Outsider (13 page)

The cop studied the vampire. Thought she was
actually attractive, like most female suspects he had tracked down
along his career. Extraordinary eyes enhanced with black mascara.
Great legs sheathed in knee-high boots. He eventually noticed that
the man propped against the wall, looked actually dead. He had a
bloodless look to his face that didn’t look promising. As often he
wondered how things like that could happen.
For God’s sake, they
were standing just outside a railway station. Or was it that by
midnight trains stopped stopping in Teddington?

Was he facing the killer he had been trailing
since the beginning of the summer? He looked at the woman: square
shoulders, one square hand effortlessly holding up the corpse.
Evaluating her strength: maybe stronger than the average female,
but nothing I cannot handle.

Her skin flushed with the freshly ingested
blood, Joy looked back. She could have easily hypnotised him,
mesmerised him into her merciless power, but she was still reeling
with anger and frustration from her little encounter with Death.
This guy was another mere pawn in Life and Death’s computer games.
The hell with them.

D. I. Madison decided to make a stand:

“You are under arrest on suspicion of
multiple murders.”

“Just like that? No back up? No forensic
team?” The snarl rippled into a throaty laughter. Human silliness
could at times sound so amusing. “Care to check the freshness of
the corpse for yourself?”

With just one hand she flung the corpse
across the policeman, who took it full in the stomach, stumbled
backwards, fell flat on his back. Then fumbled agitatedly from
under the lifeless body to get back on his feet. Looking at corpses
was ok, but getting into such close quarters with one sent shivers
of disgust down his spine. What kind of cold-blooded monster was he
dealing with? If he’d had a tie knotted around the collar of his
white shirt, he would have strangled himself retightening it.

The amused woman was facing him, smiling,
revealing……. Canines longer than average.

After a moment of silence, she pouted: “Can’t
recognise a cat when you see one?”

She stepped closer to him. He stammered:
“What……. Who……. “He still couldn’t believe
. No! Must be one of
these fakes you can get specially made in dental labs!

Laughter rippled again in her throat. In
other circumstances, it would have sounded lovely.

“I see, you haven’t read the classics.
Charnas, Jewell Gomez, Laurell K. Hamilton, Tanya Huff, Stephen
King, Konstantinos, Brian Lumley, Polidori, Anne Rice, Somtow, Bram
Stoker, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.” She mused some more: “Sometimes, I
wonder who had been the first one ever to write about me and my
kind. Because, you know, I’m only mentioning the famous names.”

He slowly pulled the gun out of the holster
hidden between shirt and jacket.

“Tut tut.” She shook her head. “That’s a
naughty little boy.”

Half a breath later D. I. Madison was
gunless, his white shirt torn open down his front, a thin red line
tingling uncomfortably from collarbone to belt, on his otherwise
absolutely smooth skin. He stared at the long nails of her elegant
fingers, speechless. In her hands, he saw his wallet. It had hardly
been a blink of an eye, not really enough time for a blurred
motion. And his gun, where was his gun now? She was foraging
between his cards, pulling them out one by one, scattering them
around all over the tarred ground, commenting aloud: “American
Express, Barclay, Mastercard! Visa, international of course. A few
twenties.” She smiled at him sweetly: “I might need them later,”
and inserted them down her cleavage. Went on with the wallet. A
small square photo. “Oh!” She cooed mockingly. “What a
sweet-looking piece of candy.” It was Madison’s sister, ten years
his junior. She had been his sole responsibility for the last nine
years, since a car crash had crushed their parents to death. She
was a brilliant student currently attending university in
Cambridge. If anything happened to him, would she be alright?

She stuffed the photo into his breast pocket.
Pulled out the last item: a policeman’s ID card. And then, only
then, chose to read his name.

“Ah ah!” She exclaimed subsequently. “D. I.
Madison! We meet, at last. It’ll be a brief encounter I’m afraid. I
am in a rather bad mood and I just finished my dinner. What am I
going to do with you now?”

The dark eyes turned icy. He felt beads of
cold sweat trickling down his spine. He thought about his sister.
She was his last remaining relative. His life insurance would be a
rather neat sum.

“You’ve been pestering my favourite rock band
lately,” she started. He felt like someone was walking on his
grave. “And you failed solving the mystery of the bloodless
corpses. You couldn’t even hypothesise. That makes you a boring,
pathetic jerk.”

The next moment, she had his left arm in her
right hand. His left arm. It took a few seconds for his brain to
analyse the situation and adjust to it. Blood started to thickly
drip from his now empty sleeve. A soaring pain flooded the
surprised nerve endings at the point of severance. He contemplated
the dark blue flannel sleeve hanging miserably on his left side,
dribbling red.

“Looking for something?”

His very own left hand slammed across his
face. He stumbled, would have fallen down to the hard ground again,
a hand-space away from her previous victim, without the vampire’s
steady grasp on his right arm. That was: when he still had a right
arm attached to his right shoulder with a fully functional joint.
He screamed with unbelievable pain and endless terror. She
discarded both arms like used matches or empty gum wrappers. She
let him wander around a bit. Watched his despair, his head rotating
from one side to the other, his wide, pale blue eyes, paler than
ever, willing the sleeves crumpling with gushing blood to grow arms
again.

Then she purposefully walked to him. She held
the collar of his jacket with two hands, thoughtfully, before
letting go. With a long nail, she slowly scratched a perfect circle
on his chest. She looked at the terror filling his eyes. He vaguely
thought her smile was devilish.

Because she had all the time in the world,
she pushed her strong fingers at a pace allowing excruciating
painful crushing of the ribs, before pulling out Madison’s heart
madly pumping blood. With horror he watched the swift rotation of
her wrist, severing the various arteries. His last thought went for
his sister.

* * * * * * *

Joy scattered the dismembered parts of D. I.
Madison all over London, giving dog walkers and gay cruisers equal
opportunities for gruesome discoveries (she had always favoured
equal opportunities). One arm in Hampstead Heath. A torso in
Brockwell Park. A head in the Hackney Marsh. A heart at the very
centre of Covent Garden.

Teddy Longhorn’s bloodless corpse? Floating
belly up on the Serpentine River.

Joy hadn’t thought about Toni since their
last encounter. Maybe last no-encounter was a more appropriate term
in that case. It went back to the early nineties, something like
barely the day before yesterday for an immortal being. And now,
there Joy was, sitting up in her obsolete coffin, feeling the sun
still bright and shiny outside, and thinking about the older
vampire, twice Joy’s age maybe, give and take a few decades. Joy
didn’t think about people once they were out of her existence. She
didn’t like people. She roamed among humans, preying on them,
drinking the life force out of their veins. Vampires being mostly
solitary creatures –of course, she had heard about covens, but that
was for weak fledglings–, she had only met a tiny number of her
kind, generally keeping the upper hand, and it was enough to know
the stories about the ancient vampires easily passing for humans
and killing or terrorising younger ones just for fun.

She had noticed Toni at one of the many
always crowded gigs she attended back in the last decade of the
twentieth century. At the time she used to only haunt the
underground music scene, favouring punk bands for their trashed
audiences whose individuals hardly anyone missed when they stopped
showing up. Of course it was easy for Joy to be liked. Her
diminutive outfits always attracted attention. She looked the part
of the middle-class, twenty-something young woman in search of a
bit of rough and that always turned somebody on. It was a wild and
greedy time: up to three meals a night.

It was a notorious indie rock band going by
the name of Fireheads and Toni looked like any punk girl: tight,
ripped jeans; doc martens; studded leather bike jacket with
numerous zips and badges over a cropped, dark T-shirt; spiky, black
hair and a few earrings. Tall and skinny, she was an attractive and
androgynous-looking scarecrow. Joy immediately liked the green
eyes, even if those green eyes were solely focused on the lead
guitar of the band, who herself had blonde hair forever flying all
over the mad rhythms and always falling over grey eyes lost in
another world.

Joy’s attractive prey didn’t look a day
beyond her nineteen years. She was dancing in the middle of the
mass of writhing bodies, towering over the wimin, eye to eye with
the men. Like Joy. Dancing very close to the stage and always
staring at the oblivious musician.

Music pounding in her ears, hips swinging
with the rhythm, Joy moved her knee-high boots with each beat,
inching her way closer and closer to this punk girl, who didn’t
seem to sweat in her leather. The song ended and the audience
roared. The singer, a scantily-clad female, shouted some
obscenities to the crowd who kept on roaring, and the drummer,
androgynous and powerful, counted everyone into the next wild
number.

The vampire with the long black and white
mohican used the sudden movement of a punter on speed to innocently
step on her prey’s well-protected feet. Green Eyes looked at her
automatically. Joy smiled her apology, made eye contact and weaved
her mesmerising spell unto the apparently unsuspecting young woman.
Joy kept on smiling, confident in her power, arrogant. Green Eyes
looked at the lead guitar who forever ignored her anyway, looked
back at the gorgeous creature staring at her and they started
dancing together.

It was always easy to guide a victim out of
the crowd, into a deserted corner, like the ladies’ loo. Those
happened to be relatively clean, having been repainted the previous
week, and Joy had no trouble to lead Green Eyes into the
graffitted, white room. She even let Toni gently push her against
the wall, so sure she was of her dinner. But as she was smiling and
smiling wider to slowly reveal her fangs, the glazed look left the
green eyes of the scarecrow, who started grinning as widely as Joy,
and before Joy really got a glimpse of Toni’s fangs, a sudden rush
of energy engulfed her, she read cynicism in the now laughing eyes
and truth exploded in her mind, a creeping fear gnawing at her
guts. Her smile froze and died. Toni was no innocent human being,
she was way older than her looks, she was an ancient vampire and
Joy would be lucky if she was not destroyed by morning or not
totally insane by the time she reached her coffin, if she ever
reached it.

A wild grin lighting her face, her fingers
playing in Joy’s silky hair, the ancient vampire buried her nose in
Joy’s bare neck, smelling the fragrance of her skin (Joy was into
jasmine perfume). The strong, predatory hands with thin and bony
fingers slid down to the shoulders and the upper arms, while the
face slowly and gently rubbed up the neck, into the soft hair. Too
terrified to move and defend herself, Joy felt the wet tip of
Toni’s tongue trace her earlobe.

Toni pulled back. Joy hated being played
with, hated not being in control, hated the uncertainty of her
current predicament. With a voice matching the amusement on her
face, Toni said:

“Such a sweet vampire child, more powerful
than the number of her years. Your maker must have been mighty. And
if I judge right by your arrogance, I would be surprised if you had
given him many years to enjoy your company.”

She caressed Joy’s hair dreamily. Joy, still
frozen with fear, was expecting her to strike with fangs at any
second, even if Toni’s skin looked like she had already nicely fed.
Ancient vampire killing for fun would be no novelty. There was
almost love in her voice when the mighty predator spoke again:

“I am in a good mood tonight, therefore I let
you be and hunt, but remember my power. Remember that I am sparing
you because, who knows, I might need you. One night.”

And when the ancient vampire kissed the
younger one, it was deep and tender and loving and warm.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really like this
band.”

With a mocking bow as mocking as her green
eyes, she left Joy still leaning against the wall and wondering
about the reality of reality itself. The band was still raging on
stage and the sound was actually a lot clearer in the toilets, as
she had often noticed. Now alone, she started to relax and slowly
regaining control of her emotions, she felt anger and hunger sweep
the terror away. She was not stupid. She knew she stood no chance
against Green Eyes. It was weird. Since becoming a vampire, since
having her maker destroyed, she had always been the mightiest
vampire in her vicinity, no one ever challenging her dominion. And
tonight, someone had duped her, played a trick on her. But the
ancient vampire had not destroyed her, not driven her to insanity.
She had merely given her a lesson.

* * * * * * *

The two vampires haunting the same scene, Joy
got to meet Toni many times. The older, but more youthful-looking
vampire would greet her with a playful hug and sometimes a light
nibble on the neck that Joy couldn’t help but long for. She
wouldn’t have minded more one-to-one moments but Toni was
definitely head over heels for the blonde musician.