Blood and Bullets Read Online Free PDF Page A

pictures of the Auschwitz prisoners from World War Two. I had never heard of anorexic vampires, but there was a first time for everything. The most important part of the description was the vampire part. Coupled with the rabid mass of vampires Nyteblade was holding at the end of the alley and all I was worried about was making them dust.
    Shuffling to the right three steps helped me cut the first one from the group. He was short and dark, still wearing a dirty chef’s apron and smock. His face was gaunt, all fangs and hollow eyes. As I drew near, he lunged out to grab me. The stake in my left hand flashed as it crashed into his cheekbone. Black blood flew out of his mouth as his head turned sharply away and splattered down his filthy formerly white smock and apron. Hooking upward with my right hand, I drove the stake under his ribcage and through the rubbery diaphragm.
    I must have hit the heart on the first thrust because his eyes got wide and he froze in mid-attack. The transition to a pile of dust took seconds.
    When staking a vamp by hand, you have to go under the ribs to hit the heart. You cannot just drive the stake through the sternum. Nobody can without a hammer. The sternum is thick, very tough, and made of a flexible, fibrous cartilage. It is like Kevlar over your heart. If the stake you are using is thin enough, you can slip it between the ribs, but then you have to travel through the lungs, and most bloodsuckers will not stand still for that.
    The next vampire scrambled toward me. She was a young one when she was turned and apparently a hippie. She looked about twenty, with long brown hair that hung to her butt. Tiny, round, purple glasses rested on a perky nose above thin, colorless lips. She was even wearing a tie-dye shirt with bell-bottom jeans and no shoes. Her hair was clumped with garbage and stuck to her shirt in several places by some unidentifiable substance. She swiped a thin arm at me that had talons extended. They rasped as they scraped along the leather of my coat. My left arm knocked hers away and my right drove the stake into her side. Wet fluid shot over my hand and the smell in the alley actually got worse. I had hit an intestine in a dead body.
    Gross.
    The shriek that tore from her mouth was shrill and ear piercing. A twist of her body yanked the stake from my hand. Spinning, she launched herself at me like a homicidal rag doll and whirlwinded into me. Even though she was small, her weight knocked me down, driving me across the alley floor. Scrambling like an insect, she skittered on top of me before I could catch my breath.
    I landed on my right side with my arm trapped under me. My left hand still held the stake, but the arm was between me and the vampire. She was trying to get to my throat and open a vein. My arm was the only thing keeping her back. Fangs latched on to my arm through my jacket. She didn’t have a good grip with her mouth, but the puncture wounds her teeth caused burned like acid. If I hadn’t had the leather coat on, her fangs would have scraped on bone.
    The butt of the other stake scraped her eye socket as I jammed it in her face. Shrieks were muffled behind the thin hands covering her eye. It was the opening I needed.
    My hand closed on the stake still jutting from her side. Pushing down to change the angle, I shoved it up and into her body cavity. The wooden stake slid in and up like silk, hitting her heart and exploding her into dust. I closed my eyes and held my breath as it rained down on me.
    Relief flooded in and a shudder ran through my body. Adrenaline painted my nervous system. I got to my feet a little unsteadily, using the alley wall to help me up. Blood was making my arm stick to the inside of the jacket from the bite. It throbbed with every step over to the last vampire on this side.
    This one was a caricature of a vampire. The once-expensive three-piece suit hung on him like a joke because he was so thin he looked like a skeleton. His walk was the