Midnight Thirsts: Erotic Tales Of The Vampire. Michael Thomas Ford

fire in his blood seemed to die down.

      Is this, then, death?he wondered as he lay there, unable to move. Am I dying? Is that what this is? Death? What did he do to me?

      He smelled scorched skin, the nauseating smell of burnt hair.

      His canine teeth began to ache, his gums aflame with raw pain.

      He slid his tongue over his canines.

      They were longer, sharper.

      Pointed.

      Rachel crawled to the bedroom door.

      She smelled smoke.

      She looked inside.

      Nigel was standing, blocking the balcony doors.

      The blond man was engulfed in flame. He was screaming as he dashed about the room, trying to smother the flames by rubbing himself against the wall.

      Tuck and roll, she thought, how stupid are you?

      As though he’d heard her, he dropped to the floor and began rolling, and the flames went out as quickly as they’d begun.

      He stood up.

      “I will destroy you, old man!” he shrieked.

      Nigel just stood, staring at him, his hands in his pockets.

      With a cry, the blond man sprang at Nigel.

      Nigel ducked to one side. The blond man reached the balcony and turned back to look at Rachel. She covered her mouth with her hands. His face was blackened, his hair burned away. He looked like something out of her worst nightmares. “You will pay, young bitch.” One instant he was there; the next, he was gone.

      Nigel began to weep.

      “N-Nigel?” she whispered.

      “I couldn’t do it,” he said, wiping the tears from his cheek. “For decades, I have tried to kill him, and I can’t do it. I am a failure.”

      “Rachel?”

      She turned her head as Philip stood up—although he didn’t really seem like Philip anymore. She looked his nakedness up and down, her mind racing, trying to figure what was different, what was wrong with him.

      The wall behind him burst into flame.

      “We have to get out of here.” Nigel beckoned to them both. When they didn’t move, he said, “Hurry.”

      They followed him out onto the balcony. Black smoke followed them out. Nigel placed an arm around each of them. “Close your eyes,” he said softly, and they did. Rachel let out a gasp when her feet left the floor, and then she landed gently on the sidewalk across the street. She opened her eyes.

      The building was engulfed with flames. She heard sirens in the distance, the sounds of people shouting and running. “Let’s go back to the apartment,” she heard herself saying, her mind not really working out of anything other than instinct.

      The sun rose outside her window, dissipating the fog. On her bed, Philip slept.

      “He will sleep for several days while his body completes the change.” Nigel lit a cigar.

      “So, what now?” Rachel looked at his peaceful face. It seemed paler but somehow more solid to her than before.

      “I can’t leave him.” Nigel shook his head. “He’ll have to come with me.”

      Rachel looked at Nigel. “I’m coming with you.”

      “No, my dear, that I can’t permit.”

      “You don’t have a choice,” she said simply. “You heard Gunther. He threatened me. And do you really think he won’t come back for Philip?”

      “There is always a choice.”

      “No. Not anymore.” She gestured to Philip. “He wasn’t given a choice. Neither was I. When you came here looking for me, you took away my choices.” Her voice shook. “You have to make me one of you.”

      He shook his head. “No.”

      “You said yourself, you couldn’t kill Gunther.” She went over to the window and looked out. “He’s out there somewhere, and he wants Philip. You said it yourself: he’s a rogue, who kills. The three of us—together we can stop him.”

      “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

      “Yes, I do.” She remembered the visions, the music in her head. “How do we know Philip will be able to do what you couldn’t? Can you keep him safe?” She looked out the window at the gloomy sunshine. “And can you protect me?”

      Tears spilled down Nigel’s face as he bit into his own wrist.

      He offered it to her.

      And she drank.

      Outside, the rain began.

      CARNIVAL

      Michael Thomas Ford

      Chapter One

      The kid was doing it all wrong, but Joe didn’t stop him. He just looked on silently as the boy tried uselessly to force the big metal pin into the hole. Frustrated, he was hitting it with the rubber mallet again and again, attempting to beat it into submission. The muscles of his thick arms bulged and relaxed as he swung the hammer over his shoulder and brought it down repeatedly in a rain of anger. His grimy white T-shirt was soaked through with sweat from his exertion, and his face was growing redder by the second.

      Somewhere a radio was playing. The sound of the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra floated through the hot August air. “Tangerine, she is all they claim,” sang Bob Eberly over the sultry voices of the band’s horns and woodwinds. “With her eyes of night and lips as bright as flame.”

      The song had been a favorite during that summer of 1942, and Joe found himself idly humming along as he watched the boy. Finally, when the kid looked like he would either explode or pass out, Joe stepped in. “Like this,” he said, giving the pin a gentle turn with his hand and slipping it easily into the hole.

      “How the fuck did you do that?” the boy said.

      “You just have to know how it works,” Joe said in his slow Texas drawl.

      He turned and walked away, wiping the grease from his hands onto his work pants and laughing to himself. He’d been working the carnival for coming on twenty years, and in every new town they stopped in, it was the same. He had to hire a team of local boys to help him set up. Big boys, big enough to lift the heavy machinery and set it upright. He always got a kick out of watching the ham-fisted showoffs trying to force the rods and gears to do what they wanted, when he knew that all they had to do was ask nicely and the motors would be purring like kittens before a fire.

      It had been different for him. Even when he was a kid, he’d understood what the machines were saying. He heard them calling to him, singing in their clickety-clackety voices of things no one else saw: worlds where time and motion whirled in an intricate dance, sweeping the stars along with them. And when they called, he was powerless not to answer. One night when he was about four, his mother had come to check on him, only to find his bed empty. After a frantic three-hour search, he’d been discovered in the basement, sitting next to the big old coal furnace with a faraway look in his eyes. They’d had to shake him to snap him out of it, and even then he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. All he’d said by way of explanation was, “The box was talking to me, Mama.”

      The other kids decided he was crazy. They’d spy him lying next to the railroad tracks, his fingertips touching the steel as he listened to the engines rumbling somewhere down the line, or catch him leaning up against a spinning washing machine, a sweet smile on his face. “Dumb bastard,” they’d say, pushing him into the dirt and laughing.

      The worst was Billy James. “Joey’s