Ebook $5.99
ISBN: 9781613900765
print ISBN: 9781885865007
28,470 words; 100 pages
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The vampire has always been viewed as a sensual creature. They are hunters and seducers of their prey, the hunt as primal and animal as sex itself. They are outside of the strictures of “common” propriety, the chastity of marriage broken, the purity of the virgin defiled.
In these seven seductive tales, sex and death and eternal life are intertwined as vampires of all descriptions–men and women and otherwise, gay and straight and bisexual–come together for danger-laced erotic encounters with humans and with each other.
Contains stories by Pat Salah, Renee M. Charles, Warren Lapine, Amelia G, Raven Kaldera, Gary Bowen, and Dave Smeds.
Look under the cut for a hot excerpt…
from “The Perfect Form” by Pat Salah
10:15 on a Saturday night. Pandemonium is already packed. Arriving ten minutes from now and I’d be queueing in the rain for half the night. I pay my cover and spot Reg and Suzy shooting some stick. Kiss. Kiss. Hi. Hi. Throw my leather down and cruise up to the bar, scoping the action. Used to be the Olympia Theatre before Eckhart bought it up. Mighty pretty place: Victorian parlor decor all in red and black and gold; rococo frescoes on the walls and huge fuck’n stained glass skylights, and girls dancing in the opera boxes, except the top two where Eckhart holds court and toasts his most honored guests. I love it. Too bad Eckhart owns it. Guy’s a pig. Notice Dre working the floor, looking sweet as usual in green velvet and fuck’n thigh-high docs, black braids slap’n against her tits. Don’t know how the prick does it but he’s got the rockingest chicks in the city working for him: all his barmaids take a turn in the boxes, and, when they’re on the floor, it shows. Like when I spot Colette my eyes are nailed to the place where the back of her shift daround the curve of her ass. So nearly knock some pubescent punker chick over. Don’t see many of those around here these days. Essen pours me a Kier, eyebrows arched, painted mouth making a moue that’s supposed to be questioning, provocative. Guy’s such a poseur. Used to think he was so styl’n, when he played with Universal Rejection. His punk days. My punk days. Now the Elders of the Kin–goddamned Vampires is what they are–openly walk the earth and anybody who knows shit hangs at Pandemonium and embraces the Gothik lifestyle. I read it in Interview: Montreal, the Canadian New Orleans. But fuck, Propaganda the exact same thing. I swear. Life has gotten weirder, it’s not just me. Trade-offs. Like when I was a punk I hung with a regular crew of pretty cool guys. When the Vampires came out of hiding I turned Goth.
Most of those guys became warm fascists–shaved their heads and started off to the idea of staking members of the Kin. fucking chance. Nothing can kill the already Dead. I moved into a cooler crowd. Cooler, as in, Dead-loving, and also, as in chillier. Lars didn’t need to pull attitude to be cool though. A good guy. When the Vampires came to town we both knew what we wanted. He got it, sort of. They moved on to some new scene, taking him with them. But they’ll be back–Lucrezia, Lars’ maker, said so in the last Engarde Quarterly. days I’m casual with lotsa folks. Keep to myself. Which suits. It’s how Lars got taken.
Man! Didn’t even recognize him the only time I saw him after the Kin Elder sunk her teeth into his neck. At least that’s the rumor, that she’s an Elder, which makes sense, she is their spokesperson. Besides the young ones aren’t supposed to be able to make new ones: otherwise he would have taken me, I’m sure of it. We both swore we would. The other thing they say is that the young ones are slaves of the Elders that make them. But that’s gotta be bullshit, a system like that would never work, because they’re all immortal: that would mean they’re all slaves of one or two really ancient Kin which is obviously ridiculous. Of course with immortals, you’ve got to wonder what would count as elder anyway. Over one hundred years, for sure. One thousand? And how could you tell? Thom says they’re shapeshifters besides. Lars Changed. Fuck, he was beautiful…
* * * *
Remember how he appeared before you out of the darkness of the club, his black hair in curls, with waif eyes and rose petal lips, an ingenue, and yet so pale and tawdry in a red satin dress and too much blush–like a prostitute dead and risen under a lurid sun. Or, as the Vampire thought, like a boy too pretty to be left alone with his sex, too in love with his cock to be made a girl: only after the Change was worked upon him, to become as pale as the bones of the moon. The Vampire left him neither living nor dead no longer wholly male nor quite female. That one shaped his body to suit his deepest desires, during the bloodletting when will was strongest. It walked his dreams and saw his wishes and answered them. It imagined Lars as voluptuous as any Vargas girl, a body fitted to his gutter angel face and his slut’s soul. The dreams of the Vampire possess such force. What a shock for dear Lars when he woke. His is the perfect form aspired to by those tormented men who hound surgeons and psychiatrists, pointing to their men’s magazines, begging: “Make me like her. Make me Marilyn, Bardot, Madonna. Inside I’m more woman than any woman.” Though Lars is not complete in that respect. He still has his beloved cock, and of course, he is Dead. All this, and more, you knew in that first moment of matched gaze. You knew the stories of the Vampire’s preternatural strength, both of will and of form, to be true. You knew could have you as it pleased–you would give your blood or flesh up willingly. Lars would not have to take you forcibly, though it thrilled you to think the thing he had become could. That was, after all, your pact.
And moments after Lars left, you were drowning in the absence of its perfume, drowning in your memory of its beauty. Until then you had caught mere glimpses of the Kin, in the dark, in your dreams: you had never seen one revealed. Now you know. The supple white length of neck, delicate curve of ankle beneath silk, arch of red rhinestone stiletto… Then you noticed you had come, your legs were weak, and you mouthed: “Come back to me,” pleading.
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