Love Bites Read Online Free PDF Page B

closer. I wanted to find out more about him. How his mind worked. Why he didn’t run for his life when he discovered what I am. And what it would feel like to kiss him. I’d already tasted his blood; it was spicy and rich. Complex, like the man seemed to be. What would it feel like to have him inside me? That’s what I wanted to know.
    It would be better for both of us if he walked away.
    For the most part, vampyres are solitary creatures. Vampyre couples do exist—I turned Rudy Valentino and we stayed together for several years, and Theda Bara and Charles Brabin have been together since 1921—but they’re the exception, not the rule. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, both members of my clan, eventually went their separate ways, although I believe Mary still loves him. But vampyres taking human lovers? They tend to be brief affairs, born out of the need to feed off a compliant partner who has some aberration of his own to work out. I have yet to understand humans who have convinced themselves they need to drink blood. Psychologists call them hematomaniacs. They’ve even got vampyre support pages on the Internet, for God’s sake, for “sanguinarians” and “vampiric people.” And vampyre dating services. If they only knew the reality.
    Maral knows.
    We’ve been together for ten years. When I hired her, she was so grateful to get out of the mess her life was in, she would have done anything for me. She was an eighteen-year-old runaway facing a manslaughter charge for killing a man who’d broken into the house where she was staying. He’d attempted to rape her. The cops questioned her claim of self-defense, primarily because she’d managed to decapitate him. They didn’t believe a little bit of a thing like her could do that without premeditation. I still wonder about it. Had she been lying in wait for him? At any rate, she didn’t have money for a lawyer, and the only job she could get was starring in a porn production “mockumentary” about her story, The Real Killer Commits the Real Kill! The producer was a scuzzy weasel who’d just finished knocking off a porno version of my movie I Scream . That pissed me off. He’d titled it I Scream with Pleasure and used a girl to star in it who bore a slight resemblance to me. At least her face did. Her body looked like Britney Spears on a bad day, and that pissed me off even more. Then, in a real moment of sleaze, he’d given her the screen name Oval Moore. I wanted to kick the shit out of him. When I showed up at his “studio” (a two-bedroom house in the Valley), Maral had just started filming. He stopped the camera long enough to pull a gun on me. She grabbed a fire extinguisher and blasted him. His toupee went flying. I started laughing. She hadn’t really saved my life—the gun was a .22, about as effective on me as a mosquito bite—but she’d made the effort, and I was intrigued. I hired her to work for me and hired my lawyer to get her out of the manslaughter charge. She’s been committed to me ever since.
    A year after we met, I was filming on Slieve More (the Big Mountain) in Ireland. It was our day off, and I’d gone hiking up the mountain alone when the sky turned black and torrential rains started falling. Whether I slipped in the downpour or was pushed, I’ll never be certain. The locals believed strongly that banshees lived on Slieve More and that said banshees weren’t happy with the movie crew being there—sort of like trying to film in Bolinas, California, where the residents insist on screaming, “Go home!” every time you roll cameras. Whether it was banshees or bad luck, I lost my footing and crashed sixty feet down the side of the mountain, rolling over and over again on scree and razor-sharp shale. I ended up in a river of mud with a broken left arm, two bone fragments sticking out of my calf, a punctured lung, a shattered cheekbone, two cracked ribs, and a broken collarbone. My vampyre physiology attempted to heal itself