The Vampire Diaries: Bound By Blood (Kindle Worlds Novella) Read Online Free PDF Page B

bourbon. Nice or not, the booze kept the cravings at bay. For a while. If not for the copious amounts of alcohol Stefan and I consumed, there would be a lot more dead bodies in this world. A lot more.
    Stefan cocked his head a little and said, “Listen.”
    I leaned my forearms on the railing and humored my younger brother. Then again, when both brothers are nearly 150 years old, “older” and “younger” become irrelevant.
    I was expecting to hear maybe the approach of a car. Or the sound of someone moving in the distant woods. Perhaps even two people going at it like rabbits in a car parked not too far away. Yes, our hearing is that good.
    “I don’t hear it… .”
    “Keep listening.”
    “Are you drunk, Stefan—”
    And then I caught something. I cocked my head a little. As I did so, Stefan nodded. “You hear it.”
    I raised my fingers to my lips and shushed him.
    A small wind swept over us, and as it did so, I heard the sound again. A whispering. Many whisperings, in fact. As if a dozen people were whispering quietly at the back of a church. But the sound, I was certain, was on the wind itself. A whispered word that I could distinctly make out. A word repeated over and over.
    “What is it?” asked Stefan.
    “I don’t know… .”
    My younger brother studied my face closely. He has a way of looking deeper into me than anyone. I shrugged. I smiled and said, “Or could just be our imaginations.”
    “No, it’s not. You heard it, too.”
    “I’m not sure what I heard,” I said.
    “It said ‘brother,’” said Stefan, his brows raised, confusion etched into his face.
    “If you say so,” I said and turned and left.
    As I sit here now, with a drink by my side and a need for more blood raging through me, I recalled hearing the single word repeated over and over:
    “Brother, brother, brother… .”
    D. Salvatore

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
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    We were slumming at the Mystic Grill.
    Tom Moore sat across from me, drinking beer from the bottle and watching a group of boisterous high school students playing pool.
    “Were we ever this loud, Max?” he asked. “When we were in high school.”
    “Louder, I think,” I said.
    My best friend, Tom, drank more beer and shook his head. “We had more to laugh about, I guess. These kids today, they’re growing up in a different Mystic Falls. A dangerous Mystic Falls.”
    Tom had a right to be cynical. Three years ago, Tom’s wife, Daphne, had been killed from yet another animal attack. This attack had occurred not in the woods, but while she was jogging through some residential streets, her normal jogging path. Tom had led a search for the creature and had returned with a dead cougar. The cougar had been shot multiple times, prompting many in the community to state that the animal attacks would now stop.
    That didn’t happen, of course. There were still other attacks, and still more big cats were brought in. The local cougar community had nearly been decimated.
    Anyway, Tom was coping with his loss as best he could. I knew he often drank to cope. Hell, I would have, too. I missed Daphne more than I let on. She was a true friend. She didn’t deserve what had happened to her. No one did.
    After Tom drained his first and motioned for another, he looked at me. “You sounded excited on the phone.”
    “I’m always excited to meet you, Tom.”
    “Can the crap. You sounded like something’s wrong.”
    Tom had known me all my life. We played football together all the way from pee-wee up to high school. I was the best man in his wedding and a pallbearer for his wife’s funeral. He knew me better than anyone, but even so, he got it wrong.
    “Nothing’s wrong, per se.”
    “What the devil does that mean?” he asked.
    “Good choice of words.”
    Tom turned and looked at me. He was a big guy, which is why he always played offensive line in football. He raised his eyebrows and asked, “Am I missing something here?”
    For an answer, I raised my hand, palm up. I