Vampires in Devil Town by Wayne Hixon Read Free Book Online

were terrifying. Some of them were merely disgusting. He didn’t know how many of them were true and he didn’t know how many of them were attributable to Ernst and Ilya and, in truth, he didn’t really care. There was a time when he would have cared. There was a time when what he was doing would have appalled him, but that time had passed. It passed the second he had looked out the window and saw Ilya standing curiously beneath an oak tree in his front yard. There had been a light radiating from her eyes. A milky bluish white that reached through the darkness of the night and wrapped itself around his very being. There was magic in those eyes and he would spend the rest of his life searching for that magic, if necessary.
  That was the last night he had spent in his house, the last night he had seen his parents or any of his friends. The last night he had felt anything resembling a childhood.
  Over the past several months, Ernst and Ilya had trained him. Trained him to be like them. And all the while, they had regaled him with tales of power. Power was something he had never had. Power was only something his lawyer father and advertising exec mother wielded over him. Power was something he craved. And now there were these people, strange though they had seemed to him at first, who promised him unlimited power. Freedom from death. Freedom from money. Freedom from society. Freedom was power. And all he had to do was die first.
  This was what his training built toward. Death. Followed by life. It didn’t make any sense but he had seen it work. It wasn’t like a Christian afterlife, something built solely on faith. This other death, this other afterlife, was something he had seen firsthand. It was something he could believe in. He had seen both Ilya and Ernst drink from the jugular of countless people. He had seen those people walk after death. So he believed and belief, like freedom, was also power.
  Like tonight in the graveyard. He knew Charlotte did not understand what they had seen—the shapes in the fog—but he did. They had seen the Devils. These were not the powerful Devils, people like Ilya and Ernst, but they were people who lived a life after death, free to roam the dark countryside. The shapes in the graveyard were what anyone living outside Lynchville would call ghosts. Here, they were not ghosts, they were the Devils, harmless Devils, unwilling to take human life. Just like Ilya and Ernst were not vampires or serial killers. Here, they were also the Devils. Perhaps Zack was beginning to understand why they had wanted to come here. Why they had brought their house here.
  The house was an old Victorian farmhouse. The whole structure sagged into the earth, decomposing into its original elements. Whatever paint covered it at one time was long gone and now the wood was gray and warped and smelled faintly of decay, better years buried deep within its pulp.
  Its porch had completely collapsed on the right side, the porch’s roof threatening to go next. Four large windows lined the second floor of the house. Once upon a time, he supposed, these windows used to be ornate. Now they were without glass, little more than holes in the side of the house. The two windows on the end were larger than the two in the middle and made him think of eyes. Two large windows stood empty on the first floor, a door in the middle. The door used to be fairly elaborate also. Now the carvings had been worn away and the door looked like it could be kicked in easier than it could be opened.
  Drawing closer to the house, he could feel its power, like a vacuum, sucking him in. Carefully treading the warped steps of the porch, he pulled the front door open onto a sparsely furnished living room. The only thing in the room was a Tiffany blue couch pushed back against the far wall. It was an odd, vibrant color, clashing with the decay of the house’s interior.
  Ernst and Ilya sat on the couch, waiting for