Content warning: blood mention, on-page death

Scorch marks and the shattered shells of holy water grenades littered the floor around us where you’d finally fallen. You lay cradled in my arms, your pulse…questionable. You’d lost your crusade.

I’d won. But I wished I hadn’t. Not yet.

I extended my fangs. Oh, how you’d hate to join the undead. But would it be so terrible to join me? Your rival? Your nemesis?

Your lover?

When I bit your neck, though, your blood tasted stale. Poison dribbled from the puncture, unabsorbed.

Useless.

I rested my forehead against yours and wept for the first time in a hundred years.

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe for new stories, sneak peeks, book reviews, and updates delivered to your inbox and social feeds.

Links

Summer’s Latest

Beneath the Bluebonnets: Tales of Terror by Texas Women

Read my eco-horror short “Well Being” in this fabulous new anthology, in which a mother follows strange impulses from tainted water to find her daughter.

From Mary Shelley to Tananarive Due and Mariana Enríquez, women have long shaped horror—often without equal recognition. Living closest to the genre’s edge, women know these fears firsthand: lost autonomy, violence, childbirth, survival.

Set in Texas, a land of haunted histories and increasingly restrictive laws, Beneath the Bluebonnets emerges from the raw intersection of terror and endurance. Written by twelve Texas women writers: R. J. Joseph, Lauren Oertel, L.H. Phillips, Kathleen Kent, Madison Estes, Jess Hagemann, Emma E. Murray, Jae Mazer, Iphigenia Strangeworth, Jacklyn Baker, S.G. Baker and edited by Carmen Gray, this collection is urgent, unflinching, and deeply haunting—stories that refuse to look away.