Kiss the Dead by Laurell K. Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

hand let go of my hair, and he lowered me to the ground. His eyes were open wide; his face tried to frown as if he were struggling to remember something. He looked confused as he set me gently on the floor.
    “Where are we?” he asked.
    I was still holding his arm, though now it was more like holdinghands than holding on. “We’re at the old brewery,” I said, and I didn’t like that he didn’t know where he was; it made me wonder what else he didn’t remember. What had I done to him? I’d fed on anger before and never had anyone forget things.
    He wrapped his big hand around one of my small ones, and blinked at the vampire that was crumpled at his feet. “Why are these people shackled?”
    Jesus, he didn’t remember they were vampires, which meant… “Lieutenant Billings, what’s the last thing you remember?”
    He frowned at me, and the effort of concentration was visible on his face and in the pressure of his hand, tense around mine. His eyes were a little scared, and he just shook his head. Shit.
    Zerbrowski was there with Smith and some uniforms at his back. “Ray,” Zerbrowski said, “we need to go for a walk.”
    “A walk?” Billings made it a question.
    “Yeah,” he said, and touched Billings’s arm where he was still holding my hand.
    Billings just nodded, but he didn’t let go of me.
    Zerbrowski pulled on his arm, just a little, to get him to come along, and Billings moved, but he also kept my hand in his. “Can she come with us?”
    “Not right now,” Zerbrowski said, and he looked at me; the look said, clearly, what had I done to him? I shrugged, and I knew he understood my expression, too. He might even believe that I didn’t know what I’d done to the big lieutenant.
    Billings was reluctant to let go of my hand, and that wasn’t good either. I’d done more than feed on his anger, and way more than I’d intended.
    Zerbrowski managed to get Billings to let go of me and go with him, but he mouthed,
Later
. We’d talk later, I knew we would. Double shit.
    The vampire on the floor said, “Thank you.”
    I looked down at him. His eyes were blue-gray, grayer at the moment. His short blond hair was almost shaggy, as if when it was a little longer it would be wavy, and was struggling to do it even short, so thathis hair looked messy when it wasn’t exactly. The hair seemed too big for his face or his face too thin for the thick hair. His jean jacket and rock band T-shirt untucked over jeans and jogging shoes made him look like a hundred other teenage boys, except for the odd haircut, and the strangely too-thin face. I realized it seemed hungry, as if he hadn’t been eating enough, and then I realized what it was; he hadn’t fed tonight. He was so recently dead that his skin hadn’t lost the human tan he’d died with, so he didn’t look too pale, but I could feel that he hadn’t fed on blood tonight. This one, at least, hadn’t had a piece of the cop we’d found eaten by dozens of fangs.
    I looked past him to the other kneeling vampires and I felt their hunger. None of them had fed tonight. They were all hungry, and they were all very recently dead, their skins still kissed with the sun. Fresh-risen vampires could look like everything from corpse-like to nearly human. The more powerful the vampire that brought you over, the more human you could look, depending on the bloodline that your master descended from. Whoever had brought these guys over was powerful, very powerful. The vampire that had been holding the girl hadn’t been, not even close, and all the vampires were hungry. I could feel it; in fact, I’d been picking it up without realizing it. It had made me feed too strongly on Billings. That shouldn’t have been able to happen unless someone connected to Jean-Claude had made them. Was their master being of Jean-Claude’s bloodline enough, or had one of our people fully blood-oathed to us done this horrible thing? And it was horrible. Six of the surviving vampires were