The Darkest Colors- Children of Asmodeus

  The Darkest Colors: Children of Asmodeus

  By David M. Bachman

  Copyright 2012 David M. Bachman

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Chapter One

  As soon as he saw her, he knew that he had to have her. She looked a bit mature for the average age of most folks there in the club, aside from the bartender, but she definitely looked like a seasoned member of the scene. She didn’t look to be that old, but she carried herself with a very laid-back, casual, relaxed demeanor that was not faked or pretentious like the acts put on by the younger ones there. Whether she was twenty-one or forty-one was not really any of his concern. What mattered to him was that she was exactly who and what he needed. The fact that she also was absolutely gorgeous didn’t hurt.

  With undisguised interest, he had watched her make her way through the club. There were plenty of other people here, enough noise and people jumping and bumping and grinding around to the music. He knew she would never notice him scoping her out from the far corner. Dark hair, dark eyes, she was dressed like one of those intellectual gals that had made the transition from coffeehouse poetry snob to nonconformist Goth club regular. While he had never been to this club before, she looked perfectly at home from the moment she’d walked in. Being a fresh face to the scene might either work for or against him, depending on what kind of gal she turned out to be when he talked with her. He knew his window of opportunity was brief, so he immediately arose and approached the bar to take a seat beside her. She turned to face him with a rather bored, tired, and almost vaguely annoyed expression. She forced a cynical smile to curve her burgundy lips.

  “Hey,” she said quite simply.

  “Hey,” he replied with a smirk, taking the same casual tone. “You here to dance or to watch?”

  “To watch,” she answered. “I don’t dance.”

  “That’s too bad. I was about to ask you to join me on the floor.”

  She shrugged. “You could always buy me a drink.”

  “Sure. What’re you having?”

  “It’s already on the way,” she replied calmly, folding up the ten-dollar bill she’d been holding before slipping it into her tiny black purse. “I’ve got a thing for the house wine.”

  “So, I take it you come here a lot?”

  “Every now and then, yeah. It depends on where my job takes me. I’m only planning to be here for the next day or so before I have to head out again,” she explained as the bartender came over with a glass of red wine for her.

  He casually flipped a twenty onto the bar and asked for a glass of the same. The short-haired, mature blonde bartender gave a smile and a nod before taking the twenty and heading off to fill another glass.

  “I’m Rick, by the way,” he said, offering his hand.

  She took his hand and gave it a brief but firm, confident pump as she replied, “Karen. Nice to meet you.”

  “So, what kind of business brings you out to these parts, Karen?”

  She rolled her eyes and let out a slight chuckle. “If I told you, you’d probably just run away screaming.”

  “Let me guess. You sell Bibles?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “Vacuum cleaners?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re a Mormon.”

  She lowered her chin and looked up at him with a displeased look as she held up her glass of wine. “Do I look like a fucking Mormon?”

  “Sorry, just running down the list of possibilities.”

  “Let’s just say that I love my job and I love my pay,” Karen said, “but I hate to talk about work when I’m off the clock.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “How about you?”

  He shrugged. “Same as you. I go here to get away from my job.”

  The bartender returned with the second glass of wine and change for his twenty. He left her a five for a tip. Karen raised her glass high in a toast, and he went with the gesture.

  “To the day jobs that finance our nightlife,” she declared. “May the two never cross paths.”

  “Amen to that,” he answered as their glasses clinked together lightly.

  He expected her to be the sipping type. Instead, Karen tilted her head back and promptly downed the full glass in a few quick, deep gulps before setting it back down upon the worn old polished wood of the bar.

  “Jesus,” he laughed, “did you actually even taste a drop of that?”

  Karen shrugged. “I slow down a little after the second drink. You smoke?”

  “Only after sex,” he said with a smirk.

  “Then maybe you’re the one that needs to slow down.”

  He blinked at her. “What?”

  “Friction?”

  “Oh,” he responded, pretending to get it. He still had no idea what she meant. Clearly, the joke was wasted upon him, so she waved it off.

  “Never mind. Wanna come outside with me while I burn a quick one?”

  He shrugged and gulped down the contents of his own glass before setting it down and nodding towards the front door. The wine wasn’t bad – definitely not great, but far from horrible. He wasn’t sure if it really was going to be this easy with this chick, or if it was going to take a bit more work to really get her alone. She sure seemed to be going for it. He didn’t have a “game,” nor did he have a set routine that he used to pick up his midnight treats. He just followed his instincts. He’d always been good at that. The only times it had gotten him into trouble had been the two times when he’d almost been caught by a jealous husband, and the one woman that had shown him one night of pleasure in exchange for a lifetime of hell. Although now that he had more or less refined the acquisition phase of his hobby to a near-science, that “hell” was becoming more and more tolerable.

  He wasn’t all that bad to look at, or so he had been told. He was what most women seemed to be after – tall, dark, handsome, lean, and a sharp dresser – and he knew how to talk them up. As long as he was carefully selective, he could always get what he wanted … or rather, what he needed. In this case, Karen was both what he wanted and needed. Survival was one thing, but the thought of getting her in the sack would be a helluva treat, as well. She sure did seem to have a lot more potential than the others he’d been hooking up with and taking down lately. She wasn’t fat, ugly, or desperate by any means. She was selective. And, thus far, she seemed to approve of him.

  Okay, so maybe it really could be this easy sometimes. Everyone got lucky now and then, right?

  “These new laws are a fucking joke,” she complained bitterly as they headed outside into the steady drizzle of a rainy Missouri night in August. “They pass these laws to ban smoking in public places, but then they force us to stand out here in the rain. Death by lung cancer or pneumonia, take your pick.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She dug around in her purse for a few moments, then briefly checked the pockets of her coat before letting out an annoyed huff and flopping her hands to her sides.

  “Shit. I left my smokes in the car,” she said as she turned toward him. “Look, I know this’ll probably sound really lame, but could you come with me? This club is okay inside, but the wildlife outside here is a little too wild for me, y’know?”

  He hesitated. “Well,
ah … are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Why not?” She smiled broadly at him. “You look like a big, strong, strapping young lad. Can I trust you to stop any bad guys from jumping me?”

  This part was always difficult. They usually picked up on it right away, but apparently Karen had not. Of course, he had been practicing a lot at keeping his teeth concealed by talking in front of a mirror, so maybe it was paying off. Perhaps it was stupid to be this honest, but he figured the odds of spooking her would be lower if she knew what he was before they left the place together. The last thing he needed was for her to panic and try to jump out of a moving car.

  “You, ah … you do know I’m a vampire, right?”

  “Duh!” she quipped, rolling her eyes. “Why else do you think I invited you out here with me? Odds are that I’m safer taking my chances with you than going out here alone and getting mugged by a gang of crack heads.”

  “Oh. So, ah … lucky guess?”

  “Hardly! The pale skin, the blown pupils, and the lack of facial hair were kind of a dead giveaway,” she informed him with a gesture to his face. “Plus I saw your fangs when we were talking. It’s not like you’re not the first vampire I’ve ever met in my life.”

  “Oh, ah … well, that’s kind of a relief,” he said as he followed her down the sidewalk around to the alleyway parking lot, their shoes splashing softly in the shallow puddles that had gathered upon on the sidewalk. “Just wanted to be sure. Y’know … so there’s no misunderstanding.”

  “Nope,” she said as she walked on, “no misunderstanding at all.”

  He could hardly believe his luck. She was practically giving him a green light. Unfortunately for her, her theory about being safer with him was completely off, but he wasn’t going to point that fact out to her. Of course, he had to be on his toes with this gal. If she was seasoned enough to have so easily spotted the fact that he was a Commoner, then there was a pretty good chance she could be packing some protection – garlic-pepper spray, silver-plated knife, a pistol with silver-jacketed bullets, or something else along those lines.

  She led him across the narrow alleyway parking lot to a late-Eighties, beige Mercury Grand Marquis with darkly tinted windows. As she went around to the driver’s door to poke in her key, he waited back by the rear bumper. The car had an Arizona license plate on it, which was quite a long drive away from where they now stood in Kansas City. Atop that, she didn’t sound like she was from the West Coast or even the Midwest, but rather from the Northeast – a New York or Jersey Italian gal, he figured. She hadn’t been kidding when she’d hinted that her job involved a lot of traveling. He wondered what the hell kind of a sales or marketing or whatever job would take her completely from one end of the country to the other … and in an old car like this one, no less. It didn’t matter much, though. He’d be putting an end to her travels soon enough.

  He watched with great interest as she bent over to reach inside the car. Damn, she had one hell of a nice ass. He could already imagine what it was going to be like to be all up in that. He would be finding out soon enough, one way or another. He was hoping she’d go along with this willingly so that he didn’t have to do things the hard way, because it always made things so much more pleasant. But at this point he’d committed himself enough that he had to follow through with it all the way, whether it was pleasant or not. He couldn’t afford to hang out inside that club with her for very long. Too many people would see them together, and too many people would remember him. He wanted to be long gone by the time anyone started to miss her, and to have settled into yet another city and started another hunt before they ever found her body … if they ever found her body at all, of course. The Missouri River was only a few blocks away from that club, after all.

  She backed up a bit and peeked around the corner from the center pillar of the open car door. Too easily, she caught where his eyes had been focused, and she grinned. Karen gave that heart-shaped ass a deliberate shake.

  “See something you like?” she asked playfully.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then what’re you doing all the way back there?” Karen reached down with her right hand and slowly, teasingly began to pull up the hem of her modest black skirt, showing the top of her dark sheer stockings.

  “Nice.”

  “You wanna go?”

  “Hell yes!”

  “Okay then,” she said, calmly turning around to face him with a large pistol clasped in both hands, “let’s go.”

  His heart skipped a beat. He took a half step back and then froze as she aimed the large-framed, black, semi-automatic pistol at his chest. He should have seen this coming. Nobody was that lucky. He’d been doing this too long to make a mistake that stupid. He’d been thinking with his dick again – his dick and his fangs, to be more exact – and the prospect of getting laid and getting a full measure had clouded his judgment completely and thrown his sense of caution to the wind.

  “What … what the fuck?” he stammered, holding up his hands defensively. “What’re you doing?”

  “Shut up and put your hands on your head,” she told him sternly, that sexy smile of hers completely gone now.

  He was still completely mind blown by this turn of events, but he complied. “What the fuck? Is this some kind of joke?”

  “The only joke here is you,” a gravelly-voiced man declared from not far away. He glanced to his right and saw a middle-aged man with dark hair and blue eyes leveling a wicked-looking shotgun at him. The beam of its laser sight was centered right in the middle of his chest.

  “Who the fuck are you? What’re you, cops?” he demanded nervously.

  “We’re not cops,” the man informed him, “we’re just part of the neighborhood watch program.”

  To his left, two more men with guns were approaching. One was a younger white male, average height with a very cop-like look about him, and the other was a huge bald black guy. The white kid with the buzz-cut flattop was aiming an assault rifle of some kind at him, and the black guy was aiming a shotgun similar to the one that the first guy held, except with the addition of a blindingly bright light which he shined directly at Rick’s face.

  “The neighborhood … wait, what? What’re you talking about?” he stammered, trying to shield his eyes from the light with his hands.

  “What’s your name?” Karen asked him … assuming that Karen was even her real name.

  He hesitated. There was no point in lying. He was good at lying, but not when he had guns pointed at him. “Who the fuck are you people?”

  “I believe the lady asked you a question, bat boy. What’s your name?” the gravelly-voiced one demanded. He sounded like someone that smoked cheap cigars on an hourly basis and then gargled with sand.

  Reluctantly, he answered, “Like I told her, my name’s Rick.”

  “What’s your real name, Rick?” She clicked off the safety of her pistol. “Or should I just put one between your eyes and have the coroner ID you from the DNA samples you left in all of your victims?”

  He was caught. Shit. The game was over. Hunting season was finished. He’d only been doing what he had out of necessity at first, but he’d come to do it as long as he had when he’d realized how good he was at it and what a rush it was. But he’d made the mistake of getting sloppy. He’d gotten careless, and they’d played him for a fool. His balls were really in a vise now. But that didn’t mean he had to make things easy for them.

  “How about a fingerprint?” he asked, raising his middle finger at her with a sneer.

  “All right, enough chitchat. Go on, kid, put this piece of shit in cuffs,” Mister Gravel Voice said to the others, gesturing with the muzzle of his shotgun. To Rick, he said, “Don’t even think about making a move, asshole.”

  The Kid, as they’d called the wannabe cop, clicked the safety on his rifle and let it hang from its shoulder sling as he dug out a set of heavy-duty handcuffs that were joined by a solid hinge instead of a chain in the middle. If they put those
cuffs on him, then it really would be over. And by over, he knew it didn’t just mean a lot of jail time. Vampires didn’t really ever do jail. Vamps guilty of violent crimes got the death penalty by default, no ifs, ands, or buts. And being that he had admittedly committed a string of the classic crimes that had given all vampires their well-deserved reputation – a reputation which that new Grand Duchess babe had been trying to dispel ever since she’d taken over the IVC – he was pretty much guaranteed a swift trial and an even swifter execution. Vamps didn’t get pretty executions like the gas chamber, the electric chair, or lethal injection, because none of those ever really worked that well. Vampires took too long to die by gas, took too many jolts to fry in the chair, and the drug cocktails they had been trying to use for executing vampires had been legally outlawed as inhumane because it took forever to work and caused terrible pain. It was always either hanging or the firing squad … and sometimes even hanging didn’t go right if the initial fall didn’t break a vamp’s neck, so it was usually the latter.

  No, death was only inevitable for him if he accepted it. He wasn’t stupid enough to give in to that. And these weren’t even cops, so surrendering to them was even dumber. If he could get away, then he would start over … for real, this time. He’d tried it before, after the first kill, but that was out of guilt. No, after this, he knew he would really have to play by the rules … or at least be a lot smarter about things.

  He should have learned before, but it took something like this to give him a reality check. After this, he would have to try to settle into one place, get into a routine, and stop this nomadic outlaw bullshit. He would do it right, get himself fixed up with a Steady Blood, or maybe he would even try the Veggie Vamp thing – the nutrition supplements, the no-blood diet, and the group therapy sessions. It was an addiction, just like cocaine or heroin, and he knew he could beat it. He would have to, because the only alternative was death. He hadn’t consented to joining this game for the sake of dying like anyone else. He had let that one bitch be his Maker because she’d promised him eternal life … and he would have it, but only after he got away from these damned gun-toting bounty hunters.