Deadly Liaisons vol 1 (Dead End Streets: Deadly Liaisons series)

By Leigh Wilder

Compilation of books 1 through 3 of the Deadly Liaisons series. Contains "Drain Me Dry", "Addicted to the Bite" and "Club Midnight."

This is a m/m paranormal erotica series. It contains BDSM, violence, and graphic sex.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leigh Wilder
• Release date: Sep 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301587445

Leigh Wilder

Leigh Wilder has been writing for 20 years. She published her first story at the age of 20, but hasn't been actively pursuing publication until recently. She lives in Columbus, OH with her husband and 3 cats.

Book preview

78

Deadly Liaisons

Volume 1

by leigh wilder

Featuring:

Drain Me Dry

Addicted to the Bite

Club Midnight

Copyright Leigh Wilder 2013

Smashwords Edition

Cover art copyright dnadigital & fredgoldstein at Dreamstime Stock Photos

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.

Notes

This collection has been a long time coming. Jamie-boy and Damian first appeared in a YA online serial, Dead End Streets, in 2007. They were minor characters and Jamie-boy was a blatant plot device to move the main character, David, in the direction he needed to go.

The serial ran for over a year and had a small but loyal following. Each chapter was published as soon as it was written and after a year and a half it had turned into a large, wet mess. After a while I took it offline and its multiple characters and convoluted story-lines sat quietly on my hard-drive.

Fast-forward to 2012. I was entering the world of self-published e-books and I wanted to do some paranormal erotica for my October release. I remembered Dead End Streets, a whole world and multitude of characters I had created, wasting away. I loved writing Jamie-boy’s eagerness and Damian’s careless affection for him, so I decided to pull them out of the manuscript and into their own story.

I adore Jamie-boy. I used to giggle when I wrote his dialogue—he was kinda campy in the original story. Making him the protagonist meant I had to give him a good reason to seek out a vampire to bite him, and quite a few of my recent characters have suffered from depression—I was comfortable writing it. A depressed teenager romanticizing his suicide isn’t a new thing, but I like to think Jamie-boy takes it to new dramatic levels.

Damian is close to my heart. I like to joke that he’s the literary world’s first socialist vampire master (before he was turned in 1906 Damian was a union organizer). He doesn’t give a damn about money and uses his power to protect and care for ‘his people.’ He’s not perfect—sometimes he gets tired of the whole thing—but he knows he has a job to do and he’s going to do it right.

The world of Dead End Streets is an alternate universe where vampires, werewolves, incubi and succubi (known collectively as cubi) were revealed to exist in the early 1960’s by a werewolf named Jessie Nolan, who picketed the White House for a cure for lycanthropy. This caused a complete upheaval of the Civil Rights movement, altered history, and for the first few decades it was very dangerous to be a Demonic American as vampires were staked, werewolves were seen as carriers of the deadliest disease on the planet, and the cubi were locked up in internment camps for the ‘moral safety’ of society.

In present day (Drain Me Dry takes place in 2010) there are strict laws governing supernatural beings, and many of them are treated as second and third class citizens. New Franklin, where our story takes place, is a struggling industrial town in Pennsylvania with a few lingering factories, a community college, and not much else. Due to its lack of demonic zoning laws, it has become a mecca for supernatural people and has the highest percentage of demons per capita in the state. This is the setting for our story.

As I write this I have no clear plan of how long the series is going to run, but I know how it will end. I have some ideas for other Dead End Streets characters that might get their own stand-alone stories, and of course there is the original manuscript. I’ve done a lot of work on it, on and off, over the years. Maybe one day it will see print after all.

book 1:

drain me dry

Jamie’s hand shook as he held the box cutter over his wrist. Do it, he muttered to himself. Do it you coward, you freak. He pressed the blade against his skin over pale blue veins, but it was dull from over-use. The flesh would not separate. His whole body was shaking now. He was so close to ending it all. Peace. Peace from the last nineteen years of hell. He pushed harder.

Hey, Fag-boy, Gareth poked his head into the stock room and Jamie let the box cutter clatter to the floor. The kitchen ain’t gonna clean itself you know, he said. Jamie thought he saw a flash of fang and his heart picked up its pace, but no. Vamps rarely showed fang unless they were going to feed, and Gareth had already made it perfectly clear he wasn’t going to touch Jamie.

Gareth disappeared and Jamie picked up the box cutter and set it on a shelf. The urge to kill himself had passed, for the moment. In the kitchen Gareth hopped up on the counter and lit a cigarette while Jamie grabbed a broom and started sweeping up the day's mess. The floor of the Taco King was notoriously disgusting by the end of the shift—broken taco shells, chunks of greasy meat, and lettuce that had been stamped into mush from Gareth’s heavy boots.

Jamie glanced at Gareth as he worked, unable to stop looking at him even though he hated him. Gareth had probably been only average looking before being bitten, but vamps had a tendency to be attractive regardless of their features. Gareth had shampoo commercial hair and hands that looked like they had daily attention from a manicurist. He had a physique to die for and every movement was utterly graceful like a cat. He smoked his cigarette and then jumped down from the counter and started clearing away the dirty pans from the line with lightning speed.

Jamie watched him work as he swept and mopped. Gareth was an asshole, and he was a twenty-six year old deadbeat who worked at the Taco King, but Jamie was drawn to him anyway. He couldn’t help himself. Where are you going when we get off? Jamie asked him.

Gareth shrugged as he scrubbed his way through the dishes. Dunno. Somewhere.

Jamie thought of the dull box cutter. He was so afraid. Can I come with you?

Gareth stopped washing and turned to look at him. Don’t be a naïve idiot. You don’t wanna go where I’m going.

Maybe I do, Jamie said, feeling braver than he had in the stock room. Take me with you.

"I don’t need a groupie cramping my style, and I’m not looking after you. You and I are not friends."

Who says I need any looking after? Jamie demanded. You don’t know what I’m after.

Gareth rolled his eyes at Jamie. There’s nothing romantic about being a vamp tramp. We don’t love you, we don’t care about you. All we’re looking for is a free meal and maybe a fuck. People die and they don’t even know it’s happening until it’s too late. Is that what you want?

Take me with you, Jamie just said a second time.

Gareth shook his head. Forget it. I’m outta here. He threw down the pan he was washing with a splash and stalked out of the kitchen. Jamie heard the heavy slam of the back door, and he knew Gareth wasn’t coming back. He looked around at what was left to clean and considered the box cutter again.

***

Jamie was tired, aching, and stinking of taco when he finally got home. He tried to sneak in quietly through the back door but his father was there in the kitchen, digging through the fridge, a bottle in one hand. Where you been? he slurred, pulling leftover pizza out of the box and tossing it onto a dirty plate. All of the dishes were dirty—his father never cleaned and Jamie had a hard time motivating to do anything. This house is a sty, his father remarked. Clean it up.

I will tomorrow, Jamie said.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, that’s always your excuse. If you hadn’t chased off your mother this never would have happened.

You chased her off, Dad. He didn’t say it aloud. I’m tired. I promise I’ll do it tomorrow. He had to walk past his father to get to the hallway, and he grabbed him tight by the arm. His father’s ham fist squeezed hard, and Jamie struggled in vain to pull away.

You’ll do it now or I’ll make you do it, boy.

It was three in the morning. All Jamie wanted was a shower. He did not want to experience his father’s drunken wrath unless it was going to kill him, and it never did. Okay, he said, and when his father let go he turned to the full sink and began to sort through the mess. Eventually his father wandered back into the living room, and before Jamie had finished the dishes he heard the clunk of an empty beer bottle hitting the floor as he passed out. Jamie turned off the water and shook off his hands. He went upstairs to go to bed.

***

Jamie woke up when his father grabbed him by the front of his t-shirt and hauled him out of bed. Pain shot through his knee when he hit the floor, and then he was on his feet against his will, giant fists battering against his skull.

It was a pain that filled his head, like he had a balloon for a brain and his father was inflating it with each impact, threatening to blow up his skull from the inside out. He was dragged out of his bedroom and, unable to get his feet under him in time, thrown down the stairs. He only managed to grab at the banister and slow his descent a few steps from the bottom. Clean the damn kitchen, his father said from the top of the stairs, and walked down after him, stepping on Jamie’s hand as he walked by.

Jamie cleaned the kitchen limping on his bad knee and working mostly with his left hand, the fingers on his right shooting pain every time he clutched something. His father worked second shift cleaning offices downtown, and Jamie was grateful when he finally left for work. The kitchen finished, Jamie went upstairs to take a long shower. The hot water felt good on his aching body and it was only there, alone under the spray of the shower, that Jamie allowed himself to cry. He couldn’t feel the tears on his face, and for that he was glad—he hated crying just as he hated his father and his life.

He spent a long time in the shower. He couldn’t do it anymore. His father was too much, work was too much. He didn’t have any money and the only skill he had was running the drive thru at the Taco King. No friends, no family that had ever given a damn about him. He thought of Gareth, of his strange beauty and cruel temper. He didn’t want anything to do with Jamie, but he was just one vampire, one of hundreds in the city. They couldn’t all be so close-minded.

Climbing into bed afterwards he slept until the sun went down. When he woke he dressed carefully, in his best torn tight jeans and black fishnet shirt. No matter what happened that night, he was never coming back. He added a spiked choker that wasn’t quite a dog collar. He had never been to a vampire bar, but he knew what they liked. Jamie knew that they liked to feel superior (because they were) and they liked their meals willing and submissive. Jamie had no problem with that, he had submitted to everything and everyone his entire life. It seemed a fitting way for him to die. It would be so much easier without holding the knife himself. Let him find a vampire. A beautiful, dangerous creature, and let that vampire suck every moment of his terrible life out of him. Let him fall lifeless, bloodless