Read Online Raven Walks by Ginger Voight - Free Book Online Page B

now, he wouldn’t.
And that, really, was the scariest revelation of all. Abigail had a
long history of taking men that wouldn’t hurt her and turning them
into men who did. She had created monsters before.
    The real question now was could she trust
herself not to do it again?
    To put her mind at ease he hadn’t made
another advance on her. Instead he lulled her to sleep with his
words and his thoughts. Finally her emerald eyes closed and the
tension drained from her face.
    He wanted to reach out and touch her, but had
resisted.
    He didn’t know why he resisted. He just knew
it would be better if he did.
    He sat in the chair beside the door, keeping
watch. If her attacker returned to find her, Raven would be
prepared.
    He rested his head against the wall. Who had
attacked Abigail? That was the real question. There was no mystery
as to why. Vampires were predators in the truest sense of the word.
They were the top of the food chain. Chasing down a scared human in
an alley wasn’t unlike a cheetah stalking a gazelle. It was just
the natural order of things, in any way the vampire life could be
natural.
    But modern vampires tended to feast upon the
blood of the willing. There were covens such as this one where they
found shelter, havens for those who wished to be fed upon matched
only by those who wanted to feed. It was a time in history Raven
was glad to he had survived long enough to see.
    He remembered the not so distant past when
vampires roamed as serial killers of the worst sort: with ravenous
appetites that were never sated, no matter how many lives were
extinguished in their wake. There was no sex back then. The act of
feeding was the act of sex. Sharp, lengthened fangs would penetrate
soft, virgin skin; bodily fluids were exchanged in an orgasmic
flurry of blood and death.
    Now sex rode shotgun to that appetite, and
the need to suck a victim dry had abated over the last century. He
liked to think he himself was a big reason for that change. He was
the one who resisted the label “murderer,” and instead used his
heart-stopping charisma to satisfy a hunger of a different
kind.
    But the Creature tonight had been angry, not
lustful. His, or her, intent had been to destroy rather than just
consume. Such motives seemed foreign to Raven, and quite frankly
scared him.
    He could only imagine the terror a vulnerable
human like Abi would experience, face to face with someone who was
determined to do her that much harm. Had Raven not come along…
    He shuddered. He didn’t want to think about
it.
    A knock interrupted his reverie. He quickly
answered so that Abi would not rouse from her peaceful slumber. The
door opened to a tall man whose skin was the shade of mocha and
whose eyes were the color of amber. It was Sebastian Crane.
    Sebastian looked beyond him to where Abi lay.
“How is she?” he asked in a low voice.
    Raven inched out of the door and into the
hallway. “She is resting.” He didn’t need to ask how Sebastian
would know about the Creature in the alley. Sebastian was the most
powerful psychic vampire he knew, having wandered this Earth for
nearly four hundred years. He’d been sent to the Americas courtesy
of a slave ship, where he proceeded to fight his own civil war
throughout the 1800s with the evilest, meanest slave owners across
the South. He willed them to come to him, to buy him, to try and
torture him – and then punish them with all the power and menace of
a vampire’s wrath.
    He knew what evil lay inside the hearts of
monsters, both human and immortal.
    It frightened Raven immediately that
Sebastian looked as troubled as he felt. He placed a hand on
Raven’s shoulder. “Which is more than I could say for you, my
friend.”
    Raven rubbed his eyes. It was true, between
all the events of the last few days Raven felt as though he hadn’t
slept in about a hundred years. He was weary with worry. “It’s been
a rough couple of days,” he stated unnecessarily as they began to
pace the hall