I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (14 page)

Rainford knew this because he had been one of
them once.

He had laughed and cried, loved and longed,
much as they. He had known thirst and hunger, privation and want.
Unlike many others, he had been fortunate enough to enjoy, for a
brief moment in time, the satisfaction of those needs. But knowing
himself satisfied, he had not grown complacent. Indeed, he had
considered himself extremely fortunate. He had begged his master to
turn him, though his master had refused.

His master was a being of rectitude, one that
did not dodge responsibility but saw a task carried through to the
end. Rainford had been impressed by that as a child. As a vampire
with ages to contemplate and an existence of his own to sustain, he
had been astounded. His master had been more humane that the humans
themselves.

That there were others like his master. But
alas, there were not.

A siren wailed past in the distant night and
Rainford knew the humans hunted one of their own.

For over three hundred years he had watched
them kill each other when they were not killing his. As a majority
of the humans banished his kind to myth, they devised new and more
efficient ways of destroying each other. What was the horror of
drawing and quartering to Hiroshima? Where was the humanity of the
guillotine next to their lethal injections?

The humans fooled themselves that they stood
for values they could cite but never understand, much less begin to
live up to. Rainford detested their deeds but above all he hated
the ways in which they lied to themselves.

Unfortunately, in Rainford’s estimation, the
children of the night were not much better.

He walked the broad avenues, well lit with
artificial light. Even this late the Asian markets were open for
business, hawking their wares. There were customers galore.

The younger generations of vampire had given
themselves over to a nihilism that denied all. They had misread
Nietzsche, much as the Nazis had. Fritz had been no friend of
nihilism. In fact, he had been its foe. Rainford knew this because
he had known the man.

Yes, Nietzsche had perceived—correctly
thought the dark Lord—the absence of moral universals, let alone
imperatives. True, he had perceived the despair this could
engender. He had warned that if one stared long enough into the
abyss, the abyss would stare back into you.

But his had ultimately been an optimistic
message, a moral lost on Kreshnik and others like it. All Fritz had
asked was that one accept responsibility for her actions and the
consequences of these actions, that one embrace the concept of
responsibility in history.

And that, Rainford had long ago realized, was
the problem with human beings and his own. Each evaded
responsibility. They carried on as though they thought their
decisions and actions did not carry consequences. Or that any
consequences were none of their concern.

Rainford turned off the street crowded with
people and stalls and entered a series of winding alleys.

He detested the Albanian and its ilk. Its
fawning harlots and mindless sycophants who lived to serve. They
looked to Kreshnik as a deity because he was learning to walk in
the sun, because his cruelty was unmatched.

Kreshnik
. It meant knight.

Rainford did not understand the thing at all.
What code did this creature live by, except that of naked avarice
and unquenchable mayhem? The spectacle and excess of this morning
with the girl, for example. Its slave. He had tried to get her
attention, to distract her with his gaze. To make her last moments
peaceful ones at least. Kreshnik did not do this. The thought would
never have crossed the creature’s mind, nor that of any of its
followers.

Rainford detested them all. But he was one,
alone, and they were many. They augured the future.

This concerned him.

He turned a corner and the man he saw
appeared homeless. He looked like he was sleeping off a drunk.
Rainford slipped into the shadows and waited, watching.

In an earlier time, in the days immediately
after he had been turned, there had been greater optimism,
hope
. Or perhaps that had just been the distorted
perceptions of an eastern European peasant boy faced with the
slaughter of his family and his own impending doom. Rainford had
been naïve enough to think his master had saved him, had delivered
him from death by transforming him.

The man slept on a slab of cardboard which
kept him above the moist pavement. Though the sounds of the city at
night were clear, no other human being traversed this passage.

The dark Lord had embraced his change, had
willingly accepted the training that it required.

Moving closer, his soft-soled shoes making
little if any noise, Rainford considered the man asleep before him.
This man was someone’s son, perhaps some child’s father. In this
man’s person resided the collective hopes and dreams of who knew
how many, as well, conceivably, as the anger and disappointment of
untold others.

Rainford realized that the attrition rate
among the young of his kind was enormous. More vampires died then
succeeded in assimilating to the lifestyle. He himself had turned
many, but only a few of these had survived. Humans and other
creatures had pursued them relentlessly. Vampires had had to learn
to live among humans, among a race who despised and hunted them
when they were not denying their existence. They went from their
diurnal habits to rising at night and fleeing the dawn.

They had had to learn to hunt and feed
without drawing attention to themselves. Many failed in the task
and perished from malnourishment. Others, Rainford knew, had
comprehended their predicament after longing for it and,
overwhelmed, ended themselves, stepping into the sun, driving
wooden stakes through their own chests, ingesting silver.

Rainford knelt down over the sleeping man and
studied him. He looked like one who had led a tempestuous life. His
skin was wrinkled and his clothes unkempt, stained. The man had
spent a great deal of time in the heat of the day since his last
shave or bath.

One could not be turned into a vampire
against one’s will. But had those who actively longed for the
transformation considered the ramifications of their new existence?
Rainford knew that the peasant boy he had been, had not. That child
lacked the mental apparatus to conceive the endless days and the
fleeting nights. That little boy, who had known periods of
starvation on the land, had no idea what hunger could mean.

The hunger.

Rainford smelled the blood coursing through
the man’s veins and arteries, feeding his organs. The man had long
poisoned himself with liquor, but this was nothing to a
vampire.

The hunger was a drive which overshadowed all
others. A thirst that would ever return.

The men who had robbed them this morning, one
of them had been disguised as a vagrant. Those men would be dealt
with, harshly.

Boone.

The man was a nuisance. A gnat. Rainford
understood the price of doing business, the business of surviving
unseen, of sharing an inhospitable landscape with others. Loss of
materials was tolerated, even expected. However, as with Kreshnik,
there was no need for the viciousness. Slashing the girl’s face,
for instance. Exposing Shane to the sun.

That had crossed a line. It demanded
redress.

The man before Rainford opened his drunken
eyes and stared up at the vampire.

The dark Lord leaned closer and enfolded him
with his gaze, disarming the man, drawing him in. The man stared
into the abyss, and found that the abyss stared back. Lost in
Rainford’s stare, he did not feel the teeth sink into his neck.

Even at Rainford’s age, the urge to feed was
powerful. But the taste had lost its magic. Though the feeding had
long ago become a utilitarian task, the necessity that drove it was
no less real.

The man beneath him did not put up a fight.
He had looked into the dark Lord’s eyes and been put at peace, a
tranquility he had probably never known. This was Rainford’s gift
to the man, his final moments.

The taking was neat and clean, the kill quick
and efficient. Unlike the scene in the warehouse this morning. As
Rainford sat back on his haunches, unfolding the handkerchief he
carried, the thought of it still bothered him.

In his nights, the dark Lord had dined on
princes and paupers, the famous and unknown. Always, he had chosen
his prey with care, caring to remain hidden, caring not to draw
attention to himself. Unlike Kreshnik, who killed indiscriminately
and on a whim. Unlike the actions of this man Boone, a man whose
name Rainford had heard more than once in the last year or two.

A name heard once too often.

He dabbed at his lips with the
handkerchief.

They would find this man Boone through his
friends. The wheels were already in motion. The creature that
called itself Enfermo was involved.
Enfermo
. Like Rainford,
a child of the night. Like the Albanian, another detestable
creature. But a creature, like all others, with its uses.

Kreshnik.

The creature was especially perturbed the
past fortnight. Its countrymen on the Continent were fleeing Kosovo
in droves. The Serbs were attempting to squelch Albanian
independence. Kreshnik wanted to return, to go back and taste
Slavic blood.

When this Boone was found, Rainford decided
he would let Kreshnik indulge its revenge, satisfy its pride.
Perhaps then the Albanian would leave the city and return to its
home. The dark Lord knew Kreshnik was marshalling its strength,
that one day soon the Albanian would make a stand against the dark
Lord himself. Its infernal mother, no doubt, goading it along. This
man Boone could be the oblation that would propitiate the Albanian
and send it on its way.

It would not end well for this man called
Boone, and in getting to him, it would not end well for his
friends. So be it. Again, the price of their business.

Rainford dragged the limp body deeper into
the shadows, covering it with the refuse strewn about the
alley.

When he was young and human and vampires
constituted nothing more than mere myth and legend, Rainford had
longed to be like them. He had ascribed to them a romanticism that
bore no semblance to the reality. He had misunderstood their
natures, what their lives entailed.

With his lack of sophistication, he had
believed the stories of their immortality.

The dark Lord stood and walked off into the
next alley and as he did so he considered.

Why immortality? Why, for that matter,
fame
, which was just another means towards the realization
of immortality? Did the one striving for fame fully grasp that
which he sought?

The living, breathing being, in his time and
place is known by a finite number of fellow travelers. Rainford had
been a peasant boy unknown outside his village. The historical
figure, he had long ago concluded, is just that, an
abstraction.

So he had read of the architect Brunelleschi
what the historian Vasari had deemed to write, that the
Florentine’s desire for glory led him to accept the commission to
vault the cupola in Florence. Brunelleschi had agreed, even when
the magistrates questioned his ability to erect it lacking a
framework.

A lesser man, Giorgio Vasari implied, would
have been put off by the demands of the judges, insulted. Not
Filippo. Instead, for him, what price glory? A temporary
capitulation to satisfy those who controlled the purse strings. A
compromise the Florentine deemed ultimately acceptable.

But what of the man himself? Rainford had
read of him, had looked upon the marble bust of the artist in the
Santa Maria del Fiore, had stared up in wonder at the cupola. What
of the man who was born in the fourteenth century and died in the
forty sixth year of the fifteenth, the man whose friendship and
adventures with Donatello were once well known to a literate
audience?

That man, Rainford knew, was dead and gone, a
memory, a historical fragment, nothing more. And yet so much more
than the nameless, faceless billions history offered up in the
perpetuation of that species.

And yet the man had been here, on this Earth,
as it turned. He had breathed the air breathed by countless others.
Now he was gone, thought Rainford, and the air of this night passed
by without him.

Could any man ever be assured of his own
immortality, if even in history books? And were not even these but
empty promises?

His hunger fulfilled for the time being,
Rainford stepped out of the alley and onto the street.

Boone walked past the line that stretched
around the corner and cut in front of a well-dressed couple who
were getting out of a limousine. He had changed his flannel to one
with sleeves but still wore camo shorts that hung below his knees
and his work boots.

They called the bouncer behind the velvet
rope Big Mike. He looked like a black Father Mark. Big Mike eyed
Boone’s apparel and scoffed.

“Normally…” Big Mike’s voice was a baritone.
“I don’t let your type in this kind of establishment.”

“And normally,” he shot back. “I don’t let
your type live.”

Boone knew what Big Mike and his cousin were
and why they had to have jobs they could work at night.

The bouncer grudgingly unhooked the velvet
rope and let Boone enter.

“Fuck you very much.” Boone spat and Big Mike
had to stifle a hiss less he bared his fangs.

Xerxes was crowded already, though the real
crowd hadn’t even got on line yet. Boone, sitting next to Gossitch
in V.I.P., said, “They got a blood sucker guarding the door now?
Wasn’t bad enough when he was just fixing our drinks. What gives
with that shit, Goose?”