Guilty Pleasures – Chapter 31 – Do You Voodoo?

Yep, it’s been a while.  I could bore you with epic tales of boring from my boring ass job, but that would be boring as shit, so I’m just going to jump right back into it.  Here goes.

Fuck, I have no idea what has been happening in this story, hang on while I go reread the damned chapter.

Well, let me stop right there.  This is an exposition catch up chapter.  You know, a lot of books have them.  It’s just a big chunk of narration done while the character is doing mundane things that take no thought whatsoever.  So Anita is coming home and taking a shower and listening to her answering machine.  And she’s going through all the loose ends LKH is going to have to tie up before we can end this story.  Fine, perfect for someone who so abruptly stopped like I did a few months ago.  On with it.

She falls asleep and inevitably dreams about Jean Claude.  Of course.  And he’s got bloody blackberries and is telling her some very obvious shit.  Like, duh, she has to strike first against Nikolaos.  What was she otherwise going to do?  Wait for her to come to her?  Anita’s got a lot of shit on her plate right now and if you keep coming to her with blackberries and blood dreams, you’re going to creep her the fuck out.

Ok, hold on, let me have a moment of fairness.  Anita in the future probably would have killed Zach on the spot, but she hasn’t had all of the voodoo weirdness happen to her yet.  The shit with Jean Claude right now, I just have to mull it over for a while longer, because I’m trying to objectively see if he was being manipulative from the start, and I;m pretty sure all this crap constitutes as manipulative.

Another thing I want to address here and now is LKH’s absolutely fucked up view of voodoo itself.

Let me start this argument here.  LKH might say that she’s Mexican and whatever, but this girl is as white as they come.  I used to want to make the argument that she’s racist, but I actually think she’s just ignorant.  Which isn’t much better, but there it is.  I think that she’s just been around nerdy white people for so long in her life that she has zero clue how to write any other ethnicity without the white people goggles and they all become stereotypes.  Which is fine, if that’s the thing that you’re going for, but I don’t know.  Something about the way she wants to write people of other ethnicities/religions/sexualities et al. just makes me fucking cringe, every single time.

Right now, it’s just the voodoo, so I’ll stick to that argument, but expect this to be revisited as we go on through the series.  LKH has seemed to have done only the bare amount of research on her topic, just enough to make the bare bones of a story, something she seemed interested in at the time.  So she’s taken all the fantastical points of voodoo and made them into some Hollywood glamor of a thing.  Sure, I understand that real voodoo can’t keep a dead man alive (or can it?  Read the Serpent and the Rainbow), and I understand the rule that reality is no defense for fiction, sure, got it.  But as with every aspect of Anita Blake, it seems like she just took the things that sounded the coolest about whatever the fuck she’s talking about and mashed it into her story wherever it would best fit.  If I was a practitioner of voodoo, I might be a little pissed.

Anywho.  I’ll go ahead and knock out the next chapter while I’m shaking the rust off my keyboard.  Sorry for the vacay, had to pay some bills.  ;D

Get them links.

Guilty Pleasures – Chapter 30 – Lies Lies Lies

This can’t be all there is in this chapter.  Whatever.  Not my circus and all that.

This is literally just a small conversation in a car.  Nothing more.  I’m going to skip over everything Willie, because all he does is ask where he’s going and tell Phillip he needs to go to a doctor.  They’ll fix him up at the club.  Riiight.

Seatbelts everyone.

Phillip needs to go to a hospital.  But he’s being a total man about it.  His reasoning is that Anita was hurt way worse the night before, and she’s fine now.

Ominous music.

“What are you thinking, Phillip?”

He turned his head to stare straight ahead.  His face was all silhouette and shadows.  “That I stood up to the master.  I did it.  I did it!”  His voice held a fierce warmth with the last.  Fierce pride.

He’s all full of adrenaline.  Looking back, he probably could have died.  Not a good thing.  I get it though.  He’s taken with these vampires.  But if you look at it, Nikolaos could have rolled him right under.  She didn’t do that.  If she had, he would have been toast.  Same with Willie.  All she had to do was tell him to kill Phillip and he would have been a goner.  He didn’t really do anything but say a few things to her and get knocked around, but I do get it.

After that, there’s this weird beat of revelation.

“You wanted to know who was giving me orders.  It was Nikolaos.  You were right.  That first day.  She wanted me to seduce you.”  He smiled.  It didn’t look right with the blood.  “Guess I wasn’t up to the job.”

Duh.  Of course it was Nikolaos.  We had that figured out from the go.  And here’s a little insight, my friend.  Not every chick can be whisked off her feet with a pretty smile and a sexy body.  That’s not how it works.

Anita goes on to try to re-inflate his ego by telling him the kiss in the bathroom was nice.

I’m sure it was.  Kissing a guy is a nice thing.  Not when you’re being forced into doing it though.  That’s not nice.  It’s like saying, oh, that time you groped my mouth with your tongue was shitty at the time because I didn’t want it and then you bit me, but thinking back, yeah, that was just the dreamiest!

Shut the fuck up.

I agree with Anita on one thing.  That standing up to Nikolaos was stupid.  I’ll give her that.  But this is the pot calling the kettle black.

“Would you be sorry if I died?”

“Yes.”

Lies.

Anita has no idea what he wants from her, and I think frankly, no one does.  It’s not clear at all.  Does he want a relationship with her?  Because he is sick and broken.  Is that why she rebuffs him?  Because let me tell you, this is her type.  She might not know it yet, and the things she does later might stem from guilt over this man, but right here in this moment, I think she is just telling him pretty words to make him feel better.  Like telling him everything’s going to be all right.

Anita Blake lies.  It’s sort of disgusting.

Back to Chapters

Guilty Pleasures – Chapter 29 – I’m Accomplishing Nothing. But Look How Good At It I Am!

So.  Anita has helped a dead guy raise a zombie for a bunch of vampires to torture.  She left her junkie date back at the

sexy ladies!

freak party alone, knowing he can’t say no if he gets pressed.  And now she’s sliding around in panty hose.  I can’t tell you the last time I wore a pair of panty hose…

Anyway.  Even Anita knows that we seem to be on a fun string of pearls adventure, because just as we’re going to ask what next, she just goes ahead and does it for us.

And gets an answer.

“Greetings, animator.  You seem to be having a full night.”

Of course, it’s Nikolaos.  Because, why not.

But, Willie McCoy is with her!  I kind of love him.

Let me stop here for a minute and make a little listie…

1. Her voice rose in a lilting song-song.  The dangerous little girl had returned.
2. The child voice was slipping, like a mask sliding down.
3. She was smiling, a cute, harmless, model, beautiful child.
4. The perfect child bride wasn’t perfect anymore.
5. She really needed a dimple to go with it all.
6. She laughed then, a sound to bring a smile to your face and a song to your heart.
7. I might never enjoy Shirley Temple movies again.
8. The voice was cold, very adult.  Children didn’t know how to strip skin with their voice.
9. She was tiny, a delicate fairy of a child.
10. She reached a small pale hand toward me.
11. She had to rise on tiptoe to breathe on my neck.  It should have ruined the menace.  It didn’t.
12. A pale little hand shot out, the barest touch.  His whole body jerked backwards.

dimples!

So there’s that.  We fucking get it.  Nikolaos is a tiny fucking girl.  A terrifyingly tiny little monster.  We’re supposed to understand by repetition that she’s a perversion, a child vampire is bad fucking news.

The thing about child vampires, and I’m thinking of our Valentina (is that her name?) and Bartolomew I think?  And think of Claudia from Anne Rice and whatever other kid vampire you can.  The fact is, they grow up.  And this is a thousand year old vampire master.  So she knows how to survive.  Shes had to be ruthless to rise to where she is, smart.  Anita of all people should understand this.

I think that it’s pretty interesting that the first villain that AB faces is smaller than she is.  She’s also blonde haired and blue eyed.  Tiny, delicate features and attributes.  Completely petulant.  You don’t get to be where this broad is in life by being a petulant child.  It’s one thing to act the part to make people underestimate you, and a completely other thing to actually be a petulant child.  It seems like for the past thousand years there has been absolutely no character arc for Nikolaos.  Was she always as powerful as she was?  Or did she slide under the radar for long enough to become as powerful as she is, then became a master?  Because that would imply that she has a lot more smarts than we’re giving her credit for.  I don’t buy it at all.

I fucking hate Tom Cruise. But I agree with him..

The child vampire can be fucking terrifying.  Think of the neighbor kid that Aiden befriends in Being Human.  That kid is scary.  He is a child, with all the lack of impulse control that comes with being that age.  Aiden kills him because he knows that he’s not going to learn it.  There’s two options.  They stay kids, or they mature in children’s bodies.  A well put together story about one of them could be a good read.  You can’t just plop this girl in here as a terrifying master and expect us to believe with her behaviors that she’s lasted for this long without pissing someone bigger off and having them off her in a heartbeat.

Rant over.

So Anita has some remorse about raising her zombie and letting the vampires kill it.  We never actually find out why they wanted to raise and torture it, at least not in this chapter.  What is the back story of Estelle Hewitt?  Here’s what the Anita Blake wiki has to say about her.  Absolutely nothing more than what we’re given.  She was born, was something less than 65 when she died and was buried in her wedding dress.  The wiki has it wrong, she can’t be more than 65.  But whatever, words.  She’s not an important character at all, so it doesn’t matter.  But what the fuck is her story?  Why was she buried in her wedding dress and why do these vampires want to rip her apart!?

I think Estelle is nothing more than a plot device.  She’s there to use the ritual to prove that Zachary isn’t alive.  After that, she’s only used in the conversation with Nikolaos for leverage.  Anita now wants to put down the zombie that she errant raised, the cost is going to be Nikolaos tasting her blood.  It’s weak.  The only reason she has importance for two chapters is to prove Zach’s death, give leverage and also to show that Anita does take responsibility for her zombies and has respect for the dead.  A trait I would think vampires would dig on.

“They won’t hurt it much.  My little vampires will be disappointed.  The dead cannot feed off the dead.”

“Ghouls can.  They feed off the dead.”

“But what is a ghoul, animator?  Is it truly dead?”

“Yes.”

Is this connected to the plot?  I’m so fucking lost.

Anita has to admit that she helped Zachary raise the zombie, and there’s a lot of conversational exposition.  Willie is pretty chivalrous.  We learn that he was punished for not being able to hire Anita the first time he talked to her.  Nothing like terror

This sucks!

in a cross lined coffin for something you had no control over.  All it took was the threat of a little rat man rape to make her change her mind.  Damn Willie, get it together.

Anita has an interesting moment where she realizes she can look at Nikolaos and start to see all her flaws that she’s not supposed to see.  Instead of keeping this to herself, she blurts it out about the little scar next to her mouth.  Stupid ass.  You have literally one advantage over this lady.  ONE.  And you blow it.  And in doing so, you possibly could have blown the cover for JC who is still very much under this lady’s power.  What the fuck are you doing?  Think about shit for a moment before you just go off and say things.

Some learning happening while we’re chatting away.

“No tasting.”  I said.

“Then let me enter your mind again.  That’s a type of feeding.”

I shook my head, too rapid, too many times.  I’d die before I let her in my mind again.  If I had the choice.

It’s either the neck or the mind.  Let’s just mark it right here, Anita does not want vampires in her mind.  Never mind the fact that she’s going to use this shit like a telepathic baby monitor later, or that she’s going to forcefully dive into other people’s minds and eat their emotions, but right here, that’s the shit she don’t like.

“Call it a shadow feeding, human.  Blood and fear are always precious, no matter how one obtains them.”

It’s interesting that she calls Anita ‘human’ here and refers to her in other places as ‘animator’.  And there’s going to be nothing in it for her to taste Anita’s blood right then.  Here’s an interesting question.  Is she going to be able to taste weird stuff by just having a lick?  Does blood have properties to vampires that we don’t perceive?  If someone powerful were to taste Anita, would they be able to tell that she’s an animator?  Marked?  A necromancer?  It’s interesting.  But not explored, so it doesn’t matter.

We learn that vampire masters can use telepathy to talk to their vampires.  It’s in this way, Nikolaos is able to tell Theresa to shoo the vampires away and leave the zombie alone.

So it’s coming down to the taste and dayum, they are dragging it out.  The suspense it literally killing me.

We’re saved from it by Phillip, who comes plowing down through the trees.  Apparently being gone for probably over an hour has tipped him off that there might be something wrong with his date.  Why not go head to head with a master vampire over her virtue?  I mean, she didn’t just insult you own or anything.

There’s a completely campy moment where Willie is going to clothesline Phillip, but Phillip just walks around the outstretched arm.  Really?  You think she may have picked a better body guard, or maybe two of them or something.  Hahah.  I love Willie though, I really do.

Phillip is all, don’t hurt my lady!  And Nikolaos is just like, dude, we already have a thing.  I’m just going to lick her all creepy like.  It’s a thing!  And Phillip is like, aww, man, you said you wouldn’t hurt her and stuff.  And Nikolaos is like, dude, we have this shit under control.  She’s all like, I keep my word, most of the time.  Stop hatin.

So we get that Nikolaos keeps her word, with the caveat that it’s only most of the time.  This leaves her far from being reliable, but she might be able to be trusted to at least not kill Anita tonight.  What she would break her word for is never really defined, so it doesn’t matter.

His face crumbled with confusion.  He didn’t seem to know what to do.  His courage seemed to have spilled out on the grass.  But he didn’t back off.  Big point for him.  I would have backed off, maybe.  Probably.  Oh, hell, Phillip was being brave, and I didn’t want to see him die because of it.

Actually, it seems like he’s been pretty brave all around for the most part, you’ve just been seeing it after something shitty happens to him that you put him into in the first place.  So whatever, Nikolaos kicks his feet out from under him and bitchslaps him light enough to draw blood from his face.  Again, everyone please remember that this little thing is fucking dangerous.

This could escalate farther, but we’re saved by the company of the Church of Eternal Life.  They’re coming to break up the pervert party!  Nikolaos excuses herself, can’t risk getting caught by them, and she runs off into the trees, leaving Willie all by himself, bumming a ride home from Anita.  Poor dude can’t catch a break.

So Anita, Phillip and Willie make a run for the car.  Anita pulls out her gun, knowing that the bullets won’t kill the vampires, but they might slow them down.  Screw Crystal, Madge and Harvey, they’re on their own.  Someone is going to call the cops, and there’s no way she’s going to be able to explain being there.  Uh, yeah, you were conducting part of an investigation.  And if that fails, there’s a zombie in the back, she could be putting down.  There’s reasons other than the sexy party for her to be there.  Stupid.

Anita caps a rushing vampire in the belly and they make it to the car, only the human rushed them.  Really?  The human?  She fired her weapon and feels cornered.  She’s shooting mid mass and you’re THE ONLY ONE that can be seriously hurt by her bullets!  Why the bloody fuck would you rush the car, mysterious ballsy human!?

At any rate, they get the fuck outta dodge.

“Safe, but for how long?”  He sounded as tired as I felt.

I patted his arm.  “Everything will be all right, Phillip.”

No.  I knew this guy was going to die as soon as I read this line.  Anita has effectively signed his death warrant.

I can’t even.  

This is a winding bumbling chapter where nothing really got accomplished.  The zombie NEVER got put to rest.  For all we know, she’s still wandering around, attracting ghouls and whatever.  Nikolaos never got to taste Anita.  Phillip never found his balls.  Willie is left scrambling for gas money.  It’s a fucking mess.  There’s too much in the air for her right now, she’s going to have to start teasing out some of the plot soon.  Very soon.

Back to Chapter Links.

Guilty Pleasures – Chapter 28 – I See Dead People

real talk

Ok.  This actually wasn’t that bad of a chapter.  At least we’re not at the damned freak party anymore.  Hooray!  But it’s still pretty bad.

So Anita is in the middle of this thing, trying to keep her and Zachary alive.  Apparently, he couldn’t raise the zombie so she’s going to step in and act like a focus for the two of them to raise it together.

The goat lay on its side.  The bare white of its spine glimmered in the moonlight.  Blood still seeped into the ground from the gaping wound.  Eyes were rolled and glazed, tongue lolling out of its mouth.

Spine glimmering?!  How the hell did he slit the throat?  Sloppy work, mate!

Anyway, that aside, we do learn a bit more about the actual act of zombie raising in this chapter.  Basically, the older the zombie, the bigger the death that’s needed.  That’s something that I’ve always had a problem with in this series and we ran right back into it in Dead Ice, but I’ll get to that when I get to it.

A bigger death is needed for an older corpse.  So a chicken is a regular, few weeks, months, maybe even years.  A goat is like a century.  I always wondered why it wasn’t the more powerful the animal, the better the sacrifice.  The thing that made me think of it was the point where she uses Were blood in a ritual and shit goes completely wrong.  But, here’s the scaffolding of rules being put into place and we’ll bounce on those beams when we get to them.  For right now, this is the standard we’re given and it works for the plot as we see it.

This far in, we know what an Animator does.  Manny taught Anita how to do it properly.  So there’s ritual magic involved, but from what I understand, being a professional Animator is actually working as your own focus every time you raise a zombie.  Animation is a natural occurrence, one that will happen, whether or not you do it for a living.  So if you’re one of the gifted people that have this ability, you better learn to channel and focus it, or you’re going to be seeing dead people all over the damn place.  It never gets into what happens if an Animator learns to control it.  Anita can put up pretty powerful shields against metaphysical happenings, is there a way to train people to shield against something like this from happening to them?  It would be an interesting thought.  I mean, there has to be another way.  Not everyone is going to go out and learn a voodoo ritual to use in the middle of a graveyard to keep it from happening.

Don’t even get me started on the absolutely awful abuse of Voodou.

Give me strength…

I’m rambling though.

Anita has some hard lines that she had to explain to her greedy boss.  Most Animators can’t raise a zombie over a century dead.  That means she can charge more money for it.  But she refuses.

I just didn’t want to.

Why not elaborate there?  Why not?  There’s no explanation.  Is it more tiring?  Is it harder?  Do you need a focus, like she thinks Zachary does?  Is there a reason other than ‘I don’t want to’?  Fuck, if you even said, I didn’t want to raise zombies I know nothing about, that make more sense.  And yes, she actually does say that later, but it would have made more sense contextually here.

So here she stands, in the middle of a graveside ceremony, surrounded by hungry vampires, thinking about how much money she could charge for this, but instead settles on the fact that living is payment enough for her.  Riiight.

Zachary doesn’t understand what she wants to do, and there’s very typical LKH over explaining without explaining anything really at all.  Of course, there’s always someone who doesn’t understand what the hell is going on, and it’s usually someone who’s going to be directly fucked if they have no clue what’s going on, but whatever, we’re just going to play it by ear and hope they just figure it out.  Gettin shit done.

So she explains to us anyway, and gets on with it.  They cut themselves, because scars and blood man, just like boats and hos.  They walk around the circle and recall it.  They rub blood and goo on themselves and Anita pauses a little on his armband.

The woven band was like a ring of darkness on his arm.  I smeared blood along the beads, fingertips finding the soft brush of feathers worked into the string.  The gris-gris needed blood, I could feel that, but not goat blood.  I shrugged it away.  Time to worry about Zachary’s personal magic later.

Shrugged it away?  Isn’t this sending up a red flag?  I think there’s a very weird line here, one between traditional ritual magic that they use to raise the dead, relying on natural innate talent.  It does get very blurred with Voodoo during the series, but I don’t think that’s entirely correct.  It’s almost like LKH dipped into the research and just picked the things she liked, smearing them together.  Which is fine.  Reality is no excuse for fiction, she can do as she pleases in this world, it’s hers.  But.  If the lines are so smeared for her to recognize the gris-gris for what it was, shouldn’t she have even a most basic understanding of exactly what the fuck it is?  It wants people blood and it can’t be the likes of her, so why isn’t this a giant red flag waving??!?  Let’s stay blissfully ignorant for a while longer, there’s more plot stuff to tackle.

They chant together and they bring Estelle Hewitt from the ground.  Seeing the corpse, she realizes where she has seen Zach before.  She was at his fucking funeral.  He just had a shitty makeup job.  You know.  Things.

I had heard rumors of gris-gris that could cheat death.  Rumors, legends, fairy tales.  But then again, maybe not.

No shit.

So here she is, in the middle of a cemetery with a zombie and hungry vampires and she knows Zach’s little secret.  Instead of being coy about it and playing her cards close to her chest, she just has to fuck with it, trying to give blood to the gris-gris.  What the actual fuck are you thinking, AB?!?  She could have played it off like she didn’t know anything, kept his secret and used it as leverage if he tried to turn the vampires against him to save his own life later.  But whatever.  Glass face.

“I should have let them kill you.”  I said.

He smiled then.  “Can you kill the dead?”

I jerked my wrist free.  “I do it all the time.”

Suuuure.

Zachary aside for a moment, lets take a moment to give Estelle some attention.  She’s worse for wear for being a century in the ground, but her eyes are wild and dark.  She’s dressed in wedding finery.  This does not sound like a good thing.  They can’t have brought this lady back for anything good.

So thirsty!

Anita has to feed Estelle, because Zachary’s dead blood isn’t enough for her.  So she does, letting the woman drink pathetically from her arm, all the while asking Zach how many people he’s killed to stay alive.  Aren’t there a bunch of vampires hovering around listening to this?  Can’t they hear it?  Do they have selective hearing in this case?  Bet she super regrets saving his ass now!

Zach releases the zombie to the vampires and Anita goes for the old stage left, taking her shoes with her.  Theresa stops her and there’s more metaphysical explaining to do.  So she basically tells this vampire who hates her that she can use herself as a pretty powerful sacrifice to raise older zombies.  Something tells me that when you’re alive that long and you’re kind of a bitch, you may have buried a lot of people that you hate.  And you may be wanting to bring them back to life to fuck up some more.

Which is exactly what they did to Estelle.

I glanced back once.  The vampires were closing in.  The zombie was stumbling from one side to the other, trying to run.  But there was nowhere to go.

I stumbled through the crooked gate.  A wind had finally come down out of the trees.  Another scream sounded from behind the hedges.  I ran, and I didn’t look back.

So wait.

She raised a zombie and gave it her blood to make it alive since Zachary couldn’t do it.  This was all her zombie being raised.  And she gets it out for these vampires to save Zachary.  Not herself, because she already stated that there was no danger to her from Theresa that night.  This was ONLY to save Zachary’s life, which, haha, joke was SO on her.

le sigh

Then, when she gets the zombie out of the ground, what did she think they were going to do to it?  Play fucking monopoly?  No, they wanted to fuck with it.  They can’t kill it again, the only thing that can put it back in the grave is Anita.  And she runs.  Leaving this poor zombie that she has no idea the backstory of, she leaves it there in the cemetery to be fucked up by a pack of angry hungry vampires.  I’m assuming they can’t take any blood from her, so what are they doing to her?  Just tearing her apart?  And she can’t die?

Anita, the brave hero that she is, left her there.  Ran away from it.  She can’t be killed by Theresa!  She could have laid the zombie back down or bought it time, or thought about what the fuck she was doing for a minute.  This is a series of unfortunate events.

But yeah.  She fucking ran away.

Click here to head back to the chapter links.  

Guilty Pleasures – Chapter 27 – The Grinch Who Stole The Whole Roast Plot

Let me start out by saying that the entire first chunk of this chapter is a fucking weird childish tantrum and the author herself even says as much.  Cause with three kids in my house, I totes enjoy reading about a grown woman having a damned tantrum.  Hooray.  The other half of this chapter isn’t so bad, but, well, you know, standards being low and all that.

Cheers!

Phillip and Anita are stepping out of the bathroom and Madge tries to get all gropey with her again.  We go in again on how gross and icky old ladies are.  So not sexy.  Why are they trying to be sexy?

A man I did not know fell at my feet.  Crystal was on top of him, pinning him to the floor.  He looked young and a little frightened.  His eyes looked up past Crystal, to me.  I thought he was going to ask for help, but then she kissed him, sloppy and deep, like she was drinking him from the mouth down.  His hands began to lift the silk folds of her skirt.  Her thighs were incredibly white, like beached whales.

What the actual fuck?  Like, seriously, what the fuck did I just read?

So does this guy want her help or not?  I don’t get his motivation at all.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and assert the fact that Anita is not a reliable narrator at all.  There’s a lot of bias in there, I’ll get to that in a moment.  Is she projecting her fear of what’s going on into other people?  Cause he’s scared at first, then he starts lifting her skirt.  And let me say, this lady has something going on if she’s able to bring these young boys down.  Thighs like beached whales or not.  Who fucking CARES?

Anywho.  Anita is still mad about the bite or whatever.  So she’s going outside to take a breather.  Instead of showing these people her and Philip on a united front, she decides to insult him in front of the lot of them, hurt his feelings (twice) and fight not to slam the door behind her as she storms off into the night.  Don’t forget Voyeur Hubby is still on the prowl, better grab a sweater.  Or a toothy junkie.

“I’ll go out with you.”

“No.  That would defeat the purpose, Phillip.  Since you are one of the things I want to get away from.”

Dayum!!  No seriously, what did you think it was going to be?  A fucking tupperware party?  Come on.

POW!

“It’s dark,” he said.  “They’ll be here soon.  I can’t help you if I’m not with you.”

I stepped closer to him and said in a near whisper, “Let’s be honest, Phillip.  I’m a whole lot better at protecting myself than you are.  The first vampire that crooks its finger will have you for lunch.”

His face started to crumble, and I didn’t want to see it.  “Dammit, Phillip, pull yourself together.”  I walked out onto the trellis-covered porch and resisted the urge to slam the door behind me.  That would have been childish.

Like you’ve been real fucking mature to this point.  Look, everything you’ve done has led up to this point.  Pretending all this time to be his lover, what did you think was going to happen at a damned sexy party?  You were going to sit around in a skirt and play Boggle?  Eh, no, that’s not how it works.  Maybe you should have thought about what you were going to do instead of blindly rushing into it and then hating the PRACTICAL STEPS someone is taking to ensure that you get through the night alive.  And perhaps not insult him right after he made some major breakthrough in his fucking addiction.

Anita Blake lacks some serious tact at this point.  And doesn’t regret her decisions in the slightest.  Like, fuck Phillip, he’s taking orders from someone else, but at least he isn’t bullshitting her about it.  I don’t know where I stand on him yet.  Yeah, it’s shitty that he’s doing someone’s shit work, but he’s at least making an effort to be helpful to her.  Most people would only be thinking about themselves and how to stay alive though it.  You can dislike him for his methods, but maybe cut the insults out?  It’s not going to do you any good in the long run.

Goat outta here!

Whatever.  She’s outside and feels some magicy shit and hears a goat bleating.  So she goes to find out who is conveniently trying to raise a hundred year old corpse in a pretty little subdivision.  What the hell is it doing buried there?  Who planned this subdivision!?

She comes across Zachary trying to raise a zombie, but it’s too old, there’s not enough of it left.  Well, they knew that, it was just part of the plan to kill him.  Maybe for fucking up the last zombie.

I really don’t understand why Nikolaos needs an excuse to kill him.  This seems like a lot of work to go to just to kill someone.  I mean, he works for her.  Can’t she just call a meeting in one of the conference rooms under the Circus and eat him?  What the hell is this giant charade?  To make Theresa feel special?  I don’t fucking get it.

And for the record, Zachary is just a really shitty animator, apparently.

So.  Zachary fails and Anita just has to make a big show in front of the vampires to save his life.  Why?  I don’t know.  She’s saying fuck it to Monica because she turned her over to the vampires, she’s being shitty with Phillip for whatever reason she has for the next 10 minutes and this asshat who assaulted a zombie and broke him, presumably to do whatever in the dungeon when Nikolaos had her own temper tantrum, she wants to help this guy and keep them from killing him.

No one ‘gave’ Zachary to the monsters.  He’s there of his own accord.  He made his own choice to work for them when he signed on with them.  He’s obviously not living up to what he advertised, so not he’s paying the price.  Why is Anita’s hero complex kicking in for this piece of shit when she thinks nothing of shitty thoughts for Phillip who didn’t ask for any of it when he was assaulted at 12?  Her moral compass has no true north.  And that’s fine, as long as she could admit it.

I promised myself I wouldn’t cryyy!

There’s some crap about Theresa being dressed like a goth girl at prom, yadda yadda.  Anita feels since she has nothing to be afraid of from her, it’s totally ok to poke Theresa as much as she wants.  There’s never any consequences to her being an ass, so fuck it, go hard.

She pulls Zach out of the fire by offering to help him raise the zombie by acting as a focus for him.  He doesn’t know how it works, but she’s totally willing to show him how to do some more powerful magic than what he knows.  Cause that won’t backfire.  Let’s show all the people working with the big bad how to do some stellar fucking magic.  Magic for EVERYONE!

Theresa strode over to us in a swish of cloth.  “Enough of this, animator.  He can’t do it so he pays the price.  Either leave us now, or join us at our… feast.”

“Are you having rare Who-roast-beast?”  I asked.

“What are you talking about?”

It’s fucking delicious!

Seriously, what the actual fuck are you talking about?  Why the fucking hell would that line pop into your head?  At that time?  No fucking way.

“You are crazy.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Do you want to die?”  She asked.

Please, just kill her now.

I can’t even.

Click here to get back to the Chapter Links!

Guilty Pleasures – Chapter 26 – Tough as Nails! Not really…

For reals.

Still jumping through hoops at the freak party.

Edwards date for the night climbs into Phillip’s lap and thankfully doesn’t try to undress him or grope him, though why Anita cares is beyond me.

There’s a bit more there about how dangerous Edward is and how he can fit into a crowd like none other.  Cool.  Got it.

Edward, excuse me, scrumptious Teddy is letting his date grope all over Phillip for the moment, and he’s having a complete junkie moment over it.

So here’s my dilemma with this whole situation.  Is it alright for Anita to drag Phillip back into this addiction?  We know that he’s working for someone, got all those breadcrumbs she’s been leaving.  And that means that whoever he’s working for has made him go back into this scene as well.  So neither side really cares about Phillip and the habit he’s trying to kick.  He’s literally a pawn to both of them.  Shouldn’t Anita as the hero of the story have more sense than this?  Is this what a hero character does?  I know that it bothers her and it gets mentioned a few times in the next few novels, disappears for like fifteen and then comes back, but it doesn’t seem to affect her very much coming up.  There’s no real lesson gained from it, as she continues to use people in the same way in books to come.  I’ll get more into that as we go along, but this would be the time for her to draw her line in the sand, and she just doesn’t do that.

Don’t get me wrong.  Phillip is the epitome of conflicted character at this point.  He is genuinely trying to help Anita and still complete the tasks that he’s being forced to do.  Phillip knows that if he goes against who he’s working for, they’ll kill him and possibly hurt other people.  So it’s a noble thing that he’s doing.  And he’s helping her find clues.  Even as he’s possibly selling her out to someone.  These pieces need to fall into place soon.

Anywho.  Darlene is licking on Phillip and whatnot, grinding her red coordinated panties on him.  Am I the only one that thinks of weird 80’s hair and lace porn when they read this?  Phillip stops her as she’s feeling his chest up and we get the first sketch of rules that these parties entail.

We coordinated our panties as well!

If Phillip lets Darlene do anything to him, it leaves Anita alone and fair game to anyone else.  Alone at her first party.  Oh nooo.  So Darlene assumes that her scars are from another freaky party and Phillip explains that they’re from an actual attack and he just can’t leave her alone.

Darlene offers Scrumptious Teddy to keep her safe for the party and of course, they can’t do that, Phillip is being the damned hero here, thank you.  Awkward moment as Anita realizes Edward has been to other parties in the past.  Though, I doubt this is how he got all his information about vampires, but alright.  Moot point, Phillip says no, Anita is his charge for the night and they head off down the hallway to the bathroom.

There’s a little victory thing as Phillip realizes he didn’t let Darlene do whatever she was going to do to him.  Hooray.  But there’s another issue.  Creepy husband is chilling right outside of the bathroom window watching them.  What the hell kind of subdivision is this?

Anita offers a second time for them to leave, but both of them know they can’t, because he’s supposed to be keeping Anita here for whoever the fuck he’s working for.  When she asks him, it’s pretty obvious she’s not going to get an answer.

“Why would you offer to let me out of my promise?”

I shrugged and rubbed my hands over my arms.  “Because… because you seem to be in some kind of pain.  Because you’re a junkie trying to kick the habit, sort of, and I don’t want to screw that up for you.”

“That’s a very… decent thing to offer.”  He said decent like he wasn’t used to the word.

Probably because he’s been dealing with people like you, jerking him around!  Hell no he wouldn’t know the likes of the word decent.

Because people inherently suck.

There’s a weird beat where Phillip changes tune so abruptly.

“Your shirt’s wet.”

He released me so suddenly, I stumbled back from him.  He drew the shirt over his head in one fluid motion.  Of course, he had a lot of practice in undressing himself.  It would have been such a nice chest without the scars.

Jesus.  Scars are only an issues if you make them an issue.  From what we know, Phillip got some of his scars by being ASSAULTED AS A CHILD.  You have zero right to make him feel bad or pass judgement on his scars in any way.  Sure, he’s being a junkie, but it looks like he’s really trying to move past all that.  This is pretty judgy.  Maybe AB has body issues about her own scars, though by the clothes she wears, it seems that she doesn’t.  She of all people should understand about body image and what she does by saying and thinking these sorts of things.

So Phillip does the only reasonable thing and bites the shit out of her neck, drawing blood.  Hey!  Can’t answer prying questions about who he’s working for if he’s putting on a peep show for creepy hubby in the window!

I let Phillip help me out of the bathtub.  I whispered, “Could he hear us?”

Phillip shook his head.  His arms slid around my back again.  “We are supposed to be lovers.  Do you want Harvey to stop believing that?”

“This is blackmail.”

He smiled, dazzling, hold it in your hand and stroke it, sexy.  My stomach tightened.  He bent down, and I didn’t stop him.

And then he does the bite.

Oh damn!

But there’s the whole removal of choice which is a hallmark of LKH.  No character can just want to get into something or choose to do something.  They have to be coerced into it.  I would have thought more highly of AB if she had been the one to go for the kiss because she knew Harvey was watching and she had to keep her role for both of their safety.

And there’s nothing sexy about lack of choice.  Nothing.

So anyway.  There are few people in the world that have ever bitten someone.  It take a lot of force with our omnivore teeth to break skin.  But he draws enough for it to be on his lip and whatever.  Whatever.  I’ll let it go for the sake of story, but I didn’t buy it.  

After all this, Anita is scared of who Phillip is, now suddenly.  He’s basically fixed the first rule for her.  She’s marked, so apparently no one can touch her for the rest of the night.  He ushers her back out to search for clues.  In all the foreplay, he’s successfully dodged the question of who he’s working for again.

It was damn embarrassing that every time he took his shirt off, my brain went out to lunch.  But no more; I had had my first and last kiss from Phillip of the many scars.  From now on I would remain the tough-as-nails vampire slayer, not to be distracted by rippling muscles or nice eyes.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Eminem thinks it’s FUNNY AS SHIT!!

Seriously?!?!

Click here to get back to the Chapter Links!

Guilty Pleasures – Chapter 25 – Bonerkiller

It’s all downhill from here.  We’ve finally reached the halfway point.

This is a pretty dismal chapter.  They get to the party and there’s so much awkwardness it physically hurts.

All the awkward!

I’m just going to dive in, I really just hate everything.

Basically, the house is just your typical suburban house, living room, central air keeping everything cool, blah blah and so on.  There’s a few people there, a husband and wife and a black woman.  Basically, in the middle of all this suburban bullshit, they have the most stereotypical BDSM party going on.  I’m not here to judge, and I know not everyone has a dungeon in their basement and these things can take place anywhere.  But here, there’s a ridiculous lack of research and a whole lot of dependence on how you *think* a freak party would go.

It’s not like this.

The BDSM culture has a basis in respect and understanding.  And trust.  A lot of trust.  Anita is obviously uncomfortable here and they’re still pressing in on her, trying to make her participate.  Telling her that once the “big guys” get there, she’s going to have to participate, Phillip is going to have to share.

Lots of trust.

The whole thing makes me uncomfortable.

Another thing that bothers me about this chapter is the whole weird sense of homophobia and gay panic that’s happening.  At this point, she’s getting groped and whatever by two women and she turns and smiles at the unknown man in the group, knowing damn well that it’s going to get his attention.  It just doesn’t make sense.

She looked like she wondered what flavor I was and how long I’d last.  I had never been looked at that way by another woman.  I didn’t like it much.

This is Madge, Harvey’s wife.  They’re both doing a spectacular job of making AB super squicky and uncomfortable.

Her eyes said she was thinking naughty things about me, and her.  No way.  Rochelle swished her skirt, exposing far too much thigh.  I had been right.  She was naked under the skirt.  I’d die first.

Really?

Ok, just a head’s up.  It takes like twenty books for this author to even get her main character into the thought of women, and even then she has zero idea of what to do with them when they get there.

GTFO!

Here’s my theory and it’s just that, a theory.

Parallel to LKH, I’ve been writing through my twenties, through a few kids, through a divorce, through new men.  And when you’re writing, it comes out in the writing, whether you want it to or not.  My early works show that I had no fucking idea what I wanted from a man or how I wanted to be treated.  The awkwardness you feel around other people, it can come through in your work, especially if you’re knowing or unknowingly basing the character on a part of yourself, which becomes apparent that she is.

Anyway.  I doubt that she’s rather die than get it on with a black lady.  That’s pretty extreme and sort of racist.  I had a problem with it.

This is pretty though..

And again.  HOW DO NONE OF THESE PEOPLE RECOGNIZE HER?  She doesn’t even bother with a fake name.  She should be screaming this in her head.  They have to know her, why is no one bringing it up?

Anyway, after all the awkwardness, Phillip says he brought her there and he was going to take her home.  Madge tells him she might be a sweet piece of tail and calls her a bedwarmer, but he’s not going to go up against the vampires when they get there.

Anita is all like hell the fuck no.  Madge comments on her temper and Anita has to say something awful.

“Did you know that when you smile, you get deep wrinkles on either side of your mouth?  You are over forty, aren’t you?”

So here’s the thing.  This is a BDSM party.  A not very well educated one, but that’s what it is.  A sex party thing.  Anita gets invited to it because of Phillip, so far that’s all we know.  When you’re in this setting, you don’t mock someone else’s appearance.  If they’re confident enough to come in front of you, old overweight in their skivvies, you take the higher road and not insult them.  The same thing she describes when Crystal gets there.  She’s less of a person because she’s fat and older.  So fucking what?  If she’s fat and older and still banging Phillip, who the fuck cares?  What?  Sexy parties are only for young hot people?

Did you just cum on my mom?

Crystal is obviously a terrible person because she looks like shit and obviously shouldn’t be there.  She throws herself at Phillip, and Anita is as tactless as ever, telling the woman to keep her hands off her date.

Anyway.  If Anita had any hope of getting information from these people, she probably just ruined it.

And I remembered what he said, that he had stopped coming to these parties.  Was this why?  Crystal and her like?

Yes, who wants to be groped by a middle aged mom?  That’s the WORST.

Madge of the sharp fingernails?

More old ladies.  Gross.

I had forced him to bring me, but in doing so, I had forced him to bring himself.

If you thought of it that way, it was my fault Phillip was here.  Damn, I owed him.

HOLYFUCKINGSHITDUHHHH

Really?  You’re just now getting here?  To this conclusion?  Trust me, stupid, the old ladies aren’t even the worst of it.  Didn’t you think before there was a reason he stayed away from his equivalent of an opium den?  Come the fuck on!  How did you graduate college?

So she makes Crystal cry.  Cause she’s a badass fucking vampire slayer, that’s right!  These people just came here to get their jollies and Anita is just killing the mood all over the place.

F U

Phillip is shaking.  Anita offers that they can leave if he wants.  Just now getting the scope of what she’s asked him to do, she offers that if it’s too much, they can leave.  But he chooses to stay, because if there’s a choice, he can do it.  I get the sentiment and it was clever that she gave Phillip a redeeming quality.

But it’s never true.  Phillip has in fact been getting orders from someone.  Someone has told him to get her there to the party and keep her safe.  But that’s not it at all.  He’s lying to her, but she can’t get him to tell her what the lie is or who is giving him orders.

But that’s alright.  Edward walks in.  Oh yes.  The highlight of this chapter.  Anita looses all of her sense and curiosity in figuring out the truth behind Phillip, because she’s in shock that he’s there.  Edward at a freak party.  She wonders what the hell he’s doing there, though it’s pretty obvious he’s there to do his fucking job and kill something.

Bringing down the house!

AB should probably focus and find out who the hell Phillip is getting his orders from, but she can’t get past it.  She’s thinking Edward might have met his match.  And if Nikolaos connected Anita to Edward, she was in a world of shit.  She knows that she should tell Nikolaos that he was here, but she wasn’t going to turn over a human to the monsters.

Edward is way better at acting than Anita, but that’s not saying much.  Edward knows she’s not going to turn him in.  Maybe she should have started working with him instead of Phillip?  He’d be guaranteed to kill his share of vampires and they’d probably get down to the bottom of the murders.

But she’s not going to do that.  Instead, she contemplates using his lack of honor like he’s using her honor now.  This doesn’t sound like it’s going to be good.

And she never finds out who the hell is ordering Phillip around.  Get your head in the game, girl.

Click here to get back to the Chapter Links!

Guilty Pleasures – Chapter 24 – You Catch More Flies With… ABUSE!

On our way to the weird ass freak party, finally.

Anita is on her way to Guilty Pleasures to pick up Phillip.  She parks in a no parking spot, law abiding citizen that she is and he’s waiting for her.  Complete in black leather pants and a fishnet shirt.  The cliches are literally choking me.  Even Anita thinks he looks sort of sleazy.  Don’t get me wrong.  I can rock the shit out of leather pants, but summer in the midwest isn’t the time.  No, not at all.

Anyway.  She’s imagining him going from flirt to hustler and then she’s dropped into trying to picture him at twelve.

Whatever had been done to him, he was what he was, and that was what I had to deal with.  I wasn’t a psychiatrist who could afford to feel sorry for the poor unfortunate.  Pity is an emotion that can get you killed.  The only thing more dangerous is blind hate, and maybe love.

Stop the train right there.

Lady.  I absolutely get the fact that you cannot change someone, all you can do is accept who they are.  Sure, yes, that makes sense.  But “I can’t afford to feel sorry for the poor unfortunate”?  Are you kidding me?  I get it, yeah, Anita Blake is such a fucking badASS.  But there’s a certain level of empathy you need to have and understanding of people when you work in law enforcement of any kind, and I am damn sure empathy and compassion should probably fall in there somewhere in the zombie raising aspect of your damn job.  Pity sure the hell is an emotion that can get you killed, but only if you’re pitying a motherfucker while someone has a gun to your head.  Right there, in this moment, she can damn well afford to take a look at Philip as a fellow human.  I don’t care much for the guy either, but this is Nicky level sociopathy.  Come the fuck on.

And don’t even get me started on the harem of damaged and similar men she picks up along the way.  SO.  MANY.  HURTS.  All of them have some goddamn trauma in their past, it’s amazing how her tune changes from this to what it is farther down the line.  Tell me again about hate and love and how they’re so fucking dangerous.

This is not a character arc.  Not at all.  I’ll get more into the aspect of self insertion into story later on, I will, as it becomes more apparent.  But this right here, I get why it’s there and the character aspects you’re supposed to take from it, but it’s entirely over the top.

Anyway, back to it.

He gets in the car and they are on their way.

There’s a nice little awkward chunk there where LKH goes into how being alone with a man is weird.  Like it’s always going to amount to awkwardness, sex or fear.  Ehm, no, not always.  Especially if you’re working with him, none of those things ever have to happen.  But Anita even now can’t seem to have a simple work relationship with anyone and has to make shit totally unprofessional.  Yeah, I know, they’re on their way to a fucking freak party, but still.  She is getting paid to solve these murders.  Paid twice.  So maybe she should try to show a little professionalism and stop adding weirdness where it is very much not.

So Phillip is also being weird, leaning toward her and putting his arm around her.  Hello, she’s driving!  Stahp!!  And he’s all trying to find out what turns her on.  Now, right here would be a good time for her to explain that they have a working relationship.  See, this is where the empathy thing would be a good tool to use.  Let him know that this isn’t like working for a vampire, sexy shit isn’t going to fly.  But instead, she slaps him with the trauma that made him who he is.  What they hell kind of a person brings up a childhood assault to make a guy not hit on her?  Jesussss.

And it works.  Understandably.  He is instantly terrorized.  Duh, Valentine assaulted him when he was a kid.  His ‘community’ knows this and they took the time to assure him that Valentine wouldn’t be at the party.  What the fuck kind of game are you playing with this kid?  Come the fuck on!

I didn’t want to see Phillip afraid.  I might start feeling sorry for him, and I couldn’t afford that.  Anita Blake, hard as nails, sure of herself, unaffected by crying men.  Riiight.

Bitch, then why the hell did you bring him up?!  What is wrong with you?!

This is the first time in the book I wanted to put it down and walk away.  See, I’m all about characters poking the thing that makes them uncomfortable.  I really am.  Good story warrants it, but this is just rude.

Phillip gets ahold of himself and is informed that Anita paid to have him investigated, to see if she could trust him.  No, lady, you probably can’t, but you’re really making him feel super valuable with all the shit your playing with him.  Even if you know your source is going to betray you, you let on otherwise and aren’t surprised when it happens.  Hard as nails, my ass.

“Where are we going, Phillip?”

“What?”

I wanted to say, “Question too hard for you?” but I resisted.  It would have been like picking on him.

Riiight.  Like you’ve been a sweet dove to him this whole time anyway.

Anyway.  They end up in a neat little subdivision.  Yes, Captain Obvious, a policeman would probably wonder what the hell you were doing with leather pants guy in the car, but you know what, he’d probably BE A FUCKING PROFESSIONAL about it.  Until you weren’t.  That’s where the fight would start.

So they get to the house and Phillip gives her some ground rules that they probably should have talked about on the car ride there instead of being all weird and shit.  She shouldn’t leave the main room with anyone but him.  They’re going to use the whole dating thing again.

I have a problem here.  Aren’t they going to know what the fuck the Executioner looks like?!  How is this not a thing?!

Anyway, Phillips looking forward to playing her boyfriend all night.  Of course.  Play the damn girlfriend and try not to get them killed, AB.  You have one job.

Blah blah blah, leave the cross in the car.  We get ti, you wear a cross.  All.  The.  Time.

They finally go to the house, weird half naked lady is standing in the yard, waiting for them.  Sure.  Anita is obviously over dressed.  Duh.

Anita quotes some obvious poetry, but Phillip is probably too stupid to get ti anyway, so she blows him off.  They follow the lady into the house and that’s where the chapter ends.

So I think what bothers me the most about this chapter is really, just how shitty she treats Phillip.  He’s literally going out of his way to help her.  He doesn’t have to, in fact, it’s hurting him more to do it.  Whether or not she thinks he’s setting her up, she could at least be not so bitchy until she knows.

And Phillip is really just the first version of half of her harem later down the line.  She literally falls for this kind of guy all the damn time.  I’m going to be interested to see where exactly her shift in thinking happens.  Because it’s going to be messy and sloppy and probably just gross if memory serves me correctly.

I really hadn’t thought I was going to find so much shit I hated this early in the books.  Really.

Halfway through.

Click here to get back to the Chapter Links!

Guilty Pleasures – Chapter 23 – Just Girly Things

So, let’s have a totally rad post about shopping and boys and puppies.

Or not.

Let’s have a talk about finding clothes that hide weapons.  And sweaty thighs with gun holsters that make you walk like a duck with a wet diaper.

Basically, Anita has done her shopping and she’s on her way back to her apartment.  There’s a lot of mechanical talk about how to carry a weapon to keep from getting tangled in your shopping bags and whatnot.  Actually good advice.  Even if you’re not being chased by daytime lackeys or trained assassins.

Anita talks about the tiny spot of paranoia she’s had while shopping.  Wondering if she’s being followed.  Is she worrying about the vampire murderer coming after her while she’s in the middle of a busy shopping mall?  It’s sort of unclear exactly what she thinks the threat is, so she’s just being paranoid of everything until she knows.

But amid all of that, the most frightening thing she had seen had been the price on the designer clothing.  Come on girl, you just cashed a check from the vampires, raised a couple zombies and are on retainer with the cops.  Money ain’t something you’re hurting for.  Go fucking nuts.

I got one piece of pizza with just cheese, the way I like it, but one piece with everything.  I hate mushrooms and green peppers.  Sausage belongs on the breakfast table, not on pizza.  I didn’t know what bothered me more; that I ordered it in the first place, or that I had eaten half of it before I realized what I was doing.  I was craving food that I normally hated.  Why?  One more question without an answer.  Why did this one scare me?

Well.  You’re either pregnant or there’s some weird shit going on.  And since this is before AB decided (oh, sorry ardeur) to fuck everything that moved, I think it’s more metaphysical weirdness.

If you haven’t figured it out before this point, or at least have had an idea, then I don’t know what to say about it.  Other than, duh, it’s JC fucking doing his thing on her.  If she hasn’t figured it out yet, and she has a fucking degree in this shit, then she’s in bigger trouble than we all thought.

On her way inside, she meets Mrs. Pringle and her pomeranian, Custard.  Mrs. Pringle is just as much of a trope as Luther is.  Old white lady who gives her relationship advice and has concern for her.  Whatever.  She gives it away that someone let himself into her apartment and Anita plays it off as though she knew about it.  It could either be Phillip or Edward.  Let’s cut the shit, we already know who it is.

Let’s stop right there for a minute.  Edward.  Let me tell you all the ways I love Edward.  There’s a million.  He’s the one character that isn’t forced into doing anything he doesn’t want to do.  We’ll get into Donna later, but right now, this Edward, he’s a character that has potential.  He’s never been swayed by Anita in the slightest and just rolls with whatever happens.  If LKH fucks it up and makes them cross a line, that, that my friends will be the day I give up completely.

More gun shuffling in the hallway and she’s decided she’s just going to shoot through the bag like Stephanie Plum if anything weird happened.  She gets in the door and looks around and it was just Edward, dropping off a shotgun like he said he would and leaving her a deadline to give him the information he wants.  And let me say right here, I doubt Edward would have let himself be seen by a neighbor, let alone chat with her in the hallway if he was bringing her a shotgun.  It just doesn’t fit, but whatever.  It’s not that big a deal.

I told Ronnie we were professionals, but if Edward was a professional, then I was an amateur.  And so was Ronnie.

I don’t even think this is a sexist thing.  There’s Manny, who taught her everything she knows, but Edward is just that badass.  I like it.

She checks her answering machine and there’s a message from Phillip.  He knows the location of the party and she’s supposed to pick him up from in front of Guilty Pleasures at six-thirty.

That gives her two hours to get ready, and if there’s one thing AB hates more than shopping, it’s getting ready for a party.  Ok, lady, I hear you.  I hate getting ready too.  But you want these people to believe you want to be there, you better do a bit more than run a brush through your hair.  And base is not the consistency of cake if you apply it correctly.

I do love a decent flowy black skirt with pockets.  It actually sounds adorable.  If the excessive paragraphs about hiding weapons is tedious now, just wait.  Oh fuck it all, just wait.  I’m going to whistle past the sweaty thigh and duck diaper shit.  I worked in a kitchen for years and weird sweat is totally a thing.  Slap some Gold Bond on them gams and get to work girl.

All set and dressed to go, she gets her shit together and packs up the shotgun.  Last lingering thought of Edward’s threat as she is about to head out for the freak partyyy..

Click here to get back to the Chapter Links!

Guilty Pleasures – Chapter 22 – My Favorite Things! Bars and Shopping!

Finally, a chapter that gets shit done.  The scaffolding is shaky and could topple at any serious prodding, but it’s there.

Dead Dave’s is run during the day by Luther, a large old black man that smokes a lot.  They seem to have done this before, they know each other well.  DD’s is a typical bar, a few suits in a booth eating, a drunk at the bar and Anita ordering orange juice that she’s probably paid heavily for, including a bribe.

Who wants to get drunk when there are teetotalers in the crowd?

I would.  When I’m trying to get drunk, I tend not to pay attention to what the fuck other people are drinking.

And why in the world would I keep coming to a bar if I didn’t drink?

Beats the shit out of me.

Anita asks Luther about Phillip and they come to the already obvious consensus that he isn’t to be trusted, duh.  He’s a junkie and you know, blah blah blah.  Leave it to the old wise black man to try to talk some sense into her.

“Damn, girl, you are moving in the wrong circles.”

I smiled.  Luther was the only person I let call me girl.

Shut up.

Here’s the thing.  It’s not like Dave tells her everything she asks without a price.  She has to provide information to them too.  That’s the trade off.

Turns out, Luther knows Phillip, at least of him and he tells her she should probably stay away from him if she can.  Nope, not Anita.  Luther remembers that Valentine was the one that turned him on to the whole junkie thing when he was just a kid.  Made him want it at a young age.  All the more reason for Anita to want to kill Valentine.  And if he wasn’t on the end of Niko’s leash, he’s going to be pissed that she’s out having lunch with his little victim.

Anita wants the daytime resting place for Valentine, but she has to know that giving out information like that to her is going to be a serious problem for Dave and Luther, and she, as far as I can see, doesn’t give a shit.

“You’re right.  I don’t have a right to ask.”  But I sat there on the bar stool, staring at him, willing him to give me what I needed.  Risk your life for me old buddy, ol’ pal, I’d do the same for you.  Riiight.

“If you could swear you wouldn’t use the info to kill him, I could tell you,” Luther said.

“It’d be a lie.”

She really wouldn’t do the same for them if they asked.  And I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t ask to begin with.  You’ve got to understand the rules of asking too much from your sources and putting more people in danger to get to your end goal.  Luther probably gives zero shits about what vampires die.  He’s been stated to have nothing to do with them except for the fact that he works for Dave.  So why put him in danger that he doesn’t need to be in?  It’s going against the personal rules AB has set up for herself.  It just doesn’t make sense, except for the convenience.

Basically Anita tells him that she’d jump the gun before a warrant was issued and kill him if she had the chance.  He warns her that she’s going to be up on charges one day, but she really doesn’t give a shit.

Luther, my friend, Anita never gets put up on charges.  She does whatever the fuck she wants.  Duh.

“Word on the street is that you met the master last night.  That true?”

“You know about that before or after the fact?”  I asked.

He looked pained.  “Anita, we woulda tld you if we’d known, gratis.”

I nodded.  “Sorry, Luther, it’s been a rough few nights.”

So they would have told her something, but she’s putting them in danger.  Mmmhmm.

Back to the issue of convenience.  Ronnie chooses that moment to call Anita about some information she found.  Let me tell you, I have a lot of drunk friends, but I probably wouldn’t start calling around to bars to look for them.  Anita didn’t tell anyone she was going there and as far as it’s written, didn’t even say it out loud.  I’m going to chalk it up to Ronnie’s sweet fucking detective skills.

Basically, there’s a rumor going around about the Humans Against Vampires group.  They have designed a death squad to wipe the vampires off the face of the earth.  Ronnie has not a single piece of proof or witness yet, but she’s totes thrilled about it.

Anita finally does something professional.  She lets Ronnie in on where she is going to be that night.  Damn right if you’re going out to a fucking freak party, you better let someone know where you’re going to be at.  Jesus, I sound like my mother.  Ronnie gives her the scolding that she deserves about going in without backup, and much deserved.  There’s already way too much cavalier behavior going on to be believable.  But there’s the issue of being forced into a situation again.

Anita can’t admit that she’s going to the party alone because she wants to.  There’s extenuating circumstances.  Jameson likes vampires, Bert is the money guy, Charles is squeamish and Anita made a promise to a sobbing Rosita that she would never ask Manny again.  Manny was her mentor on raising zombies and killing vampires.  Though, why these two things are related isn’t all that clear to me.

Either way, Rosita wasn’t fair in crying.  So Rosita’s going to be the one to blame if Anita dies.  It’s sort of annoying.  If she had just decided not to ask Manny because she knew Rosita wasn’t going to approve and he has four kids, that would be one thing.  But this chick can literally not make a choice unless someone makes it easy.  It’s so fucking annoying.

Whatever, Ronnie warns her to be careful and they hang up.

Anita is now facing the most horrible part of her day.  Shopping for clothes that show off her scars and hide her weapons.  I have a feeling I would hate to be the poor retail chick who has to wait on her.  Just threaten her friends, it’ll get her out of the store quicker.

Click here to get back to the Chapter Links!