Read Online Annie of the Undead by Varian Wolf - Free Book Online

corpse after my little night of
horrors and in no condition to enjoy an invigorating homicidal
romp. My list of ailments was long, with pure exhaustion at the
very top. I needed sleep, and soon.
    “I must rest with the dawn,” he concurred. “Let
us go to my car.”
    He came toward me with the apparent intention of
offering me an arm, but I jabbed him with the pool skimmer.
    “Back off, Don Juan. I’m no wilting flower,” I
warned. “I’ll go on my own steam.”
    “Walking was not what I had in mind.”
    “You got a car around here?”
    “Around, yes. A short distance for me, but for a
human not so short. My transportation is parked thirteen miles from
here.”
    Thirteen miles? I looked around. In
this? I looked down at my foot. With this?
    “Let me suggest,” he said carefully, “that you
consider accepting one of the perks of intimate association with my
kind. Let me suggest that you allow me to carry you.”
    I just stared at him.
    “It will be like nothing else you have ever
experienced. Mortals cannot move as I move.”
    “So it’s…athletic?”
    “Very.”
    “It’s not like being escorted through the
park?”
    “Not at all.”
    “So no fair damsel in distress BS.”
    “None whatsoever.”
    I was too tired to argue anymore.
    “Fine.”
    The vampire reached for the pool skimmer. I gave
it up. He slowly gathered me into his arms.
    “Hold tight to that gun.”
    He jumped.
    If none of the other insane shit he had done had
impressed me, this demonstration did. We rose with such speed that
I felt as though I was strapped to a missile that had just been
launched. Yeehah. My initial impression was that I was going to
fall out of his grasp to my death, but within seconds –seconds that
were ample time for Miguel to make several leaps and landings in
succession, I had no room left in my brain to doubt the surety of
his grip upon me. His arms were like iron, and I was but a
leaf.
    He leaped with the grace of a puma, the silence
of a soaring hawk, the speed of, well, a vampire. We passed over
the snow and streets of Detroit like Santa’s reindeer. One moment
we were poised at the edge of a rooftop, his toes barely, but so
adeptly, clinging to the precipice, the next we were flying twenty
feet through the breath-stealing night air and alighting on another
building, a privacy fence, a power pole, with no concern for ice or
snow. His muscles must have been trained so perfectly, he could
organize their functioning into the perfect combination needed to
land on any given surface, to skirt along any narrow width.
    He was showing off.
    I had to admit, the vampire was magnificent. He
did it all in next to silence. The only sounds I could hear were
the rushing of the air through my ears and the whipping of the
fabric of my tattered clothes. Miguel’s garments, I noticed, made
no sound as they moved. They were apparently chosen well for his
eternal occupation. Not a single soul noticed our passage, not even
the trusty Pit Bulls of inner city fame, ever alert for something
to bark at or, better, tear into. The journey was a far cry from my
crazy flight two hours before. The night was ours alone.
    Okay, so even Angry Annie Eastwood wasn’t
entirely immune to the allure of the vampire. The freedom I felt
was that which I had always wanted, the speed of a sports car in
your muscles, the strength of a grizzly in your bones. I wanted to
whoop with enthusiasm. It was a little bit like those last moments
of a great fight, when you’ve got the other bitch just about
shit-canned, and you know you’re invincible. That was as close a
thing as I had ever experienced, at least. It was like parkour on
steroids –supernatural steroids.
    That night I looked down upon the sleepy
nighttime world of the mortals, the rooftops blanketed in silver
snow, the darkened yards, some with yellow light spilling forth
from the windows of night owls like butter melting in a black
skillet. So small were they! So unimportant! The whole universe