Demon's Vow: Part 2 of the Final Asylum Tales (The Asylum Tales series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

besides blood. What a lot of people didn‘t know was that the vast majority of vampires also developed obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. For some reason, nearly all of them became as neat as a pin and compulsively organized, particularly about objects. There was some speculation that it had to do with how their brain handled the information it was now receiving through newly heightened senses. No one knew for sure, but it meant that every nest and vampire house I had ever been in was incredibly orderly. It was fucking creepy.
    We continued through the house until we finally reached the sleeping quarters and located numerous bloodstains in the sheets. They had been attacked while they were sleeping.
    “I don‘t get it,” I said as I walked out of the third bedroom behind Gideon. “Not one of them made a sound? Not one heard a noise and woke up? No one fought back?”
    “Maybe they couldn‘t fight back.” The warlock stopped in the middle of the hall and rubbed the fingers of his left hand together as if he had gotten something on them, but I hadn‘t seen him touch anything. “There‘s a residue left here.”
    “Yeah, I feel it too. It’s from the dark magic spell we came to investigate.”
    Gideon shook his head, continuing to stare at his fingertips as if he could actually see the magic. “No, it’s under that. It’s almost sugary . . . like cotton candy or cooked caramel.” When I frowned and only shook my head, he pointed to the stairs leading to the third floor. “The scent of the blood is masking it. Go to the stairs.”
    Following his orders, I started to climb the stairs, but stopped on the third one. It was there, so subtle and soft that you could catch only the barest whiff before it was lost in the other magic hovering in the air. He was right. It was like walking into an old-fashioned candy shop or the midway at some amusement park.
    “It’s . . . almost fey,” I whispered as I tried to analyze something that I was getting only the faintest hints of. “But the fey rarely have a quarrel with vampires. The bloodsuckers don’t prefer them for prey so they’re not a threat. And this . . .” I paused, waving back toward the bedroom where the murders had taken place. “The fey wouldn‘t be involved in something like this.”
    “Except for maybe the dark elves.”
    “Yeah, well I wouldn’t put much past the dark elves, but their magic doesn’t feel like this. It’s grittier. Maybe a brownie or a pooka? A red cap?” I suggested, but even as the words left my mouth, I knew they were wrong. The magic felt as if it should be fey but it wasn’t like any fey I had ever encountered.
    Gideon shook his head, letting his hand finally fall limp at his side. “We should keep looking.”
    All the vampires that had been in the house were now bits of ash out on the street. There were no corpses in the house, vampire or otherwise. Our killer hadn’t conducted the spell within the nest, which didn’t surprise me. I could feel the energy here, but not as strongly as when we walked through the apartment where the first spell was cast. That energy had crawled across my flesh and left me feeling dirty.
    My companion didn’t seem particularly surprised that we didn’t find anything either, but we had to search the house for any evidence. We had so few leads to go on as it was; we couldn’t risk overlooking any possibility now.
    “Where do we go now?” I asked when we were standing in the backyard. It wasn’t very big, but the grass was neatly trimmed and the flower beds were carefully edged with smooth river rocks. It probably would have looked beautiful in the summer, but right now it was all dead and barren.
    Gideon led the way across the backyard and through the gate to the neat redbrick house on the right. All the windows were covered with blinds and there hadn’t been a peep out of the occupants despite all the chaos that had whirled about the neighborhood. I could feel the eyes of