Prologue

Prologue

Los Angeles

October 31, 1982

Los Angeles was drowning.

Overcast skies had burst into a deluge of rain for which the city was unprepared. Children, and the adults minding them, were caught outside in the middle of trick-or-treating and were instantly soaked to the skin. The grown-ups scurried to get their costumed offspring to drier places, while the kids frantically tried to preserve their sugary hauls.

In a nascent West Hollywood, a neighborhood two years from incorporation as an actual city and five years before the first official Halloween carnival, old hippies and young punk rockers reacted in mixed fashion to the torrential rain. The latter retreated into the clubs and bars of the Sunset Strip, while the free spirits danced in the downpour, their body paints streaming down their bare skin and into the streets and gutters in a Technicolor runoff.

This rain had a chill to it. Even those who celebrated, attempting to grab joy out of the shower that was so unusual in the semidesert climate, felt something beneath the skin with the impact of every drop of water. It was a cold that threatened to burrow down to the bone. Nature herself seemed angry, as if She was trying to inflict a punishment on the city. That feeling heightened as the wind intensified, howling in fury and turning the deluge sideways.

A mile southeast of West Hollywood, in the shadow of the dilapidated Pan Pacific Auditorium, a figure roared in agony. As furious as the storm was, it couldn’t hope to compare with his rage as he held in his arms another man, this one drooping and lifeless. Bathed in the darkness of the unused park, only the distant streetlights of Beverly Boulevard glinted off their soaked skin and clothing. The lifeless man’s body was beaten and stained with blood which ran in rivulets down his limp arms. The source of the blood flow, two ragged puncture wounds in his neck, had already slowed to a trickle as the supply depleted. The screams of the man holding him became ear-piercing, and his upturned face revealed crimson-stained fangs, still dripping with his companion’s lifeblood.

The figure howled against nature’s wrath as if he were being torn asunder. He wailed in impotent anger at the heavens and, through the white-hot anguish of his torment, he made an oath; the most common promise in the history of man, and the one all sentient beings are powerless to keep.

I will never love again.