The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires by Molly Harper

Author:Molly Harper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, General, Contemporary, Fiction, Paranormal
ISBN: 9781451641837
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2012-07-30T22:00:00+00:00

10

We cannot emphasize enough our warnings against trying to get vampires to share their feelings.

—The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires

Despite the fact that she’d been “studying” at Ben’s, Gigi was sitting at the kitchen table, her homework spread around her, when I walked through the door. Cal was sitting with her, holding a case file in one hand while he argued with her about the known facts of the Trojan War. The vampiric target of my wrath was indignantly rejecting Gigi’s textbook’s assertions that Helen’s “abduction” led to the war. When Gigi called Helen “the face that launched a thousand ships,” Cal was downright offended.

“Helen was acceptable,” he insisted. “Nothing more. Personally, I thought my own wife was prettier, but I might have been biased. Helen was a spoiled, silly girl who was unhappy with the way her fate had twisted. Honestly, she wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things. Agamemnon would have used any excuse to attack Troy. A perceived insult to his family honor was a convenient ploy. Humans love attaching sweeping romantic notions to history, because they need to see order in it, reason. The truth is that events that shape history are rarely black and white, reasonable. They rarely make sense until we can see them in hindsight.”

Gigi was doing her Pied Piper thing, leading Cal deeper into the conversation without his realizing it. I really had to figure out how she did that. “How close were you?”

“What, to the machinations of war?” he asked. “I was a common soldier, but my captain, Palamedes, helped organize the troops in the early days. I was clever and loyal, so he trusted me with errands and messages and to guard his back on the field. So I was witness to hundreds of bizarre little dramas. You see, Menelaus demanded that all of Helen’s old suitors fulfill their oaths that they would assist him in defending her honor. Removed from the lure of Helen’s pretty face, those suitors had regained their senses, and many of them had no desire to join his fight. Odysseus pretended to be insane until my master tricked him into admitting that he was sound. The king of a small Cyprian kingdom promised Agamemnon fifty ships for the Greek fleet, and he provided them—but only one was a real vessel, commanded by his own son. The rest of his armada consisted of clay toys.”

“And did the Trojans really fall for the wooden-horse gag?”

“Nearly ten years later, yes. And it wasn’t a gag. There was a horse, a small one, beautifully carved from a single tree. And it was left outside the Trojan gate, surrounded with the entire army’s store of wine. Believing that we’d abandoned the field in despair, the Trojan army used it for their celebration, and after they’d drunk themselves into oblivion, the gates were rather easy to overtake.”

She frowned. “I feel like everything I know about history is a lie.”

“Most popular history is. It’s all very romanticized and clean. Real life is very rarely like that.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.