Blogging has always been a daunting task for me. I can never think of anything cute or clever to say. My life is actually pretty boring....mostly I live in the worlds I create. This is the one I'm living in now....

                                                                          Untitled Work-in-Progress

Chapter 1

            Daisy O’Donnell’s compass wasn’t much good for finding north or south; but then, she wasn’t lost or trying to navigate her way around the world. She was hunting vampires, and her little silver compass with its bright golden needle worked perfectly fine for that. Although it wasn’t really a compass. More like a GPS system for finding the resting places of the Undead. All she had to do was drive down the street and follow the needle, which turned red when she was within a few feet of a lair.

            There was no dearth of locations for vampires to hide in the greater Los Angeles area these days. She had found lairs inside shallow caves, dusty attics, cob-webby basements, ancient cemeteries, abandoned buildings, and foreclosed tract homes.

Daisy felt a rush of satisfaction as the needle shimmered and quivered, telling her she was getting close to the day-time resting place of one of the Undead. The vampire she was currently hunting had made its lair inside an old wine cellar in an abandoned building.

             Daisy paused outside the lair, her nose wrinkling with distaste as she sprayed herself with Scent-B-Gone, a concoction guaranteed to mask her distinctive scent from all but the most powerful vampires. The spray itself evaporated within an hour or two, leaving nothing behind.

The door to the wine cellar creaked like something out of an old Vincent Price movie as Daisy pried it open with a crowbar. Leaving the crowbar outside, she stepped through the doorway, then turned on her trusty four-cell flashlight, and cautiously made her way down the rickety wooden stairs. She swept the beam from right to left, uttered a soft sound of satisfaction as the light disclosed a pale pink casket in the far corner.

            Her feet made hardly a sound as she walked across the dusty cement floor and raised the lid. The vampire, a young female, slept inside. Daisy was only interested in hunting the young. She recalled an old adage that claimed old age and treachery would overcome youth and skill. She didn’t know if that was true among mortals, but it definitely applied to vampires. They got stronger and meaner as they grew older. And, unlike their young counterparts, really old vampires weren’t completely helpless and unaware during the day, which made hunting them doubly dangerous.

Although Daisy had done this sort of thing many times before, it always startled her to look at one of the Undead at rest, because they looked very dead, indeed. The vampire lay on her back, her hands folded over her breasts. Her hair was dark brown; her skin beyond pale.

            After tucking the flashlight under her arm, Daisy pulled a large syringe out of one pocket of her jacket, several small plastic bottles out of another, and got to work. There were vampire hunters who drained the Undead of their blood for fun and profit and then took their heads, and other hunters who destroyed vampires simply because of what they were.

Daisy had never destroyed a vampire. Taking a head or driving a stake through the heart of an unconscious vampire was a nasty, messy business. Unless you were a hunter for hire, there was little profit to be had in destroying vampires, but she had earned a tidy fortune in selling their blood on the Internet. Have an injury that refuses to heal? Rub a little vamp blood on it. Got a cold that won’t go away? Take two aspirins and a spoonful of blood mixed with the drink of your choice. Want a high that lasts all night? Vampire blood will do the trick with no ugly after-effects, as long as you don’t imbibe too much. An ounce enhances your senses. Anything over that, and you probably won’t wake up in the morning.

            Daisy herself had never indulged. The mere idea of drinking blood, even if it was mixed with something more palatable, was totally repugnant.

            She took a pint or so from a vein in the vampire’s left arm, enough to fill her current orders, and left the cellar with the sleeping vampire none the wiser, at least until she woke later that night.

            After retrieving her crowbar, Daisy returned to her car. She stowed the bottles in the ice chest in the back seat, slid behind the wheel, and headed home. She didn’t feel the least bit of guilty for what she had done. Why should she? Selling vampire blood wasn’t against the law, and since vampires had no human rights and no legal recourse, there was nothing the Undead could do about it.

Unless they caught you.

And then all the laws and ordinances in the world weren’t worth the paper they were written on.

 copyright Amanda Ashley 2008