A Different Sort of Living (working title only)
an excerpt

"Eric? Eriiiiic!” the woman’s high-pitched whine shrilled from behind the thick curtains in the far corner of the echoing room.

Eric Voss sighed, tossed down the book he’d been reading, and unfolded his long legs from the tattered velvet fainting couch. His Mistress’s voice.

He strode across the battered wooden floor of what was once a warehouse on Chicago’s river, but which had been converted into the sort of luxurious loft typically inhabited by wealthy ne’er-do-wells and Yuppies who fancy themselves of an artistic bent. The rough brick walls had been painted black and thick curtains in rich jewel shades hung from the metal crossbeams of the ceiling. The curtains over the floor-to-ceiling windows had been pulled back for the night, and the strong light of a spring moon shone coldly on the little islands of pillows and youthful bodies in various states of dishabille that dotted the expanse of floor.

The Mistress’s coven seethed like a nest of newborn rodents, naked and blindly questing with mouths gaping open for pleasure like babes seeking the nipple. They rolled over and around each other in tangles of plush fabric and long silken hair, small noises escaping occasionally. Well, the first generation of the coven did, anyway. The ones he’d recruited. The stronger ones, the ones more like himself—though never his equals; he made sure they were aware of that. Some of them, though, had been with him a very long time, and he had made very certain that their loyalty was to him alone, not the titular Mistress.

The others, the Mistress’s own special pets, huddled with her on the darkened side of the room, as far from the pallid light of the moon as possible and swaddled in black velvet. They were fragile things, even paler than most of Eric’s kin, and they had the gaunt look about them of animals that had been starved and abused into subservience and the desperate escape of numbness.

Elspeth Connor, the red-haired Mistress of the coven, lounged on a carved wooden chaise piled high with cushions in the middle of a pile of cadaverous teenagers with vacant eyes—her pets. Houseplants could track motion better than some of these weak children—the ones who had been here longest, the Mistress’s eldest pets. Two of the newer children sat to either side of the Mistress and she languidly twined her fingers in and out of their hair, cooing slightly. This close to the Mistress, both children seemed entirely bespelled, but Eric knew that they were still resistant, the girl especially. Well, they’d fall soon enough. The bloodsong was irresistible and these two would soon enough join the other mindless vermin clustered at Elspeth’s feet.