Adrift 2: Sundown Read Online Free

mercy of the rest of the vampires, to beg forgiveness for the sacrifice that had gone so disastrously wrong. More souls might have to be offered—perhaps a lot more—and the Order would find some way to bury it. They always had.
    It can’t be allowed , Herb had snarled. We have to stop it , he said, over and over. The world has to know. We can fight them.
    Dan said nothing.
    None of it mattered. What mattered was gone, and dwelling on the reasons for the loss—or even dreaming up implausible ways to avenge it—was a raw, scraping sort of pain. When he allowed himself to think about her —about that beautiful, terrified face in the darkness—it felt like a part of his mind was being taken from him; peeling away like the burnt flesh on Herb’s injured arm.
    Better to focus on nothing.
    He counted his breaths, trying to tune out Herb’s incessant muttering.
    In, out. In, out.
    He wondered how many more he had left to take.
    In, out.
    In.
    Out.
    Finally, even Herb fell silent, and Dan knew the reason why: the air in the container felt like it was getting thicker. His breaths were becoming shallower, he realised. More rapid, like each inhalation couldn’t quite deliver the required amount of oxygen to his bloodstream.
    Not long now.
    He shut his eyes in the darkness and did his best to think of nothing, letting his final minutes slip away.
    And then the damn doors opened, and scraps of fading moonlight illuminated the interior of the container as a chill wind blasted fresh oxygen into Dan’s lungs. Cold, grey rain fell outside—the tail end of the storm that had ripped the sky apart for several hours—and even before he stepped wearily from the container, Dan recognised the rolling steel of the Atlantic Ocean in the distance.
    He was on another ship.
    Still alive.
    And there would be no peace.
     
    *
     
    Herb was already outside the container, snarling at somebody that Dan could not see. He followed the bigger man out in a daze, stepping onto the deck of a boat that was much smaller than the one he had left hours earlier.
    He shivered at the cold; the rain soaked through his clothes in an instant. He was still wearing shorts and a faded T-shirt; what he had jokingly called his honeymoon outfit less than twenty four hours earlier, when there had been somebody to laugh at his lame gags. When he had been capable of making them.
    Now, his honeymoon outfit was bloodstained; the thin fabric reeked of death and did nothing to keep the biting wind at bay.
    Yet, despite the searing cold, Dan felt his internal temperature rising inexorably; the emotions that he had tried so hard to suppress spiralling beyond his control in an instant.
    Herb pointed a gun at a broad-shouldered man who looked to be in his early sixties. The older man knelt on the deck, his head bowed.
    “I’m not going to kill you, Dad,” Herb said. “I couldn’t. You’re family. Blood . To some of us, that actually means something. I wish I could kill you, but I can’t.” He turned and tossed the pistol toward Dan, who caught it instinctively. It felt remarkably heavy in his hands.
    “That guy can, though.”
    For a moment, Dan just stood there, stupefied. He was dimly aware that there were several people clustered somewhere behind him on the deck. Their hostility when he caught the weapon was an invisible hand that pressed into his back, but he could not focus on them; only on the man kneeling on the deck before him, his piercing grey eyes wide and trained on the gun that Dan clutched in uncertain fingers.
    This, then, was the servant of darkness that Herb had ranted about in the container. Dear old Dad . Charles Rennick, the man who had sentenced the three thousand souls aboard the Oceanus to death.
    The one who was responsible for—
    Dan saw her face in his mind again, twisted by animal panic; dying alone.
    He dropped his gaze to the weapon, watching it tremble in his grip.
    His first instinct was to use the gun on himself; to grant himself the