He drove in silence.
“Just that easy, is it?” James demanded some minutes later when he had been alone with his thoughts.
Saint-Germain’s small hands tightened on the steering wheel. “No, James—and it never becomes easy.”
BLOOD FREAK
Nancy Holder
New York Times bestselling author Nancy Holder is a five-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award who has also received accolades from the American Library Association, the American Reading Association, the New York Public Library, and Romantic Times. She and Debbie Viguié coauthored the witchy Wicked series for Simon and Schuster. They have continued their collaboration with the Crusade (about a worldwide war against vampires) and the Wolf Springs Chronicles werewolf series. Holder is the solo author of the young adult horror series, Possessions, for Razorbill. She has also written many novels and book projects tied to various television series—most significantly, in our context, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Among her approximately two hundred short stories, she’s written a few featuring vampires. Holder lives in San Diego with her daughter, Belle, and their growing assortment of pets. Visit her at nancyholder.com.
“Blood Freak” takes us back to the psychedelic era of the 1960s when even Dracula got groovy…
Captain Blood. The Bat Man. He lived in a real castle, that is to say, someone built it to live in, not to film it, in the middle of the Borrego Desert. That is to say, east of San Diego, that Republican bastion of the Military Industrial Complex of Amerika, north of the Mexican border, where you could score lids of grass for five bucks a pop. His craggy, Scottish castle had been in some John Carradine movie, which some people found more trippy than the rumor that the current owner was a vampire.
Blood was his freak. No surprise, Pranksters: because if you traveled the rippling sidewinder desiccation to that Shock! Theater on the mesa, you had to have resources, interior (that is to say, gray matter) and exterior (that is to say, eyes and ears) that the average headfeeder either did not have or use very well. So you synthesized; that is to say, you took things in. You figured things out.
You were observant. You grokked the fullness of the situation.
Going to the castle was the Great Bloodfreak Trek, the GBT, and you did it straight enough to drive, stoned enough to take the edge off, beating on the dashboard to the arrhythmic spasms of your carotid artery and the great good muscle that pumped it all together now. You and whatever merry band you had banded with could not help but hear the stories at the gas stations where you copped a pee and the bars where you guzzled whatever was cheapest (“We don’t serve no hippies.” “Right on, man, we don’t eat ’em.”) The bourgeoisie crossing themselves like flipped-out movie extras, and cops warning you off the rumble-crunching dirtrock road. Go back, go back, go back, you stupid kids; he really is a fuckin’ bloodsucker.
So are mosquitoes, baby. It’s all one big mandala. He was out front with it; he liked to suck people’s blood, and if you pretended not to grok his trip and showed up on his doorstep anyway, that was your bullshit, not his.
Vlad Dracula was no longer certain if he was mesmerized or bored to tears by the antic dances of the counterculture. In the fifties—Kerouac and the beats, bongos, and a fascination with Italy—he had moved from San Francisco with his servants and his Brides and sought refuge in the desert. In San Francisco there had been too much scrutiny, too many questions, and then a woman he had entertained a number of times began writing poetry that she read in coffee shops:
He is my biterman, Daddy-o,
he ramthroats my red trickle
down.
Thus identified, he had fled.
In the desert, he had hibernated for a time, missing the chill and the rain of San Francisco, the cold and the snow of Europe. But he had existed undetected, and kept himself fed, enjoying his homesickness as only someone who is very old can enjoy the sublime delicacy of emotions less intense than grief or despair—wistfulness, nostalgia, the watercolor washes of faint regret. But for him this was a game; he could leave any time he wanted.
Then came the changeling children, with their psychedelica and their excesses that reminded him of the oldest of his old days. The pageantry and drama of his Transylvanian court, the blood baths and virgins and the joy of opulence and extremity. Somehow one confused flower child stumbled to his