“Even Judas was sacred, even he had a mission,” so saith Father Marshall, he handed me the Mark 45 when I was fourteen. I had to shoot things that looked just like men in the face until their blood was caked an eighth of an inch thick on my skin.
She grabs Roberto by the wrists and pulls his arms down and out as if she’s going to tear them off. Her jaw looks as if it’s broken, opening wider and wider.
Fuck it.
I don’t hesitate, I move forward, I’m fast but she’s faster. I pull the Mark 45 up and sight her down. One in the head and it’s all over, we can go home. We can rest. She pulls Roberto’s body up and then tosses him like he was a Frisbee. I feint towards him and then quickly move to my right out of his flight path. I pull the trigger and fire. The Mark 45 is a hell of a weapon, sounds like a cannon mixed with an atomic bomb. She moves in a way that pulls my stomach to the back of my throat. The bullet goes past her and slams into the side of the club. The world shakes.
The police will be here soon, poking their heads into the shadows, where they don’t belong. I have special clearance from old Rome, but still, I’ve spent plenty of nights in holding cells with drunks passed out or sobbing into toilets, waiting for that clearance to be approved. I stop short of running into where she was standing before, the rain and the snow and the ice feels as if it’s burrowing holes into my face. The barrel of the Mark 45 smokes.
“I know your kind hunter, and I will not be that easily defeated” she says.
Really, did she just say that, come on? Then I notice she isn’t in front of me, she’s behind me. Fuck, rule number one with monsters is, don’t let them get behind you. Rule two through five is the same as rule one. I flick my wrist and pivot; she doesn’t expect the bladed cross dagger. That’s my own special trick. Father Marshall would not have approved, but fuck him, he’s dead.
The dagger cleaves into her left arm and through her flesh; it finds its way deep down and stops at bone, I try to push it further but can’t. I’m getting too old for this. She lets loose another eardrum shattering screech. I catch a glimpse of Roberto’s body as I bring the Mark 45 up to find her face. Roberto is a pile in the opening of the alley way, a bag of meat with a peaceful smile on its face.
Her eyes bore into me and she tries her best to push me away, I look into her eyes and push back. I stare at her and stare her down; I stare into her and through her. She flinches first but slams her right clawed fist into my stomach and I let go of the dagger. I can smell the frying bacon smell of her skin starting to cook where the dagger is buried in her forearm. I smile. “What are you,” she asks while trying to make herself look human again, I hear people running down the alley, probably cops trying to figure out who has the improvised explosives. Her Flesh turns from snow white to grey and wing to skin but she can’t push through the pain, she’s young, maybe a couple hundred years at the most. She’s almost not worth my time.
“I am the beginning and the end, I am the alpha and the omega,” I say to her and she looks at me as if I’ve just said something in another language, which I have. Latin to be exact; the young ones never learn to appreciate history.
She stops for a second and then realizes she’s heard the phrase somewhere before, somewhere in her past. But I’m done, I’ve pulled the trigger.
Click. Click. Boom.
The slug rips a hole in her face and explodes inside her head. There’s a great nearly volcanic release of blood, it spreads out and splatters everything within a six foot radius, me included. I walk calmly over to her body and pull the dagger out of her arm and reload the perfectly honed weapon back up into the release mechanism hidden under inside my coat sleeve. I hear the footsteps falling closer behind me so I holster the Mark 45, grab Roberto’s body and sling him over my shoulder. He feels like a garbage bag full of water. Bile pools at the back of my throat but Roberto deserves something better than a pauper’s hole.
I look over at the steam coming off her body, I watch as it begins to rise and curl into the cold air. I pull out the pack of cigarettes from my overcoat and light up. The thin blue smoke mixes with hers and I inhale. When the cops find her, me and what’s left of Roberto are gone. When they’re still scratching their heads in the alley I’ll have given last rites, burned and buried Roberto’s ashes deep in the ground. When they’re filing a Jane Doe report on our target, trying to pull hundred year old prints off her burnt husk of a hand, attempting to match dental records to someone who was born before their grandparents were in this country, I’ll be on a private flight back to the school, spring semester starts soon.
“Do you reject Satan and all his works?” So askith Father Marshall and I say, “I do.”
“Repeat then, after me,” so saith Father Marshall and I do.
“O Holy spirit of God;
Whatsoever You forbid me,
I will renounce.
And whatsoever You commend me,
In Your strength I will do.
Lead me then
Unto the fullness of Your truth.”
The Vampire Hunter’s Requiem
John X. Grey
The solitary old man stood on a partially-broken sidewalk, staring up at an angled three-story building that had seen better days situated along the edge of New Orleans’ famous French Quarter. Its northwest wedge angle faced the corners of North Peters and Iberville Streets a few blocks from the mighty Mississippi River and Wolderberg Park, each window covered by nailed up planks from inside or horizontal Venetian blinds. There were wrought iron railings along the second-story balcony rusted or the paint pealing, a stone foundation and whitewashed walls also in need of cleaning or repainting. Jack Petrov saw flickering lights behind upper story windows to a loft room, the neighborhood otherwise generally darker than more vibrant scenes elsewhere on Halloween night, but his necessary work required shadows and concealment from the normal world. This retired private investigator and vampire hunter had come here to slay his wife.
Daphne and Peter would’ve insisted on accompanying me. This is something I must do alone. I don’t want my daughter to see what Angelique has become since…
Adjusting his gray trench coat’s lapels and pulling that old-fashioned gray fedora’s brim lower over tired blue-gray eyes (having seen many horrors since discovering inherited vampire hunting instincts from his mother’s father), the 6’ 2” white-haired ex-policeman and private eye looked both ways, but found little vehicle traffic to this semi-deserted intersection and crossed toward the former bawdy house (built when Spain still ruled here). Fixated on the peeling white-painted front double doors with worn brass knobs and fixtures at the corner entrance under its faded green awning, Petrov never noticed two shadows half-a-block northwest on Iberville Street observing his entry into the dilapidated building.
Maybe I should have used the knocker outside to announce myself, the old man joked within as he forced the unlocked, humidity-swollen entrance with one hard shove, feeling the weapons carried beneath that coat for tonight’s work, they probably already know I’m here.
An experienced vampire hunter of fifty years, Jack had brought a short-handled double-bladed battleaxe, the dozen rounded sharpened wooden stakes, a short-bladed sword, the Special Forces knife (gift from his older son Frank, a disabled veteran), a chrome-plated .45 caliber 1911 Colt pistol, collapsible automatic hand crossbow and the silver crucifix on its neck chain hidden under his open-collar white dress shirt (he stopped wearing ties six years earlier). Petrov had courage for this work ever since facing Cossack vampires in northern Russia as a US Army Corporal, but left this matter unfinished due to his broken marriage’s nostalgia, letting second wife Angelique escape after destroying her master Uriah Ives in 1963.
Killing that 19th Century pimp and some of his cronies was easier than the woman I still loved. Do I finally have the guts to finish this business?
Brushing dust and cobwebs from gray slacks above scuffed black shoes moving through this whorehouse’s former entrance parlor and creeping carefully to
ward the long, wide staircase leading to a second floor balcony, the once grand furniture all around him covered by sheets, and mirrors or paintings streaked in cobwebs, Petrov overheard celebration sounds above, realizing he might still have surprise. He ascended that staircase no longer caring about his fate.
The visitor took a left hallway toward an L-shaped intersection across rat-eaten, faded carpet, past broken gaslight fixtures on peeling dirty-papered walls and closed door rooms where this coven slept during daylight hours (and ladies of the evening satisfied their customers’ desires decades earlier). He stared through blinds of one hallway window looking down on North Peters Street and glimpsed a young couple holding hands crossing toward that sidewalk below.
Packer assured me he was taking my daughter from the Hotel Monteleone out to dinner at Arnaud’s tonight and maybe viewing Halloween festivities afterwards. Still can’t accept they do what old folks in my day called “shacking up.” That could be them down there, but I can’t tell in those shadows. Forget it. Remember why you’re here—Angelique must be destroyed.
Turning right, Petrov saw a straight staircase leading up to his destination. He had come here and scouted the area earlier, after arriving in New Orleans with (surviving twin) daughter Daphne and her live-in boyfriend, New York journalist Peter Packer, after a cross-country trip from Gotham, New Jersey (briefly detoured in Eastern Kentucky by an unexpected case).
The vampire hunter could have dispatched this entire evil brood of thirty-eight including their Mistress Angelique before sundown, but preferred to face them at the height of their power stimulating his aging body into almost superhuman vampire hunting action. He missed the thrill of slaughtering undead, having only one other hunt since facing one ancient master vampire who almost made Daphne his new bride at Gotham University back in July 1967.
Reaching one landing to this building’s third floor loft, Petrov heard the group playing some modern music (on a record-turntable sound system and extra speakers)—Iron Butterfly’s In-a-godda-da-vida/In the Garden of Eden—and crept around old furniture, crates and boxes before glimpsing dancing figures at the attic’s center and far end in costumes for Halloween.
Okey dokey, it’s show time, Jack. Slay ’em in the aisles.
The hunter took his crossbow, surveying thirty-eight bloodsucker targets celebrating All Hallows Eve in the Big Easy (like thousands within the French Quarter’s other parts). Some were dancing together or alone while others watched. Tied or chained to the support pillars across this room’s center were the half-dozen naked humans of various races from New Orleans’ melting pot, gagged with handkerchiefs and scarves. Seated at the loft room’s rear on an old prop velvet-upholstered throne (decorated with real human skulls across its headrest and each armrest’s end) and drinking (presumably blood) from a golden goblet, Angelique was dressed as Queen Marie Antoinette, complete with powdered wig and that golden-white hoop skirted ball gown sporting the plunging neckline, and silver slippers on white silk stockings. Her big blue eyes had lost the tired appearance Jack recalled from being a stay-at-home wife and mother (different after having grown up in the relatively exciting world of one small Louisiana-based circus).
She’s pretty as the day we met back in ’47, and just like the last time I saw her.
The eye wrinkles were replaced by radiant youth, and Petrov imagined the golden-brown curls beneath that wig had become freshly lustrous, since her particular curse of vampirism made its victim appear youthful forever. Petrov noticed his wife lavishing attentions on costumed men dancing past their vampire mistress accepting kisses and tasting her cup, but just one stayed close by Angelique’s left armrest, the curly-blonde afro-styled young man with long sideburns looking tall and fit dressed like some Glam Rock performer in the purple sequined jumpsuit with black platform shoes and Elton John-style star sunglasses. The room was lit by a dozen torches in old-fashioned iron wall sconces and one wood-burning stove, giving things an eerie orange glow.
When one of the male vampires, clad as an old-fashioned 19th Century New York police officer complete with nightstick, noticed this new arrival, Petrov already had one stake out and poised to strike, impaling the fiend through his imitation tin badge for getting the point around a sternum into the heart. He screamed and fell backwards clutching the object with blood flowing, but proved incapable of removing it.
“Say good night, Angelique,” Jack declared, shifting the crucifix he wore front and center over the shirt and pulling out that small automatic crossbow (containing its twelve-shot modified clip of 6” wooden bolts) in the right grip, before firing it to slay one female vampire in her black leather cat costume, “the party’s over!”
Petrov swiftly targeted another eleven monsters with that rapid-fire trigger, hitting every single time on target (due to residual World War I marksmanship skills and the vampire hunter’s instinct inherited from Russian grandfather Dr. Ulvanov) as those costumed vampires writhed in agony before they ceased moving.
“The party’s not over until I say it is, Jack.” Angelique was defiant with her slight Cajun accent, even as thirteen minions had fallen to this estranged husband’s amazing reflexes, “take the fool alive and bring him to me.”
Bashing one daring undead male in a Spanish conquistador’s outfit with the crossbow, disarming him of his curved broadsword and almost breaking the man’s hook nose in knocking that adversary aside, Jack drew the battleaxe and decapitated another male vampire clad as the clown with pointed hat and white frilly rainbow jumpsuit including big floppy shoes. He next staked a buxom naked lady vampire in psychedelic body paint who reached out at him.
I may be older, but I’m not getting caught easily, Darling.
Twenty-one remaining bloodsuckers soon had Petrov surrounded. Angelique and her Glam rock-clad ally (removing his sunglasses) watched as the hunter advanced inside that room, until the one Spanish conquistador blocking the nearer exit fell to a crossbow bolt penetrating his breastplate armor from behind and collapsed gurgling blood.
What the hell? That wasn’t mine.
Jack smiled and cringed at the same time seeing 5’ 6” Daphne Petrov, in the purple mini-dress with a red horizontal stripe at the hem and 2” plum pumps with the tan fringe jacket and large black handbag crossed over the left shoulder. She handed a wide-eyed (green behind those round gold-framed glasses) wood crucifix-adorned 6’ Peter Packer near her the second automatic crossbow. He wore his blue blazer and slacks, brown sweater vest, open-neck paisley shirt with orange ascot and brown loafers. Jack often regretted agreeing to Packer’s interview on this trip while Daphne was at the wheel of her man’s blue 1973 Ford Galaxie.
“Daddy,” the brave young woman, bobbed brown hair held off her forehead by a violet headband above ice-blue eyes, asked him, “why’d you sneak off from our hotel without…?”
She paused, recognizing the head vampire (from old photos and memories) rising off that wooden throne prop (but not the blonde man at her mother’s side), and soon had two stakes held in each hand, as some vampires here confronted these new arrivals.
“Get your man out of here, Sweetheart,” Jack staked another lady vampire (that redhead dressed in royal-blue silk lingerie and red heels) with a swift stab, while decapitating one bald-shaven man (his Medieval armored suit had its helmet removed), “I’ve got this situation under control.”
Now I have to worry about their safety too.
“How appropriate, Jack,” Angelique taunted him, even as he glimpsed fear within her big eyes watching followers being destroyed, “risking our only surviving bitch puppy’s life, just like letting Cassandra drown on that Florida vacation to become a monster.”
Bearing scars of the past, Petrov despised his wife for dredging up their family’s painful memories to rattle him, losing the axe in severing a heavy vampire’s muscular neck (dressed like a caveman with his right-shouldered black-spotted orange calf-length tunic and brown fur boots) as he swung a club, and soon drawing his short sword to replace it. He war
ded back opponents with blade and cross while keeping one stake handy for eliminating superior numbers, turning first clockwise and then counterclockwise despite tiring in the macabre slaughter dance.
Peter managed to wound two vampires, while Daphne staked the black-clad witch in the pointed hat and burnt a Vegas showgirl using her own silver crucifix necklace until tackled onto the floor. The woman’s colleague finished that fiend with a bolt through the heart from the right side under an armpit, but then needed Daphne’s aid facing the wounded bloodsuckers (a man and woman dressed in tight red and white matching leotards as ballet dancers).
Jack lost his fedora to a dominatrix-clad female’s whip, before staking her and slicing off a cowboy vampire’s head beneath the ten-gallon black hat. He still had four undead enemies left surrounding him as seven others fled with Angelique and her male sidekick toward the staircase opposite from one Jack and his companions used getting here.
I can’t let that bloodsucking bitch escape again.
“Get these captives out of here,” the old man pointed out for Daphne and Peter the half-dozen restrained victims with his short sword, after they finished those dancers off with stake and crossbow bolt together, “and call the police.”
Maybe they’ll survive this night after all.
Staking a vampire biker in the German Army helmet as that fiend used a knife to slice Petrov narrowly across the back; the hunter chopped one short pirate’s head away through the jaw parrying his cutlass, causing the flailing body to crash into the other duo here—a magician and Confederate officer costumed vampires—where they landed prone on that hardwood floor. Jack dropped the bloodstained sword and, pinning them with both knees, drove two more stakes through their hearts. He then glimpsed that curly blonde vampire taking one of the dozen torches lighting this loft and setting fire to the dry aged wood floorboards. A lady vampire in her Charlie Chaplin Little Tramp costume knocked over that stove next, spreading its coals to generate more flames covering Angelique’s escape.
Both Barrels of Monster Hunter Legends (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 1) Page 26