Bad Blood Read Online Free Page B

Gandalf said, clearly not sure if it was cool.
    Coburn helped him with that. “No, it ain’t cool, you old goaty wizard. Let’s make a deal, you and me. You start ripping these nails out and you let me up and I won’t kill you. But”—he interrupted Gandalf before the old fool spoke—“if you don’t let me out, then here’s my promise to you: I’m going to kill you first. And I’ll make it hurt. I’ll bring pain to you that before now was an impossible nightmare. That’s the deal I’m offering. One time. One time only .”
    “I...” Gandalf thought about it. Coburn could see that. The dude stroked his long gray beard with nervous spidery fingers, and then finally he said: “I better go get Minister Masterson.”
    The willowy old-timer darted through the curtain, the beads clattering against one another. Coburn snarled, yelled after him, but it was too late.
    Kayla, of course, had to chime in, You’d think by now you’d realize: more flies with honey than vinegar, JW.
    The beads whispered against one another once more.
    A man came up to the foot of the table. Coburn craned his neck, put his chin to his chest to see.
    Tall sonofabitch. Oily crow-black hair pulled back. Scraggly beard. Little teeth behind thin lips. Reached in past a shirtless vest and idly itched a nipple ringed in black hair. The guy had a distinct Charlie Manson vibe hanging around him—along with a gauzy haze of hash smoke.
    “You must be Coburn,” the dude said. He had a familiar voice. Coburn recognized it as the one from the walkie-talkie. Like gravel under a wheelbarrow wheel. “Thanks for stopping by, vampire.”
    Coburn seethed. “You know me?”
    “Seems you’re a popular motherfucker, motherfucker.”
    “Masterson, I presume,” Coburn said. Upstairs, he heard sounds: footsteps, people moving around. How many more are there?
    “Presume away.”
    From behind the so-called Minister came the rat-man, Fingerman. He came up on Masterson’s left, clinging to the Minister’s hip like a squirrel. On Masterson’s right came a reedy love-bombed sylph with pink puckered lips and a diaphanous gown with one wine-glass breast exposed as if she didn’t even realize it. She wasn’t looking at Coburn so much as through him.
    “Nice place you have here,” the vampire growled.
    “Thanks, man. It’s pretty well-defended. We got a cushy thing going.”
    “I bet. What’d you dose me with?”
    A voice to Coburn’s right: “Ketamine, bro.”
    There stood the thick-necked Hispanic. Looking like some cracked out PTSD Marine.
    He was eating something.
    Chowing down on it like it was a big old turkey leg.
    It was a human foot.
    Coburn’s first thought was: oh, of course, I’ve been captured by a nest of drug culture cannibals , but then something else became clear: the man wasn’t eating a healthy human leg. Nor a cooked one. It was rotten. Skin pocked by red sores. Muscles mushy like the flesh of an overripe pear.
    “Ketamine’s some bad-ass shit,” the Hispanic man said around a mouthful of what looked to be undead meat. He chewed noisily, tongue smacking. “It’s like a... a dog anesthetic or something. You give someone a good strong dose of it, they fall into the K-Hole. Total dissociation of body and mind. Great for putting the moves on a girl. Get her all loosey-goosey. Once you get her lubed up with that stuff, she’s like putty in your—”
    “Flores,” Masterson said. “Enough, man. Enough.”
    “Oh. Right, bro. Right.”
    “You eat zombies,” Coburn said.
    Masterson nodded. “We do. Some of us see it as a transubstantiation of the flesh thing. Some of us just figure we’ve got an easy meat source out there. Free range long pig.”
    “It’s diseased meat. Which means you have the disease.”
    Flores laughed. Masterson shot him a look, then said: “We have ways of keeping ourselves pure. Don’t you sweat it, man.”
    “You and I have very different definitions of purity.”
    Masterson shrugged. “This is