As promised last week here is an excerpt of my new novel Bloodline: End of Days, Book One. In which our protagonist Olive Green’s life goes to hell in a handcart…. Enjoy!
ONE
Olive peeled off her work t-shirt and tossed it toward the dirty clothes hamper with a sigh of relief. Waitressing at Lou and Ev’s Chicken Dinners near the highway wasn’t the worst job she’d ever had, but it was the smelliest. She smelled like fried chicken all the damn time.
She wanted a shower but glanced at the clock as she scooted her feet into her favorite slippers. From its perch on the bathroom counter, her phone rang, and she smiled as she saw Jamie’s face appear on her screen. Tapping the icon she answered his call.
“Are you home?” he asked. “It’s almost time!”
“Keep your hair on, I just got here.”
She pulled on a pair of track pants and a sweatshirt then walked the three whole steps from the bathroom to the living area that tripled as her living room, kitchen, and bedroom. What the infinitesimal apartment lacked in square footage it made up for by being cheap and decently clean. It was one of those eco buildings built twenty years ago. Olive imagined her apartment was once the height of fashionable architecture, but now it was outdated and plasticky.
One of these days she would look back on this tiny dump and sigh with nostalgia. For now she would keep her eyes on the prize of finishing her degree in broadcast media and political science and blow off the small city of Concord, Oregon. She would make a name for herself at one of the important news outfits back east in New York or Washington D.C., just one more year of online classes and she’d be set.
Her refurbished laptop wheezed as she signed into the broadcast stream. The network graphic spun lazily in the corner of the screen. A countdown clock read 5:38. In the sidebar comments in the chat scrolled by at lightning speed.
They were replaying the interview that rocked the world and made Trina Attwood a mega media star fifteen years ago. The luck of being at the right place at the right time was fate, but Trina had the brains to spin her big break into a media empire.
“Wow!” she said, “look how many views”.
“Less than last time, though.” Jamie said. “Once your boyfriend shows up, the numbers will skyrocket.”
She rolled her eyes and made herself comfortable on the faded denim slipcovered sofa she’d found at the donation store and propped her laptop on one of the threadbare overstuffed arms.
“Very funny,” she drawled.
She didn’t doubt Jamie’s prediction, Dorian Le Fay created a stir wherever he went.
“You were so stuck on him!” Jamie reminded her.
“Me and everyone on the planet.”
Fifteen years ago Dorian Le Fay burst onto the celebrity scene like no one ever before. Charismatic and extremely easy on the eyes, Dorian was the whole super star package and that was before you got to the fact he was a vampire.
Olive had been eleven when the incident in New Mexico unmasked the vampire race. Conspiracy theories and opaque statements by officials at the time left the facts up for debate, but the basic story was that someone screwed up massively.
What everyone thought was a think tank company parked out in the desert working on renewable energy turned out to be a secret bio-lab trying to engineer super soldiers. Experiments splicing different species with human DNA, IVF, and some said cloning, were underway when things went completely pear shaped.
Those eager beavers in lab coats bit off more than they could chew. It was still unclear about how they got their hands on vampire DNA, but they tinkered with it then introduced it to their test subjects. The process was called viral amplification, or, V-AMP.
When the VAMPS finished with everyone in the research facility they moved on to the tiny town of Kitty, New Mexico. The whole incident was a social media sensation broadcast to every corner of the globe in real time. No sweeping it under the rug with dubious claims of drugs in the punch, or mass hysteria.
The troops that the government sent in were quickly killed, and those were the lucky ones. The ones who didn’t die turned. Not into pretty, charming beings like Dorian, these VAMPS were barely sentient, animalistic machines with only one goal, suck the world dry.
And they would have done just that, had it not been for Dorian and the vampires of Bryony Island. The battle and clean up was quick, who better to defeat the mutant horde than other vampires. This too was broadcast for all to see.
Everyone had been obsessed by the reveal, they soaked up every morsel of information they could. Media sources exploded with stories about the vampires, mostly, Olive knew now, completely fabricated. Olive remembered the people accused of being vampires were detained or mobbed. A real torches and pitchforks type of scenario.
That was why Dorian, again, intervened, to set the record straight and fill the information vacuum. The diehard conspiracy nuts didn’t believe it of course but for the most part folks settled down and stopped dragging people out of their beds and ramming wooden stakes through their hearts.
On Olive’s laptop Trina and Dorian bantered and flirted in that years ago interview.
“What makes you different than the vampires who attacked in New Mexico?” Trina asked, her gaze upon him bright.
Dorian smiled, flashing a bit of fang. “Those were not vampires,” he told her. “Those poor souls were mindless experiments, mutated feeding machines. Created, I remind you, by humans.”
Trina’s lips lifted in a brief smile.
“He didn’t answer the question,” Olive said to her screen.
She’d watched this countless times. When younger, Olive did so to drool over Dorian, later as she began her studies, she watched to study Trina’s interview style.
“You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Le Fay. How is a vampire different than a VAMP?”
Another smile, this one looked genuine. He was enjoying himself.
“We are people,” he said seriously. “Not supernaturally cursed or bloodthirsty monsters, we don’t hunt for our sustenance. And we sure as hell don’t sparkle!”
Trina laughed at the joke but stayed focused. “But you do depend on human blood for your sustenance.”
“We do.”
“You’ve claimed that you employ volunteers to supply blood.”
Dorian looked less comfortable with this line of questioning “Yes.”
“Was this always the policy?”
Dorian straightened up from his relaxed and speared Trina with a frank look. “Are you vegan Trina?”
“I’m not, no.”
“Vegetarian?”
“No.”
“So, when you sit down to a nice steak dinner, with pomme frites and a lovely cabernet do you think about the life you are consuming?”
“I think I get where you’re going,” she said, nodding for him to continue.
“Vampires do think of the life of the persons we feed upon. It is important that they are healthy and happy. In all the long years of my life I have never had to kill in order to eat.” His chin lifted proudly. “Unlike you with your nice steak dinner, with pomme frites and a lovely cabernet.”
Trina was nodding, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Is that why you intervened in the massacre in New Mexico?” she asked. “To protect your food supply?”
“Partially,” he said. “But mostly we destroyed the VAMPS because we were the only ones who could. Had we not and simply sat idly by we would be guilty of being the monsters you think we are.”
After the reveal, the U.S. government called for a census of the vampires; surprisingly, the population was relatively small. Dorian’s clan lived on the remote island twenty-six miles of the western coast called Bryony.
Much was made about that vampires had been hidden for centuries right under everyone’s noses. People didn’t trust the vampires would be content to continue to live on their lump of desolate rock out in the ocean now that they had been outed. Many demanded the government regulate them, put trackers on them, make sure they knew who was vampire and who was human.
Unless you pulled them out into the sunlight, took their body temperature, or checked their mouths for very sharp canines (not a good idea) it wasn’t easy to tell someone was a vampire just by looking at them.
The solution, after many years of back and forth negotiation, was to declare Bryony Island a city state, its own principality, similar to Singapore. As such, anyone coming or going to Bryony was required to have papers and travel was watched very carefully by both vampire and human governments.
After that interview Dorian’s fame was locked. In the years since he became the face of the vampire race, an envoy between humans and vampires and everyone’s imaginary vampire boyfriend.
Olive used to be a rabid vamp-fan when she was a kid, sneaking on-line at the library, frequenting blogs and sites devoted to all things vampy. Not so much these days, it was only when Dorian ventured out to make an appearance to glad hand some government goon or display that sharp smile of his smile on a red carpet that Olive got a ping.
The familiar two tone beep that signaled someone needing help at the pumps came through her phone.
“Damn, perfect timing as usual.” Jamie sighed.
Jamie was still on the clock at the Gas-N-Go near the Concord University campus. He liked to joke that it was as close to attending to university as he was likely to get. He’d been an ace student all through school and had broken the guidance counselor’s heart by not applying to any of the universities slavering over him.
Instead he’d taken a low stress job with moderate pay. He rented a room from an old lady five blocks from the station and biked to work. He spent his days off kayaking white water, surfing, or hanging by the tips of his fingers off sheer cliff faces; if it was dangerous then you’d find Jamie Miller doing it.
He tried to teach Olive how to surf once but her unwillingness to freeze in the Pacific ocean and utter lack of coordination put a halt to her lessons. Movie marathons were Olive’s sport of choice. He and Olive were different as chalk and cheese, but they’d been thrown into the same fox hole a longtime ago. They had each other’s back then and now, he was the only person Olive truly trusted.
Dorian and Trina’s original interview came to an abrupt end as the countdown clock filled the screen, it counted down from ten seconds. The chat box filled with excited emojis. The view count was a blur as the numbers increased.
“It’s starting!” Olive called to her phone. She heard the slap of Jamie’s boot clad feet as he ran into the convenience store.
“Back!” She heard him turn up the screen mounted behind the counter. “You heard there was going to be a special announcement tonight, right?”
Olive hadn’t but figured the fifteen year anniversary would be a pretty good time to drop another bombshell.
“Wonder what it could be?”
“We’re about to find out.”
The network graphic grew large as dramatic news music swelled then faded. Trina Attwood’s face filled the screen. She looked down the barrel of the camera, her dark eyes making contact with millions across the world.
“Welcome, viewers!”
The camera pulled back, she wore a bright blue sheath dress that complimented her dark skin and sky high matching pumps. Sitting in a white leather desk chair, she had her long legs crossed at the ankles, the picture of cool calm.
The camera moved again to include in the frame a small couch arranged at a conversational angle to Trina’s chair. And on the couch nearest Trina was the one and only Dorian Le Fay.
Olive’s stomach did a little flip as is always did when she looked at him. She chided herself, telling herself she wasn’t a kid anymore, but damn! He really was gorgeous.
His tall, broad body dwarfed the couch he draped himself across. Dressed in his typical sharply tailored suit, the topmost buttons of his crisp dress shirt were left open, baring a vee of pale skin. His artfully messy collar length hair gleamed blue black under the studio lights. An arm flung, oh so casually, along the back of the couch completed the look of a man with everything under control.
“It’s nice to see you Dorian,” Trina smiled. “You’re looking well.”
“And I you, Trina,” his smooth as silk voice hinted at an accent of undetermined origin. “You’re looking wonderful.”
Although she looked incredible she had clearly aged. She had been a junior reporter for Media One News fifteen years ago, a fresh faced 23 year old up and comer who had just started earning screen time with fluff pieces. It had been Dorian himself who called upon her to do the original interview.
For years the gossip rags speculated why Dorian chose her above all others for the monumental broadcast. The stories were quite inflated and the shipfic was eye wateringly graphic.
Surprisingly, Trina steered clear of vampire stories in the ensuing years, focusing on politics and world events with the occasional strung out celebrity sprinkled in for spice. Her career might have been triggered by vampires, but she wisely didn’t build her professional house on the shifting sands of their popularity.
Trina smiled at the compliment, tipping her head toward him. “And you’ve not aged a day, Mr. Le Fay.”
Vampires did age, albeit very slowly, their metabolism being much slower than a human’s was the contributing factor in their very long life spans. The eldest pureblood vampire on record lived to be over two-thousand years old. It was what made the risk of death at being turned so attractive to humans. Olive suspected the reality of living that long was more of a grass is greener situation.
“A thought I told you to call me, Dorian,” he smoldered right at the camera and smiled that scary/sexy smile. The chat box filled up with folks digitally swooning and certain prodigious vegetable emojis. Olive and Jamie shared a laugh.
“C’mon, man, what’s the surprise!” Jamie complained.
“They have to ramp everyone up,” Olive explained. “The view count is just 2 million. I’ll bet they won’t do anything until it hits another 250 k.”
Jamie groaned, patience was not one of his virtues. It seemed the same could be said for the viewers online. Many comments about leaving and complaints about teasing scrolled by in Olive’s sidebar.
Olive got up and went to make herself a snack, taking her phone with her. She tore open a packet of instant miso soup and poured it into a cup, then put her kettle on the electric hot plate.
Trina laughed and touched the feed-bud in her right ear. “As much as I’d like to catch up, our audience is growing impatient for the announcement you’ve come to deliver.”
“Yes! Thank you!” came Jamie’s voice from her phone.
“Humans lack patience,” Dorian shrugged lazily.
The chat feed exploded again, and Trina winced a fraction at what was no doubt a colorful tirade from her producer in her ear.
“That might be true Dorian,” Trina grinned. She was definitely having fun sparing with him again. “But unlike you, we aren’t getting any younger.”
Dorian’s eyes glimmered mischievously. “Such a shame.”
She made an effort to look stern. “Dorian.”
“Very well,” he conceded.
Dorian straightened from his sprawl on the couch and stood up. Trina looked a bit startled and uncrossed her legs, her brows pulling together. It was clear whatever Dorian was about to do she’d not been made aware of it.
“I would like to introduce someone,” he said, straightening his jacket. “Someone very special.”
Trina stood as well, her eyes going wide as she reacted to the information from her producer in her ear.
“Trina, and my dear viewers, may I present,” Dorian gestured to the left, the camera swung to a closed red velvet curtain. “Her majesty, Josette Forêt, queen and ruler of Bryony Island.”
“Whoa!” Jamie exclaims.
Everyone knew the vampires were ruled by a queen, someone who was hundreds of years old. Reclusive as her people, she’d never consented to an interview, nor were there any known photographs or vids of her.
“Told you, bombshell!” Olive excitedly turned the volume up on her laptop.
The velvet curtain parted revealing a woman, the spotlight behind her threw her tall shape into silhouette. The woman walked forward. She looked to have long dark hair and was wearing a slim pair of pants and heeled boots highlighting her long legs. The woman walked into the light….
Every single sound stopped for Olive as her attention compressed to a single pinpoint. The woman, the queen, the queen of the vampires. Looked just like her.
“What the actual fu-“
Behind her on the counter Olive’s kettle began to boil.
Well, Olive’s evening has taken quite the turn hasn’t it? Stay tuned to read more excerpts in the coming weeks as the release date becomes firm.
See you next time!
Kathleen
Kathleen Rear 