WARNING: contains a sex scene of moderate explicitness.

“Undead bastard? Oh, I’m sure you can do better than that.”

I smile cruelly as you tug at the ropes that bind you to the slab top of the tomb.

“I can hardly be insulted by the truth, now, can I?” I add.

My eyes trail the length of your body, from the chunky biker boots up the tight black leather trousers that emphasis the curve of your thighs and up over the black long-sleeved top that moulds to you like a second skin. If I were a mortal man I would find you breathtaking, but I have never been one for dallying with the living, not even one as beautiful as you.

Beautiful, but also furious; though whether at me for humiliating you like this or whether at yourself for being so sloppy as to be ambushed I cannot tell. You are, after all, the best vampire hunter on the continent and I… well though hardly at the base of the bloodsucker food chain, I am far below the level of your accustomed prey. Normally I would be beneath your notice.

But not now. Now it is you who are beneath me. Literally.

“Surely you don’t imagine you can kill me?” you spit. “Or turn me? I have magical protection. Wards that would tear you to shreds.”

I nod, but say nothing. I know you speak the truth. I can smell the powerful charms on you – coiling, pent-up energies that would unleash on me the moment I broke your skin, that would flay the cold flesh from my eons-old bones, consign me to years of agony before I could reform this almost indestructible body I inhabit.

I step up beside you and touch a talon to your jaw. You jerk your head away and I laugh. My other hand snakes through your raven-black hair, yanking your face back towards me so that I can continue the action of caressing your jaw, sharp claw against soft flesh.

The look in your eyes is murder. You tug again on the ropes that hold your wrists and ankles to the corners of the slab. I mutter an incantation and the hemp contracts, tightens, stretching your limbs rigid and flat against the grey stone, rendering you immobile from the neck down.