You turn on your heel and begin leaping from one building to the next, only occasionally glancing down to the streets to see them full of walking corpses. As well as, interestingly, some regular corpses which don't make you nearly as uncomfortable. You've seen death. You've seen grim and gritty. Rows of thousands impaled in Wallachia. Rivers of blood in Ostend. Screaming wounded in Austerlitz. And the horrible, sickening maelstrom of violence in the trenches of the Great War, horrors so offensive to your eye that you did your best to forego war entirely. Compared to then, the corpses in the streets below you look like children's programming. Of course, in Verdun, the corpses never did get back to their feet. In about a minute or two, you reached your objective- the home of the only mortal in centuries to earn your respect.
You met her years ago, the same way you meet most mortals- she was isolated, alone, and you intended to feed from her. Nothing new. You approached her silently from the darkness as she stood in an alley, idly doing something with her cellular phone. You took one long stride forward, grabbed her shoulder in a vice grip, opened your mouth to dig into her neck, and-
Came closer to death than you had in nearly sixty years. She had torn the crucifix she wore on her neck off of its chain and slammed it into your chest hard enough that several inches of it were completely buried in your torso. You staggered backwards, trying to grip at it, but unable to move the damned thing. Normally, you'd have been far too quick for any mortal to surprise you like that, but you had underestimated her, let down your guard, and attacked her inefficiently. You cursed yourself and cursed her as you tripped over your own heel and landed ingloriously on your ass in the back of an alleyway.
There you were, a centuries-old vampire, sired by the most deadly being to ever walk the planet, and you'd just been completely outplayed and nearly killed by some random mortal and her piece of glorified jewelry. You knew if she'd even had a moment's more time to concentrate before stabbing you, the crucifix's tip would have found your heart and likely killed you. As it was, you were wracked by agonizing pain, and unable to even move the offending object, or hell, even look at it without your eyes threatening to burst from their sockets. You feared you might ignite on the spot.
When you looked up at her, you saw her stood nearly outside of the alleyway, having dropped her telephone, and just barely suppressing a scream. Evidently she was just as surprised to be attacked by a vampire as you were to be stabbed by a human. You caught her eyes glancing to your mouth, open in a pained gasp, and then to your wound, drooling black, tar-like blood. In her eyes, you saw her thoughts. She almost immediately confirmed her suspicious that you weren't just some crazed murderer, mugger, or rapist. You were a fanged, black-blooded vampire, straight out of the storybooks and special news reports.
You tried to concentrate enough to put her into a trance and make her remove the damned cross from your chest, to, if nothing else, relieve you of this awful pain, but it seemed your supernatural abilities were useless with the offending object embedded in your body. You halfway turned your body to try to catch the arms of the cross on something in the alley to forcibly remove it without touching it, desperately trying to remove it before she got the attention of some authorities or perhaps tried to attack you again, before-
"So you're actually a fucking vampire. Jesus Christ, why'd you pick this town of all of 'em?"
You had been completely flabbergasted. Never in your life had a mortal simply tried to spark up conversation with you. And then you did something you'd never have expected yourself to do, either. Perhaps it was because of your desperation to remove that cross, maybe it was because you were so shocked to be spoken to by a mortal, and maybe it was because you were so delirious with pain. For whatever reason it was, you answered.
The two of you stayed there for what felt like hours, (probably because of the agony) and spoke. You hardly even remember what you talked about. Again, probably because of the horrible, horrible pain. But you do remember that, eventually, she stepped forward and pulled the cross from your chest. She wiped it clean of your blood and reattached it to her neck, and then she left. And for some reason, that goddamned idiot thought it was a good idea to give you her address. The next night, you came to visit her as she slept... And though it tempted you to simply strike her down for the offense of daring to attack you, you couldn't bring yourself to.
And so, instead of killing her that night, you woke her. And again, this time with less agonizing pain, you spoke. You held a conversation with her until near the dawn's light. It was a few months later that she first allowed you to feed on her for the sake of saving someone else. She began keeping her own little blood bags for the purposes of autotransfusion, though the nasty headache that came pre-packaged with your feeding caused her to insist that you didn't do it often- damn the other people, they could carry most of the weight.
You snap out of your flashback as you leap down to the front of her house. It's exactly as you feared. The place is swarmed with the walking corpses, several of them in the threshold of a beaten-down door.
You walk through them like a wall of papier-mâché. A single swing of your arm leaves them torn in half, squirming on the ground. You're still not sure how to kill them, but you're damn certain you know how to incapacitate them. You step through her door, glancing about, fearing the worst, before you hear it. A horrible splat sound you've heard all too often. The sound of the gasses in one's skull suddenly being released as it's cleaved open. You step into the next room and see her, wearing a heavy coat, boots, work gloves and blue jeans, half of her face completely splattered with the corpses' blood, most of her hair slicked down and dripping the dark purple goop. She plants her boot into the chest of one of the fallen corpses and pushes it forward, forcing it free of the woodcutter's axe she just buried in its skull.
She catches sight of you and grins, her eyes flashing. "Hey, Zel'. Took you fucking long enough."
A similar grin crosses your face as you bat away another one of the corpses.
[] "Greetings, Alice."
[] "It's Zelemir. How many times do I have to tell you."
[] "Count Zelemir. I killed a lot of people to get that title and I deserve to be referred to as such."
[] Write in...
