Free Dead Surround - The Julia Poe Vampire Chronicles by Celis T. Rono Page B

collection.
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    “Aye. Those are good books,” he concurred.
    “They squeezed a good amount of liquid from my eyes as well.”
    “I agree with you, though. Steinbeck and Hemingway rule,” said Poe who shook her head at the surprise in Maclemar’s eyes. “Yes, Mr. Caveman.
    I read, too. Whatever I get my hands on.”
    “Good for you then.”
    “So where are you taking me, Maclemar?” Poe asked. She cleared her throat.
    Maclemar scraped the steaming potatoes onto four plates and likewise divided the fish. With care he plunked down a plate where Penny sat, still distrustful of him. The piglet rested her little bottom in a corner and waited for her own plate. The third plate he handed to Poe.
    “Tabasco?” he asked Poe, who shook her head in the negative.
    She watched him douse his plate with over a dozen hits of soylent green hot sauce. He paused before taking a bite of the somewhat raw potatoes and answered, “Right. We’re going to New Brighton State Beach south of Santa Cruz. Sainvire’s people are hiding out there for now. And oh, your backpack and guns are under the bed.”
    “Thanks,” she said.
    After the first bite of the plain but delicious meal, Poe couldn’t help slide the last of the food on the plate into her mouth. She didn’t mind that some of the bits were still underdone.
    Like nothing had ever happened between them, Poe and Maclemar acted like old mates on a ship. It was easier to shut out the unpleasant past rather than bring it up to mutual disadvantage. As a peace 71

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    offering Poe pulled out a bag of colorless cotton candy from her pack to share for dessert. She snuck looks while he ate fluffy sugar. Maclemar’s pretty good looking. If Sainvire has a girlfriend, I wouldn’t mind sailing with Maclemar for a time . The thought wrenched her heart.
    “What were those things last night?” Poe asked, surreptitiously rubbing off grease from her fingers on a beaded Indian pillow.
    “They’re called Revenents,” answered Maclemar, who was in the grips of an unofficial staring contest with the piglet. “They were once blood cattle, dying from iron and vitamin deficiencies from excess blood tapping. Eventually they stopped eating. Because they were no longer useful, newly turned vampires that had never had a go at a live human were allowed to finish them off by ingesting whatever was left of their blood as rewards. Keep in mind that some of these younger undead had never bit through anything but straws to suck on refrigerated bottled blood. It was a rather big production. Then some of these bodies started coming back to life, brain dead and completely untrainable. They died hungry, and they came back ravenous. They’ll eat any living flesh before them.”
    He tossed the cotton candy stick to the wriggling pig. “As you saw last night, they’re only good for sweeping and flushing out. The whole thing’s quite blood curdling, but there we are.”
    “They were effective enough,” Poe shivered, remembering how close she came to being consumed. “If they had two or three more on deck, Penny and I would’ve been chopped liver.”
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    Maclemar’s brow furrowed, his gaze lost in the small porthole with a view of the aquamarine ocean.
    Poe took the opportunity to study his profile. His prominent cheekbones gave his face character while his eyes, jewel green and intelligent, disqualified him from being a Cro-Magnon throwback like she’d once accused him of being. If ever the bottom half of his face followed the same brown hue as the rest of his body, Maclemar would have been considered good looking.
    His lips, though wide, weren’t as full as Sainvire’s.
    They were both tall, dark men, but they couldn’t have been more different. Sainvire had a broken body and a scar on his upper lip that disfigured the nobility of his face. His shoulder was misshapen from a wound he’d attained trying to defeat Franco in Spain.
    Maclemar