In the Dark Read Online Free PDF

feeding and her body ached with the need to give him more .”
    â€œGive it back!” Julie reached out to snatch the book from his hand.
    Marc smirked. “Is that really how feeding makes you feel? Do your eyes gleam with satisfaction when you do it? Maybe, next time you eat, you could take out your mirror and check to see. Oh, but, wait a minute—” He smacked himself in the head. “Since you’re a vampire, I guess you must be invisible in mirrors too, huh?”
    â€œFunny.” Julie gazed at him resentfully. “You know what, Marc? It’s called fiction. And, for your information, if it’s got a good story and three-dimensional characters, nobody cares if some of the facts are a little sketchy.”
    â€œWhatever.” His anger spent, Marc dropped into an armchair facing his sister. “Think what you want.” Obviously, they could both see their reflections just fine when they looked in a mirror. They didn’t need to sleep in their native soil—thank the stars for that! Holy water didn’t do a damn thing other than get them wet. And, no matter how debilitating they found sunlight to be, they’d certainly never yet burst into flames when they’d gone out during the day.
    As for the question of whether or not they should accept being labeled as vampire when they clearly didn’t fit the mythological profile—well, that was a long-dead horse. Not even. It was horse dust. And no amount of beating was ever gonna make it run.
    Doesn’t any of it bother her, he wondered. Or did Julie never even think about how weird their lives were, how aimless and disconnected, how relatively empty—and, yes, damn it, how different from most other people’s.
    Like he’d really needed her to point that out! Marc knew damn well they were different. He’d always known. There’d never been a time in his life when he hadn’t felt that way, even when they were kids. No, especially when they were kids. Growing up with no parents. Schooled by private tutors. Moved every four to six years to a new house, a new community, where, once again, they’d be discouraged from interacting with anyone who hadn’t been carefully screened by either their grandfather or their uncle—the only two constants in their constantly changing lives.
    Then there were the admonitions, repeated over and over again, until they were second nature. We don’t feed in public. We don’t show our fangs to the other children on the playground. What’s said in this house, stays in this house. And, most important of all: You must never tell anyone who or what we really are.
    The only trouble with that, Marc thought, as he ran his tongue over the small protuberances on the roof of his mouth that hid his retracted fangs, was that he really didn’t know what he was, and he wasn’t always as certain of the “who” part as he’d like to be either. Despite having grown up in their care, the twins had always known that neither Conrad nor Damian were biologically related to them—or to each other, for that matter.
    Obviously, they’d had parents at some point, but no one had any idea who their father had been and, other than her name and a few bare facts about her, neither of their “father figures” seemed to know very much about their mother either. Certainly they didn’t like talking about her. Who was she , he wondered for what had to be the trillionth time. How did she die? Why were the events of their birth shrouded in such secrecy?
    â€œDo you think she was ever here?” Julie asked suddenly.
    Marc shrugged, not even a little surprised that his sister should be reading his mind. There was nothing new about that, was there? “Our mother? Probably. She and Conrad had to have met somewhere, right?”
    Julie’s mouth tightened. “That’s another thing. How are we going to find Conrad? I mean, what are