Vampires! A Bundle of Bloodsuckers (3 page)

I gasped and looked down at the blood splattered on my light blue suit. In the time it took me to shift my attention to my soiled attire, Yvonne had wrestled Falcon flat onto his back and was sitting on his chest, her purple dress hiked up around her hips, restraining his arms over his head. Red glistened everywhere.

My mind spun. We’d never covered anything like this in grad school. I knew I should do something, but my brain had put out the “do not disturb” sign and gone on sabbatical. I considered kneeling down next to them, and launching into another therapy spiel, but there was so much flailing and yelling going on, my words would’ve been lost in the maelstrom. And, even though Devereux had promised to execute any vampire who harmed me, I knew better than to trust the self-control of frenzied blood drinkers.

 “Your blood tastes of fear, my well-endowed cocksman.” Yvonne grinned maniacally. “And I know why.”

Falcon twisted and squirmed beneath her, making a completely futile effort to escape. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He sounded terrified – even more frightened than the situation seemed to call for. What was I missing?

“Yvonne! Falcon!,” I bleated uselessly, inching closer.

He finally freed one hand, and pushed at her shoulder, causing her to lose her balance. She retaliated by lunging at him, wrapping her fingers around his neck, and attempting to choke him. He put up a good fight, and the two of them started rolling across the floor. Directly into my legs.

“Shit!” I cried as I went down hard on my ass, accompanied by the sound of my skirt ripping. I barely managed to shift my legs sideways to avoid being trampled. I speed-crawled toward my desk and made it as far as the end of the couch before noticing Falcon and Yvonne were on their feet again, lumbering toward my hiding place. I poked my head from behind the sofa and watched the blood-covered combatants grappling at the other end.

Adrenaline surged through my body, preparing me for fight or flight, as I listened to the snarls and barking sounds emanating from their throats. These vampires were insane.

Treating human crazies wasn’t bad enough. No, I had to put out the welcome mat for the demented children of the night.

Yvonne screamed at him as they fought. “I found your stash of dead women, my lying, fornicating consort. Either you’re incredibly lazy, profoundly stupid or you have a true-death wish, because you’ve been hiding your kills in the same place for the last century. I’m betting on all of the above. You knew I’d discovered the secret room underneath the dungeon when I confronted you with the remains of your mother’s body. Not that I blamed you for offing the cow the moment you became a vampire. She had sold you to that sadistic pedophile, after all. Not exactly ‘Mother of the Year’ material. But you could at least have buried your leftovers.”

Falcon managed to momentarily break free, falling backwards onto the couch. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! There are no dead women. You’re delusional. Mad as a hatter. I’ve never been anything but faithful and true. You don’t deserve me.”

Yvonne smiled wide, exposing her impressive set of fangs, and leaped – faster than my eye could track – onto Falcon. “I’ll show you what you deserve, pretty boy.” They flailed so vigorously the couch tipped over, depositing the pair onto the carpet again.

Falcon scrambled to his feet, grabbed a small statue of Freud off a nearby table, and heaved it at Yvonne’s head. The marble connected with a sickening whack, opening a bloody gash in her forehead.

Yvonne let out a shriek as blood dripped down her forehead, then charged Falcon, screaming, “I’ll kill you, you miserable excuse for a man.”

Not to be outdone, Falcon countered, his voice booming through the room, “My mother wasn’t the only cow, you sexless, frigid she-fiend.”

As they ran around my office, throwing everything they could pick up at each other, I crawled toward my desk, hoping the heavy wood would protect me from the onslaught.

My favorite paperweight flew by my head just as I reached the corner of my desk, and I huddled next to the thick wood, still able to see the maniacs, but safer from attack.

“You disgusting fool. I lied. You’re a
terrible
lover!”

“Yeah, as if I’d want to get within ten feet of the Ice Queen.”

She growled and tackled Falcon again, taking him back down to the floor. I heard a pounding sound, and high-pitched male screams.

This cleaning bill’s gonna be a bitch.

Suddenly a loud, resonating tone pulsed from the timer on top of my desk. The waiting room door burst open, and Falcon’s two bodyguards shot into the office. They each grabbed a disheveled, bloody vampire and heaved them to their feet.

My heart thudding like an animal caught in gun sights, I scooted out from my safe haven, made sure the carnage had truly ended – that the two lunatics were safe in physical custody – and slowly rose. The room was trashed. Blood oozed down the walls, pooled on the carpet and collected on my leather furniture.

We all stared at each other, frozen for a few heartbeats, then I reached over and picked up the appointment book from my desk. I flipped the pages, retrieved a pencil and held it poised over the page.

“Same time next week?”

J
esus. I radically overslept.

I could’ve sworn I set my inner alarm clock for a century. Blame it on my overworked snooze button. I always try not to downshift for longer than 100 years at a time because I might miss something interesting. Or someone interesting.

But then the word “interesting” is relative when you’ve been alive – excuse me, I mean undead – for thousands of years.

Yes, I’m a vampire. And not only am I a vampire, but I’m the oldest, most powerful vampire still exploring Amusement Park Earth today.

I’ve got the Nosferatu thing down to a fine science.

And who would have guessed that my powers would keep on increasing, branching out, and surpassing themselves?

Pretty soon there’ll just be no living with me. So to speak.

Anyway, I thought it was time I started writing down some of my exploits on paper. Craft my memoirs. Spread the goodies around, as it were. So I’ve begun this flow-of-consciousness journal and am sharing it all with you from my luxury mausoleum beneath the glittering city of Paris, France. A great place to hide. Not that I need to hide, mind you. There are just certain individuals I’d rather avoid, if possible. Devotees can be so draining – and drained.

I’ve already discovered that it is now 2160 and I missed my wake-up call for the year 2100, but it really doesn’t matter. I’ll share my delectable presence with the population of this time period soon enough. But I want to tell you about my last visit during the late 20th/early 21st century and the juicy human I encountered and fell for. Hard.

Of course, I’m sure he’s still pissed at me. But believe me, we have plenty of time to work things out.

Oh, how rude. The name’s Zara. Or, if you insist on proper names, Zarafina of Sherbrook. Sherbrook being the land owned by my family since the Eighth Day of Creation. I still own it – officially. But it gets so tedious having to pretend to be some version of my own great-granddaughter every few generations or so for the benefit of one lawyer or another that I rarely give it a thought. Don’t get me started on lawyers. But I digress.

You might find my nickname enjoyable: She Demon.

Yes. Not very creative I admit, but apparently quite accurate.

I don’t really know what happened to cause me to be the force of nature I turned out to be. I am truly immortal, beyond the usual understanding of the word. It amuses me that, at this point, I doubt if I can be killed. Even if some industrious Van Helsing wannabe brought out his best collection of sharpened stakes, crosses, and garlic. By the way, remind me to give you my opinions about that silly, superstitious nonsense.

I was born to darkness – or transcended the ordinary (your choice) – in my twenty-sixth human year. The One who turned me – Jeran – was your garden variety vampire. Handsome, tall, lean, magnificently endowed, magnetic emerald eyes, with the standard glorious mane of long, dark hair. You know, the kind to die for.

Hmmm. I heard he eventually faced the dawn. Pity, but not totally unexpected. When one’s philosophy consists of “so many women, so little time,” the bloom would likely fall off the rose at some point.

In any case, the mutation must have been in my genes to begin with, because after passing along his immortality, blood lust, hypnosis abilities, insatiable sexual appetite, astoundingly beautiful physical attributes – okay, so I’m not humble – and all the other more mundane vampiric aspects, I began to develop a unique and intriguing ability of my very own.

I need to take a step back for a moment and give you a lesson in undead mythology.

It is true that vampires can’t abide the sun. Imagine sun-sensitivity times a million. It has nothing to do with any antiquated ideas of good versus evil, or light versus darkness, but is an actual symptom of the condition of vampirism. Tedious really, but it’s just as well. With pale skin like mine, can you imagine how much I’d have to spend on sunscreen?

And we do live to drink blood. Literally. Despite the stories from other authors leading you to believe that vampires are angst-ridden and don’t enjoy drinking blood, I can tell you that ingesting the elixir of the gods goes beyond mere enjoyment. It is divine orgasm. Exquisite paroxysms of pleasure in every cell of the body-mind. Yes. It’s that good. I think you’ve been led astray because we really don’t want you to know what we’ve got going here, because then too many of you would want to join in. We do need to keep our existence as private as possible. I’m sure you understand.

In the beginning the most interesting secondary side effect of blood drinking for me was taking in some of the “victim’s” knowledge through the assimilation of fluids. In fact, it rapidly became crucial that I choose my donors wisely, because some kinds of knowledge are more desirable than others. Imagine the difference between the stored information of a common thief or politician versus the abundant wisdom flowing through the veins of a scholar, artist or teacher. But, alas, there is a cloud in this crystalline sky: My unfortunate little “unique ability.”

I hate to call myself a brain sucker. It just sounds so crude, and it isn’t entirely accurate. I don’t actually suck out the poor sods’ brains along with their blood, but the result is very much the same. I can tell you that it radically changed the game for me. It took me quite a while to shape the gift into something I could control.

There I was, caught up in the ecstasy of riding a very enthusiastic penis owned by an extraordinarily handsome, intelligent musician, while at the same time drowning in the bliss of feeling my fangs penetrating the fat vein in his neck and the hot liquid flowing over my tongue and down my convulsing throat. Oh, my. I got a little excited there. Excuse me for just one moment. I need to compose myself. Where are the batteries for this thing?

Okay. That’s better. Where was I?

Well, that’s when it happened the first time. I had just swallowed my fill. Ordinarily, after enjoying a “meal” fully, I wipe said memory clear of any traces of me or my existence. It isn’t completely necessary to do that, because sometimes the victim in question just wanders off, falls into a normal sleep, and awakens remembering a fabulous dream. Win-win for everyone concerned. But occasionally an addiction takes hold and I become the focus of a continuing longing for a return trip to Nirvana. Now
that
can get annoying.

But in the case of my handsome musician, I was just about to clear his memory when I noticed an unusual thing. The lights were on, but no one was home. His body was functioning. He wasn’t dead – I hadn’t drained him – but “he” wasn’t there. Everything that made him a unique human specimen had been sucked into me through one of my multi-faceted orifices. Or something.

At first I didn’t know the cause. Was it the blood drinking specifically? The sex? The combination?

So that’s what I mean about the brain sucker label being slightly off. It wasn’t the brain I sucked out. It was the brain’s contents. Apparently, all of them. Well, except for instinctual parts that controlled things like breathing, elimination, sexual arousal, locomotion, etc. Things that were hardwired into the spinal column or which had clone sites in each cell of the body. You know. The basics.