Tourniquet is a romantic tragedy with Dhampirs, Humans and Vampires.

Summary of Tourniquet: 

Xavier Firenze—a Dhampir—has been without a mate for 110 years, and living among humans with his Creator, Tatiana Cross. When she allows him to change Ally Conner for a wife, he refuses because he wants to gain her trust, fall in love the human way—which is forbidden—before damning her to an endless day.

When the Vampire Prince rebels in the Court of the Night Children, Xavier and the Dhampirs have to keep peace between them, the humans and the Night Children but they soon realize that Prince Lazarus is much more subtle then his father and will stop at nothing to have the strongest coven. Xavier, Tatiana and Ally are soon caught up in a war that will need surrender or their lives to end it.
    
How can Xavier love Ally without surrendering to the hunter's instincts, without becoming too human? How can he protect her from his world?
 
He can't.

The idea for this story sprang from another  story of mine originally called The Silver Cross. It was the first vampire vs werewolf story I'd written. It was told in the journalistic style of Dracula and, I must admit, written very poorly. However, when I read Racheal Mead's Vampire Acadamy, I got hooked on the premise of dhampirs and half-vampire creatures. It was only after I read Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn did I ever read up on them. And so the brainstorming for Tourniquet began...

I first wrote the preface of Tourniquet--thinking I'd need one--and then began on the story, opening with the thought of life after death through the eyes of a Dhampir, Xavier Firenze. I soon discarded the preface and began with chapter one. Unlike other stories, I decided to stray from the T rating and try my hand at the more adult rating M. Once I began writing through my Main Character's (MC)  head, I let him make the role his own and soon I had my MC's flaws/positive traits.

 Unlike other characters and stories I've written it seemed incredibly easy to let myself go and just focus on the character and story because maybe fantasy's not my thing, a lot of the time it seemed forced. With this, the emotion doesn't come across as forced, but raw and I love it. The other thing is that I often "switch" POV's. Not character-wise but from I to You. Here's an example:

Excerpt taken from Chapter 1: Death's Choice, page 3 of Tourniquet

©An Apple Bleeds At Twilight 

If you can’t imagine immortality the way I do, just imagine yourself standing in a crowd—rain, sun, a fucking hurricane; I don’t care—for days on end, staring at nothing (or maybe browsing for a new Stephen King novel in a store window?) while the crowd moves in fast forward. You can’t make out their faces as they’re always changing. You’re the only one standing still. My Creator, Tatiana Cross, told me that this feeling, this revelation, was to be expected like the blissful high you get with the first drag of the cigarette after a period of withdrawal. I wondered if she’d ever felt the same when standing still, completely drug-sober.

I leaned against the ancient movie theater, breathing in the stench of peeling paint and popcorn, car exhaust and rotting leaves. It was autumn, not yet cold enough to hunker down beneath a tattered quilt in the skeletal remnants of the theater seats. The movie theater, if you haven’t guessed, is my haven, my own little freezing (or boiling, depending on the weather) piece of Hell. The city that I live in is anonymous to me—I never want to find out where I am—because then I would never make this place my own. It would always be “this little town in Massachusetts” or “the city of Toronto” it would never be my imagined kingdom. So, for you readers specializing in geography, I’m sorry to say you won’t find the City of Nothing on the map—you’ll find it under a pseudonym of sorts.

I liked my privacy. Can’t you tell yet?

 Apparently, according to a Fictionpress reviewer, DeeFective, this style of switching back and forth: "...[the writing style] fits this story like a glove. It really amazes me how you wrote it so well in a way that this type of story is not normally written. Very well done with that. Also, I find that the actual things that you do write have a certain poetic appeal to them. I love it because it makes reading this story so easy and it puts the flow on a whole other level..." (review for chapter 4) 

DeeFective also points out: "Normally, for a story like this one would see it written in third person for it to be written well but you pulled it off in first..." (review for chapter 3) 

 The other thing I loved, and kept the story flowing, was Xavier's Creator*, Tatiana Cross. She's a mixture of motherly protectiveness and "badass chick"  attitude. She is a mentor for Xavier, and a bit of a hypocrite. I wanted a balance between "dangerous to know" Xavier and "playful and loving" Ally. So then Tatiana seemed to fit the role. 

I tried not to introduce too many characters in detail because, in earlier stories that seemed to be the death of me, so only mentioned three that would come a little later: Jack Pale, a doctor and Tatiana's human lover. The Bless family, all Hunters* and good friends of both Xavier and Tatiana, and both the Conner twins: Benjamin (him only briefly) and Ally, a human writer and soon to be Xavier's love interest.

*-See Dhampir Hierarchy for details.