Naturally, there was one place Shana wished to go and that was the cemetery. Rational thought would have dictated that she avoid the place where she encountered the mad man just nights before, and for that matter, avoid the creature who was sowing fissures in her most near and dear relationships. But rational thought could not cut through the spell that gripped Shana.
Still reveling in a reprisal of her adolescence, she wandered around the cemetery, admiring the gravestones of various arcane, elaborate shapes: the obelisks, the busts, the low-laying slabs. As she used to do, she went by each of them making up little two-sentences stories about the people who rested beneath. Nora Joralemon wore high heels every day. She never learned to surf like she saw on TV. Chet Yantis was always tinkering with the household appliances. His son never got a hug after puberty.
As she approached Baker’s tomb, her knees quivered a little, breaking the even line of her stroll. The grass was a little more moist than usual, letting her shoe footprints sit for a little while longer before the grass rose back upright. The moon floating in and out of mist.
She found Baker standing outside of his mausoleum admiring the moon.
“Does it look any different after all these centuries?”
“Shana.” The vampire’s pale face lit up. “So good for you to come by.”
“No class tonight?”
“No.” They kissed. “Come.” The found a patch of that moist grass and sat down. Shana was wearing the same dress she wore to church, and the moisture quickly seeped through to her bottom.
They were far from Baker's mausoleum, and as such, did not see Tom pull up to it. Gripping a wooden stake, Tom rushed into the mausoleum to slay the vampire like he had seen in the movies. There was nobody in there. In his dumb way, Tom just kind of milled around for a second and picked at his fingernails.
A couple hundred yards away, his fiancee was being taken by a vampire. Shana was fellating the creature, enjoying the sensation of his frigid erection against the back of her pallette, for it reminded her of the refreshing sensation of an ice pop in the middle of a muggy Long Island heat wave. Feeling kinky, she slipped a finger into Baker's rear, and the vampire melted into the ground.
Determined, Tom Googled “when do vampires go to bed” on his phone. There weren't really results for this query. Not a very persistent man, Tom was on the verge of giving up. But sulky as a teen, he went to go curse the sky first. And that's when he saw the secret to his success on the ceiling.
The greatest lubricant in the world is human spit, and Shana always loved the sensation of a cock covered in her slobber being slipped into her hole. They lay on their sides, his hip inside her thigh, as they worked together to craft a lulling coital motion. It was slower, but they could each feel every centimeter of one another's organs at work, in exquisite harmony.
Shana told the vampire she would let him bite her, but not tonight.
Twice, Tom slipped down the side of the mausoleum as he lost his footing. He actually drove by a ladder that the groundskeeper left out on his way into the cemetery, but this is not information retained by Tom's one-track mind. “Motherfuck! How do I get up there?” Stomping around the structure in rage, Tom found a lattice of vines on the other side. He scrambled up the side and clutched for dear life on the slightly domed top.
Baker's body formed an arch, his head pushed down to hickey Shana's breasts while his bottom continued with its love making, the motions growing ever more insistent as Shana shivered in the intense sexual energy. The peculiar positioning of Baker's body was to prevent him from being tempted to draw the juice he so desperately needed, but it also made sure that his throbbing hard-on hit parts inside of Shana rarely frequented.
Shana climaxed for forty seconds straight.
Tom took off his Avenged Sevenfold t-shirt and wrapped it around his elbow.
Shana, mid-orgasm, pinned Baker's head to the ground, placing her forearm on his neck. The way he twisted gave them both intense satisfaction.
Tom ripped the blue tarp away from the glass skylight of the mausoleum. He smashed the glass with his elbow.
Shana sat upright, sweating profusely.
Tom writhed on the ground by his car as his elbow bled. The t-shirt did not keep any of the glass out.
Shana made her way back to the house. Tom found a $30 room at a no-name motor lodge.
Baker returned to his abode to sleep the day through. When the sunlight shone through the broken skylight, it did not annihilate him like Tom had hoped. No, in fact Tom did not shatter the whole skylight, but only a small section.
A narrow ray of sunlight shone down on Baker's crotch, and his penis sizzled off like water on red hot pavement.
Shana got the best night sleep she had since coming to Cleveland.
TO BE CONTINUED
Moonlight Desires (Book #3)
Chapter One
Tom tried Shana's phone again, opting not to leave a fourth voicemail. Words for a new message evaded him. He turned on the television and caught an Adam Sandler movie. It tickled him when Kevin James' character accidentally stapled his scrotum to a Snuggie, forcing him to wear the Snuggie on a hot date because he didn't have time to pry out the staple. “Man that's fucking rich,” said Tom to no one. Tom cracked open a Keystone Light. Tom tugged it to the thought of one of the motel cleaning women, who was kind of flat chested but had an ass that looked absolutely swollen. He finished within 90 seconds of starting. In the sadness that typically colored his post-orgasm deflation, Tom texted his fiancee again.
Tom more or less wouldn't leave his hotel room today, because he was convinced that Cleveland, with its boarded up houses, rusted-over warehouses and derelict bars and torn up pavement, was a tremendously dangerous place.
Shana hadn't been picking up her phone because she left it on silent all day. The state she was in could be diagnosed as schizophrenia if she were to experience for a long enough period of time. Half of her being was possessed by her infatuation for Baker, drunk on his sensual affection. The other half was consumed by worry: for her vanished nephew, for her sister and brother-in-law suffering through the ordeal, and for herself over Tom being the same city as she was right now. Reading did not quell Shana. Eating did not calm her. The television was just spouting information which evaded her attention completely.
As she had taken to doing the past few days, Shana walked. She wouldn't be able to tell you where she wandered, drifting through the city streets like some ghost obsessed with its own unfinished business. When she found herself standing outside of a 7-Eleven in Lakewood, she was confounded by the number of miles she must have walked to get to this point. She found herself outside of a 7-Eleven in Lakewood because there she witnessed a man having a seizure on the pavement.
Some instinct rose from a place inside of her which she was not aware of, some knowledge was remembered which she never learned in the first place. When she saw the man seizing on the Lakewood pavement - chunky black blood streaming from his nose and nylon track jacket tearing against the rough concrete, she grabbed a nail file from her purse and stuck in the man's mouth, depressing his tongue so that he wouldn't swallow it.
Shana screamed to a passerby to help hold down the man's shoulders, but before the passerby could make it over, the seizing man flailed his arms and smacked Shana in the face. She managed to keep the nail file on his tongue, but her eye socket throbbed.
The passerby was brawny and had no hair on his head whatsoever, not even eyebrows. If not for his leathery skin, his face would have bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Clean. He was not the leanest man in the world, but his arm's skin was pulled taught across bulky muscles, conforming to all sorts of unusual contours. Then again, Shana didn't ogle buff men all that often, so she wouldn't quite know the shapes that bone and muscles were supposed to make.
After a couple of minutes, the man on the ground stopped seizing. After agreement through some telepathic link, Shana took the nail file out of his mouth and took out her phone to call 9
11 as Mr. Clean held down the man for safety. It was then that she noticed 14 missed calls and 6 text messages, all from Tom. She relished the fact that she was about to talk to call in an emergency instead of calling back the dolt.
It amazed Shana how bored 911 operators always sounded. This specific one, Deb, kept telling Shana to keep calm even though Shana didn't think she sounded particularly distressed. Perhaps there was a note of disquiet in her voice when she noticed that Mr. Clean was still applying a great amount of pressure to the victim's shoulders. Shana leaned away from the phone.
“I think you can let go,” she said.
“What was that ma'am?” replied the operator, “You think I can let go of what?”
“No I wasn't talking to you.”
“Ma'am, the briefer we keep this conversation, the quicker an ambulance can get there. And I've got nothing to let go of, let me tell you.”
Shana did not appreciate being called “ma'am.” While trying to ascertain the two-streets that made up the intersection where the 7-Eleven sat, Shana became more aware of her surroundings, and in turn Mr. Clean's tattoos. They were a series of strange glyphs: a pentagram on the right bicep, ram's head on the right, some text written backwards in Latin along his clavicle, an upside down crucifix behind his ear.
Mr. Clean was courteous enough, just curt. When the EMTs showed up he provided little personal information. The EMTs rifled through the man's wallet looking for ID, and one of them attempted to pocket the cash. Mr. Clean caught this and started taking video on his phone as quickly as he could.
“If you return the cash and put that wallet back in his pocket, I'll delete this video right now.”
The EMT was mortified of Mr. Clean, the video, and the pentagram inked into his skin. You could see sunlight shimmer in the sweat that his skinny fingers left on the ten-dollar bill. As he slipped the wallet into the man's back pocket, the seized man groaned. “Ok, Mister?” asked the EMT.
Mr. Clean fiddled with his phone and chuckled to himself. “Nah, I'm going to keep this video anyway. No telling when it could come in handy.” Shana corroborated.
The man started to come to as the EMTs loaded him into the ambulance via gurney. He spit up that chunky black blood and it dribbled down his jaw.
Shana looked toward Mr. Clean. “Do you know Baker?”
He may have been caught off guard but his stony face didn't show it. “Yes.”
“When's the last time he turned a woman?”
Mr. Clean broke eye contact to stand. “Why do you care?” The flash of jealousy in Shana's face was all the answer that he needed. “Take my advice and stay away from Lake View Cemetery. These days the mortals that hang around that place are a lot more dangerous than the blood suckers.”
With not so much as a goodbye, Mr. Clean started off.
“I was chased,” Shana yelped when he was about a dozen steps away. Mr. Clean stopped but he did not turn around. His knee lifted to move him forward. “I was chased by some man, some man with a hobble. He broke the window of my car with an ice pick.”
This got Mr. Clean to turn around, but he did not walk towards Shana. Shana approached him.
“God knows where he wanted to stick that icepick, but I was done for.”
Mr. Clean turned to give her a dead-eyed stare. One of his biceps twitched involuntarily. “You will stay away from Lake View Cemetery.”
There was zero commitment on Shana's part. Just questions. “Do you know the man? His fingers were like little stubs. It's like he was missing parts of them, digits.”
“Tiny sacrifice. Parts of bodies at a time. You don't want to know who, or rather what, they're worshipping. You don't.”
“Do they kill people?”
“Not at first, no. Sometimes the people die from the mutilations, sometimes they are killed because they try to escape.”
Shana’s face was red hot and there was a three-pound stone in her chest. She hesitated a beat too long, but Mr. Clean waited. “Do they take children?”
“No. Not often. Sometimes.” It was at this moment that Shana lost all the strength she conjured to save the seizing man, that she broke through her malaise of lust for the vampire. It was at this moment that Shana bawled. Mr. Clean did something expected for a musclebound, stoic man covered in glyphs. He hugged this strange woman that he met through chance alone.
This was not a woman in good shape. The tears streaming out of her eyes lent a slick shimmer to the bruise forming around her eye where the seizing man had hit her. Her muscles loosened, human Shana morphing into a rag doll Shana. “My nephew... He's been gone since yesterday.” Mr. Clean rubbed her back with one hand and pressed her against him with the other.
After a few minutes, “How familiar are you with the teachings of Anton LaVey, the Church of Satan?”
Shana through tears and sniffles, “Satan? I've never worshipped Satan.”
“I have not worshipped in the church since a hack neo-nazi took it over, but I still practice the teachings of LaVey. I will help you,” he paused as if to say a name, his way of asking for hers. She lent it. “I will help you Shana, on the principal of Satanic virtue.”
Through her tears, a terror.
Mr. Clean gave a hearty laugh at this. “Satanic virtue, LaVey's interpretation oflex talionis, states 'do unto others as they do unto you.'” He paused to see if Shana caught his drift. Her face said that she barely had. “You guided me to save a man's life today. I will guide you to saving your nephew.”
Nothing made sense. Entrusting her nephew's well-being with a Satanist seemed like a bad move. But there was not much for anyone to lose in the proposition.
“Give me your telephone.” She did. Mr. Clean entered his information into it and texted himself. “Within 24 hours, you will receive a text message from me. I have not put my name in your phone, so you will have to trust a strange number. Likewise, I will not reveal myself when your nephew returns. This is a dangerous town for good samaritans and Satanists alike.”
Shana's eyes showed gratitude while her lip quivered in impending sobbing.
“Good day, Shana. Thank you for making me save that man today.”
When Mr. Clean left, Shana vomited. She went into that Lakewood 7-Eleven and purchased a Monster Energy drink, knowing it would be the only taste stronger than her own spew. In fact, that made her vomit again, as soon the caffeine and sugar rush proved too much for her frazzled psyche.
Chapter Two
Suze and Nate dug the vodka bottle out of the freezer hours ago, and by now there was only a shot or two left. They had made desperate love on any surface they found themselves near between anxious crying bouts.
There was a moment when Suze felt a peculiar swelling in her heart. It was when Nate was inside of her as she was sprawled on top of the dining room table. That swelling was one she remembered from when they were trying to conceive, that irrepressible feeling that their coital unity, their simple biological ecstasy, their mutual quest for climax, was for a future greater than either of them could actualize alone, one filled with hope, joy. It was a pregnancy of its own, a pregnancy of the soul.
Nate felt powerful, masculine for the first time in god knows how long, as he lifted her ankles up to his shoulder and put them together, exposing a new angle of attached between his belly and her thighs. The wonderful sensation of losing control of half of her body to her husband doubled the electric delight of the penis' head rubbing in circles around her g spot, tapping it directly whenever Nate would slip out a little bit. Their minds travelled to a plane of cosmic chaos as they lost themselves and all of their earthly worries in a singular, pure pursuit.
Shana walked into the house around sundown to find them in the middle of this scene. She yelped a small yelp and backed out of view of the dining room. They had not noticed her, or if they had they kept going without a care to give. Shana, out of curiosity, out of her own grief-induced unmooring, inched her head around the corner of the doorway to the dining room. It had been years since
she wondered what the act looked like between her sister and brother-in-law, and frankly she figured they were more or less asexual at this point. Not the case.
She saw her sister's face covered in sweat as if she had been sitting in a parked car during a heatwave. Her breasts fell to either side of her ribs and moved at their own rhythm, one contrary to the shared gyration of the lovers's pelvises. Nate's ass was desiccated, a little hairy, but his legs and arms showed definition. She never knew that Nate had a tattoo on the back of his right shoulder. It looked like the emblem for the motorcycle club he used to be part of: a skull in a crown of thorns.
Voyeurism always aroused Shana. Nothing is a bigger turn-on than the forbidden, after all. It wasn't that she fantasized about catching her sister in the act, but that there is a base, human drive which makes even the suggestion of the sexual an erotic experience. It's why they make sexy advertisements for cars and alcohol. The mind is remarkably vulnerable to such suggestion thanks to that pesky sex drive of ours. Once the erotic seed is planted, there are only so many ways to root it out.
It was dark when Shana's libido guided her out of the house. Contrary to Mr. Clean's advice, she bee-lined for Lake View Cemetery, a walk for which she somehow found energy despite her day walking more of Cleveland than she could possibly recall.
It was a humid spring night, the kind when the clouds form the kind of thick, grey blanket that the moon cannot shine through, which reflects the street light glow. It gave the typically nightmarish post-industrial scape of nocturnal Cleveland a pleasant, dream-like quality. It was a glow, a luminous gossamer which draped the bewitched city that May evening.
Shana didn't play any of her cemetery games. She didn't wander around looking for details that may have prompted lines of poetry when she was a teenager. She didn't speculate on the lives of the people buried beneath given gravestones. No, just as she darted for Lake View Cemetery, she darted for her post-life lover's stone cottage.
VAMPIRE ROMANCE: Moonlight Desires Complete Series (Books 1, 2, &3) (Paranormal Romance Collection, Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance With Sex) (Vampire Romance Boxed Set) Page 6