I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) Read Online Free Page B

an empty fast
food bag with his foot.
    “But I can drive.”
    “Chill, Yur.”

 
6.
4:12 P.M.
     
    “You do not remember me,” Rainford’s voice
cut the silence in the room, “do you?”
    “I remember you just fine.” Boone was
stretched on the rack, naked save for a loin cloth, all muscle. The
room cold, the lights harsh. “You bloodsucking cunt.”
    “This is the thanks I get.” Rainford sighed
for the benefit of the other vampires present. “Tell me, Wells,”
the Dark Lord spoke to a tall, thin vampire with a crew cut, “Is it
no longer customary to acknowledge a debt with gratitude?” It was a
rhetorical question and the vampire called Wells did not answer. He
stood there gripping a Russian knout, the rawhide thongs raw and
mean.
    “Is it me or does this entire generation feel entitled ?”
    The rack was a rectangular wooden frame with
rollers on either end. Boone—all 250-plus pounds of him—was draped
across it, legs fastened to a fixed bar, his hands tied to a
movable bar, wrists and ankles fastened to rollers. The rack was
elevated at a 45 degree angle to the ground.
    “The fuck should I be thanking you for?”
    Rainford came and stood over the rack,
looking down on him. “Your life, for one.” The vampire made no move
to work the handle and ratchet, to increase the tension on the
chains that secured the hulking young man. “Tell me, how much do
you remember of your little tète-a-tѐte with Kreshnik?”
    “Hmmm, let me see.” Boone scrunched an eye
closed like he was thinking hard on it. “I remember his head
exploding like a fuckin’ piñata.”
    “It is as I hoped,” Rainford spoke to the
other vampires. “His lucidity and alacrity remain untrammeled.
Would you not agree, Pomeroy?”
    Coifed with a pompadour, the third vampire in
the room lisped, “And such a magnificent physical specimen.”
    “I get your dead dick hard, do I?”
    “One of the most terrifying exercises with
the rack,” Rainford informed Boone, “is to force another to listen
to its use.” Rainford’s hand brushed up and down the handle.
“Cartilage and ligaments pop when they snap, like taking a pin to a
balloon. To say nothing of the crepitation of bones. Music to some
ears,” Rainford looked to Wells with the heavy whip, “though not to
mine.”
    As he spoke, Rainford circled the rack, in no
great rush. “I must confess, I do find this whole endeavor quite
distasteful. I trust your dishabillment accords you no great
discomfiture, yes?”
    “Know what I think?” Boone figured the old
vampire was referring to his lack of clothes. “Think you fags just
like seeing me hanging here half naked.” Boone directed his next
comment towards Wells—
    “He does anyway.”
    —and Pomery tittered, covering his mouth with
his hand.
    “Your homophobic jibes might work well with
middle-schoolers,” continued Rainford, “but I assure you they fall
on deaf ears here.”
    “Christ you talk like an educated Nancy.”
    “Touché.”
    “Douche. How ‘bout you’re gonna torture me,
get it over with already. I got shit I got to do.”
    “Wells.” Rainford spoke its name and the
vampire placed the heavy scourge on the floor. “A purely symbolic
gesture on our side, Boone. The laying down of one device, a symbol
of torture and torment, a deliverer of pain and distress whose sole
purpose is to instill fear and dread and break the human spirit—”
Pomeroy had produced a softcover book, an elementary primer with a
capital and small case A on the cover “—and pick up another,
a symbol of edification and knowledge imparted.”
    “You’re gonna teach me to read?”
    “A mere symbol, Boone, nothing more and
nothing less.”
    “You’re gonna what, teach me? The fuck
can you teach me?”
    “I could tell you of a multiplicity of
Russian torture contrivances,” Rainford leaned in. “Not least of
which, from my experience, would have to be the Street Sweeper’s
daughter. Fascinating, yes, but inconsequential at