Hunter of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

a deadbeat. His mother, I think, has not yet suspected he’s missing. But his father will know when the cock crows, why his young Francis never returned. And perhaps he will pay back his gambling debt to me. Perhaps he will not.”
    The patriarch had an imposing figure and a terrifying visage. He wore a tangzhuang , every centimeter of it white like bleached bone, except for a red hourglass embroidered on the back. It looked expensive beyond all reason and might have been silk. He could have been an undertaker.
    His face was hewn from marble, expressionless, and he had one ruined eye. A scar stretched from his forehead to next to his nose, and the eye which had suffered the scratch was red throughout and useless.
    His good eye, though, was the more terrifying of the two. It bore witness to the coldness of nearly a thousand winters. His bad eye suggested he had been wrong once. His remaining orb suggested it would never happen again.
    Across his chest he wore a string of garlic cloves like a bandolier. He took it off and dangled it in front of her face.
    “The reason you couldn’t smell me,” he explained. “Put it on.”
    His Cantonese was, if anything, even better than Topan’s. She put the string around her neck like a necklace. The herb didn’t smell. Certainly it didn’t smell potently the way she remembered it smelling in life. It was almost like an anti-scent, a no-zone where she could detect nothing.
    “So I’m invisible to you now?” she asked.
    “Not invisible. But I can barely sense you. And I am far more powerful than any immortal you will ever encounter again.”
    She moved to doff the necklace, but he held up his hand to stop her. He stepped down from the table onto a chair and then the floor.
    “Leave it on for just a moment. You’re troubled.”
    She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
    “Am I so easy to read?”
    “No,” he replied, “In fact I find you extraordinarily difficult to read. Nevertheless.”
    She nodded.
    “Should I feel ashamed that I felt nothing for that child?”
    Cicatrice seemed to ponder for a moment. His face was glacial. She had yet to see his expression betray any of his secrets.
    “It would not be unusual for an immortal as young as you to retain some…vestigial mortal emotions. But I have found your development to be precocious, so it does not surprise me that you don’t.”
    She nodded.
    “What did you feel, devouring him?”
    “Just the pleasure of feeding.”
    “You’re lying. Holding back. An admirable trait and it will serve you well. With others. But never with me.”
    Her eyes fell to the floor.
    “I felt something new.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    She paused and closed her eyes, trying to bring the moment back. Everything now was so slow, like swimming through a morass. Time stretched out before her like an infinite plane. Any given moment lost all its power.
    “As I tasted his blood, I could almost…sense it pumping through him. As though I could take the life directly from his veins.”
    Cicatrice’s stare bore down on her. As always, his face was impassive, like a statue’s, but she sensed something else almost there on the periphery.
    “This is the most dangerous time of your new life. This is the time when you’ll leave behind bodies and the mortals can track you if they know what they’re looking for. Sometimes the mortal authorities never catch on; other times they suspect a newborn is a serial killer. Either way in a few years the problem always resolves itself. You’ve been with me for three days. You’ve been one of us for five. I have never seen an immortal capable of sensing the life in the blood in less than a year. For you to sense it in less than a week is beyond extraordinary.”
    “Then this is a good thing?”
    “It might be.”
    She ran a hand through her hair and realized a small piece of the boy’s nose was stuck behind her ear. She fished it out and tossed it to the ghoul, who by now was messily lapping up the last