Vampire Trilogy Series (Book 2): Vampire Twilight

by Philip Henry

  Nicholl continued to look at the ground silently. Rek walked back in, stuffing his phone back in his pocket, and resumed his stance against the wall. He wondered why they weren’t talking but didn’t ask. Eventually she spoke. “Two days,” she said softly. “Give me two days.”

  “Nicholl, this is no time to argue! Think this through and…”

  “I have thought it through,” she interrupted. “You said I could second anyone I wanted. Is Ward still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK, Ward’s a good hunter, he knows his stuff. I want him to start the investigation. You know the first two days of any tracking is about sifting through hospital reports, and police missing persons’ reports. We can’t do anything ‘til we know where they are. If Ward starts on that now, in two days we should have something to go on.”

  Goodwin looked weary. “Nicholl, this isn’t procedure.”

  “Off the record, Goodwin, I want these two. Sheridan in particular. But if I haven’t got them in two days I will leave. Come on, give me two days.”

  “You don’t even know that they’re still together.”

  “They’re together. Kaaliz wouldn’t have been able to hack into that army base and find out where the napalm was stored. They smuggled themselves over in two coffins. Plus, Kaaliz was a sex-offender when he was human and he raped an undertaker’s daughter when he became a vampire. We haven’t seen any sexual assaults we can attribute to him so I think he’s getting his jollies somewhere else. They’re together all right. Properly together.” Nicholl looked into Goodwin’s eyes. “Give me the two days.”

  Goodwin considered it then said, “In two days I don’t want to hear ‘I’m really close, I just need another day’.”

  Nicholl shook her head. “You won’t.”

  Goodwin rose from his chair and walked to her. He put her phone in her hand. “Don’t forget this again.” Nicholl took the phone and Goodwin nodded. “I’ll get Ward started on tracking them. We’ll see you in two days.”

  Nicholl nodded her appreciation and watched Goodwin leave. She turned to Rek and said, “OK, you heard him, I have to wrap this up in two days.”

  “We have to wrap this up in two days,” Rek corrected.

  Nicholl smiled thinly. “OK, we. If only we had somewhere to start. It looks like we’re going to have to wait for a body to show up.”

  Rek looked nervous. “I have a lead, but you have to promise to listen to me before I tell you.”

  “Rek, if you know something, tell me!”

  “Not until you sit down and let me explain first.”

  Nicholl’s annoyance was growing. “Do you know where Kaaliz and Sheridan are?”

  “No. But I know where the vampire who Made him is. You probably know her as Zigatta-Kaaliz, but her name is Claire now.”

  Nicholl started towards the door. “He’ll be with her. You can tell me the details on the way.”

  “No,” Rek shouted. Nicholl stopped and turned to him. “First you have to listen to me.”

  bad influence

  Kaaliz threw the dead mouse at the Che’al. It landed just short of the cage. The Che’al lunged forward and shot its huge arms through the bars. Its hand and fingers were so big it fumbled with the little animal before securing it in its grasp. Its arm retracted quickly and it stuffed it in its mouth. It chewed with excessive force at the small animal, then howled at Kaaliz.

  “You’re welcome,” he shouted back.

  Kaaliz was amusing himself as Sin fiddled about on her freshly retrieved computer in the lab. The longhair hadn’t moved since Sin had given him a shot of Che’al blood. He was curled up in his cage breathing heavily. Kaaliz glanced that way every once in a while to see if he had transformed yet. He couldn’t see his face. Sin wasn’t even sure it would work. She said there was a fifty/fifty chance that the human body couldn’t adapt to a Che’al’s blood like it could to a vampire’s. She said he would either turn out to be the strongest vampire alive or he would explode in a mess of blood and guts. Either way, it was something Kaaliz wanted to see.

  While he waited, he had been practising a trick he had learned, or a skill he had developed, if you like, while he was incarcerated. He had ignored the gift at first. With all the experiments they were doing on him, the side-effects were brutal and sometimes he had no idea what was real and what was hallucination. He supposed the Prime Minister looking down on him as he twitched and dribbled after being injected in his eye with something, could have been real. As could the visit from the Vice President of America. These types were always interested in research that could build a better soldier. But then there was the visit from the red-headed Spice Girl who would dance for Kaaliz in her little Union Jack mini-dress – that might have been a hallucination.

  After they stopped injecting things into his brain he had begun to get his thoughts into order again. This may have taken weeks or months, but slowly the world slipped back into focus. That was when he discovered his talent. He had felt fine the first time it had happened but he always allowed for the possibility that there were still some foreign chemicals swimming around his body.

  His first subject was a spider. He knew Rollins – the guard – was terrified of spiders. He had seen him on several occasions jump up and down with all his weight on an unassuming arachnid that had come within ten feet of him. So when Kaaliz saw that Rollins was dozing at his desk, he wished. All he had to do was wish. He saw the spider creeping along the floor. Rollins sat in his chair with his head resting on his desk. Kaaliz stared at the spider and wished. The spider had stopped. Then, incredibly, it had changed direction and started towards Rollins. Kaaliz stared at it intently. He got more excited the closer the spider got to Rollins. It crawled onto Rollins’s shoe and then his trouser leg. Without hesitation, it just kept going where Kaaliz wanted it to go. It passed his knee, then his crotch, and started climbing up his shirt. Kaaliz was smiling. Even if Rollins woke up right now it would freak the living shit out of him. Rollins didn’t wake up. The spider crawled up his shirt to the arm and then walked along the arm that Rollins was using as a pillow. Kaaliz wanted it to avoid touching Rollins’s face immediately. He wanted to manoeuvre it to his eyes so that the first thing he saw when he awoke was a spider staring at him. It crept along his arm avoiding his face, but on its return journey upwards, it lightly brushed his cheek. Rollins moved. Kaaliz froze. The spider stopped. Rollins moved his head slightly and then got comfortable again, but this time his mouth was slightly open. Kaaliz smiled and redirected the spider to his mouth. Rollins’s mouth was almost touching his sleeve so the spider wouldn’t be on his face very long. Hopefully he wouldn’t awake until it was in his mouth. It hesitated before climbing onto his face, just as Kaaliz wished it would. Then it quickly ran into Rollins’s mouth and down his throat.

  Rollins jumped up immediately and put his hand on his throat and tried to cough it up. He bent over double and stuck his fingers down his throat. He sicked up a little pool of bile on the floor. Rollins moved closer and examined the foul-smelling liquid. He saw something flailing in the sick. It was a spider. Rollins slapped his hand over his mouth and turned to the toilets but that was as far as he got. He vomited up his entire stomach contents during the next five minutes. Kaaliz had laughed. For the first time since he had been locked up, Kaaliz laughed.

  Over the next few months he had tried the trick again – not with Rollins, who never slept in sight of Kaaliz again even though the boffins said he hadn’t caused it – mostly out of boredom.

  He found what had happened wasn’t a hallucination or coincidence. He could direct insects to do whatever he wanted. Though insects couldn’t do much to help his situation. He wished he had some animals to work on. He felt if he progressed slowly enough he could build himself up to humans. But there were no animals. So after he had perfected controlling insects – he could make groups of flies do quite spectacular aerial displays – he decided to try it on his jailers. He had no luck with humans. As he feared, it was t
oo big a jump from insects to humans. There was one incident however, that the jury was still out on.

  She had been a visitor, an MP by the look of her, but quite young and attractive. Kaaliz had tried his influence on her. He wanted her to show him her breasts. He concentrated hard but the blouse remained fully buttoned. Even when she turned away from him, Kaaliz kept sending the thought to her: Take off your blouse. She was being shown the safety protocols by Rollins. When the demonstration was over and Rollins was leading her to the lift she looked over at Kaaliz. She looked scared. Kaaliz noticed the top three buttons of her blouse were now open. Kaaliz shifted his glance to her breasts and smiled. The woman looked down and seemed shocked to see her blouse open. As she walked away she was looking even more scared as she fumbled with her buttons. Maybe he had caused it or maybe she was just hot and didn’t like him looking at her. Kaaliz chose to believe he had done it and kept trying to influence humans from that day until the day when he was granted an early parole.

  As Kaaliz sat in the comfort of Project Redbook, bored waiting for the longhair to change or Sin to finish dicking around on that computer, he had decided to restart his own experiments. There were plenty of rodents scurrying around from one machine to the next. They moved like soldiers; running and taking cover. Kaaliz had found an abandoned cage and had caught half a dozen of them easily. Then he had commenced his experiments. He was gratified to see that he was able to control rodents as easily as insects. He had found a very sharp hunting knife in one of the employee lockers. He slammed the point of the knife into the desk he was sitting at and it buried itself solidly into the wood. Then he had taken one of the mice from the cage. He held it by the scruff of its neck and stared at it. The mouse had quickly stopped twitching and trying to get away. He set it on the desk facing the blade of the knife. The mouse sat obediently. Kaaliz concentrated on the mouse and pushed his influence. The mouse walked to the knife blade. It stopped just before it and reared onto its back legs. The mouse leaned forward and rested its belly on the blade. Its forelegs embraced the blade and it began to move up and down. Kaaliz watched it and a smile broke on his face. The mouse’s gyrations became faster and blood began to drip from its belly. The mouse didn’t seem pained and continued to rub itself furiously against the blade. The mouse only collapsed when it had cut itself and bled too severely to keep going. Kaaliz tossed it to the Che’al.

  Kaaliz liked his new game. The next four mice met a similar fate. Number two stood sideways to the blade and hacked its own head off. Number three charged at the blade and hit it head-on, eventually splitting its head in two. Number four had backed itself into the blade repeatedly until it was dead. But with number five Kaaliz had been especially sadistic. He had made it cut off all four of its feet and then he had released his influence on it. The little creature had squeaked and flailed about frantically until it died of blood loss. Kaaliz had one mouse left and he was keeping that one to show his trick to Sin.

  A loud grunt from behind Kaaliz stirred him from his research project. Kaaliz turned and saw the longhair was moving. Kaaliz got up and approached the cage slowly. The longhair was still lying on the floor of the cage but his arms and legs were twitching now. Kaaliz moved closer. The longhair stopped twitching and was still. Kaaliz tried to gauge his condition. The longhair sprang against the cage and shot his arm through the bars at Kaaliz. He jerked backward in time to avoid the hand, which now resembled a claw. After the initial shock, Kaaliz laughed. He called to Sin and then studied the longhair, which was still straining against the door of his cage.

  Its forehead was much more pronounced than a human, like a Neanderthal. Its teeth were all pointed, not just the incisors like vampires have. He seemed to have grown, too: his upper torso was huge and, very probably, solid as rock. The claws that had replaced his hands were huge and his fingers now came to points with something resembling a talon on each of them.

  Sin joined Kaaliz and marvelled at the creature they had created. She studied it for almost a minute and then said to it, “Can you understand me? Can you speak?”

  The creature’s voice was low and its words were all said with a deep growl. It answered her. “I can speak. Do you fink I’m stupid?”

  “Do you know what you are?” Kaaliz asked.

  The creature shook his head.

  “You’re a vampire,” Sin said slowly. “The ultimate vampire, and we are your kind.”

  “Let me out,” the creature said.

  Sin looked to Kaaliz for his opinion. Kaaliz turned to the creature. “Do you feel like you need to feed? Do you need blood?”

  The creature nodded.

  “I can show you how,” Kaaliz said. He walked closer to the cage. “You have to trust me.” The creature nodded. Kaaliz took the swipe-card from his pocket and held it at the slot that would release the lock. He took one more look at the creature. It was panting and focussing on his hand. Kaaliz slid the card in and the locks released.

  The creature sprang from the cage and seized Kaaliz and bit into his neck. Sin ran to the desk and found the tranquilliser gun. Kaaliz punched and kicked at the creature but it had no effect. The pair of them fell forward and the creature landed hard on Kaaliz. The creature shifted from his neck. It grabbed the sleeve of Kaaliz’s jacket and ripped it off leaving his bare arm exposed. The creature held Kaaliz down and bit into his arm. Sin fired the first dart into the creature’s back and watched it bounce off and skitter across the floor. She reloaded and looked for a vulnerable spot. The creature bit down hard and tore a chunk of Kaaliz’s arm off. Kaaliz watched in terror, actually fearing for his life now, as the creature chewed on the flesh of his upper arm. Sin shot another dart into the sole of the creature’s foot. Its hardened skin deflected that one too. Sin quickly reloaded and ran beside the creature and shouted, “Hey!”

  The creature turned with some of Kaaliz’s skin still hanging from its mouth and Sin shot a dart straight in its eye at point blank range. The creature lunged for her and she flew up to the ceiling. The creature left Kaaliz and tried to jump up and catch Sin. It didn’t seem to register – even after jumping a dozen times – that she was beyond his grasp. The creature kept jumping, which was good because it would increase its blood circulation and the tranquilliser should hit it quicker. Sin looked down at Kaaliz, completely forgotten by the creature now, and saw that his neck was almost healed and his arm was regenerating rapidly. She looked below her again and saw the creature wobble unsteadily and then collapse. She stayed there until she was sure that the sedation had finally taken and then landed beside Kaaliz.

  “I’m lucky I had the old hand in here,” he said patting his chest. “What do you think, kill him or throw him back in the cage?”

  “Let’s not be too hasty,” Sin said, still keeping an eye on the creature. “I’m not sure he’s a write-off. It could just have been bloodlust. All vampires have it when they’re Made. I think his is just a little more intense than ours.”

  “He doesn’t seem too bright.”

  “No, he doesn’t. Why don’t you take him out when he comes round? Maybe if he eats enough humans he’ll leave us alone. And you can see if he has any natural hunting ability or instincts.”

  “You sound like you want to write a paper on him,” Kaaliz said dryly.

  “Well, old habits and all. Look, if he comes after you again, just fly above him.”

  “And what if he can’t be controlled or reasoned with?”

  Sin shrugged. “Then leave him on the streets of Coleraine and come home. Fuck it. Let the humans worry about what to do with him. He’ll probably get fried at the first sunrise anyway.”

  They let the creature lie on the floor where it fell until it regained consciousness. It awoke suddenly and saw Kaaliz standing against the far wall. It got to its feet and charged at him. Kaaliz flew upwards beyond its reach and looked down as it jumped up trying to reach him. It was growling in frustration every time it missed. When it was showing signs of tiredness Kaaliz spoke. “I’m not your
enemy. Do you understand? I know you want blood but you’re not getting mine. I can take you to a place where you can eat as much as you want. Do you understand me? Can you tell me your name?”

  The creature reluctantly quieted. It was still breathing hard. “Risk,” it growled.

  “Risk? That’s your name?”

  The creature nodded. “Need blood.”

  “I’ll take you as long as you don’t try and kill me like you did before. Do we have a deal, Risk?” Risk nodded once. Kaaliz cautiously lowered himself to the ground facing Risk. He noticed Risk’s eye was badly crushed from the dart. Risk saw him looking at it and raised his claw and felt it. “I took the dart out while you were out of it. Don’t worry, as soon as you get some blood down your neck it’ll start to heal.” Risk nodded. “OK, let’s go, Risk.”

  Risk couldn’t fly so Kaaliz had to carry him. Kaaliz was shocked by how heavy he was. Even with his enlarged frame, he shouldn’t be this heavy. Kaaliz hooked Risk under his arms and flew towards Coleraine with Risk dangling his feet in the air under him.

  It was Risk who asked to land. He had spotted something glued to a telegraph pole. They landed and Kaaliz shook his arms to relieve the numbness. Risk ran to the pole and read the flyer.

  NIGHTHAWKS M.C.C.

  Rock Night Featuring…

  Blue Job

  Six-Inch Screws

  The Contra-band

  Friday 18th at The Clubhouse, Admission £3

  “Is dis deh eighteenf?” Risk growled.

  Kaaliz glanced at the poster. “The motorcycle club? Yeah. You want to go there?”

  Risk nodded and grunted, then raised his arms so Kaaliz could hook under.

  Ten minutes later they landed in the car park of the Nighthawks clubhouse. Several bikers were outside smoking weed and got on their bikes as soon as they saw the two figures walking toward the clubhouse entrance.