Laws of the Blood 2: Partners by Susan Sizemore Read Free Book Online Page A

thing, but a quip seemed the appropriate way to distance herself from the situation.
    She sat up, soaking wet and shivering, pushed hair out of her face, then wiped water out of her eyes. She pulled herself to her feet. Char had to hold onto the fence for a while to get under enough control so that she could make her way up the back stairs and into the building.
    She was so shaken that she barely noticed her surroundings once she entered the third-floor condo. The place smelled of dust and felt unused, and the psychic emptiness was fine with her. What was important was that there were towels and soap in the linen closet and plenty of hot water gushed out of the showerhead when she turned it on. She stripped out of her wet clothes as quickly as she could and stepped into the shower. She was so glad to feel hot water running over her chilledbody that she almost forgot feeling the woman’s death for a few minutes. Almost.
    She had killed mortals, of course, several times and without any qualms. She was no angel; she was a vampire. She had killed a vampire once as well and had taken pleasure in the act, though she’d been quite disturbed about it later. She had the slim consolation of knowing that each death she’d brought about had been deserved. The mortals had preyed on other mortals. She had served all of humanity by ridding the world of them. The vampire’s death had been decreed necessary by the Council, and killing him had completed Char’s transformation into a Nighthawk. The world needed Nighthawks—Enforcers—to keep the strigoi and mortal worlds safe and separate. Each of those deaths had been accompanied by magic. Vampires and Enforcers were made by magic. Spells had to be cast as well as blood exchanged. She preferred to think of the process that was called magic as an advanced method of energy manipulation, but however you defined it, magic was all about power. You had to get energy from somewhere in order to manipulate reality. A human mind gave off a lot of energy, especially when experiencing strong emotions. Terror, and the release of death, were very powerful sources of energy. Char knew this in theory and in practice, and she preferred theory.
    The death she’d felt earlier tonight had not been theoretical, and it had been accompanied by ritual magic.
    “Maybe.” Char shuddered with the memory but held onto a shred of hope that she’d mistaken what she’dsensed. It was possible; she was out of practice and out of touch. The death had been real. The woman who had died had been psychic enough to shout for help. And asking for help at every level with every conscious and unconscious resource at your command was a logical way of reacting at the instant of death.
    “The woman was murdered.” Char shuddered again and shut off the tap at the exact instant that the hot water ran out. That wasn’t any magical talent, she told herself as she grabbed a towel. She’d used this bathroom every day for several years, and old habits were hard to forget.
    “Murdered,” she said again and looked in the mirror.
    She had a reflection, of course. Sometimes she thought it would fade, but that was on the days she was feeling particularly like a nonentity, particularly sorry for herself. It had nothing to do with her being a vampire. A great deal of the bad publicity that stigmatized her kind could be traced to other magic-using entities, but vampire was a catchy, sexy term that people remembered. You could hang just about any evil and ridiculous behavior pattern on vampires. True, there were some entities that couldn’t cross running water, some that reacted badly to all forms of alum. There were all sorts of behaviors, all of them restrictions that came about due to the type of magic that had created the entity. Vampires took the rap for all of them. Fortunately, no one really believed in vampires—strigoi spent a great deal of time and money seeing to it—so it didn’t really matter.
    Magic mattered, though,