Blood Hunt

by Christopher Buecheler

  “Too much exposure to me would be bad for your kids,” Two said, smiling archly.

  “It’d be bad for the illusion of normalcy is more the problem,” Sarah said. “You’re hardly the worst thing our kid has been exposed to.”

  “One time this guy on the J Train exposed himself to me,” Molly said. There was a moment of silence following this declaration before Two burst into laughter, then clapped her hands over her mouth. Molly looked perplexed.

  “What?” she asked. “He did!”

  “We believe you, dear,” Sarah said. “It’s just not the best thing to mention in polite company.”

  “Since when am I polite company?” asked Two.

  “Since we promised the state that we’d take care of Molly and try to raise her right,” Rhes said, grinning. He leaned back on the couch, yawned, glanced around at the others. “So … what now?”

  “I think now I get out of here and leave you guys alone for a while,” Two said. “You need to go back to real life. Theroen and I … we don’t know what’s going to happen yet. I don’t have an apartment anymore, so we’re staying at a hotel, but we’ll probably find someplace to live and get my stuff out of storage pretty soon.”

  “You going to bring him around some time?” Sarah asked. “We didn’t have much chance to meet him.”

  “Definitely. He thought maybe you wouldn’t want two vampires showing up so soon after the whole … Aros thing.”

  “Sounds like a considerate guy,” Rhes said.

  “He is.”

  “So what the hell are you doing with him?”

  Two laughed, shook her head, shrugged. “No idea!”

  “What about Tori?” Sarah asked.

  “We’re going to work with the council to try and figure out where she is and what we can do to help her. I don’t know what the hell these Children of the Sun people have put in her head, but there’s gotta be a way to change her mind.”

  “If you can find her,” Rhes said.

  “Right. It sounds like that’s going to be tough. Jakob says it might take years to track them down.”

  “Years? Wow. Well …” said Sarah, “at least you have the time.”

  Two thought of Theroen waiting for her back at the hotel, sitting and reading or perhaps watching television, catching up on the time he had lost. She thought of the life they could now build together, free of Abraham, free of Aros. She thought of the things they might do, the places they might go, the sights they might see.

  At last it was true. At last she had what Theroen had promised her more than two years ago. Love and safety and time; at last she had the time. Two smiled at her friends. Nodded.

  “All the time in the world,” she said.

  Epilogue

  The wailing, cowering things that kneel before her are not human.

  This is not a trick, not some mental exercise used to prepare herself for the things she is about to do. This is not self-deception, so often essential to the psychological health of those who kill for a living. This is not her living, but her very being, and she needs no such cerebral trickery.

  The things that are huddled in the corner of the room, knowing they are dead but not yet ready to accept it as fact, are not human. Their teeth are sharp and built for piercing. Their internal organs can process only blood. All of them are pale; all are also twisted, their affliction having caused horrible growths, extended ears and fingers, other deformities.

  She waits, not out of sympathy or any desire to prevent what is to come, but only because the order has not yet been given. These creatures’ cries mean nothing to her. In truth, she is unable at this point to equate them to anything human, or even anything alive. They are making the sounds of the dead. She has heard these sounds before, she thinks, though the past comes to her now only in flashes and fragments.

  Memory is difficult. The day begins with meditation and the needle, ends with practice. For many months this practice was held against inanimate targets, machines, or even humans wearing protection. More recently, they have begun to bring her these things that scream, that spray when she stabs or slashes, that thrash and howl and beg when she shoots. Their bodies shake with seizures as they react to the poisons in her darts. In all cases, in the end, they die. This is her purpose, the thing for which she has been made, and she takes righteous and savage pleasure in performing her duties.

  This journey began with death. She knows that, though she can no longer see the faces of those she seeks to avenge. She does not know if she would recognize them, even if shown a picture or video. It doesn’t matter. The past has been driven from her, or buried deep and locked tight. Now there is only her master, and her mission, and the dead.

  Her body trembles. Excitement and rage, joy, a need that is almost like lust. These things wrestle within her, yearning for release, as she waits for the word that will let her unleash the hate within her. She will work until she is empty, a hollow vessel that, by this time the next day, will be full once again.

  The voice of her master comes. “Kill.”

  She leaps forward, and the wails become shrieks of terror. Her body sings with excitement and release. She works with the blades she holds in both hands, though she could just as easily use the guns at her side or the darts strapped to her chest. Each choice has its merits, each has its time.

  Today she wants the blades. They are eighteen inches long and made of carbon steel, honed and cared for with reverence. They are not elegant weapons; there is little aesthetic value to their design. They are brutally effective devices, built to pierce and slash and kill, augmented only with the most rudimentary of hand-guards for catching or deflecting incoming attacks. She is capable of maneuvering the blades deftly, at startling speeds, with either hand.

  The first vampire dies as she brings the right blade up in a long arc that begins just below his gut and ends with the very tip of the metal skidding along the bone of his sternum. The blade tastes air for a moment between the creature’s chest and chin, then cleaves through the flesh and bone of his skull. The head falls apart like two halves of a ripe melon.

  The second of the creatures has time to scream a name, presumably that of the dead thing lying on the floor, still twitching. She hears this and her left arm, which had been pressing the pommel end of the weapon against her chest, shoots out and to the side, catching the vampire in the throat and impaling him against the wall. His cries become harsh coughing noises and his fingers scrabble at the blade for an instant before she yanks it sideways, ruining the neck and sending blood spattering against the opposite wall.

  The motion spins her to the right, which allows her to note that the third and final vampire has decided – laughably late – that his best option is to stand and fight. He is charging her, but he is so slow. She almost takes a moment to smile at this comical attempt, but there is work to be done, so instead she drops to her knees. The outstretched arms pass harmlessly above her head, and she catches him in mid-stride, driving the left blade up and into the vampire’s crotch, burying all eighteen inches of it in a near-vertical thrust.

  The force of this attack combines with the vampire’s momentum and causes him to flip forward. She takes the opportunity to drive the other blade into his skull and end his miserable existence. The body thuds to the ground as she stands.

  It has been only moments, but all three vampires are dead. She waits in the center of the room, soaked in blood, eyes closed. She is not even breathing hard, has not worked up a sweat. Her heart is barely beating any faster than it was before the killing started. The only thing that has changed is her hate; it has gone to where it goes to grow again, and she has been left hollow, shaking with relief and the pure joy of killing.

  Eyes still closed, she allows herself a small smile.

  “Good,” her master says. “That’s very good.”

  * * *

  To Be Concluded in Book 3: The Children of the Sun

  Keep Reading for a Sneak Preview!

  Author’s Note<
br />
  I started writing this book with the same words on which it still opens, “Tori Perrault shifted position,” and since then many things have changed, but those have stayed the same.

  That was sometime in the summer of 2004, and Blood Hunt’s predecessor, The Blood That Bonds, was just a manuscript that had been through a couple of drafts and a copy-edit, and had been read by perhaps a dozen people scattered across the country. I would end up working on the first draft of Blood Hunt – a much longer and more ambitious book – for two years, off and on, before leaving it aside, still waiting for an ending, in late 2006. Both books sat on my hard drive untouched for another two and a half years.

  When I published The Blood That Bonds as a free eBook in October of 2009, I was hoping to do a thousand downloads. That, I told myself, would definitely be something to consider a success. When I hit that milestone, a couple of months in, my wife and I went out to dinner and celebrated with champagne. No bullshit.

  It’s been almost two years since then, and The Blood That Bonds has been downloaded more than 150,000 times that I can be sure of (there are many distributors who don’t provide me with any numbers). That’s astonishing! It’s astonishing, and gratifying, and exciting, especially when you consider how well-reviewed the book is on its various websites. People seem to enjoy my writing, and they like this girl, Two, that I’ve introduced to them.

  They wanted more of her story, and they were quite vocal about that fact. I realized it was time to get off my ass and finish Blood Hunt.

  Well, then. Here we are. Three drafts and two copy-edits later, and I’m sitting in my office just a little more than a month from the book’s scheduled release date, typing this note into the document that will eventually become the official eBook. By the time you read these words, you will have downloaded Blood Hunt and (hopefully) read it to the end. You’ll know all about Naomi and Stephen, Ashayt, Theroen …

  But me? I have no idea how this book is going to do. The Blood That Bonds was free. Blood Hunt is not. The Blood That Bonds was short. Blood Hunt is not. The Blood That Bonds was basically a love story that ended unfortunately. Blood Hunt is … something else. Will people like it? Will they demand the third volume as they demanded this one? I don’t know. I hope so, but all I can do is put it out there and then wait.

  Thank you for downloading this book. If you paid for it, thank you even more. If you didn’t, well, I hope at least if you’ve read this far, you liked it enough to consider buying a copy, or a copy of the final installment.

  The Children of the Sun is already in progress. I haven’t finished the first draft yet, but I know much of what’s in store for Two and her friends. Not everything … these books have a habit of writing themselves, and “little” things like Theroen dying were unplanned. It just happened. I don’t know who will survive to the end of the final book, or what shape they’ll be in.

  All I know for sure is: The Children are coming, and when they arrive, things are going to get ugly. I’m excited to find out how it ends.

  Hope you are too!

  -Christopher Buecheler

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  About the Author

  Christopher Buecheler is a professional web designer / developer, a published author, an award-winning amateur mixologist, a brewer of beer, a player of the guitar and drums, and an NBA enthusiast.

  He lives a semi-nomadic existence with his wonderful French wife and their two cats, Carbomb and Baron Salvatore H. Lynx II. Currently they reside in Providence, Rhode Island.

  You can visit him at http://www.cwbuecheler.com

  The Children of the Sun

  Sneak Peak

  The man’s name was Matthias Vanden. He was an Eresh vampire, more than six hundred years old, and he had come to America for a few years at the request of his two fledglings, both of whom had visited the country often and thought he would enjoy it. Thus far they had been right. The three of them were staying in a luxurious apartment that took up the entire top floor of its building and offered views of Lake Michigan, the Sears Tower, and several other Chicago landmarks. They had been in the city for six months and had not yet tired of it. When and if they did, he thought, perhaps they would try Los Angeles or New York.

  The two younger vampires, both Dutch, both in the middle of their second century, were in the living room now, entertaining two women and a man. The humans had become frequent guests, happy to provide their blood to the vampires in exchange for the ecstasies that came with being bitten. Matthias wasn’t worried by this; at the end, the humans would remember little of their time with the vampires except that it had been extremely enjoyable.

  He sighed, filled with the pleasurable melancholy that came with reminiscence. He no longer needed the blood in such volumes, no longer yearned for it with the passion of an insatiable lover. The centuries had left him able to subsist for weeks on but a few drops, and he rarely interacted with humans. Still, though, he could recall how it had been, the blood pouring forth in hot torrents as he drank and drank, fighting against the swoon that had threatened always to envelope him. He envied his young fledglings this experience, even while he appreciated his freedom from the need to drink every night.

  He was reclining now on the gigantic bed in the apartment’s master bedroom, watching the television with the volume turned off and the closed captioning on, aware of but not really listening to the music from the other room. He and his fledglings had spent the early evening walking along Navy Pier, enjoying the throngs of people around them. Then there had been the bar. A curious place in a mostly commercial downtown area, it had specialized in martinis and played lesbian pornography on its many screens. Matthias could remember a time, not so very long ago, when the bar would have been burnt to the ground for such heresies. He had found it deliciously scandalous, and his fledglings, more comfortable in this modern age, had in turn found his reaction highly amusing.

  Matthias leaned back on the bed, grinning, remembering their laughter. He looked up through the skylights, where he could see a thin crescent of moon and a few bright stars. He could also see the lights of a nearby office building and a flashing red beacon that he thought was meant to warn airplanes and helicopters of a radio tower. He could see something else, too, something that he did not immediately recognize. It seemed to be getting closer, however, and in a moment more Matthias realized that he was looking at a human form, plummeting down from a great height and angled directly at the glass windows above him.

  Matthias leapt from his bed as the body fell through the skylight, and even as he was thinking that this must be some sort of suicide attempt, he realized that the body was not crashing to the floor in a jumble but rather landing on its feet, absorbing the impact with its knees, and springing forward. He saw long blonde hair streaming out behind it and there was a bright flash of metal. Matthias heard a woman’s snarling cry as the figure grabbed him by the neck and threw him up against the wall, pressing the tip of a blade to the soft spot below his chin.

  “Move an inch and I will cut your head from your body,” the woman told him, and Matthias looked at her in surprised awe. He knew few people who could have performed that landing and the follow-up leap forward, and all of those were vampires. This woman was not a vampire, though he did not know if she was exactly human, either. She was certainly a trained professional of some sort, dressed head to toe in black combat gear.

  How very remarkable, he thought to himself, but he said nothing, afraid that if he moved then the blade she held to his throat would pierce into him and let his bl
ood out all over the exquisite Oriental rug upon which he stood.

  There were crashing noises now from the living room and a woman’s screaming that was cut short by a loud thud. Someone – Matthias thought it was the human male – voiced a protest at this, but his cry was choked off midway through. In another few moments, there was a knock at the door.

  “Enter,” said the woman who was holding him against the wall, and Matthias watched with a kind of horrified curiosity as the door opened and a young, dark-skinned woman stepped in. She too was clothed in black. Rather than blades, she carried in her hand a silenced pistol and at her side, hanging like fruit, were two oblong, textured objects that Matthias thought were hand grenades.

  “We’ve got the other two bats contained, and the humans have learned to shut up and mind their manners,” the black girl said, and the blonde nodded.

  “Good.”

  “You want us to bring them in here?”

  “No. I’ll take him out. Go make sure they don’t get any stupid ideas.”

  The black girl turned on her heel without another word and strode back into the living room. The blonde turned to Matthias, and he saw that her eyes were a clear and brilliant blue.

  “We’re going to walk into the living room,” she told him. “You first, me behind you. If you try to run, or attack, or do anything else that upsets me, I will put this blade right between your shoulders. It will come out just above your collarbone, it will leave you alive, and it will be excruciatingly painful, especially when I start twisting it. Are we clear on this?”