Slow News Day

Here.  Have an excerpt from my upcoming paranormal romance/urban fantasy book: Balls Deep: A Denise Asspuncher Mystery: The Chylde of the Nyte Chronicles Vol. XV.

Episode 22

The Clock Strikes MidFIGHT

“So, you’re a vampire?” Denise asked, the question wafting from her mouth on the acrid smoke of her cigar.

“No,” Irving snapped in reply.  “I just said I was a vampyre, with a ‘y.’  It’s, like, infinitely more badass than some regular vampire and–”  His sentence got caught up in a hacking cough as he recoiled from the smoke as though struck with a limp wrist in a suede glove.  “Oh, Jesus, your cancer stick keeps getting in my mouth.  I think…I think I’m going to puke.”

“If anyone’s gonna be a pussy around here, boy, it’s gonna be me,” she snarled.  She paused, grunting.  “I mean, it’s gonna be mine. Or…uh…it’s gonna have your pussy in…”  After a moment, she spat out the cigar entirely.  “Let’s do it.”

“Christ, lady, what’s with you?” he shrieked.  “I’m sixteen!”

“I thought all vampires–“

“Vampyres.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, you used an ‘i.’  I heard you.”

“I thought you guys were all immortal!”

“Well, yeah, but we’re frozen in the age we were bitten.  Forever.  Do you even have HBO?”

Denise drew in a long, slow puff on her cigar as she considered him.  Upon her a closer inspection, she realized he did look decidedly youthful.  His cheeks were still the slim narrow of a youth’s, delicately white between each throbbing red pimple, perpetually on the verge of bursting and cursed to always bear a round white head turned ivory by moonlight.  His eyes still glistened with young naivete behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses as they reflected the moonlight.  His teeth, fanged as they might have been, were perfectly straight, thanks largely in measure to the metal braces stapled to each ivory crown glistening in the moonlight.

And still, they shared a gasp, her for the sight of him and him for the drag he took off of his inhaler so he wouldn’t get an asthma attack and die when she spewed cigar smoke in her face.

“Well, look, I can appreciate that,” she said, “but what exactly are we supposed to do for the next forty pages?”

“I don’t know,” Irving said.  “Isn’t there some kind of…like, pixie ring or something to break up?  Or…or are we strictly vampyres and werewylfes?  Because if I had to be honest, I’dpffffthtfpfbgbbbtbhthhthtppffftt.”  He went into a sudden seizure of spitting before slurping up a long trail of saliva.  “Sorry.  A bug flew in my mouth.”

“That must be rough for a vampire, being descended from bats and all.”

“Well, technically, I’m descended from the South Asian Foxfaced Bat, so most of my diet consists of insects.  I was actually looking for roaches when you came in here.”

“Does that mean you have no interest in…this?”

She bared her throat to him and instantly felt his eyes go agog at the pulsating jugular, writhing with each quake of blood that was sent up through the arteries of her heart, sweeping through the gentle layer of cholesterol that rimed her ventricles, across the smoke-stained tissue of her interior veins, each circular blood vessel pumping in vivid crimson detail, pulsating in time with a heart that was going to give out from rich foods and alcoholism in about three weeks.  She would drop dead at her desk; the coroner would call it a stroke induced by her tight leather pants.  Her family would be there, including her brother who decided to drop out of Harvard Law and form a nu-punque band called “Bonobos Rampage” and her father would probably deck him good and she would have to rot in the ground, silent and dead and…

Editor’s note: What is…what are you even…

[Insert touching monologue about being a vampyre in society here]

Suddenly, the alley exploded in gunfire.  She saw shadowy shapes in the shadows, brewing in the gloom, the barrels of their guns lit like giant cigarettes being puffed on by impressionable A/V club members trying to impress that one chick with the raspy voice.

“Sergeant Asspuncher!” they cried, probably in unison.  “You and your tight pants are hereby deemed a menace to The Establishment!  Put on these jeans or you are SO DEAD!”

“OH GOD,” shrieked Irving.  “IT’S TIME TO RUN.”

“No,” Denise whispered, but she double-checked her watch, just to make sure.

Sure enough.

It was asspunching time.