Sweet Blood of Mine (Overworld Chronicles #1)

Sweet Blood of Mine (Overworld Chronicles #1) Page 14

The woman's eyes widened. She licked her lips like a nervous school girl about to be kissed for the first time. "Hi," she said in a throaty voice. Her anatomy turned on the high-beams, figuratively speaking. She pushed a lock of brown hair behind her ear and smiled.

I slipped an arm around her waist and kissed her, pressing my lips feverishly against hers. She grabbed my butt with one hand and squeezed. The other hand went straight for the opposite side. I heard noises in the background: shrieks, cries of dismays, and the tap of a heavy foot against the tiled floor. I didn't know who or what was making that racket. I didn't care. Nothing could make me pull away from this meat-market love goddess. My sexy little filet mignon.

"Take it outside, you two," said a gruff voice.

I ignored the pesky voice. I pulled her body closer to mine. Felt her clutching desperately at my belt.

Someone gasped. "Oh my God, what are they doing?"

"Perverts!" a woman shouted.

I had only eyes, ears, hands, and now tongue for my grocery store Aphrodite.

Large hands grabbed me and jerked me mid-kiss off my simmering Amazonian love princess and deposited me a few feet away. I spun, disoriented and stared at the large black security guard responsible for ruining my romantic moment with—with—um, whoever that woman was.

"You two gonna have to leave if you keep that up," he said, crossing his arms and giving me a no-nonsense look. Behind him stood a group of horrified onlookers, mainly old people and moms with young kids.

"Mommy, what's that in his pants?" asked a little boy.

I opened my mouth to say something but the sheer mortification of what I'd just done froze the words in my throat. I was also keenly aware of what exactly was in my pants and fighting to get free for my horrified audience. I spun around. The woman I had just been dry humping was scurrying away, shoulders hunched.

I took her cue and grabbed my shopping cart. My face burned but I decided to push on and not let a little bit of exhibitionism ruin my quest for healthy treats. Besides, I was famished. I left the gawkers behind and pushed onward to the produce department.

It became evident after a few seconds that I could still sense and smell that alluring feminine odor. It tugged at me whenever I passed by a woman. Attractive women, mainly. The older or uglier they were, the less magnetic the smell became although it was never disgusting or repellant—they all had similar desires, wants, and needs crying for release, imprisoned by lazy husbands, worthless boyfriends, and loneliness. But I ignored them the best I could and got the heck out of there before I went porn-star on one of the cashiers.

My mind raced as I sat in the Jetta and tried to figure out what was going on with me. It wasn't puberty. I'd already grown hair in all the right places and my voice had changed from a squeak to something resembling a nerdy baritone. Whatever had happened to me had started last night. Or maybe it had started when Stacey tried to suck the life force out of my eyeballs. I wasn't about to start looking for her again even if she did have answers. In fact, I was kind of scared to go back to the same gym. Of course if I saw her in there, I'd confront her in front of everyone so as to avoid a repeat molestation. Maybe that was what I should do. Then again, a girl that powerful might just mind-rape everyone and make us her little bitches.

Unfortunately, Victoria was expecting me to show up in a few hours. Vampire mistress or not, I had to go and figure out a way to convince Stacey to cough up some answers. I drove to the hardware store and looked for a toilet. It was all I could do to resist the copious number of hormone-laden women obviously flaunting their femininity in sweaty, baggy work clothes and flooding me with hot lusty desires.

Or maybe that was just me and my new phase of hyper-puberty.

I couldn't sense their thoughts so much as feel the sexual beasts lurking behind the civilized façade people wear in public. I grabbed the cheapest crapper I could find and rushed to the front of the store with it tucked under my left arm. It was only when the attractive Asian cashier gave me a startled look that I realized how odd it must look for a chubby kid to be toting around a heavy toilet one-armed without breaking a sweat. In fact, it hadn't even occurred to me that the toilet must be something heavy.

Despite her confusion, a part of her grew aroused by my display. Vaporous tendrils of feminine allure hung before me, waiting, wanting, begging. All I had to do was—

"No!" I shouted and scared the crap out of the poor girl. She jumped a foot back from me. "Uh, sorry," I said and pointed at my ear. "Teeny tiny Bluetooth headset. Idiot brother. Really rude, I know." I paid and got out of there.

I cooked up a quick stir-fry at home while Dad snored fitfully on the couch. He'd apparently returned home while I was out and reeked of stale cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, vomit, and a sickening mix of other unidentifiable odors. The house smelled more like a low-rent bar every day. The odor sickened me even worse now that my nose had gotten a zillion times better at its job. I had to snap him out of this cycle of self-destruction soon. I asked him several times about money while I cooked. He grunted once, rolled over, and went back to sleep. I had no idea if the house or utilities were even being paid for. A mountain of mail teetered on the kitchen table. I didn't even know why I should care. I was a teenager, not a responsible adult. But I kept imagining me and Dad begging for scraps on the streets after the house was repossessed.

But I didn't know the first thing about finances or making payments. Mom's computer still sat in her office. As far as I knew, she'd always taken care of the household money, and one of the few chinks in my parent's relationship had been how awful my dad was at handling it. I turned on Mom's computer and stared at the login screen. Just great. After trying all sorts of possible passwords and failing each time, I groaned and sat back in the black office chair. The desk was immaculate with every bit of paper filed away and each item on the desk lined up perfectly with its neighbor. Mom was OCD when it came to cleanliness and pretty much everything else. Which was why a yellow post-it note stuck to the side of the pencil-sharpener caught my eye.

I snatched it and recognized Dad's handwriting. The username and password gave a cheery wave from the scrap of paper along with some rudimentary instructions for using the computer. I logged in and found a document on the desktop which told Dad in no uncertain terms not to mess with the automatic payments Mom had set up for keeping the bills paid.

But where is the money coming from? I found the answer after logging onto the bank's website. The checking account had a number with seven figures in it. I counted it twice to be sure and choked back a gasp. Who had my parents robbed to get that much money? I swore under my breath. I thought I'd known my parents. Now I felt like the kid of criminal masterminds. Could the money have something to do with Mom's departure? Were they part of a Mr. and Mrs. Jones type conspiracy? The amount of money in their bank account birthed a million new questions although it made me feel a lot less guilty about raiding their rainy-day stash.

I scoured the computer for more information but came up empty. The documents folders and everything else were empty. I stared at the system files on the screen and was about to shut the computer down when I noticed a folder that seemed out of place at the root of the hard drive named Copy of hash codes. I wasn't a computer expert, but I knew enough that this wasn't a normal system folder even though the name seemed harmless enough. I opened it and found a bunch of files that I managed to open in a text viewer program. Not that it mattered. Something like a combination of gibberish and programming code was all I found inside the files. It struck me as very odd because unless Mom was a secret hacker or computer genius, she couldn't have written this stuff.

Had she made this folder copy by accident while removing other files? I didn't know but I wanted a copy of my own just in case it might be important to figuring out where she'd gone. I grabbed a flash drive from my room and copied the folder over before shutting the computer down.

I wanted to analyze the files some more, but I glanced at the wall clock and realized I was running late for my appointment with Victoria.

The moment I entered the gym, I knew it had been a terrible mistake. Not because Stacey the vampire was there, but the sheer volume of sweaty sexy girls threatened to overload my senses. I had to think about baseball so hard I felt the veins in my head bulging. Everywhere I turned I was attacked by sexual desires and longings. It was insane. I knew what a victim of Viagra over-dosing must feel like. I pulled my T-shirt down a bit further over my shorts and found Victoria in the free-weights section of the gym. The dense cloud of male stink in this area overpowered the feminine allure of the cardio section. Weights clanged, men grunted in agony, and two muscular guys posed in front of the mirrors that ran along every wall. Just my kind of place.

"You ready?" she asked.

More ready than you could imagine, babe. "I guess." I was not looking forward to the torment awaiting me.

We went to the bench press first. She stacked on some meager weight. I pumped it up and down with no problem. She added a couple of larger plates. No problem there, either. I was so surprised with myself, I forgot to be impressed.

Victoria arched an eyebrow at me. "Are you juicing or something? That's over two-hundred pounds and you're not even breaking a sweat."

I shrugged. "I had orange juice this morning."

She rolled her eyes.

Before long she had all the forty-five pound plates she could fit on either side of the barbell and just about every dude in the testosterone-soaked iron-pumping section of the gym stared at me with unadulterated jealousy. The barbell sagged dangerously on each end. I pushed it up and down several times without a hint of feeling tired. Victoria stared open-mouthed.

"I don't believe it," she said. "This isn't possible unless you were totally faking it the other day." She waved her hands in the air over the barbell, apparently looking for invisible wires. She tried to move the barbell, grunting and jerking on it, but couldn't budge it.

"Lemme see that," said a guy roughly the size of a buffalo, with bulging arms and a shaved head. He lay down on the bench, muttering curses to himself. Then he started slamming his chest with alternating hands while screaming obscenities. "You can do this, Buddy! Come on, Buddy, you got this! Make momma proud!" He pushed on the barbell. His face went from pink to purple in about two seconds. His veins bulged and pulsed alarmingly.