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

classified as necrophilia. Euew.
    This whole business was so clichéd that she could only sigh. Still, a remote location would work for her, too.
    She came back around to the driver’s side and got in.
    “Where to, gun boy?” she asked.
    His face reddened and she watched the veins lift on his brow.
    “This isn’t some joke,” he told her, waving the barrel of the gun in her face. “You’re in way over your head now, kid.”
    Apples looked at him for a long beat.
    “You still haven’t said where to.”
    He frowned. “Just drive. I’ll tell you where.”
    “Okay. You’re the boss.”
    She started the car and put it in drive.
    “Turn right after the gate,” he told her.
    She did as he told her, pulling out of the parking lot and turning right onto the Queen Elizabeth Driveway.
    “So what’s your deal?” she asked as they went under the Lansdowne Bridge at Bank Street and continued west.
    “Shut up.”
    “Why? Are you going to shoot me? I’m driving the car, moron.”
    “Just shut up.”
    “Where’d you get my name and address?”
    “I told you, just—”
    “Shut up. Yeah, yeah. Except I’m not going to. So why don’t you stop sounding like a skipping CD and tell me what your problem is?”
    “You’re the problem,” he said. “End of story.”
    “Maybe. Except where does it begin?”
    They’d driven under the bridge at Bronson now and the Rideau Canal on their right became Dows Lake. She noticed that they’d started draining the water in the canal in preparation for winter.
    “Take a right at the lights,” he said, “and then a left on Carling.”
    “Not unless you start talking, I won’t.”
    “I’ve got two words for you: Randall Gage .”
    “Those aren’t words, they’re a name. And they don’t mean anything to me.”
    “You killed him.”
    Apples made the right onto Preston Street and stopped at the red light waiting for them at Carling Avenue. She turned to look at her captor.
    “I’m not saying I did,” she told him, “but how would you know anyway?”
    She was always careful. There were never any witnesses.
    “He told me you would.”
    “It’s still not ringing any bells,” she said.
    The light went to green and she made the left turn onto Carling. She could smell the first telltale hint of nervousness coming from her captor, could almost read his mind:
    Why’s she so calm? Why isn’t she scared?
    Because I’m already dead, moron.
    “Well?” Apples asked.
    “Randall was about five-eight, a hundred-and-sixty pounds. Blond, good looking guy. He used to come into the coffee shop where you work.”
    A face rose up in Apples’s mind, sharp and sudden. She remembered Randall Gage now, remembered him all too well, though she hadn’t known his name. After the first time he’d seen her at the Second Cup where she worked, he seemed to come in every time she had a shift. “A. Smith,” he’d always read from her name tag, fishing for the first name, which she never gave him. Then he’d made the mistake of grabbing her after a late shift and forcing her into the back of his van. He’d bragged to her about other girls he’d snatched, how the last one hadn’t survived, so if she wanted to live, she’d better just lie back and enjoy it, but no problem there, sweetcakes, because this he guaranteed, she was going to enjoy it.
    Rather than find out, she’d drained him.
    And then not been able to get back to where she’d stashed his body when his three days were up and he rose from the dead. She’d had to track him for most of the night before she finally found him trying to hide from the dawn in somebody’s garden shed, the idiot. Like the sun was going to burn him.
    “You still haven’t explained how you got my address,” she said.
    “Legwork,” her captor said.
    “Or what you plan to do to me.”
    “Same as you did to Randall. Take the Queensway on-ramp,” he added as they passed Kirkwood Avenue.
    Apples felt like driving the car into the nearest lamp