Touch the Dark Read Online Free Page B

out a way to tell him, there wasn’t time.
    â€œI’m sorry; I have to go.” That wasn’t how I wanted to say good-bye. There were a lot of things I hadn’t told Tomas because I was afraid it would sound like I was coming on to him. And now, when I could say whatever I wanted, I had to leave.
    I started to pull away, but he held on to my hand and his grip was surprisingly strong. Before I could insist that he let me go, I had a very familiar, totally unwelcome feeling creep over me. The muggy night air was suddenly replaced by something colder, darker and far less friendly. I don’t know what nonsensitives feel around vampires, but all my life I’ve been able to tell when they’re near. It’s like when people say that someone walks over their grave — kind of a shiver down the spine combined with a feeling of something being wrong. I never feel that way around ghosts like norms sometimes do, but it hits me with vamps every time. I looked up to see a dark shape silhouetted against the glare of the streetlights for an instant, before it melted into the night and was gone.
    â€œDamn!” I drew my gun and pushed Tomas back into the storeroom. Not that it helped much; if Tony had sent vamps after me, we needed more protection than a simple door could give. I’d seen Tony rip a solid oak plank off its hinges in one movement of his delicate, ring-covered hands, just because he couldn’t find his key and was in a mood.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œSomebody I don’t want to see.” I looked at Tomas and got a vision of his face streaked with blood and his serene gaze empty with death. It wasn’t a Seeing, just my brain coming up with its usual worst-case scenario, but it was enough to help me prioritize. The vamps wouldn’t come in and slaughter half the club looking for me. Tony was too afraid of the Senate to okay mass murder, but he wouldn’t think twice about removing some street kid who got in his way. It was the same attitude he’d demonstrated when he orphaned me at the age of four to ensure himself complete control over my abilities. My parents were an obstacle to his ambition, so they were removed. Simple. And the Senate wasn’t likely to fuss over something that could be passed off as regular old gang activity. Priority number one, then, was to get Tomas out of the line of fire. “I have to get out of here or I’ll endanger everybody. But now they might come after you since they saw us talking. They’ll think you know where I’m going.”
    I dragged him back through the storeroom, trying to think. I’d been a fool to come here, to let them see Tomas and me together. Despite being told otherwise on a regular basis, half the people at the club assumed he was my lover. If Tony’s thugs started asking about him and anyone told them that, they’d torture him to death trying to find me. I should have known better than to get involved, even platonically, with anyone. I was like some kind of poison — get anywhere near me, and you’re lucky if you just die. Somehow, I had to get Tomas away as well as myself and, like me, he could never hope to return. Some life I’d helped him build.
    There was also the problem that the vamp had let us go. I’d seen them look like they dissolved into the wind, they could move so quickly. He’d had more than enough time in those few seconds to strike, swift as a snake, or to shoot me from a nice, safe distance. Vamps didn’t really need guns against mortals, but the Senate preferred hits to look as natural as possible, so most of Tony’s guys carried them. He might have suspected I was armed, too, but I doubted he feared my gun even if he didn’t know how bad a shot I was. The best I could hope for would be to slow him down. No, I was alive because whoever was out there had been ordered to play the game. The obit had said 8:43, and 8:43 it would be. I could