Much Ado About Vampires Read Online Free PDF Page B

shoulders slumping as he touched one torn edge of the flattened gold. “I’m dead. That’s all there is to it. I’m dead. Again.” He looked up at me, and I noticed that he had absolutely black eyes, no difference between iris and pupil. “The Occio is destroyed, as well?”
    “Who knows? I certainly don’t,” I said, giving up and sitting down on the least pointy part of the boulder between us. “I just want to find a first aid kit so I don’t get tetanus or something like that, and then get out of here. Oh, and chocolate wouldn’t hurt, either. I’d take some chocolate.”
    “Let me see,” Ulfur said, stumbling over to where I sat. I held out my hand. “No, not your hand, the Occio.”
    “The rock?” I held out my other hand, the one with the bits of twisted gold and broken bits of gray stone.
    He frowned at it, touching one of the pieces with the tip of a finger. “I don’t understand it. This is a Tool of Bael. Why would it be destroyed?”
    “It’s not a tool. It’s like a . . . I don’t know, pendant or something.” I looked around the bleak landscape, wondering what sort of weird being the Englishman was that he could either make me insane or magically teleport me somewhere. “Who’s Bael when he’s at home, anyway? ”
    Ulfur’s black-eyed gaze met mine—he was about to answer my question when he suddenly squinted at me. “You’re . . . glowing.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “You’re glowing. There’s a sort of shadowed glow about you.”
    I held up a hand. “You know what I think? I think we’re both nuts, me because I let myself get caught in weirdness again, and you because you are seeing things.”
    “I’m not seeing things, not in the sense you mean. You’re glowing.”
    “Look, Ulfur—” I stopped in the middle of telling him that there was no way on god’s green earth that I was glowing, when I noticed something odd about him.
    “Hey,” I said, pointing at him. “You’re glowing.”
    He looked down at himself. “This doesn’t make any more sense than the Tools being destroyed. Why would we both glow just because we were banished to the Akasha? ”
    “Yeah, about that,” I said, getting up off my rock to circle him. I’d be damned if he didn’t have a faint blackish glow around him, almost like a corona. “When you say ‘banished,’ what exactly do you mean?”
    “Bael, the premier prince of Abaddon, banished us here. Or rather, he banished me, and you must have gotten caught in his power during the banishment. He spoke some sort of a curse when he did it—”
    “Abi in malam crucem, confer te in exsilium, appropinquabit enim judicium Bael,” I repeated.
    Ulfur’s eyebrows rose.
    “Basically it means go to hell, you’re banished by Bael’s judgment. I went to a Catholic school,” I explained when he looked impressed at my knowledge of Latin. “I can say ‘of the Antichrist’ in ten different languages.”
    “How very . . . useful.”
    “Premier prince? That Englishman was a prince? I figured he must be someone important because you and that big chick were ‘my lording’ him all over the place, but a prince? Wow. I’m going to have to tell Jas that I saw a real prince. He seemed kind of . . . evil . . . for a prince.”
    “He is evil,” Ulfur said, slumping onto my place on the rock. “The title ‘prince’ is an honorific, nothing more. He’s the head demon lord of Abaddon.”
    “Abaddon being . . . ?”
    “Its closest approximation would be hell.”
    I gawked at him, my skin crawling with sudden horror. “That guy was the devil?”
    “No. Not in the mortal sense. Abaddon isn’t what you know of as hell—it’s . . . well, it’s Abaddon. Mortals based their concept of hell on it, just as they based their concept of heaven on the Court of Divine Blood, but they are not the same thing. Abaddon is ruled by seven princes, seven demon lords.”
    “And the Bael guy, the man with the wicked fashion sense and plummy English voice,