Free Blood Leverage (Bloodstone Chronicles Book 1) by J S Hazzard

fun. With that cheerful thought resonating, I stripped and crawled into bed, kicking the covers until I’d scrunched them beneath my feet the way I liked them.
    After nearly an hour, I gave up. As exhausted as my body was, my brain was too wired to sleep. And then I remembered the key lime pie Nicky had mentioned.
    It had stuck in my mind because I’d never tasted a lime—I’d never even heard of a ‘key’ lime—and if I couldn’t sleep I may as well get another sugar rush out of it.
    It was a sound plan, but it never came to fruition.
    I shrugged back into my clothes and put more effort into my smile this time as I left the room. After all, none of this was Nicky’s fault. “Hey, I’m getting the key lime pie from the freezer, would you like…?”
    Halfway to the kitchen I stopped mid-question as I took in the strangest tableau I’d ever seen. Nicky wasn’t alone, and I’d definitely interrupted… something. I just didn’t know what. Whatever it was, I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t do anything but stare. However I’d imagined a vampire would look, I’d been wrong.
    The woman looked at least a decade older than I, though that meant nothing with vampires. She was of Asian descent and strikingly exotic.
    By exotic I wasn’t referencing the vampire’s ethnicity, but rather her fashion sense. She had black hair with deep purple streaks to match her outfit, which was skintight and made from the shiniest material I’d ever seen. It looked like she’d been dipped in melted plastic.
    In any other setting the outfit would have been shriekingly noticeable, but the effect was strangely muted in the purple living room—another plum in a bowl of plums. (Upon further observation she was slightly darker than the rest of the room, a lone eggplant in my hypothetical plum bowl.)
    On appearance alone I might not have pegged the woman as a vampire, though I would have gawked regardless. However, the fact that she stood behind the sofa cradling Nicky in her arms served as a big clue she wasn’t normal. Nicky dwarfed the dainty vampire and the contrast would have been hilarious if I hadn’t been struck dumb at the sight of her. I was viewing them from the side, but from the front it must have looked like he was levitating over a pair of shiny purple boots.
    Nicky didn’t even realize I was there. I was relieved he wasn’t hurt but he was no help in deciding what to do. It felt like I’d intruded on a private moment and I had a ludicrous urge to apologize.
    The eggplant vampire hadn’t noticed me either, though they supposedly have great hearing. However, I had no problem recognizing the precise moment she did notice. She turned and snarled, baring her fangs and dropping Nicky on the floor behind the sofa.    
    In all fairness to the eggplant, I thought she’d been aiming for the sofa. It looked like Nicky had flipped when she’d meant for him to flop, resulting in a crash that jarred me out of my fascinated stupor and straight into terror.
    The eggplant turned to face me and I bolted for the nearest door, hoping to simultaneously evade Eggplant while distracting her long enough for Nicky to barricade himself in the bedroom. It wasn’t a well-defined strategy—I’d skipped the planning and had gone straight to execution—but it was all I had.
    Unfortunately, the closest door held the forbidden black box and was unsurprisingly locked. Panicked, I spun around and re-aimed for the open bedroom with no belief I’d make it, lobbing the crystal sculpture I’d admired earlier behind me in a futile attempt to slow Eggplant down.
    I didn’t have a precise bearing on her location at this point, but Nicky was no longer behind the sofa and my path to the bedroom was clear. The world’s most flamboyant outfit acted like camouflage in here. What were the odds?
    I raced to the bedroom and was already pulling the door shut as I charged through. A surge of triumph flooded through me as I shot the deadbolt into place