her trail back to her house. She must be inside, so I wait, stalking my little mate. It doesn’t take long before she exits, climbs onto a bike at the curb, and speeds off.
Shit.
I don’t have any chance to follow her, so instead, I go back to the hotel I’m staying at. I came here to kill Sinclair, after all, which I did, but I also need to deal with any others preying on innocents, and mate or not, I still have to do that. She may be messing with my plans, but she won’t stop me. She won’t kill me either. Many have tried over the years, yet only she has gotten that close.
I search social media and local news, the easiest way to find monsters. People often discard the stories as far-fetched, and some of them are, but others are true and it’s about weeding those out. I ignore the alien abduction stories and some implausible desires and fan fiction until I find one that catches my eye.
It’s a tweet about being attacked by a man who tried to bite her. I click her social media to see her saying she woke up in an alley. Fuck, I bet he glamoured her. If it’s a stray vamp without a coven, or even worse, a killer, then he will go back to her. He has to, she’s seen his face. I quickly locate her address, using pictures and social media information, and head out to discover what she knows and stop her from being murdered.
Hopefully it’s nothing, but the details were too specific to be a lie or a dream. It only takes me ten minutes to arrive at her apartment building, and then I wait like the stalker I’m turning into. It takes hours, and night falls before I spot him—the vamp. He’s waiting for her, ready to finish off his kill like I suspected.
Judging by his long, ragged nails, his unkempt hair, and his stench, he’s definitely a feeder. One that gorges on blood, kills his victims, and doesn’t care about being found. He wears a hoodie covered in blood stains and holes, old jeans, and boots. He doesn’t have a shirt on, and the wind carries his disgusting odour to me, like old pennies and decay. It looks like he might have been feeding on himself, fucking scum. He’s bad for their race and for all of us.
He’s feral, a stray.
He sniffs the air and turns to look at me, his face more skeletal than human. His hair hangs limply around him in clumpy, thin, greasy strands. His eyes are blood red and locked on me. The vamp’s lips pull back to show two fangs, one chipped, both stained. He’s fed recently and plans to again.
I have to kill him. It will be a fucking pleasure too.
He slides back into the shadows. Fine, he wants to run?
I’ll fucking chase.
I stride across the darkening street and down the side of the building to a fenced in area where the bins are. I crane my neck around, searching for him, and the air whistles a moment before I feel him. I look up to see him leaping from the fire exit above. I move at the last second, and he lands in a crouch, snapping his fangs. He’s ready to drain me, to feed on anything with blood. The fucking cretin.
I roll my eyes and pull my stake, twirling it between my fingers. “You’re an animal.”
“I smell your blood,” it hisses, and then snaps at me before laughing and pulling back.
“And you’re dead, you just don’t know it yet.” I grin, and it leaps at me with a snarl. We fall back, and I flip mid-air, slamming him against the cement. He snaps and bites like a feral animal, so I smash him down again as I try to lift the stake, but he takes that moment to turn his head and sink his fangs into my arm.
Agony rocks through me as he starts to feed. Gritting my teeth, I let him suck my blood as I smash the stake down into his chest, smashing my fist on the end to get it past his ribs and into his heart. With a scream, he rips free of my arm, wrenching skin and muscle with him as blood streams from the wound. He starts to writhe as he dies, but I just set him on fire and leave him there to blow away with the wind.
Another monster dead.
It’s time