The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

I pass under the big statue of the hero on the horse, and walk jaunty and silent-footed among his many lamplit shadows. Around the bend I see a white gleam, too white and sharp to be anything but a pressed evening jacket. For a moment I think that it is Owl again. But his face, when he turns to look at me, is different.

His jacket is a little rumpled but not dirty, and his black bow tie is perfectly in place. He is smiling. I catch up to him.

"Cigarette?" he says.

"No thanks, I just had one."

He takes one from a gold-plated case, lights it and inhales slowly and contentedly. Where his lips touched it I see a dark stain.

"Hungry?"

"Not a bit."

"Wonderful night," I say.

He nods, still smiling. "Let's go dancing," he says.

We'll have a good time.

Bootleg

Christa Faust

Christa Faust is a fetish model and bondage enthusiast living and writing in Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Revelations (aka Millennium,) edited by Douglas E. Winter and Love in Vein edited by Poppy Z. Brite. Her debut novel , Control Freak, has recently been reissued by Babbage Press and she is currently working on a second. She has also written a four-part black and white bondage adventure serial for the Web entitled Dita in Distress, a sexy, campy homage to the old Republic Pictures cliff hangers .

"It's funny," reveals the author, "even though 'Bootleg' deals with blood fetish and the cosmetic accessories of vampirism, I always thought of it as more of a ghost story or maybe even a zombie story (if you could make dead love get up and walk again), rather than a traditional vampire story.

" While I do enjoy bloodplay as a sexual indulgence, as a writer I find very little blood left to suck from that old archetype. As with my other 'vampire' story, 'Cherry' in Love in Vein, in this story I tried to take the idea in a slightly different direction. I wanted to get away from the whole doomed immortal thing, the romantic wish-fulfilment fantasy of being pale and thin and pretty for ever and ever, and try to do something that was a little more human ."

Mona cut off his right hand first. It was more important to him than his penis, the source of all his brilliance, his ART (she could always hear the capital letters in his slow, jaded voice) and she took great pleasure in removing it. Then the left hand, severed just below the twisted copper bracelet she gave him last Christmas. Tattooed arms were next, lower then upper. Their swirling patterns seemed much more beautiful without him attached. She cut off his booted feet, left then right and added them to the growing pile. She sliced off his legs in thin denim sections until she reached his narrow hips. Before she detached his pelvis from the rest of his torso, she cut out his treacherous penis. (You'll never stick it in another anorexic art-school slut behind my back again, bucko.) She sliced up his belly and his stray-dog ribcage until there was nothing left but his head.

His face was serene, unaware of his own dismemberment as he was unaware of everything that did not fulfil his immediate needs. His eyes were as blue as the day Mona fell for him, a hard, pure shade of turquoise that she would for ever associate with lies. She cut them out separately, left then right. She cut out his sweet, lying mouth and his angular, aristocratic nose, then tossed what remained of his head on to the pile.

"Bastard," she said softly to herself and dumped all his severed parts into the fire.

She watched him burn for a long minute, coiling flames as blue as his eyes as they devoured him. Then she set to work on the other photographs.

There weren't that many. Mostly just snapshots taken by friends. Mona and Daniel at various stuffy parties, she uncomfortable in a strappy black, thrift-store dress and he in his eternal art uniform: paint-flecked T-shirt and torn jeans and hand-rolled cigarette, too cool to dress up. Mona and Daniel in Jackson Square, posed against wrought iron and surrounded by the bright chaos of Daniel's paintings. Mona and Daniel in love, arms wound around each other, smiling and not knowing any better. She shuddered and added these to the fire.

Then the rest of Daniel by himself, photos she had taken when the angles of his face and the smooth muscles of his arms meant something to her. Daniel with streaks of cerulean and viridian across his chest and cheeks, a thick paintbrush clenched between his teeth. Daniel sleeping like a child with his fists curled up under his chin. She slashed at them with her scissors and tossed the fragments into the fire.

The letters were all gone except for one, his most recent:

8/11/01

Mona,