Angel of Vengeance (21 page)

Maybe it’s because I haven’t fed enough today. Maybe it’s the gaping hole in my chest. Maybe it’s the fresh bullet wound. Whatever the case, Cotney manages to hold the stake at bay while pulling me close enough to get his mouth on me. I feel his breath on my neck and then his teeth sink home and he begins to drink me dead.

My head spins. Knowing time is short, I dig in with my feet and heave with my legs in a final desperate lunge. It’s enough. I drive the stake into his heart. The drinking stops. Because he is immobilized I actually have to use my hands to free my neck from those bear-trap jaws.

“You wanted to know how it felt. Now you know,” I say, changing back to human form.

Exhausted, I push back and get to my knees as the business end of the .38 presses to my head. It’s no surprise to find Reesa at the other end. She doesn’t say a word. Just pulls the trigger.

Click. Empty. Too bad for her the last bullet is already in me.

Her eyes go wide as she realizes her predicament. I stand slowly, testing my limbs. Everything hurts.

Terrified, she drops the gun and flees down the long flight of wooden stairs to the moonlit beach below.

I watch her go. Then I break a slat from the wooden deck fence and head back inside, dragging Cotney by the hair behind me. The expression in his eyes seems to suggest he can’t believe it’s come to this. I guess that’s how everyone feels when the end comes sooner than expected.

I find Coraline still hacking and wheezing where she fell. Looks painful. I kneel by her and remove her hat and veil. I stare down into her melty eyes. I can’t tell if it’s love or hate I see there. Maybe it’s all the same thing to a woman like Coraline.

As I center the crude stake over her heart, she reaches up and takes hold of my wrist weakly. “Do me a favor and scatter the ashes this time, lover,” she says in a waning whisper. “I don’t want to come back like this.”

I nod once. Then I drive the stake down. Hard.

26

I
follow Reesa up the beach. It’s a simple matter, just follow the tracks in the sand. I can see her up ahead running along the water’s edge, skirt held high to keep it from tripping her. Her hair looks like spun blood in the moonlight; so lovely it makes me salivate.

She screams when my hand falls on her neck. She never heard me coming. She turns and fights. Her fists beat at my face and chest until I grab them and make them stop. She struggles a moment more and then the fight goes out of her.

“Kill me. I don’t care. I’ll just become what I want to be anyway. Like you.”

I stare down into her defiant eyes. I don’t hunt women. I don’t feed on them. I don’t hurt them. No women, no children, no innocents, those are the rules. My rules. Without them I become what I dread most—a monster.

But this one—she’s no innocent. She’s already infected. The disease is in her. So the question becomes, when is a vampire truly a vampire? Maybe it’s as futile as trying to determine when a fetus becomes a baby, but someone has to decide, don’t they? Someone has to take responsibility, because maybe sometimes an abortion is necessary. If you knew, really knew, that the kid was going to grow up to be a Hitler, or a Bundy—or Coraline, for instance. Maybe that makes bending a rule all right. Breaking it even.

I look at her. I give her the gaze. “Let’s go back to the house,” I say.

The fear and defiance ebb from her eyes, leaving a vacancy sign behind.

“Back,” she murmurs.

The moonlight shimmers on the wet sand like a chalk outline around a body. We retrace our steps to the beach house hand in hand. Anyone seeing us now would just think we were lovers out for a romantic late night stroll.

We leave the sand behind for weathered wood and creaking stairs. We go up and in.

“Lay down and close your eyes,” I say gently.

The sun is coming. I feel its approach like a fever. Have to hurry now.

Reesa goes over to her oriental carpet and lies down and closes her eyes just as I’ve told her. Watching her, my conscience tugs at me, but having a conscience doesn’t mean you can’t go against it now and then. It just means maybe you won’t like yourself much in the morning if you do.

So there it is.

I bend and kiss those perfect lips. Then I stand and light a smoke and wonder how the hell I’m going to make myself do what I know needs doing...

In the end it’s as simple as dropping a match.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

I came up with the idea for
Angel of Vengeance
and the character Mick Angel sometime in 2005. At that point, I had already had a long love affair with vampires, but I’d never written anything in the genre. To me it was only a worthwhile pursuit if I had a new and fresh way in to the vampire mythos. The idea for a hard-boiled, noir vampire story came to me after rereading
Dracula
and following it up with a Raymond Chandler novel. Blending two of the genres I loved best by creating a bloodsucking Phillip Marlowe who was turned in the forties, and continued on as a living anachronism in the present day seemed like it held a lot of potential to be that story.

The novel that resulted is a much darker tale than that depicted in
Moonlight,
the TV show that eventually evolved from it. Having gone down a promising, but ultimately dead-end road with a previous unpublished crime novel, I decided the best route to publication was to return to my Hollywood roots by adapting the manuscript into a feature screenplay, and work backwards to publishing the novel. The result was that I ended up being put together with Ron Koslow (creator of
Beauty and the Beast,
and a man I have come to consider a good friend and mentor) to create a pilot for CBS for the 2006 development season.

What Ron and I came up with was, in many ways, a lighter, more romantic version of the dark noir Los Angeles underbelly I had created in the book, but it retained many of the novel’s themes of redemption and transcendence. The mandate from CBS was that they loved the main character and the vampire world, but they wanted the show to have a strong romantic angle. As a result, one of the first challenges Ron and I faced was to find a romantic core for the story to revolve around. We decided that Coraline was far too dark and dangerous a femme fatale to be Mick’s constant love interest. As a potential solution, I mentioned to Ron that although there was no Mick/Beth romance in my first novel, Mick does save a little girl from Coraline, and I had been thinking of exploring the ensuing romance between Mick and the grown up girl he watches over in a later novel, which I planned to call “Guardian Angel”. He liked the idea. With Ron on board, the concept for
Moonlight
was born, and together he and I hashed out a new mythology for the characters that would come to populate the series. A whirlwind year and a half later, despite having built a strong and rabid fan-base, and winning the People’s Choice Award for best new drama, the show had sadly come and gone, and I had yet to find a publisher for the novel that spawned it.

For a while, it looked as if the window was gone, and that perhaps the book would never be published at all. But much like vampires themselves, a good vampire story dies hard, and in the past year, with the help of those who continued to believe in it, the manuscript found its way into the hands of the good people at Titan who offered to publish it. As a result, my longterm plan to work backwards to the novel has finally come to be. I hope you have enjoyed the read as much as I enjoyed the writing of it. It was truly a labor of love and love lost for me.

T.O.M., October 2010

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Trevor Munson began his Hollywood career when his script ‘Lone Star State of Mind’ was bought and produced in 2002 by Sony Screen Gems. Trevor went on to write his first novel,
Angel of Vengeance,
which eventually became the CBS television series
Moonlight
for which he was Co-Creator and Co-Executive Producer.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to everyone who helped make this novel a reality, from those who read it and didn’t hate it in its early stages, to those who believed in it when no one else did. I couldn’t have done it without you. As those who know, know, the road to publication for this novel was a long and arduous one. Special thanks to my manager, Kevin Donahue, who always believed and was a driving force in finding others who did too. Also, sincere thanks to my WME literary agent, Rebecca Oliver, and my Titan editor, Jo Boylett, for shepherding the project and helping me hone it for human consumption. A six year-old boy with an idea of somehow becoming an author one day thanks you for helping him realize his dream...

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