The Midnight Work

by Kassandra Sims

Genres: Gothic

Synopsis

Christmas is a time of forgiveness -- so when Sophie Aubrey's date, a sexy and mysterious artist named Olivier, turns her into a vampire, she decides to forgive him. Especially since being a vampire is just as cool as she always thought it would be. But there are a few drawbacks she never expected, like zombies, sleazy French alchemists, inexplicable and contradictory fairies -- and her roommates: one has abandoned Chicago and her cat for the Fairy Lands, and the other reacted to vampirism by embracing it with both hands (and fangs) and gorging herself on human blood. Ick-o-rama.

Plus, Olivier seems to believe that Sophie is his true love from a thousand years ago. Sophie can forgive that too, because when Olivier touches her, the whole world falls away -- but what she can't forgive is that he didn't tell her the whole story, like how a crazy death fairy has a vendetta against her. This has Sophie vacillating between entertainment at the fairy's pretensions and being scared out of her mind that someone who calls himself the God of Death has got it in for her soul.

With the help of Olivier -- and the sleazy French alchemist, who turns out to be a vampire's best friend -- Sophie thinks she can defeat the death fairy. And if she can't, not only will she and Olivier have no future, she's pretty sure that the whole world is doomed.

Who says holidays can't be fun?

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: April 1, 2007

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 384

Sample

As she tore the sheet away, she realized her whole body was smooth and toned, not lumpy or scarred in any way.
"It happens to everyone." Olivier sat naked in an armchair near the bed. Her first opportunity to see him out of his clothes -- his body was the fulfillment of every adolescent day-dream she'd ever had. His pronounced collarbone swooped into broad, heavy shoulders. The muscles in his arms and legs stood strong and defined under his golden skin, even in repose. His chest was smooth, hard, standing out over the ripples in his stomach. Sophie immediately raised her hands to her face to cover her blush as she let her eyes follow the pronounced V of his pelvic flexor leading to his -- his --
She felt even stupider for blushing when Olivier smiled at her. His interest in her interest was obvious, and she felt about fifteen.
"Am I crazy? Is this some psycho-drug induced reality?" She used her hair to cover herself, like a mermaid in a painting.
"Do you feel crazy?" He looked at her quizzically.
"All the time." Which was the absolute truth. She'd had a hard time distinguishing reality from fantasy all her life -- starting from when she was a little girl who talked to people who weren't there. Of course, she'd thought they were there, but that didn't make that okay. Usually her oddities suited her -- not too many people could say that they'd picked their course of study because people who weren't there had told them to, because someone in a dream said they were supposed to -- but sitting in her new lover's bed, with a new body, made her distrustful of herself and her thoughts. "What happened?"
Olivier made a displeased face. "You fell in your haste to get away from me and broke your stupid neck." His face softened, and he leaned forward with his forearms on his knees.
His explanation left quite a bit lacking, and Sophie went from feeling dislocated and confused to scared. "What? How?" She reached up and rubbed the back of her neck.
"The flesh is treacherous and corrupt." He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it away from his face then shrugged. "The Dark One pushed you, maybe you're just clumsy, maybe there was a patch of ice or a pebble under your foot."
The Dark One? The flesh is treacherous? Was he playing a joke on her? That sounded like rhetoric from the heretical sect she wrote her Master's thesis on -- the Cathars. They were a medieval French group, almost a cult, who rejected the Christian God, claiming he was really the Evil, the Devil, and that the real Good God lived beyond the earth in a world of pure spirit. They had been persecuted into oblivion by the Catholic Church. Or so Sophie thought.
Olivier paused and tilted his head up slightly to look Sophie better in the face, watching her closely. "Do you treat everyone you make love with similarly?" He didn't look angry so much as annoyed, but Sophie was acutely aware of how much bigger than her he was, how he seemed extremely unbalanced, and she felt an odd impulsive desire to please him which was unlike herself.
"Only the scary stalkers!" She tried to put heat into her voice, but she sounded petulant and childish. "My neck feels fine." She glared at him in what she hoped would look like defiance but felt more like terror.
Olivier's expression closed off completely, and he sat up straight. "And I don't have a wound in my forehead exposing my brains."
This guy just kept getting creepier. "Could I get some info here? Did you drug me or something? I feel screwed up and I think I'm hallucinating. Who the hell is the Dark One? Where are we?"
"Ah, okay, there's your personality. I was wondering where it went." He smiled, and as hard as Sophie was trying to hate him and remember that he was a potential serial killer, he was just too beautiful to not want to just give up and let him kill her. "You fell. How, who knows. I hadn't gotten an opportunity to discuss certain matters with you. It was a waste -- your youth, your mind gone, and me frustrated for eternity over what you might have had to say or might have thought. I don't have much patience with unsatisfied desires. I never have." He grinned again.
Eternity? "Yeah, fine, whatever. I wanted a real answer, because you seemed really cool..." And by cool, she meant romantic and hot. Sophie flung the sheet away from her body and wiggled out of the bed. "...and I -- I don't know, but this is so screwed up."
She spotted her jeans and shoes on the other side of the studio apartment and just grabbed one of his shirts along the way to them from the piles of laundry strewn all over the floor. She was really uneasy about how he alluded to the Cathar heresy of the Middle Ages as though he were personally acquainted with it, and then ducked her questioning him about that. She had sort of known he was interested in the topic in general, or else he wouldn't have been on their chat threads at all, but his odd way of phrasing set off alarms in her head.
"You should really wait to leave." He was there, right there, so fast, and Sophie didn't see him move at all. He held her bicep loosely - -not enough to hurt, but tight enough she had to rip her arm out of his grasp. "Just wait a couple hours. There are things you need to know about the way this works --"
"Shut up." Sophie stepped into her shoes without worrying about the cold and not wearing socks. She stole his coat off the floor because she didn't see hers, and stomped to the door. She looked down at her feet, realized her center of gravity was the same. Even with all the other physical changes, she was still the same petit height. Even her hallucinations were rational. She was so boring.
"I didn't do you any favors by keeping you in this evil world, but I thought you were smart enough to ask the right questions." His voice was soft, the vowels not always quite right. He spoke to her back as she undid the locks on the front door. "You're a vampire."
As he said it, she knew, intrinsically, instinctually, like breathing and sweating and bleeding, that it was true. Which had to be magic, or something that ignorant people like her would wall "magic". Some pull tugged at her belly, a need for something that the word "blood", glimmering in her mind, seemed to fulfill.
Maybe she wasn't hallucinating after all, and that option was definitely worse.