Free Nightlord: Sunset by Garon Whited

but it’s at least as thorough and certainly more entertaining.  Once we were clean again, we ambled down to breakfast.  Sasha insisted on cooking and I didn’t argue—her kitchen, her house, her food.  And her skill; I can open packages and read directions.  That’s about it for me, but I can follow directions really well.  It still doesn’t make me a cook.
    We ate a good-sized breakfast.  It wasn’t as much as I remembered; it was merely a very large breakfast.  Big, hungry men who stuff themselves eat about that much.  It was odd to watch Sasha’s slender form wolf down eggs and sausages and toast with such gusto, though.  Now I know why!  The body still needed to have something to use to replace lost mass.  The energies we absorb give us supernatural strength and regenerative abilities, the blood stokes the furnaces of our physical forms, but we have to have the materials to run through the forge.
    A dayblood that spends a lot of time regenerating needs either a lot of blood on hand that night, or he’ll have hell to pay in the kitchen, later.
    After breakfast, we repaired to the library.  Sasha introduced me to a selection of manuscripts—some a bit charred around the edges—she had rescued from her lord’s home after the mob tried to burn it.  They were his notes on How Stuff Works for daybloods, and a few notes on nightwalkers.  Most especially, his notes on magic.
    Okay, let’s talk about the magic.
    I spent the day reading a crabbed, cramped, nasty handwriting that had an ugly habit of using Old English lettering in a cursive hand.  It was enough to make me think longingly of calculus.  But I read until my eyes crossed and took a few notes of my own.
    Magic.  I’m a vampire—now!—and I still have trouble watching magic do things, visible things, things you can watch and go “Wow!” about.
    Let’s not go into a lot of theory.  Maybe later, if I need to explain to someone, I’ll write more down.  The basic idea is that there is energy in everything.  All sorts of energy, all sorts of things.  It just takes a special sort of interaction between chaos dynamics, the uncertainty principle, quantum theory, and the functions of consciousness.  Apparently, most people can’t achieve the necessary brain function; those few who can need to be in an altered state of consciousness called “casting a spell.”
    What happened to me?  I became a dayblood.  This did interesting things to my nervous system and, as Travis noted, my brainwave patterns.  I was effectively in a permanently altered state of consciousness—and one apparently ideal for that sort of thing.
    For example, while I was leafing through a particularly difficult piece of a folio, the lights came up.  I said thank you to Sasha.  When she didn’t say anything in return, I looked, but she was nowhere to be seen.  Coincidence, right?  She just turned the lights on and left?
    Okay.  Try this.  I was twirling my pen in my fingers, like a baton.  I dropped it.  Just because my reflexes are suddenly insanely fast doesn’t mean I’m more coordinated!
    It clattered across the desk, and I reached for it instinctively.
    It jumped into my hand.
    Still not believing?  It gets better.
    I held the pen on the palm of my hand and thought about it.  It rose into the air.  I held it there.  I could feel sweat starting on my brow.  I let go of it and it fell back to my hand; I had a slight headache.  I had been lifting the physical mass of the pen with just my own little grey cells.
    Not bad for a first try.
    So I read, and kept reading.  I wasn’t sure where Sasha was—she’d said something about dealing with the real world, and I hadn’t insisted she stay.  I was distracted by tomes of arcane lore.  I’m a reader and always have been.
    Whoever this guy had been, I respected him.  He was sharper than a serpent’s tooth.  There were drawings of things da Vinci might have imagined.  He wasn’t an artist by any