city of dragons 02 - fire storm Read Online Free PDF Page A

the small round kitchen table. We probably would have been more comfortable on the couch in the living room or something, but this conversation was too tense for comfortable.
    “Look,” I said, “she couldn’t call everyone. She was hiding from them. She was running from them. That’s not the important thing, anyway. The important thing is that she’s safe.”
    “For now,” said Jensen. “But for all we know, now she’s being stalked by psychotic vampires.”
    “Should we report it to the police?” said Felicity.
    “What are the police going to do against vampires?” I said. I folded my arms over my chest. “I should have burned them all to death.”
    “Well, it was more important for us to get away,” said Felicity. “And you’re not really a killer.”
    “I killed Ace Gonzales,” I said, referring to the head of the vampire gang The Lost Breed.
    “Yeah, but that was self-defense,” she said.
    “This was self-defense too,” I said. “They were threatening us.”
    “Okay,” she said, “but it still doesn’t mean you should just go around killing people.”
    “I don’t know,” said Jensen. “If they were out of the way, I’d feel better about your safety.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “What were you doing down in that parking garage alone, anyway?”
    “Getting in my car to drive to the hotel for work,” she said.
    “Well, you won’t do that anymore,” I said. “I’ll pick you up.”
    “Or I’ll drive you,” said Jensen.
    “What?” said Felicity, looking back and forth between the two of us. “Let’s not get crazy here.”
    “Felicity, you could have been killed today,” I said.
    “We don’t know that they wanted to kill me,” she said. “Maybe they just would have bitten me, taken some blood, and run off.”
    “They would have drained you,” said Jensen. “They were crazed with magic. They were willing to attack you. They wouldn’t have left you alive to tell the tale.”
    “He’s absolutely right,” I said.
    Jensen shot me a look. “Well, I never thought I’d hear those words come out of your mouth.”
    Felicity yanked out a chair and sat down at the table. “I’m not letting you two do this to me. I can’t have one of you babysitting me at every second. I won’t be able to breathe.”
    “It’s better than your being dead,” I said.
    “And letting you die is not on the table,” said Jensen. “If anything happened to you, Felicity, I’d lose my mind.”
    She dragged both of her hands over her face. “Look, to be fair, this danger has already been around for all this time. There have been bad vampires running around in this city—”
    “We’re not backing down,” I said. “Don’t go in the parking garage on your own.”
    “And one of us will be taking you to and from work,” said Jensen.
    Felicity shook her head. “Okay, let’s go out and find those vampires, and then Penny can burn them to a crisp, and then the problem is solved, yeah? Then I get my life back.”
    I shook my head. “No, you’re right. There will always be more. The fact is that it’s dangerous for you to be on your own.”
    “But vampires want your blood and you run around on your own,” she said to me.
    “That’s because I can protect myself,” I said.
    Felicity narrowed her eyes.
    “You’re not going to win this fight,” said Jensen. “Come on, baby, it’s for your own good.”
    * * *
    “I don’t even know what kind of person they hired at the department,” Lachlan said ruefully, setting down the laptop on the counter in the lobby of the hotel. “It was one of those bureaucratic kinds of things, where they had to hire internally. This guy has some certification from Microsoft or something, so he’s supposedly qualified, but I swear he doesn’t know anything at all about computers.”
    “Well, this is a Mac,” I said, gesturing to the laptop.
    “Yeah, he doesn’t have an Apple certification,” Lachlan muttered. “And last week, there was this big