Darkness Returns Read Online Free PDF Page B

tree.
    As Lockman stepped through the door, Kress called from behind him, “The doors are ready now. You can use those for travel. You head out first thing after sundown Eastern time.”
    Lockman kept walking, without any acknowledgment that he’d heard Kress.

Chapter Four
    Her scalp still stung where that motherfucking vamp ripped out her hair. Though she turned out lucky compared to the rest of her team. A bloody scalp, some lacerations and bruises, but otherwise all her body parts still attached. The only one to survive that clusterfuck. But that’s what she got for hiring a bunch of meatheads from a biker bar to slay demons with her.
    The bells of St. Louis Cathedral chimed the tenth and final time, pushing over a silence in the night that felt oppressive. Teresa stood in the shadows of Pirate’s Alley in the French Quarter, the last place she saw her sister, Mandy, before the vamps took her, turned her. The smell of piss rose off a nearby puddle. The sounds of normal life drifted over from Bourbon Street, jazz music, a car alarm, a peel of drunken laughter. Pretty mild, though. Valentine’s Day didn’t warrant the same celebratory glee of Marti Gras. People apparently didn’t like to party so much in the cooler February air.
    Teresa shuffled into the center of the alley, her boots chuffing against the concrete. She held her hands tucked in the pockets of her leather jacket, the jacket’s collar up to hide the finger-shaped bruises welling up from when the vamp had tried to strangle her. Dumbass hadn’t anticipated the old-fashioned wooden stake tucked in her boot. Sometimes the old ways were the best ways.
    Gritting her teeth, she imagined slipping into a vamp nest and staking the sleeping monsters one after another. Watching their chests cave in, and their borrowed blood spew from their mouths. Of course, an attack like that would never work. The whole nest would wake up to the screaming of that first vamp. One thing vamps were good at besides sucking blood and tearing flesh—fuckers knew how to scream.
    She had to admit, in the short time she’d spent in the Big Easy, she had slain a shit load of vamps, both on her own and with her civilian helpers. Not enough, though. Never enough. Because after New Orleans, there was the rest of Louisiana. And after Louisiana, the rest of the country. The world. Shit, maybe vamps lived in outer space, too.
    Stop talking like a crazy bitch.
    Her sister’s voice. Only, not really. After only a couple years, Teresa found it hard to really hear her sister’s real voice. Just the one she’d constructed in her mind. And Teresa didn’t have a home anymore. No archives of home movies. Not even a photo album. She’d joined the Agency straight out of college. Everything she owned still in boxes in her parents’ basement. A house fire had destroyed it all.
    A woman screamed in the night.
    Teresa’s hand instinctively drew from her pocket and reached behind her for the .45 tucked at the small of her back. Hesitated.
    The scream came again, but tapered into laughter.
    Another drunk girl with no idea of the dangers around her. No idea that the shadows could peel away from the walls, grab her, sink fangs into her, drain her, change her.
    Teresa squeezed her eyes shut. A mild breeze felt cooler than it was against her hot face.
    I’m sorry, Mandy. I’m so sorry I let them get to you.
    She turned her back to the cathedral at the end of the alley and walked out the way she had come. She strolled out onto Bourbon Street, hands back in her pockets, mind grasping for a direction. She walked down lesser known streets. She dared the shadows to attack.
    Tonight, the shadows were not hungry.
    Either she and her crew had wasted enough of them to make them shy, or she was just lucky.
    Damn shame. She wanted to kill. So badly. She had another stake in her boot going to waste.
    When she came back to New Orleans, she thought she could sate her rage. Kill enough vamps, and eventually she would