Shrouds of Darkness

by Brock Deskins

  Her laughter made my anger spike once again. “Oh, Leonar—Leo, you poor boy. I have made you better. I have made you eternal.”

  I shook my head back and forth furiously. “No, no, you turn me back, you fix this right now or I swear I’ll kill you!”

  This amused Lesile even more and her laughter was like a hammer driving nails through my flesh. “You are perfect now. Perfect for me and we can be together forever—or until I tire of you.”

  Tire of me? And then what, toss me out like a piece of trash? Like I was nothing? Her lilting laughter, something I would have found melodious in other circumstances, was like a thousand paper cuts to my soul. I was a man of my time and nothing was worse than being laughed at by a woman, or so I thought. Lesile quickly showed me the error of that thought as I lunged across the room, my hands outstretched, reaching for that delicate, alabaster neck.

  There is one thing more damaging to a man’s ego than a woman laughing at him, and that is getting his ass kicked while she’s doing it. She moved with a speed and struck with a strength that would be formidable to me even now. Her blows shattered the bones in my legs, crippling me in seconds. A blow to my spine ended my struggles, and thankfully the agony of my ruined femurs.

  There was still plenty of pain to go around from the numerous other broken bones and ruptured organs in my body as she strapped me down to a heavy oak table. Why she had such a device with its thick, leather straps was beyond me until I realized that this was not the first time she had done this.

  She looked down on me as lay strapped to the table, that infuriating smile never leaving her perfect mouth. “The problem with making new vampires is a lot like bringing home a new puppy,” she sighed. “You have to train them.”

  “Let me go, you bitch!” I shouted at her with all the scorn I could put in voice.

  Renewed pain radiated from my broken jaw and shattered ribs and I winced. I felt no need to be polite or placating. I knew I would never leave this room alive. Even if I did, I knew I was crippled. I heard my spine snap and felt my legs go numb when she kicked me. Or was I?

  Already I felt the tingling sensation of feeling returning to my legs. I tried to wriggle my toes and succeeded. If it were not for the fact that I was strapped down on a table by a psychotic vampiress I would have whooped with joy.

  She spoke, as if reading my mind. “You see the power of our kind now, how quickly you can recover from even the most severe of injuries. It takes a great deal of energy however, and you will need to feed again soon. I will leave you for now, and when I return with your meal we shall begin our lessons.”

  I had no idea what kind of lessons she was talking about, but I had a good idea of what kind of meal she would be bringing back and the thought horrified me. It did until the hunger began to return as my body repaired itself.

  Lesile returned in less than an hour with a middle-aged woman in tow. I figured the woman was a prostitute on the downhill slope of her career. The vampiress sent the woman sailing into the room with a casual flick of her wrist as if tossing a bag of groceries onto the counter.

  The woman crawled to the far wall where she hugged her knees and wept. Lesile glided across the room to where I lay strapped down and smiled at me.

  “Feeling better?” she asked sweetly.

  I was but I still hurt and I told her to fuck off.

  “Such language to a lady,” she responded disapprovingly. “I think our first lesson must be on manners.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that at all. I cried out as she casually snapped the bones in my lower left leg and then my right arm. Fire erupted in my chest as she once again destroyed the bones that had been well on the way to healing.

  Still smiling she said, “Now, how much and for how long you are in pain is entirely up to you. You have the ability to not only block the pain from nearly all wounds you suffer, but force them to heal at phenomenal rates as well. You see how fast you heal naturally and you can increase that several fold by shear effort of will. Do you have that? Do you have will, Leonard?”

  “Don’t call me Leonard, you crazy broad!” I shouted defiantly.

  She slapped me hard like a regular, angry woman. “You belong to me, you little shit, and will call you whatever I damn well please.”

  With her soft French accent, her profanity-laced rebuke was almost cute, but I hated this creature with every fiber of my being. I was also terrified of her almost beyond reason so I kept my mouth shut and let her call me whatever she wanted.

  Lesile continued. “Normally, it takes a new vampire months, even years, to learn such control of body. I will teach you in far less time. I hope I can do it before I get bored with you…”

  I really didn’t like the way she trailed off and got that hundred-yard-stare in her eyes, so I swore to myself to be a quick study. And I was a quick study—if you consider two weeks of continually having your bones broken and your organs skewered, quick. The worst was when she gouged out my eyes with an ice pick. I think that was when I really began to learn how to direct healing and block pain. I was so terrified of that darkness that I put everything I had into seeing again.

  At the end of two weeks Lesile was satisfied with my progress, and after breaking most my bones one last time, she disappeared. I have never seen her again. I heard about her from time to time throughout the decades, particularly after I became a Sheriff. She was often the topic of conversation within our little circle. She was that legendary criminal that everyone was afraid to go after.

  She was insane, everyone agreed. But even though she lived her life towing the line of acceptable behavior, she rarely crossed it to an extent that forced the Council and the Sheriffs to act. The laws regarding the conduct of vampires are few. You can basically do what you want so long as it does not bring about the attention of the mortal populace. It seems simple enough but stupidity knows no boundaries and it happens often enough to make the Sherriff’s necessary.

  *****

  The movement of a shadow cast by the backlit body of a man through the window of the next building over and three floors down snaps me out of my mental time traveling. It’s what I have been waiting for. The voice of a young girl drifts up to my ears with hearing nearly as acute as my vision.

  “Daddy, no please, don’t,” the tiny, frightened voice begs, but her words fall on ears deaf with drunkenness just as they have so many times in the past.

  Tonight will be different though. Tonight her pleas have been heard. Like I said, I picked this spot with a purpose. Tonight, the girl would experience fear once again but one entirely new, a different sort of fear than the one she has experienced nearly every waking moment for much of her young life.

  This was no chance encounter. Despite my surly disposition, I have friends in certain well-placed positions that inform me of people that the world is better off without and will not be terribly missed. A concerned teacher had brought this man to the attention of Social Services but there was insufficient evidence to arrest the father or even perform more than a cursory investigation. I’m not the type that takes joy in the necessity of killing to maintain my existence, though there are certainly those that do, but there are times where I make an exception and this certainly qualifies as one.

  I don my black, neoprene facemask so it covers my face from the nose down. There will be a witness to my actions tonight. The half-mask will help me maintain my anonymity, and it makes me look scary as hell with the hood of my black trench coat pulled over my head. With a quick flex of my powerful muscles, I launch myself from the wall towards the fire escape, landing fifty feet away and thirty feet down from my perch. It is a fairly easy leap for one such as me.

  I barely make a sound as my feet nimbly strike the wet, metal grating of the platform. My boots make contact with the slick surface for only a fraction of a second before a second thrust of my legs propels me through the open window of the little girl’s room with such velocity that my trench coat barely brushes the sill.

  Directl
y ahead of my headlong flight into the room, a man stands in the open doorway wearing a stained, white wife-beater tank top and nothing else but a lecherous grin and the over-powering reek of cheap whiskey.

  I am behind him with my hand, with its scalpel-like nails, around his throat before his lust-filled sneer has time to turn into a look of fear. His first instinct probably makes him think it is the cops coming to arrest him for abusing his daughter. He might pray to be so lucky, but those prayers will never be answered.

  The girl, maybe ten or eleven years old, is sitting up with her back pressed against the wall, the blankets held tightly under her chin. She looks from my eyes to that of her drunken, lecherous father, unsure of who is the most terrifying.

  I look into her eyes, using my gaze to penetrate deep into that predator/prey region of her consciousness.

  “Go to sleep,” I command in a firm but low, grumbling voice. “In the morning you will call the police and they will take you somewhere safe where no one will hurt you again.”

  Ok, that was probably a lie. In this world, people get hurt. It is almost unavoidable, but it is a pretty sure bet she will be safer and will put up with far less shit than her father has forced her to endure.

  “Do not go in your father’s room for any reason. Do you understand me?”

  The girl barely nods before sliding down into the bed and pulling the covers up over her head. Despite the sudden shock of tonight’s turn of events, she will most likely go to sleep just as I ordered. This is where that old wives’ tale of vampires hypnotizing their victims comes from.

  Hypnosis has nothing to do with it, at least not in the classical sense of the term. No, it is the powerful influence a top-tiered predator like myself can have on a creature that knows it is prey. It’s like a deer that freezes in the headlights of an oncoming car or the rabbit that suddenly goes stiff and immobile when it realizes that a predator has it locked in its sights and there is not a damn thing it can do to change whatever fate has in store for it.

  I drag the filthy, disgusting man from the room with almost contemptuous ease. He doesn’t struggle much but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Like the rabbit, he knows there is nothing he can do. He is the deer, I am the car, and the power of my very presence paralyzes him.

  I don’t do this often—prey on humans—especially to the point where they die. I’m no saint. I am not doing this out of any sense of good or some saintly quality I wish to personify. I have a job tonight and I need the lifeblood of a human to make sure I am at the top of my game. Vampires can exist on bagged blood or drink only enough from a human so that their prey will survive the incident, but only for a certain amount of time. I usually do not take the life of humans more than three or four times a year. When I do, I choose those so-called victims that are least likely to be missed.

  The girl will probably tell so many horror stories about her father that the cops will not be terribly inclined to find the man that ended his tyranny. I suppose I take a small bit of satisfaction in ending this man’s abuse. Perhaps there is a tiny spark of compassion still glowing beneath the cold, passionless ashes of what was once my own humanity. Maybe I’m just fooling myself. Maybe I am only pretending that I give even the tiniest shit about the vermin that is humanity so that I do not turn rogue—again.

  The Council takes a very dim view on vampires that go rogue, feed without discretion, and draws enough attention to us that people start to see a bit of truth in what we all try very hard to ensure stays wrapped tightly in myth and folklore.

  We all have to feed and we all need to take lifeblood. The frequency of that is based upon our own tolerance and most importantly our age. The older a vampire gets the more they have to feed. I don’t know what it is in that last little bit of blood that we suck out as the human dies. Some sort life energy or the soul if you believe in that kind of crap. Whatever it is, it is necessary for our survival.

  I had a friend once, a doctor, who tried to deny this requirement. He spent years trying to develop some sort of way to overcome the necessity of killing even if infrequently. He had to kill, even if it was only once a year. God how he looked like shit in the months before his very nature forced him to take a life while feeding.

  You could never get me to care enough about humans to put myself through that. I guess he was just better than I am. When he did take a life, it was usually from a terminally ill patient, but even this was more than he could bear. He finally gave up his search for a non-lethal solution, and with the last bit of sanity left to his lifeblood-starved mind and body; he dowsed himself with gasoline in the middle of his living room and torched himself.

  That was one sure way of killing a vampire. Let me tell you about vampires. Ninety percent of what you have heard is complete bullshit. A stake through the heart? Please. When we are turned, there are significant changes that occur throughout our bodies clear down to the genetic level. That is why we do not consider ourselves human. Frankly, we are not.

  The first noticeable thing is that we no longer need air to survive and our hearts stop beating. We basically become an anaerobic creature. However, we are not truly dead and some of our other organs must remain animated, most importantly our brains along with skin, muscle, and nerves. That is why we must consume the blood of humans.

  Those bits of us must remain viable. We are able to consume vast amounts of blood, and through a process similar to osmosis, that blood is shunted throughout our bodies. Our bodies also create or take in vast amounts of stem cells and supercharge them. It is why we are able to heal very quickly. These turbo-powered stem cells rush to the site of any wound we receive and attempt to repair it, usually with a great deal of success.

  We are not invulnerable and if you cause enough damage, we can die but it isn’t easy. As a vampire ages he or she is learns to consciously control a great deal of his or her body and even the blood within it. We can move our own cells nearly as easily as you move your hand. It’s difficult at first but one learns.

  Our senses become super acute. We can hear the tiniest sounds, see in nearly total darkness, and have a sense of smell far greater than even the best of humans. We are also able, with practice, to control our nerve endings. We can block out most things that would normally cripple a man with pain.

  Our bones become nearly as strong as steel but more flexible, our muscles become quite dense and many times stronger than even the burliest of men. We are not invulnerable however.

  Fire is a great fear, because just like humans, it is very hard for us to heal. Sunlight? Not so much. Our skin loses pigment and leaves us vulnerable to the effects of the sun, but proper clothing and a good pair of sunglasses allows us to move about in daylight although nearly all of us prefer the dark.

  We do not have huge, conspicuous fangs and we do not bite the throats of our victims—usually. That is far too messy. Some use a small, sharp knife to open a vein or artery. Most of us just use a sharpened thumbnail.

  I leave the nearly desiccated corpse on his bed. There is not much mess. I am a rather fastidious eater. I hope that the girl will heed my warning about not coming into her father’s room. If she doesn’t then that’s her problem. She can talk about it with whatever state-paid shrink she will invariably be seeing, probably for years to come.

  I use the window in the trash and booze bottle-littered living room to make my exit. I’m not worried about fingerprints. I don’t leave any. We no longer have the oils in our skin that allows our prints to transfer to other surfaces.

  After a quick climb up the fire escape and a leap up onto the roof as I near the top, I vanish once more into the night. I have a job tonight and I need to get myself over to the Perestroika Club on time. My employer despises tardiness.

  I use the rooftops as my own personal expressway, leaping the wide gaps between buildings with graceful ease. I am jumping to the roof of the fourth building from the one I recently vacated when I hear the scream. I pause, more out of curiosity than any sort of concern for whatever tr
ouble some woman not smart enough to avoid has found herself in.

  I don’t hear anything more and back up a few steps for my running jump to the next building when the woman screams again and I hear the voice of a young man warning her to be silent.

  My first instinct is to leave her to her fate. Whatever trouble she has found herself in is hers not mine. Probably just some whore being slapped around by her pimp anyway. I hear the soft thump of a fist hitting flesh, the pathetic mewling of pain, and the loss of hope that comes when prey knows that the predator has them.

  Damn my chivalrous nature. I blame my intervention on being pumped up on fresh lifeblood. I take a hard left and leap to the next building, run across the roof, then drop effortlessly to the ground fifty feet below.

  Amidst the trash-strewn alley, I see a young woman, probably in her teens, cringing against the wall as a young black man holding a knife in his left hand cocks his fist back for another blow to ensure she stops struggling and crying out. At first, I think it is just as I had suspected. Some pimp smacking his prostitute around. The girl is young however, maybe sixteen or so. That’s not so unusual. Many runaways are forced into prostitution to survive.

  Then the air currents shift and I pick up the scent of them. I know what a whore smells like and this girl isn’t one. Ten to one odds she had met a boyfriend somewhere and was now sneaking back home. Like a stupid little twit, she thought it a good idea to take a shortcut so she could get back before curfew or mommy and daddy found out she was even gone. It was late. That is the more likely scenario.

  You would be surprised how much information you can get from a smell—that and a few decades of experience.

  I shout at the kid holding the knife, about to bust the cowering girl in the chops again. “All right, dickhead. Let the girl go and get the fuck outta here.”

  I’m both impressed and annoyed when the kid turns and looks at me with a sneer. Granted, I’m not what most would consider an imposing man, but I have a presence that usually makes people think twice before screwing with me. Maybe it’s because it’s so dark. Maybe the knife gives the kid a big set of stones, I don’t know.