Masters of the Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

shortly appeared at the door with a bowl of noodles
swimming in broth and carrots was not what Angie expected. There was no stern
black habit hiding her hair, no “sturdy” black shoes laced up to her ankles, and no saintly, thick black stockings. She was
sporting a bright smile, blue jeans—and she was pretty.
    “She’s a street nun,” the priest explained in answer to Angie’s look of
frank surprise. “And she may have met your—assailant.”
    The nun handed her a glass of carrot juice. “Closest thing to whole
blood nature has to offer.” Then she stood guard to make sure Angie finished
the whole glass.
    She was a nun all right.
    “You met him?” Angie asked as she handed her the empty glass.
    “He caught me by surprise one night,” the sister answered, “but could
not seem to move toward me. He stood for a long time in front of me, puzzled,
as though he was trying to understand why he was being prevented from coming
any closer.” She paused. “I think I frightened him. He didn’t know what I was.”
    Angie turned her gaze away from the bowl of soup. Something, she wasn’t
quite sure what, didn’t feel right inside her, inside her thoughts. They were
filled with places she had never been, people she had never seen, and murderous
monsters, brutal, without mercy— vampyres .
    And she was looking at it all through a vampyre’s eyes!
    Her heartbeat became runaway as she saw victims trying to flee, trying
to escape the horrible, beautiful blue eyes, and heard their screams—a
cacophony of agony. There were maidens, blood flowing down across the beaded
necklines of their medieval dresses. Young men in top hats, their waistcoat
collars spattered with red. The red hood of a Victorian cape hid all but the
violet eyes of a female vampyre . Carriages carried
music and death in the air, and wisps of dark shapes moved through thick fog,
moving silently, stealthily, toward the lone traveler, the solitary,
unsuspecting rider, the hapless homeless.
    Gripped with terror, Angie wanted to cry out to her rescuers that the vampyre had done something horrible to her. But she
swallowed her voice back into her throat. The Frenchman with his glittery, iron
eyes looked for all the world like he would stake her
if he even thought she wasn’t human anymore. And even the kindly priest was
still wary of her, keeping the cross around his neck grasped tightly in his
hand as they spoke. Only the street nun seemed unconcerned.
    Angie forced the hot, tasteless soup down her throat, perhaps more to
prove to herself, rather than them, that she was untouched by a vampyre’s world of darkness, that she had been violated,
but not corrupted.
    That she was still human.
    “You don’t happen to have any Merlot?” she asked.
    The priest left the room, and returned with a glass of red wine.
    Angie took the glass with trembling hands. She had asked for Merlot
without even knowing if she liked it! She knew nothing of wines. But as she
sipped the red-black liquid, she found herself richly enjoying it.
    Henri De LaCroix had enjoyed this wine, she
thought, startled. A new knowledge flowed through her. A
knowledge not her own.
    With the last, terrible, delectable swallow, Angie knew what had
happened to her. She had been taken into irrevocable union with a master vampyre . And his tainted drops had sealed the deal.
    Hide it, girl. Hide it, or they might kill you.
    Keeping her terrified soul in check, Angie forced down the last of the
soup as though to remove any and all doubts for them that she was mortal. Then
she handed the emptied bowl to the nun, and said, quietly, “I would like to go
home now.”
    All three of the people in the room exchanged looks she couldn’t read.
    But she had a feeling she wouldn’t be going home.
    Home. She had left
California, driving alone to Seattle despite the overwrought pleas from her
overprotective grandmother, but she had felt she was suffocating in the tightly
sheltered life. She needed to breathe. And she