Darkness Returns (The Lockman Chronicles Book 4) by Rob Cornell

Author:Rob Cornell [Cornell, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Paradox Publications
Published: 2013-08-13T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

FUNNY. FOR A girl her age, Jessie had seen her dad nearly killed a whole lot of times. Way more than any girl should. And this wasn’t like, My dad’s a fireman or cop and puts his life on the line everyday while I sit at home doing Math homework. That shit had to be tough, too. But Jessie had actually seen her dad near death on more occasions than she cared to count.

It’s enough to fuck with any girl’s mind.

When you’re a vampire, though, apparently emotion has special power. You reach a point where you can only take so much. Maybe that’s why a lot of the older vamps looked so fucked up, so very far from the people they used to be. Like the ones that looked like pure demons. Like the ones that looked like those winged mother f-ers painted on Kress’s round room.

Shit, she could sit down and analyze this all day. Dad never was one to give her all the answers to the nasty things they dealt with. Protecting her, somehow. But if he knew, even suspected, that what happened to her in that desert dusk in Vegas could happen to her, she would take time out later to kill him herself.

The scream that nearly ripped open the corners of her mouth when she opened it so wide came about from the pain. Pain like nothing she’d ever felt before. And Jessie knew pain. She’d had all her blood sucked out of her and fed back in through her mouth. That qualified as more than a little uncomfortable.

This pain, though?

Probably made childbirth and passing gallstones—those bastions of pain thresholds—feel like freakin hangnails in comparison.

It started low in her back, almost as if she’d twisted wrong, which, after tussling with Teresa the Wolf, would have made sense. It grew quickly, though. And spread as fast. Up from the base of her spine to the nape of her neck. First it felt like her spinal column had turned into a lava pipeline. Then the pain evolved to acid-soaked razor blades all jammed every which way up and down her back.

Had the Raptor Skin failed when Teresa shot her in the back?

Wouldn’t she have felt it before now if it had?

Vamp physiology was a strange thing, though. (She was about to figure out just how strange in a matter of seconds.) Pain didn’t always work the same way it did for mortals. She could take a lot more, first of all. And some things that would have hurt her before she turned vamp would have felt more like an itch to her now.

No.

This had nothing to do with bullet wounds.

The acid razors multiplied by thousands.

Then came the ripping sound.

Not just the Raptor Skin—which was supposed to be near impervious to tears—or the leather. Her skin. Ripping open. She could feel hot blood rolling down between her shoulder blades as if something were drooling on her. Something bigger than any werewolf.

Next came the crackling sound. Like a giant stomping through dry tinder.

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