Read Depraved (Tales of a Vampire Hunter #2) for Free Online

like in books and movies
where vampires are in every club and every high school.”
    Miranda laughed softly. “Do you think humans know on some
level that vampires really do exist, and are scared but also intrigued like
they are with fairies and leprechauns, and that’s why they write about them so
much or do you think vampires are the ones creating some of those stories?”
    “A little of both probably. Some writers know a bit too much
about how vampires operate and others are just copying from stories and movies
that came before.”
    “But you don’t hear a lot about vampire hunters, unless
you’re a vampire. That’s interesting.”
    “There was that Buffy chick on TV. Did you ever watch that
show?” Oliver smiled, remembering how, as a child, he’d watched reruns hoping
to learn something about his kind until his mother made him stop.
    Miranda laughed and shook her head. “Before my time.
Anything in it that seemed real?”
    “No. Totally made up. She could seriously kick some ass
though. I thought that was cool. Took karate for a while because of it.”
    “That could come in handy.” Miranda laughed softly, leaning
over and running her hands down the muscles of his arms.
    “She had human sidekicks and that really pissed my mom off.
She always stressed how important it was for us to operate in secrecy.”
    “Wouldn’t it have made more sense to involve humans?”
    “I always thought the same thing. Why not tell people about vampires and hunters? If
there aren’t that many vampires, we could have wiped them out by now with
human’s help.”
    “When you put it that way, I’m glad it’s a secret.” Miranda
wrinkled her nose at him.
    “Let’s stick to what’s real.” Oliver kissed her forehead.
    “What we think is
real,” she reminded him, smiling a crooked little smile.
    “Okay. So, there are not many vampires. They’re all clans
like yours, mostly family related by blood, with a few like you they created.”
    “No one’s like me, except maybe you.”
    “For all we know, there could be others like us. Maybe they
just wanted us to think we were the only ones.”
    “They sure acted like we were important to whatever their
real plans were,” she said.
    “Agreed. I don’t think they would have gone to the trouble
they did if we were a dime a dozen, but if I learned there were more like us I
wouldn’t be shocked.”
    “Me either. Okay, back to what we do know. Vampires bite
people, give them their blood and some turn into vampires as a result, but not
all,” she reminded him. “I wonder why not?”
    “We’re doing vampire hunters now.” Oliver chuckled. “But
that’s something else we should think about. When we were in the catacombs and
my mom was talking, remember when one of the vamps said something about their
kind dying off?”
    “I got the feeling they wanted our blood as some sort of
antidote for their problem. One of them said it would only take a drop, and
there’d be enough to go around.”
    “When I was a kid, a couple of times, they took blood from
me. Did that ever happen to you?”
    “In a way, Sage took it when she turned me into a vampire,”
Miranda said. She frowned. “Once, when I was a teenager, I had to have a
transfusion, but they just gave me blood.”
    “That’s pretty serious. What happened?”
    “We were in a car accident, my foster mom and me. I had
internal bleeding. My dad said I almost died, but they’d saved me with surgery
and blood transfusions. Do you think that was staged? Like, they ran our car
off the road, cooked up something with doctors at the hospital? That sounds
crazy too but could they have done something like that?” Her voice was high and
thin.
    Oliver wished he could deny the possibility, just to make
her feel better. “It’s possible. But why would they go to all that trouble with
you, to make it seem like an accident instead of just taking your blood, the
way they did with me?”
    “Did you say you started noticing your