Undead for a Day Read Online Free

the steam that used to be tempered by the vampire hunts. Like Dawn, he also had a soul stain, seeing as he was an ex-vampire, too.
    The antique ax he’d grabbed from a wall downstairs—the only kind of cozy house decorations ex-vampire hunters probably ever had—added to Dawn’s suspicion that Jonah hoped there’d been some kind of ghoulish attack. He wished. Jonah, more than anyone, was a fan of guts and glory. During the Underground hunts, he had thrown himself into a fight, and the blood, more than anyone.
    “Stand down, Skippy,” Dawn said. “Things are cool.”
    She took a testing breath, expecting the weight of her soul stain to bring her down, just like always. But...
    That didn’t happen.
    She still felt good. Real good.
    Costin was circling her, as if inspecting her. And when she held a hand to her chest and smiled again, he seemed to catch on that something significant had occurred.
    But what? Why? How ?
    “Midnight on Samhain,” Costin said, pronouncing the word like “ Sow-in. ” He came to a rest at her shoulder. “I have lived long enough not to believe in coincidences.”
    Jonah was still holding that ax at the ready. “What’re you saying?”
    “I fear magic has crept into this house, Jonah.”
    But Dawn barely heard the rest of their conversation, because she was slowly getting used to the absence of numbness, of regret, of heaviness.
    Alive , she finally realized, her smile only growing. For the first time in a long time she didn’t feel like the half-dead creature she’d become.
     

THREE
    The Lightness
     
     
    Costin had merged into an all-too-willing Jonah’s body and told Dawn that he was going to the library downstairs, where Costin planned to comb through the tomes that held several lifetimes worth of information about the supernatural. He was especially hoping to find a connection between vampires and/or ex-vampires and Samhain.
    As for Dawn, she got out her cell phone, opened the doors to the balcony wide, then went outside to watch the moonlight play on the restless waves below.
    Kiko answered on the third ring. “What? What?”
    “Sorry for waking you up, but we’ve got some excitement around here.” Dawn’s smile was so big that it was making her cheeks hurt, but in a good way.
    “Cool excitement?” Kiko asked. “Not-cool excitement? What?”
    She could just picture his little person’s body jumping out of bed as he ran for his clothes, their hunting days still with him, even if they were long gone.
    “It’s cool excitement,” she said, glee in her voice. And she’d never really ever done glee.
    To think—she had an inner cheerleader and she’d never even known it, not even when she was growing up and doing her best to piss her life away with every rebellious act she could think of. Of course, that rebellion had led to a short career as a stunt woman, which had led to vampire fighting, but that wasn’t here or there.
    She told Kiko about her stroke-of-midnight soul stain lifting. “I don’t know what’s going on, but how awesome is that?”
    Like Costin, Kiko was on immediate alert. “I suppose it’s cool.” Then, “You don’t think there’s something fishy about your happy-happy-joy-joy thing? This is Samhain, for God’s sake. If it were any other night, I’d just think you accidently swallowed some Ecstasy.”
    She stayed quiet, but, naturally, Kiko didn’t.
    “Okay, what I mean is this—you know how there’re different versions of Cinderella? There’s the Disney take. The squeaky clean, Yay!, glass slipper, everything is weddings and chirping birds—you know, the whitewashing of  just about every other version of the stories that came before. And I’m talking about dark stories where the frakkin’ stepsisters cut off part of their feet so they’ll fit into the slippers, and where those sweet little birds aren’t so sweet at all and they punish those bitches by pecking out their eyes.”
    “Your point is?”
    “That there’s only one