Sex and the Single Vampire

I laughed a harsh, bitter little laugh. "It's nothing I want, believe you me."

He looked thoughtful for a moment. "I guess not. Must make for some odd looks, eh?"

And odder responses, responses like people screaming and dropping things, claims that I was doing it just to get attention, and worst of all, accusations that I was a freak.

The rest of the ride was conducted in silence. I looked out at London at night and wondered if my optician wasn't wrong—the last time I'd tried contacts, I'd managed to wear them almost a week before my eyes started ulcering. That had been over a year ago. Maybe now they could handle the contacts…

As I left the taxi, the driver pushed a card into my hand. "In case you ever need a chauffeur to take you outside of London. I do that as well."

I thanked him and joined the throng of people streaming into the new bookstore.

"How many copies do you want?" a harried bookstore employee asked me a few minutes later as I shuffled forward in a line so long it was guaranteed to leave my leg aching.

"One of whichever is the latest book."

"One?" She looked me up and down as if I were an insect that had donned human clothing. "Just one? One?"

"Oh, you want more than one, dearie," the woman in line behind me said as she tugged my arm. "They're ever so good."

"I've never read them. I'm just doing this for a friend."

"Never read them!" The woman gasped as I accepted a hardback book from the store employee. "Never read them! Well, you just have to read them. Here, you, give this lady another copy. You'll love it, you truly will."

"No, thank you," I said as I pushed the second copy back to the employee. "One's fine. I'm sure they're very nice, but I'm not into this sort of book."

The woman's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, this sort of book?" She shook the three copies she held at me. "These are beautiful books, wonderfully written and full of dark, brooding men and the women who save them!"

"And the sex is good, too," a woman behind her added.

The woman behind me nodded emphatically. "Just lovely love scenes, very creative and hot enough to melt your knickers. Here." She shoved a book into my hands. "You take this. Read it. You'll be a believer in no time. The way Dante writes… it's positively unearthly."

I lifted my glasses just enough so she could get a good look at my eyes. "Trust me, I don't need to read a book to know what unearthly feels like."

She choked and hurriedly dropped her gaze from mine. I pushed my glasses back down and gently returned the book she'd shoved in my hands, turning around to face forward in the line. I hated calling attention to myself in that manner—my limp was enough to make people stare—but if there's anything I dislike, it's a rabid fan.

Those were my thoughts until the line slowly snaked its way down the rows of bookshelves, close enough for me to see the group of people gathered around a table situated in the middle of the store. Bodies shifted and moved in an intricate dance of color and pattern. I stood, bored, mentally drawing warding spells to protect me from overeager readers, until suddenly every hair on my arms stood up on end. The person directly at the front of the signing table shifted and moved far enough to the side that I could see the man who was sitting behind a stack of books, his head bent over a copy as he signed it.

Long, shoulder-length black hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, but a strand had escaped and framed one side of a hard jaw, a jaw that led down to a familiar squared chin. The man looked up at the person he was signing for and smiled. I staggered back as if I'd been punched in the stomach, literally feeling as if all the air had been sucked from the room.

It was the man I'd seen first in my dream, then later in the inn, the crazy man who had cut himself all over his really nummy body and then disappeared… or had that been a fantasy, nothing but the deranged ramblings of an overtired mind? I rubbed my forehead, unsure of whether that whole episode had been imagined, or if he was… My mind came up with a blank as to an explanation, if he really had been at the inn. No one could have cleaned up that room and gotten rid of the table in the ten minutes I was gone. No one human.

C. J. Dante, famed vampire author, the man who came to me in my dreams and begged me to help him. A tormented man, one whose anguish I could feel without even opening my mind up to him. A man who sliced himself up like a loaf of bread, then got testy when I tried to help him.

"Just who—or more to the point, what… is he?" I muttered to myself.

Unfortunately, I had no answer.

Chapter Three