A reluctant vampire hunter, stalking New
York City as only a scorned bride can.
Elle
Dupree has her life all figured out: first a wedding, then her Ph.D., then
swank faculty parties where she’ll serve wine and cheese and introduce people
to her husband the lawyer.
But those
plans disintegrate when she walks in on a vampire draining the blood from her
fiancé Greg. Horrified, she screams and runs--not away from the vampire, but
toward it, brandishing a wooden letter opener.
As she
slams the improvised stake into the vampire’s heart, a team of black-clad men
bursts into the apartment. Turning around to face them, Elle discovers that
Greg’s body is gone—and her perfect life falls apart.
A Top-10 Preditors and Editors Readers' Poll Best Science
Fiction and Fantasy Novel
Excerpt
The worst thing
about vampires is that they're dead. That whole wanting to suck your blood
business runs a close second, but for sheer creepiness, it's the dead bit that
gets me every time. They're up and walking around and talking and sucking
blood, but they're dead. And then there's the whole terminology
problem--how can you kill something that's already dead? It's just wrong.
I was twenty-four
the first time I . . . destroyed? dispatched? . . . a vampire. That's when I
found out that all the books and movies are wrong. When you stick a wooden
stake into their hearts, vampires don't disintegrate into dust. They don't
explode. They don't spew blood everywhere. They just look surprised, groan, and
collapse into a pile of corpse. But at least they lie still then, like corpses
are supposed to.
Since that first
kill (I might as well use the word--there really isn’t a better one), I've
discovered that only if you're lucky do vampires look surprised before they
groan and fall down. If you're unlucky and miss the heart, they look angry. And
then they fight.
There are the other
usual ways to kill vampires, of course, but these other ways can get a bit
complicated. Vampires are notoriously difficult to trick into sunlight. They
have an uncanny ability to sense when there's any sunlight within miles of
them, and they're awfully good at hiding from it. Holy water doesn't kill them;
it just distracts them for a while, and then they get that angry look again.
And it takes a pretty big blade to cut off someone's head--even an already dead
someone--and carrying a great big knife around New York City, even the Bronx,
is a sure way to get arrested. Nope, pointy sticks are the best way to go, all
the way around.
My own pointy stick
is actually more of a little knife with wood inlay on the blade--the metal
makes it slide in easier. I had the knife specially made by an old Italian guy
in just about the only ratty part of Westchester, north of the city. I tried to
order one off the internet, but it turns out that while it’s easy to find
wood-inlay handles, the blades themselves tend to be metal. Fat lot those
people know.
But I wasn’t
thinking any of this when I pulled the knife out of the body on the ground. I
was thinking something more along the lines of “Oh, bloody hell. Not again.”
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Meet the Author
Margo Bond Collins is
the author of urban fantasy, contemporary romance, and paranormal mysteries.
She has published a number of novels, including Sanguinary, Taming
the Country Star, Legally Undead, Waking Up Dead, and Fairy, Texas. She
lives in Texas with her husband, their daughter, and several spoiled pets.
Although writing fiction is her first love, she also teaches college-level
English courses online. She enjoys reading romance and paranormal fiction of
any genre and spends most of her free time daydreaming about heroes, monsters,
cowboys, and villains, and the strong women who love them—and sometimes fight
them.
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