30 Days of Night: Light of Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes!” Lothar declared at one point. “When I looked down from roof of his car, so wide were they!” He had lived in the United States for most of the last century, but he still spoke the accented, stilted English of the Balkan peasant he had once been. But he was lithe, light on his feet, and could jump like he had springs for legs.
    “I wasn’t positive,” Shiloh said, “because his mouth was full of blood bubbling up from his throat, but I could have sworn he called us hippies. Who talks about hippies anymore?”
    Rocco could understand his error. Shiloh had been a
real
hippie, turned in 1969, and she still tended to wear patched jeans and loose cotton tops and beads. Sometimes she even stuck flowers in her hair, but theyalways wilted quickly, so she didn’t try that often these days. She was a chunky girl with long wavy blond hair and football-shaped breasts that she still liked showing off, and she had often told Rocco that those free-love days of the late 1960s had been her favorite times, alive or undead, despite the fact that one of the many men who had tasted her pleasures had also killed her and turned her.
    “He deserved what he got,” Rocco said. He unlocked the passageway that led from the subway tunnel up into their den on the Lower East Side and started up a narrow, winding staircase. “He was an idiot, and the world is better off without him. The good news is that once he and a few more like him die, no one will be able to escape the conclusion we want them to reach. We’re undead … underfed … and we
love
the red!”
    Men were nothing but dogs.
    Marina Tanaka-Dunn took pride in her appearance, but she made the effort only for her own satisfaction. She believed that most women could have virtually any man they wanted—they didn’t have to be stunning, just readily available. Men might talk as if they had standards, but how many of them would turn down a woman who was standing in front of them?
    Marina
was
stunning, though: coltish and limber, with perfect features framed by a sleek black mane. Her father had been a Japanese scientist, one of that rare breed of playboy scientists with movie-star looksand the social skills to go with them—and criminal connections that helped finance his research but demanded much in return. Her mother had been a beautiful American journalist who went to Japan to interview him and had never left his side. Marina was a living testament to the power of good genes mixed with a troubled upbringing.
    For years she had thought that nothing could be as fun as sex, particularly those variations typically frowned upon by polite society. That was before she learned to kill. Since then—especially since she began killing bloodsuckers—sex had taken a backseat to dealing in death. Her brains, combined with her bloodthirstiness, had carried her to the top ranks of Operation Red-Blooded, where her title, since Dan Bradstreet had taken up permanent residence in a hospital bed, had been Director of Field Operations.
    Her new assignment, she’d been troubled to learn, entailed plenty of meetings and inter-office politics. She was based in Washington, DC, which she had always hated because the gray- and black-suited men who worked its corridors kept their desires so buttoned up, rather than out in the open where she preferred it. But she was told that she would have leeway to pick her own strike teams, and because she intended to spend as much time as possible in the field, she made sure that she could read the emotional and sexual nature of each of the people on the team she would work with most often.
    She wound up choosing eight agents for her team, seven men and one other woman. Of the men, three wanted to fuck her, and one wanted the team’s other woman (blond and corn-fed, she had the kind of body that would look lush until it went to fat in a few years). One was gay and out: Dan Bradstreet, disturbed or threatened by the man’s homosexuality, had never utilized him