One Fine Day In the Middle of the Night... Who: Zale and Amanda Where: A back alley somewhere When: about 9pm What: Why you don't walk home alone, children
Three days ago Cameron Calvert set himself up a soapbox at City Hall and puked his verbal venom all over the supernatural community yet again. Zale hadn’t been there of course, but he didn’t have to be for a slow curl of intent to coil around his heart. It had been a while since someone was this stupid in a vampire populated region. Sure, it wasn’t like tearing the jaw off a House traitor or beheading a hunter in the field, but it was something to distract him for the evening at least. Blake was a rich brat, he was influential, and he was a bigot. Platforms like his would rot and cave in on themselves in the politically correct liberalist state of American good-will and Zale found his squalling to be precisely the sort of bile he delighted in choking off at its source. That said, he didn’t want to do anything… overt to the man himself.
His pretty little fiance however… Zale smiled down from the rooftop on which he was strolling, looking down on the sweet blonde walking home below. Girl with a blue-bell eyes, peaches n’ cream skin, with a mouth like a Babylon whore. The charming little sow and been in and out of expensive wedding boutiques all day, slipping in and out of white gowns, fussing over herself and her soon to be marriage to her beloved prize stud. But she’d stayed out too late. Dark fell. Amanda Blake with her shopping bags of ribbons and wedding sampler books was walking home alone. Zale smiled, loving the edge of his fangs in his mouth, the lethal tapered smoothness of them and the scent of an expensive meal in the air.
Zale stepped off the roof and landed with a quite impact on the sidewalk behind the woman and began to follow.
As the date for her wedding was fast approaching and there was still much running around to be done for odds and ends, Amanda had taken the afternoon off in order to get just a few of those things checked off the massive list so she could attend to the bigger things, like fittings for dresses and getting her cousin Maureen's fat ass poured into a bride's made dress in such a manner as to not look like a stuffed Christmas goose. She had met her's and Cam's mom for dinner and yet more tweaking of the guest list, cutting out distant relations in favor of local politicians that were supporters of the Humanist rights movement, as well as those that were still riding the fence. After dinner, with the rain having finally let up, Amanda opted for more shopping rather than heading home as planned. She'd wanted to try on more gowns and allow herself a little well earned 'girlie' time to play dress up, and why not? Didn't every bride want just the right dress? Of course they did.
Dress after dress, along with under garments and shoes, lots of shoes were tried on and pranced about in. Amanda was entirely in her element and enjoying the whole experience of being waited on hand and foot that she'd lost all track of time and was there until the boutique was closing and she still hadn't settled on a dress. Oh well, there was always tomorrow.
Having left her car at work it meant a bit of hoofing it back through the streets of uptown Scarlet Oak to retrieve it in order to head home, but she didn't really mind too much. Amanda was in a good mood and enjoying the glorious fresh clean air left behind after the rain, completely unaware of the danger that had touched down behind her.
And here was the fun part of the game... well, it was all great fun but point of fact he liked this part the best. Amanda Blake, soon-to-be wife of the supernatural bigot. Zale brought his wrist to his mouth, neatly slit his own wrist and felt the soft liquid coolness of his blood pour down his fingers. Still perfectly silent behind her, the street empty of all others, he ran his soaking hand over his own throat, smeared his nice college-boy pull over in semi-fresh red. (It wasn't as though he wasn't going to replace it after all.) He wiped his own face in blood and, glancing at the woman sashaying so self-satisfied up the street, wondered if this would even work. A woman like her. If if he were a living human being as he'd once been he had trouble picturing her in perfect heels and designer wear stopping and living up to her political platform
This was all very unnecessary. He could just rip her off the street, snap her neck in passing but... that defeated the purpose. He wanted to see what kind of woman Ms. Blake really was for all her talk. His character decided on, Zale smiled privately... then slammed himself into the a car parked just off the curb. The door dented and he collapsed, grabbing at the rear view mirror for support and hanging there. His hands left red streaks on the glass. With perfectly crafted hysteria he dragged himself upright, leaning heavily against the car, like someone beaten half to death.
"Help! Help me! Please!" He staggered up, clutched his soaked arm to his chest. "There's a fucking... Oh fuck! He's going to drain me -! Oh fuck! Help! Someone!" His voice cracked slightly, all very authentic a reaction really. Zale had, after all, stolen this act from real life. (A very intimate character study in fact.) He pretended to spot Amanda, remained half fallen against the sedan. "Lady please... there was a vamp. I'm... oh God I think he cut something... something important..."
Amanda Blake was a real bitch through and through, but she was still a human being. Bitch or no bitch she did have an ounce or two of compassion for her fellow man, that still didn't mean that her first instinct upon seeing the bloodied young man begging for help and shouting vampire attack was to just keep walking and dial 911 to deal with the situation, hell, she even took a few steps backward in the same direction she'd been heading when her eyes first took in the rather horrifying sight -- but, she stopped, her heart pounding faster in her chest as she lowered the shopping bags to the pavement and let her eyes survey the area for the man's attacker or someone else that could aid in this situation, fortunately there was no sign of the former.
Unfortunately there were no signs of the latter either. "Shhh... shhh... try and calm down..." she told him, her voice hushed as her eyes continued to take in the surrounding area as she dug her iphone out of her purse and slipped off her shoes; tossing one into one of her shopping bags -- holding the other, heel side up as a little makeshift weapon as she took a few small cautious steps toward the man having no clue she was tip toeing straight into a well laid trap. "Is it gone?" she asked, taking a deep breath to summon her courage; sprinting over to the man in her nearly bare stalking feet -- moving herself between the he and the car to help support his weight in order to lower him to a seated position. "Just be calm... can you do that for me? Did it bite you? Where and how bad are you hurt?" she inquired, trying to look him over in the dimness of the street lights. There was a lot of blood, even in the poor lighting it looked really bad and Amanda was sure by how cold the man felt that he was quite close to death.
She shushed him like a child and Zale allowed himself to feel a small mote of fondness in the simple fact that she had the capacity to comfort another, even if it it was under extreme duress and in the midst of copious blood loss. Amanda moved warily to his side, eyes scanning the skies as a rabbit looking for the hawk, unaware that the very predator that made her so freely stink of fear... was feigning injury on the ground beside her. He hyperventilated frantically, gripping his slashed wrist to his chest as the woman finally – mustering the limited courage of prey – dashed to his side and looped a slender arm around him to ease him into a sitting position against the car. (Which seemed counterproductive if there was a vampire chasing him, hypothetically. Running seemed more the thing to do, however pointless.)
It was adorable how she toted that shoe, though, like a couple inches of expensive stiletto would prove any barrier at all to even the weakest of newly turned fangs. “I don’t know. I just… ran. I think I hit him or… or he let me go. I don’t know,” he babbled in reply to her first question. “He had me and he was fucking on me and then he, he – Oh god.” He let a terrible shudder run through his whole body, meanwhile absently wondering how she would ever get all this blood out of the fine ivory designer dress she was wearing. A Samaritan indeed to ruin such expensive things for strangers. To her second question he calmed his voice slightly, but remained on the edge of traumatized hysterics.
“It was too fast I don’t know, he cut me…” Zale started breathing too fast again, whole body going rigid with every sign of blind panic. “He cut me. Then he drank and he made me watch. He made me… No. We have to go! We have to hide! He’ll come back I know it! Please, lady, we have to hide!” He stared at her frantically. “Don’t leave me alone. Please. Don’t.” (This was hilariously fun.)
Amanda was scared shitless, though she wasn't going to let it show. The young man seemed to be panicking enough for them both despite her attempt to try and calm him. She tried not to let that shudder that moved through his body pass through her own, but that was awfully fucking hard to do with the fact that his vampire attacker could very well still be close by, possibly even watching the result of his handy work with some sick twisted satisfaction. Little did she know that he was a lot closer than she knew.
"I've got you... it's going to be okay, I'm not going to leave you, I promise." she told him, thinking for a moment that he just might be right about that whole bit about hiding, however, quickly figuring that the scent of blood would give them away no matter where they went. Taking her eyes off of him for just a moment to survey their surroundings for a shop that remained open, that maybe they could take cover in and get him some help.
Alas, all the lights in the windows of the shops were dim leaving little to no options. "We need to stop your bleeding, I don't think we'd be able to outrun it anyhow..." she said, pushing the touchscreen of her phone to dial 911. "I'm gonna get help on it's way and then I need you to let me help you..." she continued. "Can you tell me your name, sweetie?"
Well, wasn’t she sweet? This Good Samaritan thing was quite becoming on Miss Amanda Blake and it almost lent some charm to her ignorance, stupidity, and the fact she was a dying temporary smear on the face of a planet that would see him and his kind to its very destruction. But really, it was nice of her to try. He recalled a time – so long ago it felt like a dream or strand of fiction he’d read somewhere – when saving lives had been all her wished to do. To fix what inherently broken in the human race: it’s fragile mortality.
You don’t need to call 911, Zale thought lazily, issuing the mental command with the strength of three hundred years experience behind it, the words sliding like oil through Amanda’s mind and hard wiring the impulsive idea that she simple didn’t need or have time for dialing phones. (He didn’t want to include any parties beyond their two.) But even as he hit her with the psychic suggestion, he covered its tracks saying, “We can’t stay here. He’ll come back. We’ve got to go right now. Right now I know he’s following me.”
He lurched awkwardly to his feet, swaying briefly, as though gripped by his blood loss – a laughable idea really – and pulled her up with him. “We have to get… inside somewhere… where he’ll need an invitation to get in.” And just to test the extent of her good will, he added, voice gritted by pain, “We can’t sit here. I’m a were… a were blood hound. I can smell him nearby.”
The suggestion flowed through her mind and though she would like to think her mind was strong and impervious to such tampering, her mind accepted the suggestion as if it was of her very own making. She was reduced to the role of mouse in this game with Zale the cat, and a very skilled mouser with more than sharp claws in his arsenal. Amanda was unarmed for this battle and was certain to lose. "Right... we should find a safe place..." she murmured, her finger flicking the end call button -- letting her phone fall back into her purse as he pulled her to her feet.
He'd had her up until he claimed to be a Were, sure, Amanda didn't care for Supernaturals, and maybe she would have been fairly put off by the thought of having one spurting it's tainted blood all over her favorite designer dress, but she wouldn't have left him -- she'd made a promise after all. The problem however came as she directed her eyes up to the sky, or rather the very full moon hanging therein. "If you're a Were... how exactly are you managing to be in human form during a full moon...?" she inquired, raising an eyebrow at the young man, suddenly all too suspicious of the entire scene, her stomach lurching just a bit as she began to wonder if this wasn't some trap she'd just allowed herself to stumble right into, her hand immediately shooting into her purse to retrieve her phone once more.
"Very good, Miss Blake," said Zale, grinning suddenly a vicious Cheshire smile. He twisted his body against her, hand snapped across her and grabbing the phone from her fingers with ease that suggested she was all but moving through molasses in his eyes. Her fancy phone put up the resistance of tinfoil in his fingers, crushed instantly to its base components and a collection of small plastic pieces, which he ground cheerful to a fine collection of smaller plastic bits. He let fall this fine dust of new age technology and smiled a wickedly fanged smile. "You keep your head quite well in a panic to notice. You'd be surprised how many people pay no attention to details like lunar cycle when confronted by the threat of a vampire."
He never stopped smiling as he backed the woman to the car they'd been huddled against, never stopped talking - amiably, conversational and casually. As though he were not bearing down on her, corralling her, and inevitably trapping her back against the the side of the vehicle. Instead he went on.
"You see the thing is, prey tends to panic when there's a predator. It gets very, very hard to concentrate when you think there's a vampire around, hard to focus. You can't stop shaking. Your pulse rises. Her stomach lurches and throws itself into your throat. You feel cold, hyper-aware. You perspire and your hands get slick and you start..." Amanda's back met the chassis of the sedan. "...hyperventilating," finished Zale, whose dark heartlessly gleeful eyes never left Amanda's. He placed a hand against the metal by her shoulder, leaning on it like a college kid having a discussion about politics. "Do you know how many times I've told hunters I was a were on the full moon and had them invite me straight into their homes?"
He whistled, shook his head. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you, Amanda. You would not believe." He looked her up and down. "You seem distracted. Am I distracting you? I'm sorry I tend to go on. Did you want to say something?"
As if having him address her by her last name wasn't enough to freak her right the hell out, the way he was able to fluidly move to disarm her of her cellphone and grind it into nothing with his bare hand was enough to nearly cause the normally calm, cool and collected lawyer to piss herself right there. However, for the moment, she was able to remain in control of her bladder and bowels -- eyes widening and her already pale skin instantly drained of it's remaining color when he uttered the word, vampire.
Amanda Blake was rightly fucked, and not in a fun way.
She tried to remain calm, but it wasn't the easiest of things to do considering she had a vampire bearing down on her, smiling that little smile that sent a chill straight through her -- and that voice, so calm, hypnotic and almost soothing, if not for the words being spoken to her which were anything but soothing -- unless you found thinly veiled threats of being his prey to be soothing. Amanda definitely did not. Nor was the way he spoke her name, as if he was quite well acquainted with her. It was quite quickly becoming clear that this was indeed a trap and that Cameron's little speeches had reached at least one of the vampire houses and perhaps they were about to send him a very loud and very personal message, and would be using her to do it.
Her back made contact with the hard metal of the automobile and her eyes again flicked around as if maybe there would be someone, anyone around to help her out of this. Finding no one, again, her eyes flicked back to the vampire hovering over her. "So you know my name..." she said, trying to keep her voice from quivering as she spoke, failing only slightly to her own amazement. "Then you know who my fiance' is... and you should also realize that if you do... whatever it is you're planning to do... it won't make him back off... if anything, it'll only make him that much more tenacious."
“I couldn’t care less what your idiot of a potential mate might do, Amanda. You see, you have an erroneous view point that I can’t cure because it’s in humanity to die. Every day. In inches.” His hand flickered too quick to follow and was suddenly at her cheek, a thumb tracing the thin lines of the crows feet at the corners of her bright, liquid fearful eyes. His voice lowered slightly, became a soft, almost distracted murmur. His gaze lingered on the tiny wrinkles, not age so much as use. “Little deaths,” he said with wonder, feeling every fiber in her body coil and stiffen with fear. “Every day until the final death, each of you die and meanwhile your fiancé stands on a box and preaches hate and intolerance.”
Zale’s hand slid to the back of Amanda’s neck, cupping the slender curve just at the base of the skull and drew close, feeling the terror in her had paralyzed her – at least for the moment – against retaliation. He lowered his face very near to her pretty doe eyes, mousy and scared and blue. He whispered, breathe he didn’t require gliding silken and cool across her perfectly powdered cheek, “I have eternity to cherish, while that man wastes his life on hate.”
Then, having been appropriately genteel until this point, Zale slammed his hands into the car on either side of her, trapping her. He bared his fangs in the dark, the ivory points of his teeth gleaming bright as brief familiar pain raced through him, down his spine, spread across his back, bloomed through his body like a bullet to the brain and with a ripping sound both flesh and fabric a pair of heavy black wings – the pinions feathered with streaks of white like the edges had been dipped in bleach – arched dark and quivering with aftershock over the sidewalk. They spread as a canopy. Darkened the street. The pain became nothing and Zale opened his eyes to smile, wicked, wicked, and wanton…
Then he grabbed her and they were gone.
His touch was ice cold and caused every muscle in her body to tense all at once, if she had remotely any control of her muscles at that moment she would have slapped the demonic abomination for so much as laying a finger on her in such an overly familiar manner. Amanda did not like to be touched by people, or rather things she did not know, only Cameron or her own father was aloud to touch her face in such a way -- and nobody was supposed to talk to her in such an intimate way -- but she had no use of her limbs, Amanda Blake was literally scared stiff.
"You're only proving him right, you know..." she managed, swallowing the lump that had formed at the back of her throat. "And yourself a hypocrite by exercising your own form of bigotry." she added, though it most likely wasn't in her best interest to say anything.
And she really wished she hadn't with what came after that, Amanda flinched and let out a whimper of a noise when his hands slammed down against the car and wide eyes fixed on the gleam of sharp white fangs. A small strangled noise escaped the blonde's rose colored lips and she felt her stomach drop at the horrid tearing sound that filled the otherwise quiet empty street as the beast before her suddenly unfurled and adorned a pair of wings akin to those of an angel and Amanda Blake felt as though her legs were giving out on her -- and they would have, if not for the fact that before the signal went from brain to body he hadn't snatched her up and taken to the moonlit sky.
She was helpless, she was no match for him, she knew this. All she had left to do now was pray that death came quickly and that Cameron would be able to use her death to some better purpose.
Zale was – in vampiric terms at least – old enough to warrant some respect, but not old enough to warrant a whole lot of it (at least according to his standards). There were ancient outs there who’d seen the turn of the planet for well over a thousand, two thousand years which made his mere three hundred years of other life look like nothing. That said, while Zale’s wings could not yet take him from East Coast to West in the matter of a few moments, they could take him a mere 50 miles from Scarlet Oak to Grosse Pointe in less than twenty seconds. That said, speeds of that kind would kill the delicate package of warm flesh and bone in his grasp, so he slowed to a more manageable speed of five minutes – which was still enough G-force to be highly alarming to Miss Blake, but not enough to pop the eyeballs in her skull.
He dumped Amanda in the shallows of Lake Saint Clair, still with enough speed that she hit the water like a woman coming out of a speed boat, sending up a spray of water and a scream before she went under the dark mirror, the ripples of her impact disrupting the prefect white disk of the moon. Zale touched down on the dock just to the left of the swim area he’d dumped her in, the dark arc of his wings folding against his back, familiar and weighty. Avian muscles coiled lazily as it watched the lake, waiting until Amanda’s head broke the surface.
“Doing okay, Amanda?” he called, inspecting his left wing and ruffling a few unkempt feathers.
If she hadn't been beyond terrified before, feeling the extreme pressure of being the unwilling cargo in the vampire's flight surely took her far past that point. It was a feeling unlike anything Amanda had ever experienced or would wish to experience ever again, it wasn't a feeling of being sick so much as feeling like she was dying, slowly. That she was being crushed by an invisible force and her lungs were unable to take in enough air to keep the rest of her system going for long. Definitely not the quick painless death she'd been hoping for.
He could snap her neck like a twig, he'd demonstrated his strength by the manner in which he'd dispatched her iphone, so simply, effortlessly. Obviously, he wanted her to suffer. Amanda had no real concept of time and distance, she was oddly cold and her head felt like it was going to implode.
And then she was falling...
Amanda let out a scream she didn't think she was capable of at that point, was this her death? Unable to see the ground in the darkness, Amanda tried to brace herself for the impact her body was sure to make and prayed it would be over in an instant.
She hit the water hard, it might not have been the ground but damn if she didn't feel as though the impact had broken every bone in her body. Of course it hadn't, though she still sank like a stone. It took a few moments for her survival instincts to kick in, the dark murky water feeling as though it was pulling her into death's embrace, but Amanda Blake was a fighter by nature and willed her legs to kick and arms to push against the water -- if she died tonight, it was not going to be willingly.
Breaking through to the surface with a choked gasp for air, the water she'd swallowed on touchdown spraying from her nose and mouth as she struggled to stay afloat and catch her breath. A chill rode down her spine as soon as she heard that voice speak her name again, it would figure he wasn't done with her and the tiny fire of victory in her belly from fighting for her life flickered as her eyes fixed on his. Zale strolled casually down the dock as the pale set lump of Amanda’s head struggled for the shallows. “Keep swimming,” he encouraged, hands in his pockets. The edge of his wings rippled, shone the pale edge of the moon in his feathers as he called earnestly, “Go on! Don’t give up now.”
He hopped off the side of the dock to the damp stretch of sand, stood at the edge of the water and beckoned her toward him. “C’mon, Amanda. You’re soaking wet and I promise you if you hide in the water, I’m just going to order you to get out.” He smiled sweetly at her, dark eyes flickering amused and utterly merciless in the lunar glow. “Or I’ll come out there and drown you myself, Amanda. Slowly. Like I said: little deaths and I’m old enough to know how to make them last far longer than your meager fortitude can withstand. Much longer. You’ll ask me to kill you, to put it plainly. Now why don’t you get out of the water?”