Bite Me
Chapter One
Anne Rice sucks. Lord Byron, Bram Stoker, all the rest too. Before they got hold of the horrible legends and turned an unclean spirit possessing a decomposing body into a freaking romantic hero, nobody anywhere thought vampires were nifty.
An unhealthy obsession with bloodsuckers wasn’t a problem before the Event. Sure, there were a few delusional psychotics who believed they were nosferatu, and a subset of goth culture that wore fangs with their Victorian lace, but what’s the harm? Except for the psychos, I mean. Today it’s a whole different story.
Jacky Bouchard, The Artemis Files.
* * *
This bites.
It had become a mantra, and I repeated it as I watched the fang-action across the room. I’d been haunting Sable’s for weeks, and the scene Sable and “Evangeline” were putting on was depressingly familiar. She stood beside his chair (throne, really), all blonde curls and lace over crinoline, while he sipped at her wrist and she shivered deliciously. The rest of his court watched him with greedy eyes. I sipped my Coke and ignored the sad hopefuls watching me.
God. One more night.
The windows open to New Orleans’ warm and damp spring night didn’t help, and the sweaty crowd around me made me glad I didn’t have to breathe. A deal’s a deal, I reminded myself again. Sable had “requested” my presence in his house three nights a week; in return, he left me alone when I hunted in the French Quarter. Speaking of hunting, it had been long enough between bites that the bodies around me were looking less like people and more like Happy Meals. Time to work.
Looking around for a likely suspect, I caught the eye of a kid with a face full of freckles under bad makeup and a mop of unevenly dyed raven hair. Without lowering my glass, I pointed at the door with my pinky finger and started moving that way myself. He blanched and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, but he pushed his way out of the crowd and met me in the doorway. Envious stares followed him.
“I don’t do public fang,” I whispered in his ear, and jerked my head for him to follow me. Down the hall from the crowded parlor was a study where nobody would interrupt us. I took his hand and he flinched a little at my cool grip, but then he squeezed. I almost sighed.
A single red-tasseled table lamp lit the study; Sable liked it dim and probably didn’t have a sixty-watt bulb in the house. I sat down on the velvet-upholstered loveseat, straightened my skirts, and patted the cushion beside me.
“I.D.?” I kept my voice low. He looked blank and now I did sigh. “You don’t expect me to risk entrapment, do you?”
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded eagerly and pulled out his wallet to hand me his driver’s license. I held it up. It looked real enough and declared he was Steve Jansen, eighteen, but I took a picture of it with the camera hidden in my bloodstone cameo broach anyway, then sat demurely while he put it away.
“First time?”
“Na— Yeah.” He blushed, and suddenly I didn’t have the patience for it. I reached across his lap and took his right hand, pulled it gently towards me, and locked eyes with him.
“It’s easy.” I put influence into my words and felt him relax under the suggestion. Drawing his hand around my waist made him lean across me. A polite, or at least cautious, boy, he braced against the loveseat so he wasn’t lying across my frill-covered chest. The move put his head at an angle, neck in front of me, and despite my influence his Adam’s apple bounced again. I added more influence to a gentle “shhh,” and watched his pupils dilate till his irises practically disappeared. The pulse in his neck slowed along with his breathing, and when he was ready I leaned forward, opening my mouth.
Just a touch of my teeth and his blood flowed, electric copper on my tongue. I wrapped my arms around his waist as he went boneless, made a seal with my lips, and started counting. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four… At thirty I stopped the flow with a lick. He didn’t twitch, and I laughed lightly—mood improved as always by the spike of heat in my veins.
“Breathe,” I said, and he took a deep convulsive lungful. Pushing him upright, I patted his shoulder. “Hold still.” Pulling a handkerchief from my skirt pocket, I wiped away the two little spots of blood left behind before applying it to my own lips. Standing up, I pulled him up with me and over to the door. I waited, holding his hands; there was no way I was letting him out into the crowd in his current state—people could play cruel jokes on someone who’d just been vamped.
When his pupils started to contract I kissed him on the cheek. Putting all the influence I could into it, I whispered “Goodnight Steve, now go home and don’t come back,” and pushed him out the door. He went straight down the hall without looking back, walking fast and without answering any of the calls sent his way. Two shakes and he was past Sable’s looming doorman and out the front door. Obviously the suggestion had taken, at least for now.