Narcissus in Chains chapter 48+49

So they walk down stairs that weren't made for people, following a person named Earnie who used to have a mullet.

he’d had one of those long hair cuts with the sides shaved.

AKA a mullet. Now he has a short haircut that he can "Gel into spikes", so basically we have a trend-follower who has no idea what he really wants to do with his hair.


Who the fuck is Ernie? Why couldn't it be Jason or Asher or one of the other nine thousand characters already introduced in this book?

Ernie is a human. Anita figures he's feeding vampires other than Jean Claude because Jean Claude can have lycanthrope for dinner. We find out that all the body guards fought over who would get to walk first and who would walk last, and that all the leopards are trailing behind Anita and Micah like lost little children. Anita worries about what she's going to do when she sees Jean Claude.

They keep walking down the stairs.

The chapter ends.

...I'm gonna have to do two again, aren't I?

So they go into Jean Claude's lair, and it looks like it was decorated by the laziest wedding planner on the face of the earth. There's drapes hanging in the middle of the room, it's all white and gold and silver and jewel box and fairly land and...hold on...

That's better. Hey, what's this description actually like?

it was everything a fireplace should have been, except it was painted white.

...what the fuck does that even mean?

Asher(s) ... gold hair in ringlets...his mustache and Vandyke beard a blond so dark it was almost brown.

The dot dot dots are descriptions of the painting Asher's in. Look, hair is either blond or brown. Pick one, stick with it. It's less frustrating for the rest of us.

And then Anita senses Jean Claude coming, and realizes all he wants to do is screw. She becomes scared. I have no idea why, the only thing of any concequence anybody in this fucking book has accomplished in a short amount of time has been fucking.

This is what Jean Claude is wearing:

He was wearing a silver frock coat with white edging, white buttons. His shirt was a spill of white froth, the pants, what I could see of them, were white, but the white leather boots covered almost all of his long legs. The leather looked soft, pettable, held in place with small silver buckles going from just above his ankles to his very upper thigh.

...yeah. When this review is done I'm going to go fire up my computer and play violent first person shooters just to get the taste of this out of my mouth. Seriously, white leather thigh high boots? You can walk in those, I guess, but...one, you can't sit down comfortably, and two...why does he need to wear pants? How can Anita even see that he's wearing pants? And "pettable". Holy fuck, she's sexualizing inanimate objects, and she's critizing other people for having sexy thoughts?

And it turns out that Jean Claude hasn't fed his own ardeur yet, and because he hasn't fed "all his hungers" he's going to be useless for saving Damian, and oh fuck that means somebody's going to have sex, doesn't it? When sex is a plot roadblock, you need to stop putting it in your books.

And then Micah speaks up and the whole damn thing turns into a pissing contest. Micah somehow breaks Anita's control over her own ardeur. Both Anita and Jean Claude literally fall on their knees before Micah's godly beauty. Jean Claude, I shit you not, is vacant-eyed and drooling.

And then he touches Anita and catches the ardeur like it's a goddamned STD.

Asher tries to break things up. This happens:

I’d been afraid; now it was sheer terror. I looked up at Asher and saw him through a film of all the times we’d touched him, all that beauty, all the beauty that I still saw. I whispered, “Help us!”

Laurel. Please. Start making some goddamned sense. 

They waste several minutes trying to explain to Micah that Jean Claude needs to have an orgasm.

Micah still offers himself as food for Jean Claude because Anita won't be fed on. Anita, you just fucked over Richard for refusing to be food for you. Your highly vaulted morals aren't worth shit.

And then we get paragraphs of hot man on man action as Jean Claude climbs over Micah and...just...stands there. Seriously. It's like "They stare into each others eyes. They stare into each others eyes. They stare into each others eyes" for a couple pages. Then Anita somehow recovers from the unbearable ardeur, and then Micah jumps her and Jean Claude jumps her and the chapter ends, mercifully, just before they have sex.

...it's still not as fucked up as the Gap series.