Vampire Eden Read Online Free Page B

change my mind and hasten your death."
    "Painted fool!" screeched the flaxen-haired vampire.
    "You bad, bad girl," said the redhead. "Now you will pay. Oh, how you will pay! We will tear you into pieces." They shrieked with laughter as they slowly advanced toward me, moving as one.
    Anger rose up within my breast as my life flashed before my eyes. A lifetime of beating, of scorn, of my mother yelling at me as she walloped me with broomsticks and drew blood with her fingernails, of my father drunk and pushing me into the wall with the flats of his hands slamming into my budding fifteen-year-old breasts. A lifetime of begging for the pain to stop.
    No more begging. I picked myself up. Pulling the knife swiftly from my purse, I crouched into a battle stance. "All right. I fought my way through life and I'll fight you until you rip me apart. Give me the best you've got."
    Their leader , the woman with the hazel eyes and emerald necklace, held up her hand and the laughter stopped instantly. "Simpleton. You should fear us. Do you know what we are?" she asked.
    "Sure. I've seen the movies. You're a bunch of vampires. Vampires in Las Vegas. Why not? That's pretty funny, isn't it? Because everyone in Vegas wants to be a vampire. In one way or 'nother."
    "You're not afraid to die."
    "I've got nothing to live for but pain. Come a little closer and I'll give you a taste of some." I prayed silently that my voice would continue to stay steady and not betray the fear choking up inside.
    "Quite a change from the woman pleading for her life only moments ago. I am Aoleon and I am your death. Look upon me, for the beautiful sight I am shall be your last." She smiled and her hazel eyes gleamed. "We like people who aren't afraid to die. We draw their deaths out to the last drop. Keeps our feedings lively."
    "Well, feast away." I spread my arms out wide. "If you'd enjoy a fight, I'd just as soon give it."
    "She kissed Patrick," the woman with raven hair and purple eyes said. "And he did not resist her. Then the whispers began. The whispers of the spirits whose tongues drive us mad when we hunt, to whom we cannot speak but who speak to our flesh bait. Let us keep this woman of the night, so she may tell us what they say."
    "They condemn us," Aoleon said. "What else could they possibly say? You. Whore. Listen. Can you hear their words?"
    "I understand them," I lied. "Do you think I'm going to tell you what they are saying? What good will it do me to help you?"
              "Yes, fool," Aoleon said. "What good will it do?" She lunged in my direction with hands splayed and long nails curled into claws.
    Hushed voices whispered in the air above us, the sound coming from the space between the buildings. Aoleon hesitated and covered her heart with her hand. She gazed up at the sky with wide eyes. "The voices. I used to hear them but I could never understand what they said. They have secrets I want to know. Can you?" She stepped toward me. "Can you hear them speak?"
    "They're saying..." I craned my neck upwards, listening harder to catch the words in their train of murmurs. "They're saying...her undoing. The time is near. The human, the human..."
    I jumped as a whispered voice shrieked my name and the voices spirited away, leaving only the hollow noise of darkness, followed by the usual sounds of the Vegas night. Horns honking, drunken men calling out raucously, the lilting giggles of women, and somewhere behind the walls the ongoing bass beat of dance music.
    "A prophecy," Lucretia said.
    "Prophecy," Aoleon replied scornfully.
    "Yes," Lucretia said. "Of the ones who have come to kill us."
    "For years we had evaded the hunters," Aoleon said. "For years they have sought to do our harm in our last refuge. The only city we can call our own. Come now, ladies of the darkness. We shall leave this woman alive." She turned to me. "I persuade you not with the threat of death, but the promise of eternal life. All you desire can be yours, if you tell