It’s cold and dark and Evelyn is in the morgue. In a drawer. She doesn’t know how she got there, and Tammi, the morgue attendant who hustles her out into the night, doesn’t have time to answer questions. Evelyn has been robbed of the gift of immortality her absent lover promised her, and plunged instead, alone, into the night-time world of the vampire. In her search for love and belonging Evelyn must contend with a series of lovers who have their own ideas about what being a vampire means, and who she should be.
Excerpt
I was cold when I woke up, and confused. I should be in my narrow bed in my dorm room at the Academy, where the window was a square of faint orange from the parking lot lights and another bright bar of light from the hall seeped in under the door. But it was too dark. Was the power out? It was so dark that I wasn’t sure I had my eyes open at first, but then I blinked and my lashes brushed against something that was over my face. I moved my right hand to push it away and my fingers felt numb and cold. They brushed my thigh and I could barely feel either my thigh under my fingertips, or my fingers passing over my skin.
There was something over me and my first thought was that I was wrapped in silk like a spider’s prey, silk spun by a giant spider with Simms’ head, and each of its eight legs ended in a needle.
I was drifting off into a quicksand of unconsciousness and I deliberately pulled myself out of it.
I opened my mouth to speak, and pain lanced me in the side as I inhaled. It made me think of the crucifix hanging in the school chapel with a plaster Jesus bleeding from below his ribs. “Where…?” I whispered. My voice sounded like the rustle of tissue paper.
Evelyn's Journal
by MJ Gardner (All formats) – 77,510 words
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