Firewalker Read Online Free PDF Page B

help.”
    “While I stayed behind and turned into a vampire?”
    “Nightwalkers don’t turn their victims,” I said. “Usually. They drain them until they’re dead, or they can keep them alive if they want to. Some drink only a little from each victim and then make them forget in order to not leave a trail of bodies. Some even become civilized and learn to drink animal blood, live among humans almost normally, as long as they avoid direct sunlight. The crosses and garlic thing is all a myth, though. I once met a Nightwalker who was a monk. He probably still is one.”
    “Damn it,” Nash said when I wound down. His hands were steadier now. I’d never seen anyone heal so fast from a Nightwalker attack.
    “This one bit the wrong neck, tonight,” I said.
    Nash banged his fists on the steering wheel. Not too hard—he wouldn’t want to damage his new truck. “My life made so much more sense before you came into it. What the hell did you do to me?”
    “Sorry.” I really did feel sorry for him. Moving from Unbeliever to acceptance wasn’t easy. “But it didn’t really make sense, and you know it.”
    Nash had been injured in the Iraq War, when a building he’d rushed into had collapsed on him and all his men. He’d been the only one who’d made it out. He’d suffered from flashbacks and had gone through all kinds of hell.
    “So, educate me,” Nash said. “There are Stormwalkers like you; Nightwalkers, which are vampires; and then skinwalkers, those creatures I fought out at the vortexes. What are werewolves—dogwalkers?”
    “You’re hilarious, Jones. There aren’t any werewolves, just Changers who can become wolves.”
    We were approaching the dam, the road descending sharply around hairpin curves, traffic slowing to a crawl. “I liked being an Unbeliever,” Nash said. “I liked not knowing this shit was out there, on top of all the other shit. But I felt that thing die while he was drinking me, and I saw it disintegrate in a way no human could.”
    I said nothing but stared up at the arch of the bridge that hung against the sky. Lit up by construction lights, the man-made steel was suspended between sheer cliffs hundreds of feet above the Colorado River.
    “It isn’t the world I grew up in,” Nash said, but I knew he’d resigned himself.
    “Yes, it is,” I said quietly. “But I know what you mean.” My magical cherry had been broken at age eleven. Nash was thirty-two, with a lifetime of stubborn disbelief to give up. I couldn’t decide which would be more difficult.
    Nash fell silent again as he crossed the dam and navigated up the cliffs on the other side. Then we were heading down the highway to the glow of Las Vegas, Nash maintaining the speed limit and properly using his turn signals. The city spread out at the bottom of the valley, its line of bright colors tempting travelers to its pleasures. Nash stuck to the freeway, passing the tall hotels that reached out to us with promises of easy money, delectable food, and tantalizing glimpses of flesh of both genders.
    On the other side of the city, the desert was stark and empty, lonely and cold. After more miles of endless night, Nash turned off on a narrow slice of road that headed due west.
    We drove through a crease in the mountains into California and down into Death Valley itself, where moonlight danced on alkali beds that spread across the valley floor. Mountains soared around us, ten thousand feet high, cutting off moisture from this bleak gash of the land. At the same time it was cold, the hard cold of a high-desert night.
    “So?” Nash asked me. “Where to?”
    I looked out into all the darkness, feeling the spell pulling me northward. “Keep following this road. Pamela said she was on the northwest side of the valley.”
    “Who the hell is Pamela?”
    If Nash had let me indulge in conversation before, I could have told him the whole story. I gave him a truncated version now.
    “We need to turn off somewhere around here,” I