Paint it Black: 4 (The Black Knight Chronicles) Read Online Free PDF

will go up and catch a few hours’ sleep. McDaniel wants me in his office at eight tomorrow . . . I mean this morning . . . before we talk to the families.” She followed me upstairs and went into the room she had claimed for her own. I ducked into my room, conveniently right across the hall, wrapped a towel around my waist, and headed down the hall to the shower. I heard a wolf whistle from the crack in Sabrina’s door and flipped her off as I passed.
    I scrubbed myself all over a few times and finally got most of the smell of the night’s festivities off me. Then I just slid down in the shower and let the hot water run over my face for a while as I sat there. It felt good, like the scalding water was peeling layers off my skin. And for every layer it peeled off, some problem went away. My guilt over turning Greg, my issues with Abby, my relationship—if you could call it that—with Sabrina, these new-old dead women, all of it spiraled down the drain and out to sea as I sat there, bare butt sliding along the porcelain.
    I don’t know how long I sat there, half meditating and half sleeping, but a banging on the door jarred me back to full consciousness. “Jimmy, you still in there?” Sabrina’s voice came through the door.
    “Yeah, I’m here. Just finishing up. Sorry.” I hastily turned off the water, noticing that it had run ice-cold while I was in my daze.
    “Well, hurry up, I gotta pee, and I don’t want to go all the way downstairs.”
    “Gimme just a second.” I dried off as quickly as I could and wrapped the towel back around my waist. Sabrina stood in the hallway in my Xavier University black T-shirt and nothing else that I could see. That shirt looked a whole lot better on her than it ever had on me. I stepped into the hallway. “All yours,” I said.
    “’Bout time.”
    “Hey, that’s my T-shirt.”
    “It was in your dresser, so I guess so. You only keep clean clothes in the dresser, right? I couldn’t tell which stacks and piles on the floor were clean, so I took a chance on the dresser.”
    “Yeah, the stuff in the dresser’s clean. And the stacked stuff on the floor is clean. The piled stuff is dirty. It’s all organized, I swear.”
    “If you say so.” She slid past me and I saw just a hint of red panties as she slammed the door in my face.
    “And I want my T-shirt back! Eventually,” I said as I headed down the hall to my room. I put on a clean pair of boxers and crawled into bed, turning off all the lights as I did.
    We don’t really need to sleep regularly, but it’s preferable. We can go for a couple of days at a stretch if we need to, but eventually we crash no matter how much blood we take in. It had been a pretty hectic night, so I was perfectly content to lie down in my own bed, a nice queen-sized frame the former tenants had left. I just flipped the mattress and changed the sheets when we took it over. I wasn’t in any hurry to replace the comfy pillowtop, which is why I hadn’t run a black light anywhere near the thing. The last residents had been a vampire fraternity , after all.
    I lay there turning the night over in my head, thinking back to moping over my grave, then trying to figure out what to do about Greg, and worrying about Mike, and wondering how to handle Abby and make sure she didn’t get us all staked, and then I shifted over to much more pleasant thoughts of Sabrina in one of my favorite T-shirts and little else. I lied to her—one of the piles was stuff she’d worn that still smelled like her. I hadn’t bothered to wash that stuff. I liked having her scent in the room even if she wasn’t. And thinking like that took me down a whole different road, pondering our relationship and where we were going.
    I mean, why would she want to be with a dorky dead guy who looks a decade or so her junior? And what would I do if we did really turn into something? I was having enough trouble dealing with Mike’s mortality, and close friend or not, I’d never