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    Vamp
    Vamp
    Vamp
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Vamp

    By Terry Hayman

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Follow Terry Hayman’s keenly-felt takes on the bloodsuckers we all know and love. Meet a dangerous seductress who’s surprisingly smitten by her prey, a heartless predator hiding from an even more heartless adversary, a vampire born blind, one slipping in from an alternate universe, or one just trying to raise a son who’s able to protect himself from creatures his peers know nothing about.
    There’s always a new way to be undead.

    (Includes the short novel Raised by a Vampire.)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFiero Publishing
    Release dateFeb 11, 2013
    ISBN9781301730056
    Vamp
    Author

    Terry Hayman

    Raised in five different countries and currently living with his family in one of the most beautiful places on earth, Terry is a full-time writer and actor who accepts struggle, believes in goodness, and seeks truth always.

    Read more from Terry Hayman

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      Book preview

      Vamp - Terry Hayman

      ALSO BY TERRY HAYMAN

      Chasing the Minotaur

      Jessica Falls

      Raised by a Vampire

      Being Human (collection)

      Off World (collection)

      Dark Paths (collection)

      Life Knots (collection)

      Messed Up (collection)

      Used by Magic (collection)

      VAMP

      Terry Hayman

      Copyright © 2013 Terry Hayman

      Published by Fiero Publishing

      Smashwords Edition

      This book is also available in a print edition from your favorite bookstore or online retailer.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Published 2013 by Fiero Publishing

      www.fieropublishing.com

      Cover art copyright © vizarch / 123RF Stock Photo

      Book and cover design copyright © 2013 by Fiero Publishing

      This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

      Table of Contents

      Author foreword

      A Different Hunger

      Peter and the Vampires

      Toxic Love

      Raised by a Vampire

      Enter Freely

      Afterword

      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

      Author Foreword

      Ah, vampires.

      Seemingly ever present, they were given their first recognizable form in 1819 in the novella Vampyre, by John Polidori and, possibly, Lord Bryon. But their best known (and many would argue simply the best ever) portrayal was in the seminal 1907 novel by Bram Stoker, Dracula.

      Since then we’ve had vampire nobles and vampire tramps, vampire demons and vampire good guys, vampire lovers and vampires who sparkle in the sunlight, vampire mutants and vampire crossbreeds.

      "Some blood! Some blood! My kingdom [or love or DNA sequence] for some blood!"

      Indeed, when I began writing seriously back in 1998, the horrific vampires I’d grown up reading about had morphed first into Anne Rice’s romantic, anguished souls, then into the dark, brooding bad boys of paranormal romance fiction (forever in competition, it seems, with their less suave but more manly literary cousins, the werewolves), and on into the young adult market with Twilight and its numerous offspring—Hello, Fifty Shades of Grey.

      All of which should have been enough to make me stay away, one would think. Except…well, damn. Vampires are fun. Just look at how they’ve been used. They can be horrific, they can be agents of justice, they can be sexy or romantic, they can be tortured, self-loathing, creatures from Hell. And they’ve haunted too many of my nightmares to just ignore.

      So the stories come spilling out. Just a few, here and there, over the years. But finally I’ve begun a YA series about a kid who’s been raised by a vampire. It feels like it’s got possibilities, you know? Just how does one break away from the parental grip of a creature who’s older, swifter, stronger, and creepier than death itself? Particularly when you love the guy.

      You can read the first story in that developing series in this volume.

      And the other stories? What is the specific genesis for each of them?

      A Different Hunger – This is one of those stories where I wanted to sell to Dreams of Decadence, which at the time was strictly vampire fiction, and needed an original take on things. Couldn’t remember having read a story with a blind vampire before, so…

      Peter and the Vampires – Okay, I really don’t remember what was out in the popular zeitgeist at the time I came up with this one back in 1998, but I do remember Gordon Van Gelder writing back to me that he was relieved it wasn’t really about Peter Pan (um…copyright issues much?) because for some reason F&SF had recently been flooded with Peter Pan stories. Maybe Disney had just re-released… Whoah. Stop. Google check. My goodness, that’s what happened. Disney had indeed just released its Peter Pan to VHS in a 45th anniversary edition. Well hit my story-generator on the side of the head with what was no-doubt a blizzard of television ads. And vampires? Well Blade had just come out. So had John Carpenter’s Vampires, From Dusk til Dawn a couple of years before, and Interview with a Vampire a few years before that. Hard not to have vampires kicking around somewhere in the subconscious.

      Toxic Love – The oldest story of the group. A bit simple, but I’m a pretty simple guy at times. Probably came out of one of my nightmares where I was running around in my dream trying to figure out how to kill one of these things.

      Raised by a Vampire – I’m a dad, not a vampire. But I am sometimes too controlling, sometimes overly protective, always wanting the best and filled with both love and worry. And I’ve been a son on the other end of that stuff too. Funny how it all runs together in your head and heart. Oh, and my son did, actually go on a trip to the Baltics with his choir. It wasn’t quite as exciting as the trip in this story, but still…

      Enter Freely – I couldn’t not include at least one tribute to the novel about vampires that really brought together most of the vampire lore that’s accepted and used, or consciously ignored, in just about every vampire story since. I’m talking about Bram Stoker’s Dracula, of course. And if you haven’t ever read it, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy somewhere. As long as you’re not looking for a paranormal hero-lover, you’ll find it holds up extremely well.

      Which brings us to the end of the beginning. So snuggle down into your chair or bed, since such stories should be read at night, and enter a world where for some the dead don’t shamble; they walk, they fly, they love, they feed…

      —Terry Hayman

      North Vancouver, BC

      February 10, 2013

      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

      It's a part of town most vampires avoid because the food is tainted. Drugs. Alcohol. Despair. But it's here that the blind, undead artist, born with no optic nerves, comes to fill a hunger that has nothing to do with blood, though blood will be spilled...

      A Different Hunger

      Terry Hayman

      Copyright © Terry Hayman 2010

      I touch the taxi driver beside me and tell him to pull over. He does and I roll down my window.

      Will I get out here again?

      The rain has become a fine mist against my face. I stretch my nose out into it.

      On such nights as these, they say, the streets here shine like floating ghosts in the street lamps. The boarded-up buildings groan over them as if about to collapse into soggy cardboard, mix with the slush of wrappers and needles and forgotten foods and used condoms that wash along the gutters.

      It is a graveyard of concrete and glass, they say. Except those who live here are worse than undead; they are unclean. They shamble in and out of alleyways, collapse down against the bricks to spike needles into their veins or gulp the last of their bottles, scream at the cars, stagger against the weight of the rain, and look around too lost to move.

      They say.

      But I, born with no optic nerves, cannot see these things. Instead I reach my dampened face and nose out the window and smell the blood of the unclean, the pathos, the painful, feeble beating. And because I have already fed until my face is flush and warm, I know it is not the lure of easy kill which calls me. It is a different hunger.

      I open my door and step out.

      Hey! $18.50, bud! says the driver.

      I turn to him as a rush of darkness. He has leaned out after me and my hands snap around his head. I begin to tilt it back, exposing a neck I’m sure is pocked with shaving nicks and hair. It smells unwashed but the vein of this man’s life beats strong in my ears. Clean blood.

      I have no money, I lie. Clearly a lie, for the sports jacket I wear easily costs double this man’s monthly rent.

      O-gh...ay.

      The second I withdraw my hands, he jams foot to gas and his vehicle leaps away. From me. From this unclean place.

      I turn and glide into the shadows of the buildings then, feeling the drip of the rain on the brick, the way it weighs down even the people inside the walls. I pass by open windows and windows that open for me as I pass. You? says a yearning voice inside one, perhaps one who has seen me here before, or knows what I am.

      But I come not for him this night.

      I glide onwards.

      I find what I’m looking for not in a window, nor in an alley, but on the sidewalk of the main avenue, sitting on a mailboxs. Drawn to her defiant heat in the drizzle, I hear her rubber-soled heel creaking the mail slot open and closed, again and again, as if she wishes she could slip into it and be mailed elsewhere. Home perhaps.

      Her motion, the weight of her foot, tells me twenty, at most twenty-two years old. But as I slow to the speed and form of the living, her smell reveals the rot.

      Heyuh?

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