Chaos Bites Read Online Free PDF Page B

simple.”
    “Never is with you.” She sat in the lawn chair, glanced at Luther. “Go play on the Internet. Computer’s in the living room.”
    “Sweet.” Luther headed for the house.
    “No porn!” Megan called. “I have munchkins.”
    “Yeah, yeah.” The door banged behind him.
    Megan faced me again. “Spill.”
    “It all started with the woman of smoke.”
    Megan paled. She’d met the Naye’i, or woman of smoke, a Navajo evil spirit witch and former leader of the darkness. She was also Sawyer’s mother, which had explained a lot about Sawyer.
    The Naye’i had been jockeying for the position of Antichrist. She would have gotten it, too, if I hadn’t killed her. As it was, she opened the gates of hell and all the fallen angels that had become demons flew free. They’d had a field day repopulating the earth with Nephilim before I’d managed to put them back again. Now we were seriously outnumbered.
    “I thought you killed that bitch,” Megan said.
    “I did. But in order to be strong enough, I had to—” I took a breath. “—become as evil as she was.”
    “Hence the banging of the vampire.”
    “Yes and no,” I repeated. I had slept with a vampire, but that wasn’t how I’d gained an inner demon. “Jimmy is a dhampir.”
    “Part vampire, part human,” Megan said. I couldn’t remember if I’d told her that or if she’d found it out for herself. It didn’t really matter. “Stronger. Faster. Better.”
    Sounded like she was advertising The Six Million Dollar Man .
    “Why couldn’t he kill the Naye’i?” She frowned. “For that matter, why couldn’t you? Considering what you’ve told me about you and Jimmy, you’ve gotta be a dhampir, too, by now.”
    “I am.” Megan knew me so well. “But dhampirs, as powerful as they are, aren’t quite powerful enough. They’re only part demon.”
    “Ticky-tac,” she muttered. “You should have just nuked her.”
    “Wouldn’t have worked. There’s usually one way to kill these things and one way only. For the Naye’i, I had to toss evil to the four winds.”
    “How did you manage that?”
    “Tore her into four pieces and sent them express air”—I flung my arms to the sky, releasing my fingers as if I were throwing something away—“to the farthest corners of the world.”
    Silence settled between us. Finally Megan broke it. “I wish I could have seen that.”
    “No, you don’t.”
    I’d been a vampire at the time—mad with fury, lusting for the kill, bathed in the blood.
    “If you didn’t sleep with a vampire then how did you become one?”
    “Dhampirs can become vampires by sharing blood with other vampires.”
    Jimmy’s daddy had made him a chip off the old block just a few months back.
    “Ew.” Megan wrinkled her nose.
    “Yeah.” I peered up at the blazingly blue sky, remembering when it had been dark, with a full moon shining down, as I became a monster for the sake of the world.
    “Sanducci was okay with this?”
    “Not really. He refused to cooperate. So I . . . seduced him.” He still hadn’t forgiven me. I wasn’t sure he ever would, could, or even should.
    Jimmy had begged me not to become like him. He’d said it was damnation—for both of us. But that was a risk I’d been willing to take.
    “Liz,” Megan said quietly, and I looked up. Her gaze was sympathetic. She’d always been able to hear what I was unable to say.
    I’d been forced to choose between Jimmy’s “soul” and the lives of millions of people, which wasn’t really a choice at all. Jimmy had wound up broken inside. He could barely stand to look at me. I had to live with what I’d done, as well as the knowledge that if given a second chance, I’d do it all over again.
    “You still love him,” she said. It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t bother to answer.
    I hadn’t talked about Jimmy much, but Megan knew the truth. No matter what he did, no matter what I did, no matter how many others we might love, too, I’d feel the