Bloodshot by Cherie Priest Read Free Book Online Page B

squeaked alert to settle into the silence, and I listened around it.
    Upstairs at least a floor—maybe even two floors—I heard footsteps that were far too dense to come from an eight-year-old girl or her teenage brother. Upstairs, a man was moving with the kind of careful precision that thinks it’s being sneaky, but I heard it anyway. My ears are just like the rest of my sensory organs—exceptional, courtesy of supernatural enhancement—and Mr. Sneaky Feet did not fool
me
.
    I closed the door behind myself and didn’t mind the creak so much since I was alone on that floor.
    I figured I was alone, anyway. I extended my mind just a tad, listening with my piddly-but-occasionally-useful psychic senses for the heartbeat of something small, crouched, and concealed. No,Pepper wasn’t down here. She was upstairs someplace. At the very fringe of my perception, I sensed her heart fluttering like a canary in a coal-mine cage.
    She was terrified, and becoming more so with every passing second. Wherever she was hiding, I hoped she was fully concealed.
    I crossed the room lightly, dodging between the boxes and ducking past the crates stored on shelves overhead. I reached the stairwell door and gave it a swift but controlled yank, pulling it away from the frame and slipping through the opening. It shut itself behind me, tugged back into place by a set of fat iron coils that passed for springs.
    It didn’t make enough noise to give me away, not to an intruder a full floor above.
    Or so I thought—until he quit moving.
    He froze and I froze, because I knew good and well that I’d been quiet even in my haste. So either he’d heard me, or he’d found something he wanted. But I didn’t get the feeling, from the eager silence that smothered the whole building, that he was examining anything. I got the feeling that he was waiting to hear that sound again.
    If he’d found Pepper, everyone within a mile would’ve known it. That child can scream like no mere mortal I’ve ever met. I tell her that she must be part banshee, and I’m only half teasing.
    Wherever she was stashed, her presence had gone undetected.
    Mine, on the other hand, might have been blown.
    I waited for him to make the next move. He didn’t. He was patient, the son of a bitch. I had to give him credit.
    All right. That was fine. I had worn my comfy boots—chosen partly because they look good with everything, and partly because they have soft leather soles that don’t make a peep when I walk in them. Yes, I am
always
prepared for action. Trust me when I say it
seriously
beats the alternative.
    My initial guess had been that this was another professional creeping in on my turf—trying to steal my rightfully ill-gotten gains. But a second possibility dawned on me. Could it be another vampire?
    What were the odds? Prior to Ian Stott, I hadn’t seen or spoken with another one of my kind in … I had to think about it … the better part of five years. And then two in one night? Surely not.
    But I didn’t believe he was holding still up there. I didn’t believe he was that patient, or that stupid. It’s one thing to hold your ground and wait out a threat—but this guy was out in the open on the floor above me. From his last foothold I’d guessed his location, and there was no way he was just camping there, waiting for me to come smack him around.
    That’s what I told myself. My ears argued. They couldn’t hear a thing. Not a scraping boot or an accidentally brushed box. Nothing.
    I wasn’t armed with much.
    When I left the condo, I’d been heading out to meet a potential client in a public place; there was no sense in dragging a big blade or a big gun along. And it’s not like I live in fear of being mugged or anything.
    However, I
do
live in semi-nervousness (if not fear) of having my storage facility breached, so there was a stash of weaponry on the premises. I don’t leave the stuff out in the open—not least of all because I don’t want Pepper