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  OK, it’s early, and we neither probably looked our best. But I didn’t care, and he didn’t run screaming, and when we did our first scene and we had that first kiss – which, somehow, he contrived to drag out over twenty-five increasingly exquisite takes – I don’t think either of us was particularly surprised when the final clinch ended with him whispering his room number in my left ear.

  Not as surprised as he was when I didn’t show up.

  Friday

  Or maybe not. He greeted me the same way today as the morning before, and, as we ran through rehearsals and then a succession of takes, the sparks that leapt between us yesterday were just as pronounced, just as physically scalding. But I slept alone and peaceful again, because, when this story breaks, it’s gonna break big.

  Saturday

  Our first bedroom scene is scheduled for today – which in fact will be my second, after my romp with a biker in a burned-out supermarket that left me sitting for an hour while the make-up people removed all the scorch marks and smoke smudges they’d spent almost as long daubing on me beforehand.

  Then down to wardrobe for an outfit becoming the newly press-ganged concubine of the king of the vampires, and the next three scenes would be shot in sequence. A rarity in a business when the ending is often on tape before the prelude.

  Dracula’s seduction was straight out of the classics, the long dining table, the guttering candles, the bottle of wine … rouge, of course. The difference is, we’re aboard one of the zeppelins, passing over the fire-blackened landscape, while Drac unleashes a soliloquy on the foolishness of war. Why would anyone want to fight, he asks, when they know that the outcome has already been ordained? An allegory for Cassie’s position, the viewer is supposed to believe. Which is why it will be such a shock to you all when it’s she who makes the first move, crossing the floor to where Dracula stands and then falling to her knees before him.

  Have you ever seen Q? Laurent Bouhnik’s movie about a gang of French teens, and the insidious presence amongst them of Cecile, a girl fighting grief at the loss of her father by fucking and sucking every guy she can?

  On release, the movie caused a huge fuss, because the sex wasn’t staged; it was all very real. Which, had it been an adult movie, would have been par for the course. But it wasn’t. It was a mainstream release, and the debate started there: when does acting stop pretending?

  The experts and actors themselves will all tell you, as you know, that it doesn’t. Acting is acting, whatever you do. You could be fighting for your life against a horde of mean and screaming bloodsuckers, or sucking something that most definitely isn’t blood out of the meanest of them all. All of it is make-believe, all of it is acting. The Fourth Wall.

  I don’t believe that. As I knelt before Les and my hands shook as they unbuttoned his trousers, that was not acting. As the camera rolled silently behind me, so that only the back of my head could be seen, obscuring all that the audience was left to imagine, nothing was left to my imagination. And when my hands were cupped as the lens swung back, they were not cupped around thin air.

  The camera can tell a lot of lies. But it cannot fake the taste and texture of taking a long, erect cock into your throat.

  You may have thought you were watching me through the Fourth Wall. But I knew, and Les knew, and I suspect that a few of the crew also knew, that we’d torn it down long ago.

  Sunday

  Les was like a puppy dog for the rest of the day, and this morning he came bounding over with even more manic enthusiasm. A few eyes flashed knowingly … I guess word had got around. But still, it could not have been the first time he’d been sucked off on a film set, and probably not the first time the whole thing was caught on tape. Including, I observed with a smile as the rushes played that morning, the moment where I swallowed hard. I hoped they would keep that bit in.

  I didn’t have much to do today. A few scenes where I was needed to hover in the background; one where I watched Les taking another girl to bed. Time for that look again, of course. But when I talked to the actress afterwards, she certainly wasn’t impressed by her own dalliance with Dracula. It was, she said, ‘like kissing Hitler’, and though I knew that she’d borrowed the quote – Tony Curtis discussing Marilyn Monroe – I laughed regardless. Well, I am supposed to be The Bride, aren’t I?

  Monday

  Body oil. Gauze. Lamps the colour of fresh blood. Candles. So many candles. And so many men with fire extinguishers crowded just out of sight. Dracula’s bedroom is perched at the very apex of the Shard, a glass pyramid one thousand feet above London, reflecting the crazy dance of the city’s still blazing funeral pyre.

  [Stage whisper: It’s only a model.]

  He leads me in. The air is sweet with jasmine oil, and the blood-red roses whose petals lie like fragile broken butterflies on every surface. I’m reading from the script now, but the set designers have done themselves proud. The bed, vast and circular in the centre of the room, is surmounted by a translucent canopy that rises to the centre of the pointed ceiling. Painted stars glisten above us; on my back on the bed, I find myself counting them and realise that the very constellations have been mapped in the blackness.

  I lie there awaiting my Lord, and then he is beside me, his body glistening as his clothes melt away, and his mouth on mine, kissing me, breathing me in. He moves smoothly, loosely, despite the stage directions shouted out from across the set. As his teeth brush my throat, I feel my flesh tingle, the goose pimples rising despite the heat of the lamps. And as he kisses down my body, his tongue on my nipples, the camera sighs as they swell and bud at his touch.

  His mouth closes around a nipple, and his teeth are not acting, sharp edges grazing as my back starts to arch, and my left hand reaches down beneath the thin sheet that covers us and grips the dawn of an erection as it bunches against my thigh.

  The room is silent now, aside from our breathing and the occasional cough or the rattle of a teacup. We will film for fifteen minutes and then break for ten, before coming back for any close-ups or inserts. But the director wants natural, an unbroken flow, and if I shift my head a little I can see his eyes, rapt as he gestures to one camera to pan out a little, to consume the whole bed in its unblinking gaze, and the sharp-eyed surely see the motion under the sheets as I slowly stroke my demon lover till he’s rock-hard in my hand.

  His kisses move lower and he slips out of my grasp. The sheet slides with him as he adjusts his position; now he is crouched between my spread legs, and I raise one a little to block the view. One of the crew breathes a sigh of disappointment, but a glance from a girl with a clipboard cuts it off.

  The camera circles around. Now my leg is no longer in its sightline, and Dracula’s hand, long leonine fingers tipped with black nails that are as curved as they’re cruel, rests on my thigh, tightening its grip. Later, tiny splashes of blood will be added, as though he is rending my flesh with his claws, but only I can feel his fangs as his other hand pulls my pussy open and the first flashes of tongue that lap at my juices are supplanted by the gentle gnawing of his teeth.

  My eyes close and my hand tightens upon his head, twisting hair in my fist as we seek each other’s rhythm. My hips are rolling slowly, and his hand slips beneath my arse, raising me slightly as his tongue begins to probe. I moan, not a stage moan like the ones we’re taught in drama school, but an honest-to-goodness unconscious sigh, one to wet the panties of every woman on the set.

  He is gentle, he is rough, he knows his lines so well. His lips are at my clitoris as his tongue commences its dance, but I am not yet ready to surrender like that. I shift and the camera will close in on me moving, my firm breasts cemented in celluloid for ever. I grip his shoulders and roll him over, our bodies one continuous line down the length of that massive bed. I kiss his mouth, inverted to mine, and somebody rushes to reposition the sheet, laying it over his naked erection and then bunching the fabric so the tent doesn’t show.

  Dracula’s hands are on my hips, gently pulling me over him. My b
reasts are in his face as he snaps at my nipples, and I bite my lip not to cry out as he sucks on one roughly. I bury my face in the hair on his chest, and now it is my turn to torment as I seize his nipple, hard between my teeth, and then slowly raise my head. The skin stretches protestingly, so I release and repeat on the other one.

  His tongue is on my stomach now, lapping at the sweat that has pushed aside the oil, and I am biting lower too. The sheet was well positioned, but not well enough. The tip of his cock, that thick meaty mushroom, is just peeping out from the hair below his naval, and, as a candle flickers in an unknown breeze, a flash of light reflects from the pooling precome that leaks from the eye.

  My head darts forward, my tongue darts out, I scoop it up with the tip and his cock rears in response. A murmur at the back of the room; our fifteen minutes must surely be up. But nobody else speaks, nobody moves. I cannot even hear them breathing. There must be forty people on set right now, what with cast and crew, studio and backers, and not one of them dares be the one who breaks the silence.

  I take Les’s cock, and I take the sheet too, haul it up and over as my head sinks down. He groans and I’m holding him still in my jaw, then angling my tongue as I begin to lick. Down the length of his shaft I sweep, and across the tight knot of his clean-shaven balls. I suck at his scrotum and his entire body tenses; then back to his cock as his hand clasps my head, tightening the sheet so that when I rear up, my body is shrouded in silhouette black.

  The director speaks. ‘Beautiful. Hold that … now go.’

  And I dip down again to engulf that hard shaft, bobbing my head as the minutes tick by, and he’s so close to coming, the whole room can sense it, that when he finally releases there’s a cumulative sigh, as though every lung on the set suddenly breathed out at once.

  ‘Cut. Back in ten.’ Normal service is resumed, the lights are extinguished, the candles are snuffed and I’m sitting up, struggling into the robe that’s being held out before me, while somebody else glances down at Les, still beside me, and laughs.

  ‘Jesus, Jenny, I think you killed the poor guy.’

  I laughed. ‘Not yet. You’ll know it when I do.’

  Then I went for a nice cup of tea.

  Tuesday

  Exterior shots. Off.

  Wednesday

  Exterior shots. Off.

  Thursday

  Location filming. Off/travel.

  Friday

  The permits to shoot in the London Underground didn’t come through. Some health-and-safety executive decided that our safety could not be guaranteed in the tunnels overnight, so we gather instead at Chiselhurst Caves, where a glimpse of a mocked-up station can bleed into the deep, encrusted night of a tunnel.

  I worked here once before, on a big-budget music video that I never saw or heard of again, but the caves still impress me with their silence, scale and, yes, their darkness. You do not know black until you are standing in its heart and even the person you feel beside you is utterly invisible. Darkness, the dictionary tells us, is the absence of light. Total darkness is the absence of every one of your senses. It cloaks your voice, it oppresses your hearing, till the only sound you are conscious of is the pounding of your heart.

  I have no heart, so I have no distractions.

  A light flashes on at the far end of the cave, and I make my way slowly to where the cast and crew have gathered. Les is here, resplendent in full Dracula drag, and I look around in search of my bag of tricks. The stake with which I will initially disable him. The hammer and nails with which I will impale him. And the vast wooden cross that has fallen down here from the burned, ruined church that once stood above this tunnel.

  We are shooting the final scenes today, although the schedule stretches on for another five weeks.

  But schedules are made to be altered.

  How do I lure Dracula to his death?

  Ah, we haven’t yet shot that scene, so it would be wicked of me to give too much away. Suffice to say, he is here and he’s hungry, forcing me over the lip of the platform, my bare arse displayed for the camera – and for him.

  He is behind me and this time we are acting our parts. The Fourth Wall was shattered four days ago, and, besides, I need to save my energy for those wonderful final ten minutes. He takes me brutally, fucking from behind, his head tilted back in triumph and rage. He knew all along the cruel fate of his playmates; knew the part I played in their deaths. He tried me and judged me without raising my suspicions, then pursued me as I fled from his terrible vengeance.

  Fled to this place.

  Gripping my face as he withdraws from my body, he flips me around and hisses. I stare back. I give him the look. Then I spit in his face.

  Enraged, he reaches out, but I have already slipped from his grasp. Now I wait in the darkness deep inside the tunnel, poised in the position where I know I will meet his rush.

  The force of the impact forces me back, but I push forward too, and the stake drives home, missing his heart, which is what I intended, but impaling him nevertheless through his taut, muscled stomach. He staggers, clutching the stake as he bleeds, but I grip his arm and force him backwards. A manacle binds him to the wood of the cross, then I wrestle his other arm into position as well.

  He kicks at me, but he is weakening. I have him. He hangs suspended, and I bang in the nails, my expression grim as I wipe blood from my face.

  Then I take out his cock – and there’s a hole in the plot if ever I saw one. Massive blood-loss such as he has just suffered should certainly stop his dick getting hard. But poor Drac is only human, and of course we’re only acting, so it only takes a moment before he is rising in my hand.

  I barely need to crouch, the way the cross is arranged, and, as my mouth closes over that delicious length, I can hear voices raised just a few feet away, the rustling of pages as the crew check their scripts, the confusion of the writer as a whole new scene unfurls.

  I am sucking now, roughly, abruptly. Fake blood is dripping from his wounds onto his penis, but I barely taste its raspberry essence as my hand starts to blur while I milk his shaft. Les is still. He already knows. But the director behind me is doing his nut.

  ‘Cut!’ he cries to the still whirring camera. ‘Cut!’ he bellows to the soundmen around. ‘Cut’ to the lights and I can hear them slam down.

  ‘And you two! Jennifer! Cut, for fuck’s sake.’

  I turn and face him.

  ‘OK.’

  And there is a fresh sound in the caves, the beating of wings, the screaming of men, the feasting of my children.

  I watch them contentedly, for I too have fed. Several times. Every time Les and I shot a scene. Perhaps, if the coroner looks very closely, he might even see the bite-marks that I left on the actor’s cock.

  My children have finished. The bodies are still. I considered gasoline, but couldn’t bear to damage the caves. So I leave the corpses where they fell, so white, all drained of blood, but I cannot resist one final gesture.

  I pick up a copy of the movie script, one that is only a little stained, and tear out the title page. Then, immediately below the movie’s name, Taste the Blood of Dracula, I write five words.

  ‘I did. It was delicious.’

  That’ll teach them not to mess with my family name.

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  Copyright

  This anthology is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Mischief

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.mischiefbooks.com

  The Alchemist’s Apprentice © Rose de Fer

  The Candidate © Rhyll Biest

  Laura May’s Candy Man © Giselle Renarde

  Demonbound © Ellen Heights

  The Man at the Window © Elizabeth Coldwell

  The Girl in the Stable © Scarlet Rush

  For One Night © Torrance Sené

  Otherworldly Seductions © Kathleen Tudor

  The Best of Both Worlds © Morgan Honeyman

  Taste the Blood of Dracula © Chrissie Bentley

  The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of their work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007509478

  Version: 2013-10-11