by Lily Luchesi
***
Bella Senski’s family were lifelong neighbors of the reclusive cop Danny Mancini. She had moved out for college before he had been fired from the force, but she returned a few months ago, once her parents had gone to a retirement home in Florida. She was the owner of the house now, though she was considering selling. The neighborhood was nice, but there was something about Mancini’s girlfriend that gave her the creeps.
She’d seen the black-haired girl going outside on a few evenings, on each of which she’d said hello to her, despite her feelings that this twenty-something was far too young for Danny.
The girl had always said hello back, and once had actually smiled. It was that smile that made Bella want to pick up and get the Hell out. It was the type of smile you saw on the face of Hannibal Lecter right before he asked you over for “dinner”.
She watched from the front porch as they came home this particular night, dressed to the nines, laughing and joking as it looked like the girl was chanting as they went inside. Bella was not religious, but the thought of the girl doing witchcraft made her feel even worse about her.
How does he not see that she’s trouble? Bella wondered, sipping her tea, blonde hair tied back in an artful twist. Yep, she did not want to live next door to her anymore, and she promised herself that she’d call a realtor as soon as she woke up the next day.
She closed her eyes, savoring the hot tea on this cool spring night, when she was startled by a voice calling to her.
“Pardon me, miss?”
She jumped, nearly spilling her drink. Standing at the spot where the sidewalk connected to her driveway was a tall, good-looking man with black hair that was prematurely streaked with silver. He was well-dressed and she felt a tingle of attraction.
“My apologies. I did not mean to frighten you,” the man said, taking a few steps closer. He had a British clip that made him even more alluring.
“It’s all right. I was kinda giving myself the creeps, to be honest,” Bella replied. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’m looking to move in nearby and I had a few questions about the neighborhood. Could I perhaps come closer? This calling across the lawn is quite tedious.”
Bella paused. Of course she knew of the folly of inviting strange men close to her, especially so close to her unlocked door, but she was the daughter of an Army captain, and always carried a gun on her. If he tried anything, he’d be castrated by a forty caliber pistol.
“Yeah, sure.” Just try and mess with me.
He walked closer, and she saw his sharp, pale features and his bottomless dark eyes. His hair could use a cut, but the stark contrast of the colors was really stunning.
“Funny you’re looking to move in: I just decided to sell this house tomorrow,” she said.
“What a coincidence,” he drawled. “Why are you selling?”
She giggled. “It’s probably just my paranoia, but the girl next door gives me the creeps. Her boyfriend is nice, but her…” Bella gave an involuntary shudder.
He chuckled deep in his throat. “You mean Angelica Cross?”
Bella looked up, surprised. “Yeah. How did you know?”
“Because I know of her legacy. She is dangerous, you’re right about that.” He leaned in closer. “We all are. She’s kept our people cowed, treating you mortals as though you’re precious goods, when all you are is a quick snack. Although…” He looked over her lean body. “Some of you are much more delicious than others. ...It seems as though the dining in this neighborhood is five-star.”
Bella was stunned, pinned under his gaze as his black irises slowly turned into the burning red of Hellfire. She was unable to move or speak as she stared. And when the man pulled her into the air one-handed and began to tear her throat out with his teeth, she could not even bring herself to scream.
Chapter Two
No one wants to wake up to the police and ambulances outside of the house next door. Danny had been up with Angelica till sunrise as he usually was, and obviously much more tired out than usual thanks to their private wedding night festivities.
So when he heard the sirens racing and stopping right outside of their house, at noon, he groaned and put his pillow over his head. It took a minute for his sleep-sluggish brain to realize that they were actually right outside and then he got out of bed, throwing a dressing gown over his boxers and looked out the window.
There were three cop cars, a CSI unit, and an ambulance next door, at the Stenski house. The Stenskis were a nice couple in their seventies, and he knew their daughter fairly well. His sleep-fogged brain tried to remember when he’d seen them last and it hit him that they’d moved to Florida. The house was the daughter’s now.
Bella was not always the friendliest, but she was at least a polite neighbor. He wondered what happened. Angelica had made a comment that Bella didn’t use proper weapon storage or cleaning on her gun, and he wondered if perhaps she had accidentally shot herself, and he had been so exhausted that he hadn’t heard it.
As he watched, two EMTs brought out a black body bag and his heart sank. Making sure his robe was tied and his hair was not completely askew, he put his house shoes on and went outside just as two plainclothes detectives walked out of the house. He smiled, seeing that he had known one of them. Had his reputation not been completely tarnished thanks to Vincent Cross, he might be able to get some information.
Walking up to them, the detective he knew waved.
“Danny Mancini! Nice robe,” he smirked.
“David Taylor, glad to see you got your promotion,” Danny replied. “What happened here? I’ve known Bella since she was a kid.”
Detective Taylor gestured for Danny to step aside.
“Evidently, she was attacked in her home last night. The mailman went to ring her doorbell with a package this afternoon and he saw blood on her porch leading inside. Maybe you can answer some questions for me?” Taylor asked.
“Sure,” Danny replied.
“Where were you between the hours of midnight and three in the morning last night?”
Danny smiled. “I got married yesterday. My wife and I got home at half past twelve, and we were in the bedroom until sunrise. Windows shut, and we didn’t hear a thing.”
“Congratulations. So, nothing? Not a scream that didn’t come from one of you? A car pulling up? Nothing?” Taylor asked.
“Sorry. We’ve got a security camera that faces the street. I can check it and see if there was any car driving by or person walking around that time,” Danny offered.
“You’re the man, Mancini,” Taylor said. “What about Bella personally? Did she have enemies? Public fights? Anything?”
Danny shook his head slowly. “Not that I know of. She’s been gone for twelve years—originally, she left for college—and only came back when her parents moved to Florida a few months ago. My wife and I saw her to say hello to every so often, but that’s it.”
Taylor nodded, making a note on his tablet. “I gotta tell you, man, it was a fucking horror show in there. Whoever this was, he or she was a class-A psycho. It looked like somebody let Lestat de Lioncourt loose on her after his two hundred year sleep.”
Danny felt his heart stutter. “She looked like a vampire victim?”
The detective was about to respond when another car pulled up, a shiny white Mercedes. Stepping out of the driver’s seat was someone Danny knew too well and didn’t want to see at a murder scene next door to his home: Harriet. She walked up to where they were standing and shared a look with Danny before flashing her badge at Taylor.
“Harriet Galbraith, FBI. I am afraid we’ll have to take over this case,” she said. “The criminal falls under our jurisdiction. If your captain has a problem, tell him to call me, and fax every report you’ve begun here.” She handed him a business card. “We will also need all evidence you’ve gathered and the body. Thank you.”
Turning away and effectively dismissing the mortal police, she held her eyes on Danny. “I need everything you c
an tell me.” She led him back over to his porch, out of earshot of the other mortals.
“He’s got my statement in his tablet. All I can do is check our security camera for you,” Danny said. “Angie and I were up till sunrise and we didn’t hear a damn thing. Whoever it was must have had her under thrall.”
Harriet sighed. “I have to ask, Danny...did she stay with you every second till sunrise? I’m sorry, but this was a you-know-what and I need to be absolutely certain all I’s are dotted and T’s are crossed. That includes having solid alibis of every single one of them in the area...even the Empress.”
“What? Of course she was with me!” Danny cried.
She held up her hands. “Sorry, but like I said, I have to cover all bases. Where is she now?”
Danny rolled his eyes. “Sunning in Cancun. Where the fuck do you think she is at high noon? Asleep.”
Harriet nodded. “Right. That was rather daft of me to ask. Well, I’m going to need her. Since she publicly declared herself as the Empress after Leander was neutralized, we have had zero vampiric murders. Vampire violence is down all over the world, actually, and this is her jurisdiction alone. Her...empire, as it is. She has to decide how we proceed. ...And you need to get some trousers on. I’ll return before sunset.”
Danny sighed as she walked away. Some honeymoon!
***
Angelica thought she’d never get used to the abrupt way vampires woke up when the sun set. It was like Frankenstein’s monster waking when hit by lightning: sudden, total consciousness. Despite being in a closed coffin, she could see just fine to push the lid open, sitting up and stretching her sleepy muscles.
Before she’d even got out of the casket, she heard voices. Danny’s, of course, and Harriet. What was she doing there? She knew it could be nothing good as she stood up and stretched more. Despite the soft padding, coffin sleeping is not all fiction cracks it up to be. Before going down and seeing what calamity had occurred in twelve hours, she needed a shower.
Once she was showered and dressed, she slowly made her way downstairs, purposefully tuning out the conversation. Harriet knew she wanted out, except for a little advice here and there. So whatever had brought her here was unavoidably Angelica’s business. Vampires.
Harriet and Danny were in the living room, with photos and papers spread out on the coffee table.
“Dare I ask what happened?” Angelica asked, startling them both.
“Morning,” Danny said. “This is some start to married life. The girl next door was murdered sometime last night.”
“The one with the dirty gun?” Angelica asked. “I assume it wasn’t a burglar.”
“Very astute,” Harriet muttered. “Here.” She held out an eight-by-ten photo and Angelica took it.
Bella, whom she knew was always afraid of her and whose fears she liked to toy with every so often, was lying twisted in the middle of her living room floor, while there was a thin blood trail leading down the front hall. Her face was fixed in a permanent depiction of pure fear, grey eyes bulging and tears dried on her cheeks. Her mouth was open in a silent scream she could have never voiced once the vampire’s fangs had attached themselves to her throat. The hole was jagged, gaping. Angelica could see the bones where the vamp had twisted her neck to kill her. Her body was slightly withered, its fluids drained.
“Since you became the Empress and Leander died, vampiric murders are down by ninety-nine percent worldwide,” Harriet said. “In the past month and a half, not one PID office has reported a vampiric murder or execution. Which means we now have no protocol for this. You, as Empress, need to tell us how to proceed with your subjects.”
Angelica sighed, running a hand through her damp hair. “Find the vamp, and when you do call me. I’ll come in and do an execution. You’re right: my subjects have followed my law implicitly since Leander stopped whispering lies in their ears. I need to reinforce my laws in the most severe way possible. Remind them that I am no gentle and benevolent Empress. If you’ll excuse me...”
She left the living room and went to warm up a mug of blood in the microwave, keeping a thermometer nearby to make sure it was exactly ninety-eight point six degrees. Anything too much more or less could make a vampire ill.
As she sipped, she leaned against the counter. She was never a big believer in coincidence, so the fact that a vampire murdered her next-door neighbor worried her more than she’d like to say.
Was it a warning? Were there vampires who wanted to revolt against her rule because they disagreed with her laws? She shook her head. That didn’t make sense. One vampire was not an uprising of rebels. If anything, it was one crazy rogue who would be caught and killed eventually. And she would reestablish that her word was law, and any who disobeyed would meet the same fate.
Nothing like a little fear to keep an empire in line.
She went back in the living room, where Danny and Harriet were checking the security camera in front of the Mancinis’ house. Angelica stood behind the sofa and watched as well, and said, “Wait, Rewind and then slow it down frame by frame. ...There. An actual vampire bat.” Vampires could show up on digital video, but not photographs. The bat was abnormally large and extremely black, flying at a fast rate no normal bat could achieve.
“Is there anything you can do to figure out who this was?” Harriet asked her.
“Nope. Sorry,” Angelica said, finishing off her breakfast. “What a way to start our fucking honeymoon.”
Harriet stood up and said, “All right, I’ll go and get on with this investigation. Hopefully we can have this settled within a couple of days.”
Angelica saw her to the front door before walking back into the house. It was a beautiful spring evening, and Angelica didn’t want to waste it. She kissed Danny on the cheek and said, “I’m going to cut down a few dead trees and maybe a deer or two.”
She knew that he was used to this as of late. Without the use of the PID training room, Angelica took to the forest behind their house to exercise, using her knives and falchion on dead foliage and unsuspecting wildlife.
Gathering her things, she put on her leather jacket and stuck her MP3 player in her pocket, earbuds firmly in place. As she walked through the forest, she started up her workout playlist, beginning with “Warrior” by Disturbed, and took out her medium-sized daggers.
Despite her hearing dampened by the earbuds, she could still hear, even with the music at max volume. And even having one sense turned down low, her others were always alert. She cut down a myriad of pigeons, about a dozen squirrels—she hated the little bastards—and then spotted a doe as she got deeper into the forest.
Now, Angelica was not a cruel person by nature, though many who saw her while she was performing her forest training would label her as such for her treatment of wild animals. But if you looked closer, you’d notice she only killed what was deemed ‘dirty’. Pigeons were disease carriers, and everyone knew Chicago and the suburbs were overrun with squirrels, and many of them would bite even when unprovoked. No one saw her when she nursed a baby sparrow back to health, or when she found a family of baby bunnies a new burrow when their old one got flooded.
If she wanted to snack on a deer or decapitate some pigeons, she felt she was well within her rights to do so.
The deer gave her quite a chase, though she could have overtaken it easily. It was this that she loved: the hunt. She had no prey usually, and that was by choice. But it was in the vampire’s nature to hunt, to stalk, and to frighten. If she had to choose between schoolchildren or deer to hunt down, she’d pick the deer.
She laughed as the music pounded in her ears—now it was “The Animal”, a song that perfectly fit her current situation, despite her being a vampire and not a werewolf—and she watched the doe think it was getting away. She had done this periodically all her life, since her first suitor, Captain Quentin Michaels back in the nineteenth century, had introduced her to the joys of wildlife hunting. She’d drunk the blood, and he, a werewolf, had eaten the heart and o
ther innards.
She finally got bored with the chase and went in for the kill, dashing in front of the doe and making it crash into her waiting hands. With her superior strength, it did not knock her over. Instead she caught it easily, as if it were a stuffed toy and grabbed it by the ears, revealing its neck as she sunk her fangs deep into it, tasting its sweet blood. Animal blood held less than a fraction of the nutrition that human blood did, but it was always a nice treat, like an ice cream cone after a long hard week of dieting.
Angelica never let Danny see her like this. She knew how she felt: strong, invincible, and slightly animalistic, and that was not how she wanted him to perceive her. He liked to go to the Bears game and drink beer to relieve stress. This was her private rejuvenation time.
As she tilted her head back and sighed contentedly, the song ended, starting up a different track: “Vermillion Part Two” by Slipknot, and it was a slower song. She had no idea why it was even in this playlist. As she was calming down with the softer song and reveling in the small thrill she had given herself, she heard rustling and immediately pulled the earbuds out.
On the alert, knowing this was too big to be a rabbit and too noisy to be a deer, she took her falchion from its scabbard and brandished it.
“Come on...show yourself!” she called. “You’ve nothing to be afraid of, I assure you.” Unless you try and hurt me. Then you have oh, so much to fear. She smiled, knowing she must look insane, grinning, brandishing a sword, and covered in fresh blood.
Out of the shadows appeared two creatures that would give most people nightmares. However, Angelica had faced many of them before. They were partially transformed werewolves, created two years ago by the evil witch Fiona Guilfoyle. Angelica had set a PID team on the specific task of eliminating every hybrid shifter in existence, but Fiona had made quite a few of them before Angelica had killed her. No one knew how many, but she knew that the PID was still searching for them. Obviously.
“Even in death, Fiona still wants to fuck me up, huh?” Angelica said.
