Death's Redemption (The Eternal Lovers Series) Read Online Free Page A

back there. Vampires could not produce their own blood; much like a mosquito, they had to suck their sustenance out of others in order to pass as mostly human.
    Which begged the question, if she wasn’t feeding on the human who was still obviously inside the house, what had she been doing? Vampires weren’t known to run in packs unless they were on the hunt.
    Breath rattled from her lungs. “The woman is ours,” she managed to finally wheeze out.
    He shrugged. “I do not care at all what you do with the carcass. The soul, however, belongs to me. You know how this goes, mosquito. Just business.”
    “You can’t leave me this way,” she gasped.
    “I can do whatever I want.” His smile was pure poison. “But since you’re asking so nicely…” Leaning in, he pressed his palm to the side of the house.
    Every reaper had a talent for killing, but not all reapers killed the same. Some could transform their bodies into killing vapors, literally shooting themselves like an arrow into their prey and ripping them apart from the inside out. Frenzy’s preferred style was much more romantic.
    Using his free hand, he feathered his fingers across her cold marble skin. Hissing, she twisted her face to the side.
    “Shall I kiss it better?” he whispered as the power of death filled him, stretched him until he vibrated with it. The cadence of his voice lulled her gaze back, ensnaring her. Entrancing her.
    Frenzy had always been more of a lover than a fighter. Tipping her face up to his, her breathing ragged from the pain and a sexual wave of intense longing for his touch, she melted into his lips.
    But touching him while ridden by death was like kissing a volt of lightning. His mouth tingled as his power transferred to her. Death’s kiss sank its tentacles deep inside her, rushing through her veins, her pores.
    She gasped, pulling away as her body began to freeze from the inside out. Already pale ivory skin turned an alarming shade of arctic blue, and then cracks slid in large grooves down her face, her neck, her arms.
    “Good-bye, vampire. It’s been swell.” He gently flicked the tip of her nose, and she shattered like a pile of broken marble at his feet.
    Sighing, he stood, refusing to acknowledge that the knife wounds in his sides and back actually hurt like a mother. He licked his teeth, kicked the still-catatonic Lucian in the gut, just because he felt like it, and followed the sounds of wet gurgling inside the house.
    The smells were the first things to hit him. A blast of spring, the scent of newly turned soil and seedling sprouts. Humans smelled of this. The good ones anyway. The ones who went to the light.
    Not that he considered any of them good; as far as he was concerned they all deserved to be thrown into the fiery pit that reeked of sulfur. But whatever, not his decision.
    The squeaking chirp of mice and rats rang like a melody all around him, almost in sync with the wet rattle coming from a few feet in front of him.
    “Bloody freaking vampires,” he growled, fully expecting to find a partially dismembered human with barely a torso attached and full of fang marks. Vamps could be a lot like sharks when in a frenzy, ripping off and sucking clean. The myth that they killed with a love nibble was rarely the case.
    He now knew why their eyes glowed. Vampires could only pass as human when they fed properly. Only by being the parasites that they were could they attain the rich shade of healthy, pinkened skin and the natural eye color of what they once knew when alive and mortal.
    But when a vampire didn’t feed, they began to resemble the monster of legend. The pale-faced, glowing-eyed freaks whose looks gave them away as something other than human.
    The vampires he’d fought tonight had been half-starved. Maybe they didn’t care to appear human because San Francisco was the one city in the world that allowed any monster, be it vampire or zombie, to roam free and unmolested. A vampire did not need to hide his