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.
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SUPERNATURAL: HEART OF THE DRAGON
Keith R.A. DeCandido
The brothers face the powerful spirit behind a series of
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SUPERNATURAL: THE UNHOLY CAUSE
Joe Schreiber
When a Civil War reenactment in Georgia becomes all too
real, Sam and Dean head south to investigate.
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Rebecca Dessertine & David Reed
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SUPERNATURAL: ONE YEAR GONE
Rebecca Dessertine
Dean travels to Salem in search of a way to resurrect Sam,
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SUPERNATURAL: COYOTE’S KISS
Christa Faust
Sam and Dean discover murder and a whole new
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THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF
SHERLOCK HOLMES SERIES
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THE VEILED DETECTIVE David Stuart Davies
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THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
Manly Wade Wellman & Wade Wellman
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THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN Daniel Stashower
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THE SCROLL OF THE DEAD David Stuart Davies
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THE MAN FROM HELL Barrie Roberts
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THE STALWART COMPANIONS H. Paul Jeffers
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THE SEVENTH BULLET Daniel D. Victor
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SÉANCE FOR A VAMPIRE Fred Saberhagen
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DR JEKYLL AND MR HOLMES Loren D. Estleman
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THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS Edward B. Hanna
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THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA Richard L. Boyer
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THE ANGEL OF THE OPERA Sam Siciliano
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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.
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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
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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
Angel of Vengeance Page 17