An ill wind blew through the streets of Fort Collins, the streetlights flickering in the cool Halloween night as the power grid stumbled momentarily. Parents teased their children that it was an omen that it was time everyone should be wrapping up their trick or treating. Most of the kids had pillowcases stuffed full with chocolate delights and the hour was growing late.
Autumn in Colorado was a fickle season -- some years the snows had already begun by now, but this particular year the leaves were dropping from the trees at that perfect shade of golden brown, littering in yards in just the right way for children to make giant piles to fling themselves into. It wasn't quite so cold that the kids could see their breath fogging the air, but winter would be upon the city soon, and autumn's final moments were nearly upon it.
Just off the campus of Colorado State University lay a neighborhood called Professor's Row, a tiny subdivision where it seemed like many of the faculty from the college had bought homes. As such, it was prime trick or treating territory. The professors usually gave out the best kinds of candies. Some of them were even known to give away entire full sized candy bars or comic books, and those houses tended to get children coming longer distances with parents who didn't mind giving their kids longer walks for better payout. Being the cool parent was always a good chip to have.
The houses over at Professor's Row were certainly a bit more widely spaced from each other than most of the neighborhoods in Fort Collins, with giant yards, most of which were fenced off, but in polite ways, mostly to keep dogs from wandering out into the neighborhood and to firmly establish where one property ended and another began.
Professor Tom Osman figured the last of the children had come and gone, and was considering digging into a Whatchamacallit for himself as he moved over to the stereo, ejected the cassette he'd made a mixtape on, flipped it over, slotted it back in, closed the stereo and started the music back up once more. Last year, he'd made a mixtape of Halloween themed songs, and he'd simply broken it out for this year's Halloween instead of making a new one. It was time consuming, recording one track after another, getting the flow and balance just right.
Mixtapes had many rules.
While much of the tape was Halloween themed jazz, the first track was Screamin' Jay Hawkins doing "I Put A Spell On You," which cut through the cold air like a knife. He moved his way over to his liquor cabinet and took down a crystal snifter, filling it with three fingers of brandy, a generous pour to be certain, but nothing that he couldn't handle given a few hours.
Suddenly, he heard a tapping, as if someone gently rapping, rapping upon his front door. He set the snifter down next to his armchair and headed over to the door, stopping only to pick up his bowl of candy for the children.
He expected to hear "Trick or treat!" as soon as he opened the door, but no such salutation greeted him. Instead a singular voice said, "Hey there professor. Great costume!" Professor Osman was dressed as Sallah from the final Indiana Jones movies, The Last Crusade, that had come out a few years ago. He was certainly more Egyptian than the actor who played him was, even if it was only partly. Tom had been trying to lose weight for the last year or so, but at the end of the day, he was at least a little addicted to the slow death of fast food. The white shirt covered his pot belly, but couldn't conceal it entirely. The red and white tie helped sell the look, but mostly his tan complexion, dark beard and the red fez were all he needed. Unfortunately, he didn't teach archaeology, but a variety of history of music classes. He looked so much like John Rhys-Davies' character, though, that the outfit was his usual go to and had been since Raiders had come out. Since it was his first year at Colorado State, nobody here had seen him do it before. Next year, he would need to do something different.
Standing on his front porch was one of his students, Carla Bianchi, dressed in a Catwoman outfit. Michelle Pfeiffer's turn as Selina Kyle a few months earlier had gotten mixed reviews, but there had been Catwomen aplenty across the campus today, and Carla was no different. Most of the girls had enjoyed wearing the black latex catsuit, showing off their curves and figures. Normally Carla was a big lover of flannel and jeans, big and baggy attire, so he'd never seen her hourglass shape quite so explicitly before. She was slender with large, firm breasts, the power of youth coming through in how easily they defied gravity. Hell, Tom thought to himself, those tits could cause windshear. How had she hidden them so well before now? It almost seemed impossible. She certainly was a treat on the eyes and he found himself having to consciously make the decision to avert his gaze upwards to her face.
Unlike most of the Catwomen that had been wandering around campus earlier in the day, Carla had actually gone the extra step and done the mask and headpiece, her dark hair pinned up and tucked away underneath it, but that was Carla to a tee -- always going the extra mile to make sure she was giving it maximum effort. She was a sophomore from his history of rock'n'roll class who had been engaged with the syllabus from day one, eager to learn all that she didn't know. Many of his students had admitted to taking the class because they'd expected it to be easy, only to find they actually didn't know shit about how much rock'n'roll had evolved over the years.
"Can I come in for a few minutes, or are you going to leave me standing on your porch like a stray?" she teased, folding her hands behind her back, swaying her chest in his direction. "Give a kitten a bit of time, will you?"
Tom felt strange. There were loads of fit professors, and he'd heard from them how the temptations were real, but Tom wasn't fit, wasn't carved like they were. He wasn't muscular, he wasn't immediately handsome, he was hairy and he didn't try and be flirty with the students, not that he expected any of them to be flirty with him. They were all less than half his age, to start with. Also, Middle Eastern looking men weren't in vogue since the Gulf War last year, and while Tom wasn't from Iraq or Kuwait, most Americans couldn't tell the damn difference. He was a quarter Egyptian, a quarter Greek, a quarter British and a quarter Sudanese, but all Americans ever seemed to see was the tan skin and assumed he was a "them."
All of that meant he'd never had a student turn the spotlight of her sexuality on him, and. It. Felt.
Awkward.
"Yes, I suppose you can come in for a bit," he said, stepping back to allow her into his house.
"I do have office hours if you need to discuss your coursework, although you've been doing quite well in the class."
There was no good reason a student should be coming and visiting him at home, he told himself in his head, but for some reason, he couldn't seem to deny her entrance into his abode. His house was an utter mess, with stacks of books littering the floors like some forgotten city of paper, forming skyscrapers that seemed like they would collapse at the first stiff wind. His IBM 386 rested on a desk in the corner, mostly used for writing lectures and keeping track of grades, the 9600 baud modem hooked up to the phone line for those rare occasions he needed to access the school's Telnet system.
His couch was mostly clear, its space in front of his massive 24" television seeing regular use, with a large Lay-Z Boy armchair off to the side. Carla made her way to the couch and sat down in the dead center of it, so Tom moved to sit in the armchair, doing everything he could to keep things professional, even while this 19 year old girl was continuing to size him up.
"You don't need to sit so far away, Professor," Carla said to him. "I'm not going to bite you."
"I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong impression, Miss Bianchi, so I think I'm fine over here. Now what was it you needed to talk to me about?"
"No, professor, I insist," she said, her eyes flashing red for the briefest of moment. "Come here and sit with me."
Against his very will, he felt his body move back to its feet and start to move over to the couch, each step a jerky motion, as if the movements were being forced upon him. "Carla, what's happening? I can't... I don't... you don't want to do this..."
When he looked at her now, her eyes, which had once been a delicious shade of sky blue, burned with a deep red glow and her innocent smile had been replaced with a wolfish grin, a predator and not the prey she had been playing at, the treat having turned into a vicious trick.
"Oh, but I do, Professor," she purred. "I'm not Carla, by the way, but I'm sure you've figured that out by now. I simply assumed her form to get in the door. You men are always so trusting of nubile young women. It's such an easy trait to exploit. A pretty girl bats her eyelashes your way, and you are so foolish as to invite her into your home."
Her right hand passed in front of her face and Carla's Italian features faded, along with the Catwoman mask, and were replaced by paler skin and finer features, no longer wearing Carla's face. With the headpiece gone, Tom should've seen Carla's long lustrous black curly hair, but instead saw a bob cut the shade of burnished copper, and that hunter's smile now sported two visibly larger fanged teeth. Her eyes had shifted as well, from that faint blue to a deep and hypnotic green.
"Knew... something... wasn't... right..." he struggled to say to her, his arms limp and lifeless at his sides, unable to raise them even an inch off of his couch.
"It was the tits, wasn't it?" she said with a soft laugh. "I knew I made them too big, or maybe the waist was too narrow, but what man could resist a figure like this? They're real, you know. Firm and impossibly bouncy, the benefit of youth. Here, you really should get at least a little appreciation of all the work I did." She lifted one of his hands by the wrist and brought it up to slap against one of those mounds of flesh. He felt his fingers moving on their own to squeeze that pliant breast, and as much as he was lost in the throes of fear, he had to admit, it was glorious. "Marvelous, isn't it? Just the impossible mix of firm and soft. If you're a good boy and don't struggle too much, maybe I'll let you have the strength to play with them when I'm draining you. It would be a shame to put in all this work and it not to be appreciated. I plucked the face from your mind a few days ago and filled in the rest in what I thought might be the most alluring, but now that I'm inside, I can wear my own face."
"Why... are... you... doing..."
"I need to feed, child," she said, cutting him off with a soft laugh. "And it's always important to pick proper prey. You've only been here for a few months, so no one has had a chance to get attached to you." She moved to slide into his lap, straddling him, that toned ass resting on his thighs while one of her fingertips trailed down from his eye along her cheek. "No one's built any ties to you, and so when you're found dead in a few days, everyone will simply assume you had an accident, and no one will be any the wiser."
"Don't... vampires... leave... puncture marks?"
"Vampires?" she giggled, rolling her eyes dismissively. "I'm no vampyr, child, although I suppose I can understand the mistake. The fangs do a little like vampire teeth, don't they? I will have to remember that for next year, that maybe pretending to be a vampire would be an ideal way to hide in plain sight. Those Anne Rice novels certainly seem to have made vampires more palatable to the public at large. There are chapters from the next book in this month's
Playboy
so she shows no signs of stopping. But no, dear boy, I'm not a vampire and I'm not going to drink your blood."
