The beast that men called Fenris watched the vermin come and go from their new lair like scurrying ants. His eyes narrowed as he watched the creatures lure their latest prey to her doom. He knew that the human woman was mundane. She gave off no occult aura that Fenris could sense, and his senses never failed him. He smelled no fear from her. Her heart beat steadily.
She had no idea what was in store for her.
Fenris had been tracking the creatures for more than a week, having come across them as they finished clearing out a neighborhood in Hell's Kitchen. An old friend had looked him up on the rez and told him that the leeches had come back to the City. Marc Spector believed that no one would be able to track down the creatures the way he could, once he had assumed the form of the beast. Spector was right.
He had first come across the smell of blood and death only days before as he hunted in the darkness. Two bodies had been left in a dumpster. The corpses were drained of blood. He felt the nearby presence of the creatures that had done it. They were very, very close. He could smell the blood still on them.
After harvesting a few vagrants and streetwalkers, they moved on. He assumed that was their continuing M.O. Clever. They never took too much to be detected. Or so they thought.
He had trailed them to their new grounds, and on this night he was prepared for them. He knew how many there were. He knew how they stalked their prey. They were going to die.
The bloodsuckers began toying with the woman. They were plying her with alcohol now, something smelling of absinthe. It had become a fashion amongst them, something like red bull and vodka was to teenagers. The beast growled softly in the darkness.
The leeches had sharpened senses of their own, and the smaller of the two had heard the beast's angry challenge from where the hunter had perched.
The smaller one jabbed at the larger, and pointed up to the rooftops. Dropping the nearly unconscious woman callously on the pavement, they crouched low and moved with inhuman speed to the building where the beast watched, and began rapidly climbing the walls.
They crawled over the ledge of the building and on to the roof. Looking about in confusion, the bloodsuckers did not know the beast had already gone.
Fenris sniffed at the woman laying on the street. She had not been bitten. She would not have to be purged like the other two.
Spotting the hunter back down on the street, the creatures quickly descended after him, leaping from fire escape to fire escape as they went.
Fenris waited for them. He felt the primal rage burning in his chest and aching to explode outward as the hunt culminated.
The creatures rushed him simultaneously, thinking to overwhelm him with their supernatural strength, only to find themselves badly mistaken in the thought that they could so easily bring down the powerful hunter.
The beast took the first head on as it charged him, tearing out its throat with talons hard and sharp as tempered steel. It crumpled to the ground, vainly clutching at the gushing hole where its windpipe had been only moments before.
The second hit him hard in the side, and the two combatants were quickly enveloped in a tearing mass red in fang and claw.
And almost as soon as it had begun, it was over. The second leech's head had been cleanly removed from its shoulders.
The beast moved back to the creature still flailing on the ground. It's wounds were already healing and it would be up again soon if let alone. Fenris finished the second creature quickly, and the last of the vampires that had come into New York City were finished.
* * *
Axel Christensen sat down on a bar stool in the quietest place he could find in the City at three in the morning. He had disposed of the rapidly detiorating vamp corpses in the sewers just as he had the other dozen he'd taken down since he had come back to this god forsaken place. He'd taken the girl to a more public area and put her into a cab. Now all he wanted was a drink.
"Leinenkugel's," he said as the barkeep eventually made his way down to where he sat.
"We don't got nonna that ratpiss here,"
"I hate this goddam city," he mumbled to himself, getting ready to leave. A steadying hand landed on his shoulder, stopping him from standing up.
"Me too, but here I am," a familiar voice said from behind him. "Somebody has to stick around to take out the trash."
"I just wanna go home and drink some real beer again. I'm outta here on the first flight back to Milwaukee."
"Fair enough, you earned it," the voice said, as Marc Spector sat down next to his friend. He slid a first class ticket across the bar. "The flight leaves at 2 this afternoon. Thats enough time to at least get some sleep first."
Gesturing to the barkeep, Marc Spector ordered up two shots of whiskey. They tossed back the shots, and ordered another.
"Listen, thanks for coming in, Axel. You helped save a lot of innocent lives. I'm not nearly as attuned to the vamps as you are. It would have taken me months to clean them out myself, if I even could."
"Right," he snorted. "You have to wait for the moon to peak before you super out. That mouldy old Egyptian god doesn't seem like much help hamstringing you like that."
"Maybe," he replied, shrugging. "But he did save my life once a long time ago. I guess I still owe him. I probably always will"
"Yeah, well, I saved your life once too, and I can't get one lousy Leiney's in this craphole city. If you could do that for me, I'd call us even."
Spector laughed. "Whiskey'll have to do for tonight, but at least the cocktails on the city's menu aren't coming from the bodies of its citizenry anymore."
"Yeah, I can drink to that. But you still gotta do something about that moon thing . . . "
(published July 10, 2013)
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