Savage Magic Read Online Free PDF Page B

would do.  
    Danny nibbled at his cheese and watched Cooper devour his dried meat in two bites. "They're dying, you know. In another two weeks, there won't be any Weres left."
    "A pleasant thought, you slowly starving to death in here." Cooper tore off a chunk of bread and ate it while he stared at the ceiling.  
    "Dehydration will get him first," I pointed out, enjoying the sour look Danny threw at me. "Hallucinating as his brain dries up and his dead heart struggles to beat."  
    "The vamp's right, though," Knox said. "Each Clan has lost nearly twenty-five percent of their people."
    "Don't encourage him." I packed up the remaining half of my food and camouflaged it under the blanket at the foot of my cot. What if the Weres did decide to starve us next?
    "In two to three days the virus drives the victim mad," Knox continued, a trickle of fear in his voice. "But Travis hadn't shown any of the signs yet. I don't understand why he died."
    "But apparently he did and now you're all at risk," Danny said, a little smugly I thought, the bastard. "At least, those of you who are shifters." He took a sip of water and made a face like a kid being forced to eat Brussels sprouts and I felt slightly mollified.  
    "Those who aren't will probably be released once the higher ups have had a nice long gab about how to handle the situation," he continued. "Lots to think about, what with the Alpha's second collared and incarcerated and all." He made a tsking sound and leveled a long, speculative stare at me before going back to his water. "Hospitality ain't what it used to be."
    I wondered if Bellmonte had told him that he knew I was part Were. Not that I'd ever told Bellmonte anything. Didn't need to. He'd figured it out even before he witnessed me coming out of a shift after he'd maneuvered me into helping him defeat the previous vampire Archon. I was still pissed off that he'd put Cooper's life in danger to accomplish it.  
    "Finish eating and then get whatever rest you can," Cooper said, interrupting my enjoyable fantasy of how I was going to rid the world of Bellmonte after I offed Danny. "We'll want to be ready for anything in the morning."

    *   *   *

    In his dream, Danny waited in a black landscape of nothingness. He had no desire to move and maybe he couldn't anyway. Dreams were like that. All that he knew for certain was that something important was coming. Something he'd been waiting his whole life for. He didn't want to miss it.  
    Impatience and excitement itched through him and he started to take a step, thinking that maybe he needed to find this something instead of waiting for it. When he did, a dark shape coalesced out of the nothingness in front of him. No, it formed from the dark nothingness as if the darkness were alive and had gathered itself into the cloaked shape of a man.  
    He should have been afraid, but he wasn't. The figure felt familiar to him. It felt comforting.
    Danny didn't remember the last time anything or anyone had comforted him. Maybe when he was still with his mother and sister, before Bellmonte had found them — the mysterious new relative who had arrived at their trailer with gifts and food and money for his mother. Danny hadn't understood why she'd cried when she sent him off to spend the summer with their exotic new uncle. Or why she'd hugged him so tightly. Not until he realized that he was never going home.
    The next ten years he'd done everything he could to please his uncle, to get back what he'd lost. Until finally he'd cast his childhood dreams aside for bigger and more interesting goals. How quickly the aching desire to please had turned to dust, he thought, remembering that time and the years of brutality that marked his rebellion and his final failed escape.
    He couldn't even die to get away from the bastard.  
    But he wasn't a kid anymore and he knew how to pretend compliance while secretly plotting. Someday he would return to the comfort and peace that had been so brutally stolen