Clip preview from my up coming book

Well today's my birthday and I actually forgot that I had a blog to do today. Bad me. So I'm going to take the easy way out and just give you a preview clip from my up coming book. Here's part of chapter one.

How many years has it been since my days became nights and my nights became days? More than three, but less than eight I would guess. Time was different for me since I changed. Nothing had escaped that horrid night that seemed so long ago, and yet the memory was as fresh as if it had been the night before. I often wonder what my life would be like had I stayed at home rather than wandering the town in search of entertainment. Pointless the thought, yet very much important to me. It was a piece of my humanity that still clung on in the face of a dark immortality. A piece that I myself found necessary if I were to survive, and the thing I had become were to remain in check.

Tonight like every night since the first one, it was dark. It befitted someone like me, a creature of the night and a man in utter torment. I would have happily stayed in hiding, avoiding the nightly hunt that plagued me with an endless stream of memories. With faces that were no more thanks to an endless thirst that seemed to fill me and drive me ever outward when the sun would set. Tonight was no different than all the others.

I sought to end my existence at the start. The idea of a noble death to finish what I had become had ended as quickly as it had come into existence. A makeshift stake driven into my beating heart only found that what I thought would be an end, only became more agony. The stake failed to do anything but cause me the second most agonizing pain I had ever felt. The most agonizing was my second attempt. I trapped myself in an area I thought I could not escape and watched as the morning sun rose into the sky.

Both attempts ended in exactly the same way. The pain became more than I could bear, and then I lost my awareness. When it returned in both instances, a fresh corpse sat at my feet, drained completely of its life blood. My injuries were gone and what was left of my sanity was restored. Somehow my body refused to die, and in the process took another. The shame I felt at both of those failures was only dwarfed by repulsion at what I became. A vampire, sure and true.

How it had happened, even I was not sure. One moment I was human, lost in revelry and wine. The next was darkness and the cold that only the dead can feel. I awoke several days later, sprawled out in the back alley of an unknown place, the full moon at its zenith. The shine of it had just touched my weakened form, and smoke and pain erupted where the moon's kiss touched. To say I had been confused that night was an understatement. An aggressive dog had saved me that night from the rays of the moon, its blood giving me the strength to resist the sun's reflection off that great orb in the sky.

Without its donation, I'm sure that night would have been my last. The weakness of that new birth was too much without the aid of fresh blood. I found that I could never go without it for very long, or madness would take me. A madness I feared I would never wake up from.

So it was this fear that brought me out tonight, as it did every night. To hunt while I still had the choice. So long as I was in control and not the hunger, then it was my choice who would live and who would die. Vampire I may have become, yet the evils that name held I refuse to become.

Los Angeles. The city of angels, or so it was called. In the years that I wandered its streets searching for what I needed to keep me whole, I never ran into one of these. Perhaps they existed, after all, I did. If something so foul as what I became were here, then why not something so pure? It seemed reasonable to me, at least partly so. The logic was sound. Who knew what existed in this world if vampires were real? Anything could be possible.