Crimson Vengeance Read Free

hundred miles to the east was the city of Spokane, and it was there the vampire appeared to be heading. Colin would be right behind her before the sun set.

    It was five o’clock by the time he’d stopped for something to eat and then revisited the other drop sites for one last look around.
    He kept hoping something would come to him but it didn’t. He still wasn’t sure why this place. The day didn’t have enough hours left to figure it out either.
    Colin got back into his car and, after checking his navigator, had the address of the coroner’s office in the center of the town. He put the car in gear and started to drive away from the park. He’d need to get into the place before dark to make sure the locals didn’t get a nasty surprise.
    Just a few blocks down Stratford Road, he made a U-turn to head back in the direction of the freeway. He almost missed it, then caught it out of the corner of his eye—the coroner’s van heading south toward the on-ramp of I-90. When he closed the gap, he could see the driver was the same woman who’d been down on the dock earlier. The same one who secured the body bag. The van pulled onto the freeway headed east. He followed, keeping enough distance between the van and his car to avoid arousing suspicion. Not easy, considering the driver of the van wasn’t exactly keeping to the speed limit. Getting pulled over wouldn’t be good. It also wouldn’t be good if he lost sight of the van. He pressed the accelerator.
    “Slow down, will ya,” he muttered.
    There was always a chance the body from the lake was back at the morgue in Moses Lake and he was now in the process of chasing his tail, although he really didn’t think so. His gut told him the two things he sought were right in front of him: one, in the back of the van, and the other, somewhere in the heart of the city ahead. He kept his speed up and the van in sight.
    Colin yawned and rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand.
    Man, he was tired, and much more than just physically. His neck ached, his eyes burned, and his arms were leaden.
    His spirit was weary as well. He was tired…mind, heart, and soul weary. The journey had been long and, thank God, was now about done. Truthfully, he’d be both relieved and lost. His entire life had been about the hunt, but what would he do once he completed it? He didn’t have the answer. He wasn’t sure how to live in a normal world where creatures that hunted in the night didn’t exist. His reality was shrouded in mist and mystery, blood and fangs, death and undeath. It was almost impossible to even try to remember what life was like before.
    It didn’t matter. He’d worry about it later. First, he needed to finish what he’d started when barely in his teens. It was all he really knew how to do anyway. So, he kept his eyes on the van ahead and followed it toward the mountains, the pine trees, and the mighty Spokane River.
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    Folk legends were simply that: legends. They had little to do with reality. Or, so most people wanted to believe. Doctor Riah Preston was both a folk legend and a reality. She was a creature of the night and over five hundred years old.
    Riah was a vampire.
    She didn’t like it—not that she’d had a choice. She was turned without so much as a word on a gray, foggy winter night many centuries ago, just as she was offered under a veil of secrecy to satisfy a gambling debt when she was a newborn. Life had never given her choices, and it didn’t give her one now. That was the one constant in her life.
    Ivy’s call today wasn’t completely unexpected. For some time now she’d feared that more would come to leave their discarded victims like trash throughout the county. She could almost hear the whispers on the night air, the sounds of discontent in the fabric of her reality.
    And, there were the calls from those who were not part of the darkness but were touched by it nonetheless. People with knowledge they should never have needed to possess, like