Blood Hunt

by Christopher Buecheler

  “Yes,” Matthias said, still mindful of the metal point pressed into the flesh under his chin.

  “You’re an old Eresh, so you must be fairly fast. Do I need to tell you that I’m faster?”

  “No.” Matthias had seen her move after she came crashing through the skylight. He knew very well how fast she was.

  “Good,” the woman said. She took the blade away from his skin and held it unsheathed at her side. “Go.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” Matthias asked her.

  “If you don’t start walking, yes. If you do exactly what you’re told and stop asking stupid questions, you might get through this.”

  “Please,” he said. “I don’t … kill me if you must, but leave my children. They’ve hurt no one.”

  The woman gave him a disgusted, mocking laugh, and she pointed toward the bedroom door. “Get moving.”

  Matthias did as he was told, moving slowly and deliberately so that this woman holding him hostage would know that he did not intend to fight. Matthias had never been much for fighting; that sort of thing was best left to the Ay’Araf. He was Eresh and not a warrior, though he thought he might soon be put in a place where there would be no other alternative.

  His fledglings were sitting on the living room’s large sofa, flanked by two black-clothed human men. Adrianus, the younger of the two vampires, looked disgusted and angry. Mikel, older by twenty years and more even-tempered than his brother, seemed to be in control of his emotions. He was looking at one of the human women. She was lying on the floor, a trickle of blood running from her nose to the carpet. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, and her bare breasts were not rising and falling in the way that they should have been – they were still, and Matthias knew she was dead.

  The other two humans were each being held with their hands behind their backs by a member of whatever strike force this might be. Both were still fully clothed, though the man’s shirt was unbuttoned. He had a black eye and livid red marks around his neck, just below the edges of his long, dark hair. The girl next to him, a tall woman with a large mass of tightly curled red hair pulled back in a ponytail, was weeping quietly but seemed unharmed.

  The black girl who had come into the bedroom was standing at the far end of the apartment, looking out at the city. She glanced over her shoulder as they came into the room, watching Matthias’s slow progression forward, and then resumed looking out the window.

  “What a lovely scene,” The blonde girl commented from behind him, and Matthias could hear the sarcasm in her voice. He came to a stop in the middle of the room, and she didn’t seem to object to this.

  “Girl wouldn’t shut up,” said a tall, burly man with brown, crew-cut hair.

  “So you thought you’d break her neck?” the blonde woman asked.

  “I got a little overzealous, Captain,” the man admitted.

  “Right. Next time, wait for my orders.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Are you the one in charge, here? What the fuck do you want?” Adrianus demanded in his thickly accented English, and the blonde woman turned to him.

  “You’ll speak when spoken to and you’ll do so respectfully, or I’ll have them kill another of your blood-whores.”

  Adrianus said nothing, merely glared at the woman. The human girl’s sobbing had redoubled at the confirmation that her friend was dead, and for a moment it was the only sound in the room.

  “Please,” Matthias said. “We wish to avoid any further trouble. Tell us what it is you want from us.”

  “What I want is for every single blood-drinking piece of shit in this country to die,” the blonde-haired woman said. “But that’s not what I’m here for tonight. Tonight I’m here to send a message. You’re going to deliver it for me.”

  “A message to whom?” Matthias asked her.

  The woman moved in front of him now, holding her blade at her side.

  “You’re going to go to the American Council of Vampires in New York. You’re going to tell them that the day of reckoning has come.”

  “I do not know anyone on the Council. I am not from this country,” Matthias said.

  “Then you’d better figure out how to find them,” the woman replied.

  From the couch, Adrianus made a sound of annoyance and muttered something under his breath. The blonde woman turned to him.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said ‘this is ridiculous,’” Adrianus told her. “I will not be held captive and given orders by a group of humans with delusions of grandeur.”

  “Adrianus, please …” Matthias began, but his fledgling overrode him.

  “You invade our home, murder our friend, hold our patron at swordpoint and threaten him, and now you expect us to deliver your ridiculous message to this group of vampires we don’t even know? Go away, human. Go away before something terrible happens.”

  The woman frowned at him. “It’s a bad idea to speak to me in that tone, and an even worse idea to try and give me orders. I serve only one master: the Emperor of the Sun. I am an instrument of his light.”

  “I tire of this nonsense,” Adrianus snarled. He stood up from the couch, and the humans on either side drew their guns, pointing them at him. The black girl turned from the window she had been staring out of, an odd smile on her face.

  “Put your guns down,” the blonde woman told her fellows.

  “But, Captain …” began one, and the woman glared at him.

  “What part of the Captain’s order didn’t you understand, Janus?” the black girl asked from across the room. The man who had spoken glanced at her and, after a moment’s hesitation, lowered his weapon. His fellow guard, the man with the crew cut, did the same.

  “Adrianus, do not do this,” Matthias said. “You are making a terrible mistake.”

  “I do not fear these humans,” Adrianus told him.

  “That is the mistake,” Matthias replied, but Adrianus wasn’t listening. He was striding forward toward the blonde woman, gaining speed with each step.

  “You should have let them shoot me when you had the chance!” Adrianus roared, leaping forward. The blonde woman stood still, ready, and at the last possible moment she ducked. Adrianus’s arms passed harmlessly over her head and he tripped on her outstretched leg, stumbling forward.

  Moving now with that same impossible speed she had shown before, the blonde girl stood and, even as Adrianus was falling, swung her sword in a downward arc. The blade cleaved his head from his body and it rolled away, throwing fans of blood against the wall and coming to a stop near the bedroom door. Matthias watched as the corpse – a thing which had moments ago been his son – thudded to the ground, arms fluttering, spurting blood from its neck.

  Matthias could hear himself screaming, but the sound was warped and distant, as if it was echoing down to him through a long hallway. He stood rooted to the ground, unable to move, unable to do anything but voice his horror. Mikel, too, was screaming, but he had leapt to his feet. The humans were shrieking, struggling against their captors.

  Matthias didn’t know whether Mikel would have attacked or not, but the blonde girl did not give him the opportunity. Lightning-quick, still in a crouch, she reached to a clip at her breast and pulled from it two darts, which she flung across the room in a single motion. One hit Mikel in the chest, another in the arm, and his cries became immediately strangled. He took one step toward her and then pitched forward, twisting in the air as he did so, landing on his side.

  Matthias watched in horror as his fledgling’s limbs began to seize up and a great torrent of bloody foam gushed forth from his mouth. Even his eyes had begun to bleed, and he was making choked cawing noises of agony that seemed to pierce Matthias like knives.

  “Please!” Matthias cried, begged. “Have mercy on him!”

  The blonde girl, up on her feet now and striding toward Mikel’s shuddering, jerking form, glanced over her shoulder.

  “There is only one mercy for him now,” she said, and she held the blade
up over her head for a moment before driving it down and into his chest, piercing Mikel’s heart and ending his pain. She stood, cleaning the blood from the blade with a dark cloth. Both humans were sobbing now, wrestling with the men that held them but making no real headway in their attempts to escape.

  “It’s always a pleasure watching you work,” the black girl said, and the blonde woman favored her with a sardonic smile.

  “Thank you, Vanessa.”

  “Oh, God help me,” Matthias moaned. He was still rooted to his spot, standing now between the bodies of his two dead children, shaking and unable to move. The blonde woman turned to him.

  “There is no God,” she said. “Even if there was, He wouldn’t want anything to do with you.”

  Matthias felt a surge of rage and hatred run through him, and in that moment he almost threw himself at this woman despite her superior speed, her obvious skills as a fighter. At least then it would be over; he would be dead like his children, gone to whatever afterworld awaited. He tensed and the woman tilted her head, studying him intently.

  Then he thought of Hell, of the punishments that might be waiting for the things that he had done in his youth, newly made a vampire and intoxicated with power and the need for blood. The desire to fight passed, replaced by a sort of hopeless anguish, and Matthias felt his body slump. He was a coward; he knew it and he could see from the blonde woman’s eyes, her smile, the set of her body, that she knew it too.

  “Will you take my message to the Council?” she asked him. “Or will I leave three dead vampires behind me tonight?”

  “I will deliver your message,” Matthias told her, his voice hoarse. “I will find this Council you speak of, and I will tell them what happened here, and surely they will send better men than me to hunt you down.”

  The blonde woman favored him with a savage grin. “Surely they will.”

  “Captain, what about these two?” the black girl, Vanessa, asked. She indicated with her gun at the two human captives.

  “They’re tainted. Put them down,” the blonde girl said, and at this the humans redoubled their struggles. The red-haired woman was weeping, saying ‘no, no, no,’ shaking her head as if by such an action she could negate the things that were happening.

  Vanessa walked over to the two of them and said, “You are still human, so I will make it quick for you.”

  “Tanya, I love y—” the human man began, and Vanessa put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. There was a small popping noise, and most of the man’s brains came jetting out from the opposite side of his head.

  “Oh, Jesus God!” the red-haired woman screamed. Vanessa turned, placed the gun against her forehead, and blew the back of her head out, too. Matthias, who had not vomited in centuries, felt the urge to do so now and fought against it. The men who had been holding the two humans let their bodies drop.

  “Let’s go,” the blonde woman said, putting her blade into the sheath strapped to her back.

  They moved as a group toward the balcony, and Matthias watched as one by one they took hold of a rope that had been attached there and climbed over the edge, disappearing from sight. The blonde woman – the Captain – was the last to go. She looked at him for a long moment, not a trace of sympathy or regret in her eyes, and then she favored him with a long, angry smile. What a terrible place her mind must be, Matthias thought to himself.

  With one swift movement she was gone, and he was alone with five bodies, two of which had been his children. Matthias felt his knees unhinge, felt himself fall to a sitting position. He covered his face with his hands, his stupid, cowardly hands, and began to weep.

  * * *

  The Children of the Sun are coming. Find out more:

  http://www.tcs-book.com/