Moon River Read Online Free

she heard me, I didn’t know. She continued staring at me, sitting there on the rock, her knees pulled up to her chest, head slightly tilted, revealing the ghastly wound that that somehow looked even more awful in death, a wound composed of tens of thousands of glowing light particles. The wound, I saw, was deep. Someone had literally torn open her neck. Yes, she would have bled to death quickly.
    “I’m sorry someone hurt you,” I said.
    She hugged her knees tighter. Her feet were mostly not there. Sometimes they wavered into existence, but mostly, her legs stopped at the ankles. She had been wearing Asics running shoes.
    She’d been attacked in the park, while running.
    As that thought occurred to me, I caught a psychic hit of her running up a trail. I turned...that trail there, which led off down the hillside and through a tangle of gnarly little trees. Yes, she’d been running up there when something powerful had overwhelmed her...knocking her down, pouncing on her.
    And then pain. So much pain.
    And that was it.
    Her next memory was of sitting beside her dead, broken body.
    That had a familiar ring to it. I, too, had been attacked in a different park, while running. Of course, I hadn’t been left to die, to bleed out, as I’m sure this girl had. I had been given vampire blood...no doubt by my attacker himself.
    Of course, I would never know the truth, since my attacker—a very old and powerful vampire—was now dead at the hands of a vampire hunter named Rand. I’d recently had the pleasure of working with Rand and his merry band of vampire-hunting misfits, in a faraway land in a remote mountaintop castle. Lord help any vampire who crossed paths with those badasses.
    Anyway, her plight was familiar to me, even if the end result was far different.
    This could have been me, I thought. Dead and lost and wondering what the hell had happened to me.
    Truth was, had I been killed that night, I probably would have never known what had happened to me. I had been hit hard and ravaged and it all had been a blur...and I had awakened the next morning in a hospital, lucky to be alive.
    Lucky to be able to see my kids.
    This girl wasn’t so lucky.
    Then again, I had a certain fallen angel named Ishmael who had, no doubt, something to do with keeping me alive. Which led to another question: how had Ishmael managed to convince the old vampire to attack me—and to keep me alive? To feed me his blood?
    I didn’t know...but suddenly, I wanted to find out.
    But this girl hadn’t been part of a fallen angel’s nefarious plan to find love, to break his immortal bond with the living by turning a mortal im mortal, thus freeing him from servitude.
    A twisted, reckless way to go about love.
    If it was love.
    I suspected it was closer to an obsession. Anyway, luckily, the fallen angel, Ishmael, had mostly kept his distance. For now.
    “Do you remember who attacked you?” I asked the girl. “What did they look like?”
    She didn’t move, but the light filament around her, the thousands and thousands of light filaments, shook and scattered and reformed. She was sobbing.
    Her attack had been violent, sudden. I knew this. She might not have seen her attacker. I hadn’t seen my attacker.
    Or, if I had, I couldn’t remember.
    But maybe someday I could remember.
    And if I could remember the night I was attacked...maybe a lot of what happened to me would make sense.
    Maybe.
    As she wept, her etheric body shuddering, I saw something else: a bulge at the back of her neck. The bulge was undoubtedly caused by a protruding bone. Of course, in her current state...it was only a memory of a protruding bone. Not actual bone.
    I went back to the edge of the clearing, where Sanchez was watching me. He had been intently scanning the surrounding area, ever the homicide cop.
    “Had her neck been broken?” I asked.
    “ Did the ghost tell you that?” he asked. “And did I just ask you if a ghost told you something?”
    “ You did, and, no,