Wight

by Dorien Vincent

  Tset snorted, "Moron, these are silver. Cuts 'em."

  There was silence, then Don said, "Shit, vampires. All the more reason to get out of the City."

  For the other two, the idea only slipped in lightly, and only by the lubrication of alcohol.

  Tset never knew this.

  Hunted Vampire: Second Act

  "Monsieur Nikov." Said the waiter, pouring out two €$700 glasses of wine for Yuri and his female guest.

  She was stunning in a grey velvet cocktail dress and her dark locks done for this particular occasion, framing the light chestnut eyes and silky-brown skin. She was also exhilarated to be out on a Saturday night with such a perfect example of a man as this. She was transfixed, her breathing husky, and she looked straight into his eyes, never wavering, feeling cold when he looked away, warming all over when he smiled. He was exactly what she'd wanted her previous courtiers to have been.

  Yuri smiled, not at the beauty of his guest, but at her rarity. At seventeen it had been nearly impossible to arrange her meeting him, however, his eyes, half-lidded, alluring...

  Now she was all his. Every perfect inch, every fluid ounce, just as he liked it - young, fit, alive.

  Vampires rarely spoke about the eating habits of one another, but Yuri did make some of the other more conscienscious vampires a bit sick, as children were his main fare.

  Yuri believed he was a connoisseur, liked to tell himself that, so young, they had a special taste and brought him more vitality. Yuri was the stranger in the park who walked off with the children who were never seen again.

  He smiled at his guest, at a joke she'd managed to stutter past nervous lips.

  He could feel her heat and her intensity from across the small table. As a matter of course, this girl was a virgin - Yuri couldn't stand the taste of disease in the blood of his prey, but it was looking as though this young girl, more and more, would be willing to throw everything away. 'And be shamed,' he thought, licking his lips. Shame and human degradation, they brought Yuri the most intense thing next to a feeling he'd felt since before he had been turned. Even destroying Ricky hadn't brought him the sort of pleasure shameful debauchery on the part of a pureling brought him.

  He did not touch his wine, or his meal, as was customary, but kept a steady flow for his lady friend.

  "I'm going to get fat and drunk!" She squealed, too far gone now on expensive wine to care about embarrassment. Yuri could almost, just almost, feel arousal. He brushed her leg with his, she shuddered, moaning lightly and sensually, "Ooo." She sounded like a cheap whore. Just that word would've brought a look of disgust to her eyes only a day previous.

  Yuri was admiring his inevitable kill and she was staring straight back with a pair of the most alluring eyes he could recall in recent memory when all of a sudden there were sparks and fire, smoke.

  The two recoiled as a cake with sparklers was brought to them and just as suddenly and immediately, a barbershop quartet of waiters started up with a vaudeville version of the Green Giant's Happy Birthday Song - Yuri and his prey were both seriously distracted and felt their own fires fade.

  Yuri flared, stood, screaming, "Who ordered this? Who ordered this?"

  The waiter with the cake replied, "Why, your friend, sir." The others, the quartet, stood behind, looking shifty-eyed and nervous, now unsure of the mysterious stranger who paid Yuri's tab and ordered this cake and song on account of Yuri's birthday.

  "My friend? Where is this 'friend'?"

  "Last I saw he had gone onto the balcony, sir, to get a cigarette."

  Yuri stormed across the restaurant. Who had infracted upon him?

  The balcony was empty - the snow fell slowly but heavily, no one would come out here.

  But he saw footprints, and disturbances in the snow up the side of the building.

  Yuri drifted, landing lightly on the roof, scanning quickly for his quarry.

  He walked forward, breaking something beneath his left shoe. He bent and picked it up. It was a beautifully-shaped embalmed hand.

  'But...' It was the one from his sitting room - this had been the hand of a dancer he'd taken some hundred years back; her hands had been so beautiful, so petite, he'd eaten one and kept the other.

  Now here was one of his priceless possessions, in the snow, index finger askew from his walking on it.

  It had been bent to a fist, gripping something tightly. Yuri pulled the fingers back. An eye was drawn onto the palm, and a sterling silver .45 shell, no casing, exposed to the moonlight.

  Yuri stormed back into the restaurant, grabbing and hauling his guest from her seat, "What's wrong?" She said, the animal pain, fear and hate on his face killed her buzz and she felt her blood turn to ice water, dousing and quelling her previous determinations and the resultant physicality they brought on.

  She was thrown into his car and he sat down hard enough to rock it.

  "What's wrong?" She asked again, afraid.

  But Yuri didn't answer.

  By the time Yuri had driven her back to her house, he was his old self: handsome, impossibly handsome, and funny and sweet.

  At her parents' door she leaned in to kiss him. He put a finger to her lips, "Not now, not when we'll be interrupted before we're done."

  She felt her heart slam once against her ribs as it came violently alive with something now familiar.

  She desired this man and dark things from him.

  Yuri smiled, devilishly, turned and walked back to his car without so much as, "See you."

  She felt very strange standing there on her step. Erotic, alien to her. Also she felt totally lost and slightly degraded.

  However, she could not get her mind off that man.

  While his previous date lay awake, overheated and overcharged, Yuri drove faster than he should have.

  His car phone rang and he stared at it. His car phone was outgoing only: the number was unpublished and it was programmed not to receive incoming calls.

  He picked up, "Is this you, louse?"

  "Louse?"

  Yuri screamed, ramming his car into a hard left, sliding to a stop.

  "Where are you?"

  "Why would I tell you that?"

  "You are a fool, bug. You cannot hide from me."

  "Wait, back up, louse, bug, insect - I get it, but I did give you Ricky."

  "True, but I've been considering-" Tset cut him off, "When you weren't being a pedophile." Yuri stopped, fumed, then restarted, "You're my brother's true killer, I would need to handle you in order to be done with this."

  "Well, it was by circumstance, not will, but please excuse the grief I've caused you."

  Yuri waited a beat, expecting Tset to qualify his statement or add to it.

  Eventually Tset asked, "Are you senile or did you hang up?"

  Yuri was settling into a quiet fury, thinking again of slowly torturing Tset.

  As Tset had correctly presumed, Yuri was more powerful at night. He had simply gotten overconfident the day they met and been injured and hopeful of finding his brother's setter of fate while in the car that night.

  But now, wherever he met Tset, would be different.

  "Slayer, tell me where your lair is." He spoke smoothly, hypnotically.

  "Slayer's such a nasty word, use... 'hunter.'" Tset was unaffacted.

  His voice rose in anger, "Where is your lair, slayer?"

  "Well, Rhyme Time, if you had call tracking on your ridiculous phone, you'd know, but you don't, so I remain hidden."

  Yuri checked the display in his dashboard, finding Tset's position by GPS right away.

  "You are a fool, don't play games, you know the inevitable is coming."

  "Fuck you."

  Click.

  Yuri angrily slammed the phone down, shattering it and crushing a section of the wooden dashboard into dust, spun the car around and drove, doing 110 on a surface street.

  Tset sighed, put his phone in his pocket, drove 1.4 miles up the wharf and waited on his warehouse roof, turning on his digit
al wonder device and relaxing, in the freezing snow, to something pleasant and slow, probably Paul Simon, while he sat on the low-rise wall ringing the roof.

  He was on the far side from the street, the gunmetal ocean stretching out behind him. He decided, eventually, to play Parachute while he waited - his battery was half full and just yellowing on the screen, but it would probably be plenty.

  Yuri parked his car a ways away from where Tset's readings had been.

  Chances were Tset, with the way Yuri drove, was not expecting him for another few minutes, and so Yuri did not want to blow his advantage with the sound of a high-powered Italian beauty of a shoe-sized car.

  Of course, Yuri, who'd set many traps, should have realized Tset was baiting and waiting and it was probably going to be a set up.

  However, Yuri always set the traps. He himself had never been lured, or, if he had, the mortals doing the luring were meat within seconds of springing their little toys, they were always stupid, so stupid.

  Yuri decided to go in through the roof of the warehouse Tset had last been in by his cell-phone transmission, so Yuri slipped up the side of the building... but, before he crested a section of the very same wall Tset sat on, he heard words and music.

  With the sound of the surf, Yuri's comprehension drifted in and out - the words were coming out of 10mm speakers and were muffled further still.

  ..."I don't practice Santeria"

  "I ain't got no crystal ball"...

  Yuri looked over the lip of the building, seeing no one. Curious. What sort of a lure was this?

  He climbed agilely, moving along, sliding like a shadow on the ground - but the sound seemed to be coming from his right now

  He looked, and there was Tset, legs crossed, fiddling around with a small music device, his face awash in the blue glow of the backlight, still wearing those sunglasses and smoking a cigarette, small piles of snow on the shoulders of his trench coat. How come Yuri hadn't seen him? He'd obviously been there...

  The music was coming from his headphones, it continued, but Tset had changed songs,

  "... I worked so hard to please"

  "But look around"

  "The leaves are brown"

  "And the sky

  is a hazy shade of winter"

  Yuri crept closer, slowly, again, relishing, drawing near to his target, again, new words, shouted softly,

  "Back in the beginnaaan!"

  "When we would sing,"

  "We prayed for angels - 'cause we wished for wings"

  Tset changed songs again, a bass beat... but Yuri was almost on him. Tset hit another button on his player, the song changed, but Yuri stepped that last step, Tset was inches from his grasp, the song played on,

  "I hope she'll say-"

  There was a swish and a KSHUNK, Yuri was halted, his chest and lungs burning suddenly.

  "-hey me an' you should hit the hay!"

  There was a bit of annoying xylophone, another swish, another KSHUNK, this time pain radiated from his crotch. He looked down, a splintered nub of wood with a wicked silver cap sprouted from his chest like a Geiger creation, and then Yuri found a spear running him through from pelvis to ear, sprouting from his neck, pushing his head nastily sideways.

  Tset turned off his machine, rolled the headphones around it and put it in his pocket, looking up to face Yuri, his nose less than an inch from the dripping silver cap sticking from the vampire's chest, "So, I thought I would test a few things, since I knew you'd be here, what've we got?"

  Yuri gasped, his mouth running with blood.

  "Silver... alright, already knew that one, but splintered wood? How's that feel?" Tset was casually wiping the droplets that had spattered his lenses.

  Yuri could not move, the spear in his legs was chained to the ground and the wooden splinters dug into and cut his flesh, a sudden jerk and he would rupture.

  "Seems to be holding you in place, fair well nicely, but you'll also notice, the two beams cross in your midsection, making that arcane symbol of sacrifice, does that cause you any grief or harm?" And he replaced his glasses, Yuri catching a flash of mirth in the solid black eyes.

  Yuri let out a rageful snarl, thrashing pathetically, his claws wiping the ribbons of cigarette smoke into smaller ribbons of cigarette smoke.

  "Guess not compared to all that other shit, what about this?" Tset stood and pulled his small cross from beneath his tie, holding it forward, Yuri tried to grab it.

  "Nope, cross is nixed.

  "But, you're just in time to wait and bleed like a pig for sunrise. I know the sun doesn't hurt you very much, just makes you slow, but what about the rise of it and the set of the moon?"

  Yuri stopped flailing, his eyes growing wide as he checked his gold Rolex watch. He had fifteen minutes, max.

  Tset blew cigarette smoke over Yuri's wounds, causing him to cry pathetically, "I'll wait with you, okay?"

  Tset sat back down, putting his music back on, smiling at Yuri as he slowly smoked a relaxed cigarette.

  Yuri clawed, but it was no use, Tset would only laugh, shake his head pityingly and go back to playing, what Yuri found to be, the Music Quiz game on his player.

  Tset's watch went off - nini, nini, nini!

  He checked it, "Oh, alright," He said, rolling up his headphones and walking away from Yuri, around behind him. "Watch the moon set!"

  He slipped a pair of welder's goggles on, removing his sunglasses. Ricky's book, which he'd lifted off Ricky, had a lot of theorizing that Tset wanted to try out. One thing that was noted is that the vampires apparently caught on fire when the moonbeams and sunrays hit them. Tset did not like fire and thus the distance and goggles.

  As the moon set on the horizon, the silver threads struck Yuri, making him glow with life and energy. He struggled again, but started squirting silvery blood, and so stopped, wailing eerily into the morning.

  Tset played 'A Hazy Shade of Winter' again, with the volume up, to cut out the inhuman howl, tapping his foot to the beat as the sunrays inched towards Yuri's head.

  The result was unexpected. Tset was hit with a fireball the moment the sun's heat warmed Yuri's immaculate hairline.

  He stood, brushing soot off his coat. "Aw, my fucking tie is ruined." He pulled his goggles off. The lenses were warped. "Damn." Tset touched his face - it was cool, as though he'd been out here in the snow with no sort of pyrotechnic interference. "Damn."

  He looked at himself in his mirrored sunglasses, he looked remarkably like a stylish raccoon - his black eyes, then the soot, but a white polygonal patch where his goggles had protected.

  He put his glasses back on and looked at where Yuri had been.

  The wood of the roof had somehow melted, and the snow had been blasted away and lay in a ringed pile around where the stakes had been, still cold, almost unchanged by the fire.

  The stakes themselves were warped, like the roof, looking like candles, but carved out of low-grade 2x4s.

  "Really. Effin'. Weird." Were Tset's last comments before he took a Polaroid and hurried away.

  Second Run: Fall Of Stinger

  Tset drove back to his hotel, trashing his ruined shirt, coat, pants, shoes, goggles, cuff links, €$6,000 watch he'd bought himself as a present, and everything else he had been wearing - the soot would not rub out or clean off at all, it was thick and oily.

  Tset's silver rings, though, for some reason, were perfectly polished, "Curiouser and curious - dammit!" Tset had looked at his wall clock. Where would Tyler be right now? If he hadn't had to drive back to his 'lair', it wouldn't be eight in the morning.

  He dressed and hauled it over to The Pit, anyway, upsetting some early morning traffic cops, but losing them on the icy roads with clever use of his boots and rear brake - though he did spill it, but only once.

  He arrived at The Pit. The door was locked. He pounded on it, shouting: "Anybody in there?"

  No one answered. "Dammit."

  He looked through his contacts, calling Tyler as he had while fleeing the poli
ce. Again, voice mail.

  He called Jess's phone, Tyler picked up. "Jessie?"

  "Er, no. Where are you?"

  "Who is this? How did you get this number?"

  "I'm an angel, did an act of God, that's how I got this number. Where the fuck are you?"

  Tset was getting exasperated: the cops were still looking for him and it was only going to get less foggy - very soon a helicopter would be on him. Haliburton wouldn't like one of their operatives on live TV, he thought.

  "Act of God?"

  "I've even got a fucking photograph! A Polaroid! Where are you?"

  A police cruiser spun by, but didn't see him, the sirens stayed off.

  "Angels don't say fuck, dude. Who are you and why are you calling this phone?"

  Tset screamed at his cell, a rasping, tearing sound, rising in pitch and another cop did see him just then, screaming like something unholy at a cellular phone, dressed like a greaser in a brown leather jacket, matching Dean boots, jeans and imposing mirrored shades.

  "Oh, Tset, why the fuck are you calling this phone? That's not cool man, I was sleeping."

  Tset suddenly realized what the problem was and slapped himself in the face, "Tyler, are you at your house?"

  "No man, sleeping under the bar."

  Tyler was drunk.

  "Where?"

  "Dunno, man, just woke up here. Why the fuck did you call me on Jess's phone?"

  Tset got another call, "Sorry, getting another call."

  He hung up - this morning was already going very, very badly. 'Teaches me to start the day at anything earlier than 6PM. God dammit.'

  Tset made illegally punctilious use of a safe-house.

  Inside, he checked who the call had been from. Hal, it was an SMS. He read it:

  Mr. Tset,

  I have a plumbing job for you, if you'd care to accept it.

  We need your particular finesse for this one.

  Francois knows the tools and trade, but with the expected resistance we need two men for the job.