Blood Passages

This coming Thursday, I'm visiting FANGTASTIC BOOKS and will be sharing Valentine Cocktails from my main characters, including a "Bloody Good" recipe from Menessos...  I'll share the link when it goes live!

Since there are vampires in my novels, blood is a component of many scenes. In keeping with our weekly topic of BLOOD here are a few tantalizing tidbits from my books:

     ... His fingers glided over the lacy edge of the black bra before deftly unfastening the front clasp. Menessos removed and discarded my bra.

     The exposure both horrified and thrilled me. Energy fluttered along my skin, stronger than ever before. My hands, still outstretched, turned palms up.

     “Fire,” he whispered.

     The biting power of fire raced over me, focusing on intimate places. I had an inkling now as to why some witches did their rituals naked—sky-clad, as they called it. It felt good.

     Menessos sliced the tip of his finger open with his fang in a motion that looked more like he was dabbing at something at the corner of his mouth. Blood welled up. He licked the first drops away, savoring them, then reached out to me.

     My body flowed forward, spine bowing to arch toward him—if I took an actual step, I could not tell. His index finger touched my sternum between my breasts and sank lower, leaving a smear of his blood.

       --VICIOUS CIRCLE pg. 277

     Menessos took three steps forward, hand out, palms open in a show of nonaggression. “If my pain pleases you, Xerxadrea, if you delight in hearing of it, then come down from your dais, witch. Come down and make me bleed of your own hand, that you may be happy once more.”

     Before I could even turn back to her, the Eldrenne glided past me to accept his offer.

         --HALLOWED CIRCLE pg. 187


     Blood dripped from her old finger onto the rainbow moonstone; I felt it. I felt each drop like a giant forge hammer crushing me, flattening me like molten steel, until the binding became fused to each and every cell in my body, an amalgamation that could never, ever be undone.

        --HALLOWED CIRCLE pg. 257

   Xerxadrea continued. “His {Menessos's} perception has been transformed by eons of blood. He has worn the fabric of this world for so long it’s threadbare and holds no mysteries for him now. He has mastered the patterns. Whatever moment in time you’re bitterly clinging to and trying to alter . . . it’s merely a thread to him. He can sever it as easily as he can fray it into a hellish and frantic existence for you. Or he can reweave that thread, making those seconds produce an outcome to fit the necessary and inevitable truth he uniquely sees, and it is that truth of which I spoke.”

        --FATAL CIRCLE pg. 28

     The predatory, masculine countenance returned, and his eyes became glistening pools of gray. He rose and came around his desk as he spoke. “We all fight for what we achieve and what we want, don’t we?” He settled into a lean against the front of his desk, then lifted a tendril of my damp hair, admired the bandage, and reached toward my neck. In the next instant, he ripped the wide Band-Aid free.

     “Ow!” I tried to slap him. He restrained my wrist.

     “I know how this works, Persephone.” He dropped the bandage into a waste basket. I tried to pull my wrist free; he held on. “I know how you work . . . and then you ‘pull some new stunt’ and I find that truly, I don’t.”

     The skin on my neck was burning from the rough bandage removal. When he didn’t continue, I muttered, “Glad to know the feeling’s mutual.”

     “But that’s just it, the ‘feeling’ isn’t.” The tone of his voice was laced with a despondency that touched my heart.

     Enough of this. Every time he ignited my rage, he followed it with stirring my heart, or vice versa, shifting until my resistance was gone and my anger was fully triggered. Let’s skip ahead this time. Intending to invoke the power pull, I visualized it and felt the charge of energy materialize—

     Menessos jerked on my arm, yanking me easily into his embrace, and sank his teeth into me.

     I screamed and, my concentration lost, dropped the attempt.

     He raised his mouth from my neck and stood straight, but his grip stayed vise-tight. He hadn’t fed, just reopened the wounds or made new ones. Drops of my blood stained his lips, ran into his beard. “You may have the means to drain my energy, but I can drain yours, as well.”

     A trickle of blood slowly rolled down my neck.

     Menessos came at me again. I feared he would bite me again, but he smeared blood from his lips across my cheek and whispered into my ear, “There’s much more to mastery

than simply holding the upper hand.” He jerked the collar of my robe open, exposing my neck and breasts, and bent, licking where the blood had run.

       --FATAL CIRCLE pg. 150-151