The Opposite of Life

Narrelle M. Harris

Description

Lissa Wilson has seen more than enough death in her family, so when people start being savagely killed whenever she has a night out in Melbourne, she's determined to investigate and to make the killing stop.
Even when she realises the murders must be the work of a vampire.
She reluctantly teams up with the painfully-awkward suburban vampire, Gary, who has been instructed by Melbourne's vampires to find out who's making existence so difficult for the undead community.
But in getting to the undead heart of the matter, Lissa and Gary face more challenges than Gary's appalling fashion sense. Particularly when the idea of living forever can be a big temptation for someone who has lost so much.

'A well-made plot with a killer (literally) ending.' - Kerry Greenwood

'It's certainly a most unusual vampire novel. Lissa Wilson is a wonderful character; not because she's an heroic supergirl, but because she rings true. If you can get this book, do.' - Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood novels.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Paranormal
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Clan Destine Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781922904256
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Opposite of Life Narrelle M. Harris

This edition published by Clan Destine Press in 2023

Clan Destine Press PO Box 121, Bittern, Victoria 3918 Australia

Copyright © Narrelle M. Harris 2007

First published in 2007 by Pulp Fiction Press
Lyrics from Forever Cast and Life Song © Andrew Cullen and used with permission

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including internet search engines and retailers, electronic or mechanical, photocopying (except under the provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data:
Narrelle M. Harris
THE OPPOSITE OF LIFE
ISBN: 978-1-922904-25-6 (eBook)

Cover Design by Jill Harris
Typesetting by Ebook Alchemy

To Ian Gunn
1958–1998
You went too soon, but you sure knew how to live
Chapter One
The night I went dancing with Evie I found two girls on the floor of the ladies’ loos, with their throats ripped out.
At first I figured it was pretty typical, you know? Just the kind of thing that would happen to me on my first night out in eight months. Get dumped, mope a lot, go out to cheer myself up and, of course, dead bodies in the ladies’ loos. Later on I thought it might have been me bringing everyone bad luck, before I found out what was really going on.
But that night it was just my own sheer crappy timing. Yeah, right, like it’s all about me.
I was only there because of Evie. I’ve known her since we were twelve. It’s one of those friendships based partly on longevity – it’s such a relief to have someone around who doesn’t need your whole bloody history explained to them – and partly on some altruistic instinct she has to rescue me from myself. She came around to drag me out of my latest pit of despair. Toby dumped me a month ago, and I was still sitting in dark rooms listening to Alanis Morissette.
I kept thinking about calling him and paraphrasing a Morissette song down the line. Make the creep squirm. Except I’m nowhere near cool or bitchy enough, and, anyway, I would only have cried all over again.
So, there was Evie, at ten o’clock on Saturday night, knocking at my door and telling me to get dressed, we were going dancing. It shows how depressed I really was, because she almost never invites me to go clubbing with her. It’s usually a movie or lunch or something. We’re mates but we have no illusions. Twenty-first century geek girl, that’s me. Bargain-bin fashion sense, socially awkward, I love my books even more than I love my technology, and I much prefer either of those to human beings. Most people think they know the type.
It took some doing to get me looking respectable and out the door. It can be soothing to let Evie be bossy and take me in hand when I haven’t got the heart for it. She made me wear black, which I generally avoid, firstly, because it makes me look like I have a liver disease and, secondly, because it reminds me too much of funerals. But I had an old pair of black jeans, a mostly black cotton blouse with little silver flowers on it that my Nanna gave me the year she died, and a pair of black Doc Martens boots I’d picked up in the Boxing Day sales.
‘You scrub up well, Lissa,’ said Evie, after applying a bit of mascara and dark blue eyeshadow to me.
I checked it out in the mirror. I looked like I’d been belted in both eyes, what with all the crying and the war paint. Plus, my hair has a habit of being hostile to incoming forces, like combs and hair wax, so the effect was a bit feral.
Then I stood up taller and thought, Lissa Wilson, you are a superstar. Toby Brewster is a loser. What had I been doing wasting time with that sad bastard anyway, cramping my style so he didn’t feel challenged by my intellect? I was ten times, a hundred times, better than he was.
I’m a shade over average height, with great cheekbones supporting an otherwise unremarkable face. Evie informs me my dark brown eyes are a bit too intense for comfort. Personally, I like the combination of my eyes and my cheekbones. They kind of make up for the rest of me. I’m pretty skinny except for my thighs and butt, which are somehow out of proportion and defiantly curved. Toby used to urge me to do exercises, like that was supposed to make my thighs thinner. Idiot.
Evie gave me a quick hug. ‘There, presentable,’ she said, then hauled me out of the house. We took the tram into town and walked to the club on King Street.
She took me down the back to meet some of her friends, and went to get us both a drink. Then she went and danced with Joel, who is her guy when they’re not ‘taking a break’. He seems okay with that, and he’s nice to me. He even danced with me for a while, when Evie asked him to. She tried to be discreet about it, but I noticed the looks that were exchanged and that he didn’t flinch. He even seemed to enjoy it. He was really tall and rangy, with big hands, broad shoulders and a ready grin. I’d never seen him take life too seriously, unless he was talking about his footy team (the Richmond Tigers) or his plans to backpack through Europe next year to visit Poland, the land of his ancestors, though I didn’t know if his mates called him Joel the Pole because of that or because he was so tall and thin.
I started to really come out of the funk then. For all the weird stuff people think Goths get up to, the two true things are: they dress more stylishly than most urban sub-cultures and they love a dance party. This place was playing a good variety of music too. Not just the industrial dance music that Evie said was so popular with the newbies, but the whole shebang, from Duran Duran to Nick Cave and Evanescence. Plenty of bands I’d never heard of as well as the more, well not mainstream exactly, but less obscure bands. I’m always up for something new, though. Always be on the lookout to expand your horizons, I reckon. I didn’t know then just how expansive my horizons were about to get.
The music and the dancing and just being out with a slice of some of the more entertaining sections of humanity got me thinking positively about myself for a while. Well, screw Toby anyway, I thought. Nothing but a self-centred, control-freak, pathetic excuse for a boy-man. Where did he get off trying to change me anyway? Always trying to put me down because he hated that I was smarter than he was. Screw him for picking me up on the rebound from some shampoo-ad-pretty girl in an experiment with smart-is-sexy. Huh. Who needed it, or him?
The music got louder, the beat was driving through and I was going off, willingly losing myself in the music. Having a really good time. Not just for the first time since Toby left, but for the first time, damnit, since I’d started going out with the bastard. Another friend of Evie’s danced with me, without her having to ask him, and bought me a drink. I’d seen him around but never noticed before how sweet he was.
Of course, the world winds on and nature calls, as it does, so I went to pee. Bloody fashionable Melbourne nightclubs, though, think it’s too easy if you can tell at a glance which is the men’s and which is the women’s loos. Bars of light, weird pictures of plants, or line drawings of cocktail glasses – I ask you. The dim lighting made it more of a challenge than it already was, and I nearly walked into the men’s, but a bloke came out of that door at the same time some generously proportioned, black-clad woman steamed out of the other one, her head down. She barged past, shoving me against the bloke and I mumbled an apology before he could glare at me. Then I pushed into the ladies’.
The lighting in there was almost as bad as on the dance floor so it took me a moment to realise what I was seeing. I thought the girl on the floor was looking for something she’d dropped. Then I noticed her head was at a funny angle.
Then I noticed the blood. Lots and lots of blood. It was sprayed all over the place and at first glance, in that light, it looked like the walls were painted deep, dark red. Only at second glance could I see the paint job was uneven. Red flecked the mirrors and the sink. Red pooled on the floor. Red under the girl.
I remember screaming very loudly. In TV shows that’s where the ad break comes in, while some ninny is squealing her head off. No ad breaks in life, though. So I screamed, a short, piercing shriek, over the top of the driving music. Weird, shrill whimpers followed. The girl on the floor had had her throat ripped out. Muscle, windpipe, tendons and bone all visible. I tried not to see that. I tried not to see the second girl in the cubicle with a small pond of blood under her and thin tributaries running to join the other mess on the floor.
Someone tried to shove in behind me to see what was going on. That’s when reason, thank God, returned to her throne. I threw my arms wide to stop anyone getting past me. All that blood, and who knew if it was filled with Hep B or what. Turned out later it was mainly full of A-grade heroin, a couple of vodka soft drinks and the leftovers of an ecstasy tablet from the previous night.
A bouncer showed up, saw the scarlet scene over my shoulder and the poor, sad bastard fainted. His mate was there with the door-bitch, and they had the sense to clear everyone away and call the police.
Evie says I was dead white when they got me a chair and made me sit down. A great Goth look, apparently, but I didn’t much care for it. All I could think – and this was the shock, I suppose, though it might just have been self-centredness – was that after all I’d been through with Toby, this was a majorly, majorly crap way to end the evening.
Although not as crap as it was for those girls lying in a sea of their own blood, with their throats torn out, on a Saturday night on King Street.
Chapter Two
When t