Monthly Archives: January 2013

Carnivore Carnage

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The three vampires materialised out of the gloom luminous against the night sky gravid with snow.

“We found nothing mistress,” said Morgan in her best imitation of polite. I wasn’t fooled though, being able to see into her bloody little fantasies with me as head scream queen. Of the three she was adapting the fastest to simulating humanity. Was it so wrong to improve the already considerable skills of a ravening predator?

Her prey of choice was, after all, only human.

“There’s nothing here,” said Margaret in her fluting, girlish voice. Marjorie said nothing, curling her lip to reveal sharp, white teeth.

“Where are the…brother and sister?” asked Morgan.

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me,” I said.

Marjorie lifted a slender hand.

“Something comes.”

A milky, tainted light appeared from our left, coming from the city. But it wasn’t anything to do with the fire. A multitude of corpse-candles, will o’ the wisps, fizzed past my face and I involuntarily stepped back to avoid them. Their touch bewitched the mind into seeing what it wanted to see: loved ones long dead; treasure beyond counting; the list limited only by the imagination of the willing victim. I wasn’t ready to know the shape of my heart’s desire.

Not yet.

A chill wind blew my hair across a frozen face obliterating momentarily the piles of rubble and hulking machinery dotted around like a dinosaur’s graveyard. I was bone weary and sore from my assorted wounds. The playful scratch by Morgan throbbed and I suspected it was infected.

But I hadn’t been paying proper attention because the tainted light had not passed with the corpse candles. A low sepia cloud descended with the suddenness of a tsunami. It roiled in on itself briefly before covering the ground, enveloping everything in its path. I could see odd elongated shapes within it, like the distorted shadows of human beings thrown out by a fire. One shape raised a six fingered hand the fingers of which looked as though they had more joints than any mere human possessed.

Mistress…

The Sith were afraid. My beautiful bold carnivores were finally afraid. A thrill of satisfaction gave me the strength to go for the knives hanging at my belt. Whatever it was would have to pry these steel babies from my cold dead hands.

Winter Holiday

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“Right here,” I said, pointing at a massive oak tree bowed down with snow like an old giant that had frozen to death. Between the dark and the driving storm, visibility was just down to a few feet and I’d almost missed the turn off.

“The house is about a mile down this road.”

“Christ Rose, give me some notice.”

“You try noticing anything from the back seat at night in a snow storm. See that light up there? That’s Vic and Michael’s place.”

“What, up that bastard hill? We’ll never get the car up there.”

He was right as it turned out, we couldn’t. The car kept sliding and eventually slid into a bank of soft snow from where it couldn’t be moved. Swearing, Rufus forced the car door open and had to do the same for mine. He stood with difficulty, snow encasing his legs up to mid-thigh and claiming the rest of him under a clotted blanket of ice crystals.

“Can’t you call your friends to come get us?” he shouted above the noise of the wind. “The weather’s too bad and I won’t be able to lug you all that way.”

“They weren’t in when I called. I’ll give it a another go,” I said, dialling.

“What?”

I suppressed a smile.

“You made me drive all this way to the middle of nowhere, for fu-”

“We’re just outside Perth,”I reminded him primly. “It’s hardly the middle of nowhere. Oh hi, Vic. It’s me. Everything sweet? Sorry to hear that. Listen, we’ve got a bit of a problem. We’re at the bottom of the hill, cars in a snow drift and I’m not in great shape. Can you come get us?”

“Well? Are they coming?”

“They said they’re busy and could we come back tomorrow. I’m kidding,” I said as he punched the roof of the car. “Listen be cool with Vic and Michael. Try not to piss them off.”

A dark shape materialised behind him, an arm closed around his throat pulling him backwards. He yelped something incomprehensible and then started choking as the arm was pulled tighter. A high laugh rang out and then something thumped the window beside me as a smeared bestial face pressed itself against the glass, nose flattened, teeth bared.

“Hi guys,” I said. “That was quick. Say hello to Rufus.”

Ring of Roses

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A heavy sleet was being vomited from above when I got out the taxi a couple of streets from Crowe’s house. I walked towards it, a Victorian stone villa set in grounds too big to be called a mere garden, ploughing my way through drifts of freshly fallen snow. The gate was open as though someone had recently passed through and not bothered to close it behind them. But I knew that it had been left that way by the Baobhan Sith as an ironic invitation to me, as though I was the vampire. I decided to accept and trod the path, unsullied by human footprints.

The front garden faced the main road but the back was secluded, protected as it was by a thickly planted line of mature trees, skeletal sentinels whose branches pierced a bruised sky. A blur of movement exploded to my right, brief but unmistakable. I hurried to the huge beech hedge where it had been, certain I’d find the perpetrator, but found nothing and no one.

Then, from a ground floor window the pale oval of a face appeared.

I retreated to the summerhouse and the face tracked my progress, or at least it did until something far more interesting caught its attention. I followed the trajectory of its gaze and there, as though appearing out of nowhere, were the three Baobhan Sith, naked and dancing sinuously in the snow to music only they could hear.

But I knew something the voyeur did not, that this was no cheap peep show, but the prelude to a far meatier entertainment. One of the Sith tossed an armful of blond hair over her right shoulder raising her breast in the process as though inviting the watcher behind glass to come play. In reality it was a signal to her blood sisters and I knew the real games were about to commence.

Fairy Liquid

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It’s your round by the way,” said Rufus.

Without a word, I pulled out the capacious hip-flask from my coat and poured a hefty belt of green liquid into each of our three empty shot glasses.

“What is it?” Ruby asked.

“It’s the green fairy,” I replied, “Also known as, the devil in a bottle, or if you’re one of those quaint types that insist on calling a spade a shovel, Absinthe.”

Meeting the green Man-Goat tonight reminded me that I had some.

“And just to cement our status as one big, happy family,” I grinned at the two blanched faces, “I decided that absinthe really would make the heart grow fonder.”

“Except in your case,” muttered Rufus under his breath.

I raised my glass and smiled.

“I’ll drink to that.”