by Bryan Smith
He kept hanging back, watching as she reached the counter and began to drag herself behind it. In a moment only the cheap black pumps on her feet were visible. David winked at the two piles of greasy blubber masquerading as men still ensconced atop their stools at the counter. They were nearly indistinguishable, with their grimy blue collar clothes and blunted physical characteristics that marked them as products of the same tainted gene pool. They differed in only one significant way. Both were clearly terrified, but one’s scowling expression indicated a deep loathing for David. His contempt was obvious in the defiant gleam in his eyes and the sneering twist of his lips. David frowned. It was irksome.
He decided to stop fucking around. He stepped behind the counter and stopped the waitress’s progress with a foot planted solidly in the small of her back. She squealed in frustrated terror and clawed at the floor tiles, shredding her nails in the process. Her escape attempt effectively interrupted, David shifted his attention to the sneering fat man.
“What’s your problem, fatty?”
A corner of the man’s mouth twitched. “I ain’t got shit to say to you, scumbag.”
David’s annoyance deepened. “Scumbag? Do you really think you’re better than me? You’re a giant bag of lard. You’re not fit to judge a turd-throwing contest, much less your betters.”
“You and that whore of yours ain’t my betters, asshole.”
David glared at the man, willing him to wilt beneath the supernatural fierceness of his stare. It was a thing Narcisa would have done with ease. With barely any effort at all, really. But, as with so many other aspects of vampirism, David just didn’t have her level of ability, at least not yet. The scowling big man barely flinched.
David seethed.
You fat motherfucker. I’ll show you.
David surged toward the counter, reaching for the big man’s accusing eyes, intending to claw them from their sockets with the black talons popping from the ends of his fingers. One hand curled around the collar of the man’s work shirt and dragged his upper bulk up onto the counter. The other hand reared back, ready to strike. Maddeningly, the man’s expression didn’t change. He looked resigned to his death and determined to remain defiant until the end. David had an idea. A good one. He smiled. He’d pluck the man’s eyes out of his skull and force the fat fuck to swallow them one at a time.
Yeah, let’s see how stoic you are then, cocksucker. I’ll break you yet. I’ll—
David screamed and arched his back as something sharp and cold slammed into him from behind.
That goddamn waitress! Fucking bitch!
His foot had come away from her back in the now aborted assault on the lippy fat man. She’d seized the opportunity, knowing she’d almost certainly never have another one. There’d been a knife around. A big one. It made sense. This was a diner, after all. It was probably some kind of carving knife. She was leaning into it with all her might, driving the big blade deeper inside him. He felt it slice into one of his lungs and screamed again at the pain. She might not be able to kill him with the knife, but that didn’t make the physical agony any less real. Luckily, as a vampire, there was a way to deal with that.
Blood.
Narcisa loomed up behind the fat men. Her blazing blue eyes pulsed with malevolence. She opened her mouth wide, flashing long teeth stained crimson from freshly imbibed blood. She moved with deadly quickness and silence, reaching for the fat men and tearing both men’s throats out simultaneously. As always, the sight of thick streams of blood gurgling from newly severed veins sent David into a frenzy. He propelled himself backward and slammed the waitress into the partition. This caused her to cry out, but also had the effect of driving the blade even deeper inside him. But David didn’t care about the pain now. Yet again, all that mattered was blood.
He pushed away from the waitress and turned around to face her, savoring the fear in her tear-laden eyes. He reached an arm behind his back, tendons popping as the limb twisted and contorted in ways a normal human arm could not, and began to pull the big blade out. It emerged with a moist sound that would have made his stomach turn over before he became a vampire. He licked blood from the blade and shuddered at the sweet, intoxicating taste. His own blood intermingled with the blood of those he’d killed. There was something so satanically beautiful about that.
He sighed, an almost peaceful smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “You almost made it, didn’t you? Almost got away.”
She sniffled. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks. “Please. I’m begging you. I just want to live. You can do anything you want to me, just please let me live. Please don’t orphan my kid. Please…”
David’s smile was almost a sad one now. “I’m sorry. I think you know that can’t happen.”
Her eyes went wide as he dragged the blade across her slender throat. Beautiful blood burbled from the hole he’d sliced in her jugular vein. This wound wasn’t like the ragged holes he’d created with his own teeth. It was clean. Neat. Surgical. There was something entrancing about the way the woman’s blood pumped from the thin line of the incision. The holes he made with his teeth were just as effective, but this had its own special allure. Staring at the wound was making his cock painfully stiff. He watched the blood issue forth a moment longer, then snapped his teeth around her tender throat. She gasped and went stiff at first, then relaxed as he began to drain her blood, eventually sagging against him. Her chin settled against his shoulder and her arms encircled his waist in a weak embrace. It was almost like being held by a lover.
It was this impression more than anything else that made him act on his earlier impulse. Once she’d been drained, he lowered her corpse gently to the floor and carefully undressed her. Her nude body was lovelier than he’d imagined, with fuller breasts and slightly wider hips. He removed his own clothes, repositioned her legs, and let out a snort of animal satisfaction as he entered her.
When it was over, he put his bloody clothes back on and returned to the dining area, where Narcisa was sitting at a table with her legs crossed. The head of the insolent fat man was cradled in her lap.
She smiled at him. “Enjoy yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Feeling any pangs of conscience this time? Any thoughts of you-know-who?”
He shook his head and answered honestly. “No. Not this time.”
“Good.” She tossed the head to him and he reflexively caught it. “That’s for you.”
David turned the head over and stared into the man’s glassy, unmoving eyes.
Not so mouthy anymore, are you?
Narcisa stood and started toward the door. “We should go.”
David looked at her. Then his head swiveled side to side as he surveyed the carnage. Everywhere he looked he saw blood and mutilated corpses. His smile widened as he thought of the field day the press would have with this story once a bit of research linked it to the earlier diner massacre. The scene was so spectacularly grisly it might even make the national news, though he doubted the authorities would ever mention the word “vampires” in their accounts of the incident to the press
He looked at Narcisa, who stared back at him with obvious impatience from the door. “Do people know about us? Law people, I mean.”
She pushed the door open, taking care to avoid slicing her fingers open on broken glass. She paused there, staring evenly at him. “About me in particular or vampires in general?”
“Um…both, I guess.”
She shrugged. “I’m a legend in some circles, but mostly they think I died a long time ago. Some have pursued me before, but they always give up the chase in the end. I’m a perpetually elusive shadow to them, impossible to catch or kill. Others of our kind aren’t so skilled. And, yes, the law does know about us. Most governments have secret units dedicated to pursuing vampires and…other things.”
“Other things?”
Narcisa’s expression indicated she’d said all she intended to say on the subject. “We should go.”
She left t
hen and David watched the door bang shut, the impact with the frame rattling more glass fragments loose. He looked at the head in his hands again, smiling as he stroked the blood-stained hair.
He took it with him as he followed Narcisa back outside.
9: ACCEPTANCE
On the freeway again, the BMW speeding north out of Alpharetta. David stared at the head of the dead man as cold wind brushed his face and whipped his hair about. The head was on the dashboard, wedged up tight against the windshield. There was something pleasing about the way it looked there. He’d heard stories about serial killers saving trophies from their kills, but he’d never understood the phenomenon until now. He liked having this physical reminder of what he and Narcisa had done. There was just one problem—it was a piece of organic matter, subject to decay. The flesh would rot and the fat man’s face would melt away over time. He made a note to save something more permanent next time. A wallet or article of clothing. He supposed he could save the fat man’s skull, but…hmm, where would he store it?
He glanced at Narcisa. “Your secret place…will I be living there with you?”
She kept her gaze on the road. “Of course you’ll live there. What part of ‘you belong to me’ do you not understand?”
David didn’t respond to that. When she’d said that before, it’d been an abstract kind of thing. He’d understood what she meant, sort of, but at the time he’d thought she would likely kill him after a period of imprisonment and torture. Now it seemed the role she had in mind for David was a kind of kept man. A companion and plaything, but by no means an equal. A part of him bristled at the thought. The smarter part of him realized he was lucky he wasn’t just another emaciated bag of bones hanging from chains until he bled out or starved to death. The realization didn’t entirely erase his resentment, but it prevented him from saying anything stupid.
He frowned.
Except that—
Narcisa laughed.
Shit.
He’d forgotten about the mind-reading thing. Again. Damn.
Narcisa laughed some more. “Relax, David. It’s natural to have thoughts like that. You’d be an unthinking dullard otherwise and therefore uninteresting to me. But you’re a smart boy. You know your limitations.”
“I’m no match for you and never will be.”
She nodded. “Correct.”
“You’d kill me if you ever suspected I had any serious intention of getting away from you.”
“Also correct.”
He sighed. “And there’d be nothing I could do about it.”
She patted his knee. “See? I knew you were smart.”
They drove in a surprisingly comfortable silence for several minutes after that. David’s mind kept flashing back to all the incredible things he’d done over the last few hours. Multiple murders. Rapes. Torture. Necrophilia. All things that would have disgusted his former self. He was happy to find he was still feeling no lingering flickers of conscience. The only things he did feel were a new surge of arousal and a reawakened hunger.
He couldn’t wait to kill again.
And to do…other things.
David winced at a sudden high-pitched burst of sound behind the BMW. It was followed by a pulsing strobe of blue light. He stretched his neck to peer at the rearview mirror. A police cruiser was hanging tight on their tail.
He glanced at Narcisa. “What do we do?”
“Pull over, of course.”
She eased her foot off the BMW’s accelerator and applied pressure to the brake, slowing quickly and smoothly as she guided the car to a stop at the road’s shoulder. The police cruiser pulled to a stop behind them, but the cop didn’t get out of the car right away. Several long moments passed. After everything he’d experienced tonight, David knew he shouldn’t fear any human, but he was anxious nonetheless. He recognized it as an echo of how he’d felt any time he’d been stopped by a cop as a living man, but knowing that didn’t entirely soothe his nerves. He reached for the head on the dash, figuring he should stash it somewhere. It reminded him of how he and some friends from his youth had frantically shoved beer cans under their seats during another stop a lifetime ago.
“Don’t do that.”
A hand on his arm. Narcisa, squeezing him. Hard.
“Leave it.”
David let out a big breath and settled back in his seat. “Okay.”
Finally, someone stepped out of the police cruiser. David heard a crunch of booted feet on gravel. Another glance at the rearview mirror showed a heavily muscled white man dressed in standard cop blue and equipped with the usual gear. His sidearm was holstered, but a big hand rested on its butt. David flinched at the memory of the fat woman’s bullets slamming through his body. Bullets might not kill him, but he really, really, really didn’t want to get shot again.
The cop reached the BMW’s driver’s side door and bent slightly at the waist to peer at them. “Evening, folks. License and—”
David watched the man’s face, saw it go slack.
He’d seen the head on the dash, just as Narcisa had obviously intended. The cop’s fingers curled around the butt of his gun and the weapon began to slide out of its holster. David was in motion before he even realized what he was doing, twisting and surging up out of his seat in the last moment before the gun could clear the holster, moving so fast he would only appear as a dark blur to the cop’s eyes. He launched himself at the startled, backpedaling man, hitting him with tremendous force at center mass, exploding the air from his lungs as he drove him farther backward. The cop staggered out onto the freeway and toppled backward, landing hard on asphalt. The gun flew from his hand, skittered across the road and disappeared into a grass median. David pounced on the man again before he had a chance to recover, tearing so much of his throat out it nearly decapitated him. Blood burbled and flowed like an intoxicating wine, filling David’s nostrils with its lovely aroma as it stained the road beneath them. There was a blare of horns as cars swerved to avoid the twisting figures in the road. One driver of a Lexus SUV was so startled she swerved too hard and went speeding into the median, where her luxury utility vehicle proceeded to flip several times before stopping in a grinding crash on the opposite side of the freeway. David laughed and drank deeply of the dying man’s blood.
Then he felt hands on his shoulders, pulling him away. He snarled and fought for an instant, but the hands would not be budged. He relaxed. Narcisa. He wanted more of the man’s blood, but not at the risk of displeasing her. She steered him away from the road and he lurched toward the BMW. She tightened her grip on him and steered him away from the car, guiding him toward a stand of trees beyond the road’s shoulder. David was still wired from the fresh infusion of blood and laughed with wild abandon as he allowed her to lead him into the darkness of the woods.
The laughing stopped as white light began to displace the darkness.
“Oh,” he said, sobering almost at once. “Magic again. Where are we going?”
She didn’t answer. There was no chance as the white light glowed brighter and the fuzzy feeling he recalled from before of disembodied near non-existence wiped out conscious thought. He relaxed and knew a few moments of seemingly timeless bliss. Then the world began to coalesce around him again, darkening and solidifying. He felt the ground beneath his feet and remembered his name as the last of the white radiance fizzled away. They were on a suburban sidewalk somewhere. He heard a snatch of conversation in the distance, saw rows of respectable houses on either side of an immaculate street.
Narcisa stood in front of him, smiling. “Recognize anything?”
David frowned.
He glanced to his left and then to his right—and froze.
Narcisa laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “It’s time, David.”
He turned to fully face the house that was obviously their destination.
Janine’s house. Her parents’ house, actually.
Narcisa leaned into him, whispering fiercely in his ear. “Are you ready to do it, Davi
d? Are you ready to rip that cunt to pieces for me?”
David shuddered.
Then he smiled and squeezed Narcisa’s hand. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Good. Who do you belong to, David?”
“You. Only to you.”
“Let’s do it, then.”
Still holding hands, they started across the manicured lawn toward the house where he’d once shared warm meals and laughter with his beloved’s family. The house where he and Janine had spent many late nights plotting their bright future together.
David and Narcisa climbed the steps to the front porch.
Narcisa rang the doorbell.
10: AND IN THE END…
David sat shaking on his knees in the middle of the blood-spattered living room, squinting against the bright sunlight shining through the large bay window behind the Martins’ plush leather sofa. He remembered almost everything now—everything up until the moment after he and Narcisa climbed the steps to the Martins’ front porch. What happened after that was an enigma. It wasn’t that the memories were hazy. They were just gone, like a file permanently deleted from a hard drive. No matter how hard he strained to remember, he came up empty.
Obviously something had gone wrong. Not because the Martins were all dead. That had been according to plan, after all. The sense of something wrong derived from the array of emotions raging inside him. Guilt. Anguish. Grief. Regret. A sense of loss so profound he felt utterly hollow inside. All things he should be incapable of feeling. These were human emotions, and he was no longer human.
Or…was he?
Perhaps yesterday’s absence of those emotions was part of some trick Narcisa had played on him, a demented mind game designed to degrade him and forever taint his soul. She was powerful almost beyond comprehension. Wasn’t it possible she’d manipulated his thoughts and impressions, had somehow immersed him in a convincing illusion or delusion? Which would mean he wasn’t a vampire after all, just some gullible sucker she’d subtly coerced into participating in a slew of appalling homicides. It sounded like a plausible scenario and yet…it didn’t feel right. Because even in the midst of his grief and confusion, the scent of blood was driving him half-mad.
