VAMPIRE ROMANCE: Moonlight Desires Complete Series (Books 1, 2, &3) (Paranormal Romance Collection, Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance With Sex) (Vampire Romance Boxed Set) (7 page)

Moonlight Desires (Book #3)

Chapter One

Tom tried Shana's phone again, opting not to leave a fourth voicemail. Words for a new message evaded him. He turned on the television and caught an Adam Sandler movie. It tickled him when Kevin James' character accidentally stapled his scrotum to a Snuggie, forcing him to wear the Snuggie on a hot date because he didn't have time to pry out the staple. “Man that's fucking rich,” said Tom to no one. Tom cracked open a Keystone Light. Tom tugged it to the thought of one of the motel cleaning women, who was kind of flat chested but had an ass that looked absolutely swollen. He finished within 90 seconds of starting. In the sadness that typically colored his post-orgasm deflation, Tom texted his fiancee again.

              Tom more or less wouldn't leave his hotel room today, because he was convinced that Cleveland, with its boarded up houses, rusted-over warehouses and derelict bars and torn up pavement, was a tremendously dangerous place.

              Shana hadn't been picking up her phone because she left it on silent all day. The state she was in could be diagnosed as schizophrenia if she were to experience for a long enough period of time. Half of her being was possessed by her infatuation for Baker, drunk on his sensual affection. The other half was consumed by worry: for her vanished nephew, for her sister and brother-in-law suffering through the ordeal, and for herself over Tom being the same city as she was right now. Reading did not quell Shana. Eating did not calm her. The television was just spouting information which evaded her attention completely.

As she had taken to doing the past few days, Shana walked. She wouldn't be able to tell you where she wandered, drifting through the city streets like some ghost obsessed with its own unfinished business. When she found herself standing outside of a 7-Eleven in Lakewood, she was confounded by the number of miles she must have walked to get to this point. She found herself outside of a 7-Eleven in Lakewood because there she witnessed a man having a seizure on the pavement.

              Some instinct rose from a place inside of her which she was not aware of, some knowledge was remembered which she never learned in the first place. When she saw the man seizing on the Lakewood pavement - chunky black blood streaming from his nose and nylon track jacket tearing against the rough concrete, she grabbed a nail file from her purse and stuck in the man's mouth, depressing his tongue so that he wouldn't swallow it.

              Shana screamed to a passerby to help hold down the man's shoulders, but before the passerby could make it over, the seizing man flailed his arms and smacked Shana in the face. She managed to keep the nail file on his tongue, but her eye socket throbbed.

              The passerby was brawny and had no hair on his head whatsoever, not even eyebrows. If not for his leathery skin, his face would have bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Clean. He was not the leanest man in the world, but his arm's skin was pulled taught across bulky muscles, conforming to all sorts of unusual contours. Then again, Shana didn't ogle buff men all that often, so she wouldn't quite know the shapes that bone and muscles were supposed to make.

              After a couple of minutes, the man on the ground stopped seizing. After agreement through some telepathic link, Shana took the nail file out of his mouth and took out her phone to call 911 as Mr. Clean held down the man for safety. It was then that she noticed 14 missed calls and 6 text messages, all from Tom. She relished the fact that she was about to talk to call in an emergency instead of calling back the dolt.

              It amazed Shana how bored 911 operators always sounded. This specific one, Deb, kept telling Shana to keep calm even though Shana didn't think she sounded particularly distressed. Perhaps there was a note of disquiet in her voice when she noticed that Mr. Clean was still applying a great amount of pressure to the victim's shoulders. Shana leaned away from the phone.

“I think you can let go,” she said.

“What was that ma'am?” replied the operator, “You think I can let go of what?”

“No I wasn't talking to you.”

“Ma'am, the briefer we keep this conversation, the quicker an ambulance can get there. And I've got nothing to let go of, let me tell you.”

              Shana did not appreciate being called “ma'am.” While trying to ascertain the two-streets that made up the intersection where the 7-Eleven sat, Shana became more aware of her surroundings, and in turn Mr. Clean's tattoos. They were a series of strange glyphs: a pentagram on the right bicep, ram's head on the right, some text written backwards in Latin along his clavicle, an upside down crucifix behind his ear.

              Mr. Clean was courteous enough, just curt. When the EMTs showed up he provided little personal information. The EMTs rifled through the man's wallet looking for ID, and one of them attempted to pocket the cash. Mr. Clean caught this and started taking video on his phone as quickly as he could.

“If you return the cash and put that wallet back in his pocket, I'll delete this video right now.”

              The EMT was mortified of Mr. Clean, the video, and the pentagram inked into his skin. You could see sunlight shimmer in the sweat that his skinny fingers left on the ten-dollar bill. As he slipped the wallet into the man's back pocket, the seized man groaned. “Ok, Mister?” asked the EMT.

Mr. Clean fiddled with his phone and chuckled to himself. “Nah, I'm going to keep this video anyway. No telling when it could come in handy.” Shana corroborated.

The man started to come to as the EMTs loaded him into the ambulance via gurney. He spit up that chunky black blood and it dribbled down his jaw.

Shana looked toward Mr. Clean. “Do you know Baker?”

He may have been caught off guard but his stony face didn't show it. “Yes.”

“When's the last time he turned a woman?”

Mr. Clean broke eye contact to stand. “Why do you care?” The flash of jealousy in Shana's face was all the answer that he needed. “Take my advice and stay away from Lake View Cemetery. These days the mortals that hang around that place are a lot more dangerous than the blood suckers.”

With not so much as a goodbye, Mr. Clean started off.

“I was chased,” Shana yelped when he was about a dozen steps away. Mr. Clean stopped but he did not turn around. His knee lifted to move him forward. “I was chased by some man, some man with a hobble. He broke the window of my car with an ice pick.”

This got Mr. Clean to turn around, but he did not walk towards Shana. Shana approached him.

“God knows where he wanted to stick that icepick, but I was done for.”

Mr. Clean turned to give her a dead-eyed stare. One of his biceps twitched involuntarily. “You will stay away from Lake View Cemetery.”

There was zero commitment on Shana's part. Just questions. “Do you know the man? His fingers were like little stubs. It's like he was missing parts of them, digits.”

“Tiny sacrifice. Parts of bodies at a time. You don't want to know who, or rather what, they're worshipping. You don't.”

“Do they kill people?”

“Not at first, no. Sometimes the people die from the mutilations, sometimes they are killed because they try to escape.”

Shana’s face was red hot and there was a three-pound stone in her chest. She hesitated a beat too long, but Mr. Clean waited. “Do they take children?”

“No. Not often. Sometimes.” It was at this moment that Shana lost all the strength she conjured to save the seizing man, that she broke through her malaise of lust for the vampire. It was at this moment that Shana bawled. Mr. Clean did something expected for a musclebound, stoic man covered in glyphs. He hugged this strange woman that he met through chance alone.

              This was not a woman in good shape. The tears streaming out of her eyes lent a slick shimmer to the bruise forming around her eye where the seizing man had hit her. Her muscles loosened, human Shana morphing into a rag doll Shana. “My nephew... He's been gone since yesterday.” Mr. Clean rubbed her back with one hand and pressed her against him with the other.

After a few minutes, “How familiar are you with the teachings of Anton LaVey, the Church of Satan?”

Shana through tears and sniffles, “Satan? I've never worshipped Satan.”

“I have not worshipped in the church since a hack neo-nazi took it over, but I still practice the teachings of LaVey. I will help you,” he paused as if to say a name, his way of asking for hers. She lent it. “I will help you Shana, on the principal of Satanic virtue.”

Through her tears, a terror.

Mr. Clean gave a hearty laugh at this. “Satanic virtue, LaVey's interpretation o
f
lex talioni
s
, states 'do unto others as they do unto you.'” He paused to see if Shana caught his drift. Her face said that she barely had. “You guided me to save a man's life today. I will guide you to saving your nephew.”

Nothing made sense. Entrusting her nephew's well-being with a Satanist seemed like a bad move. But there was not much for anyone to lose in the proposition.

“Give me your telephone.” She did. Mr. Clean entered his information into it and texted himself. “Within 24 hours, you will receive a text message from me. I have not put my name in your phone, so you will have to trust a strange number. Likewise, I will not reveal myself when your nephew returns. This is a dangerous town for good samaritans and Satanists alike.”

Shana's eyes showed gratitude while her lip quivered in impending sobbing.

“Good day, Shana. Thank you for making me save that man today.”

When Mr. Clean left, Shana vomited. She went into that Lakewood 7-Eleven and purchased a Monster Energy drink, knowing it would be the only taste stronger than her own spew. In fact, that made her vomit again, as soon the caffeine and sugar rush proved too much for her frazzled psyche.

Chapter Two

Suze and Nate dug the vodka bottle out of the freezer hours ago, and by now there was only a shot or two left. They had made desperate love on any surface they found themselves near between anxious crying bouts.

              There was a moment when Suze felt a peculiar swelling in her heart. It was when Nate was inside of her as she was sprawled on top of the dining room table. That swelling was one she remembered from when they were trying to conceive, that irrepressible feeling that their coital unity, their simple biological ecstasy, their mutual quest for climax, was for a future greater than either of them could actualize alone, one filled with hope, joy. It was a pregnancy of its own, a pregnancy of the soul.

              Nate felt powerful, masculine for the first time in god knows how long, as he lifted her ankles up to his shoulder and put them together, exposing a new angle of attached between his belly and her thighs. The wonderful sensation of losing control of half of her body to her husband doubled the electric delight of the penis' head rubbing in circles around her g spot, tapping it directly whenever Nate would slip out a little bit. Their minds travelled to a plane of cosmic chaos as they lost themselves and all of their earthly worries in a singular, pure pursuit.

              Shana walked into the house around sundown to find them in the middle of this scene. She yelped a small yelp and backed out of view of the dining room. They had not noticed her, or if they had they kept going without a care to give. Shana, out of curiosity, out of her own grief-induced unmooring, inched her head around the corner of the doorway to the dining room. It had been years since she wondered what the act looked like between her sister and brother-in-law, and frankly she figured they were more or less asexual at this point. Not the case.

She saw her sister's face covered in sweat as if she had been sitting in a parked car during a heatwave. Her breasts fell to either side of her ribs and moved at their own rhythm, one contrary to the shared gyration of the lovers's pelvises. Nate's ass was desiccated, a little hairy, but his legs and arms showed definition. She never knew that Nate had a tattoo on the back of his right shoulder. It looked like the emblem for the motorcycle club he used to be part of: a skull in a crown of thorns.

Voyeurism always aroused Shana. Nothing is a bigger turn-on than the forbidden, after all. It wasn't that she fantasized about catching her sister in the act, but that there is a base, human drive which makes even the suggestion of the sexual an erotic experience. It's why they make sexy advertisements for cars and alcohol. The mind is remarkably vulnerable to such suggestion thanks to that pesky sex drive of ours. Once the erotic seed is planted, there are only so many ways to root it out.

It was dark when Shana's libido guided her out of the house. Contrary to Mr. Clean's advice, she bee-lined for Lake View Cemetery, a walk for which she somehow found energy despite her day walking more of Cleveland than she could possibly recall.

              It was a humid spring night, the kind when the clouds form the kind of thick, grey blanket that the moon cannot shine through, which reflects the street light glow. It gave the typically nightmarish post-industrial scape of nocturnal Cleveland a pleasant, dream-like quality. It was a glow, a luminous gossamer which draped the bewitched city that May evening.

              Shana didn't play any of her cemetery games. She didn't wander around looking for details that may have prompted lines of poetry when she was a teenager. She didn't speculate on the lives of the people buried beneath given gravestones. No, just as she darted for Lake View Cemetery, she darted for her post-life lover's stone cottage.

              As she approached it, she saw a figure laying on the ground, squirming. The figure was in about as good shape as a horse with a broken leg trapped in a gorge. This broken creature, she would soon find, was the very subject of her recent infatuations, that beautiful vampire who bled machismo instead of red.

She got down on her knees next to him and heard an other-worldly moan. The agony rang as a high-pitched bleating sounded like it should have been octaves lower, like the cry of a bear that just huffed a balloon full of helium. Baker's eye lids were opening just enough to expose his crystalline eyes, and shutting in split seconds before Shana could discern what direction they were pointing in.

              In her hands, Shana held Baker's head and brushed his hair with her fingers. Not a word was uttered, she couldn't imagine that he would understand a word of what she said, much less gather the speech up to respond. She just ran her fingers through his scalp and cooed.

After a few minutes of this gentle treatment, Baker started to come to. “Sh... Sh... Sha...”

Her finger found his lips to shush him. He groaned lower.

“In. Please. In.” The door to the mausoleum was just slightly ajar, as if Baker had opened it just enough to crawl out.

              Naturally, it took considerable effort for Shana to move the stone slab, the mausoleum door. There were a number of positions she tried but whenever she was able to exert adequate pressure, her feet slipped against the graveyard grass. The best luck came when she took off her shoes and dug her heels into the dirt, shoving all of her weight against the slab with her shoulder. It budged just enough for her to drag another being in.

              Baker was weak, incredibly weak, the kind of weak you see in a movie when a man has been crawling through the desert for days on end without water. There was one thing she knew may help the pathetic creature.

              Shana had no purse on her, and her pockets were empty save for a phone and keys. One key looked sharper than the others and with it, she began carving at her thigh. The key scratched away the surface layer of skin in the area she tried, but little more. With fury, she dug deeper to no avail. Shana was ready to use the key to chip off a fragment of the stone door, she really was, but her hand felt something sharp when she went to go prop herself up. The top digit of her ring finger bled, and the pain was so surprising that for a moment she forget how advantageous her discovery may be. Upon one look, she found shards of glass on the ground, and grabbed the biggest one she could find, unquestioning of from where they fell.

              The shard made quick work of opening her skin, and she dragged the vampires mouth to her lacerated thigh. The vampire instinctively lapped and lapped. The tongue movements got no quicker, just kept going. The sign that he was gaining energy, in fact, was that he was able to slither up to her and put his entire mouth around her thigh to suck her syrup more efficiently. When she started to feel light headed, she grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up to her crotch. A strong sniff of her mellow vinegar made the vampire just a bit more alert.

              He nuzzled her cotton panties and could feel the puff of her pubic hair against the tip of his nose when the fabric made contact with her vulva. Baker pushed the narrowest part of the garment to the side with his nose, barely touching his tongue to her lips as he moved his chin up. In a tease, he let the panties slip back into place. She knew by his games that he was revitalized. He repeated the previous motion, but this time giving a big, puppy lap as he raised his chin, making sure to poke her clit with the now-moist, ever chilled tip of his nose. Shana let out a low roar.

              Finding a good grip around his cheeks, Shana dragged Baker's face up to hers in order to taste herself on his tongue. No better melange had ever been mixed on her palette. They kissed short, sensual kisses, taking turns gently sucking on one another's lips. Baker sat askew on his hips, making mouth congress with Shana and fingering her sopping pussy with his cold, dead digits. Whenever he would pull his index and middle finger out from inside her, juice would drip on the mausoleum's stone floor.

              Shana reached for his member but he playfully turned away. She lent a seductress' chuckle and reached again. This time he ran his fingers up insider her so quickly that she lost control of her muscle movement. She reached a third time and hit the spot to find...

              Nothing.

              Nothing.

              There was no throbbing priapism, just nothing. Not even a flaccid lizard, just nothing. Baker undid his jeans to show her the patch where the sunlight had sizzled off his dick just the morning before. He pointed to the hole in the skylight, but Shana's attention was lost to terror. She gathered up her pants in panic. On the way out, her thigh collided with the granite podium on which Baker sleeps, inciting her second shiner of the day.

              Once again tears lent a sheen to her black eye and through this small torrent, she saw Tom, standing there right by his car. Some godawful music was playing.

“Come with me, babe. You're done with him now.” Mr. Clean was right. Lake View Cemetery was a place to keep away from.