I run a razor-sharp nail slowly from your neck down towards the waistband of your leather trousers, pausing between your breasts and brushing over your tight, exercise-honed abdomen. The first time is feather light, teasing, provoking. The second time my talon snags cotton at the neckline of your top and I slice cleanly down, parting the garment in two.

If your eyes promised murder before, now they promise unspeakable torture and a death worse than any you have ever meted out to my kind before.

In a way, it’s a compliment.

I peel open the severed top as if I were opening the covers of some priceless volume of ancient lore. Your skin is as parchment below, parchment covered with symbols tattooed into your skin, the wards that protect you.

I daren’t breach these wards. But that isn’t my plan.

Next, your trousers. The leather is more resilient than the cotton of your top, but it too parts to the supernaturally keen edge of my claws and moments later I am removing the strips of ruined garment from you.

“Have you any idea how much those cost, you fucker?” you hiss.

“No,” I answer. “Do I look like I frequent designer label shops?”

After a moment I add, “Though I’ve no doubt you will take it out of my hide, every last penny.”

“Too damned right,” is your reply.

I am surprised by the quality of your underwear, which seems more suitable for clubbing in upmarket venues than creeping through cemeteries. But expensive or not, it too must go.

Now you are bare but for your boots and the scraps of your top. Your eyes meet mine. Do your worst, they seem to say. But know that you’ll pay a thousandfold.

I bend my face between your thighs, holding your gaze as I go down on you. This is not what you expected. You thought to be raped, straightforward and brutal. Instead I open you almost tenderly and begin to lap.

Soon your breath is ragged, your teeth clenched to hold back the moans of pleasure. Soon your body is shaking despite the tightness of your bonds. Soon you are gasping, mewling, whimpering, crying… And finally, coming.

I step back and wipe my face clean. The look you give me is complex, a mixture of hate, anger, lust for revenge, satiation, and denial.

I walk up the steps, towards the door of the crypt and the cool night air beyond, leaving you tied to the tomb. Just at the top of the stairs, I turn.

“Now I own your shame,” I say. “I own the secret that the great Sarah Gilbert, hater of vampires and hater of men, can be brought to the very crescendos of ecstasy by the things she so loathes. And I will tell them all, every other vampire I meet, unless you kill me first.”

I turn and leave.

In half an hour the enchantments on the ropes will fade and you will no doubt break free. In fact I am counting on it. I am counting on you to find me and subject me to a quick and permanent death. For I am bored of this half life. Every sensation has become stale, repetitive. I seek an end.

There are very few ways for a vampire to be destroyed for good, but in pissing off the greatest vampire hunter of this age, I am sure I that have found one.

Goodbye.