Free The Last Vampire by Whitley Strieber

down an eager drain.
    The sleepy-eyed boy looked out the window, gazing into the glowing dark. The prairie grass was dancing in the moonlight, and there was a dark figure moving through the field with a burden of some kind on its shoulder.
    Paulie stared. Who was that out there? But Big Boy wasn’t barking and Big Boy was a hair-trigger watchdog.
    The figure disappeared off into the woods. Tomorrow, Paulie would get Dad and go down there, see what had happened.
    And then came the terror of the next morning and of the haunted life of Paul Ward: Where’s Dad? he had asked his mom. I don’t know honey, she had said. When is he coming back? I don’t know! I don’t know!
    Flash forward four years: Paul is walking along the stream beside their pear orchard when he sees something strange down among the roots of a tree. Again, Big Boy notices nothing.
    Now, Paul knows why. He knows that they secrete a blocking pheromone that makes it impossible for animals to pick up their scent. The remains of their victims are covered with it.
    When he saw the skeleton of his father in a casement of dry and disintegrating skin just like this, he had run back to the house screaming in terrified agony, Big Boy gamboling beside him.
    The dental records had been definitive. It was Dad. But Dr. Ford, their local medical examiner, could not figure out what had happened to him. The state police couldn’t figure it out. The FBI finally issued a report: death by misadventure unknown.
    Little Paulie had become obsessed with secrets. What had killed Daddy? An animal? Space aliens? Nobody knew. Daddy had been strong and big and good, so why had he ended up like that down in the roots of a tree?
    Some years later, Paul had awakened to see a woman standing at the foot of his bed, a woman dressed all in black, with golden hair and an angelic face. She looked at him out of sweet eyes, eyes that made the heart melt. But when he sat up, when he called out to her, she faded like a dream.
    “The woman in here with him was French,” the policeman said, breaking Paul’s reverie. “We have determined that her name was Marie Tallman. She took the Air France flight to Paris. She will be detained there when she gets off the plane.”
    “It was a female?” Paul responded. “You’re sure?”
    “A woman, yes,” the Thai said, his voice gone sharp with surprise at Paul’s odd use of the word “it.” But Paul couldn’t help himself. Paul hated these animals whether God had made them or not, and he was damned if he would dignify them with personal pronouns.
    “Under no circumstances is she to be detained.”
    “Excuse me, but that is a violation of our sovereignty. I am sorry.”
    Paul really noticed the officer for the first time. “Ask the French to photograph her and follow her. But not to detain her.” The Thai smiled. Paul could only hope that they would cooperate. He could not push the matter further, not and risk an inquiry to the embassy about the nature of his activities. The Thai were hair-trigger friends. They did not like CIA operations taking place on their soil without their knowledge.
    At high levels in the government, he was golden. But these cops were strictly low-level, and they didn’t know one damn thing about Paul’s secret brief and his secret powers.
    He gazed down at the remains, almost willing them to speak. But they said nothing. The face was stretched so tight against the skull that it looked like something you might buy for Halloween.
    “Turn him over,” he said. “I want to look at the back.”
    Two of the cops obliged. Paul knew that the vampires used human skin for articles of clothing — gloves and such — because you found such things in their lairs. He’d thought maybe the back of this man would be as neatly skinned as his own father’s had been.
    He’d held some of those gloves and purses in his hands for a long, long time. He’d wondered which of the creatures had worn garments made from his dad. Whenever he