I hit my headlights. To the outside observer, when a Nightfallen’s eyes go hypnotic, the pupils become iridescent yellow. To me, it was like looking at him from the bottom of a well, coaxing him to fall in.
I grabbed his crotch, gently stroked it. “That’s a good boy,” I said. “Let’s lay down.”
“Okay,” he said.
Holding his gaze, we laid down together onto his bed. My canine teeth extended. “Are you comfortable?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good. Just relax now,” I said, before extending my fangs, and going for his neck.
Drinking from him, the warmth flooded me. Intoxicating, like a lightweight that hadn’t had beer in months, suddenly downing straight whiskey. My head swam.
There’s an elemental part of us, the satanic version of a conscience, dedicated to ensuring our survival. It’s always there, often as a background Sumerian chant. Sometimes it’s a suggestive whisper, and sometimes a compelling shout.
The voice echoed to me now, Do not kill him, the corpse will be found, and others saw you with him. I knew the voice was right, but it was only a whisper. More a suggestion than a command, and therefore easily ignored.
He tasted so good. Sometimes it’s true: you really can’t stop at just one bite.
The door suddenly opened, light flooding in.
I disengaged myself from the boy’s neck, and turned hissing at the door.
Jackson’s silhouette in the doorway was tall, broad shouldered, and indifferent to seeing my bloody mouth. “Clean him up, and let’s go,” he said.
“I’m still hungry.”
“It’ll be hard to drink,” Jackson said, “if I have to pull out those big teeth of yours.”
“I’m stronger than you.”
“I’m not the one with allergies to crosses and holy water.”
I didn’t think he carried any on him—it would be too big a risk to blow his cover. On the other hand, was I sure he didn’t have something concealed inside that black coat of his? Did I think he wouldn’t use it on me if I truly went feral on him?
“Fine,” I said, my girlish petulance masking how much effort it took to stop drinking.
Spitting on the boy’s neck and rubbing it in, the small pinpricks on his throat seemed to wash away. The saliva of the true Nightfallen—unlike Jackson—has a healing quality. It was an adaptation that meant we could hide signs of our feeding. Ron would probably wake-up thinking he’d banged me, and I had slinked off like a good slut.
As we left the frat house, I asked Jackson, “How did you find me anyway?”
“When your time was up, I came in asking if anyone had seen my underage sister. The guys were tightlipped, but the girls were surprisingly helpful. I guess trying to save you from their fate, or at least delay it.”
“I found out something useful at least,” I said, trying to get some approval. “Evidently, one of Mimi’s sorority sisters wasn’t a big fan. Girl named Emily Lin.”
Jackson was dubious, but absent any better leads he didn’t discount Lin immediately.
I looked her up on my phone. Being the chapter’s vice president, I found her picture in several places on the chapter’s website: a tall, attractive Asian chick with black hair like liquid night, a smile so perfect you had to wonder if her daddy was a dentist, and a nose perpetually up in the air.
“Cute girl,” Jackson said, “but she’s built for wearing a bikini, not for driving pieces of wood through someone’s heart.”
“She could have hired someone,” I offered. “The night’s young. Let’s find her. I can put her in a trance and quiz her.”
“After your performance tonight, I have no faith you wouldn’t be in the mood for Chinese,” Jackson said, turning to the Alpha Psi house. “Besides, if she’s got something to hide, it’d probably be in her room.”
Jackson had driven us around the block and parked us on the quiet, dark neighborhood street behind Alpha Psi. We could just make out the back of the sorority house perhaps fifty yards away.
From a hard-shelled case in the back of the jeep, he drew a short, thin-barreled rifle. Attaching what I knew from the movies to be a silencer, Jackson rolled down the window and aimed through the scope.
Two quick shots and the floodlights behind the Alpha Psi house went out, plunging its backyard into darkness. The shots had been remarkably quiet. Seeing the look on my face, he said, “Suppressed, subsonic .22 ammo. All kinds of uses.”
While the sorority’s front and entire downstairs was brightly lit, the upstairs rear—presumably where most of the bedrooms were—was largely dark.
Matheson class vampires—the kind I was and what Jackson pretended to be—aren’t like other Nightfallen races that can climb up and down sheer castle walls like spiders. But we were still strong enough to scale the wall finding fingerholds between the white-painted bricks. We climbed to a darkened window.
I couldn’t enter unless invited in, but Jackson didn’t have that limitation. On the other hand, Jackson’s Pentagon-bought enhanced vision wasn’t nearly as good mine. I could see in infrared easier and with more clarity. Which meant I could tell when an alarm sensor was warm and operational.
Like, for instance, the one at this window. I shook my head at this window, and we gingerly made our way to the next one.
This one’s alarm wasn’t working, and I gestured to him. An older house, its windows were original, their old hasps easy to force. Sliding inside, he closed it behind him, taking care to replace its worn, iron hasp where it had popped off.
We didn’t know which room was Emily’s, so Jackson would have to ninja around inside to locate it. In the meantime, I stood on the ledge like a living shadow, listening to the party next door, wondering when some drunken jackass would come staggering into the yard and see me.
Moments later, I heard a window above me open. “Come on,” Jackson whispered.
After hoisting myself to the third floor, I crouched on the window’s ledge while Jackson began looking in her laptop’s files. Because he didn’t live there, it would have been useless for Jackson to invite me in. Killing time, I looked at all the pictures of Emily and her friends from my perch outside the window. Mostly photos of parties not that different than Mimi’s, except that Emily was in them and some had been taken during the day.
Then I saw the photo by her bed: the thin, confident, chapter vice president next to a powerfully built white guy. Handsome, his thick arm was around her as if debating whether to carry her off to a hotel room or to the top of the Empire State Building. Ramsgate Varsity Wrestling was emblazoned across his T-shirt.
And suddenly it made sense. Who else out there would know that things like us stalked Ramsgate? Who else would have experience fighting them?
“Hey, Jackson.”
“Yeah?” he said, not really paying attention to me while looking in Emily’s sent email folder.
“Remember that guy the night we met? The tough wrestler I was going to snack on before his varsity friends beat me within an inch of my unlife?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Emily’s dating him.”
4
Mission Parameters
The man in Emily’s picture was named David Hitch. Googling Ramsgate’s wrestling roster pulled up some cached images of David that I’d recognized instantly. I never forget a taste.
The search had also brought up three years’ worth of stories about him in the college paper. Mostly they were about winning competitions, going to the NCAA’s, becoming the team’s youngest captain.
Then there were a few from just a couple months ago in which David’s sports career suddenly ended.
A Quarter of Ramsgate’s Wrestling Team Quits, read the headline. David and four of his teammates.
“Not hard to guess that those four were the ones that had been with him that night,” Jackson had said as we sat in his jeep.
“They didn’t just leave the team,” I’d said, still scrolling through the paper’s news archives on
my phone. “A later story says they all quit school.”
“Got to admire that kind of commitment to a new calling. Look up their addresses, see if they’re still in town.”
What Echo Valley addresses we found turned out to be out-of-date, and we wasted the last few hours before sunrise checking out vacant apartments.
The next night, I headed over to Jackson’s immediately after sundown.
His home was a rented, 1920s bungalow on the edge of town. Its backyard butted against one of Echo Valley’s surrounding mountains, and the trees around it were so dense that even in winter, its battered aluminum siding had a green, mossy tinge.
I knocked on the door. “May I come in?” I asked sweetly when he answered.
“Sure,” he said. This was our usual ritual since he’d told me where he lived. He’d revoke the invitation every time I left, so that I had to ask permission to enter again at every visit.
Inside, the house was Spartan. A few card tables had been set-up, on which were a bullet-reloading press, some empty magazines, gun cleaning supplies, and a few laptops.
“Why don’t you try making this place more habitable?” I asked, not for the first time.
“Why put in the effort? This is all temporary,” he said.
I wondered if he believed that. He’d never said there was a set end-date to his mission.
A couch that looked like it had been stolen from someone that had put it out for the trash man was the room’s only real furniture.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“A little,” I said. I followed him into the kitchen where he got me one of his government blood packets. Besides the blood and the homemade incendiaries he stored in it, the fridge was bare.
“I’m about to communicate with my handler,” he said. “See what HQ wants me to do about the hunters.”
“Is he coming here?” I asked, wondering if I needed to hide. They knew Jackson was working with a Nightfallen, but didn’t know my real name, or that I knew what he really was.
“No, we’re doing it over an encrypted IM. McBride thinks it may be better that way, for the time being. I’ve been meeting more Nightfallen, and he doesn’t want any chance of me being seen with a real human being.”
It was strange, watching their conversation unfold. It was an old school instant message system, which I guess was the only thing that made sense. Skype wouldn’t pick up our image or voice.
It was a short conversation. Jackson typed an update to McBride on what was happening. “Please advise on best preferred strategy,” he concluded.
McBride’s reply was swift: “stay in character. kill the wrestlers”.
Jackson mouth tightened as he read it. His typing fingers seemed to fall like hammers: “Sir, they’re Americans. Practically kids. DHS could get some false charges brought up against them. This would take them out of circulation for a few months. I could then claim I took care of the hunters when the killings stopped. Also, a couple months in jail would disrupt their operation, possibly breaking it permanently.”
“yeah and if the charges get dropped and they sue and the press or a house committee decides to give a damn what then? if your undead pals wonder why fedgov took such an interest in these guys what then? dead bodies less a liability than potential witnesses”.
“I’ve saved people before when command didn’t care if they lived or died.”
“how much longer do you think your boy scout luck will hold out?” McBride wrote back.
“You know,” he said to me, “I used to believe that governments were supposed to protect their citizens.”
“What do you think now?” I asked.
“That people’s lives are just like their taxes: something to piss away on anything or nothing,” he said, closing his laptop.
I resisted the urge to say duh, opting for the more mild, “Why would you ever think it was otherwise?” I sat next to him on the couch.
He shrugged. “A boy grows up reading comic books and thinking he ought to save the day. With some, it gets into your DNA. Maybe your soul, too. Even when you’re old enough to know the universe doesn’t work like an issue of Superman or Green Lantern, it’s still there. So a boy like that might try to look for employment that’s as close a fit as he can manage in this broken world. Cop, fireman, soldier—stuff like that.”
“A hero,” I said, masking how naïve and vile the word tasted on my tongue.
“I wouldn’t call it anything that grand. Maybe just doing some meaningful work as a good man. Anyway, you sign on the dotted line for the chance. Then it all changes, and the suck of it is that they didn’t change the contract on you. It was just you were too stupid to know what the deal actually was.”
All this emotional tumult about doing the right thing, being a good man. Yet by any sane measure, McBride was right.
Killing Dave Hitch and his friends meant that Jackson’s mission would be able to continue. His mission continuing meant that he’d be able to keep gathering intel, probably saving more humans in the future. The lives of five late-teens/early-20s meatheads was a small price. To me, this would have been a simple decision.
Not to Jackson, though. I didn’t know much about the military, but according to what I’d seen on the internet, Rangers were hardcore. I knew he’d killed people—I could actually see the thin, crimson lines that radiated from him, the lingering soul-echo of those he’d killed. Those deaths hadn’t bothered him.
Yet those had been enemy. Third World savages sporting modern weaponry. Not his fellow citizens. Bizarre as it was to me, that distinction was apparently very important to Jackson Wheel.
If I had been honest, I would have told him all this. Instead, I rather liked that his human masters were alienating him. Nice of them to drive Jackson closer to my kind.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Find a way to save everyone while remaining undercover and forwarding the mission. It’s more than I’m supposed to do, but it’s the way it’s going to be.”
“I’ll help. Just tell me what to do.”
“As soon as I figure it out, I’ll let you know,” he sighed.
I loved this weariness in him now. Vulnerability that could be used. Maybe it wasn’t enough just for his kind to drive him away. He could use some enticement, too.
I’d been waiting to offer up an incentive to pull him in. My nails gently raked over his knee. “So until then, I guess we can just stay in tonight.”
Jackson looked at my hand on his jeans. “What are you doing?”
I was a little put off by this, but persisted. I edged closer to him on the couch. “If we’ve got nothing else better to do, why don’t we kill some time?” I breathed.
He remained still as I moved my lips to his. They were about to touch when he said, “Virginia Dare Weston. Not many people with that name, you know.”
I paused my approach. “Excuse me?”
“I found your obit,” he said, staring me hard in the eyes. “It must have been hard, your parents losing their only child.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Good thing they didn’t have to live with it long. Getting killed mysteriously three nights after their daughter died.”
I looked away.
“Why do you think I’d ever dirty myself inside something like you?” he asked.
The Nightfallen thing to do would have been to claw out his throat. But suddenly, I may as well have been the 16-year-old girl I was when I died. Living or otherwise, nothing bruises a woman’s ego more than throwing herself at man, and having it thrown back into her face.
I stormed out of his house. “Invitation revoked,” he called as I ran through the woods.
I was crying as I ran. It wasn’t my parents’ murders that hurt and drove me on, but the rejection’s sting. At least that’s what I told myself. I wasn’t sure, actually. Maybe the hurts were intermingling. Maybe the one allowed me to feel the other.
All I knew was that I had to get away. No physical effor
t to keep my corpse of a body moving like an Olympic sprinter through backyards and Echo Valley’s quiet streets, just mental energy. The exertion drained some of what I was feeling about Jackson, and for that I was grateful.
I must have called myself a stupid bitch a thousand times in the few minutes it took for me to make my way across town, finally stopping near Ramsgate’s upper quad.
It was still early evening, but I could see the Dominion Street bars starting to fill with young life. I wasn’t hungry, but thought about slitting some throats anyway. That would just piss off Jackson more—which I would have liked—and forever end whatever you one might call our relationship—which I didn’t want to risk.
I was emotional, not thinking clearly. Maybe I could find Dave Hitch and his wrestling buddies. What a passive aggressive move that would be—force Jackson to decide what to do before he was ready.
The problem was still finding them.
I wasn’t in the mood to play detective, pretend to be a lost little girl, ask questions of bipedal food. I wanted answers now. I wanted to see Jackson again tonight, see the look in his eyes when I told them where they were. I wanted to hear an apology. Some gratitude, even, would suffice.
David Hitch and company might be hard to find, but it seemed likely Emily Lin would know. And unlike Jackson, I wouldn’t be trying to Sherlock Holmes it from clues in her room—I’d just hide in a bush until I saw her leaving her sorority house. Then I’d grab her by the throat. Wouldn’t even bother to hit my headlights, just begin breaking her fingers until she told me what I wanted to know.
See how real spies do it, Jackson? Snapping bone equals information. So simple.
Of course, maybe I wouldn’t see her immediately. Not that I was in any mood to wait, but that’d be okay. I’d just grab the first sorority slut I saw strutting in or out of the house, and break her fingers or ankles, use her phone to text Emily something suitable inane: “hey BFF where are you? lol”. When Emily wrote back with wherever address she was sucking frat cock, I’d stalk over there like a stereotypical, psycho girlfriend. Probably drain her a little, just for the fuck of it.
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