Nightlord: Sunset Read Online Free PDF

are becoming both harder and stronger.  Your tendons are attaching to those bones with new strands and better anchoring.  Your joints are changing; their basic design is altering.  Your cells split and multiply much more quickly, and your body’s ability to repair damage no longer results in scarring.  This I know.  I believe that your nervous system is becoming more conductive…”
    I wondered, for a moment, just how crazy she might be.  Or how crazy I might be.  She just sat there, straight-faced, and kept talking.  I only half-listened, drinking absently, as she went on about polymers, superconductivity, mitosis, myosis, Hayflick’s limit, fertility, mortality rates, aerobic and anaerobic function, and other things. 
    Finally, I got a grip.  I was upset.  No, I was angry .  And afraid.  I was feeling betrayed and infuriated and frustrated and frightened.  I had been changed in a way I did not understand and to which I had not agreed, no matter how overwhelmingly better it felt.
    Oh, yes, it felt good to be this way.  But I don’t trust anything that feels too good.
    “Stop!” I said, finally.  She did, and she looked at me, waiting.
    “I don’t understand,” I finally went on, gripping the edge of the counter—I was putting finger-shaped dents in it—“why you did this to me.  You said it was hard to contract this… this… this.   But you went out of your way to expose me to it.”
    She hesitated.  “This will be more difficult to believe.”
    I laughed.  I couldn’t help it.  It broke me up completely.  It was either laugh or weep, and I couldn’t weep anything but tears of rage.  So I laughed and laughed and the windows rattled in their frames.
    When I quieted down, I was less angry.  Still mad as hell, but I was more controlled.
    “Go ahead.”
    For the next two hours, I drank and she talked.  She told me a long story about a man who had saved her from the plague in London.  A man who loved her, married her, taught her, and defended her until the day of the peasants, there in France—and who sent her to safety while he fought to give her time to flee.  Moreover, who promised her he would one day return to her through death and time.
    While she talked, I calmed down a lot.  It explained—if I could accept it as true, and why not?  More incredible things were happening in front of me; hell, to me—the portrait in the shrine-like room I’d seen.  It explained why she took an interest in me.  It also explained—without excusing—her sudden decision to hand me a virus or whatever with unpredictable consequences.
    When she finished, she had tears in her eyes.  She told me her story and waited.  She didn’t ask me anything.  I just sat there, trying to grasp the whole of that story and come to grips with what it meant to me.
    Even angry as I was, I could never have made a move to hurt her, not when she was beautiful and hopeful and desperate.  Desperate women trigger my gallant tendencies, regardless of the circumstances.  I’ve pulled over on long car trips to help stranded motorists—all female.  One was in a driving downpour, and she wasn’t that pretty, either.  But the combination of both beauty and desperation…
    I sighed and tried to let go of my anger.
    “You think I am this… person… reincarnated, or some such?” I asked.  She nodded, wordless, eyes bright.  Who knows?  Maybe I am.  My personal verdict is still out on what happens after we die.  I continued, “You know that, if I am, I don’t remember any of it.”  She nodded again.  “And I’m going to need… a while… to sort out what I think about this.”
    “I know,” she whispered.  “I will wait, as I have waited.  It is not so difficult a thing, waiting.  But would you please… not think so much that you forget to feel?”
    I agreed, of course.  “I’ll try my best.  While I’m thinking it over, is there anything I need to know about this, ah, condition for