In my horror novel, CADEN IS COMING: A SOUTHERN VAMPIRE NOVEL, things take a turn when a group of mortal humans find themselves besieged in a rural gentlemen’s club by a clan of vampires, out to get revenge on those responsible breaking into and robbing the Georgia home of their Maker, making off with a most valuable history of the vampire clans in America. Now they have come to get the book back, the trapped mortals have had to fight for their lives as the night grows long, with a number of them not surviving their encounter with the Undead. Then it is turns out that one among them was a vampire all along. Lylah, a hostess with a soft touch the club’s patrons cannot resist is revealed to a blood drinker, and she takes the opportunity to enlighten the cowering mortals about her past, and just how she set foot on the Dark Road of the Endless Night.

An excerpt from Caden is Coming: A Southern Vampire Epic:


“Not in the least,” Lylah answered. “My Maker was Ramon Santana and his clan was from some little bumfuck watering hole down in New Mexico, a place so forsaken they wouldn’t test A-bombs there, nothing but dust, and lizards, and cactus. No place for a city gal like me, I wanted my bright lights back. Not in any way did I want to be part of Ramon’s harem, where I was supposed to spend the decades being all dutiful and coy.”

“So how did you get out?” Ellison asked.

“Found a lovely little red haired girl to take my place, she was barely sixteen and I saved her from a life of having to work behind the counter in her family’s general store outside Santa Fe. Ramon had a thing for gringo gals and what was more gringo than a carrot-topped Irish lass with milky skin.”

“How did you talk her into joining a vampire clan?” Frank could not imagine anybody doing such a thing on their own volition.

Lylah gave him a throaty laugh before she replied. “I didn’t talk her into anything. Just hog tied the little bitch and threw her in the trunk of an old Packard I’d stolen. All I had to do was toss her on the ground at Ramon’s feet and it was love at first sight, at least on his part. He was so grateful that he agreed to give me my freedom on the spot. By the time the sun set the next day, the little redhead was getting her new fangs wet for the first time and I was on the road back to Vegas.”

“Why didn’t you just run away?” Elisa sounded horrified. “Why kidnap that poor girl away from her family like that? She must have had parents that loved her.”

Lylah rolled her eyes. “Run away? Like you ran away from Betty Jean? Not an option in my world, little girl. I don’t have time to explain the way things work in the clans, but let me put it this way, you don’t just walk out on your Maker. Do that and every single night walker in every other clan on the face of the Earth is duty bound to cut your head off. And believe me, a night walker can’t exist very long without help and shelter from their kind, even if you’re a gypsy like me. It’s just that simple.”

It was that simple, Frank thought, as simple as five human beings standing around at four in the morning having a conversation with a vampire. “Back to Vegas?” he said. “Is that where you lived when you were….” He let the question die when he realized how lame it sounded.

“I was serving drinks in a casino when I was turned to the Dark Road. Vegas, then as now, attracts all kinds, and by ‘all kinds,’ I mean this kind.” She bared her teeth and pointed at her fangs. “I went back to a hotel room with a certain high roller just before dawn one morning in 1949 and never saw the sun come up again. That high roller was Ramon, he liked the modern world in small doses and came to Vegas once or twice a year, but he was still a Conquistador at heart.”

“Las Vegas Vampires, it sounds like a straight to Blockbuster DVD,” Ellison observed.

“She’s being modest,” Spivey chimed in. “Lylah hasn’t told you that she started out at the Flamingo Hotel and casino back in ‘46. Bugsy Siegel himself hired her as a hat check girl.”

“That’s true,” Lylah said with pride. “But I only worked for him for a year before he got those three 30.30 rounds in his head at Virginia Hill’s house. Guess he shouldn’t have told Lucky Luciano to go to hell at that meeting in Havana.”

This cannot be real, Frank thought. These creatures have spent the entire night trying to kill us all and we’re talking to one about the glory days in Vegas.

“If you worked in Vegas,” Elisa asked, “how did you end up in the middle of nowhere?”

“I’m true to the name,” Lylah said. “A gypsy never stays too long in one spot. I spent most of five decades moving from one hotel to the other, always the best. The Ambassador in Los Angeles, the Palmer House in Chicago, the Overlook in Colorado, The Roosevelt in New Orleans and of course the Ritz-Carlton in the Big Apple. I knew them all and their counterparts in every big city from one end of this country to the other. Me and some other gypsies would get together for marathon poker games, and order room service and snack on the bus boy that brought it up to the room. As long as you flash enough green, the management will pretty much let you do whatever the hell you want, stay as long as you want, and look the other way. I got damn good with the cards, made some decent scratch and made some indecent problems for myself. And in the latter case I really do mean ‘made’ literally. Got smitten with a JD down in Florida in ‘59, it didn’t end well.”

“What’s a JD?” Elisa asked.

“Juvenile Delinquent,” Lylah answered. “And he looked just like Ricky Nelson. It was love at first sight…at least on my part. But here’s the thing, you can suck the blood out of them but not the attitude. Despite all I did for him, he refused to show me the proper gratitude and respect for turning him to the Dark Road. After all I did for him, the little punk ass paid me back by starting the rumor that I was a cheat with the cards. I barely got out of New Orleans with my head still attached after the little rat went to the Supreme Lord and Maker in the Big Easy with his dirty little lies. Had to lay low after that, give up the good life and fancy hotels, not an easy thing to do after 50 years. I was reduced to slinging drinks in a bar in Camden, New Jersey. One night Ernest walked in and offered me a job in the club he was opening down here in the Old Dominion.”


Find CADEN IS COMING: A Southern Vampire Epic on Wattpad at: https://w.tt/3ESmQXK