The President's Vampire Read Online Free PDF

he could move. He carefully walked toward the pilothouse. Maybe he could make it to the speedboat that the yacht carried with it for short trips to shore, or, failing that, he could try one of the survival rafts.
    He saw a gun on the deck and picked it up. He didn’t know if it was loaded, but it made him feel better.
    Howard stepped over the body of one of his crew. The man looked like the carcass of a dog dragged under a car. But strangely, Howard didn’t feel the urge to vomit.
    It was weird, but he almost felt hungry.
    Howard stopped in his tracks. A man stood in front of him, blocking his path. Despite all the carnage, he looked at Howard with an expression of perfect calm.
     
     
    CADE FOUND THE LAST of the survivors on the upper deck. He’d been badly injured, but the bleeding had stopped. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that he shouldn’t be able to move, let alone walk.
    Still. Cade had to be sure.
    “Were you bitten?” he asked.
    The man looked at him strangely. He blinked twice. Cade repeated the question.
    The man looked down at his arm. “Oh. This. No. I was slashed. By one of those things. What happened to them?”
    “I happened to them,” Cade said. “This is important. Are you sure you weren’t bitten?”
    The man took a step back from Cade. “Isn’t this enough?” he asked. “They nearly took my arm off, and then one of them spat this shit into my eyes—”
    “It spat at you?”
    The man stepped back again, suddenly wary. He looked at the gun in his own hand, as if trying to decide what it was for.
    “Yeah. Are you going to tell me what the hell happened here? What were those things? And who are you?”
    “How do you feel now?” Cade asked, ignoring the questions.
    The man blinked again. “Uh . . . well . . . not bad, I guess. All things considered, I actually feel . . . pretty damned good.”
    Then he laughed. And blinked again. Cade saw his eyes. The pupils had already changed.
    They were diamond-shaped.
    Damnation, Cade thought. But he wasted no more time on regrets. He moved.
     
     
    HOWARD REALIZED he wasn’t just hungry. He was famished. A voice inside him was screaming at him, trying to tell him that there was something wrong with this intruder, that the man on deck was dangerous, but he didn’t really care. He was feeling better every second. He felt pretty fucking invincible, in fact.
    Above all, he felt hungry.
    He realized, in a split second, that the man had decided something.
    Howard dropped the gun. He didn’t know if it was empty or loaded. At that moment, he couldn’t have even told you what a gun was for.
    With a snarl, he readied himself to fight. But it was already over. The man vanished in the time it took Howard to blink.
    He stopped, confused. An instant later, he felt a crushing pressure around his neck from behind. The man somehow put him in a choke hold.
    Howard thrashed. He used the new claws that were emerging from his fingers to tear at the man’s arm, trying to escape.
    Just before the very last of his human mind departed, before everything in his head became nothing but smells and heat and instinct and rage, he heard the man say something.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    It meant nothing. It was noise. Aside from the sound of Cade snapping his neck, it was the last thing Howard—or the creature he’d become—would ever hear.

THREE

    If it’s secret, it’s legal.
     

    —President Richard M. Nixon

TODAY, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

    A year before, Zach Barrows would have laughed in your face if you told him vampires were real.
    Now he sat next to one on a couch in the VIP waiting area of the West Wing.
    Never let anyone tell you Washington, D.C., is dull, he thought.
    Cade, as always, was perfectly still. Since Zach had become the liaison between the White House and Cade, he’d learned Cade was as motionless as a corpse in a casket most of the time. He had the unlined face of a college student, wearing a cheap suit with no tie. The only