by Byron Thorne
As quickly as Morgan had entered the building, he disappeared from it. He had no desire to stick around and listen to the whining, pleading, and excuse making. There was nothing more for him there, except a wealth of sickness, and with it, sub-par sustenance. Maybe if he was truly desperate he might have borrowed some from Jeremy’s heart. However, he had a backup plan already in motion. There was no need to spoil the night with the taste of bad blood.
But his patience was running out. There was no reason to risk waiting any longer, not when he had a nearly guaranteed source of sustenance ready for him. The tower on Sunset and Vine was only a short walk. The girl within would still be charmed as per his instruction, waiting for him.
There were several reasons that Morgan had sent her away from the venue. The first was because she was annoying, and he simply wanted to be rid of her. That was a given. The second was for the girl’s own safety. Although he spent more time amongst humans than the others in the Coven, and as a result was much more likely to restrain himself, he still had a limit. He did not like to test that limit. The third reason always lurked in the back of his head for situations just like that one. He could use her later. A backup plan.
Every other evening, Morgan would drink from his personal supply in the privacy of his own home. It was the only reason he kept the fridge plugged in at all. He could only fill it with a week’s supply at a time, though. Jeremy, his familiar, had worked out a system of making a few bags go missing every time they got a new batch. Clerical errors or some such. Though he didn’t much look like it from the surface, Jeremy had a knack for the criminal. It’s the reason that Morgan chose him. He didn’t enjoy keeping familiars like Jeremy around, but they had become a necessity for him.
The way he explained it, no one else from the hospital knew the spare bags ever existed to begin with. However, if he took too much at once, the error would surely be noticed by the management. In most cases, no one missed them. Except, perhaps, for the patients in the emergency room that evening.
Morgan had tried other ways to get his fix. Buckets of blood from the butcher tasted rotten going down and got even worse when they came back up. In his travels, he read stories about demons that sucked the blood from cattle, and depictions of the creatures seemed to fit early myths about vampires. He heard about pale, sickly creatures deep within sewer systems that lived off the blood of rats. He tried it, once, and it kept him from the brink of the other side. It was nothing to live on, though. Besides, he hadn’t been that desperate in a long time.
It had been several months since his last live human. Now that he was so accustomed to drinking from a glass, or even straight out of the bag, the prospect of drinking from a warm body excited and repulsed him. It also made him nervous. Morgan spent his nights mostly in solitude, afraid of losing control of himself. It was the sole reason that he stopped hunting to begin with- although it had added benefits, like not drawing the attention of dangerous individuals. Now, he needed to step back in that world. He needed to calm himself before he entered the tower, but the voice deep within him only became louder as the night grew older. There was no excitement in his life without the threat of very real danger.
50-foot high faces and beer bottles the size of buildings met Morgan’s view. They were the increasingly elaborate billboards of Vine, designed in such a way so they could not be missed from any angle. Did the tenants of the buildings get to voice their opinion? Did they even care? He would have to ask the girl, Samantha. Or not.
He entered the building, and despite the late hour, or perhaps because of it, a security guard was waiting behind a marble desk. It was the only thing in the whole room that wasn’t a stark, pale white. The girl behind the counter didn’t look particularly threatening. Maybe the wall of computer screens was supposed to do the intimidating for her. Morgan approached the desk.
“Can I help you?” she asked, bored, but not enough to look away from whatever she was doing on the screen.
“Someone is expecting me,” Morgan said, and the sound of his voice was enough to get her to look up.
“Oh,” she met his eyes and was suddenly at a loss for words.
“Can I go up, then?” he asked, a wry grin growing on his face.
“Oh! Yes. Sorry. What’s your number? Oh! I mean name. Your name, please,” her cheeks flushed red and stood out against the rest of the pale room.
“Morgan,” he said, “I hope you have a good evening.”
The elevator door opened and he slipped inside, seconds away from complete gratification.
6
First One, Then Another
Morgan didn’t bother knocking because the door was unlocked. The girl stayed true to her word. The couch she was sprawled on looked about as uncomfortable as her pose. They both looked nice enough, although neither of them was his type. The apartment shared the same kind of modern, minimalistic style that the outside architecture had conveyed. Exposed metal beams, walls made from glass, a polished, simple floor. He would have to be careful not to leave any blood laying around. It would surely end up looking out of place.
“I was beginning to think you weren’t going to show,” the girl on the couch said. The playfulness in her voice was thin. It hardly covered the longing that lingered under the surface.
“It doesn’t look like it from where I’m standing,” Morgan said half to himself and half to her. He shut the door behind him and locked it. No need for anyone else to get the same idea as him, or worse. There was no shortage of unscrupulous characters in the city.
“I don’t usually do this kind of thing, you know,” Samantha murmured as she leaned on her elbows, “but there’s just something about you. Something…different. I’m sure you get that all the time.”
“No, actually, far less than you might think. This meeting is quite out of the ordinary for me as well.” Morgan was telling the truth. Although he wasn’t one for conversation, he felt the need to keep it going in an effort to calm down. He’d made it this far. The prize was right in front of him, ready to be taken. But he needed to keep his head to spare her life.
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she said.
“I don’t really get the chance.”
“Can I get you a drink?” she asked as she sat up.
“Yes,” he responded, although she never got the chance to hear his answer. He was across the room and beside her in an instant. She didn’t mind it and didn’t question it. Either she was still charmed or it was just what she wanted all along.
Morgan gripped her shoulders tight and felt her pulse course through his own fingertips. The sensation was warm and he could trace it each time it thumped, moving from her body to his. She turned her head backwards to meet his eyes, and he obliged her wish by bringing his lips to hers. It was all he could do to stop from biting through her lip as he ran his fingers through her blonde hair. He pulled it gently and she moaned in response. The smell and the sight of her overwhelmed him, and he brought his mouth down on her neck, tasting it, making the skin wet with his tongue. Then, he plunged inside of her.
Her skin had no choice but to accept the teeth that pierced it. The two of them were connected. In a way, the relationship was symbiotic. Morgan needed what was inside of her, but the gasps she emitted as a result were those of pleasure, not pain. It was a release for both of them, and the ecstasy that he felt was drowned out only by the lingering question of why didn’t he do this more often.
Morgan took a long pull and the vein gave up her fluid willingly. The warmth he felt from her skin was nothing but a distant memory compared to this, an all-encompassing aura of passion and joy and life all wrapped in one. Time slowed down for him, and in the elongated moment, he began to feel the girl’s emotions. Emptiness nearly overcame him as he gripped her, but it faded fast, supplanted with new gratification. They both were filled with it.
If he had held on much longer, Morgan knew the bond would become even deeper. He would become intimately familiar with her thoughts, even fai
nt outlines of her memories. It wasn’t something that he wanted any part of- no offense to the poor girl, but there was enough stored in his own head.
If he held on even longer than that, there would be nothing left of her.
In the moment, it was hard to feel satiated. That did not come until later. During the act itself, Morgan wanted only more and more and that would never change, no matter how many times he drank. At least now he could recognize the feeling. He did his best to betray the call of his body, to tell it to stop before it was too late. He finally got it to listen.
Morgan pulled away from her and she collapsed into a heap on the couch. Time and the rest of the world came back to him, a haze at first. He didn’t have that all-too-familiar feeling that came from staying on a vein too long, but he checked her pulse just in case. The holes his teeth had left were already gone, and her soft, low breaths indicated she would be asleep for the foreseeable future.
Of course, it had the complete opposite effect on him. Rather than put him to sleep, he was newly invigorated. His head began to clear, and the voice deep within him became nearly silent. Perhaps he cut the flow off too early, just a result of being overly cautious around the warm body. He wasn’t completely satiated. On the other hand, the call of the demon was gone, hopefully for the rest of the night.
As far as hunting trips go, this was one of the easiest- although he still needed to leave the building. In the pleasure-filled afterglow, he contemplated eating out more often, before remembering why he had stopped in the first case. It wasn’t always that easy to get. More importantly, it wasn’t always that easy to stop. In any case, until his supply came back online, it was looking like he wouldn’t have much of a choice.
He checked the girl’s apartment for any signs that he was ever there. The place was still as clean as her housekeeper had left it. In their embrace, the two of them managed to avoid spilling a single drop on that white couch, too, so it looked like he was in the clear.
The night was moving on, but there was still plenty of time before the sun came up and Morgan had to make himself scarce. The sky was the same shade of orange as the streetlights, and the moon had gone to hide behind the clouds. He moved to the glass wall and looked down on the city and the hundreds of twinkling red lights going up the hill and the same number of white ones going down it. He watched the people inching along on the street, even smaller than the lights. His blood source gone, he could no longer just meld into the crowds of them. He never stopped watching the humans closely, but it was only out of safety or maybe some passing personal interest. Now, he would have to choose from them nightly. Size them up like he used to.
If he was going to have to hunt, Morgan needed to make sure his Domain was clear of any other vampires. It was more than common courtesy to stay off another vampire’s Domain- it was as close to law as his Coven came. They were naturally territorial beasts, but it also served the function of group safety. If every vamp stuck to their own domain, the risk of over farming was greatly reduced and the safety of everyone was increased.
Morgan had claimed his hunting ground many years ago. However, he hadn’t needed to actually hunt in it thanks to his usually reliable supply of packaged blood. There was no need for him to regulate his domain, so he couldn’t be sure what was taking place within its borders. It was time to find out.
There were far fewer vampires in the city when Morgan had made it his home, so the domain had come under his control naturally. Looking back, he would have picked a different neighborhood. But back then, the area around Hollywood and Highland was far removed than the tourist trap that it was today. The biggest advantage was the constant waves of people that flowed through it each day. Other than that, he hated it. For the most part, he had developed higher standards for his blood and did not derive nearly the same pleasure from the waves of tourists than he did from humans of a different class. Plus, they were harder to prey upon- often traveling in packs and families. He needed solitary individuals for safety’s sake.
With the girl’s apartment spotless, Morgan had no more reason to stick around. It was an aesthetically pleasing place, but there were far too many windows for his liking. No one had seen him come in other than the girl at the front desk. He intended to keep it that way by taking the stairs instead of the elevator this time. At least that was his plan, until he heard the knock at Samantha’s door.
This was why he did his feeding at home. A controlled environment avoided surprises like this. Mind racing, he placed an eye to the lens on the door, his footsteps silent. The man on the other side was no hunter. On the other hand, Morgan didn’t know the stranger’s relationship to the woman he had so recently finished drinking from. Best case scenario, the man would walk away- he was dressed poorly, athletic shorts, sleeveless shirt- perhaps ripped on purpose to show off his biceps. He was likely just a neighbor after some sugar or some such nonsense, but it was difficult to say.
Then, the man knocked again. He pulled out his phone and mashed the screen before bringing it to his ear. Morgan looked around the room for a way out. The window offered a ledge, but he wasn’t dying to take his chances thirty floors up. Besides, there was nowhere to go once he was on the outside. What else… an exposed vent in the ceiling, but was it large enough for him to fit? The man’s voice, though a bit muffled from the heavy metal door, came through. “Samantha, it’s Jeff, I’m getting worried. Did you lose your phone? I don’t know why I’m leaving you this message then, jeez. Anyways, I’m going to leave your spare key on your kitchen counter. Call me when you get this, or make it back, or I’m, you know, just down the hall if you need anything.”
The key slid into the lock on the outside of the door. The neighbor was actually going to come inside. Morgan weighed his options as quickly as he could. Escape was out of the cards. Physical assault seemed like a horrible idea, and a way to only attract more attention to himself. His charms were so much more effective on women; he didn’t want to risk it not working completely, not with the girl asleep on the couch. Not the best look. Instead, he flipped off the lights and found a shadow near the door. The orange glow trickling through the window prevented the room from being pitch black. However, Morgan had become adept at melding with the darkness.
A sliver of light peeked into the apartment and grew wider as the door opened. The neighbor stepped inside and headed straight for the kitchen. Morgan moved like a blur, silently, rapidly, and out the door before it even closed. Then, it clicked shut. He found himself in the hallway and looked towards both ends, checking for the stairs and any other nosy inhabitants. He was alone. A blink later, he was in the stairwell.
Morgan exhaled. It was perhaps a close call, and one that he could have handled differently. Considering the circumstances, and how long it had been since he’d been in such a situation, it could have gone much worse. His hunting form would come back to him.
He took the stairs at a human’s pace past the lobby and into the parking garage. There was no need for anyone to see him leave the building. The gate closed behind him and his feet hit city owned cement. They were footsteps of freedom and a clean getaway. He took a moment to appreciate the open air once again.
The night had started off poorly thanks to that loathsome Coven meeting. They got worse when his blood supply ran out. Nothing he could do about that, though. At least now it seemed like things were starting to look up.
The Vine Tower was a stone’s throw from the red line, which made Morgan’s domain that much closer. The terminal was mostly deserted. The only time he ever saw it truly packed was when he was first waking up or heading back home for the day. Then, it was swaths of suits and loafers and pencil skirts and heels. In the middle of the night, it was the homeless, the displaced, and the drunks. They paid him no mind on the train ride over, and he returned the favor.
The stairs out of the station connected to the heart of the beast. Multilevel department stores, stars and handprints all over the marble ground, and hundreds of people, even at that h
our. Then there were the lights. They were so numerous and so bright. He had picked a hell of a spot to put his flag down. Maybe that wasn’t entirely fair. Morgan had planted his flag a long time ago, and the rest of the madness had sprung up all around it. If such a reaction was still possible, the whole scene might have made him nauseous.
The majority of the geography was useless to him. It was all shuttered souvenir shops and wax museums. There were bars, sure, but damned if he would spend the next week in such places. He decided instead to become reacquainted with side streets and the back alleys in the area. At least they provided shelter from all the light.
Morgan worked to create a mental map of the entire area. He traced each block with his footsteps and became nearly lost in his work until a couple at the end of the street shook him out of it. They seemed to be bickering about something, but he couldn’t tell what. Normally, he wouldn’t care either way. There was something about the girl that piqued his interest, even from that far away. Something radiated from her, some energy that was foreign yet familiar, and it spoke to him. Why could he feel her? She wasn’t a vampire, and he could practically hear the rhythm of her pulse.
Time was running out on his night. Still, Morgan had to know more. But he needed to be reasonable. He could use it as an opportunity to test his tracking ability as well as his covertness. Perhaps it was the fresh blood talking, but the sun could wait.
The couple walked into a parking garage and the two of them became more agitated. After Morgan heard a scream emanating from several floors below, he understood why. He considered sprinting ahead to investigate, but thought better of it when he saw the couple’s reaction to the cry. At first, he focused on the weapon that the girl pulled so confidently from inside her jacket. His attention quickly shifted to the way her body moved as she took off running. She had a certain elegance and fluidity to her movements, something that most humans lacked. It was a vampire trait, but it was becoming clear that these people were far more interested in hunting his kind.