Kerry Allen

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

Nate woke, instinct trained on the nearest source of blood. He crawled halfway across the room before his mind caught up with his body and reestablished command of his limbs.

He retreated to his corner and wiped the sweat from his face. Fever sped the draining of his reserves. He needed to feed soon, before he added physical damage to his list of crimes against Amanda. “You can quit holding your breath. It’s passed.”

“My offer stands. I’ll give you enough blood to get you through a few more hours.”

He raised a brow at her generosity. “Done being angry with me?”

“I hope you choke on it, but I’d rather feed you while you’re lucid than wait until you snap and attack.”

Hunger stated its preference by cramping every muscle in his body—not the worst he’d experienced, but a warning of what he had to look forward to if the deprivation lasted much longer. Feeding from her would spare him a lot of discomfort. It would also introduce a predator-prey dynamic to a relationship too fragile to survive another hit. “I can make it through another night.”

“Suit yourself.”

See the rest of “Beyond the Darkening: Chapter 5″

Or rather, Happy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Cheesecake Day!

(Pardon my sad excuse for piping. I couldn’t find tips, and snipping a star in the corner of a Ziploc bag doesn’t work quite as well. Hence the impromptu chocolate drizzle to disguise teh ugleh.)

(I also wish I had a more autumnal plate for the presentation, but I’m not frickin’ Southern Living, okay?)

I taste test while I’m cooking.

I tasted the crust mixture—Oreos, peanuts, and butter—and said, “Gawd, I could eat this all by itself. Or use it for ice cream topping.”

I tasted the filling mixture when it was at the cream cheese, peanut butter, and sugar phase and said, “Gawd, I could eat this all by itself. Or use it for frosting.”

I tasted the filling at the everything-added phase with a little chunk of peanut butter cup to make sure peanut butter cup and peanut butter cheesecake filling actually went together (because I was doubtful… truly), and made a lot of obscene sound effects.

It would probably fill a 9-inch pan to the rim, but I had only an 8-inch pan, so there were leftovers. I ate them.

(And don’t scream at me about getting WORMS from raw eggs. You get WORMS from eating worm-infested FECES. You might get salmonella from raw eggs if you make a habit of eating dirty, cracked ones, but that’s it. I’ve been enjoying all manner of raw egg-containing batters for 34 years without so much as a tummyache. Eggs come in their very own protective suits of armor. You should be way more worried about contaminated produce, which is naked and vulnerable to exposure to all sorts of crud.)

Not that you can tell so much, but there’s a layer of peanut butter cups inside, too. They either disappeared, or I happened to slice in two spots that didn’t cut through any peanut butter cups. Neither would have occurred if I hadn’t chopped them. Recipe adjusted accordingly.

It didn’t crack. It didn’t collapse in the middle. I covered it with peanut butter cups and frosting because that was the plan, not to hide its flaws—because this was a pretty cake, I kid you not. I may have at long last perfected my technique.

I tasted the frosting—peanut butter cream cheese buttercream—and thought about staying home and eating nothing but cheesecake for Thanksgiving breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Angelic Daughter, who isn’t a big peanut butter fan, had a couple spoons of frosting for desert and told me to save the leftovers and I won’t have to worry about desert until the bag is licked clean.

Which is good, because I’m thinking I won’t be bringing any cheesecake home after the gathering tonight, and my kitchen is in no shape to be baking anything else for a while. I have a tendency to be sloppy in my enthusiasm and too spent after my efforts to clean up the mess.

I’d post the recipe, but I’d be really miffed—homicidally so—if some troll lifted it and won a million bucks in the Pillsbury Bakeoff or something. You’ll just have to wait for my cookbook, I guess…

I haven’t had four work-free days in a row in at least five years.

(’Scuse me for a boogie break. Pandora finally fed me To Be Loved by Papa Roach, for which I lost my rights when my point of origin was consumed by Rhapsody and which for some reason is difficult to acquire elsewhere and of which I have been deprived of for months and wallowing in desolation. Total air-guitar song. Have I mentioned my love for Pandora? How ’bout how much I hate DRM, which thwarts only honest consumers? Anyhoo, we now return to your regularly scheduled program.)

I intend to make my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Cheesecake Wednesday night, then sleep more than is healthy, catch up on some of that working out I’ve been too strung out to even contemplate and will desperately need after stuffing my face with someone else’s food, and make some headway on the last three chapters of BtD, which I WILL finish by the end of the year because 2009 is going to be all about SC-1, which has been taking on some shape in the past week or two preparatory to becoming the object of my unswerving attention.

I’ve made some improvements to Chapters 1-4 of BtD, so when the PDF is ready, I’m going to truncate the posted versions and refer any stragglers to the file. Don’t want to delete them entirely because of the incoming links and lovely comments, don’t want to cut-and-paste-and-reformat because it’s a huge hassle, and don’t want said stragglers reading a less-polished draft. One of these days, I’ll learn to do the polishing in fewer than 4,872 passes. I’m horribly inefficient. I get distracted and… ooh, look! A chicken!

“squirrels ate my minivan”

Who Googles that phrase, to what end (other than to make me spray my monitor with nose soda), and how in the name of all that’s *sparkalay* does it bring you HERE?

Oh, and I’m at RTB today (well, maybe—Wordpress kept telling me I wasn’t authorized to edit my own post…), blathering about everything going wrong and why that’s my favorite part of a romance novel.

(Or any novel, actually. I’m hot for Charlie Huston because he’s a sadistic genius when it comes to Making Things Worse Than You Ever Imagined They Could Be.)

My good local radio station changed format from rock/alternative to “a sunny mix of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s,” which makes for a jarring mix of The Supremes, Tom Jones, The Rolling Stones, and Wang Chung with perhaps one decent song every three hours, bookended by ear-rotting audiofungus.

We can’t afford to download any songs or subscribe to a radio service right now, and we’re not down with the other local radio fare of perkypop or country, so Angelic Daughter has been getting her music fix from YouTube, and I’ve been listening to my playlists until everyone (except Boyfriend, of course, which may have something to do with having 53 hours of music to choose from there…) is pretty much making me sick at this point.

Then I found Pandora, and Lo, the angels sang, and life was good again.

You don’t have to pay anything. You don’t even have to register if you don’t want to save your history. Simply type in the name of an artist you’re in the mood to listen to, and Pandora, that clever bitch, will hook you up with a seemingly endless supply of music in the same vein.

Being in a snarly, antisocial frame of mind (and feeling unimaginative), I plugged in Boyfriend and was served up Tool, Deftones, Filter, Rage Against the Machine, A Perfect Circle, Manson, System of a Down, Alice in Chains, Incubus, Stabbing Westward, and so on and so forth.

Four hours so far today, and I’ve yet to hear anything that sucks, which is not something I have EVER been able to say about actual radio.

My snarly, antisocial frame of mind is in danger of improving…