I Hunt Killers Blood Boy Read Free Page A

His experience with alcohol was limited to — he counted in his head — exactly none.
    “Kitchen,” the guy said, hooking a thumb in the direction of a wall. Howie figured he meant to point down the hall. “Get yourself loaded, brah.”
    “Will do, brah.” And then Howie patted the adorable drunken linebacker on his head and pushed back into the hallway crowd.
    Making his way down the hallway wasn’t easy, but there was plenty to observe on the way, so he didn’t mind. He was enormously grateful to whomever invented Halloween and decreed that women should wear the skimpiest costumes possible. The party was a press of flesh, exposed flesh in every direction. There were literal and figurative sex kittens everywhere he looked. If not for the very real sensation of blood flowing one place in particular, he might have thought he'd died and gone to heaven.
    Being a ten-thousand-foot-tall string bean who wasn’t allowed to play sports did not make for the most exhilarating of social lives, and yet nature had given him some forms of compensation. Though his freakish height could do him no good on a basketball court, his particularly elevated physique gave him the perfect vantage point from which to scope out cleavage canyons. And from that height, at that angle, it was tough for girls to tell that's what he was doing. So, score one for being a freak of nature.
    He was halfway down the hall and frustratingly stalled when he noticed a girl off to one side, listlessly thumbing her cell phone while gnawing on a straw jutting from her red plastic cup. She had two little horns poking through her tawny hair and wore what looked like a skimpy leather bra, incredibly tight shorts, and the kind of thigh-high boots that make a woman’s legs look a mile long. Just the way Howie liked them. Better yet, she was a little taller than the average girl. Howie noticed these things. He had to.
    Since he was stuck there and since she was right in front of him and since she was wearing very little, he decided to fall in love.
    “Hi, there,” he said.
    Nothing. She kept scrolling the cell.
    He cleared his throat and projected over the music. “Hi, there!”
    Startled, she almost dropped the phone. She looked up…and up…and up, her chin pointing out adorably and sexily, just asking to be nibbled by, say, a really tall hemophiliac.
    “Wow,” she said.
    “I agree. Wow is pretty much the right word.” He grinned at her, gazing down into her eyes, which sparkled green, then skipping the eyes because who cares about eyes? Down further, past that nibble-able chin and a throat that was begging to be licked was the Promised Land. Howie figured he could be happy for the rest of his life -- no matter how long or short that ended up being -- if he could shrink down and set up camp between her breasts. He would just live there all day long and roam those hills and he would be content.
    "You're really tall," she said, still craning her neck to look into his eyes.
    "Thank you for noticing. Most people don't."
    "Do you play basketball?"
    "I've been known to dribble a ball on occasion," he said with as much modesty as he could muster.
    "Are you any good?"
    "No one has ever scored on me, that's for sure."
    "Wow."
    “Again, we concur. Indeed. Wow."
    "Where do you go to school?"
    "Over in the Nod."
    Her eyes widened. "Lobo's Nod? Where that serial killer guy lives?"
    "Yep."
    "Wow."
    “And once more, you've managed to get right to the heart of the matter."
    With a deep breath that caused her breasts to undulate like only breasts can undulate, she said, "Did you know him?"
    Howie flicked a glance over his shoulder. From this angle, he could barely make out Jazz and Connie, standing just inside the living room. Jazz, channeling his inner statue, stood cross-armed as Connie chatted animatedly with a guy dressed as Captain America.
    See that guy over there, the guy dressed like no one at all, the guy you'd never look at twice? That's my best friend and he's