The Monsters in Your Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF

here.” She motioned to the bathroom and the man blushed. “We’ll, er, try to keep it down.”
    He hesitated, searching her face as if looking for a reason to disbelieve her, but after a tense few seconds he nodded. “Very good. But don’t forget, our next group will be here shortly.”
    “Absolutely, I have not forgotten,” she said as she pushed into the bathroom.
    She yanked the entire metal box filled with paper towels from the wall without meaning to and stared at it, then back at the empty space on the wall.
    “Crap.”
    But honestly, it was not the worst thing to have happened in the basement that night. And she would put it back as best she could later.
    She opened the bathroom door with the offending paper towel box behind her back and peeked out to see if the priest was still there. He wasn’t; she breathed a sigh of relief and ran back to the meeting room.
    When she pushed against the door, she found it stuck.
    “It’s me!” she said, hoping whoever was blocking it would let her in before anyone else showed up with probing questions and “concern.”
    The door swung open and Kai yanked her inside. The mummy glared at her with a look of contempt thousands of years of existence had perfected.
    “Where were you?”
    “Sorry, the priest heard the screaming,” Natalie explained as she started wiping at the bloodstains on the floor.
    Luckily, Drake’s blood was fairly thin and it came up without the stickiness of the human variety. It left a little bit of staining, but the old linoleum was so stained, it was hardly noticeable.
    “What do you mean, ‘the priest heard’?” Patrick hissed. He was still holding Drake, but he and Rehu didn’t seem to be working so hard at it anymore. The old vampire was calming as he healed.
    “Don’t stress, I told him it was screaming therapy,” Natalie said as she bundled up the paper towels and tossed them in a tall trash can by the door. “And apparently that’s a real thing, so we’re in the clear.”
    Alec arched a brow as he looked up at her. “Screaming therapy? Really?”
    She shrugged. “That’s what he told me.”
    “Humans are . . . weird, ” Alec muttered as he looked down at the pale vampire on the floor. “Drake. Drake, can you hear me?”
    There was a moment’s pause as Drake opened his eyes and stared around at the circle of people tending to him. Natalie breathed a sigh of relief. If he was awake, he would recover.
    “What happened? Can you tell us what happened?” she asked.
    Drake’s eyes went wide and wild and he grabbed for Alec, twisting his T-shirt in his curled, vampire hands and lifting himself closer.
    “Van Hel-sing,” he whispered, his voice breaking. “Van Helsing!”

    Drake’s apartment was on the east side of Gramercy Park in a building that had huge suits of armor guarding each side of the front door. It also had the requisite Manhattan doorman, which was a problem. So it had been decided that Natalie and Alec would take him home, so as not to arouse suspicion by having him stumble in with five of his closest, weirdest friends in tow.
    Now Drake leaned heavily on Alec as they approached the doorman.
    “Just keep me upright,” he murmured, his voice still strained from pain. “I’ll do the talking.”
    Alec nodded as the doorman eyed their odd group. He was totally willing to let Drake do the talking.
    “Good evening, Mr. Drake,” the doorman said with a concerned glance at Alec and Natalie. “Welcome home. Is—is everything all right?”
    Drake nodded. “Oh yes, Richards, everything is fine. I hate to admit it, but I had a few too many drinks and twisted my ankle. My fine friends here are helping me home.”
    The doorman hesitated as he stared at Alec for a long moment. Alec could almost smell him judging his shaggy hair, ripped T-shirt, and jeans. He could almost hear him thinking that Alec and Drake would not be friends.
    Great, he probably thought Drake was being hijacked by two young schemers and was