The Seeker

by Martyn Taylor

  No matter how often he heard the sound – and he had heard it a lot – that high, ululating combination of rage, desperation and fear always sent a shiver of mixed anticipation and trepidation down his spine. As the vampire sank to its knees, Call came to his feet and quickly cut across its arms to the bone, sending sprays of hot blood fountaining out, which he managed to avoid, and effectively disabling the creature until its powers of recovery restored it, by which time he would have killed it.

  He stepped around so they were facing each other and squatted down so their eyes were level. The malevolent, marrow deep hatred and fear flaring out from the vampire’s eyes might have given him pause, once upon a time, but not now. In the eight years he had been a Seeker he had long since given up having the least concern for the feelings of something he was about to kill.

  He put a blade beneath its chin and raised it. It had been an almost handsome human being, good looking in an anodyne, too perfect and symmetrical fashion, but there was weakness about the mouth and eyes that precluded true beauty. It had been too vain for that, like most vampires.

  “Your friends,” he said, “the foursome with the pet on a chain. Where do they nest?”

  The vamp tried to snarl, which was difficult with the blade forcing its chin upwards. “Why should I tell you anything?” it hissed.

  “Because I will reward you if you do.”

  “What reward could you give me?”

  “I can kill you slowly, very, very slowly…” Call pushed the blade forward and upwards, so the point was just drawing a thread of blood from the vamp’s throat while the silver coating was sending almost uncontrollable shivers through it. “… or I can kill you quickly. You won’t feel a thing, I promise.” He smiled at this, because it was a lie. He had never killed a vampire without it dying in the exquisite agony they deserved. It wasn’t just vampires who could twist the truth into all sorts of plausible impossibilities.

  “If I tell you, you promise?” The light had died in the vampire’s eyes as it had reconciled itself to the inevitable. It had two choices. Heads it was going to lose. Tails it wasn’t going to win.

  “I promise.” Call smiled, and it was a genuine smile, even though his promise was counterfeit.

  “Five of them, two men – one of them black, coloured if you like – and two women, with a child on a chain? Them?”

  “Sounds like them.”

  Call could almost see the thought processes chasing each other across the vamp’s face until it relaxed as it made a decision.

  “They…”

  Roxane materialised behind the vamp, bending forward and wrenching its head from its shoulders. There was a fountain of dust and flames and soot, mixed with sparkling reddish purple blood that evaporated almost instantly. Then there was just Call looking up at Roxane, his right blade poised in mid-air.

  The expression of savage, transported exultation was utterly terrifying. He was reminded that, whatever the disguise she wore, whatever the impression she gave, Roxane was a monster and a more formidable monster than he had ever met before. He allowed his blade to sink until its tip was resting on the steaming, smoking, hissing floor where gobbets of vampire blood were dissipating.

  “Why did you do that? He was just about to tell me where the nest is.”

  Roxane shivered, as though emerging from some transcendent state, then produced her dark glasses from her bag and put them over her eyes. “He was?”

  “Yeah, he was.”

  She stepped away and stood silent for a moment. “I am sorry. I allowed myself to be carried away. I had forgotten what it is like to be transported by blood lust.”

  “That wasn’t blood lust,” Call snarled, rising upright. “You didn’t consume a single drop of any of their blood. That was just slaughter.”

  She peered at him over the top of those glasses and he shivered as he looked into those icy, featureless eyes. “Are you telling me that you never get lost in the frenzy of killing, transported by the exhilaration of it all?”

  “Damn right I am!” Killing vampires was a necessary thing, and it appeared that he had no choice about doing it. Someone or something had touched their forefinger to his forehead and declared him to be ‘the vampire hunter’.

  But he did not enjoy it. Killing did not thrill him, or make him feel more of a man as it did some. Whatever they might be when he brought them to their end, every vampire had once been a human being and he remembered enough of his upbringing as a pale, non-church going Christian believing ‘thou shalt not kill’ to feel a pang of regret every time he killed one, justifying it to himself by the other, human lives he saved by his transgression against a golden mean.

  He could see each and every face contorted by agony and the certainty of extinction whenever he allowed his guard to fall. He was a butcher, he knew, little better than the things he butchered, but it was that small amount of being better that got him through those long, cold, lonely nights of doubt. He did not allow himself to be transported by blood lust, or to lose himself in the madness of mayhem, to become the berserker she had become. Sometimes he felt the difference between himself and the monsters was very, very indistinct and he did not dare let it go. If he crossed into their territory there would be no coming back.

  “I regret every single one of them I have to kill. Yeah, yeah, I know everything you’re going to say, but that is the truth. Every one of them I have on my conscience.”

  She stared at him for a long time, him unable to see anything of her eyes through those reflecting glasses she wore. It was like being stared at by a statue, fixed, immutable, and he realised it was not the first time he had thought of a statue with regard to Roxane. Perhaps that was how she wanted him to regard her, as a superior being, to be placed on a pedestal and worshipped.

  Well sod that for a game of soldiers. She was not though, she was a vampire, a monster and he was a vampire hunter. He might like her more than any other vampire he had ever met and he might neither want to kill her or be able to do so, but if the time ever came, he would give it his the shot. If he didn’t succeed, well, like Freddie sang, ‘who wants to live forever?’

  She appeared to relax, to soften, then reached forward and touched his cheek with her fingers. They felt human enough to him then.

  “I am sorry, Robert Call. I have disappointed you. I have made your life more difficult.”

  He shook his head. “He would probably have lied to me. He was a vampire, after all.”

  “I do believe you are learning, Robert Call.”

  He thought of some jibe about being a fast learner but a slow loser but said nothing, unable to bear being in that charnel house for another second, stepping past her and making for the door, which he found to still be locked.

  The aftermath of an execution always left him feeling wretched, almost certain he was damned even though he had only rid the world of monsters, making it a safer place for other human beings. It was many, many years since had had set foot in a church, but he had never rid himself of the churching he received as a child. He was not looking forward to explaining himself to St Peter when his time came.

  He had never felt as bad as this, however, as though hands had grasped his skull and were slowly, inexorably crushing it and him. One vampire, two were as many as he had ever accounted for at the same time.

  This massacre felt as though it was more than a quantum shift; that he had gone from wielding a surgically precise blade to dropping a nuclear weapon from thirty thousand feet at no risk to him. Or perhaps it was akin to a drone strike on a wedding outside Kabul, piloted from a container somewhere in Nevada.

  “Don’t you want their gold?” she called after him. “It is yours by right, after all.”

  Of course, nobody innocent had died down there. They were all vampires and he was being self-indulgently miserable.

  “I want none of it.” He did not turn to look in her direction. The door clicked unlocked, and he opened it, aware of a rapid whirl of air behind him. If she wanted thei
r gold, she was welcome to it.

  She joined him out on the street. The bouncer was nowhere to be seen. The queue was almost out of the door of the kebab shop, the gangs of young people of most of the races who made South London their home looking them up and down, weighing them in the balance to decide whether they could be worth rolling. Call was uncertain whether he wanted them not to be so stupid or to have a try so he could teach them a lesson. Roxane slipped her arm through his and marched him back towards the Green.

  “I’m surprised you don’t just torch the place,” he muttered.

  She stopped and turned around to look back the way they had come, forcing him to do the same. “There are children in those flats,” she said, “innocent children, their parents and grandparents. They have done nothing to deserve dying as collateral damage for this night’s work. And you consider me a monster.”

  Call’s guts wrenched and rumbled. He felt suddenly wretched. She was right, of course. He should have considered the possibilities.

  A black taxi cab pulled up alongside them, even though Call had not hailed one - and what it doing that far south of the river anyway, in minicab territory. Roxane opened the door and climbed in, only to wave her hand in Call’s face when he tried to follow her. “You must make your own way home, Robert Call. You have thinking to do.”

  The door closed and the cab drove away towards Peckham. He expected the cabbie would turn around in the entrance to Camberwell Grove. Around there might be minicab country, but further east, among the Stakhanovite tower blocks and the large family homes converted into a dozen bed sitters each, that was bandit country even for cabbies. Police cars got stoned down there, fire engines turned over and set ablaze, ambulances looted for whatever drugs they might have aboard.

  Rain began to fall as he stood waiting for the lights to change allowing him to cross the road to his bus stop. The rain drops were heavy and slow, pregnant, and he was soaked to the skin before he got under the sparse cover of the shelter with its cracked and clouded polycarbonate windows. That seemed somehow appropriate.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In a doorway on the opposite side of Camberwell New Road four pairs of eyes had watched Roxane and Call emerge from the Green Dragon Club and walk back towards the Green.

  “Follow them,” Lucyfer instructed.

  “What if they separate?” whined Kiki.

  “Improvise,” Lucyfer hissed, suggested it would be the worse for them if anything did go amiss. Kiki cringed. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  Kiki scuttled out of the doorway as fast as her short legs could carry her without actually running. Roland hesitated, looking stone-faced at Lucyfer just long enough for her to feel uncomfortable. Thus far in their relationship he had been amenable to her wishes but she did not believe she would enjoy the experience should he dig in his heels on any subject.

  He was, after all, older as a blood drinker than she was, and she was beginning to realise that the older one grew the more deceptive a drinker became. Without any change of expression he turned and strode after Kiki, catching her before she reached the end of the block.

  There was a pub on the other side of the road, ordinarily filled with food just ready, willing and eager to be drunk as the increasingly nihilistic youth of today seemed to be, but they never entered. It was also the local copper’s pub, and while no policeman worried them it was just as well not to tempt fate.

  “Shall we investigate?” she invited Gabriel. It was no more his given name than Lucyfer was hers, but she had never enquired about his human past, and not just because she was not interested.

  Build like a brick outhouse with razor cut dirty blond hair and the pale vampire eyes that grew paler with each passing kill, Gabriel wore the tight suit and Crombie overcoat that had been the uniform of an East End wide boy when his father was one. He had been the image of a man most men would choose to avoid arguing with before he had been turned.

  Now he was the image of the vampire most vampires would avoid arguing with, someone who killed first and left others to ask the questions later. He nodded, and followed Lucyfer over the road. The bouncer looked hard at both of them as they approached but Gabriel nodded and reached out to put a carefully folded twenty pound note into the man’s breast pocket and then went down the stairs. He was almost certain he recognised him from the old days, although he could not put a name to him and Camberwell had never been his stamping ground back then.

  They stood in the empty room and looked around themselves. Gabriel bent down and picked up the shattered remains of the barman’s baseball bat. Gabriel blew out his breath in a long whistle. Little more than five minutes had passed after he saw Roxane and Call enter the club until they left. In those minutes they had accounted for eleven vampires.

  “They’re good,” he muttered.

  “Good!” Lucyfer all but screamed, turning on him. “Good? She’s a four hundred year old and he’s a Seeker. Good doesn’t come anywhere near it. They would kill us and not stop for breath.”

  “Lucky for us we decided to stay on the other side of the road when the saw them, then,” Gabriel grinned. Even before being given the taste for blood he had been no stranger to bloodshed, with a nasty reputation as a cruel man who never gave a sucker an even break and chose his fights very, very carefully. He bent down and picked up an elaborate golden tiepin in the form of a galloping horse with diamond eyes and ruby hooves. Even by vampire standards it was an excessive example of bling and had been Joseph Jordison’s pride and joy, a reminder of the days when he was a jockey, and a good one, before a bookie shopped him for betting on his own races and life went downhill rapidly until undeath took him. Gabriel’s nest had never got along with Joseph’s and he could only feel satisfaction that they had died at the hands of the old one and her tame hunter, rather than his tribe. He would shed no tears when he had to kill Lucyfer and Roland, Kiki and the appalling Rosa Jane, but until that moment came they were his and he felt a sort of responsibility for them. “Lucky for us, unlucky for them.”

  Lucyfer grinned up at him from her scrabbling for gold left behind by the old one on the floor still warm from evaporated vampire blood. She could be the most unpleasant bitch when she chose.

  “Let’s get out of here before brainbox upstairs decides to come and see why everything is so quiet.”

  She showed her fangs and ran her tongue over them as though that was exactly what she wanted to happen. He shook his head and turned away. There was a time and a place for everything, even feeding. If he could see this was neither, why couldn’t she?

  He went to the door at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Just a minute,” she said, carrying on scuttling around the room, reaching under tables and benches, scooping up gold and jewellery hiding there. “Just because that high and mighty pair couldn’t be bothered to collect what is theirs is no reason we shouldn’t help ourselves.”

  Gabriel sighed and went up the stairs. Common as muck, that was Lucyfer, and she out on airs and graces with him just because he’d been born on a council estate in Streatham and she came from Ladbroke Grove.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Call decided he was in no fit condition to risk encountering the press of his fellow humanity that he was bound to meet if he entrusted himself to public transport even at this time; even in the rain, the walk home would do him good.

  There was also the possibility, even the hope, that the rain would wash his face clean of the dirt he felt he had waded through in the slaughter inside the Green Dolphin, the breeze waft the stench from his nostrils.

  After a few hundred metres he had to admit the rain was having no effect on the ordure, and that was because it existed only in his imagination. When they died for the second, final time vampires left nothing behind except the psychic disruption that always followed in their wake, the echoes of their passing, the equivalent of the disturbance to the cosmic background radiation caused by the explosive death of a star.

  According to his fathe
r’s journal – which he still had to make himself read to the end – he had never rid himself of the conviction that an execution was something that soiled him, spiritually, and that the guilt he felt was real, justified. His own eight years of vampire hunting had only confirmed his father’s experience. All the rain was doing was making him wet.

  A couple of blocks later he realised he was not the only one getting wet. Oh, they were good, sliding from shadow to shadow so stealthy they might almost squeeze between the raindrops, but they were not good enough to keep him from detecting their presence without even turning around to look.

  There were two of those he had seen at The Russia House, one female, the clumsy one, and one male, the slightly built coloured one. He wasn’t surprised they were following him. It stood to reason they would keep the trap they set for him and Roxane under observation – it was arrogance to assume they had seen the nest and the nest members remained oblivious of them, and arrogant presumption, more than anything else, was what might get him killed.

  When the trap failed utterly to contain them they would have to watch to see what they might do next. Ordinarily he would have just lost them, slipped into hiding somewhere while they searched for him and then, when he chose, turn the tables on them, transform from hunted to hunter, when he would kill them, only he had never felt less like killing vampires than he did then, even when he had not known they existed.

  Self-disgust was the most corrosive substance known to man, and unless he rid himself of it quickly it might wear him away to nothing from the inside. So, instead of hiding he picked up his pace, walking as quickly as he could without running. That way they would have to work to keep up. One of the certainties he held about vampires was that – no matter what they had been like when they were alive – they did not like exerting themselves one little bit. Reclining in fin de siècle ennui was more their style than running through the early morning rain. Well, while he was prepared to allow this pair to live on – for the moment – he was not prepared to make anything easy for them.