Vamp-Hire

A PERMUTED PRESS book

Published at Smashwords

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-401-1

Vamp-Hire (Book 1)
copyright © 2015

by Gerald Dean Rice

All Rights Reserved.

Cover art by Hunter Walker

This
book
is
a
work
of
fiction
.
People
,
places
,
events
,
and
situations
are
the
product
of
the
author’s
imagination
.
Any
resemblance
to
actual
persons
,
living
or
dead
,
or
historical
events
,
is
purely
coincidental
.

No
part
of
this
book
may
be
reproduced
,
stored
in
a
retrieval
system
,
or
transmitted
by
any
means
without
the
written
permission
of
the
author
and
publisher
.

Dedication

To my wife, who I've always wanted to be proud of me.
Hope this helps.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Epilogue

About the Author

Chapter 1

Thursday

Nick walked swiftly up the walkway, trying to keep
his stride long and confident. He didn’t want to give any who were
possibly peeping out a window the impression he wasn’t supposed to
be here. These days, people were being shot simply for not looking
like they belonged. He went over the details in his head. Name:
Nancy; digs vampires and doesn’t like guys who talk too much. That
last part was fine with him. He was nervous as it was to even be
thinking about doing this. Selling vamp blood was as illegal as
prostitution, although laws against the latter were less rigorously
enforced. If he got caught doing this he was as good as back in a
cage.

Nick didn’t know what she wanted with his
blood and didn’t care. If she had the cash he was fine so long as
he could get a bandage when this was done. Despite what a fringe
percentage believed, vamp blood was no more a healing poultice than
snake oil, no more a narcotic than baby powder, no more aphrodisiac
than Spanish fly.

He took the two porch stairs in one step and
breathed a minor sigh of relief. Though he could see almost
perfectly, any of those window peepers could not. He cast a final
glance over his shoulder before ringing the doorbell. No need to
waste time out here having second thoughts. Regret still tugged at
his insides despite knowing exactly what he was doing.

He didn’t wait long. The security door
opened, revealing the white slip worn by a slender, dark-haired
woman. The smell of roses greeted him at the same time. For a
second, he thought she was a ghost because he couldn’t see any of
her body. Then she pushed the screen door open, giving him a view
of a long, slender, olive-skinned forearm.

“Come in,” she said with a quiet, husky
voice.

Nick hesitated. Even with his keen night
vision, he still couldn’t see her face. She withdrew, leaving him
with no choice other than standing there or following her in.
Remembering the pile of unpaid bills on the table yesterday
morning, he took a deep breath and stepped inside.

“Half is on the coffee table,” she said.

“Okay,” Nick said. He looked at the envelope,
took a step toward it and stopped. He didn’t know if it was proper
to pocket the money now or wait until the job was done and she gave
the rest. And alright, he was man-whoring. He would wrestle that
particular alligator later.

He followed her upstairs.

Not knowing anything about this house, Nick
assumed it was older. Maybe 1970-something. The stairs—at least
where she was walking ahead of him—were quiet, but they began to
creak under his feet. He didn’t know anything about architecture,
so he had no basis for his guess as to the age of the house. It
seemed unlived-in somehow, though. The same way he imagined a new
house would be for someone who had just moved in. The walls were
painted maybe a purple or blue color, it was impossible to tell in
the dark.

Nancy turned around at the top of the stairs
as if waiting to push him down. The thought nagged at him for the
few seconds he was behind her until finally he was at the top. She
smiled at him and somehow he still couldn’t make out her face. It
was a thick mass of dark hair, spilling down to the middle of her
back. With a slight turn of her head, the curtained hair closed
around the lower half of her face.

The thought crossed his mind to ask if she
were a ghost before she took his hand, lacing her fingers through
his. Her palm was warm, slightly moist. It occurred to him that she
might have been as nervous as he was. Why had he assumed that she
was more knowledgeable in this sort of thing than him?

It was a narrow hallway, so Nick wound up
trailing behind her even as they held hands. They passed by a
bathroom and a bedroom before coming to another bedroom at the end
of the hallway. He didn’t know why he’d been expecting a table as
he entered, but there was only a bed. Only a bed. Nick got an
uncomfortable feeling with a tinge of déjà vu. There was a lot he
couldn’t remember even though he had a good idea where she might
have been heading.

“So…” he said after she let several seconds
of silence pass after shutting the door, “…here we are.” He held
out hope she would pull a bowl out of somewhere. She didn’t move.
It wasn’t like Nick didn’t know the mechanics of what to do; he’d
prepared himself for a specific illegal act and here he was,
presented with another one entirely. Should he even consider it? If
he begged off, could he take the money on the coffee table
downstairs?

Nancy let go of his hand and crossed to the
other side of the room by the bed.

“Come. Sit.” She put her knee on the mattress
in a way that should have been alluring. Nancy was an attractive
woman¬—what he could see of her—but there was something unsexual
about her. Like a department store mannequin with all its clothes
off.

Nick took a cautious step forward. He
realized he was bound to disappoint. Had they met under natural
circumstances and wound up in this situation, he wouldn’t have had
the moral knot in the pit of his stomach. He took a second to
mentally ponder exactly what it was that bothered him about this
situation. It certainly wasn’t the illegality of it; he’d been
fully prepared to risk his freedom as soon as he’d left home after
the sun had set. And it wasn’t as if she were repulsive. Nick
didn’t know if he had a type and Nancy seemed to have everything
pleasantly in the right places.

He realized it had to have been the luring
under false pretenses. Perhaps she was too… chaste to be up front
about what she really wanted and asked for something else equally
taboo instead. Yes, that made sense to him and Nick found himself
breathing a small sigh of relief.

Why a vamp, though? Did she want to get
bitten? Or want him to drink her blood? Maybe she was looking for
him to turn her. Nick only had a minor set of fangs. Sure, they
looked menacing enough if he smiled or wasn’t careful when he was
talking to someone and flashed them, but they weren’t that much
longer than average canine teeth in a human mouth. No, he couldn’t
turn her and the drinking of human blood, even if that weren’t
disgusting, was completely illegal, though Nick could hardly claim
any high ground there.

Maybe he would just nip her if that was what
she was into.

Yeah, she was probably some yuppie-type (was
that even a word anymore?) who had somehow managed to avoid having
a hand in the Conflict and wanted to see what all the fuss
about.

Nick felt his confidence rise, convinced this
wasn’t something more dangerous than what it had been presented as.
Maybe he might even enjoy himself. Although, not too much. He put
an arm around her waist to draw her closer to him and she pushed it
down.

“No touching,” she said. Nick could make out
a moonlit column of her face, from the narrow point of her chin,
across the thin bridge of a nose, with two shallow pools of dark
where her eyes hid, and the crest of her forehead. Even though he
had detail, Nick still couldn’t say he’d actually seen her. Her
face seemed like a bunch of individual parts that wouldn’t coalesce
into a whole.

“I kind of have to. You know, for us to do,
you know…this.” He wasn’t exuding the kind of confidence he’d
hoped. His only saving grace was that she seemed as shy as he was,
if not more.

She nodded and when Nick thought she was
about to call the whole thing off, she grabbed his hand and placed
it on her breast.

Immediately, Nick felt a reaction. Not lust…
at least not just lust. It was the physiological equivalent of some
hidden, terrible engine snarling to life, powering some beast of a
machine that fueled up with blood and produced only death. He could
feel it seeping into his bones as if they were hollow like a
bird’s, filling him with a heat that had nothing to do with body
temperature.

Suddenly, he could see much more in the dark,
much more than was previously there to be seen. The veins beneath
Nancy’s olive skin silently throbbed to life. The heat of her was
like a blanket he wanted to roll in. Right then Nick knew he could
be inside her in four quick movies, only it wouldn’t be
pleasurable. At least not for her.