Page 45

The Dries Van Noten suit he had been wearing since yesterday tears as if it is woven from nothing more than tissue paper, falling off his seven-foot-plus form from the sheer mass of his muscles. It flops down to the floor and is promptly forgotten, along with the harsh cold of the cave.

He raises up his arms to pose, cords in his neck straining, all while doing a pec flex along with it.

And all in the rubber duck-patterned boxers he has left on him.

How masculine.

Lily blinks for the three hundredth time since she was introduced—just typical stunned heroine stuff.

Then his testosterone drains, used up in the five-second show he just put on, and Every goes back to being a normal lean guy—still quite cut, though—and sits back down beside his girl. “And I’m actually a vampire. Too.”

Now Lily really is shocked. Though more at his overly dramatic tone than his revelation. “You are?”

“Yeah, and I actually told you this since the start. Right when we first met. I hid nothing from you, sugartits, no secrets, no lies.”

Wow. Bare minimum.

Lily smiles, going along with him. “The classic Count Dracula kind or the contemporary Count Dracula kind?”

“The contemporary kind. I don’t wanna freak you out too bad, you know. And fun fact: I’m actually descended from the actual Count Dracula, from my mother’s side. But it got so watered down through the generations that I’m just a contemporary one.”

“Too bad, boy. You don’t even have ’em dope ass fangs.”

“Nah, girl. The only thing watered down in my vampire heritage was the immortality thing. I once did have fangs, actually. They broke when I was seven. One moment, I was on my skateboard, and the next, I was on the ground with my canines knocked out. I was bullied quite a lot for having them anyway, so I didn't really mind. Papa assured me that they’d grow back, but em’ two vampiric white teeth just never reappeared.”

After he finishes his whole essay of a backstory, a slightly tragic one at that, they decide to go out hunting.

Just raw.

No arrow to shoot some game, no Google Maps to guide the way.

So they hunted solely with inspiring words and sheer determination.



“Buddy, you can do this,” Lily shouts out to her man as he wrestles what looks strikingly like a caribou with the exception of its long antlers. In the stead of them, the animal has little plasticky blue horns and seems a whole lot more violent than its vegetarian, human-friendly cousins.

“Motherfucker.” Not that word again, bro. Every screeches like a disappointed hunter who gets pounced by their prey instead of offing it. Basically Every’s status now, comically.

The cute-looking animal truly did pounce on him first, while he and Lily-nature-lover were strolling the icy wasteland, looking for a stream or fish or something they could catch and consume raw. See, they aren’t entire idiots like we get our readers to think. In dire, trying times like these, combining their two brain cells each gives them a whole lot of genuinely bright ideas.

And they ain’t mean-assed bitches who kill big game for naught either.

They just do it in self-defense.

Nice.

Then the hero of this story manages to lock its head, lessons from his elementary jiu-jitsu class finally put to use. So he calls out to his girlfriend to do the impossible. “Quick, Lily, come knife this bitch down before it kills me.”

Lily, standing a couple of feet away from the whole clusterfuck, shouts back to him. “Babe, I don’t have no knife or cutlery with me. Let’s just fuck off before that bitch swipes you with a horn—don’t want you pretty boy dying on me.”

She doesn't want to be left alone in the wasteland, dealing with her man’s rotten corpse while juggling living in a foreign environment and fighting off alien wildlife. With Every alive and breathing, she still has someone to do those for her.

Quite a romantic mindset, really.

Every, the hunky man whose entire personality consists of abs and some more abs, eventually follows his girlfriend’s advice and runs off from the caribou with his ass on fire. He picks up Lily, all bridal style, like the classic firefighter rescue trope found in pretty much every story. Never have I ever gone through a story without the hero picking up the heroine at least once.

Not even in the clean rom-coms or in serial killer stuff with wacko heroes.