Dark Rides Read Online Free Page B

something like this: You okay? Yeah. Love you. Love you too. Etc. Oh, and somewhere in that glance, he also warned me to keep the knife and gun handy, which I wasn’t about to give up anyway.
    “We should go,” Jeremy said, as Michael blurred off through the open doorway. “Don’t want my boss man here to remember anything.”
    He was right, but I felt bad leaving – Michael hadn’t said to stay put, but I was uncomfortable with the idea he might not be able to immediately locate me if I got into trouble. Because Jeremy was trouble. He gave off a kind of dark smoke around him – something shadowy in my peripheral vision, as if he clouded himself with it. I had to concentrate and watch him straight on to feel he was there at all. Useful skill, probably, but really scary when I felt like the warm-blooded prey to his cold-blooded, hungry predator.
    He kept his word, though. He didn’t touch me, and he walked about three paces ahead, knowing I didn’t want him at my back. Once we were out of the room, though, I stopped, because I’d totally forgotten that this was a dark ride … that I’d only found this room in the first place because of Michael’s dark-adapted eyes.
    I couldn’t see a damn thing.
    I heard Jeremy’s faint, whispery chuckle from a few feet away, and I saw a flash of something that might have been his eyes. Creepy.
    “No flashlight?” he asked. “Should be one on the dead guy.”
    I went back for it, and didn’t look at Mr. Batty’s face while I pilfered it out of its holster. It was a heavy Maglite, which was good – one more weapon, though I had to put away the gun to hang on to it. The knife was of more use against Jeremy, anyway.
    The Maglite had a brilliant beam, and it revealed all the monsters in their tacky glory – Dracula, in his threadbare cloak and dusty coffin; the Wolfman, whose fake fur was molting away; a large spider overhead made of Styrofoam and cloth and real spiderwebs, recently woven by some very ambitious arachnid. The place was filthy, and full of rats and cockroaches, and I was real glad of my stomping boots, again.
    The worst, most real monster in here was Jeremy, who looked the color of exposed bone, and whose eyes were as alien as anything you’d find on earth. His smile was something he’d learned, not something he felt, and even though he was small and wiry and looked pathetic in his baggy khaki pants, I was so afraid of him it was hard to breathe.
    But he kept his word.
    We made it out, into the cold, sharp wind; overhead, the rusty Grim Reaper creaked as he swayed. I saw nothing moving outside except some rolling tumbleweeds and blowing trash.
    Jeremy walked off a few feet, then stopped, staring up at the sky. He closed his eyes, and took in a deep, slow breath, as if he wanted to drink in the world around him. For that moment, he looked his physical age – I had no idea how old he really was, but he looked maybe a growth-spurt thirteen, maybe fourteen. Really young to become a vampire, but depending on when that had happened, thirteen or fourteen might have been adult, pretty much.
    But my heart went out to him, anyway. He’d been locked away in a cage for peoples’ entertainment, for God’s sake. No matter how scary he was, how divorced from human emotions, he didn’t deserve that. Nobody did.
    Jeremy said, without opening his eyes, “You’re wondering how old I am.”
    Well, THAT was uncomfortable. “Yeah,” I said. “Kinda.”
    “I died when I was fourteen,” he said. “But that was a really long time ago. I’m not a kid.”
    “I guessed.”
    “You know I could kill you and be gone before your boyfriend could catch me, right?”
    “Husband,” I said, and held up my left hand, because I knew that even in the dark he could see the ruby wedding ring. “Newlyweds.”
    I’d managed to surprise him, a little, because it looked like his eyebrows rose up just a touch. “Huh,” he said. “So you’re one of those who thinks vampires are some