Dead Surround - The Julia Poe Vampire Chronicles Read Online Free PDF

The liquid sugar in my belly is troubled.
    The wet and sandy thing that touched her face had a faint smell of decomposition. She had no desire to open her eyes. Only bad things could come, but Sister Ann’s voice persisted in her brain.
    “Lord, child,” the nun said in a voice of irritation.
    “You have an intrinsic gift of hitting the bullseye, no 29

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    thanks to me. I only handed you a gun and told you to hit the red circle. The rest was all you. That’s a gift if I ever saw one, especially in these perilous times. Now cut the bullshit and open your eyes!”
    With a start Poe’s eyelids fluttered open.
    Bright blue sky stabbed her eyes. Her watery gaze eventually focused on her molester, Penny the half-tongue. Why does my dog have wavy auburn hair? And she smells.
    Shaking, she pushed the dog at arms length and entangled her fingers in something spidery in the process. Once her clearing eyes saw what had snagged in her fingers, Poe belted out a shriek, too embarrassingly girly in her opinion, which pierced even her own ears.
    “Get this off of me!” she screamed as she thrashed about. “Help!” The colors processed by her dark eyes were just too stark.
    Cold metal held her wrists and ankles. Her eyes registered what it was, and she had to fight back panic.
    I’m clapped in irons like a goon in pirate movies!
    Penny inched closer to her. The dog had on a makeshift collar and leash that was tied to an anchor. Anchor?
    “I’m on a boat?” she croaked, her parched lips cracking. Queasiness assaulted the center of her belly.
    She was surrounded by ocean that painfully reflected the sun and made her squint.
    What she had thought was Penny’s new hairdo was auburn tresses of a nylon rope. It was hung out to dry and held suspended by laundry clips along the rails of the boat edge where her chains coiled against. Drying carcasses of salted fish, abalone, and squid dangled to be cooked by the sun along the same laundry line.
    Interspersed with the seafood, more of the spidery 30

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    fibers in different shades of color were pinned to dry out like salted fish.
    “What the hell is this?” Poe asked in disbelief. She noticed the few dozen monstrosities that looked like human scalp. She pulled herself as far away from the grit and blood drips that collected on the edges of the deck.
    Poe had a headache like she’d been stepped on by a monster pachyderm. She wanted to belt out another girly scream that would last for days. But vampire killers and cattle rustlers were supposed to be made of tougher material.
    “Fuck!” she cried as her fingers combed through a livid lump on her head. Seasickness had taken hold of her throat and midsection. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!
    That loca clobbered me, and now I’m gonna get scalped!”
    “The notorious Poe, awake at last,” said a voice from below deck. It was a voice full of gruff and sarcasm. Penny, the ballsiest dog Poe had ever met, crept closer with her tail between her legs.
    Poe spotted deeply tanned bare feet a stone throw from where she huddled in chains, uncomfortably near bloody drips, scalps, and seafood. Her dark eyes crinkled around the corners to reveal fire building within. Ferociously Poe flicked her eyes up to brown legs bursting with little black hairs. Her gaze rose higher until she saw a savage tree of a man in below-the-knee shorts, tattered from sea water and exposure to the elements. He had a grizzly beard that was slightly shorter than Moses’. His head must have gleamed in all its bald glory a few weeks ago but now sported an inch thick of dark growth.
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    She blinked a few times to uncloud her thoughts.
    Most of his skin bore puncture scars as if he’d been the fresh slab of tuna to go with the dinner party’s sake.
    A jinn’s got me. Or maybe an end-of-the-world loon sniffing for a disciple. His fierce, deranged eyes the color of green rhinestone supported at least one of her