Bloodfever by Karen Marie Moning Read Free Book Online Page A

another way of divvying up our sins, apportioning a few here and a few over there, shoving our internal furniture around to hide some, so we can go on living with the weight of them individually, because collectively they’d drown us?
    I shoved all thought of cars from my mind and began looking for doors.
    The garage had once been some kind of commercial warehouse, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it occupied nearly a city block. The floors were polished concrete, the walls poured concrete, the beams and girders steel. All the windows were painted black, from the glass-block apertures near the ceiling, to the two double-paned glass openings at ground level by the doors, one of which I’d busted. The garage had a single retractable dock door.
    Other than that and a bunch of cars, there was nothing. No stairs, no closets, no trapdoors hidden beneath rubber mats on the floor. I know, I looked, there was nothing.
    So where were the three subterranean levels and how was I supposed to get down to them?
    I stood in the center of the enormous garage surrounded by one of the finest car collections in the world, tucked away in a nondescript alley in Dublin, and tried to think like its bizarre owner. It was an exercise in futility. I wasn’t sure he had a brain. Perhaps there was only a coldly efficient microchip in there.
    I
felt
more than heard the noise, a rumble in my feet.
    I cocked my head, listening. After a moment, I got down on my hands and knees, brushed a thin veneer of dust from the floor, and pressed my ear to the cold concrete. Far beneath me, in the marrow of the ground, something bayed.
    It sounded maddened, bestial, and it raised the fine hair all over my body. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the mouth capable of making such a sound. It bayed over and over, each soul-chilling howl lasting a full minute or more, echoing up from its concrete tomb.
    What was
down
there? What kind of creature possessed such lung capacity? Why was it making such a sound? It was darker than a wail of despair, emptier than a funeral dirge; it was the bleak, tortured baying of a thing beyond salvation, abandoned, lost, condemned to the agony of hell without beginning or end.
    Chicken flesh sprouted all over my arms.
    There was a new cry then, this one more terrified than tortured. It rose in gruesome concert with that long, terrible howl.
    They both stopped.
    There was silence.
    I rapped my knuckles on the floor in frustration, wondering just how far in over my head I was.
    No longer feeling quite so jackassy or pushy, I left to go back to my room. As I stepped into the alley, the wind scooted trash along the pavement, and the dense cloud cover drifted apart to reveal a window of dark sky. Dawn was moments away, yet the moon was still bright and full. To my right, in the Dark Zone, Shades no longer crouched in the shadows. They’d fled something, and it wasn’t the moon or the dawn. I’d watched them a lot from my window lately; they ceded the night in petulant degrees, the largest of them lingering until the last.
    I glanced to my left and sucked in a breath.
    â€œNo,” I whispered.
    Just beyond reach of the building floodlights a tall, black-shrouded figure stood, folds of midnight cloth rustling in the wind.
    Several times over the past week, I’d thought I’d glimpsed something out a window, late at night. Something so trite and clichéd that I’d refused to believe it was real. And I wouldn’t now.
    Fae were bad enough.
    â€œYou’re not there,” I told it.
    I dashed across the alley, vaulted up the stairs, kicked open the door, and burst through it. When I looked back, the specter was gone.
    I laughed shakily. I knew better.
    It had never been there to begin with.
    I took a shower, dried my hair, got dressed, grabbed a chilled latte from the fridge, and made it downstairs just in time for Fiona to show up, and the police to arrive to arrest me.

FOUR

    I told you. He