Vampire for Hire Read Online Free Page B

Where people prayed to God and Jesus, where people worried about their kids’ health and Charlie Sheen’s career, where life went on steadily and predictably.
     
               Life hadn’t gone so predictably for me. Life had hung a hard right turn at “predictable” and detoured through a forbidden forest where the Headless Horseman was real, where werewolves existed, where a mother of two could be changed forever into something nightmarish.
     
               I took in more air and lifted my face toward the heavens. The day’s latent heat rose up from the roof’s surface, warming my eternally cold buns. I heard honking and tires squealing. The crash of a fender-bender.
     
               Oops.
     
               I heard a baby crying from the hotel below and the steady hum of a hundred or so air conditioners powering through the warm night. The building beneath me seemed alive, vibrating and swaying slightly. Or perhaps that was just my imagination.
     
               I stood there for a heartbeat longer.
     
               And then spread my arms wide and jumped.
     
              
     
              
     
              
     
               Chapter Six
     

     
              
     
              
     
               The drop down from this hotel was always a little dicey, although jumping from the roof gave me some extra wiggle room. But not much.
     
               I arched up and out over the roof...and seemed to pause briefly at the apex of the arch. From here I had a glimpse of an ambulance flashing down Birch Street, heading away from me. But there was no sound. No sirens. No honking. Nothing. Time and sound always seemed to subside in these moments.
     
               These wonderful, exhilarating moments.
     
               Now I tilted forward, arms outstretched. A falling, inverted cross.
     
               I picked up speed.
     
               Hair whipping behind me like a failed parachute. Wind thundering over me. The hotel rushing past me.
     
               Someone was standing at the hotel balcony, smoking a cigarette. He never saw me. Or maybe I didn’t register in his conscious brain. Maybe tonight he would dream about a curvy, black-haired woman plummeting past his balcony, arms outstretched, and naked as all get out.
     
               I was rapidly running out of floors.
     
               A single flame appeared in my thoughts. The flame burned bright, seemingly in the center of my forehead, no doubt in the region the New Age gurus call the Third Eye. In the center of the flame was a winged creature that would have given anyone nightmares.
     
               Except that winged creature was me.
     
               It was my monster familiar. It was my monster alter-ego. It was one hell of a wicked-cool looking creature.
     
               And it was me.
     
               It waited in the flame, its wings tucked in, elongated head cocked slightly to one side. It always waited for me, ready at my beck and call. My own personal flying demon.
     
               Except I was that flying demon.
     
               As the floors swept past me and the concrete sidewalk rapidly approached, I felt myself being pulled to that creature, drawn to it powerfully, supernaturally, miraculously.
     
               The metamorphosis happened in an instant.
     
               The flame disappeared in an explosion of light and when I opened my eyes again, a pair of massive leathery wings—which attached to my wrists and ran down below my knees—snapped taut, slowing my decent. The gravitational force on my wings was incredible, but this new body of mine was more than up to the task. My arms held strong.
     
               I adjusted my arms and angled forward, sweeping nine or ten feet over the ground and just missing a handicap parking sign. It rattled angrily in my