Darkest Heart (6 page)
This one's got the look and the moves that attract human males down pretty well: the skin-tight designer jeans, the pastel spaghetti-strap baby-doll T-shirt and the clunky platform shoes. She's even got the navel ring and the Hello Kitty lunchbox that doubles as a purse. She's broadcasting vulnerability and availability. The one jarring note to her ensemble is the three-foot-long braid, thick as man's wrist. Most observers would simply assume she's wearing a hair extension of some sort. Judging from the length of the braid, I'd peg her somewhere between eighty and a hundred years old. Probably was Made before bobbed hair was all the rage. Vampires wear the goofiest shit. The females tend to favor hairstyles that were popular during their original lifetime, while the males lean more towards outdated clothes, especially shoes. I can't tell you how many dead boys I've snuffed over the years who went to their final grave wearing spats and wing tips. Which leads me to question that resurgence of swing music a couple of years back, but that's another story.
When I'm on patrol, I sometimes feel like the sole watchman on the ramparts, keeping lonely vigil while the city parties itself into a coma. It used to not be this way. In ancient days, strangers who looked and behaved differently were automatically suspect. Then came the rise of the city, the upshot being humans so alienated and under-socialized that no one thinks twice about someone who smells a little off or is dressed twenty years out of fashion. So now its up to me to keep an eye out for the lions amongst the lambs or even worse, the Judas goats sent to lead the sheep to the slaughter.
The creature chose her victim for the night; a young male dressed in jeans with pants legs that flared out like the ears of a charging African elephant and a leather billfold fastened to his belt-loop by a length of chrome chain. The combination of grossly oversized clothing, reversed baseball cap and Day-Glo pacifier dangling from a cord around his neck made him look more like a preschooler than a college student.
She hung onto his arm, her tongue tickling his ear. A swell of lust washed over the victim, as a wave overtakes a novice swimmer. At first his eyes burned bright and wet with excitement, then suddenly grew dull, like windows obscured by frost. By the time she led him towards the door, numb hand in hers, her intended victim was little more than a sleepwalker.
He waited a beat before following, making sure they remained in his line of sight. He couldn't afford to lose them in the crowd.
I cut across the dance floor, oblivious to the multicolored laser light and the pulsing, molar-rattling beat from the speaker towers; my attention is fixed on the dead girl and her prey. Suddenly a laughing youth dressed in a towering multi-colored stovepipe hat and a Dr. Seuss T-shirt jumps out of the crowd, spraying Day-Glo silly string in my face.
My response is as immediate as it is instinctual: I slap the can out of the boy's hand and grab him by the throat. The raver's pupils, already dilated by meth, expand even further once he realizes his feet are no longer touching the floor. I wipe the silly string from my sunglasses with my free hand as the music
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) continues to pound away in the background. The raver's face is turning blue. The other partygoers are still dancing, oblivious to what's going down in their midst. The only ones who seem to have noticed are those nearby, who I assume to be his friends. They're staring at me open-mouthed. I give a dismissive snarl and toss him aside, like a lioness batting aside a bothersome cub. The boy staggers backward, spittle flying from his lips as he gasps for air. He has no idea how lucky he is. I can only hope that his ill-timed playfulness hasn't cost his fellow partygoer his life.
The rave is being held in an old warehouse in a questionable landscape of overgrown lots, rusted-out cars, abandoned gravel pits and stagnant ponds. The moon shines like a huge luminous skull, pouring its light upon the bleak cityscape below, but there is no sign of the dead girl or her party boy. I toss my head back and take a deep breath. I catch a whiff of putrescence and depravity, mixed with the reek of snake house.
It is the stink of the undead. I smile without humor and trot off in the direction of my prey. As I head down the darkened alley, I catch a second, all-to-familiar odor: sweat, blood and fear combined with the unadulterated stench of mortal combat. I round the corner and see a figure kneeling over a prone body in the shadows of the alley.
I curse the idiot in the stovepipe hat, but then I realize the raver is lying unconscious on the ground a few feet away from me. His skin is gray from shock and his eyes are rolled back in his head, but seems to be otherwise unharmed.
The shadowy figure straightens from its task and turns to face me, a Bowie knife in one hand and the dead girl's head in the other. The stranger is a man dressed in a long black duster, black jeans, a long-sleeved black shirt, and black cowboy boots with silver tips. His head is bare, his long, prematurely white hair pulled back from his face in a simple ponytail. His gray eyes have all the warmth of the yawning doors of a walk-in freezer.
He slides the big knife into a sheath fastened to his belt, next to the leather gun holster tied to his right leg. I can tell he's trying to decide whether or not he should kill me. Although I never laid eyes on him before in my life, a thrill of recognition still ignites my nerve-endings.
"Back the fuck up," he snarls.
"You got it, ace," I reply, holding my hands palms out, so he can see I'm not carrying a weapon.
I take a step backward, using the opportunity to drop my vision into the occult spectrum. I scan the stranger for signs of Pretender taint, but his aura comes up clean. Whatever else he might be, at least he's human.
"What are you doing here?" he asks tersely.
"Funny, I was about to ask the same of you."
The dark-clad stranger tilts his head to one side, his brows knitted tightly together, as if he's trying to read a newspaper through me. Suddenly there's a gun in his hand. I have to admire his reflexes. The boy's quick, I'll give him that. The silenced muzzle makes a slow, methodical searching movement up and down my torso, like a police dog sniffing out contraband.
"Look, man, there's no need to get hostile...."
The gun in his hand bucks and there's a muffled sound, like the pop of an old-fashioned flashcube. He stands snapshot-still as the gun smoke blows back into his face. I instinctively grab my wounded shoulder, momentarily turning my attention away from the stranger. When I look back, seconds later, it is to see him running down the alley, the dead girl's braid flapping behind him like the tail of a fox.
I should - and could - give chase, but I'm not keen on risking a second bullet between the eyes. The slug in my shoulder is no misfire. He could have put me down, if he'd had a mind to do so. I use the switchblade to dig the bullet out. It hurts, but I've endured far worse.
I hold the blood-smeared .38 caliber bullet in the palm of my hand, rolling it back in forth so that its silver jacket reflects the moonlight. I shake my head in disbelief, a rueful smile on my face. After all these years, it seems I've finally stumbled across a fellow vampire slayer.
* * * *
"Undead."
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) He said it loud and distinctly, so she would know he wasn't crying out in fear, but naming her, as a doctor would diagnose a disease. She stepped away from her prey and turned to face him with a nimble, feral movement, her eyes cisterns leading down to sunless depths. A long strand of saliva dripped from her exposed canines.
"This does not concern you, human."
He fired twice before she could move against him, splashing the wall behind her with blood and vertebrae.
The vampiress hit the ground and stayed there, but she wasn't completely dead yet. The bullets had severed her spinal cord, but such injuries were not instantly fatal to her kind. The killing blow would come from the silver, which, as he had learned, inflicted a painful, agonizing death. The vampiress' upper torso squirmed like a worm on a hot sidewalk as her flesh turned a pale, bluish purple, sloughing off her bones like the meat of a stewed chicken. She looked up at him, scarlet sparks of loathing spitting from her fading eyes, her lips smeared with the black ichor that served as her blood. She clicked her fangs together rapidly; making a sound like the buzz of rattler's tail, then went still.
Satisfied she was truly dead, he knelt to take his trophy. He had been thinking for most of the night about where he would put it. The braid would definitely have to be part of the display.
As he decapitated the creature, he became aware of being watched, like a hunter who has come to the stream to fill his canteen, only to find himself opposite a cougar that has wandered down from the hills to slake its thirst.
She was standing less than thirty feet away, dressed in a well-worn leather motorcycle jacket, faded black jeans, scuffed harness boots, and a ragged Skinny Puppy T-shirt. She was tall and built like an acrobat, with dark, unruly hair that hung about her face like an abbreviated lion's mane, her eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.
At first he thought she was one of the revelers from the rave who had wandered into the alley to either relieve herself or do drugs. But there was something in the way she held herself that told him she wasn't a mere party girl. Despite her pretense at casualness, he was reminded of a panther pretending to doze before springing on its zookeeper.
Something in the way she dipped her head slightly, looking over the top of her sunglasses at him for a brief second without managing to show her eyes, was genuinely disquieting. She studied him for a long moment; the way cats will break away from grooming themselves to stare intently at nothing at all.
Whatever it was she saw, or didn't see, made her relax her stance slightly - but not completely.
Since he wasn't sure she was one of them, he fired at a part of her body that would not be normally fatal. If she were undead, the silver alone would do its job. If she were human, she would escape with a broken collarbone. Granted, it wasn't the fairest of calls, but it was better than either of them being dead. It wasn't until he was in the van, tearing ass back to base, that it occurred to him who the stranger had been. He swore out loud and hammered his forehead with a doubled fist, cursing his stupidity.
After years of hunting the most dangerous game known to mortal man, he had finally come face-to-face with the only other vampire hunter on the face of the earth. And what did he do? He shot the Blue Woman.
The sun is rising in the east, chasing away the night and all the things that dwell within it. Including myself.
I sigh and let the heavy blackout curtains fall back in place. I have yet to develop a fatal allergy to sunlight, but it does not feel pleasant upon my skin, and the minutest exposure hurts my eyes, even when I wear the darkest of my sunglasses. I pace back and forth uneasily. I am weary, and the wound in my shoulder throbs. I know I should allow myself to regenerate, but there is too much on my mind to surrender to the petite mort.
The events of the night's hunt have done much to disturb and, yes, excite me. I can't shake the image of the white-haired hunter from my mind. I must know more - who is he? What's his name? Where does he come from? Why is he here? Is he a friend? An enemy? Something in between?
If I have learned one thing from my existence, it's that knowledge is power. This is why I forced myself to learn how to use a computer. Pretenders have a problem with electronics. Perhaps it's because machines
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) are things of human making, or perhaps it's simply too difficult for them to break centuries-old habits, but most of them refuse to keep abreast with the latest advances in the sciences. That's why they surround themselves with human servants; it guarantees that they can exploit technology without ever having to interface with it directly.
I unplug my laptop from its recharger and place it on the card table that serves as my desk, jacking the modem into the phone line. The LCD flickers into life as I turn on the juice, typing in my password as I go. I take out the hands-free headset and plug it into a port on the side of the laptop. I type in an address and hit the ENTER key. The screech of the computer modem fills my skull. I grimace and spin down the volume on the earpiece.
A computer-generated image fills the laptop's LCD. It's a three-dimensional picture of a man's head, perpetually rotating in cyberspace through three hundred and sixty degrees. The head is transparent and where the brain should be there is a mass of cobwebs. As the head spins and tilts, the strands of the spider web shimmer with electric blue foxfire and purple heat lightning.
I turn the volume up on the earpiece and hear a short buzzing sound, kind of like a cross between the rings of a doorbell and a telephone. Suddenly a smaller rectangle opens up within the upper right hand corner of the screen, revealing a man in his late twenties with a shaved head, the folds and creases of a human brain tattooed directly onto his bald pate. As if this was not adornment enough, there's a third eye etched upon his brow. Upon magnification, the center of the tattooed eye turns out to be a perfectly circular hole in his skull.
