It was raining rather steadily but it didn’t bother this Kindred. The water just ran down the back of her thick, leather jacket and spilled off the hem that had been shortened to stop at her shoulder blades by hand. Her greasy, jelled hair was soaked, it clung flat against her head and her dark red lipstick was running of her lips like little streams of blood from a fresh kill. A car passed her from behind and in the head lights her shadow strode with a familiar uncaring swagger along the sidewalk.
Mannequins stared blankly out of the store windows that she passed, warm in their winter sweaters that some poor slob forced over their stiff, out-stretched arms for the coming Christmas shoppers to marvel at. Up ahead, one of the poor slobs she was just mentally laughing at was huddled under a store awning smoking a cigarette with the keys of the store jangling in their cold hands. All the warm clothes in the window and this little mouse was out in the rain in a spaghetti-strap shirt and shorts, no doubt a part of some requirement ‘corporate’ made for all their female employees.
She stopped in front of the poor little thing, “hey, gimme a light?” Her voice was hoarse from years of smoking long before her body regenerated off the life of her prey’s blood and she held out an un-lit cigarette. “Sure,” squeaked the mousy woman, shivering in the, not-so-cold, California, rain before reaching out a perfectly manicured little hand for the cigarette in need of lighting. Pressing the end of the un-lit cigarette to the end of her own and puffing it lightly then handing it back, the woman smiled. “Merry Christmas,” she bade the stranger who just grunted and took the cigarette back and kept clomping on down the sidewalk. Behind her, the Kindred could hear the little mouse curse. “The nerve of some people,” she squeaked then stomped out her cigarette and charged back into the store to finish up the night’s shift. The vampire smiled before taking a drag off the cigarette, it amused her to hear the girl’s frustration.
After walking a bit she noticed that across the street an electronics store was showing the local news on some of new big screen TVs in their display. She stepped down off the sidewalk, soaking one of her heavy boots in a puddle gathered around a stopped up storm drain, then headed over to the store. Leaning idly against the wall of the store, smoking her cigarette, she watched the glowing screens in the picture window. She couldn’t hear the words the painted doll of a woman on the screen was babbling about but she recognized the picture in the corner above her head. It was a bar, have I been there? Some words zoomed in dramatically under the picture, “Are Our Establishments Safe?” They asked rhetorically before the screen changed to some asshole who claimed to have been ‘at the scene of the crime.' His mouth wagged soundlessly like a cat mewing at a sliding glass door to be let in then the camera panned a bit and the reporter moved with it over to a girl that looked remotely familiar but mostly just bruised. Her face was a nasty shade of purple around the nose area but was on its way to healing. She, like the reporter, mewed to be let out of the TV screen then it was back to Mrs. Painted Doll in the news studio.
This time, above her head, framed by the words “Are Our Establishments Safe?”, was a police sketch. The woman's mouth soundlessly formed the words “if anyone can identify this woman…”
Lori dropped her cigarette and backed away from the window, “fuck,” she muttered, “fuck, fuck, fuck.” The sketch wasn’t very good, but when she saw it everything else that had seemed familiar fell into place.
The bar in the picture was one she wandered into after her frenzy addled mind had stopped reeling. She had needed to feed, and there was hardly anyone in the ‘establishment’, as they called it, when she wandered in the back door. For some reason, even though the bar walls were covered in all sorts of garage sale crap and sport memorabilia, there was a heavy beat coming from the speakers in the main room. She couldn’t imagine who had selected such a song until she saw that sweet thing over at the touch screen juke box. Lori had given her the shiner that she wore on her TV debut and felt her up a bit before feeding on her blood to heal the damage from the recent frenzy. “Guess I didn’t hit the bitch hard enough,” she said to the empty sidewalk then broke into a mindless cackle.
The mirth ended when reality began to sink in. The hunter was becoming the hunted and Lori needed to get the hell out of town while whatever case was filed against her cooled down. She knew that meant leaving to the outskirts of town, living in the woods or the desert, sleeping in the earth, feeding off of animals and hikers but Samhain was soon. She’d lay low and attend the ritual that night, providing the Vessel that she and Circe had spoken about before she'd left town, then disappear for real and that’s exactly what she did.
A few weeks living in the wilds made her feel crazy though. The lack of her vampiric comrades had grated on her while in the city but now the meetings and the gatherings was all she craved. She hiked, no crawled, like some maddened, prehistoric, reptile to the nearest highway and stuck her thumb out until someone stopped.
It was a horny, toothless, hick from the rural parts of the valley. He stopped and manually rolled down his rusted pick-up’s window, “I’ll give ya’ a ride if ya’ suck on this dick, honey.” Lori grinned and cackled, “WHOOHOO!! Whateva you want!” She screamed then yanked the door open and threw herself into the cab.
The truck pulled off the road and the driver undid his trousers and sat back, but Lori, instead of pleasuring the man, bit down harshly on the fleshy part of his leg. He screamed in surprise, at first, but then relaxed as the Kiss took over. She only took a little blood but it would be enough to fuel her. When she was finished she sat up and headbutted the man in the face, knocking him unconscious. She bundled him into the back of the cab, climbed into the drivers seat, and drove off. When she returned to Sacramento she dumped the truck and its driver at a derelict gas station and walked the rest of the way into town. The driver would awaken with a headache and his pants down, but Lori was sure that he wouldn't be able to describe her from what he had seen in the darkness.
She spent two nights and two days in a windowless drug den, feeding off a couple of X’d out drug heads and reveling in the rush from their drug tainted blood. The Ecstasy made her long to feel a certain pair of lifelessly cold hands on her skin. Refreshed on real, human, blood the time had come to seek out the Kindred.
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