The Slayer Chronicles: First Kill Read Online Free Page A

your fingers until there’s nothing left to grasp. Now tell me ... what was the weapon that cut Cecile?”
    Inside the memory of that night, Joss looked up at the man’s face, but it was just a gray fog. As his uncle had suggested, he took a deep breath and relaxed. Slowly, the fog began to lift, revealing the man’s mouth. And horrible, blood-drenched fangs. Joss gasped and locked his eyes with his uncle’s. “Fangs! It had fangs. That man . . .”
    He didn’t know how he could have forgotten such a critical detail of the event, but now he knew why he’d considered Cecile’s murderer a monster. Not just because the man had killed a child, but because the man wasn’t really a man at all. He was a monster, a creature, a thing. Joss’s heart raced in terror. What if it came back? What if it wanted to finish Joss off, too?
    Abraham sat there in quiet contemplation for a moment, before giving Joss’s back a gentle pat. After another moment of silence, he stood and moved down the aisle to the coffin. He’d come here to pay his respects and had somehow gotten wrapped up in his nephew’s newly bloomed madness. Clearly, he wanted to get out of here as soon as possible. Joss didn’t blame him.
    But to Joss’s surprise, moments later, his uncle had returned to his seat beside Joss. Abraham nodded. “It seems you are correct, Joss. Some thing , not some one , did take young Cecile’s life. I suspect the guilty party is a vampire.”
    Joss looked at his uncle, trying to gauge whether or not Abraham was playing some sick joke on him at his sister’s funeral. All he saw was complete honesty and understanding. But his mind couldn’t shut out the questions it begged. “How can vampires possibly be real? And how could we not know about them all this time?”
    Abraham’s eyes were on the mourners as they passed by Cecile’s coffin. Joss should have been up there, too, but he just couldn’t bear it. Maybe Abraham understood that. Or maybe he was just waiting until they finished their conversation to see if Joss would go. “Do you know how big snakes get? Or how many grains of sand are in the deserts? Or exactly what lurks on the bottoms of the oceans’ floors?”
    Joss thought about each query. He dug deep into the recesses of his mind, but came up empty. “No.”
    “Well, if you can’t answer those simple scientific queries, then what makes you think that mankind is smart enough to discover vampirekind’s existence?” Abraham raised an eyebrow at his nephew then. He’d made a valid point.
    Who was to say that humans knew all that there was to know about our planet? Joss thought about the so-called scientific evidence behind vampirism that he had read about in the books at the library. So much paranoia, so many graves dug up, all because corpses would bloat, making their bellies look full, while gums shrank, making their incisors appear as fangs? Joss hardly thought so. It sounded like a lame attempt at an explanation to him.
    So maybe his uncle was right. Maybe vampires really existed. Maybe one had killed his sister.
    “I have connections to that world, if you want justice, Joss.” Abraham’s chin was strong, his jaw set, as if he very much wanted justice for Cecile as well. “All you need to do is swear on it. Swear on your dedication to taking those monsters down, and I will give you every tool you require to do so.”
    Joss looked down at the picture in his hand before allowing his eyes to trace along the room to the white coffin at the other end for the first time. He swallowed hard and said, “I swear.”
    Abraham leaned closer, his voice just above a whisper. “We are called the Slayer Society, and you now belong to us. We’ll train you. We’ll protect you. We’ll be closer to you than any family could. I can’t begin training you yet—the rules dictate that you must first be eighteen years old before that can happen. But in the meantime, you should start honing your natural skills.”
    “But I