A Dark Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

blood for long enough. It was a slow death that took
years, and it was this method, hastened along by his habit, that would be his
eventual death, for he'd never take a drop from his maker again.
    Lady Christiana hadn't saved his life. She'd merely postponed the
inevitable.
    Percy pursed her lips at his remark but said nothing, just watched him
disapprovingly as he pulled on a half-clean shirt and waistcoat for the day.
    "What do you want, Percy?" he demanded, snapping the false Iron
Necklace in place around his throat and then struggling in front of a shattered
mirror to affix a brass-worked, binocular-lensed eyepiece to his head. The
eyepiece was a replica of the Welding eye he'd once had implanted before his
transformation. It distorted the sight out of his right eye, but it was a
necessary disguise, as was the limp he affected.
    He couldn't very well show up at Scotland Yard with a regrown eye and an
even gait, much less no Iron Necklace. To most of the world, such things as
regeneration and vampires were still firmly in the realm of fiction. And the
only people of his generation who went around without Iron Necklaces were the fanatic,
Bedlam-bound Luddites. With their freakish scars and Biblical crusade against
Welding technology of any kind, they’d ripped out their implants the moment the
air was safe enough to breathe without them. The hypocrites.
    He’d almost rather be one of them than what he was.
    An abomination.
    He fumbled with the discreet leather straps near his ear. His hands were
still shaking – they shook all the time now, to be honest, another
symptom of his pending demise. He cursed when the eyepiece slid down his cheek,
refusing to cooperate.
    Percy rolled her eyes in exasperation, took the eyepiece out of his hands
and guided him to a chair, where she proceeded to put him to rights. He was too
tranquilized by the morphine to fight her meddling.
    "You need a shave, and a haircut wouldn't go amiss," she
muttered as she worked.
    He just growled at her, which shut her up, but not for long.
    "Have you ever tried ... well, just taking a sip or two?" she
asked.
    "What?"
    "When you feed. Must you drink a person dry every time? I know you
don't like doing it. Have you tried to take just a little?"
    "Yes," he said shortly, hoping that would be the end of it. He
hated when she asked him questions about his condition .
    "Well, did it work?" she pressed, finishing her work and
stepping away.
    He turned his head and met her eyes. Whatever she saw in his expression
was enough to drain the blood from her face. "No, Percy," he said
softly. "It did not work."
    "Oh," was all she could manage.
    He tried not to care that she looked disappointed by his response. They
weren't friends, and the sooner she gave up on him, the better off they'd both
be. 
    The safer she'd be.
    He had tried to take "just a little", as Percy had so
euphemistically put it. In the early days of his transformation, he'd
experimented on his victims, seeing if it was possible to pull away from the
feeding before it went too far. But it wasn't. Once the frenzy set in, nothing
could stop him.
    But he couldn't not feed. When not even the morphine could curb
his appetite, he had to find a source of blood, or risk losing control
completely, endangering everyone in his path. He'd seen it happen before, when
a rogue vampire like himself, cut off from his maker, had tried to stop feeding
completely. The creature had ended up sucking his way through half a
neighborhood before Elijah had managed to put him down like the rabid animal
he'd become.
    Always wary of sharing such a fate, Elijah had managed to restrict his
hunting to the lowest of the low in an effort to appease his conscience. He
sought out the rapists and murderers he couldn’t catch legitimately in his
profession as an Inspector for Scotland Yard, and those of his kind who haunted
the slums at night – abominations like himself the world wouldn't miss.
And his conscience was eased ... if only a