Ramblings From This Chick: A Blissfully Spooky Halloween with Margo Bond Collins

Thursday, October 29, 2015

A Blissfully Spooky Halloween with Margo Bond Collins

Margo Bond Collins writes urban fantasy, contemporary romance, and paranormal mysteries. She lives in Texas with her daughter and several spoiled pets. Although writing fiction is her first love, she also teaches college-level English courses online. She enjoys reading romance and paranormal fiction of any genre and spends most of her free time daydreaming about heroes, monsters, cowboys, and villains, and the strong women who love them—and sometimes fight them.

Top Five Ways to Tell if Your Fiancé Would Rather Be a Bloodsucking Fiend

In Legally Undead, history graduate student Elle Dupree is cheerfully planning her wedding to her fiancé Greg, but those plans are trashed when she comes home to find him being turned into a vampire—and she quickly discovers that vampirism is a choice Greg made. So in addition to having to deal with the fact that vampires are real, she’s left with some pretty difficult realizations—not least of which is the knowledge that her fiancé would rather be a vampire than marry her, and she never saw it coming. So for today’s guest post, I’m sharing Elle’s list of warning signs that your beloved might considering joining the ranks of the undead:

1. You find blood on his collar. Forget worrying about lipstick on the collar—blood is the real giveaway here. He might try to tell you that he cut himself shaving. Don’t buy it. Blood on the collar is a clear sign that your boyfriend is letting creatures of the night snack on him when you’re not around.

2. He’s recently accepted a position at a prestigious New York law firm. While this is not enough in itself to suggest a liaison with the evil undead, when combined with other elements on this list, it might suggest a tendency to prefer the company of bloodsucking fiends.

3. He often works late. Again, by itself this is not incriminatory. But we all know that vampires need darkness, and what better excuse for meeting up with these demons than “I have to work late”?

4. He suddenly develops a preference for wearing only black, white, and red. These kinds of sartorial changes might initially seem to be connected to that new job—a new dark suit, white shirt, and blood-red tie? Those could simply be a sign of his desire to succeed. But they could also indicate a deeper desire to imitate the fashion choices of creepy B-movie vampires everywhere.

5. You come home to find a creature of the night draining him. Like Elle, you might initially be inclined to jump in and stake the vampire, thereby saving your one and only. But it might be worthwhile to hang back for a moment and watch. Does your dearly beloved seem to be enjoying the process? Is he fighting back? If not, you may have walked in on a voluntary turning.

Remember, if you think your beau might prefer the tortures of the damned to pledging his life to yours, there’s help available . . . but if you can’t find that help quickly enough, you can always do what Elle did, and pick up a stake to track his ass down.

A reluctant vampire hunter, stalking New York City as only a scorned bride can.

Elle Dupree has her life all figured out: first a wedding, then her Ph.D., then swank faculty parties where she’ll serve wine and cheese and introduce people to her husband the lawyer.

But those plans disintegrate when she walks in on a vampire draining the blood from her fiancé Greg. Horrified, she screams and runs--not away from the vampire, but toward it, brandishing a wooden letter opener.

As she slams the improvised stake into the vampire’s heart, a team of black-clad men bursts into the apartment. Turning around to face them, Elle discovers that Greg’s body is gone—and her perfect life falls apart.

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The worst thing about vampires is that they're dead. That whole wanting to suck your blood business runs a close second, but for sheer creepiness, it's the dead bit that gets me every time. They're up and walking around and talking and sucking blood, but they're dead. And then there's the whole terminology problem--how can you kill something that's already dead? It's just wrong.

I was twenty-four the first time I . . . destroyed? dispatched? . . . a vampire. That's when I found out that all the books and movies are wrong. When you stick a wooden stake into their hearts, vampires don't disintegrate into dust. They don't explode. They don't spew blood everywhere. They just look surprised, groan, and collapse into a pile of corpse. But at least they lie still then, like corpses are supposed to.

Since that first kill (I might as well use the word--there really isn’t a better one), I've discovered that only if you're lucky do vampires look surprised before they groan and fall down. If you're unlucky and miss the heart, they look angry. And then they fight.

There are the other usual ways to kill vampires, of course, but these other ways can get a bit complicated. Vampires are notoriously difficult to trick into sunlight. They have an uncanny ability to sense when there's any sunlight within miles of them, and they're awfully good at hiding from it. Holy water doesn't kill them; it just distracts them for a while, and then they get that angry look again. And it takes a pretty big blade to cut off someone's head--even an already dead someone--and carrying a great big knife around New York City, even the Bronx, is a sure way to get arrested. Nope, pointy sticks are the best way to go, all the way around.

My own pointy stick is actually more of a little knife with wood inlay on the blade--the metal makes it slide in easier. I had the knife specially made by an old Italian guy in just about the only ratty part of Westchester, north of the city. I tried to order one off the internet, but it turns out that while it’s easy to find wood-inlay handles, the blades themselves tend to be metal. Fat lot those people know.

But I wasn’t thinking any of this when I pulled the knife out of the body on the ground. I was thinking something more along the lines of “Oh, bloody hell. Not again.”