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down to the last double entendre and Monty Python impersonation.
    It would be another decade or two before the vampire, dressed in black silk and leather with the stainless steel ankh dangling from one ear and a crystal embedded in his left nostril, could divert his energies to something besides the full-time task of insuring his continuance. And, for some reason, she doubted the dead boy had much of a future in the predator business.
    She waved down the bartender and ordered a beer. As she waited its arrival, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror backing the bar. To the casual observer she looked to be no more then twenty-five. Tricked out in a battered leather jacket, with a stained Circle Jerks t-shirt, patched jeans, mirrored sunglasses, and dark hair twisted into a tortured cockatoo's crest, she looked like just another gothic college girl checking out the scene.
    No one would ever guess she was actually forty years old.
    She sucked the cold suds down, participating in her own form of protective coloration.
    She could drink a case or three of the stuff with the only effect being she'd piss like a firehose. Beer didn't do it for her anymore. Neither did hard liquor. Or cocaine. Or heroin.
    Or crack. She had tried them all, in dosages that would have put the entire US Olympic Team in the morgue; but no luck. There was only one drug that plunked her magic

    Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer ( http://www.novapdf.com ) twanger nowadays. Only one thing that could get her off.
    And that drug was blood.
    Yeah, the dead boy was good enough that he could have fooled another vampire. Could have. But didn't.
    She eyed her prey speculatively. She doubted she'd have any trouble taking the sucker down. She rarely did, these days. Least not the lesser evolved undead that still lacked major psionic muscle. Sure, they had enough mesmeric ability to gull the humans in their vicinity, but little else. Compared to her own psychic abilities, the art-fag vampire might as well have been packing a pea-shooter. Still, it wasn't smart to get too cocky. Lord Morgan had dismissed her in such a high-handed manner, and now he was missing half his face.
    She shifted her vision from the human to the Pretender spectrum, studying the vampire's true appearance. She wondered if the black-garbed art afficionados clustered about their mandarin, their heads bobbing like puppets, would still consider his pronouncements worthy if they knew his skin was the color and texture of rotton sailcloth, and that his lips were black and shriveled, revealing oversized fangs set in a perpetual death's head grimace. No doubt they'd drop their little plastic cups of cheap blush and back away in horror, their surface glaze of urbanite sophistication and studied ennui replaced by honest, old fashioned monkey-brain terror.
    Humans need masks in order to live their day-to-day lives, even amongst their own kind.
    Little did they know that their dependence on artifice and pretense provided the perfect hiding place for a raft of predators. Predators like the vampire pretending to be an art-fag.
    Predators like herself.
    Sonja tightened her grip on the switchblade in her jacket pocket.
    "Uh, excuse me?"
    She jerked around a little too fast, startling the young man at her elbow. She was so focused on her prey she had been unaware of his approaching her. Sloppy. Really sloppy.
    "Yeah, what is it?"
    The young man blinked, taken aback by the brusqueness in her voice. "I, uh, was wondering if I might, uh, buy you a drink?"
    She automatically scanned him for signs of Pretender taint, but he came up clean. One hundred percent USDA Human. He was taller than her by a couple of inches, his blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. There were three rings in his right ear and one in his left nostril. Despite the metalwork festooning his nose, he was quite handsome.
    Sonja was at a loss for words. She was not used to being approached by normal people in