Paint It Black (2 page)

The male wears a halter studded with chrome spikes that displays his tattoos to their best advantage.

A leather bondage mask hangs from his belt. Both wear tight-fitting leather chaps that expose their pale ass cheeks. With their blond hair, tanned good looks, and complementing bodywork, they could be easily mistaken for fraternal twins. Perhaps they are.

The male seems a bit dubious at first', eyeing the scar that twists the right side of my face into a perpetual sneer and my ruined eye. I might not be physically attractive enough to suit his tastes, but I appear to have the necessary wealth. In the end

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) they prove pathetically easy to snare -- all it takes is the promise of free drugs and a night of excess at a fashionable address. As we leave, I probe their minds, expertly tweaking their pleasure centers while dampening their sense of self-preservation.

The humans that frequent these clubs are far from cautious by the normal standards of the herd, but I still find it prudent to lull them into a false sense of security.

It is early morning, and as the club prepares to seal its doors against the coming dawn, the city's butchers can be seen starting their day's work, unloading freshly slain sides of beef and pork from refrigerated vans. High-pressure hoses sluice the blood from the loading docks into the gutters, where it mixes with the vomit, urine, and used condoms from the night before, filling the air with the fragrant aroma of spent meat. I find it most invigorating.

The leather-clad couple ooh and aah appreciatively at the sight of my vintage Rolls and the

uniformed driver that awaits my return. We climb inside and I offer my new playthings cocaine and champagne-in copious quantities as we roll through the city' s predawn streets. They indulge themselves to excess, giggling and snorting and groping one another as I watch, smiling quietly.

The male fixes me with a questioning gaze, his eyes made hot and wet by drugs and my manipulation of his brain chemistry. 'So, what's your particular kink, buddy?' He smiles slowly, knowingly. 'You like to watch? Is that it?'

He slides his gloved hand between the female's thighs, massaging her mons veneris.

I return the drunken idiot' s clueless grin. ' Yes.

I like to watch.'

They are duly impressed when we arrive at our destination: a stylish loft apartment that utilizes the entire top floor of what was once a furrier's warehouse. The interior is an austere variant of art deco, all shining chrome and black marble decorated here and there with expensive Persian carpets, atmospherically lit by cunningly arranged track lighting.

I shrug out of my coat and smile comfortingly at my playthings. I take my place in an overpadded leather easy chair, light a French cigarette, and

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) cross my legs. I gesture to a corner of the room with exposed brick walls, bare metal pipes, and a stained concrete floor. Handcuffs are attached to one of the radiator pipes and leg manacles are set into the wall, and a metal trapeze hangs suspended at eye level from the rafters. An array of punishment devices hangs from a row of pegs.

' Why don' t you show me what you do best?'

The leather-clad couple exchange glances and

shrug. As far as they are concerned, I am a jaded, somewhat physically repugnant jet-setter with too much time and money on my hands.

The male removes his bondage mask from his belt and slips it on. With its zippered mouth and eyeholes, it resembles a leather scarecrow's face. The male grabs the female by the hair and drags her over to the pipe, where he handcuffs her with her arms over her head, her buttocks pointed in my direction.

The male selects a cat-o'-nine-tails and, after a couple of experimental snaps, brings it down on his partner's ass. The female squeals and wriggles as the male rains blow after blow onto her upturned derriere, leaving angry red welts across the creamy expanse of her jiggling cheeks.

I yawn.

This seems to aggravate the male, although it's hard to tell with the bondage mask on.

'What's the matter? Isn't this good enough for you, scarf ace?' he snaps, turning from his trussed partner to glower at me.

I pretend to let his "insult go unnoticed. 'You haven't even broken the skin!' I sniff. ' I want the Real Thing, not this candy-coated pretense!'

The male mutters something to himself and

returns his attention to his slave, smacking her unprotected backside with even greater ferocity.

The female shudders and weeps, struggling against her restraints as blood fills the paper-thin cuts striping her ass.

After a few minutes of this, the male stops to change hands, shaking the blood from the whip. He turns to fix me with a challenging stare from behind the safety of his mask.

'Is this real enough for you, you one-eyed

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) bastard?' he snarls, slapping his partner' s blood smeared flank with the flat of his hand.

'You're not even close,' I smile. 'Here, allow me to show you how it' s done.'

He stands aside, hands on his hips, expecting me to get up and take the whip from him. Instead, I simply force my mind into his skull.

The male's body twitches as I penetrate him between the eyes, his limbs convulsing involuntarily

as I seize control of his nervous system. As far as he is concerned, he has been suddenly, inexplicably struck blind, deaf, and dumb. I am the

only one who can hear him screaming inside his head.

I give him back his eyes and ears, but I don't allow him to open his mouth. Screaming is not allowed. Not yet.

The female turns to look at what she believes is still her partner, her eyes confused. 'Frankie?'

The male grabs a handful of the female's long, flowing blonde hair. I pause long enough to savor its silkiness against borrowed fingertips, then proceed to pound the captive woman' s head repeatedly against the steam pipe.

At first she's too startled to respond. By the second blow she begins to struggle and swear. The punishment my surrogate is meting out is not the kind she craves.

'Frankie! Stop it, you fucker! You're hurting me, damn it!'

I have my plaything slam her head into the pipe a third time. A fourth. One of her retinas has become detached. Blood streams from her nostrils, making the bottom of her face look like a clown's mouth.

The female goes limp by the sixth blow, cranial fluid leaking from her ears and the corners of her eyes.

Humans have so many foolish preconceptions concerning my kind: that we cannot walk in the light of

day; that we burn at the touch of religious icons; that we survive on a diet of human blood. That last bit is true, in part. Yes, blood is indeed the life.

But to feed on blood alone -- do humans subsist on nothing but bread and water? Of course not. For

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) those of us with a more refined palate, there is the gourmet delight found in human suffering. It is to blood what crack is to table wine.

However, it is not the female's pain that thrills me, delightful though it may be. It is the anguished horror of her partner I feed on, as I force his body to batter his lover"s skull into an oozing mess of matted hair and bone fragments. There are no words in the mortal lexicon to describe the exhilaration and gratification I receive from such raw,

unfiltered emotions.

The female is dead, or so close to death it doesn't really matter. I have the male release her and stand before a mirror mounted on the wall. As he watches, locked within his own" flesh, more helpless than the day he was born, I command his hands to snap the nostril holes of his mask shut. Then I zipper the mouth shut.

I feel the surge of panic swell within him as he realizes what I plan to do. The screaming inside his head doubles in intensity, echoing within his skull, as I seal first the right eye, then the left, leaving him to darkness.

Even after everything is sealed, the mask is far from airtight. It takes the male over half an hour to suffocate. I sit in my chair and watch, savoring the alternating surges of fear, terror, rage, and despair, as the dying human first realizes then rejects his fate. His last cogent thought is that the police will kick open the door and rescue him in the nick of time, just like on TV. Then he dies.

I frown at the dead man's body, then at the battered corpse of the female, still tethered to the

radiator pipe. I had hoped this would be enough, but it is not. I close my eyes, trying to block her image from my mind, but it is to no avail. I can still see her. Something in my chest aches, reminding me of my emptiness.

Dawn is close at hand, but I do not fear the intrusion of its rosy fingers, here in the mirrored

security of my Rolls. I am not a lowly revenant, scuttling from the sun's rays for fear of being reduced to a pile of oozing sores. I evolved past such worries decades before the invention of the steam engine.

My powers are somewhat diminished during the

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) daylight hours, that is true. And, like all of my kind, I find it necessary to lapse into a

death-like ' sleep' in order to restore my vitality and heal wounds dealt me in combat. But I am far from helpless, as the legends would have humans believe.

My driver cruises the streets of the Lower East Side. He asks me if I have a destination in mind - I almost give him an address of a low dive in Five Points, then I remember that the neighborhood was demolished close to a century ago. Too bad. There was a brothel there operated for and by children that provided me with great amusement now and again.

Instead, I direct him to Allen Street.

The whores who ply their trade along this particular boulevard are, at best, careworn. Most of them are crack or heroin addicts, the ravages of their addictions obvious even to the

most obtuse of human gazes. Even if I was prone to the human sexual urge, I would never dream of mating with one of these horrors. They are rarely beautiful, and often they aren' t even women.

But they are expendable and when one of them

disappears no one notices. That is what I find most attractive about them.

I see what I need and I order the driver to stop the car. A small knot of whores stand in a doorway, fidgeting expectantly as they eye the Rolls. The night must have been slow -- or their drug consumption immense -- if they are still loitering on the streets this close to daybreak. One of them, a redhead dressed in a polyester miniskirt that reveals her unwashed legs almost to her crotch, saunters forward as I power down the window.

'Lookin' for someone, mister?' she coos, her

breath redolent of gum disease, as she bends down to look into the interior of the car. When she smiles, I see that she is missing most of her lower teeth.

I say nothing, stabbing a finger over her shoulder at one of the girls standing behind her. She is tall with dark hair and high, vaguely Indian cheekbones.

She is too thin and too dirty, dressed in high-cut denim shorts and a halter top, but she will do for now.

The redheaded whore swears and moves out of the way to let the other girl by. I open the door and she hops in with an excited squeal that could almost pass for delight. The Rolls is already pulling

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) away before the door closes, but not before I have reached inside the tiny, crabbed minds of my victim's compatriots, erasing what memory they hold of either me or the car.

' My name' s Cheryl,' the whore says, rubbing the front of my pants with all the finesse and speed of a Girl Scout trying to make a fire without the aid of matches. When I look at her I can see the virus gestating within her, eating away at the T-cells in her blood.

I slap her hands away and I see fear spark in her eyes as she gets her first good look at my face. I reach inside my jacket and produce a roll of twenty dollar bills the size of an infant's doubled fist.

The whore's eyes widen and she licks her lower lip.

' Do you want this ?'

'Yeah. 'Course I want it. What I gotta do t'get it?'

' Nothing much. All you have to do is come home with me and play a little game.'

'What kinda game?' She bites her lower lip but does not move her eyes away from the money.

'Dress up.'

My renfields have the costume laid out in anticipation of our return. I lead the whore into a large

room, empty except for a marble table lit from below by a mauve light. The whore frowns down at the leather jacket, stained T-shirt, ripped jeans, and scuffed engineer's boots, obviously perplexed. She had, no doubt, been expecting something far more exotic.

' Is this it? Is this what you want me to wear?'

I say nothing, but simply smile. She shrugs and peels out of her working clothes. The room is cold and I watch with detached interest as her flesh creeps and her nipples harden. She is awkward and it takes her a few minutes to complete the change.

Finally she shrugs into the leather jacket, which creaks with her every movement.

'So, do I look okay? Is there anything else?' she asks, holding her arms up and out, modeling the costume for me.

'Just two things. You'll find them in the inside

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) breast pocket of the jacket.'

The whore sticks her hand inside the jacket and removes the items, looking puzzled. 'A pair of mirrored sunglasses and a switchblade?'

' Put the glasses on. Put them on now.' The excitement is starting to stir within me, and the words

come out as a breathy whisper.