Hard Bitten - Chloe Neill [20]
When I’d dressed again in a tank top and shorts, I glanced back at the clock. I had two hours to kill until dawn, which meant I had an hour to kill until my weekly date with my other favorite blond vampire.
My first task—taking care of basic vampiric necessities. I walked down the hallway to the second-floor kitchen, smiling at a couple of vaguely familiar-looking vampires as I passed them. Each of the House’s aboveground floors had a kitchen, a very handy thing since vampiric emergencies didn’t respect cafeteria hours. I opened the fridge and plucked out two drink boxes of type A blood (prepared by the lamely named Blood4You, our delivery service), then headed back to my room. Most vamps were fortunate enough to retain a pretty good hold on their bloodlust, me included. But just because I wasn’t ripping at the seams of the boxes didn’t mean I didn’t need the blood. Most of the time, bloodlust in vamps was kind of like thirst in humans; if you waited to drink until you were truly thirsty, it was probably already too late.
While waiting for her highness’s arrival, I poked a straw into one of the drink boxes and pored through the stack of books that was beginning to crawl its way up my bedroom wall. It was my TBR—my To Be Read stack. The usual subjects were there. Chick lit. Action. A Pulitzer Prize winner. A romance novel about a pirate and a damsel in a low-cut blouse. (What? Even a vampire enjoys a little bodice ripping now and again.)
Even though I’d spent the final hours of more than a few evenings in my vampire dorm room, my TBR stack hadn’t gotten any shorter. With each book I finished, I found a replacement in the House’s library. And I’d occasionally wake at dusk to find a pile of books outside my door, presumably left by the House librarian, another Novitiate vampire. His selections were usually related to politics: stories about the ancient conflicts between vampires and shape-shifters; biographies of the one hundred most vampire-friendly politicians in Western history; time lines of vampiric events in history. Unfortunately, no matter how serious the topic, the names were usually just silly.
Get to the Point: Vampire Contributions in Western Architecture.
Fangs and Balances: Vampire Politicians in History.
To Drink or Not to Drink: A Vampire Dialectic.
Blood Sausage, Blood Stew, Blood Orange: Food for All Seasons.
And the awfully named Plasmatlas, which contained maps of important vampire locales.
Maybe the managing editor of the vampire press was the same guy who wrote the chapter titles for the Canon of the North American Houses, my vampire guidebook. Both were equally punny—and just as ridiculous.
The names aside, let’s be honest—with Ethan running around the House, there were definitely advantages to reading in my room. Was it Master avoidance? Absolutely. But when faced with the temptation of something you couldn’t have, why not find something more productive to do?
Put another way, why order dessert if you couldn’t take a bite?
So there I was—in a tank and boxers—cross-legged on my bed with To Drink or Not to Drink in hand, the rain pummeling the roof above me. I sighed, leaned back against the pillows, and sank into the words, hoping that I might find something moderately edutaining. Or infotaining.
Whatever.
An hour later, Lindsey knocked, and I dog-eared the book (a bad habit, I know, but I never had a bookmark handy).
The book had actually been informative, discussing the earliest recorded instances of a condition the author called hemoanhedonia—the inability to take pleasure from drinking blood. Vamps with the condition tended to demonize those who drank. Add that to the fact that being a “practicing” vampire was dangerous in its own right—humans didn’t usually take kindly to being treated like sippy cups—and vampires began drinking together privately, away from the criticism. Abracadabra, raves are born.
With that historical nugget in mind, I put the book on the nightstand and opened the door.
Lindsey, fellow guard and my best friend in the House (assuming Ethan