The Graves of Saints by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online Page A

its growl echoing in Tori’s ears for several seconds. The silence that followed, broken only by the rustle of the breeze in the trees, felt like the world
holding its breath.
    She climbed off the back of the ATV. Ed stayed where he was, staring at the new thing that had sprouted from the soil. He had obviously come across it while traversing the orchard and now,
having seen it once, had no interest in getting near to it again.
    ‘Goddess,’ Tori whispered as she walked toward it, unsure even as she spoke if it was a prayer or a cry for help. The smell of earth and apples filled the air, swirling on the
breeze.
    Her heart thrummed in her chest, a captive hummingbird. Her face felt flushed and her breath came in short, shallow sips as she knelt in the dirt and stared at the new growth, which looked like
no tree or bush she had ever seen. Perhaps fourteen inches high, it had skin like an apple, and thick roots that went deep into the ground, covered in bark. It had the shape – the figure
– of a woman, though it did not move except for the stirring caused by the wind, and though it had no expression, it did indeed have a face.
    Keomany’s face.
    Goddess.
    Tori began to weep. Though she felt a shiver of fear, most of what she felt – what made her hands shake and caused the grin that broke out on her face – was the joy of miracles.
    ‘Ed,’ she said, her voice cracking with emotion. ‘Get a fence up around this right away. Tonight.’ She stood and looked at him. ‘And don’t breathe a
word.’
    Airborne
    The deep, bass chop of the helicopter’s rotors felt like an assault on Charlotte’s ears, a thumping on her chest, as if she sat inside a quickening heart that beat
from without instead of within. Normally she would not have been quite as nervous. A vampire could easily survive a helicopter crash – even an explosion. But she still had traces of the
Medusa toxin in her blood and she didn’t like her chances if the chopper went down.
    Five people shared the rear compartment of the helicopter with her. Three of them were rank-and-file members of Task Force Victor, soldiers-turned-vampire-hunters who clearly had a very dim view
of her. The youngest, a buzzcut Chinese guy named Song, no more than twenty, kept stealing glances at her that seemed to say he thought it was a shame that a cute girl who looked near his own age
was a bloodsucking freak. Song kept getting disgusted scowls from the only other woman on the chopper, a Brazilian named Galleti who had a quartet of scars on the left side of her throat that could
only have been clawmarks. The two of them took orders from Sergeant Omondi, a New Yorker by way of Kenya. He was maybe thirty, six and a half feet tall and built like a tank, though the intellect
sparkling in his eyes belied that great size. Omondi was no brute.
    As much as they intrigued her, these armed soldiers who had dedicated their lives to exterminating her kind, she was far more interested in the other two people riding in the back of the
chopper. The rumpled, goateed Barbieri carried a few too many pounds, especially as he looked to be nearing fifty, but he had kind eyes. He certainly didn’t match any image her mind would
have conjured of a forensics expert specializing in tracking vampires.
    Of all of them, it was Commander Leon Metzger who scared her the most. When she’d been taken into custody in front of the Shadow Registry building, it had been Metzger’s order that
kept her from being burned alive with the assassins Cortez had sent. Charlotte had been bustled indoors and into a room that was the equivalent of an iron box and seated in a steel chair bolted to
the floor, where she had waited alone for hours while someone – she was sure – tried to persuade Leon Metzger to burn her and be done with it.
    Peter Octavian was the only reason they hadn’t killed her on the spot, and the reason that instead of burning her, Metzger had come into the iron box with two cups