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Burke’s Lore Briefs: Portrait of a Lady Vampire and Other Vampiric Cravings

by Christopher J. Burke

Vampires are not alive, but they have lives and wants and needs and desires. And other cravings.

Erased from her vanity, Lady Isabelle, a three-hundred-year-old vampire, longs to see her image and commissions an artist to paint her portrait. She's feared nothing but daylight for centuries, but she trembles at the thought of what she might see.

Magnus attends to his Guinevere and her bloody cravings as a cursed event approaches. He takes to the night to find an appropriate snack from the diner but not something on the menu. However, sometimes substitutions have to be made, and they can be found in unlikely places.

Lord Matthias St. John rose under the spell Countess Finch, who'd killed his wife. After her demise, he fled to America to start a new life, such as it was, in New York. How did he come to find himself dying from a silver bullet on a farm on the prairie?

Plus a bonus story!

 

Excerpt:

As the artist gave the canvas its final brush strokes, Lady Isabella sat frozen in the regal pose she wanted immortalized. She'd held that position since the Moon had risen into the night. Any discomfort would be worth it, though, if Genevieve could capture her essence. She wanted to be able to see herself the way the world saw her.

Seeing oneself wasn't an easy task for a vampire.

About the Author

Christopher J. Burke is a writer, math teacher and webcomic creator living in Brooklyn, where he was born and raised. (He walked across the Brooklyn Bridge before it got crowded.)

He's loved the idea of writing since an early age, and finally broke through with the story "Don't Kill the Messenger", published in the Steve Jackson Games house magazine Autoduel Quarterly. This led to creating a fiction fanzine, Driving Tigers Quarterly, and ultimately co-writing GURPS Autoduel, 2nd Edition.

After switching careers and raising a family, he started writing again, mostly turning out flash fiction and short stories, in addition to a webcomic that was started on a lark but has run for over a decade.

His geeky comic, (x, why?), about the lives of teachers, students and living math concepts, can be found on his blog: http://mrburkemath.blogspot.com