Bad Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

parse what he’d heard. A figure drifted beyond the beaded curtain; a shadow upon the sea of shadows. Coburn willed his eyes to see better—normally, he could see in darkness like it was a cloudy day, but right now it seemed that either the ketamine or his day-long exposure to the bleary fireball known as the ‘sun’ had done his night-sight no good.
    Again he smelled jasmine and death.
    Stronger, this time.
    The figure emerged from behind the curtain.
    Now he could see her. She was Asian. Clad in a white doctor’s coat. The woman was tall, long limbed, with the elegance of a cellar spider. Flesh pale like a cave cricket and flawless like porcelain—except for the asterisk-shaped crater on her cheek below her left eye. Like someone had taken a chisel to a beautiful doll.
    As she approached with confident step, the jasmine smell washed over him.
    And so did the smell of death.
    She’s one of you , Kayla said.
    “I’ve come to take your blood,” she said.
    “That’s awfully matter-of-fact, Doc.”
    “I see no reason to obfuscate my intentions.” She walked the table at his feet, pacing in slow half-moons. He couldn’t hear shoes. Was she barefoot?
    “You’re pretending to me like me.”
    She frowned. “To be like you how?”
    “You know.”
    “Enlighten me.”
    He opened his mouth, hissed, let his tongue play across the tip of two plainly-displayed fangs. “See what I’m getting at, China Doll?”
    “I’m Korean, and why do you think I’m pretending?”
    “Because I’m the only one out there.”
    “I’m surprised you think so, though I suppose I see why.” She seemed done with the conversation. She waved someone on behind the beaded curtain, and here came itchy, twitchy Fingerman, pushing a metal cart with a wooden case atop it.
    “Don’t you, uhh, need lights?” Fingerman asked.
    The woman barely gave him a look. “I can see in the dark even if you cannot. Run along, little rat.”
    Coburn snorted. “I thought he looked like a rat, too.”
    But she didn’t respond. So much for being friendly.
    “What’s your name?” he asked her.
    “Lydia.”
    “Nice to meet you, Lydia. I’m—”
    “Coburn, yes, I know.” She popped the latch on the case—a little brass hook—and opened it. Looked to be something out of medical antiquity. One giant metal syringe. A number of glass containers, each about the size of a stick of dynamite. Old surgical tubing. A shiny metal piece that looked like the head of an octopus with all of its tentacles chopped off at the half-way mark. She began hooking it all together efficiently, silently.
    “What’s all this nonsense?”
    “It’s a blood transfusion kit. From the era of the Great War. Would’ve preferred something more updated, but the hospitals remain host to a continuing plague of the undead.” She clipped the octopus head to the tubing, then the tubing to the syringe. Then she did the same the other way: connecting one glass jar to the tubing, and back to the octopus head. “Don’t worry. I tested it.”
    “Tested it.”
    “Mm. I have test subjects.”
    “Pigs?”
    “Humans. Children, actually.”
    He laughed, though it was without mirth. “I’m a little confused here, honey. You know that if you were a real bloodsucker you don’t need all this fancy crap, right? You just... open your mouth. Let your fangs come out to play. Sink them into somebody’s skin like pushing your pinky through a stick of warm butter... mmm. Oooooh-ee. Nothing beats it. Not that you’d know, being a—”
    He was about to say pretender, but then Lydia leaned forward, extended her jaw and tilted her head back, and let her fangs show.
    As he did, she poked at each with a tongue.
    “Satisfied?” she asked. “Good.”
    Then she went back to setting up the kit.
    She told you, boy, Kayla said.
    He willed her to shut up.
    “So why the kit if you could just drink me dry here and now?”
    “The blood is not for me.”
    She turned her gaze suddenly to the wall. Then