Incubus Dreams--chapter 68-69

The buttons. They are pushed. Dragon Breath Part One is now filtering through Amazon and Nook Press's various processors and should be live sometime tomorrow morning. I'll upload the thing to Smashwords when it is live elsewhere.

Oh, and two things: the campaign is going well, you guys are awesome, I love ALL of you.

Second: I'm not always the easiest person to hang with, and I get that. And you guys have every right to call me on shit if you feel you need to. You don't need to jump to my defense--in fact, it's usually better if you don't. When I read a new comment it is usually from the dashboard, where the "delete" button is right next to the "view this post" button. If a comment exists for more than a few hours it's because, for whatever reason, I want it there. I have no problem nuking a comment if I think it is not good for the blog. You guys have the right to be heard and responded to, even if I don't like what you're saying.

That said, while I'm not going to ask you to be nice, I am going to ask that you be polite, and respect your fellow blog-readers even if you disagree with them. Nothing has happened so far that isn't directly my fault, and the conversations at issue have remained polite, and I am very grateful that you guys HAVE kept things on a respectful level. Let's keep it that way. We might not all agree how we should play in this sandbox, but let's not shit in it either, mkay?


Mkay.

Shitty book time.

So Anita runs over to the two vampires who helped them nab Jonah and apparently Unstabbed Vamp is disturbingly pretty, and Stabbed Vamp is disturbingly pretty, and--oh shit, this is Wicked and Truth.

Let's go back to talking about how to talk about things on the blog, okay?

...you're not going to let me get away with that, are you?

IIRC, Wicked and Truth are background members of the Harem in later books. Not stand out characters, but these two are kind of clouds the size of your hand in terms of how much more this series will suck.

Anita tells Malcom that Stabbed Vamp could survive, and Malcom says that only a master vampire could help him survive, and "Wicked and Truth have no master".

...Anita is going to have some kind of sex/foreplay to save Random Hero Vampire's life and switch their bloodline over to Belle Morte's just like she did with Damian, isn't she.

You know, I went out of my way not to buy any alcohol today, because I planned on not drinking tonight. SO MUCH FOR THAT. 

 After a few paragraphs we figure out that Truth is the stabbed vamp and Wicked is the other dude. Apparently the founding sire for their bloodline died and they survived, and this is a Really Big Deal, and anyone other than Malcom would have killed them, but it's kind of a big deal now because nobody has a blood oath and that means these two vampires are probably going to die.

Or have sex with Anita.

Because that's the solution for every single problem in this series.

So Anita starts negotiating with Jean Claude--who reveals that Wicked and Truth are also known as the Wicked Truth (did you have to think real hard for that one?) and are famous among vampires for killing their crazy maker--while Malcom is all "Back my children, avoid her black magic" and I have to say Malcom would do real well as a televangelist. You can't really tell the difference between them and vampires anyway...

(Seriously. Rick. Joel. Lighten up on the pancake)

Anita breaks out the silver knife and it's going to be erotic blood play. They pull the other knife out of Truth and he promptly starts bleeding all over everything (apparently having paramedics on hand for things like this is asking too much.) Anita realizes Truth is too weak to feed and so this happens:

Jean-Claude breathed through my body, “Kiss him.” 
“What?” I said out loud.
 “What is it?” Wicked asked.
 “Give him enough energy to feed.”

Well, maybe at least this will be something approaching erotic and not at all offensiv--

I kissed him, and felt his death. Felt that spark flickering like a match in the wind. I breathed power into his mouth. I forced it inside him the way you force air into the dying....It brought Truth gasping, sitting up off the floor, yelling. Yelling something in a language I’d never known.

She kiss-rapes Truth back to life. With bonus points for borderline necrophilia.

Because there is no other way to do magical healing than to describe it in terms of "force" and "sex".

Truth begins to feed. He also starts pawing all over Anita because getting this over with and going back to the (non-existant) plot is asking too much.

AND THEN THE ARDEUR RISES.

 Anita tells Jean Claude that she needs to shut that down so she can go back to work. Jean Claude warns her that if he shuts it off for her, he'll have to feed off his entire club and I thought it was impossible to completely piss me off on every single level, but hey, they just did:

“Then feed like you did last night. Feed on the willing, but let this cup pass me by tonight. I need to catch a murderer, not fuck everyone we bring over.”

Because nothing says "Sexy-a-go-go" like quoting the words of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.

And embarrassing yourself in front of your co-workers is absolutely comparable to death via crucifixion. 

 Wicked throws a mini temper-tantrum because Anita is too blood exhausted to give him blood and bind him the way she did Truth, so she promises to "bind him like his brother" which is signficant, but we're never told how. It's much more important for Jean Claude and Anita to emphasize how amazing awesome these characters we've never seen or heard of before are, and how they are "Our warriors" and have I mentioned that Jean Claude is doing all this from a room full of "sexy women"?

The chapter ends with three sentences that ALL say "Be careful what you wish for."

Next chapter:

Anita realizes that Jonah Cooper is either a vampire she was hunting or a vampire hunter who supposedly died in a nasty fire. THE TEXT IS NOT CLEAR. What is clear is that however he survived, he arranged for a lot of cops to die in the same fire and suddenly Zerbowski and all the other cops in the room become profoundly disinterested in observing all of Jonah's legal rights.

Jonah is equally disinterested in helping Anita, so she decides to borrow Malcolm's mind-reading powers. By blackmailing him into breaking the law on her. She picks Malcolm's psychic pocket, uses the power on Jonah and discovers that the murdering vampire leader is Vittorio!

...WHO THE FUCK IS VITTORIO?!?

 The name sounds familiar enough for me to think he was either a Creepy Fucker from Guilty Pleasures or he was with Musette's crew back in Cerulean Sins, but the text confirms neither of these and I'm too lazy and tired to go wading through that mess to figure out who this dude is.

Jonah decides to make Anita kill him, and she punches him so hard she breaks his neck, and then keeps right on with the mind-reading. She has to find out where the daytime retreat is. So she's going to see a major landmark or a place she recognises or--

It was a big building, a condo. A fucking modern condo. I wanted to see the front of the building. I saw it. I had the address. Wait, number and name on the condo, and I was looking at the little boxes with all the names and numbers. I was looking at it from higher up than I would have seen it. Street, I thought, what street are we on?

...she gets an exact address complete with the number and name of the owner.

This is almost as bad as finding the bad guy's pad via Google Earth.

Cooper wakes up. Zerbowski is sending teams to the address. Anita says no, don't, Vittorio will kill them, let me talk to them instead.

Zerbowski is less than enthused. Given all the things Anita has just done in front of him, none of which are explained or even remotely sane, I can't blame him. But he gives her the phone. It's an answering machine. They leave a voice mail and then take Jonah away from the church. Anita tells him that she kills because she wants to (HONESTY FINALLY) and starts torturing Jonah with bullets.

The heroine. is torturing info. out of the bad guy. with bullets. He refuses to give her anything, so she shoots him in the head until most of his head goes away.

Our heroine.

Speaking of which, Zerbowski and company are still standing right there. And since when did "cruel and unusual punishment" get amended with "Unless the guy's dead already, because it sucks to be you fucker."

Malcolm brought the entire flock to watch Anita blow a vampire into tiny, tiny pieces. Wicked and Truth apparently enjoyed the show.

Everybody packs into the cop cars (Except for the vampire sheep and W&T) and goes off to confront Vittorio. Anita is mildly disturbed by what she's just done.

End chapter.

The book's almost over. We're almost there. Don't worry. It'll get better soon.

We'll do the dinosaur book next. I promise.