Blood Hunt (7 page)

The tile was growing cool against her skin as the warmth from the shower dispersed, and goosebumps were prickling up on her arms. Two sighed, opened her eyes, and began to dry herself off.

* * *

The light on her phone was blinking. Voicemail, probably Rhes again. Two ignored it, not wanting to deal with him. Rhes had managed to hurt her, a little, the first real emotion she’d felt in some time. She had thought she’d inured herself to everything at this point, but when he brought up Molly there had been a few seconds where the pain had resurfaced, bright and clear, like sunlight shining through good crystal.

Two had sighed and forced herself to shut it out, and shortly thereafter the conversation had ended. She had sat for a time on her balcony, as she often did during the afternoons, smoking cigarettes and sipping on a glass of bourbon, and then had taken her shower. Tonight she would walk, as she did every night, with no real hope of finding the thing she was looking for, but with nothing else to do, and no real reason to do anything else even if there had been.

At last the sun was setting, and she could begin. Two had to wait for it before starting her search because of the nature of what she was hunting. Theroen had told her that only some vampires could abide the sun, and that of those, few preferred to spend any significant time underneath it. When the last sliver of red had dipped below the horizon and dusk covered Manhattan, Two would begin her walk. She never planned, never mapped out a route or decided on a path. She let her feet move her according to random whim, the timing of the street lights, the movement of the crowds.

Two leaned back and glanced at the clock sitting by her phone, noting that the sun should fully set in another thirty minutes. The light on her phone blinked and blinked, as if chiding her for not checking her messages. She thought about listening to Rhes apologizing for upsetting her and grimaced, then got up, crossed the room, picked up the phone and hit the button. The moment the automated voice broke into its scripted greeting, Two quickly pressed the series of keys that would clear the mailbox, waited for confirmation that this was done, and slammed the phone back into its cradle. She walked out onto her balcony again, lit a cigarette, and stood watching the traffic down below turn fuzzy and indistinct in the dimming light. Time crawled. Two smoked.

“I hate you,” she said to the crowds of people on the sidewalk below, to the cars and trucks and limousines that crawled along Sixth Avenue towards the theatres to the north. It wasn’t true, of course; there was nothing left anymore but the ghost of this feeling, and of countless others. She didn’t hate these people, nor envy them, because she didn’t care. Her body survived, even as she drove it into the ground, subsisting for the most part on cigarettes, bourbon, and water. She waited for the sun to set, thinking of Theroen.

“There are vampires in Manhattan,” he had told her once. “I know few of them, unfortunately. Abraham keeps me from interacting with them any more than is absolutely necessary, but I have met three or four of them. There is a council that he sits on … lords over, I imagine. He’s the oldest vampire in this country by hundreds of years.”

“What does the council do?” Two had asked.

“According to Abraham, most of what they do is pointless deliberation and setting meaningless laws. It does seem a bit absurd. Abraham is their chief, yet he follows no law but his own, and never has. Of course, it’s to his advantage to be the head of the council. If nothing else, it allows him insight into any plotting that might be done against him.”

“Are most of the vampires like you, or like him?”

“Neither, really. They are individuals, people like you and I, though shaped somewhat by their bloodlines. There are four types of vampires: Eresh, Ashayt, Ay’Araf, and Burilgi. The basic mechanics are the same … we drink blood to survive and use blood to reproduce, but there are substantial differences in physiology and psychological makeup.”

“You and Abraham are both Eresh, right?”

“We are. He is, so I am, so shall you be. Obviously, given the differences between Abraham and I, it would be a mistake to say that the blood within a given vampire determines who that person is. Still, it has some effect. Ashayt vampires are often spiritual or creative, and can be prone to depression. The Ay’Araf are warriors, for the most part, people who not only excel at conflict but actively seek it out. They value strength and speed, mastery of fighting skills, and are often callous or abrupt, uninterested in politics or self-expression. Amusing, really … Ay’Araf himself was a priest and a poet.”

“There’s so much to learn,” Two had told him, and she remembered his smile; that maddening, subtle grin that made her want to grab him, hold him tight, kiss him until her lips were raw.

“There is all the time in the world,” Theroen had replied. The words had sounded so sweet, then, coming as they did from his mistaken belief that he had started Two down the path to immortality. Now they seemed to her only deeply ironic. “All the time in the world” had turned out to be little more than a handful of weeks.

Two watched the last hint of sunlight fade from the sky, watched the streetlights flicker on, watched as her own reflection grew ghostly, pink and blue and purple in the afterglow of the sunset. Her one-bedroom condo in SoHo, modest by New York standards, lent her views of Sixth Avenue and Prince Street. The evening crowds were thick, a sea of people seeking dinner or entertainment or both. Perhaps her vampire was out there, somewhere.

Maybe tonight,
she thought, and then laughed. It was a harsh, angry little sound. Yes, maybe tonight she would find what she was looking for, and if not, then maybe the next night. It didn’t matter. She would search until she fell dead on her feet, even though she no longer believed that she would ever meet another vampire. There was nothing else to do and, as Theroen had once told her, she had all the time in the world.

* * *

The rain had stopped and now the city was cool and damp. The sound of water rushed from the sewers below her, trickled from the walls to her left, echoed from little streams of the sidewalk. New York steamed and smoldered and stank, and Two paid it no attention. She had lived her entire life in this place, and it seemed to her there was no more natural a setting in the world.

It wouldn’t have changed anything, the rain; she would have gone on her walk even in the midst of a tempest, but at least now there were people on the streets to survey. She would not have to spend the entire night ducking into bars and clubs to catalog the people within. Two zipped her leather jacket against the wind, thinking of a time when she would not have even perceived the chill. With a bitter grin, she lit a cigarette and began to walk.

The evening passed. Two’s steady but aimless path took her through SoHo and Little Italy, moving in a general eastward direction until she reached Second Avenue, where she turned north, heading up into the East Village, past Union Square, and into the Flatiron district. Finding this area nearly deserted by Manhattan standards, she made her way west along 18th Street. She scanned each passerby as she went, looking for the right combination: pale face, oddly luminescent eyes, an ethereal sense of balance. Everywhere she walked, Two looked for vampires and found none.

This did not surprise her anymore, though it still pained her. She had spent more than enough time doing the math, figuring out the odds, coming to the understanding that in a city of twenty million, the relative handful of vampire inhabitants would be almost impossible to locate. There might even be several hundred – she had no way of knowing for sure – but Two saw more people than that in a given hour of walking. The probability was akin to the needle-in-a-haystack conundrum, except the needle and each individual piece of hay were in constant motion.

When she reached Ninth Avenue she turned north again, moving along the border between the Garment District and the neighborhood the city government was trying to rebrand as “Clinton,” but which would, she knew, always remain Hell’s Kitchen. The fabric shops gave way to theatres, the streets overloaded with garish neon signs and old-style marquees. Two found it possible, even likely, that the type of vampire she was looking for might frequent the New York theatre scene, but she found herself unable to face the crowds of tourists and so turned left instead, making her way to Tenth Avenue via 48th Street before turning south.

Near midnight she stopped for a slice of pizza, more out of the need to fuel the rest of her walk than out of any desire to eat. She sat on a stool at a counter, looking through the plate-glass window in front of her, watching the people walking by. It was a Saturday night, and the New York nightlife was in full swing. Two knew that there were still four good hours of searching left to her.

She continued her walk south, listening to the sounds of cars passing, people talking, music blaring from the open doors of various restaurants and bars. She was headed toward the entrance to the Lincoln tunnel, an area not well-regarded, but was not afraid. She had not been afraid of New York in a long time, not since the days before the needle had gotten hold of her. The city’s dangers paled in comparison to those she had faced on the grounds of the mansion. There was nothing in New York more dangerous than Abraham.

She passed this relative dead zone without incident, still checking everyone she passed for the telltale signs of vampirism. Even the drunk and quite possibly homeless man urinating on the side of a building, near 36th street, did not go without scrutiny. He responded to her stare with a leering grin and a beckoning wave of his hand. Two wordlessly declined the implied invitation, continuing her walk.

The neighborhood slowly grew upscale as she made her way south, skirting the edge of the Meatpacking District and moving down into the West Village. The wind freshened and Two shivered, but not from the cold. She was feeling a curious doubling sensation, something like
déjà vu
but not as strong, nor so disorienting. She had not been here before, had not lived this moment already in some past life, but she knew this feeling
just the same. She was shaky, tense, excited; she hadn’t felt these emotions in what seemed like years.

Two thought back to an evening last October, when a hand had fallen suddenly on her shoulder and a voice had whispered her name. She thought of waiting on the curb outside of Darren’s building – waiting for her destiny, as it turned out – and she wondered if she was remembering correctly how it had felt then. She thought it had felt like this.

* * *

The club on Hudson Street made its presence known two blocks away; the blue glare from its myriad neon lights bathed the street, the buildings, and the nearby trees in icy hues. The ground floor on both sides of the street was occupied by commercial space, but above the shops and restaurants were numerous apartments. Two wondered briefly how anyone in these buildings could sleep with the light from the club shining so brightly, and thought of the heavy blackout curtains that had lined all of the windows in Abraham’s mansion.

The face of the club was nothing but glass, and all of this had been painted jet black. The neon blue lights converged above the entrance to form words:
L’Obscurité.
Two wondered if it was a Goth club. She’d been to many, in the early days of her search, before considering the fact that only one of the vampires she’d known, Missy, had seemed a fan of that particular subculture. Theroen had been a fan of black clothes and heavy eyeliner, but that was the extent of his interest.

Two hadn’t been able to understand the young men and women she’d met, obsessed with death, morose and often disturbed. While it was true that the vampires she had known were trapped in darkness, the world that Theroen had shown her was not a place of grim and Gothic depression. Vampires were not cold, dead things; they breathed. Their hearts beat. Their lives could mean warmth, love, and immortality; there was little, if anything at all, to do with death.

I’m going in,
she thought to herself, though she couldn’t say why this particular place had brought about that strange, familiar feeling within her. The club’s entrance seemed to call to her, drawing her near, as if pulling with a magnetic force. Two had relied on her instincts for so many years that she no longer questioned them. When they told her to go inside, she listened.

L’Obscurité
was not a Goth club, much to Two’s relief. The clientele was upscale and Two, in a pair of jeans and her leather jacket, felt underdressed. She moved through the crowds on the dance floor, inspecting faces, avoiding eye contact. She had to pass through two rooms to reach the bar, but it was quieter back there. The music had become a part of the overall background noise, no longer assaulting her ears or shaking her entire body with pulsing thuds.

“Girl, you do not have a drink. It is my pleasure and my
duty
to put one in front of you.”

The bartender was young and black and beautiful, his muscles filling out a leather t-shirt and matching pants. Two thought he was wasting his time tending bar when he could’ve been modeling. His head was bald, and when he smiled at her his white teeth cut through the haze of neon and black light that colored the mist from the fog machines by the stage. They were dazzling and Two smiled back, almost despite herself.

“OK. What’s good?” she asked.

“It’s all good, honey, but the specialty of the house is the Cup of Blood.”

Two shuddered. She tried to stop herself, but couldn’t. It seemed she had lost all control of her body for that brief moment as the spasm passed through her.

The bartender raised an eyebrow. “Hey now, did I scare you? It’s not
real
blood. You OK?”

Two took a breath, squeezed the back of her neck once to relieve the tension, and got a grip on herself.

“Yeah. Yes, I’m fine. Sorry … what’s the Cup of Blood have in it?”

“Whiskey, cherry liqueur, little sour raspberry syrup, bitters. It’s dark red. Good stuff.”