Bad Choices (Hypernaturals 8)

The Library

There are a few libraries in Galveston. We decided to start at the Rosenburg because it has some great historical stuff. The original part of the building is, like the Galvez, beautiful. Modern additions are basically, like most modern stuff, 'blah'.

It is possible to build a modern building and not have it be boring garbage as far as design goes. The Venetian in Las Vegas is a great example of that. All it takes if a metric ton of money. No taxpayer-funded building in this day and age is ever going to look like anything other than a building you stuff government employees in. That makes the outside of the Rosenburg a combination historical building and box.

I suppose we are not there to see the outside anyway. We are trying to see what we can find about LCPF. Andrea gave us an acronym, the fact that it is probably French, and little else. Great, because in a historical city like Galveston, connected by water and history to New Orleans, and French-named Pirates like Jean Lafitte, that is going to be easy to figure out.

Not.

There is a persistent rumor, even after all these centuries, that Pierre and/or Jean left some Pirate treasure someplace in Galveston. If so, it's probably buried under a new hotel now.

We have a couple or three days to kill, and contrary to popular culture, Vampires are not 'Pure Sex'. We try, but we are only extra-human at best. We have to eat and sleep too, and even though this is also a sort of honeymoon, having honeymoons is a house rule for us. Any given two people spend a week away from the family every year, to be exclusively with each other. Even the non-romantic pairs. Morgan and Helen go away to places as much as Jessica and I do. It is an inviolate rule, broken only slightly when Morgan was pregnant with Laura. To deal with the ramifications of that situation, Jessica, Morgan, and I went away for a total of three weeks together.

When a Vampire woman is pregnant (all three times we know of anyway) she has a biological imperative to be near the father of the child. It is somewhat like the monthly imperative to drink blood, but many orders of magnitude more intense. The imperative seems to be more than a mere bonding drive, insofar as it does not seem to allow substitutes. When Helen was pregnant with Rachel, it had to be me there, not Jessica or big Rachel. She could tell when a substitute was being slipped in and it did not make her happy. It is also a blood thing, as she wanted to drink from me every single day. Jessica too. I was spared that with Morgan because she has no fangs, but that seems to be compensated for by an even higher sex drive and involuntary scents.

That bonding imperative required that I could not leave for a week with Jessica. It is expressed as sex drive but its something very deep and powerful. Morgan said it is not like being horny. it is like hunger. Starvation. Morgan would have deeply suffered, and neither Jessica nor I would do that to her. Jessica, having already been in biological servitude to the imperative, understood completely. We could not let all the time away all pile up until after Laura was born either, for a more practical reason: No one wanted to be away from the new baby.

Humans have a similar thing. Sex and love cause the body to generate Oxytocin: You get a little high being around the person you are sexually bonded with. Even simple touch and cuddling cause an Oxytocin reaction. Vampires have the same mechanism, amped up, the same way so many things are taken to the next level in Vampires.

Instead of staying at home and breaking the rule, we compromised and made it the three of us on three different honeymoons. Morgan and Jessica grew much closer, in part because Jessica was the first to go through the need, and helped Morgan understand and cope with it. Morgan does NOT like being out of control, and her body had other ideas about that.

Despite all temptation to the contrary, Morgan and I are not going to sit in the hotel and have sex all day long every day until Andrea gets here. We need to rest. We have to eat and drink. We have a mystery at hand and therefore we have research to do to get ready for the day that Andrea woke up, and left his house to go to his father's.