I flung myself onto the ground with a giant flop behind a growth of bushes grimacing as the mass of cans slugged my lower back and clanged together like dense little drums. I clutched my pistol in both hands slightly off the ground in front of me propped up with my elbows against the ground. There was a long silence except for the engine drawing nearer and some coyotes yipping in the distance. I squirmed my way around with one hand and my elbows so that I was facing the house. I lay there panting into the ground momentarily before crawling forward very slowly until I could peer through the brush all the while thinking that that I should have been moving in the other direction. I stopped when I was about twenty feet into the forest. I could see the house through the screen of vegetation as a yellow outline in the moonlight. A fallen branch jabbed uncomfortably into my stomach, but the sensation faded away as a cold ball of fear settled into the pit of my stomach and froze me to the warm ground.
A vampire stood in the little clearing in front of the house sniffing with high nostrils set in a long thin nose. It was as if he’d popped out of the darkness or sprung out of the moonlight that bathed the clearing. He walked over to the trunk of the fallen tree, nostrils flaring, his sharp intakes of breath barely discernible above the light breeze that fluttered the dried leaves and pine needles around me. He walked with the smooth silent gait of the vampires barely lifting his feet from the ground as if he were gliding through the air. Mature vampires often move more quickly than the human eye can perceive so to me it seemed as if he took no steps at all but simply slid forward. When he came to the tree trunk he sniffed, his eyes narrowing, and then he bent as if bowing and inhaled deeply. As he rose, he turned and looked in my direction. His eyes glinted red as the light hit them and he hissed like a snake around two fangs that just jutted out over his thin grey bottom lip. They were dazzling white and were the length of a vampire who’d been turned between twenty and thirty years ago, my own age. A trickle of saliva ran down one fang and hung briefly suspended, crystalline in a beam of moonlight before it fell turning over in the air and then shattered against a crisp new olive-colored shirt.
He shot towards me with a speed that was made even more alarming by the silence of his passage. Foliage sprang back into place unmolested as he passed and still, he made no sound, not even the solitary crunch of a leaf. My fingers tightened around the trigger and I was prepared to leap up and flee when a dark green jeep came roaring up to the house. Even in the darkness it drove quickly without any lights. A couple of vamps leapt lightly out both clad in baggy camouflage pants that consisted of splotches of tan, gray and sandy brown and strode towards the vampire in the center of the clearing who’d spun around to face the jeep his face sinking into a flaccid wariness as he recognized them. The two vampires who’d arrived in the jeep moved almost in lockstep, but one moved with the shuffling, top heavy gait of a thrall. The other was extremely tall, very pale, and shirtless his bare chest a tangled mass of silver scars and wiry black hair. His dark eyes caught the moonlight and became featureless spheres of glinting light over a delicately shaped moustache.
My pursuer bowed to him and hissed through his teeth, “Sir, my hunt is glorified by your presence on this chill night.” I smirked a little as I lay drenched in sweat and felt no nip in the air.
“You expect me to be reclining cozily at the blood den losing my faculties?” His speech was smooth and languid but as he spoke his eyes flared and he bared his long fangs pulling his lips back tightly.
“No Sir,” the other replied quickly, “I simply trusted that you would be enjoying a few well-deserved comforts for one as powerful as yourself.”
“Not so powerful as the one who sent me youngling. General Marcus.” The one he berated frowned and his fangs vanished instantaneously. “It seems another ambassador to Benjamin Eldritch has been returned to us in a most unfortunate manner.”
I reeled. The moon seemed to roll over me in rapidly repeating orbit. Only basic instinct kept me from rustling any leaves as my senses abandoned me in the face of a vampire uttering my brother’s name. I felt as if I were drifting weightlessly, bobbing along the forest floor and the vampires’ voices came to me as if disembodied, formless, and emanating from the darkness. There was no reason for my brother to receive vampiric emissaries unless he had himself been turned.
“He put a stake through his heart and sawed off his head before floating his body downriver in a pine board box. How this human manages to survive with his ridiculous notions is beyond me, but he is nothing if not thorough.” A gasp escaped me as I heard that my brother remained human but then I wondered why they would send a Sir in army fatigues to meet with him. Unless it was an assassination.
“Why not raise the call, descend upon the North en masse and destroy this little worm?”
“The General does not think that is wise at this time.” He paused momentarily. “And
