Read Online Vampires: The Recent Undead by Paula Guran - Free Book Online Page A

vamp—they still don’t know that—but because so far as they know, I just did the big disappearing act the night I got turned. Went to a concert and came back home four days later. Trust me, that did not go over well. I was canned for a solid month, which made feeding a real pain—having to sneak out through a window between two a.m., when Dad finally goes to bed, and dawn to find what I can at that time of the night. I never much cared for booze or drugs when I was human and that’s carried over to what I am now. I still hate the taste of it in someone’s blood.
    Yeah, I drink blood. But it’s not as gross as it sounds. And it’s not as messy as it is in some of the movies.
    - 4 -
    The Aberdeen Pavilion was a wonderfully eccentric building in the middle of Lansdowne Park where the Central Canadian Exhibition, the oldest agricultural fair in Canada, was held every year. The pavilion was the largest of the exhibition buildings that dotted the park, an enormous barn-like structure surrounded by parking lots, with an angled roof curved like a half-moon and topped with a cupola. For a city kid like Apples, going inside during the Ex had always been a wonderful experience. The air was redolent of farm smells—cattle, sheep, horses, hogs—and she’d loved to walk along the stalls to look at the livestock, or sit with Cassie on the wooden seats in the huge arena and watch the animals vying for first place ribbons.
    Though she still took Cassie to the midway every August, she hadn’t gone inside the pavilion for a couple of years now.
    As she walked across a parking lot towards the Cattle Castle, Apples wondered if this was part of the freak’s plan, if he knew that this was where she’d gotten turned. It had been right here, between the Cattle Castle and the Coliseum when she’d come to see a Bryan Adams concert a few years ago.
    She didn’t have to close her eyes to be able to visualize the woman, that first sight of her coming out from between the parked cars. Tall and svelte, with a loose walk that lay somewhere between the grace of a panther and a runway model. Golden blond hair fountained over her shoulders and down her back in a spill of ringlets and she was dressed all in black: short velvet skirt, low cut T-shirt and high-heeled ankle boots. Apples remembered two conflicting sensations: that this woman was so unbelievably gorgeous, and that no one else seemed to notice her.
    “Come with me a moment,” the woman said and without a word to her friends, Apples had left them to follow the stranger into a darker part of the parking lot.
    And nothing was the same for Apples, not ever again.
    I no your secret .
    Maybe he did.
    The area around the Cattle Castle appeared to be deserted, though there were a handful of cars in the parking lot. Apples recognized the sedan that had come by her house earlier in the day and walked in its direction. There was no one seated in it, but Apples could smell the driver. She assumed her semi-literate pervert was lying across the seat, waiting until she’d walked by so that he could jump out and take her by surprise.
    That was okay. She had a surprise of her own. But first she wanted to know how he’d gotten her name and address. With her luck, somebody had put up a directory of known vamps website on the Internet and every would-be Van Helsing and Buffy was looking for her now.
    She walked by the car and pretended to be shocked when he opened the door and confronted her, a gun in hand.
    I hope you’ve got wooden bullets for that thing, she wanted to tell him, but she kept silent.
    “Get in the car,” he told her, waving the gun. “Not there,” he added as she started to walk around to the passenger’s side. “Behind the wheel. You can drive, right?”
    To some remote location, Apples supposed. Where he’d have his nasty way with her. Or kill her. Probably, he planned to do both, hopefully in that order. Though technically, any physical relationship with her had to be