Joe went to his art class and was surprised to see the model from the afternoon before waiting for him at the door.
‘Here! I wanted to pay you for that painting.’
She stepped forward and thrust a check into his hands for one hundred dollars.
‘You don’t have to do that. I can’t take this.’
‘Are you saying you don’t need it? You mean you aren’t a starving student like the rest of us? What’s your secret?’
‘No, I’m not saying I don’t need it. I definitely need it. I’m starving more than you could ever imagine.’
‘Then take the money.’
Joe slipped the check into his pocket.
‘You can use it to take me out to dinner if you’d like.’
‘Uh … I’m kind of involved with someone at the moment.’
‘In love?’
‘Maybe. I’m not sure.’
‘But you don’t cheat on her?’
‘She satisfies me.’
‘Well, that’s good then. Keep the check, though. And if you ever need … more, then you give me a call, okay?’
‘But I don’t know your number.’
‘It’s on the check.’
Joe pulled out the check and saw that it did indeed have her name, address, and phone number printed on it. The model winked at him then walked into the art studio and dropped her robe. She smiled as Joe stumbled into the room, staring at her in that desperate way he had about him.
You’re going to be mine, big boy, she thought.
Joe sat down and immediately attacked the canvas. In minutes he had run out of red paint. His canvas looked like a massacre.
The model wasn’t his type but something about her set him afire. She was such a willing victim, like Frank but a female. There was no way he could have sex with her, though. Not after what had happened with Alicia. He was afraid of what he’d do to her. Besides, it would have felt like cheating.
‘I need more paint.’
The teacher walked over and stared at his gruesome canvas. She gasped audibly.
‘I ran out of red.’
‘Uh … yes … I’ll go get you some more.’ She scurried away from Joe, nearly tripping over the easel in back of him. Joe could smell her pheromones and those of the model commingling in the air. It was like having a ménage a trois through his nostrils. The model’s nipples were erect and pointing right at him. Her eyes zeroed in on the bulge in his crotch. She licked her lips when she saw him looking at her. Joe turned away.
‘Don’t tempt me,’ he growled under his breath.
The teacher came back with the red paint and Joe once again took his frustrations out on the canvas. It was bloodied and bruised when he finally left the room for his next class. He left it sitting on the easel and felt some pride when he saw the model and the teacher staring at it and whispering.
Let them fuck each other. It’s a hell of a lot safer than what I’d do to them, Joe thought as he hurried off to math class. If anything could douse the fire in him it was sitting in a classroom balancing equations for an hour and a half.
Joe sat through over an hour of math, trying his best not to think about the scrumptious meat chained up in his bedroom. The numbers on the page kept jumbling up in his head and at the end of the class his paper was still blank. He balled it up and tossed it in the trash on his way out the door. He’d much rather get an incomplete than a zero.
Joe left the mathematics lab and walked back across campus to the library. The sun was beginning to set and the fog was already rolling slowly across the manicured lawn toward him. A cool breeze slipped through the trees and across the grass, whispering beneath his clothes and across his skin. Joe sighed and shivered. After having his face glued to a page full of senseless mathematical equations for over an hour, the cool moist evening air was refreshing, soothing. It calmed the beast inside him.
Joe felt relaxed and sedate as the fog caught up to him and sucked him in. Still, he could not stop thinking about Alicia. He didn’t want to hurt her again. He had to find a cure for himself.
He tensed as he remembered what Professor Locke had said: Sever the bloodline. Kill the original werewolf.
Hopefully, there was another way. Joe hadn’t thought about Damon Trent in years. Not until the hunger had started to come upon him and he’d looked into the bathroom mirror to see the same pitiless lust-clouded eyes of his long-ago victimizer staring back at him. He should have known then that the man had passed something evil on to him.
The librarian looked up and smiled nervously as Joe entered the building and stalked past her desk. Joe rolled his massive shoulders and smiled back at her with a leering smile as he dragged his eyes over her thick curves. Her smile faltered and fell from her face, landing in a hard trembling line. She lowered her eyes and turned away. Joseph smiled wider.
Joe struggled to maintain control over the beast raging within him but the smell of her perfumed skin was driving him mad. He walked past her and into the rows of bookshelves, reeling like a drunken man. He stopped in front of a book in the mythology section called Vampires in Fact and Fiction. He pulled it off the shelf and walked with it back to the huge oak table in the center of the room. He opened it and turned to the section on ways to become a vampire.
There was some nonsense about being born on Christmas Day or being excommunicated from the church that Joe immediately discounted as superstition, then there came the part about being bitten by a vampire or drinking the blood of the undead.
Joe quickly turned to the section on destroying vampires and read about nailing them into their coffins by driving a wooden stake through their hearts or through their skulls so that they could not rise to feed. There was a prescription that called for decapitating and burning the corpses of vampires or dragging them out into the sun. Filling their mouths with garlic or placing host wafers in their coffins so that they could not lie there. Joe turned more pages until he came to a section that reiterated Professor Douglas’s own remedy for the werewolf curse. Curing a vampire of the curse likewise called for finding and killing the original bloodsucker. Joe slammed the book shut and sat there thinking, first about Damon Trent the child murderer and then about Alicia, whom he would surely murder and consume if he did not cure himself. He got up and walked over to the computer to do a search on Damon Trent.
