Read Online Edie Spence (Book 5): Bloodshifted by Cassie Alexander - Free Book Online Page B

attention—he’s only barely alive—”
    “I know. Let’s get to the car,” he said, and started going back the way we’d come.
    *   *   *
    Tunnels intersected, forming a map in my mind. I definitely knew how to get up to the club now—and how to get out to the garage. Jackson flipped open a metal box on one wall, revealing a wall of key hooks like what you’d find at a valet station. It was open—of course it was. The only person here who wanted to leave was me.
    We walked down a row of cars until we reached a Honda Civic. “I don’t get to drive the fancy ones. Wouldn’t want to, either, with him on board.” He clicked the doors open and settled the boy into the back. I crawled in through the opposite door to keep an eye on him. Jackson gave me a look, but closed the door and settled into the driver’s seat.
    *   *   *
    “So it’s like this all the time?” I asked, lips pursed into a frown.
    “Yeah. Rex—the other male vampire—picks out a few candidates and dopes them up for himself and the others. GHB, MDMA, coke, whatever suits their moods. Do they want an easy meal? To fuck or to fight? Even without the drugs, they’ve got their own powers, the mind-control thing they can all do, and I don’t have you tell you that they’re strong.”
    I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to give him an out, for making something so awful sound so commonplace.
    “Sorry if I sound clinical,” Jackson said, after a long silence, looking back in the rearview mirror at both of us. “I realize this is your first time with it—but this sort of shit is my every night. Most times their victims are convinced, the way vampires are good at convincing people, that they were lucky to be chosen and that they had an amazing time. They got picked to go to Heaven and drank top-shelf drinks and danced with beautiful girls, and they got a little overdone. Sometimes there’s sex, even willingly, and sometimes there’s not. And sometimes I get to put on a plastic apron and cut corpses up with chain saws and put body parts into buckets of lye.”
    “So where are we going now?” If he said we were going to a chain-saw-and-lye-atorium, I would have to jump him.
    But then what? Wreck the car and fight out by the roadside? If it were only me I could risk that—I wouldn’t think twice. But not with you here, baby. I looked down at the slender cool wrist in my hand.
    This boy beside me had been someone’s baby once, too.
    “Relax. We’re getting him somewhere safe. And then we’ll call him in. Between the drugs and the narcotics in vampire saliva, he won’t remember what happened to him enough to explain it to the police.” He took a right-hand turn. “You don’t know how lonely this town is, Edie. And Rex has a way of picking out people who just got here—with no connections, no friends, no past.”
    “And sometimes no future,” I said.
    “I don’t kill them, I just dispose of the bodies.”
    “And that makes it better somehow?”
    He took his eyes off the road to look at the rearview mirror again. “What do you think you are now? What do you think you’ll grow up to be?”
    My lips thinned into a line. I hadn’t gotten a choice. Natasha’s dad had taken that away.
    *   *   *
    Jackson pulled over to a desolate side road in a bad neighborhood and put the car into PARK. I opened up the backseat door and got out, and he took the man out, laying him carefully on the side of the road. He flipped back a corner of the man’s shirt. “See? One bite’s self-sealing. There’s no reason for anyone to find it. And they’ll test what little blood he has left and find out that he went out and got drugged, only he won’t remember where he was going.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. I listened to him report hearing a gunshot and seeing someone fall by the side of the road, sounding like a gruffly concerned bystander too nervous to get out and check on his own, and I waited until