Read Online Dying Bites: The Bloodhound Files-1 by DD Barant - Free Book Online Page B

means I don’t eat meat—with the exception of anything I can add wasabi to.” I grab a big green chunk of it with my chopsticks and drop it in my saucer of soy.

    “You must consume a great deal of fish.”

    I peck at the wasabi with the chopsticks, mashing it into the sauce. “Not really. I get most of my proteins from tofu, beans, dairy, and eggs.”

    He shakes his head. “That seems very . . . alien to me.”

    “I suppose it would.”

    “Why do you deny yourself meat?”

    I dab another piece of nigirizushi in my wasabi and soy. “I’m not denying myself anything. I’m choosing not to kill another being to fill my stomach.”

    “But . . . that is their purpose, is it not?”

    I pop the piece in my mouth. “Depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? If you think the planet and everything on it is here for your own personal use, then I guess the pain and Dying Bites – Bloodhound Files 01
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    suffering of other living beings doesn’t matter much. But where I come from, we look at things differently—or we’re starting to, anyway.”

    “So no one consumes meat where you are from?”

    “No, plenty of people do. I’m just not one of them.”

    “Without the natural cycle of predator and prey, the natural world becomes unbalanced.”

    “Sure. But that balance also gets thrown out of whack if one side of the equation becomes too dominant. If everybody eats beef, cattle need lots of room to graze. Forests get cut down to make pasture. Instead of trees absorbing carbon dioxide to make oxygen, we get cows absorbing grass to make methane. I don’t know about thropes, but I’d rather breathe air than cattle farts.”

    He considers this. “That is a very Eastern way of looking at things. Most Americans I know do not think like this.”

    “Well, most of the Americans you know probably aren’t from a parallel dimension.”

    “That is true.”

    The food is making me feel better, a little less culture-shocked. Strangely, it’s also making the Urthbone stronger; I can feel Tanaka’s emotions like an undercurrent in my own mind. It’s a bit like being drunk, when your own emotions seem bigger and more important than they are usually; I decide that now’s a good time to try to refine the effect, see if I can make it work for me. I try to focus on Tanaka’s emotions as opposed to my own, and find it isn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

    There’s just a touch of worry, but hardly any; he’s good at his job and knows it. Confident, but not arrogant. And there’s something else, something stronger, Dying Bites – Bloodhound Files 01
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    underneath that—it must be his lycanthrope nature, the wild part of him that he keeps in check. I close my eyes, pretending to enjoy a particularly succulent prawn, and probe the feeling like an invisible tongue searching for a sore tooth.

    The result, though, isn’t a jab of pain in my mouth—it’s a burst of another feeling entirely, and a lot farther south. Warmth spreads through my belly and groin, and the smell and taste of the food is suddenly much stronger. I breathe in sharply, almost inhaling half my ebi roll, and cough, spewing grains of sticky rice and bits of shrimp meat all over the table. Tanaka leans forward, suddenly concerned.

    “Are you all right?” He lays a hand on mine, and the feeling of his warm skin against my own makes me a little dizzy on top of the coughing fit.

    “Fine,” I manage to choke out, and pull my hand back.

    I get my share of male attention. I stand five eight, do a hundred crunches a day and have the abs to prove it. I’ve been told I have the neckline of a goddess, though nobody ever says which one. My hair is long, very black, and full, while my features tend more toward the Slavic definition of beauty than North American. I don’t put on a mini skirt unless I mean it, but when I do I can cause car accidents.

    But nobody’s ever responded the way Tanaka did.

    It wasn’t