Sanguinary, by Margo Bond Collins
A Night Shift Novel
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Only
fifty years left before vampires rule the world.
When
Dallas police detective Cami Davis joined the city's vampire unit, she planned
to use the job as a stepping-stone to a better position in the department.
But
she didn't know then what she knows now: there's a silent war raging between
humans and vampires, and the vampires are winning.
So
with the help of a disaffected vampire and an ex-cop addict, Cami is going
undercover, determined to solve a series of recent murders, discover a way to
overthrow the local Sanguinary government, and, in the process, help win the
war for the human race.
But
can she maintain her own humanity in the process? Or will Cami find herself,
along with the rest of the world, pulled under a darkness she cannot oppose?
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Excerpt
"Hey, Bradley." I beckoned the crime-scene tech, who had finally arrived and was snapping on gloves. "Is that a piece of paper under the vic's head?"
He bent down over my shoulder to get a clearer view from my line of sight. "Looks like it's tangled in her hair," he said. He pulled a pair of long tweezers out of his kit and snagged the sliver. "Yep. Looks like it has a word written on it . . ." We both peered at the brownish, spidery writing.
"Sanguinary," I said. "Is that written in blood?"
"Maybe. I'll get the lab to run a basic analysis on it. If it's blood, we'll be able to let you know pretty quick if it's human and if so, what type. DNA will take longer."
"Sounds good." I stared at the woman a little longer. Her dark hair—almost the same color as mine—spilled out around her, matted with dark, coagulating blood. The two bloody marks on her neck shone like black stars on a white background.
Vampire.
I knew that if I lifted her dress, there would be other puncture wounds all over the body, and strange symbols carved across her skin—pentagrams within circles and other ritualistic signs. Exactly like the others. Ten murders in the four weeks since the beginning of September—all centered in downtown Dallas, and many with affluent victims whose families demanded action.
The department had been in a barely suppressed uproar.
I stood up, my knees popping a little. Five years ago, they wouldn't have done that.
And five years before that? Vampires hadn't existed, except in books and B-movies.
It took time for the world to believe. We hadn't even realized how to fight back when they'd first shown up.
This victim's ragged, bloody fingernails suggested that she had tried to resist, but obviously failed.
The red dress she wore would have originally matched the color of the relatively scant splashes of blood surrounding her, but those stains had dried to a muddy brown, the same color as the writing on the paper caught in her hair.
Her clothing suggested that she'd been at the opera that evening, though the manager, roused from her bed, swore that the building had been cleared and empty when she left.
One black, high-heel shoe lay several feet away, toppled over onto its side, the heel broken, as if she had stumbled out of it when it failed her as she ran from a pursuer.
Sanguinary.
I'd heard the word before from vampires I had taken down—whispered as a threat, shouted as a warning: the Sanguinary is coming, the Sanguinary will kill you all.
The Sanguinary is here.
It was why I was about to go undercover among the vampires.
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About the Author
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Connect with Margo
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My Top Five Favorite Vampire Films
A Guest Post by Margo Bond Collins, Author of Sanguinary
As a general rule, I like my filmic vampires to be brutal and bloodthirsty—as much as I enjoy the recent trend toward sexy vampires (because YUM), I think there’s a reason that we, as a culture, keep coming back to the kinds of vampires who are absolute monsters.
Both kinds of vampires—those we want to devour and those who want to devour us—are the expression of the human id, that part of us that is unsocialized, that wants what it wants without thought of consequence. The hot vampires of paranormal romance allow us to fantasize about one kind of unsocialized behavior. But the murderous vampires allow us to explore even darker fantasies.
The vampires in my own new release, Sanguinary, don’t have a sparkle among them; they are, for the most part, more beast than beauty—as are the vampires in almost all of the movies on my “Top Five” list below. So in no particular order, here are my top five favorite vampire films:
30 Days of Night: I love the fact that the vampires in this film are truly monstrous—they look like they’ve been transformed into rat-faced horrors with sharp teeth, and they are utterly vicious. I also like the nice shout-outs to Dracula: the vampires show up on a ship and come slinking into town without warning to take over.
From Dusk til Dawn: Again, these vampires are brutal. I love the fact that they have a vampire biker bar and that unsuspecting travelers are drawn in. There’s lots of blood and gore, but my favorite part is the implication of the last image of the film as the camera pulls away from the back of the bar and pans down: the vampires inside the bar were only the tip of the iceberg. They’ve been around for a long time, and the coming of dawn implies only a temporary reprieve.
The Lost Boys: Keifer Sutherland as the Peter Pan of vampires. What could be better? I love the setting of this film (sunny California is such a ridiculous place for vampires to live!), I love the odd familial element of the head vampire courting the divorced mother, and I love the Coreys Haim and Feldman as comic-book-trained vampire hunters.
Fright Night: I’m going to break with general critical trends here and say that I love the 2011 remake of Fright Night. I think that Colin Ferrell made a great vampiric neighbor, all creepy and stalkerish. And David Tennant as the freaked-out, washed-up, checked-out vampire hunter who gets back in the game absolutely rocked.
Blade: My favorite movie of the Blade series is the first one (though I also like Blade: Trinity, wherein Jessica Biel kicks much ass). I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a scene any creepier than the opening of Blade, where the sprinklers come on in the back-room nightclub and cover everyone in blood. The vampires dancing in blood while the humans scream is an amazing visual example of the sensuality connected to the horror of the vampire.
What about you? What are some of your favorite vampire movies? I’m always on the lookout for more, so I’d love to hear your suggestions!
A Guest Post by Margo Bond Collins, Author of Sanguinary
As a general rule, I like my filmic vampires to be brutal and bloodthirsty—as much as I enjoy the recent trend toward sexy vampires (because YUM), I think there’s a reason that we, as a culture, keep coming back to the kinds of vampires who are absolute monsters.
Both kinds of vampires—those we want to devour and those who want to devour us—are the expression of the human id, that part of us that is unsocialized, that wants what it wants without thought of consequence. The hot vampires of paranormal romance allow us to fantasize about one kind of unsocialized behavior. But the murderous vampires allow us to explore even darker fantasies.
The vampires in my own new release, Sanguinary, don’t have a sparkle among them; they are, for the most part, more beast than beauty—as are the vampires in almost all of the movies on my “Top Five” list below. So in no particular order, here are my top five favorite vampire films:
30 Days of Night: I love the fact that the vampires in this film are truly monstrous—they look like they’ve been transformed into rat-faced horrors with sharp teeth, and they are utterly vicious. I also like the nice shout-outs to Dracula: the vampires show up on a ship and come slinking into town without warning to take over.
From Dusk til Dawn: Again, these vampires are brutal. I love the fact that they have a vampire biker bar and that unsuspecting travelers are drawn in. There’s lots of blood and gore, but my favorite part is the implication of the last image of the film as the camera pulls away from the back of the bar and pans down: the vampires inside the bar were only the tip of the iceberg. They’ve been around for a long time, and the coming of dawn implies only a temporary reprieve.
The Lost Boys: Keifer Sutherland as the Peter Pan of vampires. What could be better? I love the setting of this film (sunny California is such a ridiculous place for vampires to live!), I love the odd familial element of the head vampire courting the divorced mother, and I love the Coreys Haim and Feldman as comic-book-trained vampire hunters.
Fright Night: I’m going to break with general critical trends here and say that I love the 2011 remake of Fright Night. I think that Colin Ferrell made a great vampiric neighbor, all creepy and stalkerish. And David Tennant as the freaked-out, washed-up, checked-out vampire hunter who gets back in the game absolutely rocked.
Blade: My favorite movie of the Blade series is the first one (though I also like Blade: Trinity, wherein Jessica Biel kicks much ass). I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a scene any creepier than the opening of Blade, where the sprinklers come on in the back-room nightclub and cover everyone in blood. The vampires dancing in blood while the humans scream is an amazing visual example of the sensuality connected to the horror of the vampire.
What about you? What are some of your favorite vampire movies? I’m always on the lookout for more, so I’d love to hear your suggestions!
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