Nicholae
One Year Ago
New York was absolutely the perfect hunting ground. My prime prey was abundant. Rapists and muggers slithered in every alley, gangsters and mafia kingpins could be found in just about any bar, and the millionaire murderers practically laid out the red carpet for me to creep into their lavish high-rise condos and indulge on the blood that coursed through their black hearts.
My current victim, Brice Carter, was ripe for the picking. He was a heroin junky and did absolutely anything for his next fix. He had robbed his sister at gunpoint, assaulted and even killed several innocent pedestrians on the streets for the cash in their wallets, and he was now headed to his dealer with a gun in his jacket pocket. His plan was to kill the man and take all his stash.
His dealer was no better of a human being than Brice himself, and it might be karmic justice for me to let the murder happen—one less bad guy to terrorize the world. But if I did that, I’d be striking one more possible victim off the menu. A vampire’s gotta eat, right? So, after weeks of stalking Brice, I finally decided to take a bite. I would kill him tonight and the dealer tomorrow. I didn’t need to feed more than once a month these days, but when I did, I liked to splurge. A week of kills would be a fabulous smorgasbord. And I was going to start that feast tonight.
Luckily, I had managed to keep Brice hidden from Benny. Benny had to be the most annoying, infuriating vampire with whom I had ever had the displeasure of crossing paths. For whatever reason, he had made it his personal mission to kill my chosen victims right before I decided to kill them. I didn’t know much about Benny, but I knew he was older than me by several centuries. I was stronger than him, thanks to the blood exchange forced upon me by the ancient Arianna, but he was faster, which, paired with his masterful sneakiness, made him impossible to catch. I detested Benny.
It was vampires like Benny that made me regret publishing my life’s events in the form of fictional novels. At first, I had started writing just as a way of self-medicating. Getting out every detail of the things that happened to me—the cruel way that I was ripped out of my human life by a reckless vampire, the tutelage I received after the ancient Laramie killed my maker and took me in as his own fledgling, my kidnapping and torture by the even more ancient Arianna, and my desperate attempt at assuaging my loneliness and finding a brother in William, my one and only fledgling—made it all somehow more tolerable. I never actually intended to release them into the world. But I found an editor at a publishing house who needed a big break. She was sweet, a single mother of two beautiful daughters, and she was going to lose her job unless she signed a decent author. I wanted to help her and to be honest, the prospect of millions of people reading my words, knowing me, understanding me even on an abstract level, was more appealing than I anticipated. I gave her full access to all my writings. She saw the potential of it all, helped me separate the huge manuscript into parts, and published three books several months apart. The books were a huge success! It encouraged me to write the stories of other vampires, like Laramie and William, and others who wanted their stories told. People loved the books, both humans, and vampires alike. I was an overnight celebrity. But that meant that the whole vampire world knew who I was, and while many of them were not happy about my exposure of our world, some like Benny took it upon themselves to punish me for it endlessly.
Ultimately, the fame was a hollow victory. Though the world knew me and loved me, I was still just as alone as before.
I followed a block behind Brice, walking at a casual human pace that I rather enjoyed. I could easily sprint up to Brice in the blink of an eye and drain him dry before anyone was any the wiser but going at a slow human speed made me feel less…dead. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed being a vampire most days, but after two hundred and fifty-some-odd years, the loneliness had begun to weigh on me, and anything that made me feel more human eased that hollow ache.
Brice turned the corner and began to descend the stairs to the subway. It was time to pounce! I licked my lips in anticipation as I picked up my pace, but the vibration of my phone in my pocket gave me pause. Only a small handful of people had my number, and they only called when it was about something important.
I pulled the vibrating contraption out of my pocket and checked the screen. It was Richard, my accountant/lawyer/only human who knew what I was.
Richard had sort of inherited me as a client. His family had been keeping track of accounts and properties and identities for just about two centuries. They were incredibly loyal and discreet, not to mention meticulous at what they did. Naturally, they knew that I was a vampire or something of the sort, so they kept their interactions with me at a minimum. Richard almost never called me. Thanks to the advent of the internet and cellular technology, most of our communication was done through emails and text messages. For him to call me, especially at prime hunting hours, must mean he had an urgent issue, although I couldn’t imagine what that could be.
Frowning in slight irritation at the timing, I swiped the green answer icon and put the phone to my ear.
“What is it, Richard?” I asked, still trailing Brice at a fair distance.
“I found something that you need to see asap,” Richard said, not bothering with unnecessary greetings. I appreciated that about him, always straight to business.
“Can it wait?” I asked. “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
“You can eat later,” Richard said, surprising me with his frankness and actually making me smile. “We have to deal with this right away.”
I stopped at the foot of the stairs to the subway, watching Brice get into the silver train a few meters away.
I sighed. “Very well. I’ll be at your office in two minutes.” Then I hung up the phone and took one last look at my meal before the subway train carted it away. Maybe I could wrap up this business with Richard before Brice killed his dealer. I doubted it.
Abandoning the human façade, I used the full measure of my vampiric speed to race across town to Richard’s office. He worked in one of those tall buildings whose lights never turned off, whose doors never locked because someone—usually dozens of someones—was always working. I zoomed through the main lobby and practically flew up the stairs because the elevator would be too slow for my current temperament. I just wanted to get this over with and get back to my meal before it got cold.
I got to the tenth floor and found Richard’s office in seconds, opening the door without formality. I must have slipped into his office too quickly and quietly because when I approached his desk, he jumped and shouted, “Jesus, would it kill you to knock!”
“Sorry about that,” I apologized, pursing my lips to hide my amusement at his slow human senses. “Now, what was so urgent that it couldn’t wait a few hours?”
Richard straightened his tie to regain his composure. He was a handsome man in his late twenties, with manicured light brown hair and green eyes, and I enjoyed how well he wore his suit. He had a very businessman-like face, almost like a permanent mask, pleasant and to the point, but betraying nothing of what went on underneath. Except for times when I caught him off guard like I just did, no emotion crossed his face unless he wanted you to see it.
“Someone has hacked into several of your accounts,” he said in a serious tone.
Well, that’s not what I was expecting. “What!?” I asked, remembering to maintain the level of my voice, so it didn’t hurt Richard’s sensitive human ears. “What did they take?” My mind was racing. Who managed to access my bank accounts? Plenty of people had reason to target me, and since they couldn’t outright kill me, draining me of funds would be a hefty second option. There was Benny. He was always broke, a playboy to the core, spending millions as fast as he could get it. And then there was Delilah. She was the wicked and vengeful sister of Arianna, whom I had killed. Delilah had wanted me dead ever since she found out what I did to her psychotic sister. But no, this wasn’t Delilah’s style. If Delilah were going to strike at me, she would go for blood, not money.
“Well, that’s the thing,” Richard said, furrowing his brow. “They didn’t take anything. All they did was access it. I almost didn’t even catch it.”
Now that didn’t make any sense to me. “Show me,” I demanded.
Richard turned his computer screen for me to see and logged into my largest account first. “This was the first one they got into,” he said. And sure enough, every last cent was still there. He showed me the other three, and again, nothing was taken. Why would someone go to all the trouble of hacking into my bank accounts but not steal a single penny?
“Can you find out who it is?” I asked, burning with intrigue.
“I can, it will just take me a little while to identify and track down the IP address to its source,” he said. “Can you wait that long?” He raised an eyebrow, mocking me. What a bold human.
“For this, I certainly can,” I answered, narrowing my eyes at him to counter his challenging tone.
“Alright, let me see what I can find,” Richard said, turning to his computer and tapping away at his keyboard.
I went to the wall of glass behind him and looked out the massive window at the twinkling city below. Who could have done this, and why? I knew that the government was actively trying to track down my kind. Could this be their way of checking on me? I wasn’t so sure. If the government had been monitoring my accounts, I doubted Richard would have found them at all, simply because of the huge resources they had. Whoever hacked it was doing it solo, without the digital protection of a large agency.
As I stood there pondering, I realized that I rather enjoyed having a puzzle to solve for a change. Was I so bored that I welcomed such an invasion of my privacy?
“Huh, that’s…interesting,” Richard finally said, his tone questioning.
“What is it?” I asked, rushing to hover over his shoulder. “Did you find them?”
He gasped at the unrestrained speed with which I crossed the room but was otherwise unruffled, keeping his attention on the screen. “I did, but the results are a bit…curious.”
He frowned at the screen, and I was too impatient to read through the text on the screen myself. “Well, who is it?” I urged.
“The IP address belongs to a human residence in Tucson, Arizona,” he explained. “At least, I believe they’re human. The house is inhabited by a woman named Samantha Wilkinson and her daughter Crimson. Do you know these people?”
I cocked my head, my eyes finding the names on the screen. “No, I’ve never heard of them. I don’t believe I know anyone in Arizona. What would this woman Samantha want with me?”
Of course, I knew that a name didn’t mean anything. Those could just be assumed names, and the real culprit could be one of my established enemies. I had to investigate this further. I had to go there in person and see these people for myself, find out what they were doing snooping around in my money. I swiped and pen and notepad from Richard’s desk and scribbled down the address.
“Thanks, Richard,” I said. “You’re an invaluable asset.” I patted him on the back and zoomed out the door.
“Does that mean I get a raise?” I heard him call out after me, and I snickered as I sped down the stairs. Maybe I would give him a bonus.
****
It took me only two hours to make it from New York to Tucson. I ran, or rather leaped. Leaping high into the air at my preternatural speed, cuts travel time in half, and I’m already impossibly fast on foot. Planes fascinated me that a huge mechanical vehicle like that could carry hundreds of people into the air and take them all over the globe. But when I actually needed to get somewhere, they were a hindrance, so I almost never rode in one.
Once in Tucson, it didn’t take me long to find the address on the slip of paper, and I was standing in the driveway in no time. The domicile was a quaint little suburban house in a quiet little neighborhood. I knew instantly that no vampire lived here, or anywhere even remotely close for that matter. Vampires have a specific scent, and there was no trace of it here.
I opened my telepathic radar to read the minds of those inside. The woman, Samantha, was cooking dinner in the kitchen, her thoughts nothing more than a soliloquy about her day job as a computer programmer. Could she have been the one to track me down? I scanned her mind for any snippet about me and found nothing.
The daughter, on the other hand…now isn’t that interesting.
Crimson, the sixteen-year-old girl, was in her bedroom with a male friend named Damien. The teen boy was giddily sucking up her bandwidth on her computer, apparently happy for the chance to play with technology again after being reprimanded for elicit internet behavior. But Crimson was sitting on her bed, her mind buzzing with thoughts about me.
She was the one who had tracked me down, or rather, had this boy do it for her. She wasn’t trying to hurt me or get anything from me. Crimson was just a huge fan of my books—which I admit was exceedingly flattering—and she had stumbled upon the truth of my existence by accident. And after having every bit of proof verified, she was overjoyed by the fact that I was real.
Her glee and excitement were addicting. I needed to get a real look at her, not just see telepathic images of her from her memories. I crept around to her bedroom window and peeked inside. Again, another pleasant surprise. Crimson was beautiful. Lovely face framed by long wavy deep-red hair, a tall and slim athletic figure, and bright green eyes that gleamed with a strange mixture of wisdom and innocence, making her look older than her youth.
I imagined what it would be like to hold her petite, fragile body in my arms, to take a little taste of her blood so that I could fully know her inside and out. I sometimes did this with pretty young humans, take a quick bite, heal them and erase their memory of the event so that it did not disturb their life or health. Being that close to goodness, to innocence, made me feel less the villain I truly was.
And yet, the thought of doing this to Crimson felt wrong, for the first time ever. Like it would be a betrayal of the very innocence I wanted to sample. For, as I browsed through her memories, I saw the nightmares her vile father had put her through, saw how that innocence had been abused. It was amazing that her innocence remained at all. I couldn’t invade her body in such a way, in any way. I almost felt bad for even invading her mind, but I told myself that reading her mind made the two of us even for how she had invaded my privacy by snooping through my history.
“What am I going to do about you, young Crimson?” I whispered to myself as I looked at her smiling face. She knew the truth. She knew that I was real, that the stories were all true, and she had proof that my residences were all in fact owned by me. At this very moment, she was fantasizing about one day coming to meet me. She had fallen in love with the person she’d read about in my books. A sweet, schoolgirl kind of love that both flattered and humbled me at the same time. I found myself completely captivated when her daydream took a more intimate turn, becoming a heated scene of the two of us kissing. I threw myself into the mental movie her mind was streaming, losing myself for a moment.
When at last I respectfully withdrew my telepathic gaze from her mind, I had decided that she needed to be protected. If she had found me, she might accidentally stumble upon another vampire that would be less forgiving than me. What if she crossed paths with someone like Delilah? If she was going to continue to investigate me, she might eventually uncover a trail that led right to Delilah and her coven. Delilah wouldn’t allow a snooping human to live with this knowledge. I didn’t want that to happen. I felt oddly protective of this impetuous teenaged girl.
I told myself that I was going to stick around to keep an eye on her, make sure she didn’t piss off the wrong person and step in if needed. But the truth was, I liked this girl. Maybe it was just the fact that she was completely infatuated with me, or maybe it was her beauty and innocence and cleverness, or a mixture of it all. Whatever it was, I wanted to know more about her. It wasn’t like I had anything else going on in my endless, monotonous life.