Read Online Any Given Doomsday by Lori Handeland - Free Book Online

removed, that added influx of humanity seems to have allowed us a choice.”
    What he was saying did make a weird kind of sense. Or as much sense as anything else did lately. Except…
    “Why did I see fangs, Jimmy?”
    “There’s vampire in me; I’m not denying it. But those traits are dormant. I don’t have fangs.” He smiled widely; there was no joy in the expression—and no fangs in his mouth. “I don’t drink blood. You saw for yourself that silver didn’t hurt me.”
    “Does it hurt any vampire?”
    “No.”
    I almost laughed. Trust Jimmy to bring up a defense that wasn’t a defense at all. He always pushed every boundary there was, stepped over every line that he saw. That hadn’t changed.
    “You had to have sensed my dormant nature when you touched me; that’s the only thing that makes sense,” he muttered.
    He could be right. What did I know?
    “I worked with Ruthie,” he said softly. “She trusted me. Can’t you?”
    I wasn’t sure. But the reasons I didn’t trust him had little to do with this.
    Jimmy was right. Ruthie had worked with him. She’d given me her gift. She’d told me to help him, and I’d said that I would.
    “We’ll work together to find out who killed Ruthie,” I agreed.
    “And then?”
    “Then we’ll see.”
    “You have the power now, Lizzy. You’re kind of stuck.”
    Kind of fucked was more like it, but I kept that to myself.
    “We’ll work together,” I repeated, “but that’s it.”
    “No problem,” he said, and opened the door to the tack room.
    I scowled at his back. He didn’t have to sound like he could care less; he could whine at least a little. Beg a little more.
    “It’s a bad idea for DKs to be involved with anyone.” He glanced over his shoulder. “My life expectancy is pretty dim.”
    My gaze fell to his steadily healing hand. “But—”
    “I can heal, but I can also die. Wounds inflicted by a Nephilim don’t mend as fast.” He flicked a finger toward his eye. “Remember this?”
    In my hospital room, after I’d checked out for nearly a week, he’d still had a shiner from getting hit at Ruthie’s place.
    A weight seemed to settle on my chest at the idea of Jimmy dying. I didn’t want him touching me, but I didn’t want him dead and incapable of it either.
    I rubbed my forehead. Working with him was going to be such a pain in the ass.
    “Besides healing”—I dropped my arm—”what else makes you special?”
    “Extreme strength and speed. My eyesight is better than most. 1 can see a vampire behind their human disguise.”
    “Do all DKs have special abilities?”
    “Pretty much.”
    “They’re all breeds?”
    He hesitated as if thinking, then nodded.
    I let that sink in. I guess it made sense. You didn’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and you didn’t send just plain folks to fight demons of biblical proportions. Not if you actually wanted to save the world instead of watch it die.
    Laughter tickled the back of my throat. This was all so ridiculous it had to be true.
    “Wait a minute. How am I supposed to know the difference between Nephilim and breeds?” I asked. “Ruthie whispered berserker and she whispered dhampir.”
    “When something’s trying to kill you, it’s always a good idea to kill it back,” he said.
    “I’m serious.”
    “Me, too.”
    “Even if I knew the difference between breeds and Nephilim, according to you, some of your kind fight for the other side.”
    “It’ll take time for you to get used to this. Eventually you’ll learn—from books, from others, from seeing the same types of creatures over and over again—what’s a Nephilim and what’s a breed. But Ruthie always said that she could distinguish good and evil just from the nuances in tone and the volume of the voice in her head.”
    “Swell,” 1 muttered.
    “You’re going to need some training and some practice, but right now we have to meet Springboard.”
    “They’re waiting for you at City High.”
    “You think?”
    I