The Neon Graveyard Read Online Free PDF Page A

overtake his mind, he still managed a small shake of his head. He didn’t want me crossing that line, no matter what the Tulpa did to him. I blew out a hard breath and returned my gaze to the monster holding him. “No.”
    “Worth a try.” The Tulpa shrugged.
    His arm elongated unnaturally, the flesh extending like another joint was hidden inside. Neal rose higher in the air, and even the seven-foot creature gazed up at him. “You were once Light. I can smell it on you, though it’s now faint, like dried herbs. What’s your name, young man?”
    “Fuck you,” Neal managed, though his face was caught in a grimace. It was a look repeated in empathy, if not intensity, on the thirteen faces around me. Vincent even made a move forward, but the Tulpa’s black-eyed gaze halted him in his tracks.
    “Well, unfortunately for Fuck You,” the Tulpa went on, with a bland nod, “there’s a much more powerful law at work here.” And now he turned back to me.
    “See, enemies are one thing. You expect them to stab you in the back, to stab you in the front, and you don’t even call it a betrayal.” He shifted quickly, and a barbed nail caught Neal just beneath his shoulder. Crying out, he arched his back. Carlos made a pained sound to the right of me. “See? An enemy’s strike? Why, it’s practically the most truthful thing that can lie between two people.
    “Yet former allies? People who were once of the same breed, the same pack? Those you once trusted to have your back, whom you invested time and secrets in, and maybe even a bit of that fair emotion called love?” He drew Neal close, patted him none too gently on the head with the gloved hand, then lifted him even higher. Neal’s body swayed with the movement, agony lacing his moan. The Tulpa merely raised his voice to be heard. “Well, those are the betrayals that hit the hardest. A rift between enemies is nothing personal, after all. But a mishandling of friendship, kinship, loyalty? Why, that’s nothing but personal.”
    Though Neal was the one pierced above him, the verbal jab was for me. Everyone had read the manuals documenting my poor treatment by the Light I’d trusted. Yet I’d since been accepted by others—I’d accepted myself—so the Tulpa couldn’t hurt me with that now.
    Carlos attempted to redirect the conversation. “None of the grays, even our former Shadows, ever belonged to you.”
    “They’re all mine.”
    “Not on this side of the line.” Carlos said, stepping forward.
    “Well, Fuck You didn’t make it, did he?” And as the Tulpa held Neal’s body straight to the side, he closed his eyes, and fell completely still.
    “What’s he doing?” I heard Foxx whisper.
    “He’s in a trance,” Vincent said, his voice a low rumble next to me.
    Gareth stepped up to the other side. “Or he fell asleep.”
    “No,” I said softly, though they were both nearly right. I withdrew my gun, cocked it, and stepped as close to the invisible boundary as I dared. “It’s a lesson.”
    Neal, sensing the odd stillness, squinted over at us, saw my stance, my new weapon, and winced. He blinked once, a flash of gratitude and good-bye, before his entire body began shaking.
    The howling hit us first, scratchy growls and snaps ferried across the desert floor on an unseen wind. The coyotes themselves appeared from nowhere, rising from the desert floor, made from the sand. They blazed over the selfsame terrain, a half dozen in all—dusty and craggy, gritty bodies swirling with debris, the thorns from tumbleweeds comprising their ribs, sandstone chips forming their teeth. Their snarls were the sound of winter wind howling over the desert, though rolled up and rounded off in snapping syllables of fury.
    Neal made no move to defend himself as the six beasts drew close, and at first I thought it was because he wanted it over quickly. My second thought was that he trusted me to put him out of his misery. But then I realized the Tulpa had drawn back, arm still