I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

down the alley and out onto
the street, the stolen K-car and Pontiac abandoned in the lot.
    Gossitch thought about something Santa Anna
had said to him back in the Reliant, something about Boone.
Gossitch had meant what he’d said about wanting Boone by his side
if things went to hell. It had happened once or twice on a job, and
the only reason any of them had survived was because the kid
had been there. Boone was a valuable man to have on the crew,
Gossitch knew, but his value stemmed in part from his role as a
maverick, as something almost uncontrollable.
    That shot at the vampire in the RV, for
example. Had the kid been meaning to cap the tall thing? Probably.
Boone was such a bad shot.
    Gossitch wondered if it was all the
testosterone Boone put in his system to pump his muscles up. Maybe
it was the cocaine or whatever other recreational drugs the kid
snorted and smoked when he wasn’t on a job. Gossitch would never
work with a man whose head wasn’t on straight, but he ascribed to
the belief that after a job was over a man’s free time was a man’s
free time.
    When it came to vampires or werewolves or any
one of another dozen varieties of nasties that inhabited the Big
Apple, Boone was ready to throw down on the get-go. And that was a
valuable quality in and of itself.
    The crew chief didn’t think the kid had any
fear. None. It would have been a dangerous thing if the kid wasn’t
smart. But Gossitch knew, aside from having a set on him like a
pair of basketballs, Boone was shrewd enough, even calculating.
    The kid had rammed the vampire through the
glass and hung it out there to burn. That had messed up all the
other vamps with the exception of the tall one. Gossitch made a
mental note to ask Raheem about that.
    Truth was, Gossitch admitted it to himself,
the kid’s action had jarred him some too. There was an unknown
quantity with Boone, something of a sadistic streak. The kid could
have just as easily tossed the vamp out onto the sidewalk to fry.
Maybe he would have if Gossitch hadn’t been there.
    And that thing with the girl…there was only
one fate left her now.
    They robbed monsters. That’s how they made
their living. Gossitch did it for the money, not the thrill.
Gossitch suspected the kid did it for the thrill. The crew chief
knew Boone nurtured a special hatred for their non-human marks. It
was the way some white people Gossitch knew felt about blacks and
Hispanics. The kid hated monsters, all monsters, even the ones they
worked with .
    Yeah , thought Gossitch, maybe it was
all that testosterone in the kid’s system. Or maybe it was just
Boone’s warped brain chemistry.

 
8.
6:03 A.M.
     
    Somewhere off in the dark, water dripped.
    After three hundred and twenty six years of
existence, the dark Lord Rainford had grown fatigued in body and
mind.
    This was nothing new.
    He had grown dispirited and disillusioned
centuries ago. His end, he knew, would come in the next decades,
and he felt none of the anticipation or elation that others he
shared this earth with did for the coming of a new millennium. He
had seen the passage of centuries and realized that time, in the
sense of seconds and minutes and hours, of days and weeks and
months and years, was an arbitrary affair, an imposition of order
upon a seemingly haphazard universe.
    Rainford might have felt pity for the humans,
their thoughts centered on the coming millennium, if he wasn’t
contemptuous of them. The millennium. Just another capricious
number. The humans. They had hunted Rainford’s kind down through
the centuries, through the millennia.
    Drip … drip … drip …
    Now he felt annoyance at his own kind, those
who had beckoned him rise from his rest. There was weak daylight
outside the warehouse’s blackened and barred windows, and centuries
had acclimated Rainford to dormancy in the day. As one who had
spent hundreds of years hiding from the burning white orb, Rainford
had developed what he considered a healthy respect for