Read Darkness Returns for Free Online

feel better. But there were more dangerous things out there than French Quarter vampire clichés. In fact, she knew personally the most dangerous vamp of them all. One that should have been put down a long time ago.
    Going after her, however, would take more than a gang of fleshy bikers. It would take a group with real power. A group that knew what they were doing. And one she could convince to help her.
    In other words, some friendly supernaturals.
    But she had severed her ties with the friendlies. The ogres, the gnomes, the merefolk, and all the oddball in-between things that didn’t have names or mortal folklore to describe them, but who had gathered together to fight the threat of a vampire army. Lockman’s people. The ones, Teresa heard, he had led into battle and got killed.
    No friendly supernaturals left.
    Teresa stopped on the corner of an intersection. She had no idea of the street names. Instead of blues bars and Cajun restaurant, pawn shops and voodoo boutiques lined the sidewalks, most of them with metal grates or steel doors pulled over their storefronts. One of these solid storefront shields had the “A” for Anarchy symbol spray painted on it in deep red. The paint ran like blood from the A’s feet and the ring around the letter. Instead of anarchy, though, it made Teresa think of Alpha.
    One of those subconscious clues that sometimes drops into the conscious mind and rattles like cast bones. All at once, it seemed, Teresa knew what she could do to recruit the muscle she needed and take out the world’s most dangerous vampire.

Chapter Five
    As the van pulled through the gate leading to the hospital grounds, Jessie glanced at her reflection in the mirror on the visor again. She couldn’t help it. The team back at headquarters had done an amazing job. Guys Kress knew from the movie world, apparently, and they could work magic with makeup and effects as stunning as any display of her own real magic power—except maybe when she turned those werewolves inside-out.
    Her dad sat behind the wheel, face illuminated by the lights from the dashboard, and glanced at her as she admired herself. He hadn’t said anything about the work they’d done, but she could tell it freaked him out. After all, she looked exactly the same as she had before getting turned into a vampire. No matter how hard she scrutinized herself in the mirror, she could almost convince herself all the vampire stuff had never happened. They’d even done a trick with her fangs, capping her teeth so that they all matched up and looked normal.
    Jessie smiled at herself.
    An electric ping shot up from her belly to her chest.
    I’m me. I’m a normal teenage girl.
    “You all right?” Craig asked, directing the question at her, but maybe she should have been asking him that.
    “I’m great,” she said. “This is unbelievable.”
    “It’s just makeup, Jess.”
    She sighed from way back in her throat. “Do you have to poop on every parade? You’re like a freakin seagull sometimes.”
    He pulled the van up in the circular drive in front of the hospital, a white building about a dozen stories tall, that looked like it was made out of stone Legos, all blocky and straight. Jessie had pictured something more like the haunted asylums from the movies. An old, sprawling mansion kind of deal. Maybe a pair of stone gargoyles standing sentry on either side of the entrance. Instead, the hospital had a trash bin and one of those old cement ashtrays with a sign on it declaring this a “Smoke Free Zone.”
    In other words, this was just a plain old hospital.
    Jessie peered up at the rows of windows in the building, wondering which might belong to Ryan’s room. A sparse sprinkling of snowflakes fluttered out of the dark sky, most of the flakes melting an instant after touching down. All of a sudden, as if switched when her dad put the car in park, the happy buzz over her appearance gave way to a nauseous pit in her gut.
    “I don’t think I can do