Dave Carver (Book 1): Thicker Than Blood Read Free Page B

acting like a thousand stupid teenage girls from a thousand terrible horror movies.
    I wasn’t, though. Whatever else I was—and these days I honestly wasn’t sure what that was—I was not a victim. If this intruder, who-or-whatever he-or-it was, wanted a fight, I’d be more than happy to oblige.
    After bending to the floor to pick up my beer, I crossed the threshold into my apartment. I dropped my unused keys on a little table near the door, making as much noise as possible. I whistled softly but with a certain bounciness as I did it. I’m not afraid of you, I tried to get the whistle to say.
    It’s not a concrete sensation, the feeling that you’re being watched, but I promise you’ll know it when you feel it. I think it’s a leftover instinct from when human beings were prey animals, wandering the savannas with the gazelles and antelopes. We needed a way to know when the lions or hyenas were stalking us. Human beings still are prey animals, by the way—but most people don’t like to think about that. I could feel the slight itching on my skin, as some pair of eyes bored into me. There was an intruder in my apartment, all right. I just couldn’t see him.
    My apartment was small: the combined living-room-dining-room-kitchen area took up less than a hundred square feet. The door to the bedroom and bathroom was closed, and since I could still feel the eyes on me, I figured he wasn’t in there. There was nowhere to hide in the main room, but there was no sign of him.
    Invisible burglar. It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to ever happen to me.
    Oh, hell. I hated magic. As best as I could understand, when you tossed the mystic arts into an equation two-plus-two could equal a banana cream pie with chocolate sprinkles. People who were smarter than me had explained that that wasn’t true, that there were rules to magic, just like anything else, but I didn’t understand them, and anything I didn’t understand I didn’t trust. There was none of the hungry, alien vibes that accompanied supe (sorry, that’s short for supernatural ) predators like poltergeists or brollachans, so I thought that I had a human magician in my apartment, concealing himself with some sort of veil.
    I left the door open behind me. Never enter a dangerous situation without leaving yourself an escape hatch. I flicked my eyes around the apartment, taking in the sights. In the six months that I’d lived there, I’d seen the apartment probably hundreds of times. It was all routine to me. The garage sale furniture hadn’t been moved. The last week’s dirty dishes were still piled in the stagnant water of the sink. Nothing unusual there. The mail on the table that served double-duty, part coffee table and part kitchen table, though, was stacked neatly with an OCD-ish precision that was uncharacteristic.
    What the hell? Did I have a break-in maid?
    I took another step into the apartment. A fruity smell drifted into my nostrils. I was immediately bowled over by the scent. It was warm and sweet and pleasant, and it reminded me of a summer’s evening, even though it was late March and New York City was in the last grip of winter. Strawberries , I thought.
    I smiled, then, and sat down on my thirdhand couch. I kicked off my old leather biker boots and put my socked feet on the table, purposely knocking over the orderly stack of junk mail. I twisted open one of the beers from my case and said, “Hey, May.”
    The air in front of my fridge shimmered, like heat lines rising off of blacktop on a hot day. My apartment rippled like that for a moment, before the lines formed into a more or less human shape. The lines solidified even more, until standing in front of my couch was the first woman I’d ever loved.
    Mayena Strain smiled. (God, I’d missed that smile.) She tucked a strand of red-gold hair behind her ear. The sight of her made my heart ache. Not just because I missed her—I really, really did—but because she reminded me of my old life. The