FICTION

Psalm of Vampires Chapter One

An excerpt from the upcoming novel about a streaming vampire with a whole lotta problems.

Charles Bastille
18 min readDec 11, 2023

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Image credits: Book design by author. Image of red water droplets licensed from Adobe Stock

Chapter 1: White Violin

My nose was drawn to her like a human child chasing the scent from a candy store. With the stadium’s video screens focused on me, I set the violin down.

Daphne, wearing the kind of white shorts you might see on a K-pop fashionista, held the drum mallets in the air as she stood poised to strike her massive dagu drum again. Silky threads of black hair, darker than the skies of an age long lost to me, clung to her sweaty face. Silence from the crowd. I stood up, then glanced at her menacingly.

The crowd was so quiet you would have heard my shoes clamber across the stage floor if I had been wearing any. But I wasn’t wearing shoes, just my favorite Pokémon socks. I walked behind Daphne, feeding off her scent. I moved locks of her long straight hair to one side while my teammates bowed and smiled in unison. She dropped her mallets to the floor as if they were on fire.

Daphne gave me this cute, “Don’t you dare look,” at which point I opened my mouth wide and lunged toward her newly exposed neck with a set of fangs that could have punctured rhino skin. The crowd, sensing what…

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Charles Bastille
Charles Bastille

Written by Charles Bastille

Author of MagicLand & Psalm of Vampires. Join me on my Substack at https://www.ruminato.com/. All stories © 2020-24 by Charles Bastille

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