Stones Unturned by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online Page A

and longed for it every moment with an ex-junkie's ardor.
    But murder and blood wouldn't do anything to assuage her sadness and remorse. Jophiel had stirred it all up in her tonight, and her hatred burned inside her like a tiny sun. Now if it had been him pressed up against the stall door, maybe she would've changed her mind.
    She hadn't had a meal of angel's blood in a very long time.
    But this sadistic fuck wasn't worth her time.
    Eve left College Boy lying in a puddle of his own piss on the floor of the bathroom stall, shaking and crying like a baby, praying for God to forgive him and swearing that he wouldn't hurt anyone ever again.
    Her blouse was open as she made her way out of the club, the buttons still lying on the floor of the men's room. She gave the dancers an occasional shot of the girls as she strolled toward one of the fire exits. Eve could feel their eyes upon her as she passed, but nobody dared approach her. It was almost as if they could sense her difference now, some primordial mechanism in the brain warning them to keep their distance, which was probably a good thing.
    She was no longer in the mood.
    Stepping out of the club into a back alley, she reveled in the touch of the cold night air on her exposed flesh. Eve looked down at her blouse, considering whether or not it was possible to salvage, but noticed some of the delicate material had been torn where the buttons had once been.
    "Shit," she muttered under her breath. She'd really liked this shirt. She was considering going back inside to the men's bathroom to scare the little puke some more, and maybe relieve him of five hundred dollars, when the feeling hit her.
    It was as though a wave of unease had just passed over her. The hairs on the back of her neck rose to attention, and goosebumps rippled her cold, undead skin. An awful, high-pitched sound came to her on the wind, and she turned to stare at a dumpster at the far end of the alley, where a commotion had erupted.
    Rats — what seemed to be hundreds of them — swarmed and hissed and tore at one another. The fighting vermin resembled a single, writhing entity of grayish black fur and multiple, hairless tails. They were all screeching as one, tearing and biting at each other, a puddle of expanding red collecting beneath the undulating mass they had become.
    "What's this all about?" she whispered to the night, walking from the alley out onto Lansdowne Street. Eve sniffed at the air, searching for the scent of whatever it was that had just passed by. She glanced back down the alley to see that the ground was covered in blood and pieces of dead rat. The swarming had ceased, the survivors scuttling into the shadows.
    A hint of something nasty lingered in the air, but before she had a chance to try to identify it, the feeling and the scent were gone.
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
    Clay Smith had been to an eternity of funerals, so many that they had long since lost the ability to touch his heart or bring him to introspection. Wakes were something else entirely; they fascinated him. A great deal could be learned about people — both the deceased and their survivors — just by observing the behavior at a wake. Most often, when the deceased had died of something natural, such as that equal opportunity killer, time, or something typically stupid, like smoking, wakes were like cocktail parties held in a library, people laughing and reminiscing, but trying to do so with a certain hush to their voices.
    The wake of a murder victim was different. No one laughed. There was nothing funny about murder.
    Clay stood in the back of the room at Yerardi & Sons where Corey Gillard had been laid out in his casket so that people could say a prayer over his corpse and be quietly grateful that they, themselves, were still alive. As grim as a wake was, for each attendee it was also a quiet celebration of his or her continued existence. Clay could see it in their eyes.
    That was the sort of wisdom imparted by immortality.
    He