and I loved him for that… and for whom he was.'
He understood what Odette was telling him, he loved Meghan that way. But it was becoming so difficult to hold onto the memory or to nurse it to life.
'Imagine after more than two hundred years… the memories fade and all you have left is the pain.' Her stare was so hypnotic, so open, and for all that she was and all that she had done, she possessed serenity.
'I have to finish this, tomorrow night, then I can move on.'
'I know you have to redress what happened to you,' she said quietly, briefly closing her eyes. 'Just as one day I'll route out the rest of those in the coven that participated in the coup against Alfonse.'
'I know,' he murmured, moving against her slowly and now appreciating the unhurried pleasure of their union. She was a beautiful woman, but there was something beyond that, something still so genuine inside her very being. It had been so long since he'd witnessed that or had allowed himself to experience the possibility it existed beyond Meghan. The fact that he felt the way he did almost seemed like a betrayal.
'It's not a betrayal,' Odette murmured, brushing his mouth with hers. 'They would have wanted us to go on, to thrive, and not merely survive. If we exist tortured, then the others have also won.'
A gasp escaped him as Odette's slick sheath tightened around him. He studied her face as he loved her slowly, kissing her throat, then her breasts, paying delicate homage to her erect Hershey nipples with tiny suckles until she moaned. Satiny legs encircled his waist as she arched and offered him her throat. The strike into her jugular was swift but tender, her gasp sending a shudder through him that made him cry out.
The night wore on, their lovemaking an anthem, to survival, to renewal, that took them from the floor of the vast bathroom to the sprawl of her king-sized bed. He watched semi-dazed as the steel door to the basement sanctuary closed and pure darkness surrounded them, but yet he could still see.
'Rest,' she whispered. 'Later tonight will be ours. We have the benefit now of time, power, and stealth.'
He pulled her against his chest in the darkness, finding it new that no heartbeats meshed and only cool skin now touched. The heat was gone, but not his loyalty to the one who'd saved him. The seeds of a long-time love had been planted. One that wouldn't grow old, one that understood him more than the former love of his life ever had, one that shared his altruism and even his dark side.
'I'm glad you found me,' he said quietly. 'I didn't want to die.'
She nodded and kissed his chest. 'I am glad, too. This is rare… it is magic.'
'Finders keepers.' For the first time in years, he closed his eyes with a smile.
They entered the casino just as they had left, but no monitors could perceive them. Old Stan looked at Tony and then glanced away.
'Wait here,' he said to Odette. 'I have to clear this up.'
She nodded and perused the floor watching as her lover tried to make an old man understand. But that was pointless, people believed what they wanted to. Finally, she saw Tony hail her with a slight lift of his jaw.
'Ask Odette,' he said calmly, placing a hand on Stan's shoulder.
She already knew the direction of the conversation. 'He didn't kill the young dealer, they did. Tony used to work for the feds.'
Stan straightened. 'Then get the fuck away from me, would ya!' He spoke through his teeth. 'I don't wanna wind up like that kid, and I don't wanna know what's going on-but I don't want them to see me ever talking to you.'
Tony nodded. 'No problem, you live well.'
Odette took his arm. 'There is much I have to teach you about the use of your power.'
'Just get me up into the security area without them seeing me.'
'Vapor?' she said with a wide grin. 'Follow me to the shadows. You just don't do that on an open casino floor in polite company.'
She took his hand and then pulled him into an alcove, kissing him passionately as passersby glanced at them once, and then they were gone.
Drifting replaced body weight, and then vents became passageways. Silence echoed all around him until Odette's voice entered his head.
Bullets will hurt but not kill you. However, the rage is controlling you right now, you must control the rage. Decide before you go in there whether or not you want to rip them to shreds with your bare hands and start an entirely crazy investigation, or if you want to just shoot them all so that it looks like a human-on-human crime.
Before he could answer her, he was standing inside the room and could feel her presence invisibly monitoring his first foray as a vampire.
They were eating take-out from the restaurants below. Laughter filled the room, total entitlement to joy surrounded them like his life and death and that of an innocent kid's never matter, never happened. They didn't even see him.
'I told you I would haunt you,' Tony said in a low growl.
'Oh, shit!' Lou jumped up and grabbed his gun.
Four henchmen cursed and scrambled for weapons.
'I thought you whacked this bastard!' Fat Joe shouted.
In that moment, Tony decided. He didn't want to shoot them. Hand-to-hand combat just felt too good. Ripping Lou's arm out of its socket and then shooting him in the head, just felt like the right thing to do. But wisdom and vampire speed prevailed, as he unloaded his clip.
'Feed before you leave,' Odette said, materializing behind him. 'Or else, it's a waste.'
They sat hand in hand under the stars on a bench watching the surf. A thousand questions pummeled his mind but he was grateful he didn't have to verbalize any of them for her to understand.
'It is a sexy, glorious emotion, revenge, but just like sex with a lover you don't love, once you climax, it all feels so hollow.'
He nodded. Leave it to a woman to so eloquently define what was raging within him. 'Now what?' he whispered. 'There are so many more of them, so many I could go after, and will… but it all seems so pointless.'
She laid her head on his shoulder. 'This is why I haven't destabilized the coven. After I repaid Gustav for what he'd done to Alfonse, I sadly realized, it would never bring him back.' Her soft palm stroked his chest as she looked out to the moon. 'Alfonse and I decimated the town back in Haiti before we left that fateful night of my
making. We settled all old debts, but in the end, none of that made us feel better beyond the moment of the blood-letting.'
'Sorta like a crack high… for the moment it's an adrenaline rush like you cannot believe, and then…'
'And then you crash.'
He stared at her. 'So how do you go on living now?'
'As time passes you'll realize that the greatest thing you have is someone to share that passage of time with… for what felt like eons I focused on the ugliness so much that I could never see the beauty of life. Once I died I forgot how to do that.'
'I had forgotten that while I was still living,' he said in a sad murmur.
'I have seen the dawn of so much, though… cars, telephones, airplanes; I could go on and on. But also wars.'
He smiled, and then chuckled sadly. 'So, what do we do, become philanthropists?'
She smiled and shrugged. 'Why not. We can be whatever we want to be, can right wrongs, can help or hurt. What do you want to be?'
'I don't want to hurt people,' he said quietly, his voice so sad that it drew her.
She stared into his eyes and nodded, touching his lips with one finger. 'Enough lessons for one night. Enough vengeance for one era. Let us focus on beauty.'
He took her mouth in a slow dissolve of pleasure. He was her greatest find, something precious that she would vow to keep, and she knew that she was that for him. The irony of that truth not lost on either of them.
After the Stone Age by Brian Stableford
Brian Stableford's latest novels, all new this year, include Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity, The Dragon Man, and The Moment of Truth. He is well- known in vampire circles for his novels The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires, The Empire of Fear, and Young Blood, and for his translations of French author Paul Feval, pere's nineteenth-century works of vampire fiction (which pre-date Bram Stoker's Dracula). He has also authored many other novels and French translations, as well as numerous works of non-fiction about science fiction.
About vampire fiction, Stableford says: 'It's probably popular because it imagines a kind of charisma, a subspecies of angst and an insidious variety of violence of which humans are incapable, thus providing a temporary distraction from the charismatic void, ineffably tedious angst and mere brutality that constitute the quotidian human condition. I became interested in it when the history of the subgenre took an interesting turn in the 1970s, when assumptions of monstrosity formerly taken more-or-less for granted were challenged and interrogated in various quirky ways, presumably reflecting-albeit in a distorting mirror-contemporary sociological shifts in attitudes to sexuality.'
This tale, which first appeared in the BBC's Cult Vampire Magazine, is about the potential utility of vampirism as a 'natural' substitute for liposuction.
Mina had tried them all: WeightWatchers, Conley, grapefruit, Atkins, hypnotherapy and pumping iron. On the day she decided, after three grueling months, that the Stone Age diet was doing her more harm than good-just like all the rest-she felt that she had hit rock bottom in the abyss of despair. She clocked in at sixteen stone five pounds, just six pounds lighter than the day she had embarked on the Stone Age with such steely determination. By the end of March she would doubtless crack the seventeen stone barrier, going in the wrong direction.
Younger people, she supposed, calculated in kilograms but she had never contrived to adjust. Mercifully, she was in public finance rather than the commercial sector, so she rarely had to audit accounts that were connected, even in the remotest degree, with the EU. She never traveled abroad, because she couldn't bear the
