I had to swallow a few times before I could speak. “Where are we?”
“You wanted to know where I spend my daylight hours.” He nodded. “We are inside a mountain. This is my private place. It has been so for centuries. Sometimes I come here to be alone. Or to time travel.”
My throat tightened, holding back all the words I wanted to say. I was touched and honored that he’d finally shown me his secret lair—overwhelmed that he was willing to be that vulnerable to me.
“Well, then I’d better thank you yet again. This time for trusting me.” I walked over to him, threw my arms around his neck, and kissed him.
He wrapped his arms around me and deepened the kiss.
My knees threatened to give out again and I pulled away. He smiled, apparently aware of my physical challenge and who caused it. I strolled over to the sleek black coffin.
“Do you sleep in here?”
He joined me, caressing the smooth lid with his long-fingered hand. “Sometimes. Mostly I enjoy the comfort of the bed.”
I lifted my brows. “You use the bed if you have company?”
His expression became serious, his brows contracting in the middle. He took my hand. “I have never brought anyone here in all the centuries since I created this place. You are the first. The only.”
That stunned me, and I encircled his waist with my arms, and pressed myself against him. “Thank you.”
He kissed the top of my head. “Let us explore the comforts of the bed.” He scooped me up into his arms and walked us there. He crawled onto the mattress, still holding me, and dropped me into the exquisite softness, quickly collapsing on top of me.
He flicked his hair behind him and licked my lips with his warm tongue. I opened my mouth and groaned.
Pulling away, he smiled. “I will ask you what Hallow asked. Do you choose me, Kismet?”
Immediately, the horrible memory flashed through my brain, and I froze underneath him, feeling unexplained terror. He continued smiling down at me, his sweet face shining in the candlelight, his eyes shimmering. I saw nothing but love there. I relaxed and stroked his soft skin.
“I do.”
Epilogue
Devereux says he tastes Hallow in my blood. He’s asked all his master vampires, wizards, and healers to explore the possible consequences and potential solutions of my contamination. He offered to let me drink more of his blood, to balance out Hallow’s wild power, but we’re waiting to see how—or if—the monster’s blood changes my life in any way before we make a decision about a remedy.
Victoria came through her ordeal stronger than ever and nagged me relentlessly to join her coven. I finally gave in, and have been enjoying the company of other women and the acceptance and strengthening of my own abilities—the ones that have nothing to do with Devereux. I’m a Priestess in Training.
Tom survived the transformation process and has been sequestered away until he can be trusted around humans. I understand that might take decades. The Dr. Sex cable TV program will have to wait.
Luna has been banished to a secret vampire enclave. Devereux doesn’t like talking about her, so I don’t push.
One of the role-players from my night at the amusement park asked for a psychotherapy appointment. It seems he’s lost chunks of time and has been experiencing strange flashbacks. I wonder if I can deal with what we uncover.
Devereux says we belong together. He could be right. I’m open to discussion.
For the most part, I’m coping with my feelings of guilt about Maxie’s death and my unwanted thoughts of Hallow. I keep having a recurring dream where I talk to him in the white-columned, lofty setting he used before. I don’t know what it means.
I don’t want to know.
A special presentation of:
The Vampire Shrink
LYNDA HILBURN
Chapter One
My involvement with vampires began innocently enough. Long before the blood hit the fan, so to speak.
Like most psychologists, I’d been trained to view the world through a diagnostic lens, hearing my clients’ stories through my metaphorical ears, searching out the deeper meanings. Thankfully, my tendency to reduce each person to a prevailing neurosis was tempered by my irreverent, dark sense of humor, which kept me from taking myself and the world too seriously.
While I never was as bad as some of my colleagues about believing only in what I could prove—if you couldn’t quantify it, it wasn’t there—I had seen enough bizarre stuff in my private psychotherapy practice over the years to make me more skeptical than I was comfortable admitting.
My private practice had its share of UFO abductees, demonic possessions, satanic cult survivors, religious cultists, attached entities—all the newest selections on the menu of emotional and mental pain. Plus, all the “regular” therapy issues.
So, when I opened the door separating my reception area from my office that fateful Friday to welcome my new client, I was only momentarily surprised. Waiting for me was a young woman wearing a long, black dress covered by a dark purple velvet cape. Rings adorned all ten fingers, and a long snake bracelet, with sparkling ruby eyes, wound its way up her arm from wrist to elbow. She had waist-length, light brown hair with multi-colored streaks, and she wore white theatrical makeup, dark red lipstick, and remarkably life-like, high-quality, removable fangs.
My mind began to pick out the various category boxes I could put her into. Hmmm, Goth? Vampire wannabe? Acting-out teenager?
“Please come in and have a seat.” I gave my warmest therapy smile and waved my hand in the general direction of the couch and chairs in the center of my office. “I’m Dr. Knight. Please call me Kismet.”
That’s quite an outfit. Spectacular, really. This sweet, young thing has a flair for the dramatic. What’s that delicious fragrance? Sandalwood?
She walked in silently, handed me the packet of paperwork she’d filled out in the waiting room, and sat down in the chair farthest from where I was standing. Scanning the information, I noticed she’d listed her name as Midnight.
“Midnight? That’s a lovely name. Is there a last name?”
“No. I have no need of anything from my human past,” she said, with exaggerated seriousness.
Okay. Let’s not assume the obvious. I chose a chair across from her and picked up my note pad and pen. “Tell me how I can help you.”
“I’m only here because my family made me come. They can’t accept my choices and they’re hoping you’ll talk me out of wanting to be a vampire. They want you to fix me.” Her voice separated each angry word like little staccato notes.
She gave me the once-over I’d come to recognize from my younger clients: the smirking scan that evaluated my tailored, light blue suit and sensible, black heels and found them hopelessly conventional. Then, inevitably, her eyes moved to my hair, which was very long, curly, and often had a mind of its own. The dissonance between my conservative suit and unintentional rock-star hair disrupted the inner picture she was constructing of me. I always enjoy the flash of confusion that washes over their faces at that point. My inner trickster is never far away.
She hiked her dress up until the hem rested on her knees and crossed her legs dramatically. “You’re not what I expected.”
I smiled. “What did you expect?”
“Someone old, with her hair in a bun and no makeup. You’re not that much older than me. And you’re pretty. You remind me of that singer my mother listens to all the time. Sarah Brightman. The one with the long, dark hair and blue eyes.”
“Thank you. I enjoy her, too. Are you comfortable with someone who isn’t old and who doesn’t have her hair in a bun?”
She frowned. “I guess so.”
I could see that her need to connect was struggling with her automatic protective defenses, and the jury was out about which one would continue the session.
“Well, tell me about your desire to be a vampire. How long have you wanted to be one?”
She tilted her head, pursed her l
ips and sat silently for a few seconds. Quick flashes of emotion danced across her face as fear, disappointment, and resentment gave way to hope.
“Ever since I met Devereux—or Dev, as we call him about a year ago,” she said, dreamily.
Ah, connection won. Maybe she’ll let me in.
“Why would meeting Dev make you want to be a vampire?”
“Well, duh, because he is one.” She rolled her chocolate-brown eyes, and made that “tsk” sound with her tongue against her teeth.
I kept the warm smile on my face, and ignored the teenage angst. “Can you tell me about Dev?”
She hesitated, staring down at the floor, using the tip of her tongue to play with the fake fangs. “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about him. He wouldn’t want me to. He says it’s better if no one believes vampires really exist.”
Oh, I see. Her sharp little fangs fit perfectly over her own canines, with an almost-invisible band holding them—similar to braces. How clever.
“Do you believe that vampires really exist?” I tried not to sound as if there was only one right answer to the question.
“Oh, yes. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen. Denver has tons of vampires,” she enthused.
“Really? Midnight, I want you to know that anything we talk about in here is completely confidential. You can feel free to tell me anything you want and it will go no further. I’d really like to hear about all these vampires.”
Vampires. Well, that certainly is a change of pace from aliens and demon possessions.
She raised an eyebrow. “How do I know you won’t tell my parents?”
“Unless you’re going to hurt yourself or someone else, I will never tell anyone anything that we discuss,” I explained, giving her my ethically required disclaimer.
She paused a moment, studying me. “Well, I guess it’s okay then, since you can’t tell anybody.”
She uncrossed her legs and shifted forward in the chair. “So, what do you want to know?”
“Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”
She nodded. “I met the vampires right after I graduated from high school last year. My friends all went down to that cool club that used to be a huge, old church in the funky section of downtown—it’s called The Crypt. We’ve got the best fake IDs so we just slide right in. But it’s weird. Even though we’ve got the perfect IDs and they let us in, they never let us buy alcohol. If we go up to the bar, the bartender just laughs at us. Pisses me off. What’s up with that?”
I scribbled notes on my pad. It was a delicate dance to get the words on paper without letting my clients feel abandoned by my split attention. I always wound up with a cramp in my hand after each session from all the fast writing.
Interesting that the club wouldn’t sell drinks to her. Maybe they’d gotten in trouble for serving minors before?
She worried her bottom lip with the tip of one of her fangs, as if it gave her time to think before speaking again.
“Anyway, there are several levels to the club and one of them, down in the basement—we call it the dungeon—is private. There were curtains over the doorway, but my friend, Emerald and I, we waited ’til the guy who guarded the door left for a minute, and then we sneaked down and peeked in through the crack and saw all these amazing people,” she reported, with an expression of awe on her face from the memory.
“Amazing people?”
“Yeah, two different kinds, really. A whole bunch of kids around my age, maybe a few years older, all dressed up sorta Goth, but not really, wearing white paint on their faces and red on their lips. Then there were the other ones. So beautiful. They were wearing regular stuff like leather, and didn’t have the white makeup on, but they were totally awesome. They were a little older, maybe in their 20s or 30s, and they all had gorgeous, long hair …”
She stared off for a moment, her mouth hanging loosely open, having gotten lost in the vision.
“So, they were totally awesome?”
Nodding her head gently, she said, “Totally.”
“And then what happened?”
“We were just standing there, scoping out the room, and a hand came through the curtains, opened them, and the hottest guy I’ve ever seen asked if we wanted to come in. Emerald didn’t want to go in—she’s afraid of everything—but I really wanted to check out all those people, so I said yes. The hot guy reached out, took my hand and actually kissed the back of it and said his name was Devereux. I thought I was going to pass out just from looking at him. There was something about his eyes.” She paused and glanced over at me, trying to gauge my reaction before she shared any more details.
I felt the muscles in my neck and back tighten, which happened sometimes when I worked too hard at holding in all the opinions that wanted to tumble out of my mouth. Often, having to remain silent was the hardest part of my job.
She met a strange man in a bar. A man dressed in leather, who invited her into a private room. What’s wrong with this picture?
I smiled. “And then?”
“Then he sorta led me inside and Emerald followed us. There must have been fifty people in that room and they were all incredible. Dev walked us over to a table, and he was so polite. He pulled out the chairs for us, like in the old movies, and asked if we wanted anything to drink. We both ordered beers—we had to try—but he brought us Cokes, and we just sat there, staring at him. He wasn’t drinking anything and I asked why not, and he said he’d already had his fill for the night, and he just kept smiling and giving us those psychedelic eyes. I didn’t know what he meant back then, but I do now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you sure you won’t tell this to anyone? I don’t want to piss Dev off,” she said, reading my face for signs of deception.
“I promise,” I assured her.
She nodded. I’d evidently passed the test.
“Well, he drinks blood, ya know? That’s what vampires do. So, when he said he was full, he meant he had already ‘eaten’ for the night,” she explained, her voice light and casual, as if we were talking about the weather.
Yuck. He drinks blood. Can you say mental illness?
“Do you drink blood?”
That, obviously, was a loaded question, because Midnight started scraping her lower lip against her upper teeth. She twisted the edge of her cape nervously in her hands and stared down into her lap.
“Midnight? Are you all right?”
Squirming in the chair, she said, “Yeah. It just feels creepy to be talking about this.”
“Do you mean because of what your family would think?”
She hesitated. “No, because of what Dev would do if he found out,” she said, softly. “We’re not allowed to drink blood.”
Thank heavens for that.
“We’ll come back to the blood in a minute. What’s your relationship with Dev?” I was becoming more and more suspicious of this seemingly charismatic character.
Catching the drift of my concern, Midnight shook her head. “He’s just a friend. All the girls are after him, but he said we’re too young and that he’s into older women. We all hit on him but he never goes out with any of us. He’s in charge—the boss, I guess.”
The vampire Bruce Springsteen? “The boss of what?”
“The vampires. And the apprentices.”
“The apprentices?” I had a sudden vision of several vampire wannabes sitting around a conference table in New York with Donald Trump. A vampire Donald Trump. I fought to keep the amusement from creeping onto my face. My sense of humor is such a challenge.
“That’s what we call ourselves.”
“Let’s go back to the drinking blood part. You seemed to have a strong reaction when I asked you about that. Why?”
She lowered her eyes and started chewing her bottom lip again. “Dev lets us hang around with him and the other vampires, but he won’t let anyone take blood from us and he won’t let us drink blood, either. He said that only real vampires can use blood the way it was
meant to be used. Since we’re officially still human, we could get diseases that vampires can’t get. He has lots of rules about what we can and can’t do if we want to be with them.”
Okay, so maybe the guy isn’t totally whacked if he keeps them from the blood thing.
“So, what is it you don’t want him to know?”
Long pause.
I waited silently and watched waves of conflicting emotions flow across her face as she decided what, if anything, she was going to tell me.
“There’s this one guy, Eric, who wants to be a vampire real bad. Dev told him that he wasn’t ready, that he needed to go out and learn about life before becoming the undead, but Eric doesn’t listen. He set up all these rituals at his apartment, where the apprentices drink each other’s blood. He gave us all these neat little necklaces with tiny knives on them, so we can make little cuts in each other’s necks and drink,” she said, her voice breathy. “It would be really bad if Dev found out because he’d be totally angry, and I don’t want to do anything to make Dev mad at me.”
My eyebrows crawled up toward my hairline.
The apprentices drink each other’s blood?
Holy shit.
I hoped she was simply acting out and all this blood stuff was imaginary. I needed to find a non-threatening way to convince her the entire vampire thing was a fantasy.
“Are you afraid of Dev?”
“No. Not the way you mean.”
“But, despite Dev’s disapproval you go to the rituals at Eric’s apartment?”
She scooted forward excitedly in her chair. “Well, yeah. It’s so much fun. I never would have thought that drinking blood could be so sexual—so romantic,” she gushed.
I tried very hard to keep the neutral expression on my face.
“Sexual? Romantic? What happens at these rituals?”
AIDS! Not to mention viruses, bacteria, and things I can’t even comprehend. What about infections from the cuts? Red alert, Kismet.
“Well, first we order a pizza or something and drink some wine—maybe get high—just the same as any other night. Then we pick a partner, and after we take turns drinking a little blood—not much, just a couple of teaspoons—we have sex. It’s the most amazing feeling. I let Eric cut my boob last week and suck on it. It was so hot.”
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