Under a blood red sky

Cavan didn't often return to the scene of his murders if they were outside of a few special places. But it had been a while since he'd seen his would-be-friend, and the last time they'd been together it had been in the cemetery. He was also a little curious to see if the blood stains still remained on the tomb, or if they had done something to get them off.

It had been night the last time he'd been here, so it was easy to find where he'd killed the stranger. Cavan removed a flashlight from his bag that he'd bought specifically for this and clicked it on. The blood had seeped deep into the concrete, and while it seemed that somebody had spent some time scrubbing, he could still see the almost black red in the cracks and deep in the pits. He rubbed a hand almost lovingly over the top.

His flashlight beam played over the expanse of the tomb and then he lifted it briefly in the direction that the man's head had gone when Hearth had removed it. Of course that would be gone by now. They'd likely found it, and even if they hadn't, critters would have dragged it off. He'd forgotten to look in the paper the next day to see what had been printed, if anything. There had been a lot of distraction the rest of the night and the following couple of days, due to the nature of his meeting and the potential it had brought into his life.

He returned the beam to the tomb, bending low to see if he could smell the blood, though he knew he wouldn't be able to. His nose was merely human, and there had been weather between then and now. But he could still fantasize that he could, and he knew the scent of old blood well enough to bring it up with memory.

Cavan had been a busy boy. Since his night with the vampire - Cavan was sure now that's what he was - he had done as planned. Ruined the safety of the daylight hours with horrors normally only seen during the night. He hadn't restricted himself, of course, but he'd been sure to place more of his focus on destroying the peace of one more.

He made sure to start early, so that when found, his corpses would be obviously fresh. There was a certain joy in his work that hadn't been there before. Something new. Maybe just knowing that the people of this town wouldn't feel safe anywhere, at any time, because of him and his new... playmate.

To make sure that things were extra gruesome, Cavan had taken apart a couple of his victims and left them in pieces in various points, very obviously. Nothing hidden. Which meant he'd had to be extra careful with trace evidence. It would not due to draw attention to himself. It wouldn't help the plan work. He was careful anyway, making his clean up just a little bit tedious, but he didn't want a single mistake. He wanted to see this through to the end. See how far it would go. See this thing that he'd been told about.

Today he was watching. Trying to find a new victim for tomorrow. That was one thing that he had not given up. The way he did things. The following, the knowing. The trinket he rewarded to himself at the end. The two deaths he'd created on the night this had all started had left him feeling itchy and irritable. He didn't like that. He liked feeling happy when it was over, complete maybe. Satisfied. Unless forced, he didn't plan on doing a slapdash job ever again.

The bus stop wasn't exactly hopping at this hour. It was good news, and bad. Luckily, Cavan had a book with him. He'd picked it up at a convenience store on his way here, to blend better. The book was absurd, something about sparkly vampires, he was pretty sure he was going to set it on fire as soon as he didn't need it anymore. Maybe before then.

Harth couldn't help but notice the waitress was getting all over the floor.

Granted, the vampire was well aware this was due in large part to the fact that he had pinned her to the counter of the restaurant with steak knives.

Since his first night in York, Harth had been largely bored with his surroundings. His initial assumption that the massacring of the not-so-great Rupert Giles would bring him followers en mass had turned out to be ill-placed. The only demons Harth had encountered thus far were low-level scum that he wouldn't even employ to attack a janitor, let alone the universe. Sitting at the gates of Hell without a single enthusiastic follower to help him break them open was horribly frustrating.

Harth had wandered into the diner for something to do, not surprised by the fact that besides the staff, it was completely vacant. York was no Haddyn, where activity bustled at all hours of the day. It was a small, uninteresting town that just happened to hold a very important secret. That said, it also meant that the locals weren't usually up when Harth was wandering the streets.

The waitress had been friendly enough, he supposed. She did offer him coffee and told him the "specials." She also didn't scream too horribly much when he was slamming steak knives into her extremities, and he knew those little serrated parts on the blade had to hurt.

Harth held a mug under the woman's dripping body, collecting enough blood in the cup to make an adequate yield to sip on. The place was quiet, save for the slight sound of sizzling from the head of the fry cook that Harth had left on the grill.

Sitting at the counter, the vampire took a few leisurely gulps from his cup. He had to admit, he kind of liked diners.

After a few minutes of sitting in silence, Harth's peace was interrupted with the sound of the bell above the diner door jangling. Without turning his head to look at the new entrant, the vampire gave a small smile.

"We're closed."

Cavan sat at the counter in the diner, happier here at the very end of it than he would have been in one of the booths. Here he didn't get glared at for taking up so much space for so long. He'd been in plenty of places like this over his lifetime and had learned that the less space you took up, the more people ignored you.

The book he was reading sat in his hands, and one of his knees was braced against the counter. The head waitress had scolded him for this sitting position a couple of times. Bad for his back, rude. But she'd stopped when she realized he just wasn't going to sit normally. She came by and refilled his coffee every 20 minutes or so, and looked at him in the way that middle aged women often looked at boys like him. With a wistful longing that she could be that young again. Be sitting with him. He smiled at her about every other visit to endear her further so he could stay longer.

He watched plenty of people walk in and out, having their meals quickly and speeding off to whatever their next destination was. This was the part of life that he enjoyed most. Well. Maybe second most. Watching people. Getting to know them through their movements. Guessing at what they might do with the rest of their day when he wasn't there to see. Picking one out, possibly.

Cavan looked up from his reading to watch another group leave. Elderly. Not to his tastes. But they all seemed so happy. Despite their horrible age and their withering bodies, they seemed to him to be carefree. He didn't understand that at all. One of them could drop dead just trying to pick up dropped keys, and apparently they didn't care. He shook his head and turned back to his book. Crime in the 17th Century.

Cavan stepped off of the train, one of the last bastions of travel that didn't try to look at your internal organs from the outside when you just wanted to get aboard. He preferred it over the bus, as he could get a private cabin and stay to himself, whereas on the bus he tended to get homicidal within minutes. There was no good place on a bus to kill anyone with discretion.

There were things that he carried with him that planes and airline attendants didn't approve of. Even when he made a special package of it and checked it instead of carrying it on with him. There were always questions, always things missing. Neither of which he liked. Especially the latter. He put a lot of time and effort into his collection, making it important to him. Certainly more important than the thieving fingers of Charge You For Fucking Water Airline's baggage handler. The unfortunate part was the inability to know who had touched what.

Pennsylvania reminded Cavan a lot of Portland, Oregon. There were trees everywhere, and so far York didn't seem to be particularly spectacular. Of course, he was just seeing this world from it's train station, and he supposed that wasn't very fair. Train stations didn't tend to be anything special anywhere.

Things here, from what he'd read, were certainly more exciting than Portland. Mysterious happenings. Unexplainable beings. The internet was rife with descriptions of things that interested and attracted Cavan. He'd known pretty quickly that he needed to be in the middle of it. To try new things. It hadn't been difficult to come up with or execute a plan that would be plausible to his mother and explain to anyone curious as to why he'd moved clear across the country. College. It also helped him out with the cash portion of the problem. All he'd had to say was that he had a partial scholarship. Covered all the classes and books, but not the rest. His mother had been tickled pink to hand over enough to get him an apartment and food. She'd said that she would provide these things until he was done with his education, and sent him off with a box of homemade cookies.

Fucking cookies.

Cavan couldn't really help but suspect she might be glad to have him out of the house. She may have never said so, but he knew she blamed him for his father's death. Which was alright with him. She'd been oh so careful around him since he'd been 'hospitalized', but she couldn't quite hide the look in her eyes when they fell upon her son. The way she just moped around the house all the time. She might not say it out loud, but she really didn't need to.

He looked at the box of cookies and tossed them at a girl sitting with her doll outside the ticket window, not caring where they landed. It would probably be the nicest thing he did the entire time he was in York.