Read Online Innocence and Evil (The Arcadia Falls Chronicles #6) by Jennifer Malone Wright - Free Book Online Page A

nodded, giving the librarian
her leave. “Yeah, thanks.”
    She smiled back. “I’ll be at the desk if you
need me for anything.”
    After she was gone, I stepped up beside
Christina at the bookshelf and caught her gaze, raising my eyebrows
in a silent question.
    “Yup,” she confirmed.
    Even though it was light outside, vampires
could still move about indoors during the day. If that vampy
librarian was awake then most likely more of them were too. “Let’s
look around.”
    Instead of wandering through the many aisles
of books, we took to the perimeter where we would be able to take a
peek into any additional rooms. If the vampires were actually
hiding out in this place, we would find out where.
    We found nothing on the second floor, so we
wandered back downstairs. “You think she will come looking for us?”
I asked.
    “Shhh.” She held her hand up, ordering me to
be quiet. “Probably, if we take too long. But, if you don’t keep
your voice down she will hear us anyway.”
    “All right.” I lowered my voice to a
whisper. “You think she knows who we are, though.”
    Christina shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably,
they can sense us just like we can sense them. Just be ready to
fight.”
    “I always am, baby.”
    We hurried down the staircase, making sure
the librarian wasn’t looking our way when we hit the landing. The
desk and main doors where to the right, so we went left,
disappearing further into the depths of the stacks.
    I glanced at some of the titles as we passed
and saw that all the books in this area were fiction. The
non-fiction must have been the upstairs, since that was where she
took us for the pregnancy book.
    The silence and eerie feel of the place
reminded me of when my mother had taken me to a big museum when I
was young. I remembered my mother and I being the only ones walking
down the halls full of exhibits. Her high heels had clicked on the
shiny floors, echoing loudly with each step. As if to honor the
atmosphere, we didn’t speak. When it was time to pause, she would
simply place her hand on my shoulder and I would stop.
    “Hey, check this out.” Christina halted her
already slow pace.
    I shook off the memory, forcing myself back
into the present. “What?”
    She pointed. I followed the direction she
indicated and saw that there was another staircase, almost hidden
among the shelves that lined the walls. I leaned in and tried to
see the bottom, but the steps took a turn part way down so all I
could see was a wall with a decorative sconce and a bulb that was
supposed to emulate torch light.
    “That looks promising.” I glanced at
Christina and raised my eyebrow.
    She closed her eyes and then opened them
again. “We’re going down there, aren’t we?”
    “We came all the way in here to check the
place out. Of course we are.”
    She flipped her dark hair and then reached
down with both hands, pulling two rather large knives from the
sheathes hidden under her coat. “You better hope that we haven’t
gotten ourselves into something we can’t handle,” she mumbled
before taking the lead and stepping into the stairwell.
    I wanted to come up with some snarky comment
to annoy her, but she was right. We might very well have been
walking straight into a trap if that librarian upstairs knew who we
were. Or, there might just be too many down there for Christina and
I to take on our own.
    I was right too. We had come this far, we
were inside, now we just needed to find out where the lair was and
the best way to infiltrate and we were golden.
    Christina naturally had a light step, she
had been raised to be stealthy. Keeping my boots from pounding on
those stairs was more of a conscious effort than I would have
liked. On the way down, I pulled out my gun so that I’d be ready in
case anything attacked us.
    We made the turn and saw that there was
another turn just like it coming up. Damn, wherever this led, it
was deep beneath the main floor of the library. We were just about
ready to