Free Hunting Kat by Kelley Armstrong

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    I stretched out on the lounge chair in front of our motel room.
    “Basking in the sun, mon chaton ?” Marguerite’s French-accented voice sounded behind me. “You have been doing a lot of that lately.”
    “Can’t get sun cancer now.”
    “No, you just like thumbing your nose at the myth.”
    I grinned. “A sunbathing vampire. So Dracula-retro.”
    She sighed. I tilted my head back to look at her as she stepped out the screen door. Like me, Marguerite is a vampire. She’s been one a lot longer, though. Over a hundred years, though she looks twenty, the age when she died. Eternally beautiful. Well, in Marguerite’s case, at least—she’s tiny with blond curls and big blue eyes. I’d thought she was an angel when I first met her. She was my angel, rescuing me from a science experiment and from parents who weren’t my parents at all, but people paid to care for me.
    That was ten years ago. I was sixteen now, and undead for six months. Marguerite had nothing to do with making me a vampire. That was the experiment, plus a bullet to the heart.
    Marguerite had known what I was all along. That’s why she’d taken me. She’d never told me the truth, though. I found out the hard way, waking up on a morgue slab. I understand why she kept it a secret—she wanted me to grow up normal—but I haven’t quite gotten over it. I don’t tell her that. When it comes to feeling guilty, Marguerite doesn’t need any help.
    “Are you hungry?” she asked, holding out a travel mug.
    “Not for that.”
    She set it down beside me. I could smell the blood, warmed to body temperature. Like that made a difference.
    “You need to drink, Katiana,” she said.
    “It’s stale. Now that . . .” I waved at a man three doors down, passed out drunk. “That’s a proper breakfast. Not like he’d notice. He’s already going to have a killer hangover. A missing pint of blood wouldn’t matter.”
    “You are too young to drink alcohol.”
    “Ha-ha.”
    “I am serious, Kat. Whatever is in his blood will be in yours. Drugs, alcohol . . . You have to consider that.”
    “No, I need to consider what I am. A hunter. I need to hunt, Mags. You do.”
    “And so will you, mon chaton , when you are—”
    “Psychologically and emotionally ready.” I tried to keep the edge out of my voice. “But you’re going to talk about it with the other vamps, right? That’s why we’re going to this meeting in New York.”
    “We are going for many reasons.”
    “But you are going to ask them whether I should start hunting.”
    “Yes, I will. Now drink. We still have a long drive.”
    Marguerite went back inside to get ready. I drank the blood. It was like eating store-bought chocolate chip cookies—I could taste hints of what I really wanted, what I craved, but they were hidden under a leaden layer of foul crap.
    As I sipped, I eyed the drunk guy and imagined sinking my fangs into his neck. Imagined his blood, hot and rich. The back of my throat ached so much I could barely gag down my blood-bank breakfast.
    I know I sound like a coldhearted bitch, fantasizing about drinking some guy’s blood, like I’m brutally nonchalant about the whole vampire situation. I’m not. I have my good days. And I have my bad ones, too, when I can’t get out of bed in the morning, when I lie there and think and worry.
    Am I going to be sixteen forever? Marguerite says no, that the genetic modification experiment was supposed to get rid of the eternal youth thing, which when you think about it, isn’t really such a blessing, being one age forever, never able to settle in one place, make friends, get a job, fall in love. . . .
    What if the modifications failed? What if I am sixteen for the next three hundred years? I think about all the things I didn’t get to do before I turned. Things I might never get to do.
    Even if the modifications took, how would that work? I can’t be injured, can’t get sick. Does that mean I’m