Read Online When Darkness Hungers: A Shadow Keepers Novel (Shadow Keepers 5) by J.K. Beck - Free Book Online Page B

filled with the ghosts of her memories, but once she was settled, she realized it wasn’t as bad as she’d anticipated. There was something healing about being in complete control of a place where she’d once had to tread softly or else risk getting whipped. Or worse.
    Still, she had to admit it was nice that Leena was therenow. Her head was throbbing, and if she’d come back to an empty house she would have just sat on the couch and licked her wounds. Now she could sit on the couch and gripe to her friend.
    “I’m so sorry,” Leena said, dropping into the chair opposite her. “First it takes me forever to figure out a way to pinpoint the sorry SOB, and then it turns out I didn’t even really manage to do that.”
    “Don’t you dare apologize,” Alexis said, realizing she was being a complete shit by complaining. “You’ve been amazing. I know how much I owe you.”
    “Including for that bump on the head,” Leena said with a frown. “I’m the one who sent you to Hollywood Boulevard.”
    “You’re the one who changed my life. Everything I know about this evil we’re fighting—it’s because of you.”
    A smile curled the other woman’s lip. “Just don’t get yourself killed and we’ll call it even.”
    “Deal,” she said, then winced as she adjusted the ice pack.
    Leena winced too, in sympathy. “I should have the strength to look again tomorrow. It’s not soon enough, I know, but …”
    “It’s perfect,” Alexis said firmly. She was lying, of course. She wanted Leena to look now, but that desire came from a selfish place, and she didn’t want her friend exhausted or suffering through more migraines.
    At the same time, she knew that she couldn’t do this alone. They’d become a team, she and the psychic—more accurately a witch, she supposed, but somehow calling her friend a witch just rubbed Alexis the wrong way.
    After Leena had dusted the vampire in New York,Alexis had been more than a little freaked out. Now, of course, it seemed absurd how blown away she’d been by the realization that not only did vampires exist, but Leena’d had one chained up in her basement. Alexis should have seen the signs—hell, the whole task force should have. But that kind of stuff belonged in the world of dreams and nightmares, not in New York or Los Angeles or Anywhere, USA.
    Might not belong, but it was there anyway, and once she got over the shock Alexis had been determined to fight them. Fight them all—but find the one who’d killed Tori.
    She’d told Leena the whole story. About her childhood and her big sister and her emotionally distant parents who, as it turned out, hadn’t been quite so distant with Tori. She’d shared her anger at her parents and her hurt that Tori hadn’t been able to suck it up and stay for her benefit. And her guilt for feeling that way, because goddamn her selfish heart, she didn’t really wish that Tori would have just gritted her teeth while her father grunted and sweated and pushed himself into her. Did she?
    She’d confessed it all, and Leena had said all the right things, and told her that of course Alexis hadn’t really wanted Tori to suffer, but that didn’t mean she didn’t wish she was still there, beside her. Leena’s own mother had been abusive, it turned out, and while she’d gotten the limp fighting vampires, Leena was pretty sure the migraines had started when her mother had beaten her so hard she’d hit her head against the hearth. “I felt different after that,” Leena had said. “And then the headaches started. I didn’t care, though, because my mother died that night. A heart attack, the doctors said, but Ididn’t believe it. She didn’t have a heart. Not a real one, anyway. Sometimes she was the best mother you could want, but it would turn on a dime. She’d sort of fade into herself, and then she’d be someone else entirely. Someone vile and mean, and I hated her.”
    They’d bonded over their past, and now, together in Los