By Blood We Live

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 Féval, père'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 thought of an airplane seat, let alone stripping down to a bikini on a beach in Marbella. She had never lost the habits of embarrassment gained in childhood, and now she had the prospect of middle-age spread looming before her.

Mina hadn't an atom of proof that she had been passed over for promotion because of the way she looked. The fact that her newly imported line manager, Lucy Stanwere, had a figure like Paula Radcliffe as well as being ten years younger might have been coincidence. The fact that Lucy was able to wear four-inch heels, thus allowing her to tower over those condemned by gravity to flat soles, might also be irrelevant to her rapid ascent of the status ladder. The fact that Mina was due to see Lucy for her annual appraisal the morning after she fell off the Stone Age wagon and gorged herself on Welsh rarebit and chocolate milk was, however, definitely not a coincidence. Anxiety had always been a key factor in Mina's comfort eating.