He looked off to the west, where the last
traces of the sun fell below the horizon, leaving just a trace of
orange lining the edge of the sky where it met the land. The light was
dim and a slight mist gathered, warning of the fog that would coat the
city in grey and shadow under what he knew would be a full moon
tonight. He could hear the music from Bourbon Street drifting down the
alley where he was walking, the alley commonly called Pirate’s Alley.
The alley where the girl had been found earlier in the week. Found
bound and gagged, her dead eyes wide open in fear and her throat cut
from ear to ear. The work of some madman that Vincent Adcock was sure
would kill again.
It always happened that way it seemed.
One girl would turn up dead and then another and another. Some
strangled, some tortured in other ways, almost always they would have
been violated in some unimaginable way. Even after close to two hundred
years, Vincent still didn’t understand the mentality, the mental
defect, the warped mind behind the madmen’s eyes. So he did what he
could, he hunted. He hunted until he found the madman and then he
wreaked his own type of punishment upon those perpetrators of horrid
crimes against helpless women. Vincent loved to hunt, he loved to
chase his prey and toy with them just as they toyed with the women that
they hunted. It was his one redemption for being what he was. A
soulless man in a body that would not grow old. A vampire.
He stopped in front of the Faulkner
house, once home to the author William Faulkner, now a bookstore with
living quarters above. He remembered the days when the author was in
residence and how he and his artist accomplice played havoc on visitors
to the Quarter. Now, the bright yellow exterior held his shadow as he
stood there in the growing dimness. The fog filled the night air, and
he lifted his head. Inhaling deeply, his sense of smell was much more
effective than that of a bloodhound. He smelled the leftover scent of
food, something that he only ate in public to keep questions about his
nature to a minimum, as he really had no need for anything other than
the blood he thirsted. A slight breeze slipped through the alleyway and
upon it he smelled the odor of excrement and urine, probably that of
some dog or cat who had come through this way recently.
Generally, Vincent would take the time to
enjoy the city at night. He loved New Orleans; he had loved it at the
turn of three centuries now. He had been a young, virile man when the
city got its first group of refugees from Haiti. Quite a mixture of
people he remembered. Whites, free blacks, and slaves. With them came
the French language and voodoo. Then there had been the War of 1812
when he saw the British defeated by the troops led by Andrew Jackson,
among those troops were the privateers that were recruited by the
pirate, Jean Lafitte. Not long after the defeat of the British at
Chalmette, his life as he knew it was forever changed by the loss of his
lovely wife and the arrival of the woman who had made him into the
monster he was. He never should have seen the turn of the next century
or the one after that.
He saw the coming and going of the Civil
War, the city being occupied and claimed early in the battle by Union
troops. He watched as slaves were freed and political changes came to
the area during the Reconstruction. He saw hurricanes come and go,
flooding, the building of levees, more hurricanes and flooding yet
somehow the city always survived and held onto to the rich history that
seemed to live there. Only during the last hurricane, the one named
Katrina, Vincent became aware and appalled of what humankind was willing
to do, that people were sometimes less human than himself.
Finally he smelled the scent he was
seeking, something on the air that was unlike anything that a normal
human could detect. Sickeningly sweet and verging on decay, the odor of
madness. He recognized it, the distinct smell that he wished he had
noticed that night in 1815 when the woman who had made him showed up at
the doorstep of his plantation house outside of the city. She had been
mad, sick with the need for blood and tortured with the lust for male
companionship. She had pretended to be destitute, running from a
husband that had abused her in his drunken rages. He had invited her
in, something one must never do to a vampire. For once they are invited
in and cross the threshold to your home; you become their prey, their
victim. And now, Vincent was doomed to live for the rest of the years
that the earth existed and maybe even longer. Nobody really knew.
He followed the trail of the scent out
into the street, walked across the lawn of St. Louis Cathedral, stopping
for a moment to envy those who could enter. He had been in the
Cathedral several times as a child and remembered the peaceful look that
passed over his mother’s face each time they had entered. To him, it
had just been a place where a young, active boy had to be quiet for much
too long, and now he regretted not being able to enter the building as
an adult. Vincent could not enter a place of worship; he was banned
forever from going to one of the places where others could go for solace
and an infusion of faith. He shook his head and got back to the task
at hand, hunting.
The scent wafted throughout the lawn
around the cathedral, growing stronger at times then fading away to just
a hint on the breeze. He continued to follow it back out to Chartres
Street and across the street from the cathedral. He stopped briefly,
listening with ears that heard things that sometimes he didn’t care to
hear, and looked to the right then the left. Then he heard it. The
distinct sound of a frightened heartbeat, fluttering in terror of what
was to come. In a flash, so quickly that the human eye could not detect
his movement but might feel a trace of chill as he passed, he was upon
the sound at the rear of a house that still had plywood covering the
windows, evidence of the wrath that Hurricane Katrina had brought to the
city a few years back. There, by a haphazardly placed dumpster, the
animal had his hands on a young woman.
About Blood Vengeance
Title: Blood Vengeance
Author: Teresa Keefer
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Abigail Cooper has a gift. A gift that allows her to ‘see’ things that
are only visible to those who understand just how thin the veil between the
human world and the spirit world really is.
When Reilly, the teenaged sister in her charge, goes missing Abigail’s
gift takes her to the steamy southern city of New Orleans.
Vincent Adcock has a secret. A centuries old secret that has the potential
to destroy him and his small group of colleagues if ever discovered. Quite content with his wealth and the
immortal life he leads in a penthouse high over the city of New Orleans, his
very existence is put in danger when Abigail turns up at his door.
Abigail knows what he and his colleagues
are. Vampires who scour the streets of the
south for human predators and turn them into prey before they unleash their cruelties
on innocent victims. Her communications
with the spirit world have convinced her that Vincent and his group of
vigilantes are the only ones that can help her find and rescue her sister from
the danger she has been lured to. What
she wasn’t prepared for was her own seduction by the wealthy vampire’s raw
sexuality combined with his ingrained southern gentleman ways.
Follow Abigail and Vincent and the band of
vigilantes as they enter a world of cults, drugs, prostitution and murder in a
race to find and rescue teenaged Reilly before it is too late. Will they succeed and what sacrifices will be
made as time runs out…
About the author
Teresa
Keefer is a self-published author by night and a human resource professional
during the day. Her primary interest is
romantic fiction; however, she has been known to dabble in other genres when
the mood strikes her. Being an avid
reader of everything from non-fiction to horror to romance and erotica since
she was young, her dream of becoming a published author herself became a
reality in 2013 when she published a contemporary romance she completed in
2007. She is a current member of Romance
Writers of America as well as the Indiana Chapter of RWA.
Coming Home was released in February
2013 through Amazon’s Create Space and Kindle Direct Publishing. Blood
Vengeance-Book 1 Vengeance Trilogy was completed and released by the
same platforms in July 2013 with the subsequent books due to release in
2014. She also has written several short
stories and essays as well as poetry which may be found on www.fanstory.com.
First-hand
experience breathes life into her stories because they are set in places that
she has visited. Coming Home is set in
the beautiful, peaceful Smoky Mountain area of East Tennessee, which is her
favorite place to relax. Blood Vengeance
is set in the steamy, seductive New Orleans, a place where she and her
daughters visited and to which she hopes to return. We should also watch for locations such as
Las Vegas, New York City, Washington D.C. as well as some fictional locations
that she has created in her own mind.
She says that if she is able to start working on her bucket list soon,
there will also be a visit to Ireland and hopefully a story from there
too. Her favorite author saying is ‘be
careful what you say or do…you might end up in my next novel’. Not to say that her fictional characters bear
any resemblance to actual people, living or deceased. Readers have said things like ‘she pulls at
the heartstrings’ and ‘she makes you feel like you are right there’ when
reviewing her books. She says between
book ideas that are fed to her by friends, her own imagination is continually
coming up with new book ideas and she has no less than three works in process
at a time.
Teresa
is a lifelong Indiana resident living in a rural community in the east central
portion of the state. As a single mother
of three daughters, she returned to college as an adult and earned an MBA from
Indiana Institute of Technology. Teresa
has spent over 25 years in the human resource profession and has often
threatened to write a humorous depiction of life in the human resource
profession. Oh, the stories she could
tell! She has been known to debate
political and social issues with passion and generally does not back down,
sometimes resorting to dry sarcasm to prove a point. In addition to spending time with her
daughters and grandchildren she has a lot of other interests that compete for
her time such as cooking, sewing, gardening, crafting, studying spiritualism,
and traveling.
Links
to Teresa Keefer-Author-
Giveaway
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