Free Rachel Caine & Kristin Cast & Claudia Gray & Nancy Holder & Tanith Lee & Richelle Mead & Cynthia Leitich Smith & P. C. Cast by Immortal_Love Stories, a Bite Page A

know, you’ll be up to real sentences. . . . Where are we going?”
    Jerome’s eyes glared at me in the mirror some more. The car smelled like dirt, and something else. Something rotten. Skanky homeless unwashed clothes brewed in a vat of old meat.
    I tried not to think about it, because between the smell and the lurching of the car and my aching head, well, you know. Luckily, I didn’t have to not-think-about-it for long,
because Jerome made a few turns and then hit the brakes with a little too much force.
    I rolled off the bench seat and into the spacious legroom, and ow. “Ow,” I made it official. “You learn that in Dead Guy Driver’s Ed?”
    â€œShut up.”
    â€œYou know, I think being dead might have actually given you a bigger vocabulary. You ought to think of suggesting that to the U. Put in an extension course or something.”
    The car shifted as Jerome got out of the front seat, and then the back door opened as he reached in to grab me under the arms and haul. Dead he might be; skanky, definitely. But still: strong.
    Jerome dumped me on the caliche-white road, which was graded and graveled, but not recently, and walked off around the hood of the car. I squirmed and looked around. There was an old house about twenty feet away—the end of the pale road—and it looked weathered and defeated and sagging. Could have been a hundred years old, or five without maintenance. Hard to tell. Two stories, old-fashioned and square. Had one of those runaround porches people used to build to catch the cool breezes, although cool out here was relative.
    I didn’t recognize the place, which was a weird feeling. I’d grown up in Morganville, and I knew every nook and hiding place—survival skills necessary to making it to adulthood. That meant I wasn’t in Morganville proper anymore. I knew there were some farmhouses outside of the town limits, but those who lived in them didn’t come to town much,
and nobody left the city without express vampire permission, unless they were desperate or looking for an easy suicide. So I had no idea who lived here. If anyone but Jerome did, these days.
    Maybe he’d eaten all the former residents’ brains, and I was his version of takeout. Yeah, that was comforting.
    I worked on the ropes, but Jerome tied a damn good knot and my numbed fingers weren’t exactly up to the task.
    It had been quitting time at the plants when I’d gone out to the parking lot and ended up road kill, but now the big western sun was brushing the edge of the dusty horizon. Sunset was coming, in bands of color layered on top of each other, from red straight up to indigo.
    I squirmed and tried to dislocate an elbow in order to get to my front pocket, where my cell phone waited patiently for me to text 911. No luck, and I ran out of time anyway.
    Jerome came back around the car, grabbed me by the collar of my T-shirt, and pulled. I grunted and kicked and struggled like a fish on the line, but all that accomplished was to leave a wider drag-path in the dirt. I couldn’t see where we were going. The backs of Jerome’s fingers felt chilly and dry against my sweaty neck.
    Bumpity-bump-bump up a set of steps that felt splinter-sharp even through my clothes, and the sunset got sliced off by a slanting dark roof. The porch was flatter, but no less uncomfortably splintered. I tried struggling again, this time really putting everything into it, but Jerome dropped me and smacked the back of my head into the wood floor. More red and white flashes, like my own personal emergency signal.
When I blinked them away, I was being dragged across a threshold, into the dark.
    Shit.
    I wasn’t up for bravado anymore. I was seriously scared, and I wanted out. My heart was pounding, and I was thinking of a thousand horrible ways I could die here in this stinking, hot, closed-up room. The carpet underneath my back felt stiff and moldy. What furniture there