Vampire Dreams_Int.indd

“When the impossible is real, and the real is imaginary, boundaries and borders break down. Christina Moss ignores the constraints of common knowledge with blithe abandon, and weaves a tale of what might be, and how it should be if it were.

“Everything about
Vampire of My Dreams
is dark and cool on the warp, and bright and hot on the weft. The fabric of this tale will chill and warm you at once, an unusual sensation you will remember for a long time.”

—Don Dewsnap, Oak Wand Publishing

“I rarely read for pleasure but more to learn about my trade and to improve upon my skills. Not only did this book keep me intensely interested, it brought tears to my eyes — more than once. I don’t recall the last time a book had the same effect on me. Now that’s saying something.”

—Brad Fraunfelter, Science Fiction
and Fantasy Illustrator

Copyright © 2010 Christina Moss

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Adamantine Publishing House

PO Box 6338

Burbank, CA 91510

First Edition: September 2010

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fi ctitious.

Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN 978-0-9828245-2-8

Cover Illustration: www.bradfraunfelterillustration.com

© 2010 Christina Moss

Interior Illustration: Christina Moss

© 2010 Christina Moss

Book Design: www.creativepublishingdesign.com Proofreading: Don Dewsnap

Printed in the United States of America
This one is for my husband, Edward.

† † †

Vampire of

My Dreams

T
error coursed through the man’s body, and his heart was pumping fast as he tried to fl ee through the cold, dark night. Death was at hand and he always knew his would be gruesome, an inevitable outcome following a life of crime. He understood that very soon he would be dead but he ran just the same — instincts of self-preservation are like that.

His end did come fast, just as he’d predicted. A freakishly powerful force knocked him to the ground and his pursuer was on him. The cold hand on the side of his face shoved his head aside, while the other hand ripped through his collar.

He felt the fangs sink deep into his jugular and then he shook convulsively. Numbing feet and hands, then his slowed pulse signaled the life draining from him. He felt his throat being slit, and a moment later, he was dead.

Alexander, the nearly-two-hundred-year-old vampire, licked his knife clean and slipped it into the leather sheath. He stood over the corpse for only a second before walking away.

1

Vampire of My Dreams

He didn’t often feel elated but he did that night. However, his lift in spirits had nothing to do with his most recent kill.

On the contrary, feeding on humans was not an activity he took any pleasure in at all.

The thing that made him happy was the fact that he’d fi nished work early. That meant he could spend more time talking with Zoe and tonight was a special night, since it was her twenty-fourth birthday.

For the past six years he’d entered the human girl’s dreams a few times each week and they would talk — sometimes for hours. Zoe was innocent and beautiful but in all of those years, the girl knew Alexander only as a dream, and so the vampire had never taken advantage of her. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, it was just that it wouldn’t have been right.

That’s how he fi gured it.

In those six years he’d revealed to her so much about himself — at least about his life when he still had one — the life he’d led before he was turned. No one knew as much about Alexander as she. And he had discovered so much about her

— he knew her fears as well as the things that annoyed her, what made her laugh and what made her cry. But the one thing that Alexander discovered that most took him by surprise, was not about Zoe at all. It was about himself. He realized that he loved her deeply. And that was a signifi cant realization, given the fact that he’d never loved anyone, not when he had a life and certainly not since his life had been taken away.

2

Christina Moss

For years he’d carefully reasoned with himself that he couldn’t offer her anything of importance or meaning because he wasn’t human. He’d settled, instead, on being content with her friendship a few nights a week and he enjoyed her human perspective and companionship. And of course, she was beautiful with long dark hair, dark eyes and a vibrancy he had never seen in another.

It wasn’t easy, but time and again he’d managed to talk himself out of revealing to her that he wasn’t just a dream and that he really existed. If he told her the truth it was more than likely that she would reject him altogether, or so he thought.

Recently, however, things had begun to change. Zoe had mentioned Michael — someone she’d met at a gathering —

and Alexander feared that he would have to stop seeing her altogether. Therefore, something had to be done.

And so, Alexander was feeling elated because after refl ecting on it for a good long time, he’d come to an important decision. He’d decided that he would ask Zoe to go to a particular location when she was awake. He felt certain that if he asked her to, she would go somewhere at a specifi c time, then he would turn up. In that way, he’d reveal himself to her as a real being, not just a dream. He’d tell her how much he loved her and ask her how she felt about him.

3

Christina Moss

Five years later . . .

Z
oe stood before the three-sectioned, full-length mirror and stared at her naked refl ection. She looked aged and tired.

But of course she did. She’d just been through years of absolute hell. People used to tell her she was pretty, but it seemed like a long time since anyone had told her. She wondered if anyone would ever tell her that again.

An icy chill went through her, and she grabbed her white bathrobe from the hook on the wall and wrapped it around herself. It was just her own unfortunate luck that her divorce was fi nalized that very day — on her twenty-ninth birthday.

She shook her head in disgust. A year of engagement was followed by four short years of marriage. She wondered how so much could go wrong in such a short time.

Analytically, she understood that it wasn’t her fault. Emotionally, she felt guilty and spent.

Having no experience herself with drugs or addicts, she couldn’t have known that Michael had already been addicted 5

Vampire of My Dreams

to meth when she’d fi rst met him fi ve years earlier. He’d hidden it well but she felt stupid just the same. Stupid that she hadn’t suspected anything strange about his behavior — not while they were dating, not on her wedding day, and not even for the fi rst year or so of their marriage. It wasn’t until he’d begun losing weight, acting frantically and staying up until all hours of the night (doing who knows what in the garage) that she knew something was terribly wrong.

It was the rapid deterioration that alarmed her and that’s when she really paid attention. She thought he was ill so she pleaded with him to go to a doctor. No sense could be made of it — he just wouldn’t go. One clue led to the next and the discovery was made. Discovery was followed by confrontation, research, the broken promises and failed attempts to rehabilitate him. It was somewhere during that process that Zoe had lost, one by one, all of her friends. They’d become repulsed by his transformation and outraged at her for wasting her time with a hopeless addict. As painful as it was to lose her friends, Zoe knew she had to do everything in her power to save Michael.

After all, marriage vows meant something!

But even she had a breaking point. The decision hadn’t come easily, but it had become clear after a time that he didn’t want to change, even if it killed him. That’s when she knew that staying with Michael would only result in her own destruction. As devastating as it was, she’d fi led for divorce.