Free Dead Certain (Eve Benson: Vampire Book 3) by P. S. Power Page A

Cow, of course, but it isn’t too expensive, or anything. If you had that
here, would that make any difference?”
    Eve schooled her face, but didn’t
say anything for the moment, waiting for the angry rationalization, for the man
to growl about how unfair it was that they couldn’t eat people anymore. It was
kind of the common line, after all. Even she’d heard it, while selling blood to
people each night, and that was from the ones putting up with the rules.
    Instead there was a long pause,
as they kept moving down the street. That surprised her a little bit, since
there was a lot of bright colors there, and it wasn’t a drab or particularly
dirty place really. No worse than Washington D.C. and the colors of the
buildings were better here. They had bright reds and golds in places, along
with blues and greens. Things were a bit more closely packed together here,
where they were walking, but it wasn’t ugly really. Just old. Some of the
buildings in the distance had cool round roofs, and were kind of like Christmas
tree ornaments. The fancy kind that Darla put on her tree.
    The Vampire fellow looked at his
friend, making it clear that the other two were closer than was safe for Eve,
and finally smiled a bit.
    “Ah. It is, I fear, not so
simple. We can get blood, there are farms and such here, like everywhere
else, but we can’t keep it for any length of time. The anti-coagulant…” He said
the word, but Eve just guessed that was what he meant, not recognizing it in
the language they were speaking. “Is a secret, unknown to even the finest of
chemists. We have not been allowed to know of it. No one in the world has. You
either buy blood from the Americans, or you suck on dogs and cats in alleyways,
hoping you are not seen doing it. We asked the Council to aid us in that, if
they were to insist on these new hardships they call rules, but to no avail. I
spoke to my own maker the other day, and was informed that we would be given no
aid that way, being forced to live like animals, at the pleasure of the
Council.” He wasn’t pleased by those words, apparently, since his eyes went
red. No fangs popped out though, and he managed to clear the rest of it after a
few seconds.
     Eve gave him a slightly
skeptical look.
    “Hmmm. I doubt that,
Bohdan. What did she really say? That doesn’t sound right at all.”
    The man glared for a bit, and
then stared at her, hard.
    “You say that I lie? Why would I
do that?”
    “I don’t know. But it sounds wrong, doesn’t it? The Council might want you under their control, I mean, I
want you under my control, and imagine that it works the other way, too,
but they have no reason to keep blood from you. Doing that with the new rules
would just force you to break them, right? So, what was it she actually told you?”
    The man, for all he was probably
going to die sooner rather than later, wasn’t a complete fool.
    “I didn’t say my maker was a
woman, did I?”
    She shrugged, and glanced over at
him.
    “Marissa, of the Council, isn’t
strictly a woman, but she tends to wear dresses, so that’s what I go with. It’s
the polite convention in the States. If a person wants to be seen a given way,
you try to address them like that, so they won’t feel uncomfortable. We’re nice
that way. Anyway, what exactly did she tell you? Please.” It never hurt to be
polite, did it? Even if it did sound a little annoyed at the moment.
    The man was also bright enough to
get that going by his maker’s last name was kind of a giveaway as to who that
might be, it seemed. So instead of taking her knowing that as a sign that she
was there to kill him, and all his friends, he kept walking, not speaking for a
good long while as they marched down the street.
    “I was told that we had to bow to
the Council, or that we would be killed, and that the owner of the formulae we
need would not part with it for us. I begged her to intervene for us, to allow
this to be handled in a way that would provide