Introducing ‘Love Bites’ Blackfeather: the nocturnal vampire of legend. No one is safe from the edge of his kris or the bite of his kiss. With all new ability and recall animations, a dashing leather look and exciting new effects, never before has this classic Halloween monster been more romantic.

‘LOVE BITES’ BLACKFEATHER (SPECIAL EDITION)

MODEL CHANGES:

Red and black leather jerkin, split tail cape and trousers

Armored right arm

Two-handed, cobra-headed kris

SPECIAL EFFECTS:

Jeweled Heartthrobs

Feint of Heart produces black petals and evil red energy

On Point flashes with a curved kris shape and releases a colony of bats

Enemies are bitten by vampire bats

ANIMATION CHANGES:

Fancy new On Point reverse thrust

All new Feint of Heart slash and lunge

Rose Offensive attacks in a swirl of bats and bladed slashes

Bow with a cape flourish recall

ALTERNATE FATES LORE

Night of the First Kiss

In the mountains, there is an old legend about the day when the brave townspeople defeated a vampire and saved the town.

(To put a finer point on it, the townsmen revved themselves up with rage and invaded the home of the monster, for they were sick of failing to protect the virtues of their mothers, daughters, sisters and wives from the vampy seductor. Even grannies long past their childbearing years were on occasion wooed away from their rocking chairs in the night, returning home at dawn with tousled white hair, goofy grins and low-grade anemia.)

And so the vampire’s castle was raided at lunchtime and the vampire himself was lifted, lifeless, from his velvet-and-satin sheathed canopy bed. Amid cheers and jeers the vampire was toppled into a casket along with enough garlic to season a hundred pots of ragu — garlic being the sworn enemy of kisses everywhere — and the lid was secured with long silver nails. The coffin and its soulless charmer were stashed in a crypt, and the vampire was never seen again.

The town settled, for generations after, into a peaceful calm brought about by heavy legislation. With the embellished legend of the philandering fiend as evidence, kisses were abolished. Hand-holders were ticketed and fined. Marriages were arranged by steady-minded elders. To keep passion at bay, spicy peppers, wine, sugars and sweet confections were outlawed. Honey was rebranded by the town’s marketers as “bee defecation.” Even the princesses were encouraged to be sensible; the castle towers and all of the Hardy Orange bushes were razed to the ground.

One such princess, tugged from within by a primal post-adolescent yearning, formed a clandestine search party of one through the town’s graveyard. Ten centuries worth of dead people congregated in those crypts and under the stone markers, so it took months of exploration to find the mausoleum. The plaque over the door bore no name, only a warning of certain death, and the casket within was sealed with silver nails.

A thousand hummingbirds took flight in her ribcage as she crept into the crypt out of the tower-less castle that night, wearing only her white nightdress, her dark curls tumbling down her back, her feet bare, a princess without a tower, a kisser without a kissee.

With grit, determination and a borrowed hammer she pried the lid loose from the vampire’s prison and pawed her way through the piles of garlic to find the legendary villain himself, pale and still as death but not at all rotted, golden locks spilling over red and black leather, extended canine teeth resting against his lips. Beside him rested his sword: a two-handed, cobra-headed kris.

It was with this curved blade that the princess nicked her own wrist. At the first drip-drop of her blood against the undead’s lips, the fiend reanimated, sat up in his coffin and grasped at the poor girl’s arm with uncommon strength. He drank from the girl’s wound, his gaze boring into hers, until she swooned.

In a flash the vampire leaped from the coffin and caught the princess up in his arms. With his lips brushing hers he whispered, “You have invited danger back into the world.” He wrapped one of her sproingy curls around his finger. “Why have you done this?”

The girl’s eyes fluttered open. “For love,” she replied.

It was a new beginning of lawlessness, the revolution of juicy nocturnal trysts and unabashed giggling. Ever after, this blunder was known as the Night of the First Kiss.

READ BLACKFEATHER’S CANON LORE: