Blood Lite

"My blood?"

"Well, from your line."

"She's related to me?"

Doru, who had been listening silently as the others talked about her, suddenly rose to her feet. "I'm your cousin ten or twelve times removed. I lost count. Hi, cuz!" The girl waved at him, licking her lips.

Istvan put a hand to his head as if to hold his brain in. His eyes fell on the mirror and he saw an empty room. It was true. They had already turned her. Likely she belonged to all three of them, which meant she would obey them, not Istvan. Now there were four! Against him! How would he survive?

The four bitches Surrounded him. Sephora threw an arm around his shoulders, Morgana placed a palm on his thigh and Celine took his hands in hers. Doru knelt at his feet and looked up at him with dark flashing eyes, eyes that somehow resembled his own. "It won't be so bad," Doru said.

"Not at all," Morgana confirmed. "We can have parties—"

"And have fun and go to clubs—" Sephora added. "And buy chic dresses and makeup—" Celine contrib­uted.

"And go to fancy restaurants and shows—" Sephora said.

"And meet guys—" Morgana said. "And girls, too—" Celine added. "And—"

Istvan tuned them out. He thought for a moment of all the money it would take to add another horse to his stable, one whose mouth he should have looked into, despite Mama's warnings to not do that. If he had, he would have seen that Doru's fangs were not plastic implants but the real deal.

But his thoughts also flitted to cold winter nights when the winds blustered outside the house. When he would be home alone with the four of them, and what that would mean to his sanity. For fleeting moments, he imagined ru

As if reading his thoughts, the young Doru ran a hand up his chest and tilted his face until he was looking into those eyes, bottomless murky pools. She moved close and the others with her. He felt himself tense, as if caught in a huge spiderweb.

"No! Absolutely not!" But before he could do or say more, they each had their sharp incisors in a vein or an artery and Istvan was being drained dry. He was already weak from not feeding, and the little resistance he could muster proved futile. They drank every last drop, leav­ing a starving, needy shell. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open. But open they were, enough that he could see the sky lightening through a crack in the curtains. A crack that widened when Morgana threw open the drapes.

"Time for bed, my sisters," she, the eldest, said, and the other three giggled and followed her from the room like baby ducklings, leaving Istvan crumpled on the set­tee. As the brilliant sun scaled the horizon and its rays shot through the window like fiery arrows moving steadily toward him, he heard more laughter in the distance. And words like "boring" and "demanding" and "cramping our style" and when he heard "box of wafers," he knew that they were talking about him.

Oh, how could it have come to this! He had given them eternal life and they gave him nothing but vindictiveness! Some women would pay to have the blood drained out of them, but these bitches just wanted revenge!

And now death by sunlight and starvation. Oh, cruel fate! He deserved much better. But some part of his brain consoled him with the fact that soon it would all be over. His misery. The torment of those . . . those . . . creatures! The true death would free him at last!

Sounds dimmed. Light blazed through the window. His thoughts turned inward, remembering home and his mother and how at last he would be reunited with his family. Or burn eternally in hell. He wasn't sure which, and he wasn't sure which fate was worse because he had never gotten along with his domineering mother. Oh, he could see it now, how he had been set up from childhood so that he was drawn to controlling women. Well, the true death, regardless of where it led him, had to be better than what he'd been enduring. Good-bye, cruel world! Good riddance, evil brides!

But Fate, heartless as she can be, presented herself to him in the physical form of Doru, who appeared before his eyes as if materializing out of a mist. The lovely Doru at that moment seemed as pure and i

Now she wore a seductive, diaphanous gown the color of new vitae. She held out a wrist, which she or someone else had bitten into until blood—likely blood she'd taken from him—flowed along her arm. He stared, mesmerized, at the seeping liquid as it slowly wove its way along her skin, hating the waste of it.

"Here, Master. Drink," she said. "Make me your bride."

Suddenly, the arm moved closer until the blood nearly touched his lips. "No!" he cried weakly. "Let me die! I'm just about free! I want to be incinerated, to fade with hunger from this wretched world." But she did not listen. He tried to resist, but the smell of the red stuff drove his depleted, immobile body insane with blood lust.

Instantly, instinctively, thoroughly against his will, he gathered the last fragments of his energy and lunged. He slurped up the coppery elixir like a hungry baby sucking milk. Istvan had the wrist to his lips and the blood down his throat faster than a bat flying out of a dark cave at night. Energy flowed back into him with every gulp, fill­ing his cells as if they were expanding balloons. He knew he was cementing the relationship between them, but, like an addict, he could not kick this habit and only stopped when she yanked her arm away.

He had drunk enough to be somewhat mobile again and wanted nothing more than to throttle her. But Doru had more blood in her veins than he did, and moved faster than he could, and in truth his first movements were to get out of the path of the encroaching light.

"Now we are truly family," she said dramatically. "One big, happy family!" And then she made a theatrical exit.

The realization struck Istvan that this one, this Doru, was more diabolical than the other three combined. Now his existence would go on and on and the four of them would torture him into infinity, to the limits of his endur­ance, if not beyond!

Weighted down with that grim thought, Istvan stag­gered to his coffin and pulled the heavy lid closed, imme­diately soothed by the balm of total darkness. He tried to cheer himself. Tomorrow, he thought, is another night. He could always get up early, buy batteries and there was bound to be a rerun that he'd enjoy, maybe Six Feet Under.

If only he could get the four bitches out the door before midnight. . . . Maybe he could score another pint at the blood bank without it being missed. He'd need a new hid­ing place, of course, for the blood and, if not more wafers, perhaps a stash of garlic as a safeguard, squirreled away someplace they would never find it. It was doable. Noth­ing could defeat the all-powerful vampire Prince of Dark­ness. Well, almost nothing