K. C. Adams, "The Vampire's Revenge"

Kristina Adams is the author of 20 novels, 3 books for writers, 1 poetry collection, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes mother/daughter ghost stories as K. C. Adams. She also works part-time as a content marketer. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend. 

About The Vampire's Revenge, by K. C. Adams
Is this family of ghost hunters about to become vampire prey?

Edie
Do I ever get a break? I’ve just been attacked by a knife-wielding weirdo and found out my new friend is a vampire. And now the bookshop has been vandalised.
But it turns out the vampire who trashed the bookshop murdered Maisie’s mum and turned her into a vampire. So now, she wants revenge.
And she wants my help to get it.
But how far will she go? And who’ll get caught in the crossfire?

Niamh
Fadil’s chronic pain is getting worse. He won’t let anyone help him, but it’s now so bad that some days he can’t even get out of bed.
Has being 4,000 years old finally caught up with him, or is something else going on? Do the answers lie in the normal or the paranormal? If we can’t convince him to get help, will he continue to get worse? And just how much worse could he get?

The Vampire’s Revenge is the eighth book in the Afterlife Calls series. It contains cave-dwelling vampires, a haunted bookshop, chronic pain representation, sassy pets, teenage angst and mid-life romance. Every book in the Afterlife Calls series contains a standalone mystery and threads that tie into a larger plot at the end of each part in the series.

You can read more about The Vampire's Revenge on the author's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The Vampire's Revenge

From the Author's Note 

Whenever I tell someone I’m from Nottingham, they immediately think of Robin Hood. While Robin of Loxley may be the most well-known part of Nottingham history, there are far more interesting parts.

Underneath the city are (at the time of publication in 2025) over 900 documented caves. These are human made, carved out of the unique Sherwood Sandstone. What makes Sherwood Sandstone unique is its ability to hold its shape. Go a few miles to the west and the sand won’t hold its shape; go to the east and you won’t get through it without a drill.

Nottingham’s cave network was built by hand, which is another thing that makes it remarkable. While we don’t know the exact age of all the caves, some are thought to be around 3,000 years old – almost as old as Fadil! 

All the facts about the caves and the Goose Fair in this book are true. Except for the vampire part and the cave in which they live.

There are caves (and catacombs!) around the Church Rock Cemetery and Forest Recreation Ground which I’ve been fortunate enough to tour, but the one the vampires in Afterlife Calls inhabit is fictional. Most caves in Nottingham are quite small and unconnected. I needed something big and labyrinthine for them to live in, so I took some creative license with that part.

I grew up in a town similar to Hucknall, and my friends and I always complained that there was no interesting local history. But there probably was.

So much of our local history has already been lost. It’s really important to me that we preserve it, because we can learn so much from the lessons of the past. For example, the Luddites, something else Nottingham is famous for, didn’t rebel against the new technology in lacemaking their employers were bringing in. They rebelled against poor pay and working conditions. Sound familiar? Sound like it could be written now?

Everywhere has history. The problem is that local history just isn’t shared. If people don’t share it, it dies. Much like the origins of the catacombs in Nottingham, for example. We’ll never know if they really were carved out to house the dead and Notts folks got squeamish about it, or if it was just another excuse to mine sandstone. Personally I think the latter. The sand was an important part of local building and also exported for things like glassmaking. No one is giving up that lucrative business without a fight. They must’ve done eventually, though, as the city is no longer mined for sand.

If you want to find out more about the City of Caves, you can do a tour which will tell you about their history as homes, businesses, and even air raid shelters.

You can also walk down a cave called Mortimer’s Hole beside Nottingham Castle, which gave my legs a hell of a workout but was full of interesting stories of political intrigue.

Megan Taylor, "We Wait"

 

Megan Taylor is the author of four dark novels, How We Were Lost, The Dawning, The Lives of Ghosts and We Wait, a haunted house horror. She has also had many short stories published, some of which are included in her collection, The Woman Under the Ground. Her next novel, a psychological thriller, The Therapist’s Daughter, is due out from Bloodhound Books in September 2024 and she’s working towards a second short story collection. Megan lives in Nottingham. She has been running fiction workshops and courses for over ten years. For more information, please visit her website here. 

About We Wait, by Megan Taylor

The wealthy Crawleys can’t abide a scandal, so when fifteen-year-old Maddie’s behaviour causes concern, she’s packed off to the family’s country estate, along with her best friend, Ellie. But while Maddie is resentful, Ellie is secretly thrilled. A whole summer at Greywater House, which she’s heard so much about, and with Maddie, who she adores …

But from the moment the girls arrive, it’s clear there’s more to the house and the family than Ellie could ever have imagined. Maddie’s aunt, Natalie, and her bedridden grandmother are far from welcoming – and something has been waiting at Greywaters, something that flits among the shadows and whispers in the night.

As the July heat rises and the girls’ relationship intensifies, the house’s ghosts can’t be contained and it isn’t just Ellie who has reason to be afraid. Three generations of the Crawley family must face their secrets when past and present violently collide.

You can read more about We Wait here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From We Wait

The woods were crowding so close when Ellie woke that, at first, she thought she’d dreamt her way right through to dusk. Before she’d allowed her eyes to shut, they’d been driving past white-walled villages and golden fields, the lazy spin of wind turbines on a hazy hill. Now there was nothing beyond the car but trees. They made a tunnel of the road, reaching out with fringed branches to brush the roof and overpowering the Beetle’s air conditioning with their rich, sweet breath. Ellie remembered Maddie mentioning the woods around Greywaters. Maybe they were nearly there? But there was no sign of a house, just those stretching limbs, the endless leaves …

All that green was dizzying; Ellie rubbed a sweaty hand across her face. Her head was still thick with sleep, her body aching, her shoulders stiff from holding herself apart from Maddie, who was sitting in the cramped back seat beside her.

Maddie didn’t return her gaze. She remained bowed over Ellie’s phone, half-hidden by her hair, a perfectly straightened auburn wing. She’d been that way for hours, ignoring everything but the mobile, which she’d grabbed from Ellie as soon as she climbed into the car. In the driver’s seat, Maddie’s mother continued to fume. 

Ellie could see Sara’s narrowed eyes in the rear-view mirror, and her mouth, sucked tight. But though she’d chewed off most of her lipstick, Sara hadn’t exploded yet. Perhaps she’d given up? It had been almost a month since she’d confiscated Maddie’s phone. 

Briefly, Ellie considered exploding for her, snatching the mobile from her best friend’s fingers, yanking the window open and hurling it out. Instead, she leant towards Sara, trying to think of something harmless to say, and that’s when she saw the girl.

A girl standing in front of them, in the centre of the road. 

Standing very still, as if stunned or waiting, framed by the green, the trees, like a girl in a picture.

A moment ago, the road had been clear. The girl must have come scrambling out of the woods, though the verges looked impenetrable, the trees bound with nettles, their thick branches entwining. The bright July sky reduced to a scattering of stained-glass pieces overhead.

Caught in the canopy’s shade, the girl didn’t appear to be crossing. She wasn’t moving at all.

"Drip" by Holly O'Brien

Holly O'Brien is an English student at the University of Leicester, studying Creative Writing as a pathway. She is an aspiring novelist, and enjoys exploring different areas in which she can take her passion.

Drip

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. A boy shifted while he laid in bed. Drip. Drip. Drip. The boy furrowed his eyebrows. Drip. Drip. Drip. The boy groaned. What was that infuriating sound? It had woken him up. He wondered what the time was, but he didn’t want to open his eyes and check. As long as his alarm hadn’t gone off, he could stay where he was for as long as he liked. He pulled his pillow over his head to block out the sound.


Drip. Drip. Drip. “For God’s sake,” the boy grumbled, voice muffled under his pillow. Why on earth could he still hear it, as plain as he’d been able to without the pillow? Ignore it, he thought, it’s probably been going on all night, and you haven’t noticed it until now. Ignore it. Easier said than done. It was one of those irritating sounds that makes your blood boil, bubbling hotter and hotter until it stops, like someone heavy breathing next to you, or a car alarm in the middle of the night that the neighbour doesn’t seem to care about, a sound that becomes so annoying that you lie in bed thinking, “Just steal the bloody car, will you!”

*

Beep, beep, beep! Drip. Drip. Drip. The boy fumbled frantically beside him, searching for his alarm clock. He could still hear that cursed dripping sound, and he didn’t need it to be accompanied by something else. Beep, beep, beep! Drip. Drip. Drip. The boy sat up, his hair sticking out in all directions. The alarm clock wasn’t on the table next to him. He leaned over the edge of the bed, following its sound; the blasted thing was on the floor. The boy huffed and picked it up, turning it off and placing it down beside him. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and got up. He didn’t notice that his alarm clock didn’t read 7:30AM like it usually would after waking him up. Instead it read 3:00 AM.

*

The boy made his way across his bedroom, heading towards the bathroom. He planned on turning the tap off; surely that was what was making that dripping noise. Creeeeaaaak. The boy stopped halfway across the room, and looked down at the floor. The floorboards hadn’t creaked like that before. He reversed and took the same step again. No creak. And come to think of it, he couldn’t hear the tap anymore. The silence was music to his ears. Satisfied, the boy began to walk again. Creeeaaaak, creeeaaaak, creeeaaaak. Drip. Drip. Drip. The boy stopped again. So did the sounds. “I’m going mad,” he murmured to himself, rubbing his eyes, “I need to start getting more sleep.” He’d have to just walk to the bathroom, despite the phantom noises. He was sure they were just in his head anyway.

*

                
He arrived in the bathroom and checked himself out in the mirror, like he did every morning. But, he didn’t look like he did every morning. He was pale, white as a sheet, translucent, ghostly – odd. Perhaps he was coming down with something. That would explain the hearing things. A preferable option to mental instability. Drip. Drip. Drip. The boy looked down at the tap. It didn’t seem to be dripping at all. A sure sign it was all in his head – that is, until he saw the red water.


The boy bent down, nose millimetres away from the tap. He stared at it. There was something red coming out. He swallowed. He reached to turn the tap off – but it wouldn’t budge. It was off all the way already. Maybe if he turned it on…


The boy yelped as red water gushed out of the tap. He felt faint as he realised it was too thick to be just water, as screams started to echo around him, crying out in pain. It was only after a minute that he realised that he was crying, too, tears of red, his limbs burning as though on fire. Everything was going black. Menacing laughter had joined the screams now. Thump.

*

The boy never got back to his bedroom. If he had, he might have seen that the clock still read 3:00AM. The Devil only gets an hour. He always makes sure to succeed.