Read Online Falling from the Light (The Night Runner Series Book 3) by Regan Summers - Free Book Online Page A

concrete was sizzling when we tumbled out of the car, dragging our bags with us.
    “I hope the elevator’s close,” Mickey said as we shoved through the door in a frenzy of crinkling bags.
    “There probably isn’t one since they require electricity. Vampire bellboys can carry anything the guests might bring, anyway.”
    The building was clean and very, very quiet. That’s difference number one between a human place and one occupied by vampires. Their spaces were quiet—thick walls and doors stuffed with insulation and none of the background hum of electronics. Flashbacks of standing in foyers, hallways, and offices, waiting for vampires to sign my clipboard, rocked through me. But I was a guest here, nothing more.
    Yellowish, lacquered wainscoting stretched to the end of the hall. The walls above were covered in fabric rather than wallpaper, light with small red-and-green shapes, like distantly spaced paisleys. Oil lamps hung from dropped hooks at even intervals, and the artificial light would have been pleasant if the building wasn’t pressing down like a bunker. The fact that it felt like we were going to turn the corner and find swinging saloon doors was a little disconcerting, but I guess we were in the West. The olde West.
    Through the thick walls, a tendril of vampire energy reached for me. Being with Malcolm, opening to him, had made me more sensitive to it. But it wasn’t just him. I could feel them all now, their power and their emotions: interest, anticipation, that raw grate of hunger. I’d expected to expand my horizons as I got older, maybe pick up some new hobbies. I hadn’t anticipated finding myself intimately aware of people I’d considered dangerous for most of my life.
    “Why do you keep looking back?” Mickey asked.
    “Wondering if our guy’s coming in.” Mal considered this place safe, but he’d never navigated the halls as a human. I wouldn’t mind backup.
    “You know—” Mickey gasped, and the temperature in the hallway dropped about fifteen degrees. I spun, my hand diving into my bag in search of pepper spray.
    A female vampire stood a few feet from us. She wore a starched white button-down shirt and black pants. Her hair, also black, was wrapped in an intricate knot at her nape, and the power she emitted nearly bowed the walls away from her. Pulse pounding, I maneuvered around Mickey, nudging her back with my elbow.
    The vampiress slipped through the space between us and I sucked in a breath when she lifted a lock of my hair. The wide expanse of her upper lip drew back, revealing a row of even white teeth and two rippled patches of skin over her eyeteeth, like the scar tissue from a burn. I had no idea what it took to permanently scar a vampire. Not anything good.
    “You wear another’s hair.” Jewelry clinked on her wrist, metal rings and stone. Her voice was soothing. Her eyes, black and glittery like a snake caught in bright moonlight, were not.
    “Mickey,” I managed, “go to the room.” Maybe Thurston was there. Maybe Mal and Soraya had returned. Maybe, even in a hotel, this vampiress wouldn’t be able to cross the threshold to get to her. The female’s head tilted to the side. Her eyes fixed on Mickey as the girl scrambled past, snagging the bags off my wrist.
    “She’s not really anyone you need to worry about,” I mumbled. Those dark eyes snapped back on me and I tensed before the trembling started. Most vampires retained habits, motions, from their human lives, or fell back in mixed company. Not this one.
    She stared, motionless. No tells, and I couldn’t catch a distinct sense of her. The lamps around us flickered, the flames guttering before they picked up again. What would she do next? Start chanting and pull my still-beating heart out of my chest? Disappear in a plume of bat wings and smoke? Bite my head off, literally? I wanted someone to round the corner at the end of the hall so badly that the print on the wallpaper started swimming in my