Read Online No Man's Land by Debra Dunbar - Free Book Online Page B

butcher shops used, but instead they were in heavy–duty zip–lock bags. Pulling out the bag with the liver, she examined it in surprise. Usually meat packages only held the residual blood from the raw meat, but this liver was literally swimming in about a pint of blood. The heart was too. It was as if Jaq had added a large quantity of blood to the meat.
    “Do you want some of this too?” She asked, pouring the blood into a large glass. It came right to the rim.
    Jaq pulled two more glasses from the cabinet for the wine. “Nah. You drink it. I wasn’t sure you vampires ate solid food at all when I first found you.”
    Kelly took a huge swig of the blood and hid a grimace. Cold cow blood. Ugh. At least it was reasonably fresh, though. “We do. It just doesn’t metabolize if we don’t have blood.” Everything would eventually shut down. Her body was probably already beginning to devour itself, and this cow blood would only delay the inevitable.
    The other woman nodded, seemingly unbothered by Kelly’s beverage. “I don’t really know that much about you all. Hard to tell what’s myth and what’s real.”
    Kelly watched Jaq pour the wine and dug a fry pan out of the bottom of the stove. She was tired of eating raw meat, and she assumed the other woman would want it cooked. It had been over a century since she’d actually prepared her own meal, but frying up a piece of liver couldn’t be all that hard.
    “There’s a grain of truth in most of the myths. Don’t bother with the garlic, though. That’s complete bullshit.”
    Jaq shot her a quick grin. “Werewolves don’t need the full moon to change form.”
    “And I still wear my cross pendant,” Kelly continued. Well, she would have still worn it if it hadn’t been silver. The very thought made her cringe.
    “Silver bullets,” the tall woman added as if she had read Kelly’s mind. “Those things burn like the fires of Hades. Grabbed a candlestick once when I was a kid and nearly wound up in the hospital. Hives everywhere, blisters all over my hands. Took me forever to heal. Me! It was bizarre.”
    It was how the other woman smelled that was most bizarre. “Are you really a werewolf too, then? You don’t smell anything like the other guy — the one down at the bar.”
    Jaq turned to jam the cork back into the wine bottle. “Yes, I’m a werewolf. We don’t all smell the same.”
    Kelly got the odd feeling the woman was lying, although she had no experience with werewolves. Perhaps they did all smell different.
    “So what happened that you got turned into a vampire?” the werewolf continued. “Accosted in a dark alley one night?”
    More stereotypes. “Humans accosted in a dark alley find themselves dead, not turned. I chose this. We’re Candidates for a while and if everything works out, we get turned.”
    “Can you guys change your minds?”
    Yes. And wind up dead. Same with those who didn’t “work out”. It was another thing the vampires never told anyone, not even in the fine print.
    “Of course. Once you’re Chosen, though, once you get the venom, it’s irreversible.”
    Jaq took a big gulp of her wine. “How bad is it? The transformation, I mean?”
    Kelly grimaced, glancing over at Jaq as she gave the frying pan a quick swipe with a towel and put it onto the stovetop. “Bad. It’s like having the flu with non–stop charley horses throughout your body. That’s the first couple of decades. You beg them to kill you, even try to take yourself out. It gets better about fifty years in, although the genetic change isn’t totally complete for a few thousand years.”
    Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the werewolf shift nervously. Kelly took a deep breath and dug through the fridge for butter, trying to appear nonchalant about the whole experience. It still shook her — so recent and raw in her memories. Another thing they didn’t disclose. The pain had gone on forever, more terrible then even her worst imaginings of