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

the only
way this arrangement will function…Annie. Annie.”
    “Trust, right. All kinds of trust.”
    If he said anything after that, I did not hear
it. The longest day of my life had finally ended.
     
    When I awoke, I almost wished the vampire had
killed me. I had finally caught the motherfucker of a cold that had
been going around the jail for weeks.
    The night of frozen hell probably hadn’t helped
any. All the symptoms that typify the nastiest of colds gripped me
then. I made the mistake of swallowing, and my throat raged like
I’d been eating broken glass. My whole head was so stuffed that you
could have strung it up and used it as a piñata, so stuffed that
there was no room in my head for my eyes, for my brain, or for the
buckets of snot streamed forth, threatening to flood the entire
room. My joints felt disconnected from one another, unlubricated,
bone grinding against bone.
    I had no idea what time it was, or what day, or
for a moment where I was or anything that had happened in recent
hours. My first impression was that I was in jail, but then I felt
the familiar cold shape of the gun beside me, and after that the
cold shape of a hand.
    That got my attention. I opened my eyes, sat up,
and threw back the covers.
    And I found a dead guy.
    It really took me some time to clear my head of
the idea that I was lying next to some corpse, and I was in some
kind of trouble. After all, it made more sense than the truth.
    What led my sluggish mental processes to the
truth was the fact that the dead guy was so dang beautiful. His
skin was vibrant pearl with a gold cast, his lips, eyelids, and
other sensitive areas rosy. He looked very different than I
remembered him from the previous night, when he had seemed almost
the color of the snow falling on his hat. He was lying flat on his
back, eyes closed, one hand on his chest and the other lying, I
realized, where I had been. His hand had been entwined with
mine.
    Okay, now that was a weird thing. I rolled
hastily out of bed and away from hand and dead guy, putting weight
on my bad ankle and being painfully reminded just how bad it was.
Drooling like a drunk dog and with about as much coordination, I
limped to the bathroom, poured myself a cup of water, and tried to
douse the demons in my throat. It didn’t work.
    Ice , I thought. When I was a kid, Chris
used to smash up a bag of ice cubes with a hammer and give them to
me with a spoon when I had a sore throat. Hotels have ice machines.
I had to find one.
    I limped back into the room, seeing the vampire
once more, lying exactly as I had left him, unmoving, dead. I
realized that it was probably not a good thing that I had left him
uncovered. There was light tracing a bright line around the borders
of the curtains. Was it sunlight or artificial? The clock by the
bed said 5:00pm –still daylight outside. Hot hell, I’d slept all
day. Getting an early start on this whole nightlife thing, I
guess.
    I reached for the covers to shield the vampire
once more, but something made me pause. I lingered there, staring
at him, his proud forehead with the depression of a scar stabbing
down toward one eye, his slightly beaked nose, his ebony hair. He
looked like he had been sculpted of stone, not grown of flesh, and
he was beautiful, so beautiful. I touched his cheek –cold, like the
room. I ran my fingers across his forehead, down his nose. I
touched his lips. Slowly, I parted them. His teeth were like
newly-carved ivory. His gums were vivid velvet red.
    I moved away, realizing why he looked so
different. He was full of blood –fresh, red blood. That was why his
frosty complexion of the past night was gone. He had stolen a new
one.
    But he had not taken it from me. He had spared
me, chosen me, and now he was lying still as death. Was he really
helpless? Was he serious when he said he would be so by daylight?
How could he trust me like this? Was he some kind of undead
idiot?
    My head threatened violent retaliation for all
this deep