A reluctant vampire hunter, stalking New York City as only a scorned bride can.
Elle Dupree has her life all figured out: first a wedding, then her Ph.D., then swank faculty parties where she’ll serve wine and cheese and introduce people to her husband the lawyer.
But those plans disintegrate when she walks in on a vampire draining the blood from her fiancé Greg. Horrified, she screams and runs--not away from the vampire, but toward it, brandishing a wooden letter opener.
As she slams the improvised stake into the vampire’s heart, a team of black-clad men bursts into the apartment. Turning around to face them, Elle discovers that Greg’s body is gone—and her perfect life falls apart.
A Top-10 Preditors and Editors Readers' Poll Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novel
Excerpt
The worst thing about vampires is
that they're dead. That whole wanting to suck your blood business runs a close
second, but for sheer creepiness, it's the dead bit that gets me every time.
They're up and walking around and talking and sucking blood, but they're dead.
And then there's the whole terminology problem--how can you kill something
that's already dead? It's just wrong.
I was twenty-four the first time I .
. . destroyed? dispatched? . . . a vampire. That's when I found out that all
the books and movies are wrong. When you stick a wooden stake into their
hearts, vampires don't disintegrate into dust. They don't explode. They don't
spew blood everywhere. They just look surprised, groan, and collapse into a
pile of corpse. But at least they lie still then, like corpses are supposed to.
Since that first kill (I might as
well use the word--there really isn’t a better one), I've discovered that only
if you're lucky do vampires look surprised before they groan and fall down. If
you're unlucky and miss the heart, they look angry. And then they fight.
There are the other usual ways to
kill vampires, of course, but these other ways can get a bit complicated.
Vampires are notoriously difficult to trick into sunlight. They have an uncanny
ability to sense when there's any sunlight within miles of them, and they're
awfully good at hiding from it. Holy water doesn't kill them; it just distracts
them for a while, and then they get that angry look again. And it takes a
pretty big blade to cut off someone's head--even an already dead someone--and
carrying a great big knife around New York City, even the Bronx, is a sure way
to get arrested. Nope, pointy sticks are the best way to go, all the way
around.
My own pointy stick is actually more
of a little knife with wood inlay on the blade--the metal makes it slide in
easier. I had the knife specially made by an old Italian guy in just about the
only ratty part of Westchester, north of the city. I tried to order one off the
internet, but it turns out that while it’s easy to find wood-inlay handles, the
blades themselves tend to be metal. Fat lot those people know.
But I wasn’t thinking any of this
when I pulled the knife out of the body on the ground. I was thinking something
more along the lines of “Oh, bloody hell. Not again.”
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About the Author
Margo Bond Collins is the author of urban fantasy, contemporary romance, and paranormal mysteries. She has published a number of novels, including Sanguinary, Taming the Country Star, Legally Undead, Waking Up Dead, and Fairy, Texas. She lives in Texas with her husband, their daughter, and several spoiled pets. Although writing fiction is her first love, she also teaches college-level English courses online. She enjoys reading romance and paranormal fiction of any genre and spends most of her free time daydreaming about heroes, monsters, cowboys, and villains, and the strong women who love them—and sometimes fight them.
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