DarkWalker

by John Urbancik

  She wouldn’t accept that, though.

  She picked up the bag, in which a laptop computer contained all the secrets Jack had recorded. A database of the dark, of evil, of vampires and ghosts and—and maybe she could find something about the crimson behemoth, the creature who’d orchestrated the attack.

  “We’re not safe here,” Nick said. She didn’t even look at him. “We’re being watched. Examined. They might attack us again.”

  “Let them,” Lisa said. It was a two-story brick building, a nightclub. She’d been on its roof before, dancing to a reggae band. The club might be locked, but she knew exactly where to find the stairs. “Can you open this door?”

  She looked at Nick. Glared at him. Challenged him to say No. Instead, he pulled the gun out of his waistband and shot the flimsy lock. The door shuddered, swinging inwards perhaps three inches. “There,” he said.

  She stormed through the door, into the pitch black of the club. Didn’t look for the ghost. Didn’t peer into shadows. Didn’t care what else might lurk inside, didn’t even look to see if the hunter followed.

  In the very back of the club, past the bar and down the hall toward the bathrooms, absolute dark hid the staircase. She’d climbed them before, presenting I.D. to a bouncer at the base of those steps. Smiled prettily. Flirted. Followed Liz to dance under the moon. Not a spell, no ritual, no rite—just two women, among a hundred, looking for a good time.

  She’d had it then.

  The memories felt pale now, and thin.

  The night wasn’t so completely dark. Outside, ambient light spilled from everywhere, even the clouds. The moon had been visible for a while. There were streetlights, headlights, windows, signs.

  Inside: nothing but the red exit sign, no brighter than the numbers on Lisa’s alarm clock.

  The door at the top of the stairs was locked. Lisa twisted the knob, cursed, and kicked it. She shoved it with her shoulder, almost knocking herself back down the stairs. “You still with me, Nick?” she asked.

  He said nothing, but gently pushed her aside. He knelt at the door, played with the lock a moment, and then turned the knob.

  It opened onto the roof.

  8.

  Jack Harlow’s vision swam in and out of focus. They flitted over rooftops, jumping effortlessly from one to another, across alleys and streets, and then to the higher buildings of downtown. Bank names shined from the peaks. From the two-story club, to a five-story glass and brick building three blocks away, then to the side of a ten-story building, and finally atop one of the bank spires.

  The rooftop around him was primarily gravel, tiny white rocks with stone walkways leading from a building entrance to the main air-handling unit, a metal storage shed, and various vents and grills.

  The ascent had been dizzying. It was colder here. The wind blew more harshly. They stood on a two-foot-wide concrete ledge maybe six feet above the gravel rooftop—and twenty stories over the street. Jack saw no details below. His eyes watered, blurring everything. He felt weak, and cold.

  He didn’t quite know what had happened. He’d been stolen from the life he never got to live. His captor, if she chose, could just shove him over the edge. He’d splatter.

  She held him from behind, one arm still curled under his shoulder and across his chest. Her hand was cold as the wind.

  Jack waited for death. Hoped for something quick and painless. Wished he could have been with Lisa instead, down on the street; how would she and Nick survive against that demon?

  All thoughts fled when the vampire lowered her mouth to his neck. Warm lips—moist and soft. She licked from his collar bone to the base of his jaw, pausing to suckle, to drink the blood that had spilled from his wound. The were-bat had done that, hadn’t it?

  His head tilted back of its own accord—or she did it. He couldn’t tell where his body ended and hers began. She must’ve supported him, because all strength seeped from his legs as her mouth moved across his throat—kissing, sucking gently, licking. His body trembled. Eyes rolled back so all he saw were pinpoints of shimmering light. Heat rose at his neck, and spread.

  Jack tried to lift his arm, to at least touch the hand that held him, but his limb was heavy and unresponsive.

  She slipped around his side, snaking her arm behind him, bending him backwards with the intensity of her kiss, one hand behind his spine and the other at the nape of his neck. As she supped, pulling blood from his wound, his senses faded—all but touch. She’d come around to his left side, her kiss crossing over his jugular and windpipe and carotids.

  In a final burst of strength, he managed to reach behind her back. Tried to grasp her. Hold on. But when he tightened his fingers, his grip slipped, and then so did his consciousness.

  If Jack Harlow dreamed, it was of the endless kiss of a vampire, and of the bliss her victims felt in their final moments. Life slipped away effortlessly, without pain, without panic—nothing but euphoria. In those last moments, when Jack existed only in his mind—where he expected to find eternal darkness—he instead felt an ecstasy unsurpassed in human experience. Complete. Body-wracking. Mind numbing.

  The universe dissolved to her two lips on his throat, even in his dreams. With what he knew were his dying thoughts, he wished it was Lisa’s kiss.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1.

  Nick Hunter followed Lisa onto the rooftop.

  A stage stood in one corner, bathrooms to the side. There was a full bar behind a rolling, chain-link (and padlocked) fence. Rooftops to three sides were a matter of hopping four feet of bricks; the wall to the front was taller and overlooked the street.

  There were plenty of places to hide, but Nick doubted the vampire used any of the nooks or false walls. She wasn’t behind the wooden bar, nor on the other side of the shack-like bathroom set-up. The adjacent roofs were barren except for typical industrial vents and storage sheds; she wasn’t there, either.

  The roof had been converted into a bar, as wide and deep as the downstairs, with a makeshift dance floor and colored lights—all dark—hanging on poles. Cheap but functional.

  Lisa circled the outer edges of the rooftop. The stairs that led them here were attached to a small, shed-like structure opposite the larger restrooms. When Lisa disappeared around the side of those, Nick scanned the other rooftops.

  Another long building was behind the club, as if they’d been built as twins, but it was empty and unused. Beyond it, past what was probably a road, were some trees and, not too distant, I-4.

  To Nick’s right, north, again there was only one building before the street. The store in the opposite corner was three stories high, so he couldn’t see the roof. For a vampire with her demonstrated agility, that was not an impossible leap.

  To his left, the rooftops continued, some higher or lower, with a dull regularity: one after the other, all the same, stretching maybe a hundred yards before ending abruptly. Across the street, the climb was much higher, five stories.

  “He’s not here,” Lisa said, coming again into view.

  “No,” Nick said, nodding to the north. “They went that way.”

  Lisa stared a moment. “Up there?” She pointed with her knife—Nick’s knife.

  He walked to the wall separating one roof from the other, seeing no sign of movement. “Not anymore.”

  Next to him now, Lisa nodded. Her eyes were steady, solid, teary but determined; otherwise, she was a mess of mud and blood, a woman in disarray—Nick’s normal state. Her fists were clenched. She gripped the knife in her right hand so tightly her knuckles were white.

  “You’re a hunter,” Lisa said, casting her eyes on him now. “Track them.”

  The vampire had gone downwind, so her scent would be carried away. Nick could make logical guesses as to which direction she might go from one roof to another. But in truth, he had never tracked a particular beast before. And she hadn’t made it easy.

  He’d never seen one flee. This one hadn’t fled, exactly; she’d come down, taken her prey, and gone
off to feast in private. It wasn’t simply a rare event, it was unique in Nick’s experience. They found corners, shadows, empty places where they could feed without interruption. The seductive type, like the vamp that took Jack, tended to troll clubs and bars, finding their victims and luring them away without spectacle, quiet and unseen, undetected except by scent.

  Lisa waited for him to respond. Her eyes told him she’d hunt the beast alone, though she didn’t know how—or what to do if she found it. Worse, if she found Jack already dead (which was probably the case), or a vampire himself now, she’d be dead (or undead) inside one minute—and she wouldn’t care.

  Nick still reeled from the attack. There’d been five of them, different creatures working together—plus the rats. Organized. There may be more.

  The moment he’d arrived, Nick had thought this city reeked of a vampire infestation. Now he realized he was wrong, that it was much worse than that.

  His whole life—the training, the encounters, even the loss of Chris Hunter and Diane—led to this moment, this decision: go after the beasts and all their allies, or walk away?

  What a stupid question.

  2.

  Lisa waited, surprised her mind was so clear. She didn’t even consider alternatives. Go after Jack. Fight for him. She’d always wanted to fight for someone.

  Twelve hours ago, she would have laughed at the idea of fighting demonic armies. That was before teeth dropped out of the sky, before Jack unveiled the shadows. Her senses were open now, her night vision sharpened and her hearing more acute. She was fit. Ready and willing to fight for her love. Able. And, for good or bad, not alone in her struggle.

  “We need to know more about what we’ve seen already,” Nick said. “How to kill that red behemoth, for instance. And the clay thing, in case there’s another.”

  The computer hung from her left hand, the straps of the soft briefcase crunched within her fist.

  “And,” Nick said, “we have to get away from here. The police will only slow us down.” Until he said it, Lisa hadn’t heard the approaching sirens.

  Lisa nodded. “We can’t have that.”

  “This way,” he said, going to the back of the club and scaling the four-foot brick wall.

  They climbed down from the roof to an alley behind the club.

  Lisa spent little time trying to puzzle anything out. It was useless to assert reason on anything she’d experienced tonight. She’d seen enough horror movies to know the constant skeptic died—horribly—crying at the end that she believed, truly believed, and needed no more convincing.

  If her mind was shot, if this was all a dream, she’d wake up with the alarm or anti-psychotic medicine, and Nick and Jack and the multitude of demons would fade from memory.

  They moved more quickly now that they weren’t the focal point of every shadow, past a clearing and under the I-4 overpass. Not so far they couldn’t hear the police sirens or see flashing lights, but far enough so they could open the computer and see what they would see.

  “It’s almost morning,” she said. The sky had brightened faintly.

  “It is morning,” Nick told her. “Newspapers have been delivered. Bakers have baked, bagel shops are hopping. Sunrise in . . . about twenty minutes.”

  “Vampires are night creatures, right?” Lisa asked. “I mean, the thing that took Jack, it won’t be out and about during the day, will it?”

  Nick hesitated. “Most sleep during the day, yes.”

  “So if Jack survives until sunrise,” she said, though his chances seemed slim, “he’ll probably be okay until sunset.”

  Nick didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It was a false hope; he’d said most, not all, and his hesitation suggested not this type. And the other creature—the giant with bright red flesh—hadn’t been a vampire. It was subject to different rules.

  3.

  Nick Hunter opened Jack’s database, spent a few minutes figuring out how to work it, and finally searched for vampires.

  It listed eleven kinds. More than Nick had seen, but fewer than Chris Hunter had known about.

  Nick scanned the pages of information, but it was mostly technical and overly detailed: temperatures, wind directions, dimensions of the rooms or alleys; the names of bars and bartenders; at least two victims’ names and addresses. It lacked the information Nick needed: how to kill them, where they lived, weaknesses specific to their race of vampire.

  He found a type of Chinese vampire: Chiang-Shih. It exhaled poison. When insubstantial, it became a sphere of light (like will-o’-the-wisps). Jack had apparently seen one in Chinatown (which Chinatown, it didn’t say) half an hour before dawn. It was sitting in an alley, growling and hissing, counting grains of rice.

  Nick found no particular name for the seductive vampire, and nothing he didn’t already know. Fast, agile, strong, and devastatingly beautiful, they were mildly hypnotic and had a high level of pheromones.

  “He saw her,” Nick said.

  “The vampire?”

  “Just . . . a few nights ago, it looks like. Here. He talked to a ghost about her. No, the ghost talked to him. Wanted to tell him stories. This entry has both.” Nick read more, summarizing for Lisa. “She winked at him. Touched his back.”

  Lisa had approached while he read and looked over his shoulder. “You sure it’s the same one?”

  “He describes her as Asian, dark hair to her shoulders, with brown, almost amber eyes.” Nick shook his head. “Nothing else.”

  “Sounds like a lot of Asian women,” Lisa said.

  “Yes, but this is an Asian woman who also happens to be a vampire . . . a western vampire, not Asian, and at the same club. It’s got to be her.” Nick finished reading the brief entry. “It doesn’t say anything else.”

  “How about how to kill it?” Lisa asked.

  Nick opened his jacket, showing Lisa his silver and wood. “Got that covered.”

  “And the other thing?” Lisa asked. “With the red skin?”

  Nick searched for behemoth, but found nothing. Red appeared all over the place, describing dozens of things—even the eyes of certain rats, which Nick had seen tonight. But for blister red skin, Nick found only one entry.

  It described the place and the temperature (warmer around a gas station somewhere south of Route 80 in Pennsylvania, forty degrees elsewhere). A kid, working the night shift, had apparently read from some book (Jack hadn’t named it), and summoned a nine-foot-tall mass of muscle in a cloud of reddish smoke. The creature grabbed the kid (and ignored Jack, just outside, who had stopped to buy a drink). The smoke thickened, and they vanished. Inside, Jack picked out his drink and a few things to eat. The creature’s feet had left scorch marks in the cheap linoleum that would dwarf Bigfoot’s tracks. Heat lingered. The counter had been burned.

  Nick stared at the entry, at its title, unaware his mouth was hanging open until Lisa touched his arm. “What is it?”

  “It,” Nick said, swallowing hard, “is a full-fledged demon from Hell.”

  Lisa stared at the screen. “It doesn’t say that.”

  “Demon.” Nick pointed at the word. “It says demon. Where do you think they’re from?” But she didn’t look as scared as Nick felt—which, oddly, reassured him.

  She held his gaze. She had no tears any more, not even a hint of them. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’re going to kill it.”

  A moment of hesitation. Fear. All the things he didn’t know, the knowledge and lore that existed outside his realm of experience, held him down. It wasn’t too late to walk away; the watcher was gone, dead by now or a vampire himself.

  But that was running away.

  Worse, Nick felt responsible for Lisa. It wasn’t his fault she’d become involved in this, but he couldn’t knowingly let her hunt vampires without knowledge or preparation.

  But a demon.

  Everything he knew about demons came from books or movies—and even there, his experience was slight. Ancient spells manifested demons, and spells sent them back. Bu
t Nick was no sorcerer. They’d met one earlier, the vaudoux, but Nick knew of no way to track a man who vanished in a cloud of smoke.

  Knowing this might be the last day of his life, Nick shut down the computer and inhaled deeply. “I think I know what we have to do. It’s not the demon we need.”

  “It’s the vampire,” Lisa said.

  Slowly, Nick shook his head. “No. The vaudoux.”

  They returned to the scene of the crime. There was no indication of it; the door had been shut, no police lingered outside the club, only smeared clay—like mud—on the wall.

  Nick imagined the vaudoux was still nearby; he’d said he was “already close."

  He went to the storefront at which the witchdoctor appeared, under a brown awning proclaiming “Best Sushi.” The raw smoke smell lingered, heavily mixed with blood, sweat, and exhaust. The street was no longer empty, either; a few people walked the sidewalks, and cars and trucks lumbered down the one-way road.

  “What, exactly, are we looking for?” Lisa asked. She knelt beside the door, touching the ground with one hand.

  “He’s got to be close,” Nick said. “He appeared here, right before the attack.”

  “I don’t think he attacked us.”

  “Then maybe he’ll help,” Nick said. “I’ve never fought a demon before. I don’t know how they die. Or if.”

  “And the vampire?” Lisa asked. “You can track her, right?”

  Nick looked skyward, to the rooftops across the street. “Won’t do us much good if we find her just to die. Won’t help Jack any, either.”

  When vampires burned, they often left a silhouette in the ground; rain washed away the smoky outline. The vaudoux, however, had left no such trace. Nick assumed that, wherever he’d disappeared to, the vaudoux had gone no further than line of sight. If he had summoned the demon, he must have been within sight of that, too, nearer the corner.

  Maybe it was as simple as summoning him. “Vaudoux,” Nick said. “Show yourself.”