Chapter I
She had a razor blade smile beneath cold, dead eyes and she was looking for someone to hurt. Dressed head to toe in tight, black, city chic, she was a predator among the sheep. The flashing lights filled her sight as she walked unnoticed through the underground club. The miasma of despair lay like a pall of smoke and blanketed everything, making her soul sing. This was her Heaven, this was her Nirvana.
This was the point where she let her essence flow outward like a shadow of mist, expanding to try and touch every soul in the club, drinking their sorrow and hopelessness in an orgy of gluttony. Unseen smokey tendrils roped out from her body probing the people closest to her until she settled on one. A man, no more than a boy really, dressed in a yellow shirt subconsciously swaying to the music as he waited for his drink at the bar. The scent of his pain enthralled her, so potent, so lonely as he stood apart even within the pathetic crowd. She let the tip of her tongue slide out, moistening her lips as her hunger deepened and she approached him.
Jon sat with his back to the wall, letting the noise and chaos flow over him. His gray-steel eyes were unfocused, staring at nothing in particular, as he lost himself in the moment. The near empty glass looked childish in comparison to his huge hands. His shaggy, brown hair remained unruly even in the heat of the club. He looked down at his drink where the last bit of his Wolf'sFire whiskey vibrated to the sound waves coming from the ubiquitous speakers. He wanted more but knew this was not the place to indulge. It would be too easy to lose himself here, to forget the caution someone like him must be aware of when-ever they were in public. And so he sat with the flashing lights playing over his tan skin and tried to think of nothing at all.
For a second, he found the place he was looking for: the nothingness away from the mundane existence of every other second and as he was reveling in that spot, a soft electric pain shot up his spine. Instantly he snapped back to the here and now, eyes hooded as he scanned the crowd looking for the cause. He knew there was one close by. He felt the subtle shock anytime he was close to one of them; he knew they did as well. He couldn't tell in the gyrating mass which person it was, so he closed his eyes and drew a long breath through his thick nose. There it was: the smell of corruption, of week-old rotting flesh masked beneath the smell of alcohol and cheap perfume. Jon was always amazed that normal humans couldn't smell it; it was so overpowering that even the most primitive animals could pick up the stench from a long distance away. Following the trail of that scent, he saw her leaning on the bar with her back to him. She was whispering in the ear of a young man in a yellow shirt. Her hand was resting lightly on his shoulder as they laughed a secret laugh. As she leaned close, Jon watched her place a soft kiss on the boy's cheek while she was whispering to him. The boy startled, turned and after a pause, embraced her. Jon watched the woman wrap her black-clothed arms around the boy's yellow shirt and thought of nothing more than darkness devouring the light.
Jon knew she was newly turned. There was no way that the ancient evil living in her undead body would have missed the small current announcing his proximity if it hadn't been so focused on its hunger, lust and anger. He watched her lead the boy through the crowd, toward the back entrance, goading him on with the soft silken promises of her flesh. As Jon watched them leave through the backdoor into the seedy city alleyway behind the club, he hesitated. There would be hell to pay if he interfered. Although there were no written rules, his kind and the vampires usually kept a delicate peace and avoiding each other was the first rule. Yet here she stood in their territory as brazen as day and was going to murder this boy for her pleasure and food. It was bad enough to know they existed and be powerless to stop them but to come here and feed and flaunt it in his face was too much for Jon's conscience to bear. He had to try to talk her out of it. He paused again as he thought of another point. This was obviously someone's new plaything. Vampires as a rule don't go about creating more just for fun. It was difficult and why make another predator you were going to have to compete with in the end? The slow seduction of the other person's soul, the domination of their will and the final permission once they were wholly corrupted, all took time. The surrendering to the vampire and offering up their body for possession and undeath usually took even more. Someone was going to be very pissed that he put an end to their new toy, if it came to that.
Jon shook the thoughts out of his head; he would not sit and watch an innocent person murdered as he cowered in a dark bar. How could he live with himself if he did? He slipped out the door about a minute behind them. He felt like a voyeur as he watched them kissing, desperately trying to figure out a way to stop what was about to happen. She was petite and beautiful, her small frame deceptively harboring ancient power, power that Jon knew was more than his own. The stink of the vampire was overwhelming. He could already sense the rats moving towards them, drawn by the smell of rot and decay. How dare she do this? Jon felt the anger wash over him. He figured he should be prepared for whatever happened next, so he took a discarded two by four and wedged it against the door to make sure no one stepped outside and stumbled across something not meant for them.
His anger continued to rise and he let it go unchecked. The sheer hatred of vampires flooded Jon, sending waves of energy through him, building in him, expanding him till he felt he would die. He dropped to the floor, the agony seeping through every joint in his body. His skull shattered and re-knit, the bones in his legs and arms ripping and growing. There was no thought now, only pain. The latent energy building muscle and sinew as his body became covered in a short, coarse hair. He writhed, trying to regain some semblance of humanity as the animalistic spasms pulsed through his body. Jon knew that it took only a short time, but when every bone in your body is being torn apart, even a short time feels like eternity. Finally, the change was done and he stood up. In his mind he held onto one thought: Aldus and the song.
Through the red haze of the change, he realized the female vampire was now staring at him. Jon took a step out of the shadows, letting the dim light illuminate him more clearly. Jon's new form easily topped eight feet tall and weighed well over four hundred pounds. The large muzzle and lupine features turned to regard the pair as the corded muscles of his body screamed for the release of action. His mind, reeling from the pain, tried to focus and not let this get out of hand. He wanted to save the boy and nothing more. The pale young man in her arms was dumbstruck in terror and disbelief. Jon growled around teeth not meant for speech, “Run boy, run home before it's too late.”
To his credit, the young man did attempt to run away, grasping and tugging on the woman's arm as he tried to save her from the danger that had just come stalking out of the shadows. He didn't even budge her. She turned on him, fangs now bared, the glamour gone and the true face of her evil revealed. A casual backhand sent the boy flying into the wall fifteen feet way as she turned all of her attention back to the werewolf standing in front of her. Jon watched in relief as the boy amazingly stood up and ran off.
She screeched at Jon in a voice that was the whine of a flat-lined heart-monitor and the rumble of distant thunder combined, “You must have a death wish, dog, to come between one of us and our prey. It is our right to feed on these lesser beings.” Her voice took on an even more menacing tone. “Your interference will not be tolerated.”
“You will not feed here; this is our territory. You have no rights here. The boy is gone. Leave peacefully before this goes any further.” The pain sang to him, lulled him, begging for a fight he would probably lose. Jon could not let the lycanthropy dictate his actions, so he fought the growing rage.
“Do you know who I am, little puppy? I don't cower for dogs like you.”
Jon stood up to his full height, looking down on the little woman standing in front of him. The next words he spoke were the hardest of his life, “I will tell you again, go. The boy is gone; there is no problem.”
She smiled a sickly innocent smile at him, “Oh, you have a problem.”
Quickly she lunged at him and grabbed his arm, sending Jon's massive frame careening into the wall. He lashed out trying in vain to catch her in the chest, to crush the shriveled heart barely beating within her body. There was only so much possession could accomplish. Some rudimentary form of life had to stay active in the body to keep it from rotting while they inhabited it. That is where the blood of others came in. They fed off it, breaking it down for the nutrients they needed to hold onto this life and this world. Destroy the heart pumping the nutrients stolen from others and the body housing them would die. She rushed at him again, hissing, quick as a viper. Jon held up his arm to try to stop her, to keep her at bay. She broke it in two places and danced away just out of his reach.
“Did that hurt, little dog?” She laughed at him.
Jon took the moment her gloating gave him, and held his broken arm out in front, so she could hear his body mending the bones back together. Jon just grunted and waited. When she came running at him again he started to move to the right, as she adjusted lightning quick, he went left just a tiny fraction and caught her with his shoulder. He plowed her into the wall, shaking dust and debris free from the old building. With their faces inches apart, they bared their fangs at each other. Jon quickly grabbed her and ran her back toward the club door, slamming her again between his muscled body and the brick partition. Getting her feet down against the wall, she was able to shove him a foot away. Violently she jumped and swung, her talons aiming for his eyes. With incredible speed for his size, Jon was able to duck under the devastating roundhouse swing. Pivoting, he grabbed the two by four he had propped against the door, breaking it as he turned and hiding the action with his body. Up he shot just as she completed her own turn from the wild swing. He drove the splintered beam deep into her chest, shattering the bone cage around her heart before she even knew what happened.
She dropped like a sack of bricks with a two-foot section of wood sticking out of the ruined hole in her chest. Her body shook and her arms and legs flailed, as a blood curdling scream issued from her mouth shattering windows along the alleyway and almost deafening Jon. As the spasms slowed he took a massive hand and titled her face upwards as he bent down so he could look in her eyes, “Enjoy hell,” he said, as he smashed her head against the wall in a explosion of fine red mist.
