Hunting Karoly

by Marie Treanor

  She was right. In typical west Scotland fashion, the sun had quickly faded behind a patchwork blanket of scudding gray and black clouds, which were just about to open on to us. The whole sky was darkening fast. In fact, the air, close and oppressive, seemed to crackle. I had been too absorbed in my conversation and senses to realize before but I thought we were in for a thunderstorm.

  Great. I hate thunder.

  Hilda said, “If he’s not here, you’ll have to try to pick up his trail again. If there’s nothing, we’ll wait ’til dark. You keep watch, phone me if you see him returning.”

  Even better. Standing on a street corner for hours. At least there were no people around. We were between church services. Frank and I hoisted Hilda over the fence without anyone watching, or at least watching obviously.

  As Frank skidded down the slope toward the bushes covering the trapdoor, I called, “Hilda? He doesn’t sleep, so be prepared. And Hilda,” I added, when she just nodded and started after Frank, “if he attacks you… he moves so fast you can’t see it. I think he kills easily, but if you back off, he might let you go. He can’t be bothered dealing with dead bodies and the inevitable fuss that follows.”

  I don’t know if she heard even half of that. Part of me didn’t want her to. It revealed far too much of my own observations. But I didn’t want the vampire to kill her. Frank, I thought unkindly, he could have, if his fastidious tastes could stomach the jerk. At heart I didn’t really believe they would either capture or kill Karoly, although it was possible I would have to track him through the storm.

  I leaned against the railing, my heart hammering with fear for Hilda, with anticipation and just general, unspecific dread. The rain began, at first in just a few spots, quickly turning to a good, solid downpour.

  His hands had touched the fence recently. I could feel them, those hands that had touched me so intimately in my dream. Dear God, I hoped it was a dream. If I had really let him do those things to me, if I had actually begged him to fuck me, Jesus, how could I live with myself? I couldn’t ever justify the desire he aroused in me, I could only squash it. And explain it a little, perhaps. Some of it was hypnosis—those green and gold spiraling eyes. Some of it was his sheer beauty. And my own loneliness. My record of relationships with men was abysmal. I’d never kept one for longer than two months. And never met one I’d really wanted to hang around for longer. None of them measured up to my male friends like Nick and Tam. And none of them had been trustworthy enough to hang around me any longer than my father had.

  But this was no time for getting into self-analysis. For the first time, I was doing something right at work, I had discovered that Hilda, at least, believed in me and that there was a possibility of the Centre decentralizing and my coming back here. Not to Glasgow, perhaps, which was fine with me. I really had wanted a change when I had left the school, a chance to meet new people in new places. But I’d discovered that I missed my friends and if anything happened to my infuriating mother…

  Wrenching away from this, I turned my back on the church and through the gloom, gazed between the buildings opposite to the visible band of river. I knew I was doing something not only right, but just. I was doing my job and helping find a killer, a monster no one in their right minds could believe in, let alone deal with.

  So why did I feel like a traitor?

  “I have no intention of killing you today.”

  Well, I had no intention of killing him either. How can you kill someone you’ve got drunk with, laughed with, kissed…? I couldn’t. But I could stand back and let someone else do it.

  I wouldn’t even cry. I’d be churned up a bit, I’d have to wrestle occasionally with the guilt, even the sense of loss, God help me, but I’d know I’d done the right thing and I would not cry. It was rain running down my face and into my mouth, just rain.

  I don’t know what made me look up. But I did, quite suddenly, and through the misty wires falling from an opaque, nearly black sky, I saw the darker figure of a man on the roof opposite, silhouetted for just a moment.

  I knew it was him. It was only a glimpse and then the figure disappeared, but it was him. It didn’t just look like him in his plaid, it felt like him.

  Chapter Five

  Once again the incoherent anger rose, blotting out my hard-won rationality. He was a threat to my mother, to everybody, he had kissed me like that, made me dream like that… And God help me, as I remembered the images and the sensations of the dream, I grew hot. I began to run across the road, feeling my legs sliding on the wetness between.

  Hilda and Frank were still in the church, looking for him, but I didn’t think he’d been there at all today. When I finally pushed aside the jumbled mixture of anger and guilt and desire, I could realize that everything I had sensed about him had been yesterday’s tracks. He must have feared me after all… He’d moved his lair, even if not so very far away, because I’d threatened him.

  So did that mean last night had definitely been a dream? That he hadn’t come after all? Among all my confusion I was conscious of something perilously close to disappointment.

  I caught sight of him again in the street that backed on to the church, vaulting the ridge of a warehouse roof, his damp kilt bunching heavily around his legs. I ran on, wondering about his sudden carelessness. The thickness of the clouds had obliterated the sun like an eclipse, but that wouldn’t last forever. Within the half hour, less probably, the sky would lighten to dingy gray and he would have to take cover again. But if he didn’t care about being seen leaping the rooftops now, in daylight, then he was probably preparing to move on. Which made him doubly dangerous. To Frank and Hilda and the whole population. To me. Today could be the day he killed me. Or I killed him.

  Was that not what everything in the last two days had been leading up to? Some necessary act of contrition, of reparation for my sin of lust? To kill the only being who had ever seemed likely to fulfill my sexual desires, every secret, sensual dream…?

  Lust is not so terrible a sin, said the devil on my left shoulder.

  It is when it’s focused on an evil undead killer, said the angel on my right.

  “Bugger off,” I said aloud to both of them, and paused before the warehouse, gazing up at the roof, trying to sense his presence. It was hard. I think he meant it to be, keeping high and away from anything I could touch or come into close contact with. Walking around the building, I wondered if I had lost him. For all I knew he could turn into a bat and fly to the airport.

  Something drew me on to the next building, if only to try to sense more or less than before. More, I thought suddenly. My heart began to beat faster. The electric tingle in my body made all my nerve ends shiver. Though this was once another warehouse, it was a prettier building and had been converted into flats, some with little balconies more useful for flowerpots than sunbathing.

  When I gazed up at the roof, I saw no one, but I felt him. I stood there for several moments, letting the rain run off my hair into my eyes, just feeling him. Feeling my own destiny.

  Then I saw him, on one of the little third floor balconies, a shadowy figure in a wet, swirling kilt, pushing open the door into somebody’s home.

  Aye, right, destiny. Sheer fury sent me prowling round the building, looking for a way in. I don’t know why his entering that house made me so angry. He must have done such things literally countless times before. It was the invasion, a crime I still half suspected him of committing at my mother’s house last night.

  A rickety fire escape ran up the side of the building. Without further thought, I ran up it, two steps at a time until I arrived, panting, on the third floor landing. From there, it was easy to step over onto the first balcony, where I finally paused to draw breath and made the mistake of looking down on to the road. Immediately the old vertigo kicked in, the sudden dizzying sickness causing me to step hastily back toward the glass door into the flat.

  A sudden flash of lightning turned my eyes away from the angry sky to the still figure who stood,
suddenly illuminated, on the next balcony. In sodden red and blue tartan and a white, full sleeved shirt, his eyes gleamed yellow from shadowed pits in his thin, white face.

  My heart jolted. I was conscious of a weird sort of tense triumph, as well as the inevitable fear, but it was only for an instant. By the time I blinked, the flash was over and he had already jumped onto the balcony beside me. Thunder crashed, for once not even making me jump. Water ran down his face, dripped from his broad shoulders and his kilt, forming a puddle at his feet. Why had I never noticed his feet before? He wore sneakers.

  For another instant, we both stood quite still, staring at each other. The only sound, outside the furious drumming of my heart, was the lighter pattering of rain on the balcony roof. For once, he looked serious. There was no mockery in the beautiful, dissolute face, no laughter in those amazing green and gold eyes. Then, slowly, the faintest smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

  He said softly, “You came,” and reached for me, trapping my loosely hanging arms between us. I shook one sleeve, feeling the stick drop downward into my palm.

  And yet his words, his nearness, made me think of last night’s dream. Maybe they were meant to. You came.

  I said sardonically, “Oh yes, I came. And now I’ve come to kill you.”

  Mostly, I didn’t expect him to let me. Mostly, I expected to be flung off the balcony. A flashing, sickening vision of the road I had just glimpsed from the balcony flitted through my mind and was ruthlessly suppressed. Or to be torn apart by his sharp, sexy teeth while he drank my blood dry. Or even to be stabbed with my own stake. But I had to try.

  As I spoke the words, I yanked my right arm upward, pulled back my shoulder and struck him full in the chest with my sharpened stick. I put all my strength behind it and the force of the blow jarred me from the wrist to the shoulder. I didn’t feel the crunch of bone or tearing flesh, I didn’t know if I was supposed to, since I had never stabbed anybody before. And now that I did, it had to be him.

  He didn’t reel back. He didn’t move at all for several seconds. My eyes were fixed on his face, desperately waiting for the reaction, for his anger or pain before he fell into a pile of dust or whatever it is vampires are supposed to do when you kill them. He did nothing. Only the expression in his light eyes changed to something I couldn’t quite read at first. Then, struggling with a thousand contradictory emotions of my own, I realized it was compassion. I felt my eyes widen with incomprehension.

  He said, “You’re meant to use the sharp end.”

  My eyes closed fast. Involuntarily, my head fell back against his arm. “Oh Jesus,” I whispered. I let the useless stick fall to the ground, well aware I had wasted my only chance.

  The vampire smiled. “Just kidding,” he said and my eyes flew open again. Now, over the compassion, he was definitely laughing at me. Looking for the truth, my eyes fell to his chest—and widened once more with a horror I couldn’t prevent. Dark blood oozed over his shirt, staining it crimson even in the poor half light of the storm.

  “I did it,” I whispered, slowly lifting my gaze back to his. “I really did it?”

  “You really stabbed me, but I am not so easy to kill.”

  “You won’t die?” Despite everything, relief flooded my voice, drowning the desolation and the pity for him and for me. “But you feel pain, I’ve hurt you!” Helplessly, my fingers hovered over the wound—which, incredibly, seemed to be closing already—afraid to touch him, not knowing what to do. Stupidly, it never entered my head to flee. Of course, his arms were still around me, so any fleeing would have required his cooperation. My whole body heated inside my sodden clothes and the ache shooting downward from my abdomen had very little to do with fear or remorse.

  He said, “My body heals.” He was right. Through the ragged tear in his shirt, the wound looked no more than a pinprick. The blood had disappeared, the bruising almost all gone.

  He lifted one hand from my back to touch my cheek, astoundingly gently. “And now you’ve got that over with…”

  But my attention was caught by his hand. A long, ugly scar ran up its back, a scar that had certainly not been there in the church undercroft yesterday.

  “Your hand!” I exclaimed, catching at it. He let me take it in mine, let me look, though he said nothing. “It’s burned,” I said, frowning with the glimmerings of understanding.

  “A small contretemps with the powers of daylight.”

  “That’s how Dog got out yesterday. You lifted him out and burned your hands in the sunlight. I could smell your singed skin still on him.”

  Still he said nothing, just bent his head closer to mine until my stomach filled with panic, with wildly fluttering butterflies. Where, for God’s sake, was the terror I knew I should be suffering? And now I thought of it I could feel what was definitely not his sporran growing hard against my stomach. Instantly, my own nether regions responded with a flood of moisture.

  “Why did you do that for Dog? Why aren’t you killing me?”

  “Because I want you,” he whispered, his lips so close to mine that I could feel their every movement. “I want to taste you, all of your sweet body… Ask me again to fuck you.”

  Again. He said ask me again…!

  “Jesus, you were there.”

  “No. I just made you dream.” His lips touched mine, so lightly I barely felt them and yet something leapt inside me as if it had been the deepest kisses, with tongues.

  Struggling against my own weakness as much as my own inability to understand, I said faintly, “How?”

  “With the kiss…” Softly still, his mouth closed on mine, as cool and silky smooth as I remembered it and even more unbearably sensual, deliberately parting my lips and then leaving them so that I looked as if I was begging, open-mouthed, for more. And dear God, I was. “It allowed me the connection, so that I could pleasure you in your dream. And I did…” His hand cupped my breast, releasing a new flood of moisture between my legs. Casually, his thumb flickered across my straining nipple. “I felt all of your long, sweet orgasm as if it were my own, every twinge of arousal, every blissful convulsion, every after pang of pleasure. And I want to give you more. I want to sink my cock in your wetness and slake my own thirst. So ask me again…”

  I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything at all, so heavy with desire had my body suddenly become. I saw two buttons pop off my shirt as his hand delved inside and brought out my naked breast. His touch was killing me. Every tweak and pull of his long, clever fingers on my nipple shot arrows of desire straight downward. And he knew it. His eyes moved between my face and what he was doing to my breast. He must have felt my ragged breathing, the trembling of my whole body, the moan of mingled pleasure and desire that I was trying desperately to suppress. Deliberately, he brought out my other breast and as he palmed it, caressingly, cupped it in his hand, I swallowed convulsively. My eyes closed with the pleasure, my head fell back against the glass of the balcony door. I didn’t even think of anybody being in the flat on the other side of it. I had long ago forgotten why I had followed him here. My body, not my head, was in charge now.

  His hands left my breasts and slid around to grip my waist instead. I gasped as he lifted me easily off my feet, bringing my breasts closer to his mouth so that he could lick my nipple. Slowly, he twirled his tongue around it then sucked it into his mouth and rolled it sweetly between his lips while his tongue continued to torture it. The moan escaped at last and, hearing it, he smiled around my nipple. He let me go so that I slid down the glass door back onto my feet. At the same time, he stepped forward and pressed his lower body into me. Through his kilt and my skirt, I felt his erection huge and hard as rock.

  “Take my cock in your hands,” he whispered, “and ask me again to fuck you.”

  My lips moved soundlessly, with what purpose even I didn’t know, and in any case words were no use to me. Instead, I reached up with my mouth and latched on to his, pushing my tongue inside to explore the inner silkiness, running it over his te
eth, feeling the sharpness of those wicked, pointed incisors. Fear shot through me, along with a desire so sharp that my body thrust itself into his, grinding into his crotch. My hands fought their way inside his soaking wet shirt, feverishly caressing the cool, damp skin of his back and the hard muscle beneath.

  He tugged up my skirt and swept his hands over my bare thighs and my cotton-covered ass. He took the elastic of my knickers between both hands and tore. They split down the seam and fell in a puddle at my feet. A sound like a sob escaped from my mouth into his. He wore no underwear. Beneath his coarse, wet kilt, I could feel only smooth, hard skin, his tight, shapely buttocks.

  I gasped again as his fingers found my pussy. Dear God, I remembered them, wanted them…

  “Hot and wet,” he whispered, sliding them around my slick inner thighs, collecting the moisture running down them and taking it back to the flooding pool in my pussy. “Soaking wet and ready… So ask me again.”

  Bringing my own hands around his thighs, my trembling fingers forced their way between our bodies to find the shaft of his cock. I moaned aloud at the feel of it, huger and thicker than any I had ever encountered and at my touch, I heard some sort of growl come out of his throat. For the first time, I was fully aware of my effect on him and I loved it.

  I closed both my hands around his cock, drawing back the skin with one, caressing the slippery head with the other, squeezing until his growl deepened. I slid my hand all the way down his shaft, over the thick root and cupped his taut, heavy balls, rolling them in my fingers. The vampire hissed between his teeth.

  Breathlessly I said, “Why should I ask you? Can’t you enter without invitation?”

  And he smiled, deliberately pushing his finger inside me. I gasped. “Oh I have all the invitation I need right here.” Bringing his finger out, he showed it to me, glistening and running with my moisture. “I just want to hear you say the words.”