Even though my apartment’s exterior was the sort that sent most tenant’s running screaming into the night, I thought I’d done a pretty good job of creating a cozy place to call home. Granted, ninety percent of the furniture was hand me downs or things I could scrounge from garage sales and resale shops, but it had its own style. Where I could, I added knick knacks collected during my childhood or while I was overseas with the military. It’d never be featured in Home and Garden, more like thrifter’s anonymous, but it suited me and my personality, which was as tattered and cobbled together as this place.
I propped the bike against the entryway wall and set my helmet on top of it. Walking into the kitchen, I pulled off my light jacket and threw it on the table along with my keys. Since I never ate dinner there, it had become a catchall for my random odds and ends.
I opened my fridge, pulled out a wine bottle and grabbed a glass from the cabinet. The liquid I poured looked like any red wine except a little thicker and not made from grapes. When I’d filled it most of the way up, I capped the bottle and stuck it back in the fridge before grabbing my glass and heading back to the table where I’d set the book earlier.
Now that the matter with Hermes was taken care of, I had the rest of the night to focus on my original plan. I sifted through the junk that had somehow accumulated on the old, beaten up wood.
Where was it?
I know I left it here. This was where I put everything. Especially when I was in a hurry.
I stepped back and lifted a jacket off the pile. No book was hiding under it.
Damn it.
I glanced around. Where would I have put it if not here?
Maybe the living room? I headed in that direction, stopping by the couch and lifting the blanket off it.
No. I didn’t remember being in my living room before heading to Hermes.
I turned to leave, banging my shin on my coffee table.
“Son of a bumble bee.” I grabbed the offending appendage.
I blinked at the coffee table in front of me. In the middle of it, like an offering, sat the book.
How did it get there? And why did I not see it when I was tearing the rest of the living room apart?
My hands were hesitant as they reached for it. Since becoming a vampire, I was much more attuned when unexplained or suspicious things happened, like a book appearing somewhere I did not leave it. Especially when that book had come to me under odd circumstances.
Nothing happened as my fingers brushed the cover. No tingle in my fingers. Nothing bad jumped out to eat me, and I wasn’t magically transported somewhere new.
It was almost a letdown to have it act like a normal book.
I fell onto the couch and propped my feet on the coffee table.
The Uninitiated’s Guide to the Supernatural.
Long title. Sounded more like a field manual than a book.
I thumbed through the pages quickly as I tried to determine what about this thing had caused the book keeper to give it to me for free.
It didn’t seem like anything special. It was just a normal book. One that had slightly disturbing hand drawn pictures. I hesitated on one of a monstrous creature surrounded by a mountain of skulls and wearing a necklace of ears. That was disturbing.
I flipped past it and read the description for another creature, something called a yamabusa. Hm, I hoped I never had occasion to meet one of those.
Enough of this. Time to get to what I really wanted to know.
I flipped to the glossary section and turned to the v’s and looked up the section I wanted, which was appropriately named blood drinkers, before flipping to it.
My heart sank as I realized that only a page was devoted to vampires.
I skimmed the section before tossing the book back on the coffee table in frustration, running my fingers through my hair. All that trouble and for what? Information I already knew. The book only recounted things I had already figured out myself.
Vampires drank blood. Check. Knew that. The sun was mildly irritating to most unless they had been starved or gravely injured or were newly turned. Knew that because of the draugr incident. Usually forced their newly turned, otherwise known as yearlings, into what amounted to an indentured servitude for the first one hundred years of their life.
Seeing the glass of blood next to the book, I grabbed it and chugged, not stopping to breathe until every drop was gone. I sighed as the parched feeling in my throat disappeared, and I got a nice boost of warmth as the blood started working its magic.
