This Halloween we’re celebrating Vampire: The Masquerade’s 25th anniversary with the Endless Ages fiction anthology, with stories covering every era from Vampire’s 1st Edition through to the 20th Anniversary Edition.
We complete our excerpts with a preview of “Numbers” from author Ann Lemay:
When one lives for as long as vampires and other folk that go bump in the night, a healthy sense of humor can mean the difference between sanity and well, probably utter boredom at worse. Anyway, that’s my take on it, but I’m biased – I’m very fond of humor. That said, this short story did start off serious in the initial stages… for about as long as it took for the one-liner pitch to be approved, anyway. Gravitas is often favored in most narratives, but sometimes you just want to shove characters in the most absurdly embarrassing situations and see what they make of it, squawking and complaining about it the whole way. Thankfully, my shift in tone was enthusiastically embraced, and the less than dignified shenanigans of the protagonists in this story will hopefully prove as entertaining to read for you as they were to write for me.
“Would you like to be friends?”
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”
Idiot Lasombra who used to be a killer-for-hire. He’s perfect, he’s going to be even more perfect once I get my hands on him. I’ve been looking for someone just like him forever. He’s exactly what The Plan needs, and he’s ruining everything — including his own small-minded plans in the process — by trying to kill me. How stupid can this evening get? I mean, he’s only the entire reason I was in town in the first place. All I did was ask if we could be friends. I didn’t mean to startle him, he’s a Lasombra for crying out loud — I fully expected him to hear me lurking about in the shadows. Shadows are supposed to be his domain. I was being polite by lurking in them. Hi, here I am. I wasn’t even trying to sneak. Augh. Asked a question, a nice question even. And the most unhappy blam blammity blam of all ensued. So of course I ran. I’ve seen what those bullets of his do.
I just didn’t expect him to follow me and corral me to this place — I mean, I realized he was corralling me but then I got curious and dammit all, I wanted to know what his plan was, so I went along with what he was doing. That…was perhaps not wise. I really should have acquired more information before doing this. Cat. Curiosity. All that.
Still. Figures the one person I’ve ever considered taking on as an ally would have been the one to finally get a sense of the boogiething giggling in the shadows.
So. Very. Annoying.
Though I do think some of the single-minded intent he’s been showing today probably has to do with being embarrassed over the screech of surprise he let out before turning on me. I have to say though, it was a very nice shriek of surprise. I’ll have to tease him about that someday. If he doesn’t kill me today, that is. That would be a bit of a problem. Bah. Stupid Lasombra assassins.
The Endless Ages Anthology is now available from DriveThruFiction!