Just months before I start medical school in Boston, I decide to let loose for one night. A dark club, a loud band, strong drinks--and the attention of a dangerous-looking man who says he's in the city for only a week.
I know exactly what he is: a...
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FEBRUARY 21, 1986/Boston, Massachusetts
I swirl the pinot noir around in my glass and turn another page, absorbed in my book. While it's true that I'm a two hundred-year-old, opera-loving, highbrow culture-consuming, occasionally violent immortal, I have exactly one guilty pleasure.
Romantic fiction.
Yes, yes, I know I said I deeply disliked fated mates. But only in real life. Fictional happiness is somehow far more satisfying, at least to me. Probably this is due to my occupation as a young man, during the time that I was human. I was a poet for several years.
Over the decades I've been a voracious consumer of popular books, bestsellers, and now, romance. It's always been a way to escape the tedium of my existence. Writing has eluded me since I was turned into this current form, and it's one of my chief frustrations about my life.
Or what passes as a life.
Damiano would laugh his ass off if he saw me tonight, a muscular, angry-eyed vampire reading a romance novel in an expensive home in Boston. If he'd lived, he would've wanted to stroll down the hill to the Ritz and sit at the bar, hoping to pick up some gorgeous socialite and then drink her blood while giving her the best orgasm of her life.
Once upon a time, I was like that with women.
These days, all the eroticism I need is in books, because humans bore me. I especially enjoy the historical romances set in Europe in the nineteenth century; it's always fascinating to see how the fictional world compares with my own experience.
Tonight I'm inhaling something a little different: Jackie Collins' Lucky. It's one of the biggest books of this decade, and while I'm not a fan of the prose, I have to say the Mafia plot is addicting, like a sexier Godfather. It's a campy and fun book, and probably far more interesting than what I have to deal with later tonight.
I finish the chapter and set the book down on a dark mahogany end table. There's a sip of wine left in the glass, but I don't touch it. Instead, I check my vintage Rolex, then slip it off my wrist and set it on top of the book. Ten o'clock. I click off a lamp, and bright moonlight streams into the room, casting beautiful shadows on one of the exposed brick walls.
It's time to leave the cool, quiet sanctuary of this Beacon Hill home and go in search of my prey. A dark nightclub is the perfect setting for what I need to do this evening.
Fortunately, my stalking this past week paid off. It hadn't taken much to pay off an intern in the registrar's department at Boston University. That young woman had given me Evangeline Ransom's entire schedule. Then, I'd lingered outside of a lecture hall, and fell into lockstep behind her and another woman.
They'd talked excitedly about an upcoming concert at a club called Axis. Some band called The Mission was playing. I'd never heard of them, but that wasn't surprising. I was familiar with fiction trends, not music.
