NOTE: This work contains material not suitable for anyone under eighteen (18) or those of a delicate nature. This is a story and contains descriptive scenes of a graphic sexual nature. This book is purely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously—any resemblance to actual persons, whether living, deceased, actual events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

—Lazarus by the Sea, Maine, 1896—

Lacey strolled east from the estate. Keeping a steady pace, she walked in a straight line to the cliff overlooking the sea. As she approached the precipice, Lacey turned her attention to the small collection of houses, businesses, and docks with ships moored in the harbor. If things went according to her plan, the terror would end.

In the sleepy fishing village, a man moved from one lamp to another, lighting the streets in anticipation of the approaching darkness. The grand, old manor west of town, perched atop a hill, cast an ominous shadow across the settlement. While no light showed in the windows of the massive house, and the mansion appeared empty and abandoned, everyone realized he had returned.

The dead girls littering the beaches, alleys, and their beds testified to his return. And unlike him, they wouldn’t be coming back. Taking only a few sips of their blood and breaking their necks, to be found by a loved one, a friend, or the township constable, in a plot to instill fear in the citizens.

It worked.

Others died slower after many visits and nights of torrid sex, making a banquet of their deaths. Feeding on their sex and blood, perhaps giving them his ichor, the purer fluid of his veins. No chance taken. Each victim, all fifteen of them, had stakes driven through their hearts, their heads severed, and their bodies burned. The women’s ashes carried far from shore on a ship and spread on the waves to ensure they wouldn’t return.

The sun sank below the horizon. Lacey stood at the cliff’s edge, peering down at the rocks and waves crashing over them. As the darkness descended over the coast, she wondered if she might be strong enough to end the evil. Already, she sensed him, rising from the dust of his coffin, an evil god with a vengeful spirit.

To him, Lazarus, the woman well understood she was more than a lover, more than food, more than the value of her life; she was revenge. An act of proper vengeance against her father. Taken for that which her father had stolen from him. For Jason Anderson destroyed Lazarus’s only true love. A timeless lover destroyed while she slumbered, months before, hundreds of miles from this place.

Destroyed is the correct word, for one cannot kill the dead.

For the past week, Lacey Anderson had a visitor in the darkness of the wee hours of the morning. Appearing from a fog in her room, Lazarus made love to her for hours and fed on her life’s fluid. As the sky lighted, in those fleeting minutes before dawn each morning, he vanished, leaving her weak and ashamed.

Thoughts of him invaded her waking hours, his icy touch, the fires inside her as they rutted in her bed, wild animals in the heat of passions fires. Becoming one flesh as he sipped the life from her. Long, rough strokes deep into her throbbing center.

The passion built inside her until a cataclysmic explosion of rapture shattered her. The euphoria rumbled over her essence like thunder rolling through the skies. From peak to peak, the two copulated, and he feasted on her life.

Each gave and took in equal portions. Though Lacey’s giving was not from her free will but from dark urges buried under the layers of Victorian constraints of polite society.

The most dreadful thing, Lacey coveted his touch. Longed to make love to him and desired those sweet, sinful kisses more than the breath of life. Deep in her heart, she yearned to taste his vitality, sup on his grume, share his existence, and become the thing she abhorred.

Life, everlasting, and perpetual youth, is its own reward.

As the darkness deepened, the air chilled, and a thick and foreboding fog covered the village, ocean, and surrounding countryside in a shroud of dread. The woman needn’t rush to her home; Lacey understood she had time. After all, Lazarus wouldn’t come to her until after midnight.

First, the vampire would find one or two maidens, a prostitute on the wharf, a young woman rushing home from a shop, or a tender morsel slumbering beside her husband. With them in a spell, he’d ravage their body, sup on their blood, and murder one or two women before he found his way to her boudoir.

At last, the fog covered the area so thickly that Lacey felt the need to return to her home. Being careful, like a blind woman, she returned to her father’s estate.

The persistent ache throbbed inside her. A gnawing hunger, a dry thirst, demanding appeasement and quenching. She required a reckoning. But what remuneration she needed, wanted, escaped her. The encounters left her in an uncertain stupor of not quite appeased desires, which only lessened, never leaving her, never fully gratified.