EXTRACT FOR
A Fire in the Blood
(Author Unknown)

    "Tamara?" whispered a voice on the wind.

    "Who's there?" she demanded, whirling to look behind her, ready to use the purse as a weapon. It was by God heavy enough to do some real damage. Especially if aimed at the right spot. She'd learned a few tricks in this trade. 

    "I'm warning you. I've got Mace!" She fumbled in the bag, searching for the small canister by feel. Her heart sank when she remembered taking it out and putting it on top of the refrigerator when Davy was playing with her purse that afternoon. But that must have been before?

    "Do not be alarmed," came the voice again. "I do not wish to harm you."

    "Show yourself!" she cried.

    A swirl of fog spiraled up her body, its leading tendril ending with a stroke against her cheek. "I am here," breathed the unseen stranger.

    She could swear that teasing voice was coming from the fog itself. She shivered.

    The fog caressed her breast with its moist touch, and she jumped. "Hey! What's going on here?"

    "So long?" murmured the voice as the fog continued to tease at her clothing and hair. "I have been alone so long?"

    "Stop it! That's cold," grunted Tamara.

    As if as a response to her words, the fog seemed to take on an edge of warmth and a tinge of color under the distant streetlight. Now, there was something almost sensual in the touch of the unseen hands that played about her body.

    "W-who are you?" Tamara asked, shaken to the core by the feel of that ghostly touch.

    "What's in a name?" 

    She felt cool lips upon her throat, chill hands cupping her breasts through the satin?then sliding beneath her shirt to trace the sensitive skin of her nipples.

    "I - " The thought was lost in the warmth spreading from her core as the unseen stranger's fingers played.

    The touch on her throat, at first a butterfly's kiss, became more urgent. She could feel ethereal lips suckling at the soft skin above her jugular, and reached up to sweep aside her mass of golden curls, baring her throat for easier access. It was too long since she had felt the touch of a lover, not a john. Too long since someone had cared what she felt from their pairing.

    The thought jolted her. Pairing? Lover? What was she thinking? She was standing in an alley somewhere in the middle of downtown, and there was no one here but the fog.

    She moved to take a step toward the street, and the phantom arms tightened their hold. She could feel them now, cradling her to a solid chest, but there was still no one besides herself in the alleyway.

    "What is happening to me?" she moaned.

    "Give me what I crave," whispered the voice, its chill breath stirring the small curls at the base of her neck. "You know in your heart what it is that I desire. Be mine, body and soul."

    "I can't - " she began, and then all protests were swept away as the lips nuzzling her throat parted, and a tongue of fog flicked about her pulse point.

    Tamara whimpered, relaxing into her captor's embrace. She did know what he wanted. As surely as she knew her own name. "Yes, oh, yes."

    "You will give me what I crave?"

    "Take it ? I give it freely." Somehow she knew this to be the correct answer. It was a ritual that must be completed. Without her free-willed consent, the encounter could go no further. But she wanted it to. She wanted this more than she had ever wanted anything in her entire life. 

    She let her head drop toward her far shoulder, arching her neck for his pleasure.

    There was a sigh from her phantom lover, and then a sting of sharp pain as his fangs fastened on her throat. Fire raced through her body, spreading from those twin points of contact to every cell of her being.

    Oh, God! She had known and not known what he was, this ghost from the fog. She had wanted him despite that half-formed knowledge, and now she was his. 

    As a young girl, she had devoured novels about ghosts and vampires, getting an erotic thrill from their pages before she even realized what that phrase meant. Her high school fantasies had been full of exotic men in flowing capes with piercing eyes and sharp-toothed grins. Before life had gotten in the way. And she now stood clasped in the possessive embrace of a dream.

    He drew upon her blood as if an alcoholic given a long withheld bottle, deeply, greedily. She semi-swooned in his embrace, lids heavy.

    Through the half-closed eyelids, she saw the tenuous fog of him solidify. The mist became a man, as if her blood was pouring substance into the glass shell of him. A pale, ghostly arm now circled her waist to keep her upright against his chest, shape defined by the amorphous billow of a poet's sleeve. Meanwhile, an elegant hand slipped questing fingers beneath the loose waistband of her shorts.

    She gasped, and arched up to meet that touch. The long supple fingers teased at her shaved pussy ? the johns liked it that way, but she'd never realized what it could do for her own sensations before this moment.

    Her head was swimming. She felt giddy with the loss of blood and the pleasure of his touch. A fleeting thought of Davy swam through her dazed mind. She should be home with him?tucking him into bed, kissing him goodnight?but he'd be fine with Mama?

    Her ghostly seducer flicked his tongue against the wound on her throat, and the blood stopped. "Enough for now," he murmured, his breath now warm against her clammy skin. "There is much I would teach you, little one. So many secrets I would share."