Chapter 1
He can smell it, that metallic sizzle in the air when one of them is near. It invades his sinuses like a knife, sharp and stinging, his sense of smell more keen than any of innocent humans walking along the dark streets.
He shoulders his crossbow, padding silently in the shadows, hiding, hunting. The smell gets stronger, his senses pulling him to the dark entrance to a seemingly empty alley. There’s a lone and weakly flickering bulb just above a door at the alley’s end, and he can see a woman standing in the small pool of light.
Her blonde hair catches the beams and seems to absorb them, emitting a golden glow in the darkness. Her back is to him, shoulders hunched forward as she tries to unlock the door. She doesn’t notice the dark figure creeping up behind her, evil intentions propelling him along. Frank waits for the man to pounce.
He sniffs the air. He can taste death on the gently wafting currents. The evil little man carries it in his very cells, packed as they are with every foul deed they’ve ever done. Frank raises his crossbow, silently daring the stalker to take one more step toward the woman. He relishes the sound of an arrow singing through the air, the quiet death and faint thwack of a body collapsing onto the ground. It draws no unnecessary attention. The silent melodrama of it gives Frank a little thrill. After all, this is what his kind has been doing for centuries, long before the brash and loud theatrics of firearms.
The man lunges across the alley, and Frank sees a flash of metal coming out from under his coat. He hesitates on the crossbow’s trigger, frowning in thought. Blood suckers don’t normally use knives. Superhuman speed and strength make such things superfluous. The hairs breadth of a pause causes Frank to miss, watching in surprise as his titanium tipped arrow sinks into the mortar between the bricks where the assailant’s head head been seconds before.
He almost missed what happened, and but for a distinct flash of blonde hair, he wouldn’t have been sure really what had snagged the man and raced away with him.
He springs out of the shadows, following the scent trail of the woman and her prey. Frank can barely wrap his mind around the fact that he’s been fooled. It hadn’t been the knife wielding twerp that he should have had in his cross-hairs. It was the woman, coldly beautiful in the darkness, her slender vulnerability an effective facade for the cruel power in her limbs, the deadly hunger in her eyes. She was one of them, one of the heartless murderers that he spent his days tracking down and killing.
He grits his teeth and pushes on, listening carefully for the sounds of a struggle. Frank hears the harsh breathing of the doomed man, and his ears catch the man’s last breath. It’s punctuated by the distinct gurgle of choking, gasping for air that goes nowhere. Then Frank hears a familiar sound, that silent thump as a body slides to the ground. He’s just entering the edge of central park when he hears her take off again, this time unburdened by the weight of her dinner.
He pushes himself, ears straining to hear the silent whisper of air as she cuts through the park like a ghost. The moon is out, shedding an eerie glow on everything in sight. He could run for hours on a night like this, wind rushing past him, the faint pleasurable burn in the muscles of his legs. He has to reign in the urge to let out a howling yell into the night. It’s far too close to the full moon to be engaging in a chase like this. The pull of round orb makes him reckless, blood lust running through his very veins.
He’s coming to the edge of a thick stand of trees when he sees her, blonde locks looking like liquid silver in the moonlight. She’s more beautiful than he’d imagined, eyes flashing as she sees him, long graceful limbs clad in black. Her face is full of fear, and it gives him pause. Every one of these evil creatures he’s ever come up against had sneered at him in revulsion, attacked him with misplaced confidence in their abilities.
She does the one thing he hopes she won’t. She leaps up against the nearest tree trunk, justing her momentum to propel herself to the lowest limb. In mere seconds she’s gone, using her lithe abilities to disappear into the forest. He runs a few minutes more, listening as the sound of her gets more and more faint.
When he stops, his chest is heaving, a dreadful need twisting inside of him. The tension is pulling at him, and for once in his life he can’t solely attribute it to being thwarted on a hunt. He keeps seeing her face, the curve of her lips as they part in surprise, the fear. He’s intrigued, imprinting the scent of her on his memory.
Karen gets home mere minutes before the sun begins to rise, locking herself in her windowless bedroom. She had ran in looping circles for hours after her brush with the hunter. Even now she can still feel the paranoid fear clutching at her. There’s always a chance that he followed her home, that he’ll wait until the sun rises and burst into her compartment, eyes blazing with fury as he stakes her in the chest.
She disrobes, hands shaking as she twists the knobs in her bathtub. There is still blood on her hands, and she feels her stomach twist with guilt even as she craves more of it. She washes away the remnants as quickly as possible, letting the scalding water rush over her. The fact that her victim had murder on his mind mere seconds before she took his life should soothe her, should take away the pain she felt when his life drained out of him. She is so damn careful about these things, going out to hunt only when she can’t take it any more.
The longest she’d ever abstained had been three months. Today had been week eleven, and as she’d ran from the hunter, the animal inside of her had fought hard to turn and fight, to bathe itself in the blood of yet another. She shudders at the thought.
She’s not sure, but it’s possible that he’s the one everyone is talking about. The most dangerous of the hunters, a vicious boogeyman hiding in the dark waiting to take out any and all her kind. She curses herself for her stupidity. Going out the night before a full moon is a death wish.
When the memory of her kill is scrubbed from her skin, she leaves the cooling waters of her bath. It’s the only time she ever feels human, the warmth of the water seeping into her cool skin, her flesh rosy with the life of her most recent victim. Looking at herself in the mirror she can almost believe none of her current life is real. The hunger she feels when she doesn’t feed is nothing compared to the longing she has to feel this way. This is the danger. She could so very easily go off the deep end striving to feel human again.
She turns angrily away from her reflection, stomping into her bedroom. She’s going to be stuck in this apartment again for months, and she doesn’t relish the idea. Next time she won’t be stupid though. Perhaps fighting the urge until she’s close to losing her mind with hunger is a bad idea. Another day or two and she would have gone on a killing spree of epic proportions, coming back to herself only to feel the horror of what she’d done. She’s going to have to start scheduling her feedings, and making sure they never fall so close to the full moon.
She almost hates how easy it is to fall asleep when she’s sated like this, the pleasurable floating sensation, the warmth coursing through her. It’s tempered by the fact that she dreams of her victim’s lives, which wouldn’t be that bad, except she has a penchant for picking murderers and rapists. She’s in for one hell of an awful slumber.
Frank tries to forget her, to focus on the vamps crawling all over the city. It shouldn’t be that hard. He can’t believe he’s falling into the ‘one that got away’ cliche, but she’s all he can think about. He finds himself sifting through the scents around him, searching for her. It’s absurd, especially since he’s beginning to do it in the middle of the day, when she couldn’t possibly be anywhere near.
Two months have gone by and he’s starting to think that maybe someone else has gotten to her. Casually he asks his fellow hunters about their recent kills, listening for any tales of icy blondes, beautiful women luring scumbags into alleys. Nothing of the sort ever comes up, and he can’t tell if he’s disappointed or relieved.
He’s at the bar, waiting for the sun can go down so he can go out and start his nightly work when he hears one of his brethren expressing bafflement at his most recent encounter with one of their enemies. The man is on his fourth shot of whiskey, clapping his hand on his shorter companion’s back. “I’m telling you, Foggy, she lured him right under the bridge. I thought maybe they knew each other, that they were both vamps, but then before you can blink he’s dead and drained and she’s gone like the wind.”
“I call bullshit, Matt. Ethereal blonde beauty luring unsuspecting men into dark shadows to suck their blood? It’s all a little bit too Elvira’s Movie Macabre to me. You’re making it up.”
Matt shakes his head, sliding a shot glass over to his friend. “Nope, totally true. Drink up.”
“God, I hate this game.”
Frank is across the bar and behind the two drinking buddies before Foggy can even bring the shot glass to his lips. “You let one of them go?” He growls the question, murder in his voice.
Matt turns around slowly. “Why hello, Frank, and how are you?”
Frank ignores his question, glaring at him and waiting for an answer of his own. Matt sighs, running one hand through his hair in frustration. “Look, she's… she’s not like the other ones. The man she killed was an evil bastard, and if she hadn’t done it… I don’t know man.”
Frank does know, but he rarely sees the world in terms of anything that’s not black and white. Moral gray areas are a fucking headache. “You don’t let them go.”
Matt sighs. “Can we not do this? It’s my night off.”
“Where was she?”
Matt knows this conversation can end one of two ways. He can refuse to give Frank any information, and they’ll end up in a fist fight, both of them leaving with black eyes and sore ribs, or he can give the dog a bone and let him go chasing his tail out into the night. He chooses the latter. “Out by the docks.”
Frank turns on his heel, not deigning to respond. Matt yells after him. “That was last night! She’s gotta be long gone!”
The only thing Matt hears in response is the jingle of the bell as Frank slips out the door.
Karen shouldn’t be out a second night in a row, but she can’t help it. She's still shaken by her encounter with the hunter two months before, and when a second one interrupted her last night, she’d dashed away before getting her fill. There is still a raw edge of hunger propelling her through the darkness.
She hates coming down here. It’s damp and cold and smells like the inside of a rotten fish, but she never fails to find some soulless asshole that the world is better off without. And tonight it’s imperative that she not go home before feeding.
The sound of a scuffle draws her attention, and she smells the scent of her kind on the air. It’s hot and metallic, searing the inside of her nose. Someone is in full-on kill mode. Normally she shies away from situations like this, keeping to herself more than anything. But there’s something else in the air, something warm and inviting and dangerous at the same time. It’s familiar, yet strange.
When she finds the source, her eyes widen. It’s him, the hunter with the coal black eyes. He’s fighting off a group of vamps, easily hurling the vicious beings into the stone wall behind him. He’s playing with them, and evil grin spreading across his face as his adversaries pick themselves back up.
She can see the rage in the vamps’ eyes, raw hunger tearing through them. These are the ones who let themselves get taken over by the hunger, the ones who cease to feel anything other than the life of someone else slipping down their throats.
The fight continues, skulls cracking against the wall, punches landing with soft little oomphs against the hard midsection of the hunter. He swats away their fists and pulls two long daggers from underneath his coat, driving them in sync into the chests of two of the men.
Karen watches in horror, frozen to the spot, as the two vamps shrivel in death, their shiny alabaster skin withering away to dust. The third one, turns to run away, finally realizing the danger he’s in, but it’s too late. The hunter snatches up his discarded crossbow and sends an arrow flying right through the fleeing man’s back and into his heart.
She lets out an involuntary gasp of fear, covering her mouth a little too late. The hunter’s head whips around, dark eyes boring into her. She turns to run, knowing that in a matter of seconds she will feel the cold bite of a titanium tipped arrow biting against the skin of her back.
It never comes, and she pushes herself to run faster, everything around her turning into a blur of dark shapes. She skids around a corner, intending to duck down into the closest entrance to the subway. If she can only get down there she can slip into the unused tunnels and find her way home safely.
But something catches her before she can reach the first step, arms like bands of steel wrapping around her, one clamping her own arms down to her side, and the other pressed firmly against her throat. She can feel him breathing down her neck as she struggles to break free, but nothing works.
Her vision begins to get spotty, energy slipping out of her muscles. Things begin to go black, and the last thing she remembers before falling limp in his arms is the sound of his heart beating, pumping blood through his body. It's a sharp hunger that zips through her before she loses consciousness.
Frank carries her back to his place without fully understanding why he didn’t just kill her. There are little gashes against the skin of his forearm where she’d tried to sink her teeth down on him. It should make him angry, but he knows she was just defending herself.
When he lays her down on the couch he contemplates taking some rope and binding her hands and feet, but he can’t make himself do it. Her wrists are the most delicate things he’s ever seen, fine bones like the lines of a marble sculpture. She makes him feel protective and oafish at the same time and he doesn’t know what to do with that feeling.
So he puts up blankets over his windows, carefully tacking them down so the sun cannot get to her. And he waits for her to wake up, drinking coffee across from her as morning begins to dawn. Her eyes flutter, and he tenses in anticipation, setting his cup down on the table.
She comes awake with a gasp, like she’s still struggling for air, and it sends a little pang of guilt through him. Before he can open his mouth to say something, she’s already up, leaping from the couch and running toward the door.
He’s faster, and he manages to block her exit, catching her in his arms for a second time. “Stop.” She kicks at his shins, and he curses. “Damn it, I said stop!”
“Let me go!” She’s panting against him, fear coursing through her like a raging river. He can feel it in the way her heart is beating, the fight-or-flight urge still fluttering in the muscles under his fingers.
“Listen, it’s daylight. Unless you want to crisp up like a piece of bacon, I’d stay right here.”
Her terror doesn’t abate, but she stops struggling against him, slumping in resignation. “Just kill me and get it over with.”
Something in his chest catches at her words. He clears his suddenly thick throat, before saying, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
As if to demonstrate his intentions, he lets her go, dropping his arms to the side. She could go for his neck if she wanted, probably get a few pints of blood out of him before he could do anything to stop it. He really wants to know if she’s different, if she has any humanity in her at all. It’s a test of sorts.
She curls into herself, backing away from him in fear. “Why are you doing this? You’re a hunter.”
He is a hunter, damn it. But… It’s not like it is for any of the other hunters. He’s a monster, like her too. A were-wolf. He hates the term. It always leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. He understands the desire to kill with abandon, the need that courses through him no matter what he does. Until this very moment he hadn’t realized he’d always been looking for someone else who felt the same thing. She fought against her nature too. He takes a deep breath, silently imploring the universe. “I’m not what you think.”
“I know exactly what you are, wolf.”
Frank’s head snaps up, surprise written on his face. “What did you call me?”
“You’re the last son of Lupa, a wolf-man, a vicious killer that can’t be injured. You live off the blood of vampires. Howling at the moon as you bathe in it on the night of the full moon our blood to keep your eternal life.”
He lets out a barking laugh, raising his hands over his head. “What kind of bullshit… ” It’s so strange to hear himself mythologized like this, like he’s a deity on earth, something dark and magical and evil. He’s not. He’s just an aberration in the natural order of things. “Yes, I’m a were-wolf, if that’s what you want to call it. And there used to be hundreds of others just like me until your kind wiped us out. As for drinking the blood of vampires…” Frank snarls his lip. “I’d rather drink out of the stinking East River, thank you very much.”
Karen steps forward, for the first time seeing the gashes on his arm, the wounds she had inflicted. “…and you’re not impervious to injury either?”
Frank laughs bitterly, lifting one hand to probe his left side. “Not if my bruised ribs have anything to say about it.”
She swallows, still afraid, but feeling less frantic than before. He’s not the monster she had imagined, but he’s still a dangerous man. She can smell the blood drying on his arm, and feels a little twitch of longing. She pushes it down, refocusing on the man standing in front of her. Now that she can look at him through clearer eyes, she can see that he looks a little worse for wear, dark circles under his eyes, old and fading bruises here and there.
He moves gingerly now, as if loathe to cause himself any unnecessary pain. She wonders why he does this to himself. There had been no need to fight those vamps out on the docks, he could have ended their lives in seconds if he had chosen to do so. But instead he had engaged in hand to hand combat. Perhaps he enjoys punishing himself.
She watches him as he moves toward his kitchen, flipping a light switch along the way. He’s rummaging through drawers, looking for something. When he finds it, he sets to work, threading a sharp needle and dousing the gashes on his arm with alcohol. He struggles with the work, fumbling with the needle in his left hand, using his teeth to pull the thread taught before trying to apply the next stitch.
Without thinking she crosses the room and takes the needle from him, barely noticing the way he tenses at her approach. Her hands are cool against his skin and she slips the needle through expertly. She’s completed four stitches before he even says a word. “Where’d you learn that?”
“My mother was a seamstress.” The words are out of her mouth before she even has time to think, revealing a piece of herself to this man that she hasn’t even thought about in centuries. She can still remember playing in her mother’s shop, hiding behind the skirts of fancy ladies, soaking up the sunshine that spilled through the great big windows that faced the street. The memories are painful.
Frank watches her as she sleeps, draping a threadbare blanket over her when he knows she’s sunk deep into slumber. Her eyes twitch behind their lids with some frantic dream, mouth pursing occasionally in displeasure. He agreed to let her go when the sun went down, a shaky truce between them. As long as she doesn’t hurt anyone innocent, he’ll leave her be, and he’ll make sure the other hunters do as well.
Frank doesn’t know why he’s glad he’ll have an excuse to keep an eye on her, but he is. In a moment of weakness he reaches down and brushes a stray lock of hair away from her face. She looks so troubled in sleep, so ready to fight, ready to run. He wishes he could see into her dreams, wishes he could know what well of strength she draws from to fight the demons that live inside of her.
It’s that fight that draws him to her. A fight that he finds himself losing more often than he’d like to admit. It’s too pleasurable to let the animal inside of him take over, to claw and howl until everything around him is destroyed. For the first time in a long time he’s found something that gives him hope, another soul struggling in the darkness.
A/N: There’s a strong possibility that this could be continued. I don’t know..