After I wrote this for him – his last few days and thoughts. Not online, of course – on paper. Perhaps someday, someone will read this, but it wouldn’t matter. Queendom come: it won’t matter then. It’s only a few years now, anyway. I left his body in the room – Claire and Jolie are [...]

xx Shit. Double shit. You can’t beat the system. You always pay for your sins, in one life or the next. Right? I knew that. I had been lying in the dark for what seemed like hours. No more light streamed at the edges of the window, but Jane had turned a knob before she [...]

xix I remember feeling feverish. My throat burned with a pain that none of Jane or Claire’s bites had left. I was weak – even the sheets thrown over me were too heavy to lift. I remember Jane undressing me in the dark and putting me to bed. I remember waking when she let other [...]

xviii My eyelids popped to the clack-clack of heels on the wooden floor. I had no idea how much time had passed – it could have been minutes or hours. I had a headache. My throat burned and felt heavy as lead. I could barely breathe. The specter was on me, clutching my shoulders and [...]

xvii Claire’s eyes were still locked to me as she now stood far away, by the door, whispering urgently into the receiver. I dropped back to the settee and closed my eyes. Shit. So much for discretion. I heard her door open and shut, and I knew she had locked me in again. I had [...]

xvi You see, vampires had managed to gain their social acceptance – where they had managed to gain it – because the living citizens of those communities were thoroughly convinced that their soul was eternal. Before the Lens changed their paradigm, their blood and their flesh – their life – were all people really had. [...]

xv I picked over my words before I answered Claire, choosing another vague but accurate response. Choosing again whether or not to be an idiot. “I’m just done,” I told her. I chose poorly. She smiled, and played with the folds of my ear between her fingers. “It’s certainly not a bad way to go [...]

xiv I probably should have explained something earlier, but most people know it already. By this time, the majority of prostitution around the world was run by vampires. Sure, there were still nickel and dime girls out there with a breath and a heartbeat, but the business was a vampire business. So a lot of [...]

xiii Later, when we were still on the settee, I thought I might like that cigarette after all. I lied on my back while she sat between my calves, idly stroking my thigh with her nails as if to excite me back to action again, and she said (now without the accent), “Jane sure knows [...]

xii Her frustrations seemed to be gone after about an hour of my carefully-supervised ministrations, not that I was watching the clock. She smoked an old-fashioned paper cigarette afterward. I didn’t smoke, though I didn’t mind the smell and wasn’t too worried about my lungs at this point. I was still building my strength, she [...]

xi Later in the evening, we were back in my cell. Rather, I was in my cell and she was in the doorway, leaning up against the frame. I had written a bit in my journal – a final entry – and set it to expire, so it would delete if no one stumbled across [...]

x The tattoo seemed to be a hall pass too. Jane led me first to a floor with long halls stretching off in both directions, lined by tightly-packed doors on either side. The doors were numbered, and we strolled down the left hall until we found number 276. She produced a small fob and waved [...]

ix True to her word, Jane had a pair of shears waiting when I emerged from the shower; she cut each leash down to about six inches and tucked in the loose ends on my ankles to keep me from tripping. The wrists she left dangling for “easy handling”. She had changed into a flower [...]

viii I woke the next morning to a brightly sunlit room. A pale yellow glow shone in from the wall of windows, painting a faded, impressionistic image of the web-draped bed against the far wall. I propped myself up and saw that my wrists and ankles were still tightly bound in last night’s silk ties. [...]

vii I was still mulling myself over when the lights in the room guttered and dropped like a candle flame. There was rustling by the fucking bed, but I barely heard it, and didn’t turn to look. I didn’t turn to look yet, not until the screen flickered back to a tinted window and I [...]

vi The sun had set, and by the time we got back onto the freeway the twilight line was moving west across the sky, chasing the oranges and purples toward the horizon. Jane fished a moist towelette out of her purse, and I wiped down my face. Though the road was empty, she slid over [...]

v We didn’t go straight there – wherever there was. She asked me to show her around the town – the places I’d worked, the spots I’d hung out. There wasn’t much to show, since I hadn’t done much after the university. I didn’t really hang out. I didn’t even move more than a few [...]