We’re in Matthew’s POV again, and he’s driving out to Scotland to visit a daemon friend named Hamish Osborne.

Like most creatures, they’d been taught to fear each other and were uncertain how to behave.

Oddly enough, though we have oddles of backstory for every random shop clerk that passes through the novel, we don’t really have a good explanation for this.  So they have a culture that keeps them apart.  Why?  Do they have a history of attacking each other?  Or of demonizing the other so that humans will attack the other and leave them alone?  Did there used to be some period of time in which vampires thought it was lucky to eat daemons, and the daemons responded by attempting genocide?  Giving me the history of this hatred would go much further toward building a sense of a three-dimensional world than telling me where the yoga instructor was born.  I don’t want to know a bunch of random details, I want to know the why’s of things. 

Apparently Matthew is there to hunt and called Hamish in for company. 

unlike most daemons, he was levelheaded and difficult to unsettle.

So, this is starting to get to me.  Because there’s magic involved, it’s possible to say that all of a race is a particular way.  They’re all violent or all clever or all whatever.  But when you throw in personal nuances like this, it gets dicier.  Suddenly, all daemons are not excitable, because we’ve only seen two so far and they’ve both been perfectly pleasant.  So what’s really going on?  It’s unsettling because this happens in real life, too.  You’ll hear people say “blacks are this” or “Asians are that” and then stereotypes get bandied about, even though we’re all just people and no race is more predisposed to one thing than any other.  (Of course, you add in cultural influences and things get tricky, especially since culture can be influenced by stereotypes and create a perpetual-racism-motion-machine, but that’s a different matter.)

The basic point is, when you say all of a magical race is one way, then point out exceptions like it’s no big thing, you’re not giving me much choice.  I’m just going to assume that daemon’s aren’t magically predisposed to whatever, and Diana is a racist.  It’s too close of a parallel.

Matthew tells Hamish about Diana, going on about how she’s got this impressive lineage from being descendant from both the Bishops and the Protors, because apparently being the progeny of two devoutly Christian settlers who were senselessly murdered for things they didn’t do makes you a witch now.  (No, I’m not going to forget you did that, book.)

Anyway, point is, Diana is crazy powerful even though she doesn’t know it, and her magic is literally leaking out of her.  Matthew can see it as little lights, but other people would sense it other ways, and Diana doesn’t know she’s doing it.

And somehow, from all this talk about her ancestors and her untapped power, Hamish knows that Matthew is falling in love with her.  (Also, nice bit of POV shifting there, book.  Uhg, the mistakes in here are just so amateurish.)

Matthew and Hamish go out stalking, because apparently vampires in this world don’t need to eat blood, they just need to hunt and track.  Which means this daylight-tolerating vampire who is obsessed with some random girl’s smell is even more ‘vegetarian’ than Edward Cullen.  How…un-dramatic.  I mean, the whole point of vampires being monsters is that they kill people to survive.  Take that away, and what’s so dangerous about them?  Sure, something can be.  You can go the whole souls route, and say vampires don’t have a soul, if you want to open that kettle of religious worms.  But the point is, when you take out one point of tension, you have to add another in, or else your monsters end up pretty fucking flaccid.  They’re not really monsters any more, they’re just really cold people.

Matthew sat patiently for the next several hours, considering whether the stags were worth pursuing.

And…that’s it.  Seriously.  They took a jeep up to the deer, found them while driving, and then got out and sat next to the jeep for ‘hours.’  Then Matthew gets up and decides it’s time to go home.  Didn’t move at all, didn’t track or hunt, just took a drive and stared at the deer.

It’s like she’s trying to make me bored at this point.

More important, it upset the vampire because it was gaudy and feminine. It was Hamish’s favorite room.

By the way, Hamish is gay.  Gee, thanks book, for once again drawing a line between gay males and femininity, then deriding all things feminine.  Making just such great strides towards equality, aren’t you?

So after that pointless stalking scene, we go on to playing billiards, and oh great zeus, please, make something happen, anything.  I really don’t want to go through this whole “let’s follow every tedious little thing Matthew did today” routine.  It wasn’t fun with Diana, it’s not fun with Matthew either. 

Author, please listen closely: you don’t have to write down everything that comes into your head.  Really, you don’t.  I know those scenes probably sound really great and awesome to you, but you need to learn how to cut out the chaff.

They play then they drink and the whole time they talk about the book so far as if we haven’t been paying attention or something.  Seriously.  No new information is imparted, they just go over it all once more to…damned if I know.  Oh, and there’s more passages about architecture and pointless backstory.

Then she sent it back to the stacks and shows no interest in recalling it.

You know, no one has yet asked Diana to recall the book.  Seriously.  They’ve said that she had it at one point, they’ve said that they want it, that they’re looking for it, that it’s magical and they can’t just go to the stacks and get it themselves.  But no one has yet sat down with Diana and said “Hey, can you call that book back?  Pretty please?”  Which doesn’t necessarily have to result in her doing it, but it would at least address the issue of why she doesn’t.  She would have to say or think “no, because…(insert reason here).”  Right now?  I have no idea why Diana doesn’t call the book back and chuck it at someone so that all the creatures will stop following her.  There has been so little thought from her on this point that it’s like the option doesn’t even occur to her.

I’m … craving her.” Even saying the word made the hunger spread. When his hunger focused, grew insistent like this, not just any blood would do. His body demanded something more specific. If only he could taste it—taste Diana—he would be satisfied and the painful longing would subside.

Hamish studied Matthew’s tense shoulders. He wasn’t surprised that his friend craved Diana Bishop. A vampire had to desire another creature more than anyone or anything else in order to mate

…

……

I…

Just….

What?

Let me see if I read that right.  Matthew wants to eat Diana.  This means that Matthew is in love with Diana, because in vampire logic, wanting to eat someone is the same thing as wanting to have sex with them?  Is that what’s going on?  Sexual desire is being equated to violent aggression?

And I’m supposed to see this jerkface as a romantic lead? 

She resists my attempts to help her, and the more she does, the hungrier I feel.

o.O

It’s Fifty Shades of Grey all over again.  This guy isn’t just chasing a woman who says no, but the fact that she’s saying no is the thing that attracts him.  The more she says no, the more he wants to force her into stuff anyway.  He’s attracted to her ‘no.’  That will never not be creepy. 

We get a couple pages of Hamish’s backstory.  He had a disgustingly easy time coming out as both a daemon and a homosexual, because his parents apparently took both bits of news with perfect equanimity.

Then we get a topic switch over to the murders in London that were mentioned earlier.  It’s like these murders are valiantly trying to be part of the plot, but the extra details and the cloying ‘romance’ are choking them out.  Matthew seems to think that the murders are linked to a theory he has about creatures going extinct, but he can’t prove that creatures are going extinct.  Apparently, it’s not actually known if their numbers are decreasing or not.

So…I’m guess that means that there’s no central agency going on here to police these creatures?  If there was, it would be a simple matter to take a census.  But if there’s no oversight for these creatures, why haven’t any of them come out?  If there’s no one to enforce this ‘hide in the shadows’ stuff, then why is it still around?  And don’t tell me that humans would murder anyone who came out as a witch or vampire.  In this day and age?  This culture?  A vegetarian vampire?  Yeah, right.  Plus, we’re not the type to burn people at the stake anymore.  If someone came out as a fantasy-magic-slinging witch, we wouldn’t burn her.  We’d study her with our fancy science.  And all these oddles of scientist vampires should know that.  And before we get at her with our science, she’d probably make buckets full of money seeing the future or solving unsolveable problems or whatever.  And then going on Oprah to talk about how hard it is to be a fantasy-witch.

(And, what, there’s never been any accidental coming-outs?  Nothing that ever needed a cover-up?)

They move on to dinner and playing chess, because we’ve still got to see every fucking moment of their evening for some reason.  Then Hamish uses some faulty logic to convince Matthew that he’s in love with Diana, and for some reason this works, despite the book going on at length about how everyone involved is a genius. 

“I want what I shouldn’t want, and I crave someone I can never have.”

Why can’t you, Matthew?  What is keeping you apart from Diana?  Is there some rule from some governing body that…doesn’t keep a census and that we’ve not yet heard about?  Is there some force of nature keeping you apart?  Is it all cultural, which is kind of weak since Diana has been pretty willing to thaw on that issue?  Or did your author just completely forget to write in a reason in favor of shoveling on the tropes and angst?

Ah, there’s the reason.  Matthew has killed two of his lovers by accident before.  …apparently neither death had anything to do with the relationship, though.  One wasn’t even a lover, just a random pretty girl that he accidently ate too much of, the other got in the middle of a fight between Matthew and another vampire.  Which would have also happened if she’d been just a friend or bystander.  Eh, alright, I guess it’s okay for Matthew to not be entirely levelheaded on such a subject.  On the other hand, it’s a pretty weak reasoning that could be cleared up with a conversation and then some pity-sex, which is how this trope usually gets resolved.  There’s not really any tangible problem to overcome, just Matthew angsting a lot until he stops.

Then they play chess some more and shoehorn in pointless imagery about the queen piece and did I mention I hate this book?