Moon Shadow (Vampire for Hire Book 11) by J.R. Rain Read Free Book Online Page B

very old and powerful vampire. The attack changed me forever, Jacky. In effect, it killed me, but I did not die. And now, something very dark and sinister lives within me, waiting to emerge. But I fight it every day. Every day, every hour, every minute is a fucking fight. I may not be a professional boxer, Jacky, but I am in the fight of my life. And it never ends, and it will never end.”
    Jacky’s lower jaw twitched, moving and jerking and spasming, but no words came out. His bright-ish blue aura had turned a tumultuous green, swirling and streaming and billowing. This was a lot to absorb, especially for a guy whose own mental faculties may or may not be one hundred percent. But Jacky was street-smart, worldly tough, a fighter in every sense of the word. Not a lot was going to shake him, which was what I was counting on. He had seen the evidence. He had seen my strength in action. He’d now seen the wound in my hand heal before his eyes. Now, it was just a matter of allowing the information to sink in, for understanding to dawn on him.
    He wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t want to influence him or prod him. He needed to get there on his own terms.
    Outside, through Jacky’s closed office door, I could hear grunting and some hee-yawing . Jacky also ran a kickboxing studio. Jacky was a businessman, too, although I doubted he would go so far as to provide spin classes. I closed my eyes and saw light just behind my pupils, swirling and morphing and forming and reforming. Even with my eyes closed, I am never truly in darkness.
    We are the darkness, Sam... came a distant, hissing voice in the deepest recesses of my mind.
    “And your son?” asked Jacky.
    I opened my eyes and the swirling stopped and the old boxer came instantly, sharply into view. 20/20 vision for the rest of my life. Not a bad deal. Jacky had wiped his brow, and the turmoil in his energy field had steadied, although the occasional green spark blasted through it.
    “My son is a lot like me,” I said.
    “You did say ‘vampire,’ right, Sam?”
    “I did, Jacky.”
    “We know of vampires where I’m from.”
    I nodded, waiting, suddenly tired. It was still early afternoon. The sun was still out. In the gym behind me, my son was sparring with one of Jacky’s top young recruits. My daughter, now a freshman in high school, opted to walk home with her friends these days. I had asked who her friends were, but she wouldn’t tell me. Bad move. But I had my ways.
    “We had stories from the town I grew up in. Rumors of a young man who may or may not have been a vampire. Some sheep had ended up dead. One person had gone missing. Months later, the young man went missing, too. Some claimed he was a vampire. I didn’t know. I was only a kid. I didn’t get out much. No TV, only newspapers, books and magazines.”
    I nodded, listening. I had no doubt that vampires have been among us for centuries. At least for as long as the great purging, or whatever the hell Archibald Maximus, aka The Librarian, called it. Back when a sect of highly advanced dark masters had been banished from the Earth.
    How the hell did they get banished? And who had banished them?
    The answer, I suspected, was an order of highly advanced alchemists, of which I was an extension. The Librarian was such an alchemist, too. Very powerful, very adept, and the son of Elizabeth. Yes, the same Elizabeth who currently paced like a hungry tiger within the cage of my mind.
    There had been, I suspect, a great war of some sort five hundred years ago, a war of good and evil, a war that had set the stage for today’s currently supernatural climate. A war that, I suspected, wasn’t quite over. And somehow, I’d found myself in the middle of it, with a bloodline that went all the way back to the greatest Alchemist of all time—and now, his greatest enemy was currently residing within me.
    A tangled web we weave, I thought.
    Except, of course, all I had done was gone for my nightly jog. I had been unaware