Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life Read Online Free PDF

A deep breath, let it out. Safe—for now. Listen, as she had been taught. The ears can hear what the eyes cannot see. Faintly, deep in the building, there was a chugging sound. She recoiled. It was somebody heavy climbing the stairs. A security guard was moving between floors. There was a silent pause, then a clang. He’d gone into one of the floors, but which one? She had no way to know. She’d have to take the risk of running into him as he came out. She heard Miri’s stern words, Do not tempt the unknown. But what could she do, dammit? She wasn’t any good at this, and she never would be. If only she’d had more time to learn. If just once, they had taken her hunting with them. But she’d had to make it all up, using guesswork and imagination.
    Hard light shone off gleaming tan walls and a black, highly polished linoleum floor. She began moving down the service stairs, stepping quickly and silently beneath the stark fluorescent lights. Her feet hardly whispered on the steps as she descended. Still, though, she knew that there was sound. There was always sound.
    She had gone perhaps ten stories when she heard another clank, quite nearby—just below, in fact. She stopped, stopped breathing. Looking straight down, she could see the top of a steel fire door opening. An instant later, she smelled perfume, cheap and dense. A woman appeared in the stairwell. She had bleached blond hair tied back tight and a trench of a part. A cigarette hung from her lips.
    A whore, leaving by the back way. The Sherry wouldn’t allow working girls to cross its public spaces. Instead, they would be using the same freight elevators and stairs as the rest of the service staff.
    The girl was crying, her sobs almost machinelike. Had she been pushed out of some room, spat on, robbed, brutalized?
    The sobbing faded like some indifferent memory, and Leo started down again. She passed floor after floor, watching as the stenciled numbers unwound to “MAIN” and then “BMT” and then “SUB-1.” Here, the Sherry-Netherland stopped, perhaps sixty feet underground.
    There was no way to know what would happen when she pushed the door open. Maybe she’d be in a police guard room, or some sort of employee cafeteria. Planning is everything. Care and forethought. Then teach me how, dear Miri. How do you plan for monsterhood?
    All right, shut up! Just do the damn thing and get it over with. She opened the door. First thing, she looked for security cameras. Cameras were death.
    No cameras, at least none that she could see. Even so, she drew her ski mask down over her face before she stepped out into the room.
    Dim light, black pipes, roaring. Boilers and things, furnaces. She knew furnaces, understood fire, understood heat. Later tonight, she would draw a furnace to eighteen hundred degrees, so much heat that it would vaporize bone.
    Then she found what she was looking for, something that was present in all of these buildings—an exit from the subbasement to the outside. It had to be there by law, an emergency escape. It consisted of a black iron spiral of stairs that led up to a steel door…which was elaborately alarmed. If you went through, you set bells ringing in the guard room on the next level up.
    She’d confronted many of these doors over the past fifteen years. They all relied on the same mechanism to trip the alarm—a hard push against the crossbar. She took our her flat toolbox and inserted a thin but very strong blade into the lip of the latch, pressing against the angle of the tongue until it came free. Being careful not to move the crossbar, she drew the door open and stepped quickly out.
    A reek of garbage, the nearby sound of a horn honking in an underground parking lot, closer silence. She took off her ski mask and stuffed it into an inner pocket in her car coat. Then she climbed the steel stairs to the surface and stepped out into the street. A moment later, she was just another quick figure, as isolated as the rest who hurried up