Intermission: A Taste Of Things To Come

There we have it.  Volume 1 of Vampire Love Songs, "Name Your Poison", is complete: click here to read it in full.  I will be taking a break from Seth and Mallory for the next few weeks to work on other projects, before coming back with more confessions and misadventures.  In the meantime, here are a few teasers for Volume 2, which has the working title "Beautiful Creatures".  (Spoilers for all chapters so far after the jump)

10. Bad Kids

It is the best kind of winter's morning: bright, crisp, and so cold that even a vampire's breath can be seen in the air.  A tall, rakish gentleman with shaggy dark hair sits outside a fast food restaurant on Wenceslas Square, flicking cigarette ash into a cup of cheap, undrinkable coffee.  His companion, a pretty young blonde, finishes the last of her hot chocolate.  It is their final day in Prague; at the train station a few streets away they will choose a new destination.  A new adventure.

9. Mother's Ruin

St. Helier, 1920

It is a Friday, and Mallory wishes to die.  It dawns on her rather suddenly, as if she has just remembered how to spell a word that has been bothering her all day.  She wonders if the enormity of such a wish should shock her, but then she realises that this desire for her life to be over has slowly and irrevocably seeped into every corner of her being over the last several weeks.  It is not so much an impulse as it is mere inevitability.

Interlude: Seth and Mallory's Playlist

These tracks more or less sum up how both Seth and Mallory feel in the aftermath of the events of the Vampire Love Songs instalments "Euphoria" and "Holy Wine".

8. Holy Wine

Seth agrees with his wife; the blond boy is beautiful.  They’ve watched him for the last five minutes, since he strode into the bar with the purposeful rhythm of a man trying not to appear quite as drunk as he is.

7. Euphoria

Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children; often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.

            - Herman Hesse

“Good morning, sweetie,” Mallory breathes in his ear as he wakes.  “Ready to be reborn?” 

“No,” Billy says casually, sitting up in bed.  “I’ve changed my mind.  Would you mind terribly?” 

Mallory tuts and pretends to think about it.  Before she can come up with an appropriately sarcastic answer, Billy has dived on top of her.

“Happy birthday,” Seth says from the doorway.  He shrugs off his robe and joins them.  It occurs to Billy, as he finds himself fellated, bitten and sodomised all at once, that this might not exactly be how everybody imagines turning twenty-one.

***

Interlude: Billy's Playlist

Billy is something of a mystery to Seth and Mallory.  While they are usually able to work out a person's story fairly easily, Billy has remained a closed book.  "Billy" isn't even his real name.  He's running from something, that's for sure, diving headfirst into sensory overload to avoid his ghosts.  Below are a few songs you might find in his battered, liquor-stained iPod.  In contrast to the more retro, melancholy tastes of his vampire bedfellows, these are the choices of a wild young thing who is very much of the modern age.