“Saw your girlfriend yesterday,” he said.
I made the jack-off motion.
“Yeah, I was going to say I saw her taking off with Kathan and her sister and I figured she must’ve wised up.” He let out a long stream of smoke. “Shame’s what that is. If I ever get a girl with blood like that, I’ll chain her to my bed before I let her slip through my fingers.” He laughed. “Or treat her like a goddess or whatever we’re supposed to do to show women we appreciate them. I forget.”
I snorted.
“Look, I’m going to ask you a question that’s going to piss you off and you’re going to try to do the macho thing…but trust me on this, Tough, I can beat you half to death while finishing this cigarette and I won’t even miss a puff. Remember all the times freshman year you got your ass kicked for your snotty attitude with the seniors? Well, being a vamp is the same way. I’ve got seniority. So don’t try to start anything. I’m not asking to be an asshole. I just want to know. Okay?”
I gave him a flat stare.
“Fine, do whatever you have to do, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He pitched his cigarette at the other butt on the ground, then crushed that one, too. “What was it like? After you got made, when you had sex with her, was it as hot as drinking off her or—”
Two of his front teeth snapped against my knuckles and his head bounced off the brick. Then my head bounced off of brick, too. My shirt ripped where Finn’s fists had ahold of it.
“That was a bridge, asshole,” Finn growled. At least, he tried to. It’s hard to sound intimidating when you’re lisping. “You have any idea how much dental work costs?”
I tried to kick him, but he slammed me against the wall again. I bit his forearm. It’d only been a couple days, but I’d already forgotten how bad vamp venom tasted. Or maybe my brain blocked it out so I wasn’t gagging twenty-four/seven knowing that burning, rotting venom was flowing through my veins. Whichever one it was, when I tore into Finn, my stomach started heaving.
How the hell did I get this down the first time? I hocked up as much venom as I could and spat it at Finn.
“I was just asking! You think you’re cold now? Freeze your balls off for a few years and you’ll be looking for anything that’ll warm you up! I just wanted to know!”
Maybe it was him mentioning the bone-deep dead-cold that never went away, not even when you stood in the shower with the heat all the way up or laid in bed all day with your girlfriend crying on your face. I quit struggling.
“Just tell me what she is,” Finn said. “I’ll piss off and find one of my own and let you go back to trying to steal her away from Kathan. I just want to know what she is that makes it like…like…”
Like hooking your heart up to jumper cables and revving the engine. Like replacing your blood with kerosene and setting yourself on fire. Like finding out you can kill dragons and defeat evil and live happily ever after.
Finn knew. He’d felt it, too. For a second, pissed-off flared up inside me remembering the snuff film that had been rolling through my brain when I was drinking off Desty. If Finn knew what it felt like, then that meant he’d drank off her. If he’d drank off her, then he’d at least thought about doing worse to her.
But something Tiffani had said when I mentioned Desty’s blood stopped me from going supernova on his skinny-jeans-wearing ass. There’s no difference between humans’ blood. If there was, vamp protectors would eat out a lot more often.
Finn was smart enough to know what that meant—Desty wasn’t human.
Dammit, I’m always too fucking stupid to figure stuff out before it’s too late.
“So?” he said. “What is she?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t had any idea my best friend since kindergarten traded my voice for a dumbass’s magic. How was I supposed to know what the girl I met a week ago was?
“Listen, you little cocksucker, I’ve been sleeping like shit since I drank off her and starving even worse. I drained three tourists last night and all I got was a stomachache. Now, I want to know what—”
I snapped my head forward. Finn’s jaw cracked and his bottom teeth came away covered in my vamp venom. He dropped me and grabbed his mouth.
“Asshole!” he lisped between his fingers.
The thing about skinny jeans is that they make the legs of any dickwad dumb enough to wear them look like twigs. Fragile. While Finn was still wondering what the hell happened, I stomped the inside of his ankle. It rolled. He yelled, then took an off-balance swing at me, but it was more of an afterthought than anything else, like he realized I was about to kick his ass and knew he should do something to stop me.
I swung my fist at his throat. Finn’s eyes got huge, but he didn’t move to dodge the blow, just stared like a ten-point buck in the headlights.
You know how sometimes you get sick and tired of being on the receiving end of the beating? I used to get that way with Ryder. I would do anything I could to get him riled up because being able to make violence happen instead of waiting for it to happen made me feel like I had a little bit more control. The second I saw Finn’s Oh shit expression, I got this rush. It wasn’t the kill-high snapping Jax’s neck or tearing apart that groupie had given
