Last Vampire Standing Read Online Free PDF Page B

mouth.
    “Why . . . move?” he panted back.
    I cupped his erection and whispered what I wanted.
    I don’t know which of us hit my California king bed first, but waiting for him to strip me was excruciating. When it was my turn, I kissed and rubbed and teased each inch of skin I exposed. And then he slipped into my body, and I matched his rhythm until we climaxed as one.
    I love it when our pheromones mingle at midnight.
    Later, when Saber’s breathing evened in sleep, I smiled at the waxing moonlight streaming through the window and enjoyed his warm body until my mental to-do list nagged me out of bed.
    I closed the drapes to keep out the light come daytime. Not that sunlight fries me. It doesn’t, and my naturally olive skin provides some protection, too. But UV overexposure will make me break out in lesions similar to what lupus patients experience. I wear super sunblock when I’m outside in the daytime, of course, but I don’t wear it to bed. So for my bedroom I made blackout drapery panels that, when closed, look like surfboards stacked against the wall. I’d also sprung to have wonder windows installed that are both UV reflective and impact resistant.
    Yes, Saber had wanted bulletproof windows to protect me from the vigilante vampire hunters, but the expense was astronomical, and they didn’t come with UV protection. Instead, I had a perimeter alarm that was triggered by weight. If the siren sounded, I hit the floor and crawled to the secret escape hatch in the walk-in closet.
    I also built an alcove in the living area to house a computer cabinet. It served as my study and office space, and, dressed in my penguin-on-the-beach sleep shirt, that’s where I headed to run a computer search for Marco. Sure, I knew Marco Sánchez was dead. Jo-Jo’s Marco was a whole ’nother creep, a whole ’nother set of fangs. On the other hand, the vamp knew my formal title. Peace of mind is priceless.
    I reset the security code and alarm system while the computer booted, then zipped to the Vampire Protection Agency website and their version of America’s Most Wanted. The pages listed the names of vampires who’d been declared Rampants, along with their aliases, descriptions, and notations of “at large” or “terminated.” This list dated back to 1997, when vampires were first designated a protected species, but Saber had accessed older archives for me, and I’d memorized his codes. Okay, it was a little sneaky, but for a good cause.
    A click on this button, a password and verification code in that box, and I was in. I typed M-A-R-C-O, waited only seconds, and had ten hits. There, just as I remembered when Saber showed me. The next to last entry on the page read: Marco, surname uncertain, approximately two centuries old, of Spanish descent, black hair, dark brown eyes, five feet eight inches. He’d been killed three years before the VPA was launched.
    If the villagers hadn’t killed Marco, and if someone else hadn’t squashed him like a stinkbug before vampire hunters kept good records, then this was the proof I needed. No new daymares for me. Ding-dong, Marco was dead. My lingering doubts lifted. I cruised the VPA site awhile longer, found the five-year rule, and read the history of the Vampire Protection Act and Agency. May as well read up now before I talked with Maggie.
    I learned that a crime reporter had stumbled on the scene of a slayer disposing of a vamp body in the early 1990s. With conspiracy theories and Pulitzer visions merrily dancing, he’d broken the sensational story. Vampires Among Us. Film at eleven. Disbelief, confusion, and terror summed up the initial human reaction to the news that vampires walked the earth. Governments of the world couldn’t pooh-pooh the story, because a select conclave of vamps flew out of the closet to prove they were real. Course, that’s when the scientists injected themselves into the picture.
    With the help of some not-so-scrupulous slayers, vamps were captured for