Reborn

By J. Hepburn

Sasha never learned the rules of being a vampire, and Ithel has always been unstable. But they are fiercely loyal to each other and have managed to survive in a hostile world by carefully covering their tracks. Then they make a mistake they can't hide and Sasha learns there is much more to life as a vampire than he ever realized—if he is willing to risk everything.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. Hepburn
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463810460

J. Hepburn

J. Hepburn is a speculative fiction writer from Queensland, Australia. They live with their girlfriend, two cats, the ghosts of four giant grey shaggy hounds that take up a lot of space, and innumerable visiting magpies, kookaburras, parrots and carpet pythons.

Book preview

Sasha never learned the rules of being a vampire, and Ithel has always been unstable, but they are fiercely loyal to each other and manage to survive in a hostile world, carefully covering their tracks. Then they make a mistake they can't hide and Sasha learns there is much more to life as a vampire than he ever realized—if he is willing to risk everything.

Reborn

J. Hepburn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

Original edition edited by Keith Kaczmarek

Cover designed by London Burden

This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

Second Edition September 2019

First Edition published by Less Than Three Press

Copyright © 2013 by J. Hepburn

Printed in the United States of America

To Tam, who somehow still loves me despite all the time I spend with my characters

Reborn

J. Hepburn

What's your name, pretty? Sasha asked as he leaned into the tall boy and trailed one long fingernail down the tanned face. Tanned faces always fascinated him. They were one thing humans could manage that he could not.

Steven, the boy said, swallowing through the pulsing background fear that he could not, even with the alcohol in his system and the throbbing erection in his pants, entirely suppress.

Steven, Sasha repeated, pitching his voice to slide through the boy's ears and caress his brain from the inside. That's a nice name. Isn't that a nice name, Ithel?

Ithel, his eyes dark red pools and his lips parted slightly to reveal the first glint of his fangs, only nodded as he loomed slightly too close over Sasha's shoulder.

A pretty name from such pretty lips, Sasha said before kissing Steven, controlling the kiss as the boy at first tried to reflexively withdraw and then began pushing back.

They were in a cheap hotel room where the sheets were thin from endless washing in industrial laundries. It was the sort of hotel that welcomed vampires bringing consenting prey for a dirty night away from respective homes.

Sasha Kornel Wolanski and Ithel Caradoc Teague had found Steven in a nightclub chosen, like the hotel, for its tawdry cheapness and its lack of glamour. Rich men paid them to wallow in silk sheets and marble baths and drink blood sweetened with cuvée champagne and single malt scotch, but younger blood is sweeter and young lust is headier, so they spiced their afterlife by wallowing in the squalor of sticky carpets, cheap drinks and raging hormones.

They had drunk red wine for its appearance in the glass, and dressed well enough to attract attention without looking out of place. Sasha, shorter and stockier and with straight black hair trimmed close to his head, had chosen a T-shirt of gleaming black Lycra stretched tight over his sculptured chest. Ithel, taller and longer in body and face and with a mat of tightly curled hair on his head, had selected an open-necked shirt of loose black silk that flowed like water around his slender torso and ended at tight, long cuffs over his wrists. Their pants, too, gleamed in the light, Sasha's hugging his arse and Ithel's hinting at his.

The club had been a gay bar by the numbers with predictable music and a horde of cloned twinks in tight white T-shirts, tight jeans, and hair rigid with product. The bouncers and bar staff had been there long enough to see patrons come and age and go and remembered when the club had been in a different venue that was now a sports bar.

They had moved through the crowd with such ease, and such an absolute awareness of space and the movement of others that it had not taken long for the patrons, as one, to realise they were vampires. Speculation had turned to fascination, fascination had shaken hands with fear, and finally fear had been over-ridden by the thrill of mingled danger and the unknown. Vampires did not often leave their own clubs and enclaves, and many humans had never seen one in the flesh.

Sasha and Ithel had tasted the humans' emotions in the air, and the red of hunger had bled into both their eyes.

Sasha had let the tips of his fangs show, to encourage respect, and Ithel had showed his without thinking, so they had space in which to move. None of the clubbing boys had, unknowingly, challenged Ithel's mercurial temper with a display of unjustified braggadocio. At the same time, neither vampire had seen any boy worthy of their interest.

Ithel's predatory playfulness had been threatening to turn to frustrated petulance before he had spotted, against one wall, a tall boy with an intensity about him that spoke of slightly higher intelligence than the norm, and less of annoying, unwarranted, self-aggrandising strut.

It had taken Steven's friends half an hour to notice that he had disappeared.

Steven was now breathing heavily as Sasha's hands finger-walked over his chiselled torso. He knew he was safe–that the Covenant protected him–but the intellectual knowledge did not keep him from feeling visceral fear as Sasha let his lips curl back to show Steven a flash of fangs before darting with snake-like speed to gently suck on one nipple.

Steven's skin tasted of fear and then a spike of arousal, and Sasha resisted with difficulty the urge to sink his fangs either side of the nipple