Published 'Fresh Blood' 1993
He entered her throat with his teeth.
His teeth were so long they easily by-passed her own teeth and, after gouging the inevitable divots in her tongue and via careless abrasions upon tonsils and the throat’s soft lining, their jagged tips soon found even softer, more blubbery obstacles, beyond which they could not possibly reach, despite the wide-yawning creak of both pairs of jaws. This was the only method for him to suck a body’s juices without doing permanent damage to it. Otherwise, the punctures would have been wall-to-wall.
This had been a particularly heavy feed, resulting from his own uncommon hunger together with the woman having recently been bloated by unnecessary blood transfusions from over-zealous doctors with too many donors on their hands. The vampire sat back on his haunches, formed a bubbly red smile, retracted his sharpened jawbone (along with the teeth) and licked his lips with the rough flannel of a tongue.
The woman returned the smile. Her body felt far less tight, her clothes hanging as if she wasn’t really inside them. The vampire was sliding on all fours towards the exit, casting desultory comments behind him about the weather, the general election, late night TV and so forth. She did not answer. Small talk was never her bag. In any event, she was too exhausted to speak, having, as it were, given birth to a large bouncing baby of blood.
The ever attentive doctors would no doubt return with their donors and hangers-on before the night was out, so her relief was only temporary. It was a pity you couldn’t get vampires on the National Health Service these days. She supposed it was because they themselves needed to pay exorbitant prices for cosmetic bone extensions, with the present Government in power. But if the fees were high, the fangs should be exquisitely long and stake-sharp...
Her smile became an empty sigh.
