“I’d be ‘appy to ‘elp, I’m sure,” she responded as Connor decided subtlety was a waste of time and flipped open his coat to indicate the button fly of his high-waisted breeches.
Pearl’s triumphant grin turned Connor’s stomach. He allowed her fingers to walk like bony spider’s legs down over the cotton fabric of his dress shirt.
“My,” she breathed in a sickly-sweet tone. “You looks after yerself. Rock ‘ard those muscles.”
Connor smiled as her hands snaked up under his waistcoat and she reached for the waistband of his pants. Closing his long fingers around hers, trapping them, he said, “Not here. I have a theater box... if you fancy?”
Pearl’s eyes glittered with beads of jet. “Never been in a theater, not even up in the gods, let alone the stalls.”
He smoothly turned away, letting her fingers slip from his as he set off along the sidewalk, jerking his head for her to follow. “Come along, Pearl. You only live once.” He laughed to smother the bitterness in his tone.
The artificial light spilling out from the theater foyer onto the sidewalk captured the first glimmer of suspicion crossing Pearl’s rouged face as Connor walked past the doorman, touching his hat in greeting, and disappeared around the corner.
“‘Ere,” Pearl spluttered in protest, hurrying along at the doorman’s scowl.
“We don’t want your sort here, miss.”
“Alright, keep yer ‘air on,” she muttered, rushing around the corner as though Connor and his wallet were slipping from her fingers.
She collided with Connor’s chest and his hands closed over her arms as he steadied her.
“Well, here we are, Pearl.” Connor bent to breathe seductively into her ear, chasing goose bumps over her dry skin, “Wait here, I’ll be back directly.”
Pearl turned her face and her lips grazed Connor’s cheek. Her heart rate quickened as he stopped breathing to keep her stench at bay, and kissed her.
Poor girl. Even the string of her sticky saliva clinging to his lips could not turn the feeling of regret to revulsion.
“Wait here,” he whispered, and then he vanished.
Pearl had time to turn her head and wonder before a crow-black form collided with her chest, breaking three of her ribs as it slammed her into the wall, yanked her rag doll-floppy stunned body forward again, and threw her down onto the ground twenty yards further along the dark alley.
Straddling her hips and staring into her petrified face, in three seconds, Jack had used his thumb to burrow into her voice box, killing the scream rattling inside her throat.
Ten yards away, buried in the deepest shadow, Connor wondered why his heart felt like it had doubled in size, or weight, at least. He felt like shit. Why the hell can’t the undead council do their own dirty work? He sighed, having gone this far, the very least he owed Pearl was that she not have died in vain.
He waited for Jack to finish the kill. Having used a blade to slice open her abdomen, Connor understood the hard bite Jack made into the belly, near her womb. The tissue there is always plump, always at some stage of preparing for the joy of life, and Jack’s tastes are for the iron enriched parts of the female body. Thin arterial blood could no longer satisfy his deformed brain cells.
Watching until Jack left the scene, Connor faced what he had done.
The weight in his chest dropped him down to his haunches as his eyes roamed over the body. Taking out a handkerchief, he took a moment to clean the blood from Pearl’s blank face, the desiccated tissue already shrinking to cling tightly to her skull. Dragging his cold fingertips down from brow to cheek, he closed her eyelids, veiling the black pools of her blown pupils which glistened with accusation.
“I’m sorry, Pearl,” he murmured.
Rising swiftly, he set off in pursuit of Jack, and found him, within seconds, vomiting in the alley behind the Astoria Theater, of all places. Certainly a well chosen spot. Puns tumbled over in Connor’s mind as a distraction from the deed he had yet to perform.
After encore number sixteen, Jack’s final curtain call. Connor was about to enter stage left.
The metallic stench of regurgitated liver shrank Connor’s sinuses in disgust, curling his lip in a sneer. Jack had returned to eating; a classic sign of vampire dementia. Connor had seen it once before. The craving for blood is so overwhelming the vampire’s instincts step over the line into addiction. They still drink the blood, but in desperation, are compelled to eat the flesh.
Of course, absorbing fluids as rehydration was one thing. Digestion is an altogether different process, and vampires do not have that function. So, here knelt Jack, vomiting up the indigestible pulped liver of Pearl like a bulimic regretting every last mouthful.
Connor as an executioner was an ironic choice. Firstly, because the newspapers had Jack down as a surgeon because of the clinical disemboweling of victims, and secondly, because Connor was a surgeon and the butchery he had just seen was an insult to his profession.
Jack dropped to his knees, retching, his hands massaging the offal, trying to reinsert it into his mouth even as it flooded out. Connor materialized as an ethereal face floating above a body of shadow. The moon glinted on the stiletto blade in Connor’s hand, sharpened to a needle fine surgical implement. Unseen by hapless Jack, Connor pressed the tip into the space at the first vertebrae, where the curve of the skull ends. With the heel of his hand, he hammered hard on the hilt and drove the knife up into Jack’s brain stem, severing the spinal cord. Jack collapsed face down into his last meal, and lay stone still.
Connor ignored the blood seeping into the knee of his black gabardine pants where it rested on the floor beside Jack. He pushed the knife deeper up into the skull and stirred it through the jelly of his brain. Crushing his skull would cause suspicion, but death was only a word for vampires. The devil is in the detail, thought Connor. Death was the termination of brain function, anything else was just an eternity of mistakes replaying behind a frozen inanimate facade. Even Jack does not deserve to be buried alive.
Rising smoothly to his feet, Connor slipped back into the shadows, and whisked away along the dark streets. Being a cold night, Jack’s chilled firm tissues would be attributed to the freezing temperature, so for now, vampire society could heave a collective sigh of relief.
Buttoning up his long coat as he moved hid the blood-soaked fabric at his knees from view. It was a simple act to saunter towards the wide promenade along the embankment of the River Thames, and to hurl the blade into the middle of the gunmetal-gray boiling current.
A shrill shrieking sound sliced through the night air, and Connor smiled.
Nothing conveyed panic and mayhem as surely as the repeated blasts of a policeman’s whistle. Connor could almost see the flushed face of the copper, blowing hard, and trying to keep his own rising panic under control.
Who have they stumbled across, I wonder. Pearl or Jack. Connor hoped it was Pearl. She deserved that, to not be left lying in the alley until frost bit into her as spitefully as Jack had.
Connor headed home. He had done everything Principal Julian and Malachi had asked of him. He could not be happy about it, and he hoped that vampires such as Jack were rare.
But for now, their secrets were safe.
Death of Connor Sanderson: Prequel to Fire & Ice Series (Fire & Ice - Prequel) Page 21