Chasing Shadows (A Shadow Chronicles Novel) Read Online Free Page A

water bucket, and I took that as a sign that I could move on. Walking through the barn, I turned left and looked in on the chickens. They were clucking and moving around their pen same as always, so I about-faced to check on the pigs in their sty. They were all flopped over on their sides in the shade, so I left them be as well.
    I walked over to the split-rail fence that opened into a paddock, walked across the paddock and over to the gate that led to the main pasture. My six cows and four horses were all out grazing, so I had to whistle to get their attention. The cows, of course, barely looked up, but the horses raised their heads. I whistled again and they started trotting over. As I waited for them I couldn’t help but shake my head, my mind drifting back to Vangie’s visit. Vampires had been on Earth pretty much since the beginning of Man, though the term wasn’t actually used until the 18 th century. Certainly my people had learned fairly early on in their existence that by drinking blood every day, they could stay awake longer during the daytime. For that matter, they didn’t have to sleep at all during the day if they didn’t really want to.
    I shooed Hasufeld away and allowed his brother and parents to pass into the paddock as my thoughts kept turning. Most vampires had taken to living the lifestyle myth and legend had painted for them because of the simple fact that they could walk around at night without the fear of falling asleep at an inopportune moment. Why should they put in the extra time and effort it would take to maintain a human sleep cycle? Why fight the nature of what they had become?
    Still, I had once wondered, why not at least try it—especially if you kept vessels or knew someone who did who was willing to share? Sure, you might have to drink a lot of blood, or at least consume regular quantities throughout the day same as humans had mealtimes, but wasn’t it worth it to see the beauty of sunlight? To smell flowers, or hear birds chirping in the trees? My people had no idea how much they were missing by giving in to their biology.
    After getting the three horses back into their stalls, I made quick work of trimming and filing the edges of their hooves before putting them back outside once more. I then had to tackle one of the most despised tasks of farming—mucking out stalls. I had ten that I had to clear, not including the pigs’ indoor habitat and the chicken coop, which also needed cleared out.
    As I resigned myself to that task and got started, I found myself wondering about Mark Singleton and why he had all of a sudden called about interviewing for the job I had advertised. I also had to consider that while I would be hiring him (if I did) to help out around the farm while I started on another book, I wasn’t going to be able to simply ignore my animals. I’d have to work with him every day for a week or more just so they would get used to having a stranger around. And I wouldn’t be able to go about doing things the way I sometimes did when I was alone. Although most of the time I did the farm work just like humans did—slowly, without using any extra speed or strength—there were days when I just wanted to get it all done and I buzzed around like Clark Kent on Smallville , popping nails in boards with my fingers and pounding posts into the ground with my bare hands. I could lift whole hay bales with one hand and race around the entire perimeter of my land within minutes. I wasn’t going to be able to do any of that with a hired hand on the farm—
    —especially one who would be living above the barn.
    But it was a price I would willingly pay, because the presence of another would be a welcome reminder of my own humanity.
    I was just coming back from hauling the waste of the fifth stall out to the compost pile when I heard a car, and out of habit I stopped moving to feel with my “supe-sense” whether or not this new arrival was of a supernatural origin. I got nothing but the