Page 20 of Blood and Bonbons

No brainer on that one.

Idly taking another bite of cake, I wondered if vampires fed on other creatures, too. The news never reported non-human vampire killings, though. Hell, they rarely reported human ones anymore. Vena’s parents, who were researchers like Miles, said there’d been a big drop in missing person cases after some of the lesser creatures had made themselves known to the world. The working theory was that vampires were to blame for most of them, and they knew they would be hunted if they kept it up.

However, given the age of the clothes the vampire in the cave had worn, he would have been hibernating through all of that. The werewolves coming out (and all the supernaturals that followed)... The laws that had been made to accommodate them… The public distrust of his kind... He would be in for a rude awakening if he chose to rise again.

I took another bite of cake and continued to skim the information Miles had gathered. While I had no interest in becoming intertwined with the supernaturals, educating myself was plain smart. The more I understood, the more I could avoid the dangers associated with some of them.

Under the papers about vampires, I found random old articles about the first creature sightings. Things probably related to whatever Miles had been researching before our vampire run-in. A fairy in Norway, which I personally felt they should have squashed immediately. A dervish in the Everglades. A troll in Russia. The oldest article was dated almost a century ago.

Absently, I skewered another bite of cake.

Weight tugged my fork when I lifted it and started to tip my plate. Fumbling to steady it, I looked down to see my fork had snagged on something inside the cake. Something that looked like a frosting-covered baggy.

Cringing, I pulled it out and went to the sink to rinse it off.

The water ran down it, revealing a withered and slightly furred shaft of skin inside the plastic.

Gagging, I dropped it on the counter.

“I ate dick cake!” I wheezed.

Another gag gripped my throat and stomach, and I grappled with the faucet.

Gargling didn’t help, so I distracted myself by naming every cast member fromThe Other House,starting with season one. My stomach gradually settled.

“I’m going to kill Miles when I see him. Why couldn’t he be normal and use a toilet tank to stash stuff and not a perfectly innocent cake? And why a shriveled dick?” I asked the room.

I felt another gag creeping in and took a calming breath.

By the time someone pounded on the front door, I had my stomach under control.

“It’s me,” Vena called.

I hurried to let her in.

“I ate dick cake, Vena,” I said, tears gathering in my eyes. “Why would Miles do that to me?”

She stepped in and locked the door behind her. “He’s here? Miles!”

“He’s not here. The cake was in the fridge.”

Vena’s gaze swept the front rooms.

“Forget about the cake, Ev. Where the hell is he?”

“I don’t know.” Her worried expression cut through my cake trauma. “What’s going on, Vena?”

She blew out a frustrated breath and tried calling him again.

“We need Miles.”

“Yeah, you already established that.”

A muffled phone rang from the apartment’s only bedroom.

Vena ran for the sound, and I followed, confused. She pulled his phone from under his pillow and swore. Then she fished his protection charm from the blankets. The chain was broken.

With a sinking feeling of dread, I stared at both the phone and the charm. There was no way Miles would have voluntarily left his house without those. One, maybe, but not both.

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