Angel of Vengeance

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by Trevor O. Munson


  As I center the crude stake over her heart, she reaches up and takes hold of my wrist weakly. “Do me a favor and scatter the ashes this time, lover,” she says in a waning whisper. “I don’t want to come back like this.”

  I nod once. Then I drive the stake down. Hard.

  26

  I follow Reesa up the beach. It’s a simple matter, just follow the tracks in the sand. I can see her up ahead running along the water’s edge, skirt held high to keep it from tripping her. Her hair looks like spun blood in the moonlight; so lovely it makes me salivate.

  She screams when my hand falls on her neck. She never heard me coming. She turns and fights. Her fists beat at my face and chest until I grab them and make them stop. She struggles a moment more and then the fight goes out of her.

  “Kill me. I don’t care. I’ll just become what I want to be anyway. Like you.”

  I stare down into her defiant eyes. I don’t hunt women. I don’t feed on them. I don’t hurt them. No women, no children, no innocents, those are the rules. My rules. Without them I become what I dread most—a monster.

  But this one—she’s no innocent. She’s already infected. The disease is in her. So the question becomes, when is a vampire truly a vampire? Maybe it’s as futile as trying to determine when a fetus becomes a baby, but someone has to decide, don’t they? Someone has to take responsibility, because maybe sometimes an abortion is necessary. If you knew, really knew, that the kid was going to grow up to be a Hitler, or a Bundy—or Coraline, for instance. Maybe that makes bending a rule all right. Breaking it even.

  I look at her. I give her the gaze. “Let’s go back to the house,” I say.

  The fear and defiance ebb from her eyes, leaving a vacancy sign behind.

  “Back,” she murmurs.

  The moonlight shimmers on the wet sand like a chalk outline around a body. We retrace our steps to the beach house hand in hand. Anyone seeing us now would just think we were lovers out for a romantic late night stroll.

  We leave the sand behind for weathered wood and creaking stairs. We go up and in.

  “Lay down and close your eyes,” I say gently.

  The sun is coming. I feel its approach like a fever. Have to hurry now.

  Reesa goes over to her oriental carpet and lies down and closes her eyes just as I’ve told her. Watching her, my conscience tugs at me, but having a conscience doesn’t mean you can’t go against it now and then. It just means maybe you won’t like yourself much in the morning if you do.

  So there it is.

  I bend and kiss those perfect lips. Then I stand and light a smoke and wonder how the hell I’m going to make myself do what I know needs doing...

  In the end it’s as simple as dropping a match.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  I came up with the idea for Angel of Vengeance and the character Mick Angel sometime in 2005. At that point, I had already had a long love affair with vampires, but I’d never written anything in the genre. To me it was only a worthwhile pursuit if I had a new and fresh way in to the vampire mythos. The idea for a hard-boiled, noir vampire story came to me after rereading Dracula and following it up with a Raymond Chandler novel. Blending two of the genres I loved best by creating a bloodsucking Phillip Marlowe who was turned in the forties, and continued on as a living anachronism in the present day seemed like it held a lot of potential to be that story.

  The novel that resulted is a much darker tale than that depicted in Moonlight, the TV show that eventually evolved from it. Having gone down a promising, but ultimately dead-end road with a previous unpublished crime novel, I decided the best route to publication was to return to my Hollywood roots by adapting the manuscript into a feature screenplay, and work backwards to publishing the novel. The result was that I ended up being put together with Ron Koslow (creator of Beauty and the Beast, and a man I have come to consider a good friend and mentor) to create a pilot for CBS for the 2006 development season.

  What Ron and I came up with was, in many ways, a lighter, more romantic version of the dark noir Los Angeles underbelly I had created in the book, but it retained many of the novel’s themes of redemption and transcendence. The mandate from CBS was that they loved the main character and the vampire world, but they wanted the show to have a strong romantic angle. As a result, one of the first challenges Ron and I faced was to find a romantic core for the story to revolve around. We decided that Coraline was far too dark and dangerous a femme fatale to be Mick’s constant love interest. As a potential solution, I mentioned to Ron that although there was no Mick/Beth romance in my first novel, Mick does save a little girl from Coraline, and I had been thinking of exploring the ensuing romance between Mick and the grown up girl he watches over in a later novel, which I planned to call “Guardian Angel”. He liked the idea. With Ron on board, the concept for Moonlight was born, and together he and I hashed out a new mythology for the characters that would come to populate the series. A whirlwind year and a half later, despite having built a strong and rabid fan-base, and winning the People’s Choice Award for best new drama, the show had sadly come and gone, and I had yet to find a publisher for the novel that spawned it.

  For a while, it looked as if the window was gone, and that perhaps the book would never be published at all. But much like vampires themselves, a good vampire story dies hard, and in the past year, with the help of those who continued to believe in it, the manuscript found its way into the hands of the good people at Titan who offered to publish it. As a result, my longterm plan to work backwards to the novel has finally come to be. I hope you have enjoyed the read as much as I enjoyed the writing of it. It was truly a labor of love and love lost for me.

  T.O.M., October 2010

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Trevor Munson began his Hollywood career when his script ‘Lone Star State of Mind’ was bought and produced in 2002 by Sony Screen Gems. Trevor went on to write his first novel, Angel of Vengeance, which eventually became the CBS television series Moonlight for which he was Co-Creator and Co-Executive Producer.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to everyone who helped make this novel a reality, from those who read it and didn’t hate it in its early stages, to those who believed in it when no one else did. I couldn’t have done it without you. As those who know, know, the road to publication for this novel was a long and arduous one. Special thanks to my manager, Kevin Donahue, who always believed and was a driving force in finding others who did too. Also, sincere thanks to my WME literary agent, Rebecca Oliver, and my Titan editor, Jo Boylett, for shepherding the project and helping me hone it for human consumption. A six year-old boy with an idea of somehow becoming an author one day thanks you for helping him realize his dream...

  AVAILABLE MAY 2011

  ANNO DRACULA

  Kim Newman

  It is 1888 and Dracula has married Queen Victoria

  and turned a large percentage of the English population

  into undead.

  Peppered with familiar characters from Victorian

  history and fiction — Dr Jekyll, Oscar Wilde,

  Swinburne, John Jago — the story follows vampire

  Genevieve Dieudonné and human Charles Beauregard

  of the Diogenes Club as they strive to solve the mystery

  of the Ripper murders.

  ISBN: 9780857680839

  WWW.TITANBOOKS

  OUT NOW

  SUPERNATURAL: HEART OF THE DRAGON

  Keith R.A. DeCandido

  The brothers face the powerful spirit behind a series of

  particularly brutal killings in San Francisco’s Japantown.

  ISBN: 9781848566002

  SUPERNATURAL: THE UNHOLY CAUSE

  Joe Schreiber

  When a Civil War reenactment in Georgia becomes all too

  real, Sam and Dean head south to investigate.

  ISBN: 9781848565289

  SUPERNATURAL: WAR OF THE SONS

  Rebecca Dessertine & David Reed

&n
bsp; The boys find themselves in a small town in South Dakota

  where they meet an angel with a proposition.

  ISBN: 9781848566019

  COMING SOON

  SUPERNATURAL: ONE YEAR GONE

  Rebecca Dessertine

  Dean travels to Salem in search of a way to resurrect Sam,

  but his brother is not as far away as he thinks.

  ISBN: 9780857680990

  SUPERNATURAL: COYOTE’S KISS

  Christa Faust

  Sam and Dean discover murder and a whole new

  world of monsters at the Mexican border.

  ISBN: 9780857681003

  WWW.TITANBOOKS

  THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF

  SHERLOCK HOLMES SERIES

  OUT NOW

  THE VEILED DETECTIVE David Stuart Davies

  ISBN: 9781848564909

  THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

  Manly Wade Wellman & Wade Wellman

  ISBN: 9781848564916

  THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN Daniel Stashower

  ISBN: 9781848564923

  THE SCROLL OF THE DEAD David Stuart Davies

  ISBN: 9781848564930

  THE MAN FROM HELL Barrie Roberts

  ISBN: 9781848565081

  THE STALWART COMPANIONS H. Paul Jeffers

  ISBN: 9781848565098

  THE SEVENTH BULLET Daniel D. Victor

  ISBN: 9781848566767

  SÉANCE FOR A VAMPIRE Fred Saberhagen

  ISBN: 9781848566774

  DR JEKYLL AND MR HOLMES Loren D. Estleman

  ISBN: 9781848567474

  THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS Edward B. Hanna

  ISBN: 9781848567498

  THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA Richard L. Boyer

  ISBN: 9781848568600

  THE ANGEL OF THE OPERA Sam Siciliano

  ISBN: 9781848568617

  COMING SOON

  THE PEERLESS PEER Philip José Farmer

  ISBN: 9780857681201

  THE STAR OF INDIA Carole Buggé

  ISBN: 9780857681218

  WWW.TITANBOOKS.COM

  OUT NOW

  RUNESCAPE

  BETRAYAL AT FALADOR

  T.S. Church

  In the kingdom of Asgarnia, the Knights of Falador

  defend the land and protect the people. But when

  a young woman’s stormy arrival launches a chain

  of events that endangers the very fabric of magic,

  the knights must solve the riddle of Kara-Meir or

  everything they hold close may be lost. But hope may

  lie with an untested squire named Theodore.

  ISBN: 9781848567221

  RETURN TO CANIFIS

  T.S. Church

  In Varrock, the greatest human city in the world, people

  are being taken by an inhuman abductor, its victims

  murdered... or worse, spirited away to Morytania,

  where vampires rule. As unrest grows, the King sends

  the now-famous Kara-Meir and her friends across the

  holy river into Morytania, the land of the dead.

  ISBN: 9781848567276

  WWW.TITANBOOKS.COM

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

 

 


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