Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
“His name’s Kyle,” says Lazarus, “and I didn’t bring him here to be flirted with. I brought him here to—”
“—teach him our ways?” finishes Drake, then leans toward Kyle, voice lowered, lips curled cutely. “Is it working? Are you, like, totally drinking the vampire Kool-Aid?”
The next instant, Drake is slammed against the wall, with a maddened Lazarus upon him, fingers digging into his denim jacket. “I will ask one more time. Is our dinner secured? Or do I have to again return home empty-handed because my brother can’t do his one fucking job?”
Drake, entirely unfazed by the show of aggression, turns his bored gaze back onto Kyle. “Has Laz been treating you better than he treats me?”
Kyle blinks, peering back and forth between them in shock. “You two are brothers? Like, actual brothers?”
“Can you not tell?” asks Drake with humor. “Practically mirror images … except for his generally horrifying appearance. He’s the total life of the party every Halloween.” Lazarus grips his jacket tighter. Drake frowns. “Hey, hey, I got this at a thrift store in town, it’s a one-of-a-kind, watch it!”
Lazarus nearly growls. “Dinner, Drake. Where is dinner?”
“I think you and your fellow orgy entourage can skip a night or two, can’t you? I’m lucky to drink a single person’s worth of blood a week, if that, and I look fine. About the same as your new friend here, judging by his humanlike appearance. By the way,” he asks as he glances at Kyle again, “are you single?”
Lazarus’s fury grows as he lifts Drake off the ground, still pressed to the wall, like it is now he who weighs nothing at all. “Go back inside now,” demands Lazarus, “and handle your four new liberal arts friends before that sun rises.”
“That’s so rude. Don’t you want to get to know them first? One’s Maya Patel and she’s—get this—a cultural anthropology major who is a competitive gamer.” Lazarus grips him tighter, growling. “Then there’s Alex Nguyen, a philosophy and ethics major who was just telling me at the bar earlier how his shelves are filled with works by Camus, Kant, and Nietzsche …”
“And my mouth is about to be filled with its blood,” snaps Lazarus, baring his fangs—a sight that even causes Kyle to step back, “regardless of its fucking major or its fucking name.”
“Federico studies linguistics,” Drake carries on underneath Lazarus’s threat, “which you can greatly benefit from to expand your vocabulary beyond words like ‘fucking’ this and ‘fucking’ that. Also, he’s shockingly well-endowed for a guy with braces and no social game. He let me cop a feel. I did ask first.”
Lazarus drops his brother at once and steps back, changing his tack. “Just get the blood,” he states as Drake smoothes out his clothes, “and we can make it back before sunrise.”
“But you could use a tan,” says Drake. His brother doesn’t indulge him with a response. After one last sigh and a glance at Kyle, Drake finally gives in. “So how about it, hot stuff? Wanna come inside for a quick phlebotomy study sesh?”
Kyle dreads learning what such a “study sesh” entails.
But after Drake turns to head back inside, Lazarus gestures at Kyle to follow him, then heads off himself, perhaps to hide his inhuman appearance among the trees again. Kyle thrusts his hands into his pockets and follows Drake into the building. He passes through a lobby, into a smaller lounge, then down a long and brightly-lit hallway to a dorm room with its door propped open. It’s inside that Kyle places names to faces—Alex, Maya, Federico, and a fourth whose name wasn’t shared. All four have since passed out, two of them on a bed, one on the floor next to them, and the fourth halfway to the closet, body lying akimbo on the rough, unpleasant carpet.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter what their names and majors are. To Lazarus and the others at the Devil’s Mouth, these are just food, these are just blood, these are just its.
“Which one should I do first?” asks Drake. “Any will do.”
Kyle glances at him. “What?”
“We’ll start with Federico.” He steps over Maya, crouches down in front of the one Kyle figures is the linguistics major, lets out a weary sigh. Then he fetches a backpack from nearby, presumably his own, and peels it open. But it isn’t schoolbooks he pulls out—it’s a bunch of medical supplies, including tubes, needles, and rubber gloves, a set of which he calmly puts on. “On a normal night, I’d bring these four lucky blood donors with me so they can be fed on directly by my thirsty aunts and uncles, then returned back here long before they wake. No, the folk you likely met back in our cozy cave are not my actual aunts and uncles, I’m just being sentimental.” Drake pushes up one of the sleeves of Federico’s shirt, fastens a rubbery strap around the student’s upper arm forming a tourniquet. “But seeing as we’re out of night, I gotta do it another way: extracting their alcohol-filled blood and bringing it back with me like it was my plan all along. Call me Nurse Drake. Just kidding, don’t.” He produces a double-ended needle, jabs one end into the rubber stopper of a collection tube, gently taps on the student’s arm to find the vein. “Not my aunts’ and uncles’ preferred method to feast, since most are hundreds of years old and used to the old way: straight from the jugular and sucking out more than a fair share, then disposing of the body. But I find my methods to be humane. Also, no one dies. That’s a plus.” He rubs an alcohol swab over the vein, then inserts the needle with a sigh, rolls his eyes over to Kyle. “Whenever I do it this way, they say I’m ‘bringing home the special red wine’, like I’m a delivery bartender, it’s a whole thing, a whole shtick.”