Scarlet Masquerade Read Online Free Page B

always knew she was a lesbian. She never fell in love with men. It just wasn’t who she was. She liked to play with women, and she played a lot. She just didn’t play in her own backyard. That could be dangerous. She also had a rule and that rule was simple, she didn’t feed where she played. She could feed on a lover and she could turn them. She just didn’t end their lives, she loved them too much.
    A.J. worked hard at constructing what would be seen as a normal life for a woman back then. She was seen with men so often that no one would have guessed she disliked them. She had never slept with them and she hadn’t dated them longer than a few months. She had traveled and enjoyed what life had to offer. She had more than her share of closeted lovers, too. It wasn’t hard to find women who liked other women, actually. Parisian men had their own lives and vices and that often left lonely, horny women at home, a situation she found ways to take advantage of. Befriending a wife was easy. She often met them at social engagements where they would become friends. They would go to lunch or meet for tea, talking about what beasts men were, how they violated their wives or had affairs and there she was to comfort the poor things.
    She tended to her own affairs, took care of estate business and lived much like a man did. She even opted for wearing men’s clothes when she was home. She liked working her estates and primarily loved working the grounds, a fete most of her staff admired, especially when she shared small talk about their families or ate a meal with them. She had hated those who treated their staff like slaves, ordering them around, paying them meager wages and rarely giving them time off to raise their families, let alone see them. She had learned at a young age that if you wanted respect you needed to give it. If you wanted loyalty you needed to earn it. She still missed her father’s guidance and wished he had lived long enough to see how she had succeeded.
    Back in the present, the ride through the city was quiet and calming, the night finally cooling. The streets were barren and lifeless as she made her way to the parking garage of her apartment complex. She hated the city, actually. It made her feel dirty and hopeless. The high-rise cement skeletons that made up the living spaces for the inhabitants reminded her of crypts. Only these crypts were filled with people who paid five bucks for coffee and yet walked past a homeless man and offered only scorn for his condition. She had chosen to live close to work so she didn’t have the long commute every day, but it was beginning to wear on her. A.J. thought she had seen it all, but lately, humanity was showing how low it could really sink into the abyss. The senseless gang shootings, the drugs, and now the Middle East war that seemed to go on forever. It was beginning to make her wonder why she had chosen to stop feeding on humanity. And she was the evil everyone in the world worried about? Please, one less scumbag in the world, who would notice?
    Her life had become a series of patterns. Lonely, lifeless patterns that repeated themselves every fifty or so years. However, tonight that pattern had shifted, skewed because of one woman. She thought about Clarissa again as she dropped the kickstand down for the third time that night. Walking to the elevator she stopped, inserted her key and punched the button for the penthouse. She stood listening to the hum of the elevator waiting to be lifted to her sanctuary. She wondered what had happened to Clarissa since she’d last seen her. How had she survived? Did she have someone in her life now? Where did she work? What was her name? More questions than she could give attention to swirled in her head as she watched the doors, waiting for them to open up and swallow her inside. She felt herself become dizzy and reached for the cold wall, one knee buckling slightly as she swayed towards the support. What was wrong with her?