Sex, Blood & Belladonna

By Melanie Cantor

The vampire love story of Mina and Adam continues. Adam is called to Amsterdam to deal with his maker's will and takes Mina along for a much needed vacation with the love of his undead life.

Unfortunately, not all vampires feel that commitment between two creatures of the undead is acceptable.

Their spontaneous vacation quickly turns into a nightmare when they come across these fascist vampires and learn that their relationship comes with a price and that price is paid in blood...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melanie Cantor
• Release date: Mar 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301285587

Melanie Cantor

Grew up in Philadelphia, went to Hussian School of Art where I graduated with honors with an A.A. in Graphic Arts. I have had some short stories printed in some adult papers distributed in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia and this is the first time I have tried my hand at writing a full length novella.I'm a mom and a wife and now currently living still in Philadelphia and working as a graphic artist in New Jersey.

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Sex, Blood & Belladonna

By Melanie Cantor

Copyright

Published by Melanie Cantor at Smashwords

Cover art by Melanie Cantor

Copyright 2012 Melanie Cantor

All Smashwords books are sold DRM-free, without copy protection or encryption.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Thank you!

Thank you to all my friends for reading the rough drafts and giving me all the feedback. Especially Briana Haney for being my number one fan.

Also thank you so much to my editor Rich Dalglish who so gracefully helped me mold this book into what it is today with his wonderful editing skills and critique.

Dedication

To every vampire book and movie ever created… if it weren’t for you,

I wouldn’t be so in love with the undead.

Same author as Sex, Blood & Rock ‘n’ Roll

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Thank you

Dedication

Chapter 1: Boxes

Chapter 2: I’m filthy fucking rich

Chapter 3: I live like a fucking vampire

Chapter 4: Love is a smoke made with the fumes of sighs. ~William Shakespeare

Chapter 5: To an eternity, bonded together by blood

Chapter 6: Do you have a passport?

Chapter 7: I know, but I want to be inside you more

Chapter 8: You should go home and thank the baby Jesus you’re still in one piece

Chapter 9: But … you’re a vampire

Chapter 10: Adam … something’s not right, baby

Chapter 11: We are going to go on a little ride, my liebling

Chapter 12: You’re very odd for a vampire

Chapter 13: Why can’t you just let this go?

Chapter 14: Ah, another piece of the puzzle

Chapter 15: Well … this was something I didn’t anticipate

Chapter 16: Don’t try that ‘Twilight’ bullshit with me

Chapter 17: Are you just about done in there, Miss?

Chapter 18: How long have you known?

Chapter 19: I’m done with it, done with love

Chapter 20: Wonderful things to distract me

Chapter 1: Boxes

Adam

I was in the attic for what seemed like forever. The damn boxes were everywhere. I couldn’t believe I had accumulated so much stuff. I guess that’s a drawback to being immortal. I needed to go through all that shit so I didn’t end up on Hoarders.

I looked at my phone. I had been up there for a half hour and was on my seventh box, and still no luck. The box, from my childhood in Germany, contained old school books, toy soldiers in a tin box, even some comic books. I started collecting Batman comics when I was a young boy; if I sold them now, they’d be worth a fortune, but I could never bring myself to do that.

I moved on to the eighth box, marked 1944. I was seventeen when I packed that one up. I vaguely remembered it. We were leaving Egypt, where we had lived for about a year. It was my final year of high school, so the box was full of yearbooks, letters from old girlfriends, movie posters, and a pair of brown leather boxing gloves. Looking through that stuff had me thinking about all the differences the past few decades had witnessed. Teenagers nowadays were so unlike how I was at seventeen. The pace of their lives is so much faster, and some things come much more easily to them. When I was seventeen and wanted to date a girl, it was all very innocent. I would have been thrilled to get a kiss on the cheek at the end of the night. One day, I’ll have to share some of these boxes with Mina. But that box didn’t have what I was looking for, so I moved on.

I rummaged through box nine, box ten, and box eleven and still hadn’t found what I was looking for. The twelfth box looked more promising. It had belonged to my father. He had packed it for me before he died. During the last decade of my parent’s lives, our relationship had been strained. Before my change, we were very close. When I wasn’t traveling I would stay with them, spend time with them. As parent-child relationships go, we got along quite well. But after I became a vampire, and then only after my bloodlust was under control, I was limited in how often I could see them. Then, once I reached my mid thirties, they started to notice I wasn’t aging. I blamed it on our Jewish genetics, but after a few more years, that excuse wasn’t cutting it. They were retired and living in Florida, so when I moved to London I was able to use the distance as the reason for not seeing them anymore. I kept our contact to phone calls and letters, and it was tough on them and on me. They wanted to see me, but I somehow managed to keep up the excuses.

As they got older, I fought with my emotions on a regular basis, wanting to see them but not wanting them to find out I was a monster. Especially when my father called to tell me my mother had cancer and was dying.

I called every day to check on her, and I kept telling him I would come home soon. It was painful to lie to him. But when he made that final call, to tell me she was critical, I decided to bite the bullet. I needed to go home.

My father was shocked at my appearance. He couldn’t understand how I could still look like I did in my twenties. I promised him an explanation after I saw my mother. I spent the next few days at her side, and she wasn’t so feeble that she didn’t question my young face as well, but when she did, I would just change the subject. Eventually my father sat me down in the kitchen. He had more bad news—he was sick as well. He hadn’t told my mother, didn’t see any reason to. She would be gone before him, and he wanted to spare her the sadness that his illness would cause her. I decided that night that I needed to be honest with them.

I asked my father to join me at my mother’s bedside. I held her hand, and it was almost as cold as mine. I know you have been asking me about my secret, why at the age of fifty-seven I still look as I did when I was twenty-five, I began, patting her on the hand to comfort her. I told them about Atef, about the night at the club with my friends. I explained about the attack and how I survived.

When I was finished my story, I could see the shock in my mother’s eyes. Growing up in Israel, she had heard all the folktales about vampires. "Motetz Dam!" she gasped, looking into my eyes.

Yes, Ima, Motetz Dam. I put my head down, resting it on her hand. I’m so sorry. It was not my choice to live this way. I looked up at her then. But I make better choices—I choose not to take lives. Ima, can you please forgive me? I asked, tears running down my face. She looked at me, not with the disgust I expected, but with understanding. Then she pulled me close—her breathing had become erratic—and whispered in my ear, "Ani tamid ohav otcha. I will always love you." Then, still holding my hand, she died.

She never actually said she forgave me. I suppose that shouldn’t matter since she said she still loved me, but somehow it always bothered me. My father, on the other hand, couldn’t easily understand what I was. But he didn’t care anymore. After my mother’s death, he was broken. He only wanted me to stay with him until his own death. He said he wouldn’t ask any more questions, just as long as I stayed. I granted him this, his last wish. I slept days, and he didn’t ask. I hunted some nights, he didn’t ask. I spent the rest of my time taking care of him or just hanging out with him. Most nights we sat in the living room watching sports or news or episodes of That’s Incredible.

A few weeks before he died, he pulled a box out of his closet. He told me it was for me, that he had packed it before I got to Florida. It was full of mementos my parents had saved since I was a child, important things that only a parent would cherish. The yarmulke from my bar mitzvah, my old report cards, my first passport, photos from my childhood, baby clothes, baby books, and cherished jewelry they wanted to pass down to me. I had never been able to bring myself to look through it before. I had glanced through it when he was sitting with me, but it was easier then, when he was still alive. But once he died, the final realization that both my parents were gone hit me hard. So I sealed the box up and never looked at it again … until now.

That box had to have what I was looking for. I couldn’t imagine where else it would be. I made an effort to focus on the task at hand and not get lost in the memories of my dead parents. I ransacked the box with no luck and was about to give up when I saw it, the object I so desired at that moment. I stared at the small object in my hand, it was perfect, just what I needed. I closed the small box and put it in my pocket. Now that I had what I was looking for, I just needed a plan.

Chapter 2: I’m filthy fucking rich

Mina

Adam had been acting odd for weeks. He’d been nervous at times, extra chipper at other times, and altogether on edge. But whenever I asked him what was going on, he would just mumble something about work and change the subject. It was frustrating, but I didn’t want to push the issue, so I let it go, hoping he would eventually just tell me himself. Other than that, our first year together had been bliss for the most part. Putting aside the blood and carnage and dead bodies littering the end of our first six months.

Now that Adam’s ex-vampire bitch was dead, by my own hands, I worried less about something coming between us. Although feeding sometimes got very arousing, we had agreed a long time ago that sex outside our relationship was just not something either one of us wanted, unless of course the other person was present and it was consensual. Recently, a feeding we had shared did get more heated than usual. Adam didn’t fuck the woman, but we got pretty damn close. There was lots of kissing and touching between all of us. It was extremely enjoyable, and we agreed to do it again if the opportunity arose. But outside of that, we just didn’t want to be with other people. We had a steady stream of donors or people we met at V-Circle parties, and we tended to choose donors we weren’t seriously attracted to. It made feeding from them less tempting, and we were able to manage our lust with more control.

When feeding, a vampire can become so aroused from the human blood coursing through their system that sex is almost irresistible. For Adam and me it was not an easy choice. We made it a point always to feed together—being with one another made it possible to resist the temptation. We could direct our stimulation toward each other instead of to the person we were feeding from. It was a challenge but well worth all our efforts.

One night when I woke up, Adam was at work, where he would be most of the night. I was meeting Darla at the bar in a few hours. I dragged my tired ass into the bathroom, brushed my teeth and headed downstairs to eat a bowl of cereal and do my yoga. Even though it was nighttime, I still liked my morning cereal and coffee. After a solid forty-five minutes of very advanced yoga—thanks to my new vampire muscles, advanced yoga was super easy—I decided to take a long hot bath. I poured sweet-smelling bath salts into the steaming water, plugged into my iPod, and began to read the book I was heavily involved in. Twenty minutes later