Total pages in book: 125
Estimated words: 122030 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122030 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
I can’t exactly ask her, so this will remain a mystery for now.
She props herself up on one elbow and smiles at me. “I’m so hungry. When does the food bank open?”
However it ended, she seems satisfied. So I don’t dwell on the blackout. “It’s always open.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“That’s super-convenient. Should we make it a date?”
I look down at her, picturing her getting dressed and me dragging her over there. “No. I’ll go. It’s just a couple blocks away. Hell, this town is only a couple blocks long.”
“No, you don’t have to. It’s almost morning. I’d rather you stay here and keep me warm. You’re like a little furnace, Ryet.” She snuggles into my chest. “I like it.”
Wait. It’s almost morning? I look up at my crappy analog clock over the door and find that it is four-thirty.
Now that… might be concerning. It was early evening when we got here. Maybe six-thirty. seven at the latest. So how is it four-thirty the next morning? And what have we been doing for the last nine hours?
I suddenly have a need to get out of here. To think things over. To try to piece together the missing time. Because I did take some of her blood. That’s the last thing I remember.
And that’s not how this works.
I scoot away from her. “It’ll only take a minute. We have to eat something. By the time I get back, it’ll be breakfast time.”
She lazily objects with a comment about my body heat, but doesn’t stop me when I get out of bed. Just settles into the pillows and lets out a long sigh.
I quickly pull on my clothes and boots, shrug my jacket on, then take one last look at her pretty face as I pull the cabin’s door closed behind me.
It’s snowing, and windy, and bitterly cold.
But it feels good. Vampires run very hot. Scions less so, but still. As Syrsee noted back in bed, we are very warm creatures. So we love the cold. That’s why Paul lives in Montana. It’s winter almost nine months of the year. I’ve seen him get into a heated pool in the middle of February and turn it bubbling like a hot tub just from his own body heat.
I sigh, shove my hands into my jacket pockets, and press into the wind as I make my way towards the tiny downtown of White River. I don’t like the people at Paul’s place in Montana so I don’t go there unless he summons me. And Paul might be a demon, and evil, and selfish, and… well, pretty much every negative trait one can have, he has it. But he’s really not a dick.
Not to me.
Not usually, anyway. That stunt back in Miami with the dreamwalk has me rethinking things. But generally speaking, he likes me. And he hasn’t summoned me to Montana for several years now.
White River is not that far away from the compound. A few hours in the truck and I could be there. And I would enjoy it because that place is actually very nice. I did a lot of the construction work back in the nineties. The main lodge—and it really is a proper lodge, not like this piece-of-shit place—was built back in the late twenties last century. And a couple dozen more houses appeared over the decades since it was made.
I ran the crew who updated the lodge. It’s all high-end log cabin. And there are indoor pools, and outdoor pools, and that little fishing lake. I really like that fishing lake.
Sometimes little bits and pieces of my real past—my real life—will come back to me. And fishing is something I kinda remember doing. It was something I liked. I think I took my boy. I think I had a boy. I don’t actually know for sure, I just know I had a nice family. I feel that to be true. I tried looking up their deaths on the internet because I do remember that they all died. So I do the same search, like the one I do for my name, but I never find anything.
There’s a part of me that knows that Paul has manipulated things so that I will never stumble over this old life. And there’s a part of me that’s grateful for that.
But then there’s that other part of me that also knows that one day he will be lazy. One day he will stop hiding my past from me. One day, he won’t care. And on that day, I will get my answers.
Anyway. The point is that I like the Montana compound. If it were just Paul and me, I’d probably live there with him. I might even like it.
But it’s never just been him and me.
Lucia and Josep have always been at his side. Hidden, in Josep’s case. He never comes out of his cave. And ‘cave’ is the appropriate word here. I had to hire a guy to build him a bunker back in the sixties. That was my first order after Paul brought me to the compound. I’ve never actually met Josep, so it would be very easy to imagine him not even existing.