A Coven of Vampires Read Online Free PDF Page B

situated on a wild stretch of the coast, away from mankind’s great masses. But even so, it was only a matter of time.
    “They came, found me, sat outside my house, outside the wire and the walls, and they waited. They found ways in. Dogs dug holes for them, seagulls tore at the mesh overhead. Frantically, I would trap, pour petrol, burn, listen to them pop! But I couldn’t stay awake for ever. One by one they got the birds, leaving little empty bodies and bunches of feathers. And my dogs, Bill and Ben, which I had to shoot and burn. And this morning when I woke up, Peter parakeet.
    “So there’s at least one of them, probably two or three, here in the room with me right now. Hiding, waiting for night. Waiting for me to go to sleep. I’ve looked for them, of course, but—
    “Chameleons, they fit perfectly into any background. When I move, they move. And they imitate perfectly. But they do make mistakes. A moment ago I had two hairbrushes, identical, and I only ever had one. Can you imagine brushing your hair with something like that ?And what the hell would I want with three fluffy slippers? A left, a right—and a centre?
    “…I can see the beach from my window. And half a mile away, on the point, there’s Carter’s grocery. Not a crust in the kitchen. Dare I chance it? Do I want to? Let’s see, now. Biscuits, coffee, powdered milk, canned beans, potatoes—no, strike the potatoes. A sack of carrots….” 
    • • •
    The man on the beach grinned mirthlessly, white lips drawing back from his teeth and freezing there. A year ago he would have expected to read such in a book of horror fiction. But not now. Not when it was written in his own hand.
    The breeze changed direction, blew on him, and the sand began to drift against his side. It blew in his eyes, glazed now and lifeless. The shadows lengthened as the sun started to dip down behind the dunes. His body grew cold.
    Three hairy sacks with pincer feet, big as footballs and heavy with his blood, crawled slowly away from him along the beach….

KISS OF THE LAMIA

    Bully boys out of Chlangi they were, desperadoes riding forth from that shunned city of yeggs and sharpers, on the lookout for quick profits in the narrow strip twixt Lohmi’s peaks and the Desert of Sheb. And the lone Hrossak with his team of camels easy meat where they caught him in ambush, by the light of blind old Gleeth, god of the moon. Or at least, he should have been easy meat.
    But the master and sole member of that tiniest of caravans was Tarra Khash, and meat was rarely so tough. For all his prowess, however (which one day would be legendary in all of Theem’hdra), the brawny bronze steppe-man was, on this occasion, caught short. With only the stump of a jewelled, ceremonial scimitar to defend himself, and nodding in the saddle as he let his mount pick out the way through badland rockpiles and gullies, Tarra was hardly prepared for the three where they saw him coming and set their snare for him.
    Indeed the first he knew of it was when a sighing arrow plunked through the polished leather of the scabbard across his back, sank an inch into his shoulder and near knocked him out of his saddle. Then, as a second feathered shaft whistled by his ear, he was off the camel and tumbling in dust and grit, his hand automatically grasping the jewelled hilt of his useless sword. In the darkness all was a chaos of shock and spurting blood and adrenalin, where wide awake now Tarra heard the terrified snorting and coughing of his beasts and huddled to avoid their kicking hooves as they ran off; where the moonlight silvered the stony bones of some ruined, long-deserted pile, and where the dust of Hrossak’s fall was still settling as stealthy shadows crept in upon him.
    Out of the leering dark they came, eyes greenly ablaze in greed and blood-lust, darting in the shadows, and fleet as the moonbeams themselves where the way was lit by Gleeth’s cold light and by the blue sheen of far stars. Men of the