Bloody Kisses

C
opyright
© 2016 by Virginia Nelson, Saranna DeWylde, Alyssa Breck, Ripley Proserpina, Rebecca Royce

All authors retain rights to their works. The stories are collected here with permission.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. In short, don’t be a dick.

D
earest Reader
,

C
lassic monsters have been
a staple of my dreams and nightmares for as long as I can remember. From the first viewing of The Exorcist at my 8th birthday party where I thought about everything it made me feel, and I thought: “I want to do that” to even now watching movies and reading about every incarnation of the monsters that we love to scare us.

I remember the first time I thought that horror and love were a good mix. I was in middle school and it was Howling VI: The Freaks. If you haven’t seen it, an evil vampire captures a tortured werewolf for his carnival side show. But the werewolf resists his beastly nature for the local girl he’s fallen in love with—and for her part, she sees past the monster. The ugliest side of him. What a powerful story, right?

I’ve always wanted to write my own versions of these classic monsters and I wanted someone to tell me the story of how they fall in love. So within these pages you’ll find a lake monster, a demon, a mummy, a vampire and even a modern Prometheus.

I hope they bring you as much joy as they brought me.

L
ove and Spooks
,

Saranna

T
he rumors said
the walls bled, which was enough to intrigue Madeline. She’d never seen anything like that, and if there was even a slight chance to see something like that, she was in. Most of the time, their little band of paranormal researchers spent their time stumbling around in the dark.

Nothing popped out of the inky blackness when they searched, unless she counted the occasional startled and unhappy raccoon. On really unlucky days, they might scare a skunk… not an experience she wanted to repeat.

No noises she couldn’t explain, even if Drew—her recent ex, and the leader of their misfit bunch—liked to romanticize everything. Every creak of old wood, every moan of wind through cracked windows, every inexplicable orb of light in their pictures were proof to him of life beyond the grave.

Madeline took a bit more convincing.

Her best friend, Layla, insisted that her disbelief was reason enough to leave the society and stop wandering around in the middle of the night seeking proof of the unknown, but Madeline didn’t see it that way. She went ghost hunting with the society because she
wanted
there to be something more. There had to be. Something other than waking up to go to work and paying bills. Something more than growing old and facing death. Something special. Something magical.

Besides, Madeline suffered from insomnia since she was a kid, so it wasn’t like she had something better to do at two o’clock in the morning. It was after her shift at the gas station—
cashier, super fancy gig, right?—
ended, so it wasn’t like she could work or do something else with the hours she spent wandering around abandoned buildings and anywhere else that might be haunted.

The road to the old mansion was overgrown and pitted, so they’d only made it partway down it in the car before they had to strike out on foot. A little walking never bothered Madeline, but Drew bothered her. When she’d first broken up with him—because lackluster sex wasn’t enough to make her keep dealing with his bullshit and drama—he’d tried to hook up with Cammie, another of their little society. Cammie wasn’t into him so much, but she wasn’t a great friend to Madeline, so for a bit…they’d had a thing. Madeline thought they still were together, at least as far as she knew. That led Carter, the last of their group, to think he should hit on her.

Nope. No way, no how. Been there, didn’t get a tee shirt. There is no way I am hooking up with anyone else in the society. This is my recreation and curiosity time. I’m not wasting it pretending to feel something for someone.

Because that was what relationships had become to her. Pretend. It didn’t seem anything enough anymore. Like she’d built up a tolerance to relationships and couldn’t get that emotional payoff others enjoyed.

Whatever. Enough introspection. Back to bloody walls.

Supposedly the old mansion had so many ghosts, people had actually died of fear when they tried to stay one night there. One person claimed they knew someone scared so badly, they never spoke again. All in all, it really was sort of the typical urban myth laden kind of thing the group chased down. But this one felt different, somehow. Like her skin was awake, each tiny hair on her arms feeling the breeze in a way they hadn’t before. Distant lightning illuminated the beast of a structure as they approached, making it look like black teeth gnawing at a storm tossed sky.

“Could you keep up? It is going to start raining on us if we don’t get a move on,” Drew complained. Since Madeline was about two feet behind him, his whining tone and stupid words were even more grating than normal.

“You don’t even know if this place has a roof, or if whatever roof it has is even waterproof. Rushing in isn’t a guarantee we’ll stay dry. Not to mention, aren’t we supposed to take in the ambiance around the building as well as within?” she asked.

“Whatever,” he said, shaking his head. His flashlight beam shifted swiftly, blinding her as he shined it right in her eyes.

Dick. Bag of dicks. Limp bag of dicks,
Madeline thought spitefully.

“We do need to hurry,” Cammie agreed. “Even if the ceiling isn’t great, it still will provide some protection for the equipment.”

Madeline snorted.
If the haunting was real, we shouldn’t need equipment.
That was her big beef with their group and other paranormal research teams she’d seen on television. If the ghosts were real, and they were interacting with their plane, why would they need temperature gauges and other stuff to recognize they were here? A good ghost should be like the old horror movies—in your face, pea-spitting, and obviously nasty.

But then again, they did say she was a perverse little beastie.

Even with them rushing her, though, she paused at the grand staircase leading up to the doors to enter the mansion. She couldn’t help it, something drove her to look up at the windows. Well, what was left of the windows. It looked like someone had busted out most of them and some were replaced with bits of plywood, but on the upper floors…some glass remained, reflecting the latest flash of lightning.

A second after the flash, for a brief second, she saw red eyes. Glowing red orbs, set in what looked like the oval of a face, looking right back at her.

Madeline blinked fast as rain began to pelt her. The face was gone, so it could’ve been her imagination. It could’ve been just the lightning messing with her eyes, like the after effect of a camera flash or something entirely natural. But her excitement ramped. Maybe tonight they really would find proof of something Other.

Is it ridiculous to say that the possibility turns me on?

Because it did.

* * *

T
amerlane

The four humans—kids, really—stumbling in the dark toward the mansion weren’t particularly interesting. Less common, in recent memory, but not novel in any way.

Back when The Big Bad invented this in-between place, a few had tried to make it a home.
Fools
. Humans tended to have that in common, though, in his experience. If you put enough windows on a place and threw in a few grand staircases, people thought it was must have property. But the ones who would buy and move into the mansion to try to revitalize it had long since gone, leaving it to the young and the adventure seekers.

They came in droves for a while. They’d bust the windows, blast their music, and otherwise come for a good time. Armed with spray cans for their graffiti, enough drugs to kill an elephant and the beer to wash them down—no condoms…because apparently pregnancy and STDs were less scary than unprotected sex in a supposedly haunted house.

Humans bored him.

Everything bored him.

But that was the idea of the punishment, wasn’t it? Not that it was a particularly fair punishment, not in Tamerlane’s eyes. His brother had tweaked the Big Bad—trolling, that’s what the kids called it in this age. The Big Bad had been out for blood. To protect his sibling, Tamerlane took the heat for the actions.

That’s what brothers did, even demonic ones. He’d make the little bastard pay in his own way when his punishment was over.

The punishment was particularly cruel, at least in his opinion. Banished to the human dimension, stuck with their smelly and brief lives. At least the house afforded him some distance from the bulk of humanity. Isolated as the formerly palatial estate was, not too many came to invade his silent hell.

But when they did… well, that was what it was all about, wasn’t it?

Some souls were particularly evil and had a taste—nay, a penchant—for violence. Both in their behavior since their inevitable demise and in their time on earth, which afforded them certain perks from the Big Bad. One of those dubious perks? The ability to cross the veil at some points and toy with the humans. Basically, it was the equivalent of a resort experience for the baddest of the bad spirits. They got to mess with humans, the humans got a little peek at what hell was like, and everyone went home happy.

Except for Tamerlane, trapped as the babysitter to evil souls and their human victims.

Fun, fun.

The latest band of humans didn’t look like partiers, which was a bummer. He did like the partiers because their glassy eyed shock at seeing a ‘ghost’ cracked him up. But these humans had heavy packs and a determined step which meant one thing and one thing only.

They were ghost hunters.

Tamerlane snorted. If only they knew the reality of the afterlife, maybe they’d spend their short lives enjoying being alive rather than toying with the dead. But it wasn’t for him to judge. Nothing was.

It was only his to
babysit
.

But one of the humans paused at the foot of the stairs and peered upward. Her face, even at this distance, looked somehow familiar. When lightning flashed, it illuminated her. For a brief second, it seemed like she actually saw him. The sense of recognition flared brighter and, for the first time in perhaps an age, his heart beat in his chest.

Magdala?

But it couldn’t be her. Could it? He stepped back from the window quickly, not wanting her to get a better look at him, but he couldn’t back away from the shock of knowledge, the thrill of pleasure, the scent of the hunt.

The lost souls could play with her friends, but she was
his
.