Friday Night Bites (Chicagoland Vampires, #2)

by Chloe Neill

“First get the facts. Then you can distort them all you want.” —Mark Twain

I woke bright and early—or maybe more accurately, dark and late—the next night.

“I’m a reader, not a fighter.”

They shook, the guy who made me, and the vampire who made me something else. That seemed fundamentally wrong. Or maybe discomfortingly right.

YOU CAN TELL A LOT BY THE SIZE OF A MAN’S LIBRARY

That hurdle passed, I led Ethan away and began the trek toward the long concrete space at the back of the first floor where my parents entertained. Along the way, bare, angular hallways terminated in dead ends. Steel mesh blinds covered not windows but bare concrete walls. One stairway led to nothing but an alcove showcasing a single piece of modern art that would have been well suited to the living room of a maniacal serial killer. My parents called the design “thought-provoking,” and claimed it was a challenge to the architectural mainstream, to people’s expectations of what “stairways” and “windows” were supposed to be. I called the design “contemporary psychopath.”

“There is nothing we want quite as much as the thing we know we can’t have.”