A dark silhouette blotted the autumn moon. She stood as still as a gargoyle on the roof of a house on a hill, the one that loomed over Bloodless, Arizona like a slumbering god, ancient and beautiful, a woman in long black robes.
Mina's eyes scanned the grainy black landscape of the night, but she saw neither the fingernail sliver of new moon nor the twinkling multitude of stars nor the drifting shadows flittering and twittering through the sky like leathery birds. She peered deep into a vision of memory and was chilled by what she saw.
Bodies.
Blood-drained and lifeless, their faces drawn up in silent screams, their dead hands claws that scraped the air. They littered every memory like land mines. Mina remembered why she came out into the desert: to escape the bodies, to escape the curse, to escape HIS legacy. To starve herself.
Mina sighed. It had not worked out that way. Mina was known as Master to some, the Bride to others, and to all she was a manifestation of the purest evil on Earth, a curse that was a thirst that knew nothing but to drink and drink and drink, doomed to never be satiated, doomed to turn Mina into a raving lunatic mass murderer.
Her tongue slipped over her lips, licked the tip of one sharpened fang.
She had come to this place to die. She had found a cave and chained herself to a wall. She knew that eventually, without the nourishment from feeding, her body would decay and the curse would be lifted. Death was the only way. Death was her penance.
Then someone found gold. People came and built this town, this town that now lay dead around her, and they had found Mina in the mine, the same mine where she now kept the unwanted ones, the lost.
They had found her, and Mina had fed. At the point when children disappeared nightly, and blood stained the streets, the people fled from her and her curse. But having stuffed herself, Mina lived a long time after that, a long time to forget who she was and what she had done. Time erased her pain. Time turned her again into a monster.
She remembered the night he came for her: dark flowing cowl and glowing red eyes, the Prince of Darkness. They had thought him dead, killed during a daring rescue by a band of brave men including her husband. They had been wrong. Mina remembered her husband's surprise and his bloodcurdling scream upon seeing the Dark Prince, undead and well, and the sound of Jonathan's blood spraying against the wall.
And Mina remembered how her sweet Prince had taken her over her husband's dead body.
Hot tepid breath on her neck, his cold groping hands, his penetrating freezing member, his teeth sinking into the soft flesh of her neck, puncturing her jugular and stealing the life that pulsed within, but what Mina remembered most was the shuddering, mind-numbing orgasms that left her helpless in his corpse-like arms.
A chill shivered up her spine, a mix of repulsion and lust.
Mina felt her stomach rumble. The thirst tickled her throat. Why had she hoped to die? She had been weak then. How did she not realize that blood was power? Death could not be her penance for she WAS death. She must not only accept her fate but relish it, welcome it with open arms and receive the gift the Prince of Darkness had seen fit to bestow upon her.
A coyote brayed in the night, and Mina smiled.
***
"So what the fuck just happened?" Bridget Briswell said, her hands clutching her shoulder length, straw colored hair.
They gathered around the smoking remnants of the vampire, now only a flickering pile of ash as if it was a waning campfire, and Bridget waited for someone to break out in "Kumbayah." Instead, Doctor Malcolm St. Graves, vampire hunter, dusted off his tweed jacket and flashed a small smile, his face unnaturally calm after the near disaster. Bridget thought about how the old man had dangled like a worm on a hook from the creature's hands, and she shivered.
"I daresay they knew we were coming, ladies," he said. The old man walked over to the archive's single reading table where his briefcase had been placed before hell opened its doors and unleashed the creature that had attacked them. St. Graves flipped the case open and pulled out a couple of small metal flashlights.
"No shit, Sherlock. We're lucky to be alive. Did you see the size of that thing? It could have killed us all!" Bridget replied in spastic breathless gasps. Her heart still pounded in her chest, and she felt the world sway under her feet.
St. Graves shook his head and said, "It would not have killed us, my dear. It would have turned us."
"Turned us?"
"You know bite us, make us one of them?" Alexandria Knight said, her dark face stoic and hard. "A common strategy to keep outside forces from being suspicious while increasing their own numbers."
Knight took an offered flashlight from St. Graves and said, "What do you make of what it said about this Bride?"
She flicked on the flashlight, stabbing St. Graves chest with a circle of light. A silver crucifix gleamed around his neck. The white-haired vampire hunter frowned at the question and stroked his goatee.
"I'd rather not make any hasty assumptions. Instead, let us quickly dig up any useful information we can on Bloodless and take our leave of this place," St. Graves said and shot them a solemn expression.
"The fiend may have had reinforcements coming."
***
Ol' Karl looked crusty and sun-baked across the table from Morgan and Melvin, Karl's eyes squinty with wrinkles, his skin blotched with sun spots. Threads of beer leaked from the corners of his mouth as he chugged, the mug pressed hard against his thin, cracked lips. He finished it off and thumped the empty mug onto the table. A few drops of foam specked Melvin's shirt.
"Whadda ya wanta know? Karl said, wiping a dirty sleeve across his mouth. His grating voice crackled and slurred. His yellowy weasel eyes narrowed.
"Joseph Gray," Morgan answered, and she leaned over the table. Her own eyes turned a steely blue. "You talked to him about a town not far from here. Bloodless."
"I 'member that fella, I do. Talked him up 'bout some gold. Ya interested in gold, yerself?" Karl's eyes twinkled. He was a man who liked to tell tales. He wore a dusty flannel shirt, jeans, and a faded blue baseball cap on his tiny head. Melvin had seen plenty of his type in the city where they were better known as con men.
"What did you tell him?" Morgan said. Her voice implied that she did not want any bullshit.
