Chapter 14

My problem with Cleo was her goody-two-shoes attitude, her Pollyanna syndrome, that frightening urge to bandage broken wings and tilt at windmills. We all know what happened to the good Don when he took on a windmill.

We were in the coffee house of the Pan Pacific Hotel having some drinks while Cleo snacked on a sirloin steak. It looked like it had been torn from a cow and covered with sauce and stuff before it was served. She stopped eating suddenly, looking positively ill.

"Anything wrong, Cleo?" I asked with some concern.

"I don't know, Kaid. I thought I saw someone from my past."

"Past? You have a past, dear Cleo? How in-deres-ding," I purred in my best Transylvanian accent.

"Don't play the Transylvanian twerp with me, Kaid. You've been watching Bela Lugosi remakes again. Except for that slightly fishy complexion you're a typical countryman."

Meaning I was your everyday, ordinary, wimpy Malaysian.

She was in a foul mood. I let her subside before taking her hand in mine, grew some claws and drew them caressingly over the top of her hand. That always got her lusty and raring to go, but it didn't work that night. She pulled her hand back and absently scratched it where I had drawn my claws over her skin. She still hadn't made up her mind to change and I wasn't hurrying her at all. I had to be sure that her worldview had become right before I allowed her to take that final, awful step.

Perhaps becoming a vampire would scour away her thin veneer of civilised behaviour patterns and allow the real persona to emerge. I sensed strongly that her middle-class upbringing and possibly even the Catholic schooling she had received in her childhood had suppressed her true nature. That was something that I needed to consider. I watched her gather herself and then breathe out explosively.

"How do you do it, Kaid? I mean you help people yet you refuse to be involved. How can you involve yourself and yet not be involved?"

"That's what is wrong with you, Cleo. You get too involved. For an ordinary person in our present political environment that's quite risky. For someone like me? Unthinkable! Think of the consequences if they discover what I am. Next thing you know, a horde of religious fanatics and concerned citizens will turn up at the bungalow to burn me out. Once my secret is out there would be no place safe for me. No rest! No peace! You know it yourself. Imagine being chased by a horde of paparazzi waiting to take pictures of me having a snack or two."

I shuddered as I visualised the headlines — DRAC IS BACK ... LOCAL REP IS CORPORATE BLOOD SUCKER ... MONKSHOOD REP PUTS THE BITE ON PUBLIC.

I think Cleo got the picture because she became thoughtful. Then as I watched her, she suddenly lost her calm and her self-control. I watched in surprise as she began to curl in on herself as if something dreadful was about to happen. Damned if something wasn't scaring her badly. She was actually shuddering with loathing and fear. Her eyes looked past me and over my shoulder. I turned and saw a beefy man in a sports shirt and designer jeans. He radiated menace and authority.

Cleo's eyes had become frozen marbles. The man was wearing a cruel smile to match the dead snake's eyes in his head. This was a nasty one, I thought. He caught sight of Cleo and lifted a languid hand to wave a limp greeting at her. His almost effeminate hand movement was totally out of character from someone who looked like a rugby fullback. Then he made a pistol with his hand and uttered a soft BANG! Cleo winced.

She looked at me and whispered hoarsely, "Take me home, Kaid. Now, please."

We left. An uneasy hush muted the loud chatter of the patrons as they peered at the man in their midst and instinctively felt that they were being menaced. The man watched us leaving.

She dragged me upstairs and we lay on my bed, doing nothing. Cleo clung to me and shuddered from time to time. Bit by bit the story unfolded.

"I was younger then, Kaid, and willing to take on every thing — sea serpents, dragons, and even the Home Ministry. I was investigating a case that had been swept under the carpet. I still don't know why they arrested the man. It was under the Internal Security Act. When he was released he was physically broken but still active in his field. Human rights it was. When I heard that he had been taken in again I began to sniff around and I think I came too close for their comfort.

"I just disappeared off the face of the earth. No one knew what happened to me. For three months I was a non-person. I was tortured. I even had to bargain with them and make concessions just to change my sanitary pad. The physical stuff did less harm. It was what they did to me to reduce my self-esteem, to corrupt my principles and my soul. It was horrible because they succeeded. I recanted. I signed every document they put before me."

She described some of the frightful things visited on her person and it was a wonder her experience did not make her frigid for life, anti-sex, and a man hater.

"They made me watch while they did things to that man with injections and other things. In the end the poor man broke ... and agreed to everything they demanded. But the chemicals they injected into him and the torture he suffered also broke his mind. To my shame, I agreed not to pursue the matter any more."

"That man in the coffee house ... he was one of them?"

She nodded. "Insp. Osman Sameon, Special Branch."

"So what now, Cleo?"

"I think it's time for me to change. I think he's after some people I know and I'm damned sure he thinks I am the conduit through which he can get to them."

"You're quite certain about this? As Odali, my vampire mother, said, 'Forever is a long time'."

Her eyes gleamed and her smile was positively evil.

"If this Odali was your vampire-mother then you'll be my vampire-father. Right?"

"I suppose that's about it."

"And I'll be your vampire-daughter?"

"Right." I caught on to what she was leading to.

"It'll be like incest, right?"

"Yes. Won't that be fun, Cleo?"

I grinned at her and she moved closer into my embrace and offered her neck.

"Uh huh! Let's do it the fun way."

Her eyes lit up. She did a sexy striptease and got herself ready. Through that night, we made love between bites until finally she was almost drained and I offered my gashed arm for her to drink on.

People react differently to change. I think that desire and a sense of urgency has a lot to do with the speed of the change and Cleo had loads of both. She came out of her 'little death' fifty hours later to find a fine, young fellow lying in a stupor next to her. It was my present to her. She was utterly beautiful. Where she was once gorgeous she was now radiant. I felt my cockles stir. Slowly she drank the boy's blood.

"Stop, Cleo. You have taken about a litre of his blood. Any more would be very dangerous for you and him," I told her firmly.

"Must I, Kaid?" she whined.

"You know you do," I told her. "Use him now. Make it a good one for him, too."

She brought the boy to arousal. He was about seventeen and he had an impressive package between his legs. She impaled herself on him. She slid him in and out of her slit, working her inner muscles to the delight of both. He began to heave up into her as she slid down his rigid shaft. She dragged it out for twenty minutes before the youth stiffened and ejaculated with a gurgling moan.

She put him to sleep and offered me sloppy seconds. We made wild vampire love which is more intense than the human kind. Love is the least ingredient in such an act. We indulge in profane and unspeakable acts of passion. The ties that bind a vampire and his 'get' are deeper and unbreakable. When we both peaked in shuddering ecstatic orgasms, she sighed and fell asleep. I took the boy away, leaving him on a street corner not far from where I had found him. As usual I left money in his pocket and no memory of what he had gone through.

Cleo's complexion took on a change as well. Her warm cafe au lait colouring became lighter, creamier. Her skin had a sheen that made her seem to glow from within. She was different from Mandy. Change had made her both regal and lethal, a Kali come to life, but without the tangle of arms and tits. It changed her so significantly that when she appeared in public after an interlude in hiding, even her close friends had trouble recognising her.

I taught her the things a predator in a world of aggressive victims had to know. In a week she absorbed the basics and very soon she was in the advanced stage. Change had also awakened an innate ferocity in her that I never suspected. But she never lost that empathy for the underdog, although she now realised that she couldn't joust on their behalf without attracting dangerous attention to herself and to me.

She had to be given a cover — a new life to conceal her un-life. So on behalf of Herr Direktor I retained her as our company lawyer in Malaysia. She fitted in nicely although it took some time for Mrs. Tan to overcome her antipathy towards Cleo. I suspected that she resented Cleo for replacing Mandy. There wasn't much she could do though, since Cleo was now a valued employee in charge of the company's legal matters. Mrs. Tan was now the company COO although 'Herr Direktor' always had the last word.

"How on earth did you manage to appoint me, Kaid? You must wield quite an influence with Herr Direktor," Cleo mused when we were in the car.

"Naturally," I replied smugly, "especially since I am Herr Direktor."

"You? You are Monkshood, Inc.? But why ... I mean how?"

It took nearly two hours to tell her the whole story and explain Mandy's role in the business. Essentially I owned Monkshood and now that Mandy had Nightshade she didn't need the income from Monkshood. I decided that I should give Cleo a part of the business and I told her so.

"It isn't necessary Kaid," she said although her eyes glowed. "As you know I can easily make a good living as a practising lawyer."

"How about moving in with me? Maintain an apartment in the city like I do, but move in with me."

"OK then. And there is also that Shaitan to deal with," she said, referring to Insp. Osman Sameon (Special Branch).

Her eyes narrowed cruelly and her smile would have congealed Osman's blood if he could only see her then.

Before my western readers think that I'm becoming chummy with Shaitan because I refer to him by his first name, I should mention that Malays follow the Arabs in the naming of children. The given name comes first followed by the father's name, usually with a bin between the two. We don't have family names.

A Grey Sister

I can't explain why Kaid's bite never aroused feelings of abhorrence. First he sank his long, thick shaft into my pussy. I wrapped my legs around his butt as he pumped into me with long, deep strokes. Then he sank his fangs into my neck tapping my carotid artery. It stung just a little. He began drinking my blood as we fucked. His body covered mine and his heaving weight was a pleasure to bear. Hot waves of ecstasy slammed through my body. Undergoing the change was a revelation. Towards the end when he was in the last stage of emptying me of blood I fell into a kind of warm, comfortable drowsiness. Drinking his blood was something else again. My heart began to beat louder and louder and I could hear his heart beat too. The trick was to synchronise both our heartbeats until they beat as one. That was the hard part. Even harder was the moment we had to separate. It was a real effort to pull away from him but it had to be done otherwise we would have experienced real death instead of the near death, the coma as I prefer to call it. Then came the lovemaking — wildly erotic, and passionately fulfilling, filling me to the quick. Every inch of my pussy was stretched. He has this trick of controlling the size of his organ so that fornicating was an ecstatic gambol through the halls of paradise. I felt so different when I came out of the little death that is part of the transformation.

He took me out at night to teach me to hunt for our prey, reminding me never to drink the blood of an innocent.

"You can always tell who they are. They have a special aura about them," he explained.

Oh, for the hunt — flitting through the shadows of the night stalking our prey, the quiet pounce, then the bite. The food feels the initial sting of being bitten, after which it shares in the pleasure of feeding us. Once the feeding is over, the woman pleasures me with her tongue and fingers while the man uses his prick. There, I've used the word. Kaid laughs when I hesitate to use bawdy words to describe those things.

Fornicating with Kaid is timeless, always wonderful, and never dull or boring. Then there is our ability to read body language, which makes it almost impossible for us to be other than absolutely honest with each other. Love him? Vamps are incapable of love. If we were then we wouldn't be what we are. It is the price we pay for almost immortality. Sometimes I wonder if it is worth the loss of our humanity. Is that an oxymoron? How can we grieve over the loss of our humanity when we are no longer human? I don't know. I haven't lived that long yet. But on the other hand, humans haven't got a wonderful track record anyway.