Nightshades by Melissa F. Olson Read Free Book Online

was nothing of interest. Lindy found herself glancing at her bag, where she kept her personal laptop.
    It’s stupid to keep fucking around on the Darknet,
she reminded herself.
You don’t know who could be watching.
    Resolutely, she went back to her desktop, opened a browser window, and pulled up newspapers in several languages. You were never done learning a language, because they changed and evolved every day they were used. That was why Lindy loved them. She started with the Russian newspaper first, because that was the most recent of her languages and the one she most worried about keeping up with. Then she read through the Hong Kong paper, the Tokyo paper, and three separate papers from Europe before finally switching over to
The Washington Post.
The front-page headline screamed out at her.
SHADES MURDER SEVEN MORE IN CHICAGOLAND CORNFIELD
    “Fuck!” Lindy said out loud. She spoke seven languages, but this was still the most diverse curse word, and therefore her favorite. She skimmed through the story, faster than any human speed reader. The dead agents. The single survivor, who had been nearly disemboweled by some kind of short blade. Giselle.
    “Hector,” she muttered under her breath. “What the fuck are you doing?”
    Telling herself it was now necessary, she pulled out her personal computer and quickly flipped it open, Lindy had once drunk a world-class hacker, who’d set her up with an untraceable IP address and a little scrambler that supposedly kept her from being hacked. She remembered to turn it on despite her agitation. Her company claimed that they didn’t monitor their employees’ computer usage, that they trusted their own people. This, and the flexibility of their working hours, was one of the reasons Lindy had taken the position at this particular firm, instead of any of the other ones that had tried to throw money at her. Despite their promises, though, Lindy would much rather take precautions than chances.
    She made her way into the Darknet and began going through the private message boards. There was no way to know how many shades there were in the world, or what percentage of them had access to the Darknet sites, but it was still the best way she knew of to gauge their opinions and moods as a group. Most of the shades—including a few she had once known personally—had posted in the last twenty-four hours to express benign concern about the murders. Nobody was reckless enough to openly speak against Hector, but they were confused: Hector himself was the one who’d adopted the stay-under-the-radar plan, figuring that if the new BPI couldn’t find a single other vampire after the famous “Subject A,” they would eventually decide to cut bait and go back to the way things were.
    That strategy was meant to confuse the human authorities, and it was a decent plan, Lindy thought, even if it meant cutting loose that little worm, Ambrose. If the government actually got around to declaring him inhuman and torturing him, Hector would have to step in, but until then, silence was the best policy.
    It was, in fact, Hector’s own policy. But now he had committed a whole series of splashy murders, and there were also a handful of shades on the message boards who were
thrilled
by the news that Hector had gone rogue. They saw the overt murders as a call to arms. Lindy knew this crowd: the ones who believed that shades were the dominant species, more evolved in every way, that they should get to do anything they wanted, blah blah blah. Lindy couldn’t argue with the fact that her people were
physically
superior to humans, but they were predators. They needed a large number of prey in order to survive, and as a long-term plan, trying to “overthrow” humanity was about as silly as it got.
    Meanwhile, she noted, there was no sign of Hector himself on the message boards. He was probably staying silent on purpose, to keep their people even more off balance and afraid. He was that kind of leader.
    Lindy