THE GIFT OF INFINITE MIDNIGHT

Lucien’s clothes looked better on the dead, hairless boy with the kohl-stained eyelids than they did on him. The cooling corpse grinned up at Lucien from the sticky motel bedsheets, seeming as grateful for those gifts of black satin and suede as he had for the gift of Lucien’s mouth upon him. Idiot. Moonlight dripped between the heavy drapes covering the room’s only window. Here and there, crimson splotches like red wine staining the sheets glistened in its frigid glow.

They were not red wine stains.

He might have killed the effeminate youth even if Lucien hadn’t come away from this encounter two thousand dollars richer. He might have done it for the sheer enchanting glee of it, just as he’d done with his younger sister Carina’s kitten as a child. The animal, like the pale, cane-thin boy, had committed the sin of once too often testing Lucien’s patience. It mattered not whether his irritation came in the form of a fluffy, wide-eyed little sack of piss with a growing fondness for urinating into Lucien’s shoes, or in that of a hairless queer hellbent on carrying his vampire fetish too far. Lucien’s ire, once roused, was a bloodhound. Relentless, its satisfaction it would demand by gnawing day and night at his mental fringes until Lucien sat convinced that his very sanity depended upon doing whatever should silence it.

The dead boy’s grin, one that Lucien found utterly unpalatable for its grace and beauty, lay frozen upon the delicate face. It looked exactly as Lucien had imagined it the day he received the boy’s first blood-smeared correspondence to him…