Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

holding it out for a handshake.
    “Darren Oliver,” he said. “Welcome to my castle.”

3
     
     
    It was something to do with the blood.
    Even that tiny taste of it had sent a surge of power coursing through Jake McIntosh's twisted muscles, lighting up his veins like an electrical storm. Just a few delicious droplets on his tongue. He wanted more. Craved it.
    It hadn't been like that when he had killed and eaten animals. The blood of the humans was different somehow, like distilled energy that lifted him to a place of endless euphoria; making him feel like a god.
    Am I a vampire?
    The thought amused Jake, almost made him laugh out loud. The cretins in the underground base had tried to lay waste to humanity with some sort of virus based on a hundred clichéd zombie movies, and had ended up creating a vampire instead. It was just too funny.
    Except that he definitely was not a vampire. He could eat a deer or a rabbit and feel the energy and vitality the food provided. Sunlight had no effect on him whatsoever, and Jake had no doubt that silver or holy water or garlic would do nothing to him. Vampires did not exist, just as zombies did not exist. Only humans that had been twisted and remade, driven back to their savage, primal beginnings.
    Some side-effect of their tampering with human DNA, then. They had created humans that were driven by a need to taste the blood of their own. Some part of that programming had made its way into...whatever Jake was now.
    In the end it didn't matter. The bloo d was like a powerful drug delivered in its purest form, and he needed more.
    Jake had tried drugs, of course. Back when he had been a serial killer rather than a force of nature, he had experimented with any number of ways to increase the delirious high he felt when he tortured and killed the helpless. Ultimately he had discovered that cocaine and ecstasy and crystal meth only served to pollute the purity of the experience. Killing was far less fun when your mind was swathed in a numbing fog. Drugs flattened out all the glorious nuance, and rendered the wondrous process mundane.
    He never felt the remotest danger that he might become addicted to any of the drugs he tried. He was already addicted to something far greater. Murder was a delicious elixir. Pure, dizzying power.
    The blood was different to the other narcotics, though . As he licked the traces of life from the spine of the man he had killed, he felt a sense of intense acceleration, a powerful rush that felt as if the air itself was trying to drag the cells of his body in a hundred different directions. Everything became wonderfully vivid and the dark landscape around him shimmered, like the world had been daubed in fluorescent paint.
    He stood for a moment, drinking the sensation in. He was, he realised suddenly, shaking with pleasure, every muscle twitching in unison as a tsunami of adrenaline surged through him.
    In the distance h is hyper-attuned senses detected a large group of humans, and he could sense their terror wafting toward him on the breeze, and he very nearly charged forward immediately, throwing caution to the wind in his desire to taste their blood.
    Only the memory of the way his energy had drained so suddenly back in the underground prison in which he had been birthed gave him pause. His body was uncharted territory. The thought of blacking out among the humans and leaving himself vulnerable was too much to bear. To die at their hands simply because he could not control his urges would be a terrible waste.
    You should proceed with caution , he thought. There's no need to rush in blindly like the pitiful eyeless creatures that they created to kill themselves .
    He inhaled deeply, a ragged, shuddering breath, trying to calm his racing nerves and clear his mind.
    Just another taste...
     
    *
     
    Gillian Harper had been there right at the start. She had been one of the fortunate ones holding a weapon when the infection had walked in the front door at Catterick