Blood Oranges (9781101594858) by Caitlin R. Kathleen; Kiernan Tierney

it on your own again, I fear for the duration of your life expectancy.”
    â€œAsshole,” I said, and that was the first time I ever said a word against the bastard. It was the beginning of our long and tumultuous love-hate relationship.
    He leaned back and held both his hands palms out. “You’re a free agent, precious. Free to get up and walk out that door, return to the everlasting glamour of your previous existence, and never will we meet again. Just you remember, odds are good you had a price on your pretty head
before
I found you, and maybe the only thing keeping the wolves at bay—so to speak—is your affiliation with me. I’d bet my bottom dollar you’d be dead by now if I hadn’t come along. Best the devil you know, isn’t that the expression?”
    Of course, Mr. B ain’t no devil. He’s just a two-bit lowlife ballsy enough to have cornered a niche market no other lowlife would go near. But what the fuck was I supposed to do? I knew he was right. I knew I’d been played, and there was no going back. Some vamp comes looking for me, was I really gonna say, “Oh, so sorry. Please excuse me. It was a terrible, terrible accident, really it was.” Yeah, that would’ve saved my narrow white keister. A few seconds later, Mr. B’s boy came back, all lipstick and purple patent-leather pumps, and I picked up the dope and slipped it into my jeans pocket. And the rest, as all the cold-blooded motherfuckers of the world are forever reminding us, is history.
    But here’s the kicker. No sooner had I pocketed the heroin, Patti Smith was singing “Land” through the speakers mounted on the walls. And all I could see was that beast crouching over Lily, and her blood spreading across a dusty warehouse floor. Songs for my funeral? You bet your life.

CHAPTER THREE
    BOBBY NG, ALICE CREGAN, AND THE TROLL WHO LIVES UNDER THE BRIDGE
    O kay, so somewhere back there I know I mentioned the apartment Mean Mr. B rented for me, down at the sketchy post-apocalyptic end of Gano Street. Just a block or two over from my place, you segue back to those spiffy Victorians with their tidy front yards and lawn gnomes. But my building, it’s seen better days. Maybe back in the 1940s. The tendrils of gentrification haven’t reached the corner of Gano and East Transit, and the way the economy’s headed, it probably never will. I don’t even know what he pays every month. Maybe he doesn’t pay anything. Maybe he owns the place, and twenty bodies are buried in the basement.
    That night—my first as a full-fledged lupine bloodsucking abomination in the eyes of all vampkind—I walked from Babe’s on the Sunnyside back to the apartment. There were the usual guys on the sidewalk outside my place playing dominoes on a folding card table. Sometimes, they played all night long, dusk till dawn. Which was fine by me, just so long as they kept the Mexpop blaring from the stereos of their parked cars down low enough I couldn’t feel the bass pulsing behind my eyes like a migraine. And as long as nobody got shot. Not that I much cared what people did with their firearms, but I hardly needed the police hanging about. Because, remember, this was after Bobby Ng and Swan Point, so, technically, I was already a bona-fide killer. Not sure whether or not it would have mattered to the cops that my victims had been dead a spell
before
I killed them, but I didn’t want to go there.
    That night, it was after my first
human
kill, so all the more reason to be cautious.
    As I was unlocking the door, one of the domino players noticed the dried blood on my T-shirt and jeans. Maybe he saw it in my hair, too. I suppose there was enough illumination from the streetlights, it was probably hard to miss.
    â€œHey, chica. You been in a fight?” he shouted. I think that one’s name was Hector. Or Hugo. Or . . . okay, so I don’t remember. I do remember he