The Blood Racer (The Blood Racer Trilogy Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

Dominion.
              Sparks looked over at me as I walked in. “Uh-oh,” he said, grinning widely. “Fun time’s over.”
              I chuckled. “Just like your days of having hair.”
              Rigel laughed loudly at my comment, but Sparks slapped a hand over his bald head as his mouth fell open. “Immediately, she comes out swinging!”
              “You can’t joke with her,” Rigel said, still laughing. “She goes for the hurt. Every time.”
              “Your face is gonna hurt in a minute,” I said, hopping onto a vacant stool by Nichols’ work table.
              Rigel pointed me and looked over at Sparks. “See what I mean?”
              Sparks got up from his own stool and made his way toward the door, pulling on his long leather coat and shouldering the large mailbag he always carried with him. “All right, I guess I should be going. Got some Rainier business to take care of. Besides, if I wanted to get nagged at all day by a woman, I’d get married.”
              I cackled dramatically. “You? With a wife? That would be the day.”
              He grinned again, his silver tooth glinting from the corner of his mouth, and stroked his scraggly goatee. “Still mad that I turned you down? How long are you gonna hold that against me?”
              Laughing at his own joke, he ducked out the door before I could muster a sardonic response. Growling, I tossed my delivery slip onto the worktable. He hadn’t ‘turned me down’ for anything. Sparks just loved getting the last word. His ego demanded it. He was older than I was, probably by about a decade, so his wit was a little sharper than mine. That didn’t stop me from giving him grief whenever I saw him, though. It was a regular routine with us. We would fire quips at one another every chance we got. I couldn’t do that with Rigel. He was a little too sensitive. He could joke for a minute, but he always ended up with his feelings hurt, like he thought I was serious. With Sparks, there was no danger of that.
              Still smiling, Rigel sauntered over to me with my hydro tanks dragging on the ground behind him. Now that they were full, he couldn’t carry both of them “You’ll get him next time,” he said with a wink. I gave him a playful shove and he slid out the door, managing to hook it with his foot so that it closed behind him.
              With a sigh, I turned to look for Old Man Nichols, who was hunched over a workbench in the back of his shop, soldering some small pieces of metal together. “I suppose I should count myself lucky that I had finished my business with him before you drove my mail carrier away,” he said, not even looking up from his work.
              I rolled my eyes to myself and smiled. “I assumed you’d already got the business out of the way first, and that Sparks was just flapping his gums. That’s kind of his thing, you know.”
              Nichols chuckled quietly. “Indeed, my dear.”
              I exhaled and tapped my fingers absentmindedly on the table in front of me, carelessly toying with various tools and bits of metal. “Well, the delivery slip is here. Signed by Westward. Is there…anything else for today?”
              Nichols paused in his work and raised up slightly. “Just one thing,” he said.
              I suppressed a curse, but I couldn’t keep my shoulders from slumping. Nichols stood from his work bench and made his way over to me, wiping his big filthy hands on the blackened apron that hung off of his neck. On his way over, he grabbed Sparks’ stool and set it down in front of me, taking a seat on it with a groan.
              On most days, Nichols didn’t really strike me as an old man. He