Current mood:

My strange and strangely written vampire tale, Thirsty, is in the current issue of Night to Dawn.

I barely remember writing this story. I remember when I sat down to read and edit it, and then re-edit it. But a huge chunk of the story came out while MariDarling and I were chatting vampires on MSN one night. Or maybe it was yahoo. Whatever – it was there, in all of it’s rather nasty glory. I love it!

A little excerpt:

He didn’t waste any time, I’ll give him that. He leaned over and kissed me. I pushed him away that night, but every night for weeks afterwards, he pushed himself on me. Eventually I gave in.

Too many years have passed now, for me to say whether or not I loved him. Too many years filled with death and pain and fear. The experiment backfired you see. The child I gave birth to was the real anomaly. He didn’t wait to be born as any normal child, vampire or human, would have done. He tore himself from my womb, ripping and shredding as he came. Michael barely had time to call the council to save my life before my child, our child, began to grow. Immediately after he was freed from my body, he began to feed.

On me.

When Michael and the council arrived, he tried to run, that tiny combination of Michael’s humanity and my vampiric soul. No feeble, weak human child this. Even vampiric babies are weak to begin with. Ankhil was not. He stood on those tiny legs almost immediately, and used his little arms to hold my leg still as he bit into it. I tried to fight him off; I did. Somewhere deep in that part of me that was human, a maternal instinct rose that I could not shake. I could not kill my own child.

After he’d fed for only moments, I wouldn’t have been strong enough to hurt him anyway. As he released me and turned to flee, I saw he’d grown to more than double his birth size already. He was the size of a toddler.

I was beginning to fade when the council chased after him, and Michael began to feed me. I was so thirsty…at that point I’d have drunk water, if it’d help me survive, but I was too weak to suck. Michael knew without blood I’d be dead within moments, and while he injected me with his blood, the council member left behind patched my body back together. The gaping wound in my abdomen hurt like hell. The screams from outside the house were the last things I heard before I slipped into unconsciousness.