{"id":338,"date":"2014-12-26T09:54:22","date_gmt":"2014-12-26T14:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/?page_id=338"},"modified":"2014-12-26T09:54:22","modified_gmt":"2014-12-26T14:54:22","slug":"cinnamon-roses-by-renee-m-charles","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/?page_id=338","title":{"rendered":"Cinnamon Roses by Renee M Charles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>ebook $5.99
\nISBN: 9781613900468
\n44,710 words<\/p>\n

[wp_eStore_add_to_cart id=103]<\/p>\n

The ebook edition is also available at: Barnes & Noble<\/a>, Smashwords<\/a>, Kobo<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, & AllRomanceEbooks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

**All royalties on this title will be donated to Catkins Animal Rescue<\/a> in Park Falls, Wisconsin, in memory of the author, A.R. Morlan.**<\/em><\/p>\n

From the vivid erotic imagination of Ren\u00e9e M. Charles come six seductive vampire tales of sex, love, and bloodlust. Within these pages, a female tattoo artist commissioned to do some intimate inking on three beautiful women is initiated into their secret world, an ordinary college girl tries to find out her mysterious roommate\u2019s secret and undergoes a startling and sexy transformation, a half-vampiric dhampir who hunts his own kind finds that one intended target is not at all what he expected, and more. Reaching outside of the standard cape-wearing, neck-biting vampire mythos to draw on folkloric traditions from around the world, from the long-nailed callicantzaros of Greece to the feathered aswang of the Philippines to the pontianak of Malaysia who brings doom to all who love her, the inventive stories of Cinnamon Roses provide a fresh take on the sensuous encounters between vampires and humans.<\/p>\n

Contains the following stories: Cinnamon Roses, Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes, The Twelve Nights of Callicantzaros, Opening the Veins of Jade, Initiation Into Club Sanguis, Mist Kisses<\/p>\n

Renee M. Charles\u2019s fiction\u2014both under her own name and her hard-core erotica-only Renee pen name\u2014has either appeared in or is scheduled to appear in over 130 magazines and anthologies, including BEST AMERICAN EROTICA, THE YEAR\u2019S BEST FANTASY & HORROR 1991, 1993 & 1994, F&SF, FULL SPECTRUM IV, THE ULTIMATE ZOMBIE, THE HOT BLOOD SERIES, LOVE IN VEIN, GRUE, 2 AM, TWILIGHT ZONE MAGAZINE and many, many others. Her non-fiction has appeared in OMNI, SPACE & TIME, WRITER\u2019S DIGEST, CEMETERY DANCE, TWILIGHT ZONE and THE HORROR SHOW. Her erotic short stories have appeared previously in several Circlet anthologies. She also has two novels published by Bantam Books and reprinted by Borgo Press, THE AMULET and DARK JOURNEY. She lives in the Midwest, with a houseful (literally) of cats, some of whom have appeared in her novels and short fiction.<\/p>\n

Hot excerpt under the cut\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Excerpted from the title story, Cinnamon Roses<\/em><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s because people buy so heavily into the mythos of vampirism (y\u2019know, the gal\/guy-in-a-sweeping-cape-swooping-down-on-her\/his-prey\u2019s lily-white, blue-veined throat batcrap), or if it\u2019s because they have this idea that we vampires just need a suck of blood every day or so to keep body and soul in one just slightly undead package, but being a twentieth-century working vampire is not just a matter of staking out a little patch of earth under an abandoned warehouse somewhere out in the hinterlands of the city\u2014c\u2019mon, get real.<\/p>\n

Spending twelve or more hours a night biting and swooping and not much else is fucking boring<\/em>. And it doesn\u2019t contribute squat towards the rent or utilities on my basement apartment in Greenwich Village, either.<\/p>\n

Besides, just because a gal gets a little more than she bargained for during an admittedly dumb unsafest sex of all fling with some guy she met in some club she can\u2019t even remember the name of (oh, I made him wear a condom, but that didn\u2019t protect my neck\u2026) it doesn\u2019t mean that she suddenly becomes the reincarnation of Dracula\u2019s Brides. I still needed to make a living, and since I\u2019d been a barber\/hairstylist before\u2026 well, you\u2019ve got to admit, scissors and razors do have a way of occasionally drawing blood.<\/p>\n

And from personal experience, I know that vampire bites feel a heck of a lot like the touch of a styptic pencil\u2026 down to the not-quite-needle-sharp tip pressing down on warm flesh.<\/p>\n

Getting my boss to let me change my hours from mid-afternoon to evening to evening to pre-dawn wasn\u2019t difficult; the place where I work, the Heads-or-Tails, is one of those places that specializes in punk\/SM\/adventuresome types\u2014full body waxes, razor and lather shaves, even a little extra stuff on the side (regular customers only\u2014cop shops can\u2019t afford to send in decoys week after week) so it isn\u2019t unusual to see just about every type of person coming in for that special cut or shave at any hour of the night.<\/p>\n

And at $100 bucks a pop and up per session, the Heads-or-Tails never closes. So when one of the stylists demands a right now<\/em> change in working hours, the management is more than happy to oblige, especially when she (as in me) keeps drawing repeat nocturnal customers\u2026<\/p>\n

Another misconception about us vampires is that if we keep on doing what we do best\u2014a.k.a. neck-biting and blood-sucking\u2014eventually we\u2019ll infect the entire fucking world, because our victims will infect victims of their own, and so on until you\u2019re looking at one of those Andy Warhol\u2019s Dracula<\/em> situations (the whiny vampire strapping his coffin on top of the touring car and motoring off in search of fresh \u201cwurgin\u201d blood). Get off it, do you think that one sip from a person is enough to make them go mirror invisible (which is another load of bullsheet\u2014sorry, but the laws of physics don\u2019t work that way, though it makes for a nice special effect in the movies, I\u2019ll admit!) and start draining the family dog for a pre-bedtime snack? I had to spend a week with my nightclub Nosferatu before sunlight began to make my skin itch, but I can still put on my lipstick in the mirror, thank you!<\/p>\n

So, a slip of the disposable razor here, or a nick with the scissors there, and it\u2019s good-bye hunger, but not necessarily hello fellow nightwalker. Not unless I\u2019m<\/em> interested in some continuing companionship over the course of a month or so. And even then, I make sure I know the potential victim well enough to be sure that he or she will be in a position to tap into a private food supply without attracting attention. C\u2019mon, do you think that some of those E.R. nurses on the graveyard shift keep missing your veins by accident? Or those dental technicians who can\u2019t seem to clean your teeth without drawing blood?<\/p>\n

But sometimes, no matter how much a gal exercises caution, and forethought, not to mention common-sense, there will come the day when that certain customer walks in\u2014and every vein in my body, every blood-seeks-blood-filled throbbing vein, cries out to my brain, my lips, my cunt: Take this one\u2026 don\u2019t ask any questions, don\u2019t think about the night after\u2026 just take this one.<\/em><\/p>\n

(Doesn\u2019t even matter if this one is a gal or a guy; skin touching skin is gratification enough, and fingers and tongues more than equal a prick\u2026 there\u2019s nerve endings enough to go around all over the body).<\/p>\n

For me, the first signal of a customer being a taker<\/em> is their smell. The smell of clean, healthy blood surging under their veins just a few millimeters under the unbroken flesh\u2014for each of us, the name, the associative taste, we give to that good blood-odor differs. For me, it\u2019s cinnamon; cinnamon that\u2019s been freshly scraped from the stick, that raw, so sharp it tweaks your nostrils tang, so fresh and unseasoned the smell soon becomes a palatable taste even before the first drop caress my tongue.<\/p>\n

(How else do you think vampires avoid HIV and AIDS? Once you\u2019ve had a whiff of that moldy-grapes and stale-bread odor\u2014naturally, this perception differs from vampire to vampire\u2014you can smell a victim coming at you from two blocks away. Three if the wind is blowing past them.)<\/p>\n

Oh, all non-infected normals smell somewhat like cinnamon to me now; as long as you\u2019re reasonably healthy, the cinnamon-tang is still there, but in some people\u2026 well, it\u2019s more like a cautious sprinkle of the spice over toast, or across the top of an unsealed apple pie. Maybe it\u2019s all the stuff people take; additives, drugs, you name it. But in a taker, that fragrance is a living part of them, like an extra finger or breast. Richer and more lingering
\nthan the smell of sex, more piquant than ejaculation seeping out of your crevices.<\/p>\n

But the blood isn\u2019t the whole reason for that desire to own, to make a normal into a new-blood kin; even though it is the most tangible reason; for me (at least) there has to be a certain look in their eyes, a vulnerability that goes deeper than mere submission. The look which says What I am now is not all I could be. Doesn\u2019t matter if the look comes from eyes in a straight or gay or female or male body, either. Like I said before, there\u2019s nerve ends a plenty all over the body. Age isn\u2019t a biggie either, although most of the clientele of the H. or T. is youngish, adventuresome.<\/p>\n

Color, background, whatever\u2014none of these things matter either. Maybe because we vampires live so much in ourselves, and are ruled by what runs through our bodies and not over our bodies, that which is within others speaks to us so eloquently, so desperately.<\/p>\n

Even if they themselves do not realize that inner need\u2026.<\/p>\n

To read the rest, download the ebook today!<\/em><\/p>\n

[wp_eStore_fancy2 id=103]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ebook $5.99 ISBN: 9781613900468 44,710 words [wp_eStore_add_to_cart id=103] The ebook edition is also available at: Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, Amazon, & AllRomanceEbooks. **All royalties on this title will be donated to Catkins Animal Rescue in Park Falls, Wisconsin, in memory of the author, A.R. Morlan.** From the vivid erotic imagination of Ren\u00e9e M. Charles … Continue reading Cinnamon Roses by Renee M Charles<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":863,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-338","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/338\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}