The scuff from the roof top above draws the predator’s attention, though human ears could not have heard the faint sounds from nearly thirty feet away. The creature no longer needs to hunt, but he will not leave a witness to his deed. Still dripping blood from his chin, the creature leaps high upon the near wall and bounds from it across the alley to the far wall. A third leap brings it to the lip of the building and the creature searches for the source of the sound.
Night vision picking out heat sources, the creature quickly finds the man. The voyeur is calm. The murder and the monster which created it bring no fear or seemingly any emotion from the man. The creature should have wondered at such a thing, but its bloodlust clouded judgment. The man must die, it thinks and no other option presents itself.
Leaping forward to attack, the predator’s claws search for the man’s throat. It will rip the life from his body, or so it thinks, but as its claws slice the air before its target, the man moves with amazing speed side stepping the killing blow.
The predator feels pain from the side of its chest.
Glancing down, the creature sees blood dripping and bands of flesh and cloth swaying as it turns to face the man. Confusion etches it features. The mouth opens revealing extended incisors. The eyes are all white save its irises. Ears, nearly pointed, are oversized and acute of hearing. It hears the man’s heartbeat thrumming steadily.
It looks at the man more closely. Reason begins to override bloodlust and the creature notes four ivory claws dripping with his blood. Virtually gleaming white even in the wane moonlight, the claws extend unnaturally from the man’s right hand. There is a glint of steel from the man’s side. A sword rests upon his hip where the moon catches the metal hilt revealing the blade still sheathed.
Arrogance in the predator’s strengths, well beyond human now, convince it to attack again. It is a mistake. The clawed hand swipes across its chest tearing through bone and flesh alike. A back swing, as the predator stumbles back in shock, removes the head at the neck.
The heart is bared. It thumps, even as the body falls to its knees. The man calmly stabs the claws through a black diseased looking heart. Pierced, the heart stops and begins to burn. As the man steps back withdrawing his claws, the torso catches flame and soon the whole body is afire.
Knowing the creature is dead, the man steps to the edge of the building above the site of the kill. With a vampire’s corpse behind him, the man knows that the story may not be over. He jumps over the edge, but instead of injuring himself thirty feet below; the man seems to slow his fall. At half the speed he should be falling, the man touches down without harm.
He checks the woman and finds a ragged pulse. Taking a dagger from another sheath, the man cuts his hand and places it over the wound in the woman’s neck. His blood enters her wound. With a cry of pain, the woman wrenches her body from the pavement with a quick jolt. The wound seems to burn, though not the way of the vampire. The torn skin cauterizes and heals as if there has been no attack.
Falling back towards the alleyway floor, the woman fades back towards unconsciousness. The man catches the woman as she collapses backward. Checking her pulse again, he finds her heart strengthening. Apparently out of danger, the man pulls out his cell phone.
“Marek,” he states, “there’s a little clean up for you.”
It is not long before they come. The man, with his claws now hidden, waits for them on the roof. The vampire’s head sits on a furnace cap near the body’s remains. Burned near to ash, there is little left of the body and even much of its clothes are reduced to char. The man had found a wallet mostly intact. As the quartet leaps onto the building from the darkness, the man’s wallet is thrown to the leader.
“Recognize him?” the first man asks before the others can barely slow themselves in front of the ash.
“Leonard Newton? No, I can’t say that I do,” the man’s English holds the trace of something eastern European, but it is only slight. Years of practice have removed much of it since the two had met so long ago.
The monster slayer points to the head. “Someone in your clan may recognize him. He seems only recently changed, maybe someone didn’t finish a kill? You know your people can call me so we can avoid this sort of thing, Marek?”
“Of course they do, Nicholas,” he pauses, “if that is the name you still go by today.”
The man addressed as Nicholas smiles a half hearted glance in recognition of the attempted joke. “It is for now, yes.” Quickly returning to the matter at hand, he adds, “Do you think we have someone new moving into the territory? Maybe he’s just some loaner wandering in off the train or something?”
Marek shakes his head as he offers the wallet as evidence. “Chicago. He lives less than half a mile from here. If there’s someone new converting people, my crew hasn’t brought them to my attention.”
Nodding in answer, Nicholas responds, “Alert them to keep watch. We can’t afford to have someone creating feral spawn and leaving them to cause a mess we can’t hide. We’ve worked too long to keep your people out of the media to have some careless vampire exposing us now.”
The others nod.
A moment’s thought brings a new question from the vampire slayer. “How is your stores of the blood holding up?”
“The clan should be fine with what we have for a month.”
“Good. I part with it to avoid this sort of thing.
“Did you bring a car or just fly over? There’s a woman down below that can be brought to a hospital.”
Marek nods. “Of course, we did. You said there was clean up. Jake parked a street north just in case. We can get her and the remains removed. I assume that you treated her in time?”
Sniffing in mock arrogance, Nick replies, “Don’t I always?”
A slight chuckle from the group precedes Marek’s friendly retort, “Well, you are getting older, voran. If you were just a human, you would be dust, so it’s understandable that you might start to forget things.”
“Humph, you better hope that I don’t get so old that I forget we’re friends, you silly old bat. I still remember the day I decided to spare the scrawny yearling hiding from its sire. As long as I am around, we can maintain the peace. If I were getting too old, we’d have to find someone else willing to prolong it.”
Marek sighs, “You are entirely too serious, my friend. We know your mentor still lives and she’s centuries older than you. Must you always head for the doom and gloom when we talk?
“Come, Nicholas, the night is still young and beautiful. Smile and join us later for a run across the rooftops. We can even keep an eye out for more trouble, peace keeper. That way you can even feel that you’re making a serious attempt at remaining serious,” the man finishes with a chuckle.
“Running with this lot will make me old before my time. You and your clan can play without me this time. Just make sure the woman gets to a hospital and make sure her memory is properly adjusted. There’s no sense sending the poor woman to an asylum on top of this.”
The quartet laughs. “You’re almost showing a sense of humor, my friend, but we will accept your refusal this time. Soon we must get you out here with us. It’s fun. You might actually like fun.”
Again the others laugh, but Nick is already cinching his long jacket tighter with his belt. It is getting colder even as winter was supposed to be relinquishing its hold. Some years Chicago just refused to let spring come and then it would skip to the heat of summer.
With a last parting farewell, the man, known as a voran, moves off into the darkness.
The Mermaid’s Chest
The four friends jogged down the beach in the direction the boat and two girls had gone. Fighting the urge to run harder and knowing it would be futile if they did, the four hurried along the sand with its broken branches and washed up seaweed forcing them to keep an eye on where they placed their feet.
“You don’t think she’d actually leave us behind for real?” Taylor gasped as she ran near the back of the group.
She had never been overly athletic and preferred theater and music to running track, so she had avoided it since the first year of gym.
Emily had firmer control of her breath since she swam and jogged quite often. Wanting to be a sports doctor in the future, the girl felt she should be an athlete as much as possible. Shaking her head Emily spoke loud enough for her friends to hear, “No, if I know her, she’ll figure to get just out of sight before turning around to get us, but then again Faith could let us wait for half an hour before doing it. When she pulls pranks, my little sister tends to go for maximum effect.”
“I’m going to kill them both!” Katie snapped looking somewhere between Emily and Taylor for fitness as they jogged along the beach. “When I get my hands on her…
“She has our food and water too. It’s not like she could have at least left us something.”
Phoebe tried to concentrate on where she placed her feet. Thankfully her friends back home had kept her somewhat active and her breathing was still fine. She still wondered why they were running. Faith would have to come back for them, wouldn’t she? There was no way that the girl would leave them stranded on an abandoned island without food or water.
Even if Faith had a grudge against her sister, Phoebe couldn’t believe that the rest of them would need to be tortured as well, but she had to admit that she barely knew her younger cousin. The past few days the Australian had become close friends to Emily, Katie and Taylor with a lesser degree of time spent with the younger girls. Even so, that hardly meant she or any of the others should be left behind.
Several minutes later as the girls neared a bend in the island’s shape, they spotted the boat drifting near the middle of the channel and the two girls moving frantically onboard.
“Oh no,” Emily gasped, “she didn’t?”
“Didn’t what?” the other girls seemed to answer in a chorus as their eyes went from Emily to the speedboat out on the water.
Giving a groan and sweep her hands along her cheeks anxiously, the blond leading them answered, “I think she may have broken it!”
A feeling of dread covered them all as they moved to the edge of the sand where the water rose and fell splashing across their bare feet. The four girls standing side by side watched as Faith broke out the paddles. It wasn’t an efficient endeavor and the waves would work against the boat making it that much slower.
Emily stripped back to her swim suit. “I’m going to swim out and try to help them before they drift away.”
Taylor joined her though the second girl wasn’t as strong a swimmer as the trim blond. Both girls pulled their hair back into tails that they tied with flex bands that had been on their wrists like bracelets. With hair out of their way, both girls waded in for several feet before they were up to their waists in the water.
Plunging her upper body into the water and letting her scooped hands push through like an arrow, Emily quickly slid through the channel cutting through towards the speed boat with long, strong strokes. Taylor followed right behind her though at about half the pace of her more athletic friend.
Phoebe glanced to Katie, who still stood beside her and hesitantly asked as her attention moved back to the water and the girls swimming towards the crippled boat, “Should we…?”
The curly blond quickly shook her head. “When they get closer we can wade in and use the anchor’s rope to pull them in. Emily and Taylor can handle it. Besides there are only four paddles so we’d just add weight and get in their way, unless you wanted to try kick paddling behind them to push the boat?”
Scrunching up her face at the idea, Phoebe quickly shook her head. “No, I like your idea better. When they get closer we can wade out to grab the rope and pull them in then.”
The plan decided, the two girls waited for the others. Emily made it to the boat first and gave Taylor a hand up before getting onboard. Everyone could tell that the elder sister was angry at Faith, but the blond haired girl said little about the fact that her little sister had done something reckless and stupid. Instead she set Taylor to work with Brook on one side of the boat and joined her sister using another paddle to paddle from the other.
Sitting a few feet above the water and having to lean over the side of the boat, the four girls struggled for nearly twenty minutes against the tide despite only being a short distance away from the island to start. The currents fought their efforts refusing to let them take shelter by the island. It was as if the boat had become an uncooperative enemy beneath their feet.
While the girls paddled, Phoebe looked at the part of the island that might end up being their refuge for longer than she could have known when they first arrived that afternoon. Only twenty feet back from the water, the island jutted upward in a forty foot climb to a cliff top. It had a lot of loose stone, the girl thought, though she wasn’t a skilled climber so her guess was hardly an educated one. Vines and other greenery dotted the off white stone and the brown of dirt colored it in places where the cracks were big enough to give purchase.
The sand near where they stood was worn into an odd groove like a river’s bed nearly ten feet across and five feet deeper than the ridges to either side leading back towards the wall of stone. She guessed that at higher tides the water might enter the trough that extended all the way to the steep wall. The wall of the cliff curled a bit coming closer to them on the near side and obscured the end of the trough from Phoebe’s sight, but instead of dwelling further on the land she returned her attention to the water and the approaching boat.
“I think we can get the rope now,” Katie stated grabbing the other girl’s attention from her search.
Emily must have thought the same thing. Abandoning her oar a moment, the girl moved to the anchor and swung it for a decent throw ahead of the boat. With a splash, it sunk quickly and dug into the sand beneath the water unseen. Worries of the tide pulling them back were over as the anchor would be tough to pull free.
Katie and Phoebe waded up to the taller girl’s chest and the smaller blond dove under to find the rope. It still took a few seconds to find the thick cord in the murky water, but Katie was able to pass off the strong strand. Letting Phoebe, who was taller, pull the length to where she could help pull the craft towards shore, the two then began pulling the boat with the rope. Their feet were set in the soft bed of the channel but the boat began to turn as the girls strained to pull the boat after them.
Paddling to assist the girls in the water, the six soon had the boat close enough to shore that the anchor was forced into the sand in the sandy groove which had begun to fill with water as the tide began to rise. The moon was rising in the east even as the sun continued to fall into the west. Time was getting to be a scarce thing and when the daylight left them, the girls would have no hope of fixing the engine or rotor until morning.
Phoebe noticed Emily searching thru the bag she had brought along which held a smaller handbag. Producing her cell phone, the blond flicked it on with an answering chime of music. After only a few moments, Emily’s forehead knotted worriedly. “I can’t get any bars,” she announced in disappointment.
While the other girls on the boat began searching for their own phones, Katie tripped a set of levers on the housing and forced the motor assembly forward. The shaft with attached rotor lifted out of the water revealing a snarl of seaweed and other plant material. Phoebe waded over taking a look at the mess that had been made of machinery.
As Katie began to pull the weeds free, the other girls began to add announcements of their cell phones having no signal.
Emily walked over to the rear of the boat looming over Katie where she worked at the snarl. “How bad is it?”
“The shaft doesn’t appear bent or broken, but I can’t see everything yet,” the wavy haired blond said glanced up with her blue eyes meeting her friend’s gaze. A slight smile of relief flit across her mouth trying to be encouraging.
Returning the smile with a grim one of her own, Emily stated, “Well, then it’s up to you, because it doesn’t look l
ike we’ll be phoning for help from here.”
“We could try climbing higher and see if we can pick up a signal from there,” Taylor proposed as she lowered her useless smart phone. For all its bells and whistles, the piece of technology was little more than a dead piece of plastic in her hand without a tower to make a connection.
Nodding, Emily said, “Let’s give Katie a minute to see if clearing the rotor will get the engine running again. If she can’t make it start then we’ll send a couple people up to test all the phones.”
Curiosity forced Phoebe to ask, “Do you know much about motors?”
“I’ve helped my dad and brothers with their cars. Dad has a garage. He and my oldest brother Jack run the place,” the girl said with most of her attention on the mess in front of her. “We don’t have a boat but I’ve messed with Emily’s a little bit. Usually I have tools to work with in a garage, so this is a little more challenging. As long as nothing’s broken or bent too much, it’s no big deal.” Glancing up to Emily momentarily, she asked, “Check the first aid kit. There might be a knife or scissors in there. This is pretty tough stuff.”
Her friend did as she was asked while the other girls watched and waited with various levels of patience.
After nearly half an hour and a little help from other hands, Katie managed to clear the rotor of tangling weeds. Despite the run in with both plants and what was guessed to be a hidden sandbar, the blades looked to be none the worse for wear. Using a Phillips screwdriver, the only tool they could find besides the small scissors in the first aid kit, Katie managed to open the cover on the motor and did her best to make sure there was no damage hidden that would ruin the machine even more if it was restarted.
Battle Mage: Dragon Mage (Tales of Alus) Page 50
