Free Replica (The Blood Borne Series Book 2) by Shannon Mayer, Denise Grover Swank Page B

eyes. A few beats of silence passed between us, and then she smiled a slow-growing grin I didn’t like.
    “Oh my God. You think Ivan kissed me? Girl, he is so not my type. Irritating as hell is about all he is to me.”
    My jaw ticked, but I struggled to keep eye contact with her. I finally put a hand to my forehead. “ Madre de Dios , what wrong with me? Hundreds of years and I’ve never been affected like this.”
    “Not even with Calvin?” Ever the journalist, she asked the one question that cut to the heart of it.
    “No. Not even with him. That was...slow.” I shook my head, remembering all too vividly the scent I’d picked up right before the restaurant had blown up. Time to change the subject, and I’d have to do it rapidly to avoid the girl talk we were falling into. “I don’t think Calvin is dead. I caught wind of him and then it disappeared just as quickly right before I ran into trouble.”
    Rachel crossed her arms, her blue eyes hard as ice in the dead of winter. “What kind of trouble?”
    “The usual. Explosions, demon dogs, and monstrous flames. No way out.”
    She swallowed hard, her throat bobbing. “If he’s a vamp, would he really turn on you?”
    I closed my eyes and searched my heart well and truly for the first time, letting myself see Calvin for all his flaws as well as his strengths. “He will hate me for not killing him, with the passion only a true zealot can have. So, yes. He could turn on us.” I opened my eyes and let out a long breath. “He knows my ways, knows how I do things. Calvin would be the perfect vampire for them to set on us.”
    “Well, that’s just fucking great, isn’t it?” Rachel spat out as she began to pace again.
    I leaned back against one of the broken pillars. “Who gave you the stake?”
    “Some guy.” She raised her left hand to her lips again—an unconscious gesture. So. The man who’d given her the stake had also kissed her. Her face pinked up again, but I didn’t pursue that line of questioning. There had to be some give and take in the trust department, on both sides, for our partnership to work.
    “Where’s the vampire you were going to bring back for questioning?” Rachel half turned toward me.
    “They’ve all fled the city. Except for Calvin, and I have little hope of finding him until he’s ready to be found. Since Ivan is following the contact, I assume that means you got nothing.”
    Rachel dug into the bag hanging at her side and pulled out an envelope. “Not nothing. But not everything I’d hoped for, either.”
    I took it from her and flipped through the contents. A couple of pictures, one of them with coordinates written on the back, and a phrase that meant nothing to me.
    “This is where we’ll find Stravinsky.” I tapped the back of the picture, holding it with the coordinates. “This just confirms that we’re on the right path.”
    “That would make the most sense. It almost feels too easy, though. Like a trap.”
    I snorted softly, memorizing the coordinates and the phrase before I tucked the documents back into the envelope and handed it to Rachel. “Life is a trap, my friend. It’s how you handle the snap of the killing blow that determines if you are the prey or the predator.”
    “Lea,” the way she said my name should have tipped me off, “why do you hate vampires so much? Not that I’m against going after them, but I met Louis. He wasn’t a bad guy. And while you’re a crazy-ass bitch when it comes to fighting, you don’t go around killing vamps left and right. They can’t all be bad.”
    “No? Do you know that for the first fifty years of a vampire’s life, the blood lust is nearly uncontrollable? They’ll feed on anyone without thought unless controlled by a master vampire. Louis was only as polite as he was because whoever made him had a tight hold on the reins. One slip, and he would have been on you and Calvin in an instant.”
    “Then why didn’t you kill him?” she asked.
    “Because I