Vampirus (Book 1) by Hamlyn Jack

Author:Hamlyn, Jack [Hamlyn, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: vampires
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2013-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

50

He had promised himself he would go look in on Maddie Skorenska and the triplets, so he went over there about an hour after first light one morning. He had needles in his belly as he climbed the porch. Bob was tense, skittish. He knew there was something in that house. Maybe Luke suspected as much, but Bob knew it.

The door was unlocked and they went in together. Luke had to practically drag Bob over the threshold. It was clear that he did not like it in the least.

The first thing Luke noticed was that the heat was off.

It was chill in the house, but there was no masking the stale, pervasive odor that was like old cornhusks locked in a dusty barn or books flaking away for decades in a moldering trunk. It wasn’t a putrescent stink as he’d encountered before but one of death suspended and held in check: dry, crumbling.

Bob started to growl.

“Easy,” Luke told him. If he could smell it, he could just imagine what it must have been like for the dog with his hyper olfactory sense. It must have been vile beyond words, a living yellow seam of dissolution.

Bob led him down the hallway and then sat down before a door, looking sheepish and scared as he did whenever he found a Carrier.

Sighing, Luke went inside and found Maddie right away. She was under the bed. He put his flashlight beam in her pallid, grinning face, and knew he couldn’t go through with it. There was just no way. He wondered vaguely what had happened to her, who had gotten to her, but he knew. In his heart, he knew very well.

Anne got to her. You have no proof of that, yet you know it’s true. Anne probably came after the triplets who then came after their mother.

Again, no proof, but his belief was irrefutable. They were all monsters, but Anne was the very worst of them. In Bram Stoker’s novel, Lucy Westenra was a real horror that fed off children, but it was Dracula himself that was the apex monster. Luke hoped that Anne would be as close as he’d ever come to the fictional count.

He put the light on Maddie again.

She was nothing but a fucking mindless leech now, but in life she had been very sweet. He knew if he had to destroy her, that the image of it would haunt him for years.

And therein lay the problem with cleaning out the neighborhood.

They had all been his friends, some good friends and others just acquaintances, but he still had personal relationships with them all and that made it so much harder. When they cried out, it would be like he was hurting them. Maybe Van Helsing in the old vampire movies claimed that you were merely destroying a shell and setting a soul free when you staked them, but to see it, to really experience it, was to know that they died a second time in horrendous agony.

If you keep being

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