Brimstone Kiss - By Carole Douglas Page 0,1

to bed, shuddering as my floor-cooled feet found the sheets already chilly. Even the slim silver chain on my wrist felt icy.

I snuggled stomach-down, curled up, and waited for sleep to find me.

Then I heard the rustling. And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before...

Damn! Why was my subconscious quoting Edgar Allan- Poe's "The Raven?"

Maybe because the rustling sounded like curtains and there weren't any curtains on my dormer windows. Or maybe because the rustling sounded like a big bird's wings...

'Tis the wind and nothing morel

If that mantra had worked for Poe's uneasy scholar it would work for me. I pulled the covers farther over my head.

The raven-size wing rustling increased to a California condor-size woosh, with a wingspread of, say, ten freaking feet. Only an idiot would ignore that kind of indoor tempest. This was no little lost bat or even a misplaced sparrow.

I sat up, turning the covers half down, and faced the windows. "All right!" I challenged the night.

Not all right, baby girl, whispered my internal invisible friend since childhood, Irma. We are getting called on by more than Big Bird. We're not on Sesame Street anymore, Delilah.

No. The room's temperature had dropped to meat-freezer cold and I was instantly afraid I was the meat. Post-Millennium Las Vegas teemed with things that went bump, stump, hump and slurp in the night.

I was appalled to see that the small shadow from the windowpane had moved inside to become a pillar of darkness draped in black, severe and funereal. I was almost getting used to seeing apparitions in the tall hall mirror, but not in thin air. Slowly, the head of the entity moved, lifted and the cloaked sides spread their wings.

Awe mated with my fear, and both held me frozen. A pale white face came into partial focus. Only cruel, slanting dark eyebrows and a gray grinning mouth were fully visible.

The black fell back, revealing an ash-gray satin lining framing a man's black evening suit of elegant antique cut. The vintage clothing collector in me couldn't help but admire the tailoring even as goose bumps ran races up and down my arms. The figure had no color at all, not even red around the eye whites.

Then I recognized my visitor from his many collectible photographs and posters.

I was beholding the most commercially potent incarnation of Dracula of all time: 1932's Bela Lugosi, slithering onscreen with Eastern Euro-trash swagger and Art Deco decadence. I recalled a few pre-adolescent longings to someday meet a classic vampire: suave, smooth and deliriously sinister. I hankered for any one of a dozen pop culture reinventions of the father of all vampires as a sex symbol. Bela Lugosi had a certain predatory hunger, but he wasn't the hunky anti-hero women would willingly welcome, swooning for his seductive suction action.

Lugosi was nasty. Not as nasty as the ancient devouring vamp in Bram Stoker's novel, but far from the lounge lizard, oral-sex fiend Frank Langella's portrayal had made women go crazy over a few decades back. Why do women always go for the bad boys? I sure hadn't liked the variety I fought off in the group homes.

I could think clearly, but sat paralyzed-just like all those passive silver-screen victims-my fingers curled into the sheets. At least this wasn't a debased half-vamp from the group homes. He was the reel thing, although not a Gollum-gaunt creature of the night like Nosferatu from the days of silent films. That scrawny, long-clawed leech and lech was all too reminiscent of the real-life crackpot Howard Hughes in his current undead state to conjure.

No, Bela Lugosi's slo-mo sinister diction may seem hokey today, but in person, gliding to your bedside, he was mesmerizing. He leaned in and down, showed only the tips of his pointed canine teeth, and lowered his gaze to drink in the sight of my bare neck.

By now my silver chain bracelet had subtly shimmied up my arm. Even as he ogled my throat, it looped itself into a solid wide dog collar around my neck, blocking all ports of entry.

"Bah," Dracula said, recoiling. "Cheesy silver trinket! I only wanted to take a tiny symbolic taste."

"Bad taste is never symbolic," I said, my fingers tracing the smooth, defensive form my silver familiar had taken. It never failed to surprise-and defend-me.

"My master wants you."

"Isn't that Renfield's line?" I didn't mean to be a smart-mouth; I was just surprised that Dracula would admit to a master. He