The sweat soaked woman hurried down the street, faltering between running and walking. When the fetid yellow hue of a lonely gas-light gave her the hope of seeing, she cast a hasty glance over her shoulder; in her head she was trying to be calm, but her heart was telling her that there was something there. She wanted to run, propriety only let her scurry; whilst spiders of fear chased up and down her spine.
The fair haired vampire was looking down from a rooftop. He grinned to himself when he saw her look backward. The useless sheep always thought the danger would come from behind! He had been stalking her for an hour now, savouring the sight and smell of her growing terror as the deeper parts of her soul responded to his presence. A primeval dread, buried down, lost beneath the five shallow senses, so that it lay in the terrified pit of every mortal creature. The thing his dark lord of a sire had taught him to wake.
She had reached a junction and was casting about, her nerves unsettling her as to the best way to choose. Quickly home along the alley? Or the long way round, through crowds of people, where she would feel safe?
Whilst she hesitated the vampire jumped, clean and silent, from one rooftop to the next. Only he slipped slightly as he landed, his highly polished boot skidding on a piece of slimy scum on the slate. Unbalanced he flailed out wildly to regain his control and knocked the iron gutter: sending a shower of rust and old paint chips spattering down on to the cobbles.
The woman started, looking around for the noise and, unable to identify the source, she instinctively headed away from it towards the busier streets. The vampire cursed softly in his mind.
And jumped down.
He landed directly in front of her; and whilst she froze in shock he tilted his head cockily to one side, smiled, and let his demon ripple across his face. Before she could scream he swept forward, caught her in his arms and plunged his fangs into her throat. They tore in swiftly, ripping through the soft white flesh, seeking out the blood, so that they almost seemed to hunt of their own accord in his mouth. Unstoppable and relentless. He felt the familiar slight tug, the billow of sharp sweet pain straight up into his skull as the prey tried to struggle beneath him. He held her in his arms, wrapped them around her, squeezing, hugging the breath from her lungs as he sucked the blood from her neck. The scent of her was like oranges in his nostrils; he could feel the tickle of her lace collar against his chin. And all the time the blood, pounding like a steam engine through her veins, pumping and throbbing down his throat and carrying the life with it.
He let her slump back, her dead weight lolling against his shoulder, and he took a deep lifeless breath to clear the stink of mortal from his head, so that nothing but the metallic tang of the blood would remain. Then, very carefully, he fished a silver-plated claw from the depths of his pocket and, fitting it deftly onto one finger, he scratched a small cross on the corpse’s cheek. It glowed faintly crimson on the pale skin, but there was very little blood left to seep out.
The vampire, who was called Penn, climbed up to the roofs again to make his way back to his lair. His sire had once said that there was no point taking risks with your get away, and that the rooftops were a vampire’s natural element. Roofs or tunnels. Penn made a point of hunting the sewers at least once a month. Not that the London sewers were up to much, they were mostly new and boring; he missed the intricate variety of Rome. One thing you could say about the Italians, they knew how to build interesting catacombs. He wished he and Angelus could have hunted them together. Prowling like the strong swift predators they were, silent in their unspoken bond, side by side through the night.
Penn sighed, and then checked himself. It was a bad human habit that he had never managed to cure himself of, and Angelus would not have approved. But he did miss Angelus.