Read Online Tome of Bill (Companion): Shining Fury by Rick Gualtieri - Free Book Online Page B

replied. “None of that powdered shit. Although, it’s getting harder and harder to find. Beginning to feel like this is less Boston and more Soviet Russia.”
    I had to agree, at least on that former note. The hot chocolate really was good. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a social call, and we couldn’t afford the time. “Thank you for taking us in off the street, but we really need to...”
    “Yeah yeah, I heard you,” he replied, sitting in an easy chair. “Just settle down a bit. No good can come of running off half-cocked.”
    We were twenty minutes into Vincent’s advised half hour of radio silence and while I was still antsy, Jacob had done a lot to make us feel at ease.
    According to him, he’d once owned a small farm down in South Carolina, but as he’d gotten older, it had become too much of a chore to run. Last year, at his daughter’s insistence, he’d sold it and come up to Boston to live with her. That had been before things had started to get weird. Since then, they’d been trying to live their lives as best they could, but it was getting harder and harder.
    Though it wasn’t outright said, it seemed that a martial law of sorts had been put in effect. People had gone missing. Others had seemed to change. What had once been a close knit neighborhood was now filled with suspicion and doubt. Though people sometimes still went about their business during the day, there was an undercurrent of wrongness to it all. Come night, however, shades were drawn and people hunkered down with their own.
    The strange behavior of the police only got worse after dark. It seemed the setting of the sun triggered an onset of violence. Gunshots in the night became common as well as other sounds, things that couldn’t be easily explained. When that occurred, people would retreat behind locked doors and wait, hoping it passed them by until the sun rose again.
    I considered this. Though we hadn’t gotten close enough to know for certain, it was quite possible those police had actually been vampires. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Many preferred to use their superior physical abilities, but they weren’t averse to using modern firepower if the need called for it. Remington had been all the proof of that I needed.
    “Where’s your daughter now?” Kelly asked, eyeing the many photographs on the mantle of the cozy living room, visible in the light of an old oil lamp that provided the only illumination. “Is she here?”
    “Not right now. She’s fetching help,” Jacob said. “She’ll be back soon.”
    “Help?” I asked. A quick glance passed between me, Kelly, and Vincent. It didn’t go unnoticed.
    “Relax,” Jacob replied. “There’s still good people in this town even if everything is going to Hell. My girl, Cynthia, she got sick a month back. Was real bad and I couldn’t get enough meds from the pharmacy. Bastards were charging ten times the price they should have. But as I said, there’s good people here ... friends. They helped us. Got my Cindy back on her feet. That’s how things go when you can’t rely on the government or police no more. Even though things are bad, people are still good. They help us. We help them. And I think they’ll help you. Worst case, they know this town better than you. Can get you out of this neighborhood and back to your friends without being seen.”
    That sounded good to me. Aside from some assurances that a few vampire covens in the area still opposed Vehron’s reign – assurances that neither myself nor the Templar were overly inclined to rely on – we’d gotten very little in the way of inside information. According to Bill and his friends, Boston was under tight lockdown. Bernadette had come to a similar conclusion. Though the Templar didn’t have a large presence in this city, there had still been a small chapter of brothers. However, they hadn’t been heard from in months.
    If what Jacob was saying was true, there was an underground of