Death is Only a Theoretical Concept Read Online Free Page A

hair gel,” the vampire
replies with a suitably straight face before breaking into a grin.
He has small, barely-noticeable fangs, and the thought occurs to
Steve that if he refuses to think about what it is he is going to
embark on, this might actually be the sort of vampire—sort of
man—he can pull it off with. In point of fact, it’s not the vampire
part that bothers him. “Actually, I was wondering why you’re here.
You don’t look like a leech or a faefapper, and guys into breather
guys usually hit the bars inland. Not that I wasn’t wondering about
that guy with the fishhooks, though.”
    For a moment,
Steve doesn’t know what to say, and it’s not because he doesn’t
think his moves, honed on girls from here to Sydney, aren’t going
to work. Flirting with a guy can’t truly be much different, can it?
No: this vampire, he feels certain, is sitting at the bar cursing
Ares and his admirers because he isn’t looking for some flirtatious
one-night stand. He’d be out on the dance floor, getting his grind
on in the company of one or more people, otherwise. He’s actually
here to meet someone—someone real, long-term. Someone who isn’t a
straight guy on a dare.
    There are
leeches aplenty, their make-up resembling corpsepaint, all looking
for someone to fuck them, bleed them, turn them—as if there’s some
kind of hot, attractive, erotic danger in an ambulant corpse.
Summer tourists: breathers come down from the city to spend a week
gawking at the Mer and the vampires ... and usually leave about the
time they met their first zombie. Tour boats above Mere Illara are
the town’s second-highest cause of income, after the fishing
trawlers, never mind the fact that there’s nothing to see but a few
well-paid merfolk smiling at the tourists and calling them obscene
names in Merish. Plenty of quick fucks abound, if one is fortunate
enough to be one of the “acceptable” undead; real dates, though,
might be somewhat harder to find.
    Steve wonders,
if he survives death as one of the twenty percent, if he’ll sitting
at a bar hoping to find someone willing to look at an
often-not-all-that-hot zombie.
    “ If
you were really after a vampire,” Steve says, quite truthfully,
“the last thing you’d do is dress up like a leech and have every
vampire in the room trying not to laugh at you.” He pauses. “Okay,
the hair gel was a mistake, wasn’t it?”
    He nearly jerks
away and curses his ridiculous nerves when the vampire offers his
hand. For fuck’s sake, he’s not doing anything! Not even Swanston
has reason to think this conversation a flirtation, yet, so why is
he looking over at Ares and his harem out of fear that Swanston’s
looking?
    “ Abe
Browning.”
    Steve raises his
eyebrows, silently praying that Abe is not as old as his name
sounds—because that would be way too weird for him to handle, no
matter how young Abe looks. Late teens, early twenties? Younger
than he sounds. “Your mother was born in the 1700s?”
    “ No,
but my great-great-great aunt was, and she talked my parents into
naming me after her father.” Abe rolls his eyes. “Everyone else was
being named ‘Adam’ or ‘Erin’ or ‘Shane’ when I was born. Not
Abraham.”
    That sounds like
Steve can place his birthdate—it’s never polite to directly ask an
immortal’s date of birth, and the problem with most vampires is
that they were turned hundreds of years before most breathers had
even been born—somewhere in the 1980s. It’s stupid, he knows, but
he gives a huge sigh of relief: the bloodsucking doesn’t bother
him, but the thought of banging a dude old enough to be his
grandmother should be disturbing, shouldn’t it? Not that it seems
to bother Johanna… “If it makes you any feel any better,” he says,
“Sofu—my grandfather—still can’t figure out how to tune a radio.
He’s also controlling enough Chichi vowed that he wouldn’t return
to Ni—Japan until he was dead, and he doesn’t have the excuse