Nightlord: Sunset

by Garon Whited

  I learned something. Sasha took a mouthful of blood from the bottle, spit it into her hand, and rubbed it over her blistered skin. The skin seemed to suck it up like thirsty earth drinking rain. Where the blood sank in, the skin was whole. She smeared blood up and down her arm until every trace of the burn was gone.

  “It’s not good for deep burns,” she said, “but it has a wonderful cosmetic effect.” Then she swigged from the bottle and gulped the rest down.

  We went to a club and enjoyed another buffet. Life pulsed in tiny bits through the dark webwork we wove, in time to the heavy thud of the woofers. The place—The Fire Gate—was a loud, flashing, chaotic place, with a flame motif and lots of flickering neon. I would’ve hated it a week ago; now I enjoyed the stimulation it gave my senses.

  By the time we got home, we were both effectively drunk. It’s not really intoxication, as such, but it’s definitely a feeling of euphoria. Imagine how it would feel to combine that floating, dreaming feeling after a powerful orgasm with the replete fulfillment of an excellent meal. Now add a feeling of boundless energy and optimism, along with a mild hyperactivity. Now double it. That’s close.

  The blood is physically pleasurable, a thousand times better than rare beef to a starving man. It fuels the body of a vampire to do things—it grants physical strength and speed, durability, stamina, regeneration, the works. The spirits we tapped, however, fed our life essences, our souls, if you will. While Sasha could not truly use that energy for anything aside from a stockpile against her next feeding time, I had the capacity to take that power and use it to work magic. When I expended energy, it hastened the next time I would need to feed on life.

  We were well-fed on blood and spirit.

  We were also moving a bit too rapidly for normal humans, that’s certain. I dropped my keys while unlocking the front door; Sasha caught them before I could—they never had a prayer of reaching the ground. She dangled them in front of me, teasing, and I tried to snatch them. She laughed and hid them behind her, smiling at me.

  I stepped up to her and put my arms around her, reaching behind. She looked at me with half-lidded eyes and whispered, inhumanly low, “Wilt thou taste me, my lord?”

  “Aye,” I whispered back.

  Maybe because my hearing was keyed down to hear her, I heard the clicking.

  I lifted my gaze to sweep the front yard. There’s a big circle drive, a large expanse of lawn inside it, and a hedge along the inside edge of the circle.

  I don’t think I’d have seen anything with normal eyes. They were dressed in dark, matte colors. They had been perfectly still, waiting. The one had only moved enough to bring his weapon to bear and click the safety off.

  He fired almost immediately.

  I pushed Sasha, hard, to one side, using the momentum to propel myself the opposite direction. I was mildly lucky; the rocket impacted on Sasha’s side of the door, missing us both, but flames bloomed like an incandescent flower on the front wall. Incendiary warheads made it instantly to the #2 spot on my fecal roster.

  I got bathed in a wash of flame. My hair singed and burned, and my clothes caught. I threw myself off the porch—it seemed to take forever to reach the ground—and rolled like a panicked log until I didn’t feel on fire. I was in a lot of pain, and not just from the blast of fire; I accidentally bit my tongue with these inconvenient fangs—they tend to pop out when I’m overexcited, day or night. They punched a hole right through my tongue and it almost hurt worse than the burns.

  The high-pitched feminine screaming, however, did nothing to improve my mood. I was up again as soon as I was extinguished.

  Vision: Sasha on fire, screaming and writhing. The three men were on their feet, pouring streams of bullets into her.

  First things first, after all.

  This was their main mistake; they chose to finish off Sasha, or try to. The guns were chattering, some sort of submachine guns. Bullets were popping when they hit her, blowing chunks out. If they’d known what a job of killing it would be, they might have focused on me and we would have been in trouble. I can only assume they assumed Sasha to be the one I created, instead of the other way around. I suppose they felt she would be easy to finish off, and then they could focus on me. That’s the only explanation I can think of, anyway. I’ll never know for sure.

  I did not consciously think of killing them; I simply moved to do it. Extinguishing Sasha, nursing my hurts, running away—these were all considerations after the fact. At the moment, there was just a heavy pulse, a sort of throbbing in my blood that had nothing to do with a heartbeat.

  I plowed into the trio at full tilt. I don’t know how fast that is, but I do know I left accelerating footprints deep in the lawn the whole way.

  The guys I ran between and clipped spun away like pins from a wrecking ball. The third one I slammed square into; he didn’t so much bounce away as crunch, like he’d been hit by a car. He did a nice job of helping me come to a halt, though, and I was grabbing for his weapon even as I hammered into him. I could feel a stinging, burning ache on both shoulders and all along my front—a different, nastier burning sensation, like my skin was trying to flake and peel. Possibly what acid would feel like. I don’t know.

  I ripped the gun out of his dying hand and sprayed the remainder of the clip into the one who was closest to regaining his feet. The explosions blasted chunks out of his hip, chest, and head—and were much more effective on humans than on people who don’t necessarily need most of their internal organs. A vampire isn’t alive—well, not at night, certainly—and is really just a corpse that doesn’t care to sit still. We can soak up appalling amounts of damage without really feeling it.

  Shooting him turned out to be a mistake; a white light blazed out of the wounds as he staggered back and fell. The light blinded me for a second. Meanwhile, the guy still on the ground wasn’t trying to get up. He just aimed at me and let fly with what was left in his magazine.

  I took four of the bullets. Each one dug a hole about two inches or so into me—one in the leg, one in the abdomen, one in the lower lung, one in the upper chest, all along the right side. Each exploded and took with it a sizable bite of me. Explosive bullets made it to #3 on the roster.

  I snarled. No, I didn’t just snarl, I growled. The throbbing increased to a pulsing thud in my body and mind; a reddish stain crept into my vision. The bullets hurt more than anything I ever felt before. I was not just hurt, I was wounded—I felt hurt, even if I didn’t really suffer from it. It was worse than breaking a leg on a summer job; that had been an accident. This was deliberate. It was worse than the agony of falling down concrete steps in the rain and cold because a migraine gave me momentary vertigo. It hurt because I’d been shot, for God’s sake! Being shot is supposed to hurt! It was an assault upon my person, and the hurt went deeper than the flesh.

  But vampires don’t understand the meaning of “shock” unless it involves lightning—and now he needed to reload.

  I threw the gun I had in hand, hitting him in the upper arm; I’d been hoping for his head, but my eyes were still blinking away bright spots. It hurt his arm without breaking it. It still slowed him in his attempt to reload. I approached as quickly as I could. I was feeling a lot less chipper now, but the rage in my blood allowed only thoughts of attack. He remained prone and slammed a fresh clip into the gun. He raised the folding stock to his shoulder, brought the gun into line…

  … and I was close enough to grab it by the barrel. I squeezed. I wasn’t in a mood to consider the effects. I have wondered, since, if I chose the best course of action. As with so many things in life, the answer was both yes and no.

  The gun blew up. The bullet in the barrel exploded, rupturing it and sending bits of jagged metal around indiscriminately. This I could stand, but I got the brunt of it. Shrapnel bothered me slightly, like bee stings bother a normal person. He took some shrapnel, but not anything lethal.

  When the magazine took the shock of the explosion and self-detonated… well, he was the
one holding that end. He wound up missing both hands and part of his face. I planted a boot in the remains of his face—literally; my heel wound up kissing the back of his sinuses—before I considered the screaming still coming from Sasha. The whole fight had lasted less than four seconds.

  I hurried over to her. She was still on fire; charring had set in all over her body. She had no hair left and apparently no clothes. She was rolling on the ground, but her flesh was combusting. I didn’t waste time wondering at the fact that human flesh wouldn’t ignite at such temperatures. We aren’t exactly human.

  I grabbed her, ignoring the way my hands sizzled and bubbled in the heat. I ran with her, rounding the house in record time, hindered slightly by the slowly-closing hole in my right thigh. We both splashed into the wading pool, submerging completely. The flames sizzled and steam boiled up, but the Sasha-consuming fire went out. The throbbing in my body began to slow. This let me think of other things.

  I was up and out of the water again immediately. Sasha would be fine there while I attended to details. What was she going to do? Drown?

  As I zipped around to the front, my first order of business was to use one of their guns to make sure each of the assassins was really dead. I didn’t want to find a stream of bullets stitching my spinal column. Head shots are sure shots.

  Then I grabbed a hose and started putting out the front of the house. It was touch and go, but whatever they used had obviously been intended to start fires on readily-flammable things—like vampires, maybe?—not as a materiel destruction device. Witness the low-power explosion and the huge initial wash of fire.

  I did succeed in putting the front façade of the house out.

  When everything was dark and silent except for the drip of water, I turned off the hose. I felt tired. No, more than tired—bone-weary. I don’t know if what’s-his-name ever did an experiment to determine if a vampire has an adrenalin high or not, but I believe there’s something similar, at least. I was coming down from one to prove it. I sat on the wet porch and started to shake, both from exhaustion and from what I’d just done.

  I’d killed three men. That was okay—they had been trying to kill Sasha and myself. That squared up. Fine.

  I hadn’t thought about it. I just fought. Everything I did was by reflex and by impulse. As before, I hadn’t considered any portion of the fight. My conscious mind had been an observer—one lost in the performance. But this time… I had been angry. Enraged. It was a level of fury I’d never felt before. I’d killed, in any fashion it took. Bare hands. Bullets. I would have torn them limb from limb if that was the most direct route to their deaths.

  It scared me.

  I sat there for a while before I realized I was getting hungry. My wounds were visibly healing, but slowly—and my hunger was getting stronger. I didn’t have time to sit and brood; I had other problems.

  I headed around back to get Sasha. The pool had a floating layer of black ashes and oily scum; I stepped down into the water. Sasha was right where I’d left her. I carried her to the edge and set her on the side. Her skin was black where she still had skin; a lot of her body showed naked, cooked muscles and charred patches of bone. She opened her eyes. One was cloudy white, burned a bit, but the other focused on me.

  “We live?” she asked, voice rough and cracked.

  “We do,” I replied, and sat down on the edge of the pool next to her. “They don’t.”

  She nodded, slightly, and closed her eyes. “Blood,” she rasped.

  I rose slowly, still tired, but there was more to do. I lifted her; she seemed incredibly heavy. I staggered as I carried her into the kitchen. There, I broke out what blood we had in the house and we had a drink or twelve.

  FRIDAY, JUNE 17TH

  It was well after midnight before we finished off the stocked blood. I don’t know how many gallons we drank, but it was a lot. Sasha got the lion’s share—not because she wanted it, necessarily, but because I insisted. I was hideously hungry—or is that “thirsty”? My body was trying to pull itself together and was apparently consuming the last of my reserves in the process. I felt like something was clawing its way out of my stomach. But I realized, as bad as that was, Sasha must have it worse. So I held her down and poured blood down her throat. She lay there and swallowed when I sat on her and upended a bottle in her mouth.

  The blood of humans is a more powerful than cattle, just as their life-essences are. I think three human beings would have been enough to put us back to rights. Maybe it has something to do with sentience, as well as size. I resolved to check out a whale and a dolphin for comparison, sometime. Or maybe it’s just because human blood is so nearly identical to ours. It has everything we need and in the right proportions. I dunno—yet. Someday.

  I also discovered a useful fact: pouring blood directly into a wound works wonders. I’m glad the hole in my tongue had a lot of blood poured on it. My fangs make wounds that don’t want to close. A handy thing when you’re a blood-drinking fiend, I guess. I got to watch—and feel!—the bullet-craters in my flesh fill in. It was like the cosmetic effect of Sasha’s burned skin, but the open wounds let blood get inside. A burn has damaged flesh underneath an outer layer, too deep for that sort of treatment. I suppose we could peel back a layer of burned skin and pour blood under it as well as on it, but it’s a lot less painful just to drink!

  As for the regeneration… I don’t know how to describe how it felt. You know the itching feeling you sometimes have under a scab when it’s getting better? Imagine that magnified a thousand times—so powerful that the flesh feels like it’s squirming. Like it’s alive and moving and not entirely you.

  I also wondered where all the blood went. Think about it. I know I slugged back about four gallons. That’s not an insignificant amount of anything. Yet I was not swollen like a bloated tick; I was as slim as ever, undistorted. Sasha sucked down at least twice that, not counting what I poured on her. She didn’t gain a hundred pounds of weight.

  Maybe it’s just magic and I should quit wondering.

  Anyway, like I said, we finished off the entire blood supply in the house. We were both feeling pretty close to normal—well, as normal as a dayblood can feel at night—but still weaker than usual and tired. We cleaned up and dressed again. Then we went out front with a couple of tarps, gathered up the remains—salvaging undamaged equipment—and drove the bodies out into the hills.

  The bodies weren’t too difficult to move. A pruning hook was all it took to slide or roll one onto a tarp, then we would drag the tarp. I didn’t bother checking for the marks the Fist puts on their people; we could feel the effects of it just by standing near. Their garments had been thoroughly covering, complete with ninja hoods. The holes I’d made shone white from the light within.

  It’s good to know who your enemies are. Sort of.

  Sasha had a nice, deep chasm in mind for a garbage dump. It was far back in a cave—more of a cleft in a hillside—concealed almost totally by the overgrowth around it. I didn’t ask how many bodies were down there; I could just barely smell old rot and mold. We disposed of the bodies, tarps and all, by shoving them under the brush until they cleared the lip of a drop. I heard them thud more than once on their way down.

  Then it was time for lunch.

  Sasha drove us into town while I went through the stuff we’d collected. Two working submachine guns and two loaded magazines, three pistols, three silver fighting knives, and something I presumed was a bazooka. It looked like something from a World War Two movie, and I found spots where serial numbers and other identifying information had been scratched off. No ammunition for it, though.

  And that was all. I thought that weirder than anything else.

  Well… okay, one of the weirder things about these guys.

  I mean they didn’t even have wallets. Not even a picture in a breast pocket of a loved one. No loose change. No lucky rabbit’s foot. No car keys. Nothing. It was like they’d deliberately divested themselves of everything but what was mission-o
riented. Or just sprang into existence on our lawn. Hell, if I’d seen a parachute harness I would have felt a lot better; it would have meant they were just people, real people, not aliens beaming down just to shoot at us!

  I picked up one of the knives. It tingled slightly as I held it.

  “Silver bothers us?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I touched the flat of the blade, gingerly, as though it might be hot. It tingled strongly, as if a mild current was going through it… but it was fading even as I sat there. I could feel it. I put it away.

  “So where are we going?”

  “To eat. We may need our strength.”

  “I can’t argue that. But at this hour? The clubs are closed and the all-night supermarkets will look at us funny when the customers start falling down.”

  “There are ways,” she replied, darkly.

  I didn’t argue, just went along.

  In short order, we were in one of the local hospitals. She parked and we both got out. As we walked through the parking lot, I cleared my throat.

  “We’re going to raid the blood supply?”

  “No. We are going to do our job.”

  “Our job?”

  “Yes. And I am going to teach you something, as well.”

  I was too tired to argue. We went inside and the nurse at the front desk looked up. I could feel Sasha touching her with dark lines of force, twisting them inside her. The nurse looked blank for a moment, then shrugged to herself and looked back down to her magazine.