Page 24 of Suck This

CHAPTER 7

If I eat this pepper, is the diarrhea it’s going to give me worth the dollar?

-Acadia to Corbin

ACADIA

“What?” I semi-shrieked as I snatched the paper from Keisha’s hands.

Keisha tried to snatch it back, but I turned my body so that she couldn’t get it without physically crawling into the seat beside me.

“I told you,” she said. “You could’ve just listened to me. I would’ve read the entire thing word for word.”

I didn’t reply, too busy reading about Constantine’s office blowing up to care what she had to say.

It was true!His office had been hit not long after I’d gotten my brother to release him.

“It says police were refused entrance,” I read to my friend. “Do you think that was because they treat them so badly?”

“Yes,” she answered instantly. “They’re just as likely to do more damage than they are to help anyone.”

“The majority of Constantine’s employees are undead,” I informed her. “Likely they wouldn’t have cared, even if there had been humans there. They’re of the mind that they made their bed, now they have to lie in it.”

“No paramedics or firefighters showed. Only the police, and that was only due to a noise complaint of the fire alarms going off. They likely wouldn’t have shown at all if it hadn’t had been for that.”

I agreed.

The prejudice against the undead was freakin’ outrageous.

The general population didn’t even give them a chance, then went out of their way to make them feel unwelcome.

Such as setting their buildings on fire and planting bombs.

I just hoped that nothing happened to Constantine while he was there… if he was there. My hope was that he went directly home and didn’t stop at his office.

• • •

And it continued to bug me through my workday.

“You seem distracted,” my partner observed.

I was.

Really.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I informed Grady. “I try to get shit done, and it is clear that it’s not going to happen.”

I’d been working on filing case notes for the last two hours, and I’d gotten only about a quarter of it done in the same amount of time than I usually did all of my notes.

“You have moon eyes,” Grady said. “Who are you thinking about? That vampire?”

I shot him a look. “How did you hear about him?”

“The whole department is talking about him,” he said. “I overheard it being talked about over lunch.”

Itbeing the near-rape of my person, and a vampire saving me. Oh, and killing the man that had done it. Yeah, that it.

Constantine had just snapped his neck like he was breaking a toothpick in half. Crack.