Blood Lure

Is it one of the great truisms of romance writers that everyone has a vampire story tucked away somewhere? Yeah, me, too. Here's a snippet from the beginning. The heroine is a witch - this implies both religion and magic. She's been called in by the police department to consult on a set of ritual murders - trying to understand what ritual was being performed and to what purpose.

            “No one works this site after dark,” I said.

            Silence met my pronouncement. I glanced up. The ring of police sneered at me.
            “Sure. We have all the time in the world for a good night’s sleep,” Officer Crandell snapped. “This is a murder investigation. . .”
            “And if you work this investigation past sundown, it’ll be a massacre,” I retorted.
            He jerked back as if I’d hit him. “Sunset? You can’t be serious. Vampires?”
            Tanya closed a hand around my arm. “This is a vamp site?”
            “It’s a prison.”
            They stared at me as if I’d sprouted wings.
            I stared back, horrified and amazed at the blank faces. “Do you not feel the weight? The hooks digging in as you move nearer that corner? Can you not feel the rage? The vampire is trapped.”
            Uneasiness crawled through the knot of blue uniforms.
            “For the love of God, don’t free it!” one of the uniforms grumbled.
            “That isn’t my intention,” I replied. “The vampire nation polices its own. Any vampire they consider enough of a threat to bury in a place like this isn’t high on my let’s-be-friends list.”
            “Not to mention that mucking with vampire magic ends so badly for anyone who isn’t a vamp,” Tanya muttered.
            “Not to mention,” I agreed.
            “So, vampires murdered three people to imprison someone?” Crandell asked. “Sacrifices for some kind of spell?”
            “What do you smell here?” I asked.
            The cops glanced around, nostrils flaring, noses wrinkling.
            “Death,” said one.
            “Blood,” Tanya said.
            I nodded. “Blood. Vampires don’t waste blood. Not like this. Vampires didn’t commit these murders. You don’t trap a predator with the blood of its prey.”
            Crandell’s eyes widened. “It’s a lure?”
           “That’s my guess,” I said. “And that’s all it is. But given the amount of blood, the placement and the fact that the trapped vamp is awake within his prison. . .”
            Crandell’s eyebrows climbed. “Him?”
            I shrugged. “Overwhelming sense of masculine presence. Every susceptible man and woman in this room feels it.” I glanced at Tanya. She’d hunched her shoulders. When she caught me looking, she forced them down and back. When I looked at the one gay investigator, he met my gaze, rolled his eyes and wiped sweat from his upper lip.
          “I stumbled into one of his snares,” I said. “I got a good look at him.”
           Tanya gasped. “And he at you?”
           I shrugged. “He is trapped.”
           “For how long?”
            Uneasiness roiled through my gut. “I don’t know. As if you didn’t have incentive enough to catch the killer, I suspect this is a mortal’s attempt to free the vampire and bind him to service.”
           “Is that possible?”
           “I don’t know that it’s impossible,” I said. “I am motivated to find out.”
           Crandell blinked, then frowned. “Because the vamp has a lock on you, now.”
           “Because he has a lock on me.”

So Pretentious. Much red.

by Allison Pang

I've been battling the flu the last few days so forgive me if I sound a little out of it. On the other hand, being sick means I've been eating a lot of citrus fruit to help stave off anything worse. Which brings me to the topic at hand:

Blood Oranges.

See what I did there?

To be honest, I'm only eating the normal sorts of oranges, but I will say there has been an uptick about the shade of this particular color of fruit.

But I'm sick, so I won't. However, as funny as as the meme is, yes there is a difference in actual red vs blood orange, but I'm just doing my part to spread amusement. 

On a different note - how good are YOU at distinguishing color? Try this test out and see what your score is:

http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge

I did score a perfect, but I've got years of sewing experience - ask anyone who sews how much fun it is to separate thread colors that have shades like: Bright Red, Orange Red, Dark Orange Red, Light Red Orange,  Very Light Red, Peach, Crimson - all for the same project. >_<

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

 

Love Blood

I loves me some blood... Captain Blood to be precise. 1935.  Errol Flynn. Basil Rathbone. Good man done wrong. The decline and the redemption. Pirates. Buccaneers. Rakes. Swords. Battles on the High Seas.

Yep. I watch it every time it comes on the telly. Really, I watch anything with Errol Flynn or Basil Rathbone. The movies they did together? I watched those more than Saturday Morning Cartoons. Okay, okay, okay.  I would have had I been a child in the days of DVDs, On Demand, or Streaming. 

That reminds me, I ought to go back re-read Sabatini's novels Captain Blood and Scaramouche.

~wanders off in search of the worn tattered copies~

It's in the Blood

I'm in San Diego this weekend, doing a training for my day job. This is the view *outside* the convention center where I'm spending most of my time, alas. Fortunately it's an excellent training and I've learned some great stuff.

That said, I don't have much time to write this post. I might be pulling a bit of a James here. ;-)

Which is too bad, because the word of the week is one of my favorite things: BLOOD.

No, really.

I even did a paper in college about the religious significance of blood rituals.

They are there, throughout the various pre-Judeo-Christian ("Pagan") religions, in the Torah, the Qu'oran, the Bible. Elaborate practices and beliefs have been built around the letting of blood.

Some examples:

• Virginity and the evidence of blood
• Menstruation along with those taboos and rituals
• First blood as a signifier in a duel
• Kosher practices for clean blood-letting
• Blood sacrifice
• Jesus giving wine to his disciples to drink and calling it his blood

When you start paying attention, you'll find the concept comes up over and over. Why?

Now we understand how blood can carry disease, but so can other bodily fluids. I haven't seen many religious rituals built around pus or snot, for example.

Blood is the life-giver. It takes the place of the sea that used to surround us, that we took inside, to go on land. It is the internal primordial ocean.

Magic.