Read Online The Awesome by Eva Darrows - Free Book Online Page B

when put somewhere important, like brains or hearts. The vampire’s screams cut short, her mouth falling open as white, foamy spittle pooled at the corners of her lips. Her ravaged body shuddered—even the parts separated from her torso—and then it went still, collapsing with a squish.
    “Get a couple balloons,” Mom said. “Head and neck. I’ll stake the heart for good measure and phone this into the clean-up crew.”
    “Okay.” I did as I was told, trying not to stare too long at any one gob of vampire flesh as I holy watered the corpse. The dead flesh fizzled and smoked, filling the air with a distinctly bacon-y smell. It did nothing for my queasy stomach.
    “ No. Why?” The handler ran his hand over his face. “How... why? She was helpless. You didn’t have to kill her.”
    Mom snorted. “Helpless? My ass. I’m a federally registered hunter, and your charge threatened me and my partner not once, but twice. The moment she came after us a second time, it was over. Don’t like it, talk to the DoPR.”
    “But... “ The handler went to his knees before the biggest pile of fanger goo. “But she was an elder’s first born. This can’t happen.”
    That gave my mother pause, though if you didn’t know her you wouldn’t be able to tell—a slight tension around her eyes, crow’s feet where there normally weren’t any. She collected herself quickly, shrugging her shoulders and heading back to the van. “He can make another.”
    “Not another first born.”
    “Sucks to be him then, don’t it?”

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
    I STRADDLED THE toilet in the bathroom, my sweatshirt cut open from shoulders to waist, my bra hanging off my biceps. Mom didn’t want me lifting my arms because she didn’t want me to unclot, so she dismantled my outfit with a pocket knife and a pair of scissors.
    “Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news.”
    “Bad news first.”
    “You’re the Big V. I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with penis again.” I stared at the wall in front of me, finding Mom’s attempt at humor lacking, all things considered. Pancaking an elder’s first progeny was a punch to the ovaries; there was no way the elder would take it well, and an eye witness meant our involvement couldn’t go ignored. The handler probably painted us as whores of Babylon to a butthurt, powerful superior.
    Not good.
    Mom peeled the sweatshirt away to run a damp cloth over my cut. “The good news is I hit you with holy water and you’re not screaming. It’s not a vamp tag. I’m going to clean you and super-glue you to be sure, but you should be good to go.”
    “Super glue me?”
    “Yeah. I don’t think you need stitches, but we’ll glue you shut in case.” I wouldn’t ask. Mom had been performing first aid on herself since she started hunting with my grandparents twenty years ago. The only time she hadn’t mended her own cuts and bruises was the year she took off to be pregnant with me. If she said I needed to be glued, glued I would be.
    She prodded the tender, broken flesh of my cut, and though I swore I wouldn’t cry, my eyes welled up anyway. It stung. Mom couldn’t see me, but she must have been able to tell I wanted to snivel like an infant because she made conversation to distract me. “If that vampire was an elder’s first child, we might have some complications. The elders tend not to bite any old meat sack. She might have been someone, you know, important.”
    “So we’re moving again,” I said, used to this routine. Any time Mom thought a monster might come after her, we relocated to stay one step ahead.
    “Not necessarily. It’s always a possibility with this business, but the ball’s in the elder’s court now. He might take it out on the handler’s ass for being a moron and letting her go at us a second time. It’s not like we hid that we were hunters.”
    Mom reached for something in the medicine cabinet. I kept my eyes fixed on the wallpaper in front of me, following the