance coupe, from state-of-the-art to timeless classic, I am a car fanatic—and Barrons has them all. Well, maybe not
all
. I haven’t seen him driving a Bugatti yet, and really, with 1003 horsepower and a million-dollar price tag, I’m hardly expecting to, but he’s got pretty much every car of my dreams, right down to a sixty-four and a half Stingray, painted what else but British racing green?
    There, a black Maserati crouched next to a Wolf Countach. Here, a red Ferrari stretched on the verge of a purr, next to a—my smile died instantly—Rocky O’Bannion’s Maybach, reminding me of sixteen deaths that shouldn’t have happened to men who hadn’t deserved to die, and at least part of it was on my head: sixteen deaths I’d celebrated because they’d bought me a temporary stay of execution.
    Where do you put such conflicting feelings? Is this where I’m supposed to grow up and start compartmentalizing? Is compartmentalizing just