Finn’s grinning now. “I could let you play with my robot arm like Rylee does.”
“I’m not going to lie… I would love to examine you and see how it works. And this whole thing about your blood has piqued my interest. When we’re done chasing this asshole around, I would like to see what I can figure out. I’m intelligent like ten percent of the time.”
“You figured out how to make it so you can walk in the sun with how young you are. I think you’re intelligent enough,” I say.
“What?” Claude asks as his head snaps around. “That’s right. What the fuck are you doing walking around in the sun?”
Mads waves it off like it’s no big deal and not something that could change the lives of so many vampires. “Ha… it’s simple, really.”
“Simple?” Marcus asks. “You think something scientists have tried to perfect for at least a hundred years is simple?”
“You don’t even have sunglasses on,” Alexei realizes.
“Yeah… if I don’t die, I will tell you. If I do die, I wrote it down in a notebook in my apartment in London. It’s the red notebook. Don’t look in the blue one.”
“Is the blue one porn?” Finn asks.
“Full-on porn,” Mads teases.
“I tried to find Marcus’s porn, but he’s so good at hiding it, I’m pretty sure I’m never going to find it. Woe is me.”
“I don’t need any with you around.”
“Aww, you’re so cute. I would like to say the same, but I read some porny books sometimes, man. There are things… that happen in those books… that… let’s just say they’d make even you blush, Marcus, but I’m still not going to stop.”
Marcus slowly nods, evidently agreeing with that statement. “I… have made the mistake of opening them. I learned things that even hundreds of years of experience didn’t teach me.”
“Right? You liked it, didn’t you?” Finn asks.
“Claude has stacks of porn,” Alexei announces.
Claude gasps. “I do not! They’re magazines of underwear models, Alexei! Underwear!”
“What about the ones with no underwear on?”
“They’re sock models! With them nude, nothing can distract from the finesse of a fine sock.”
Finn seems reasonably confused by this. “They think their clothes are more distracting than a dick?”
“Have you met Claude?” Marcus teases.
“I’m going to teach you how to dress one of these days,” Claude threatens.
Finn turns in his seat to focus on me for some reason. “What about you, Ender? You just strike me as someone who has a sex dungeon. Mads, have you seen it?”
“Noooo, I have not. Ender, why did you take me into the middle of the forest with a madman instead of this fancy sex dungeon of yours?”
“I took you to a dungeon. I just forgot the ‘sex’ part of it.”
“No. I very much didn’t enjoy that one. That dungeon wasn’t very fun at all!” Mads says as he rubs his stomach where he’d been stabbed.
“I keep forgetting you’re not much older than me,” Finn says to Mads. “I just… it’s like you being a vampire automatically makes me think you’re an old fucker like Marcus.”
“My life before all of this was quite boring. I taught secondary school for about five years before switching to university and that’s it. Fun, eh? This one time… I didn’t eat in my classroom, I ate in the teacher’s lounge. Wild of me, eh?”
“You seriously would pass up an opportunity to talk nonstop?” I ask in disbelief.
“But I was talking all day to my students, so I liked my quiet lunch break,” he explains.