Flashbacks one of the drawbacks of being a vampire. I don’t mean particularly vivid memories, I mean, “one second I’m there, the next I’m reliving memories from my traumatic past” detective movie stuff. Anyway, this memory was one I had mixed feelings about. It was a moment of triumph, hate, power, remorse, and regret. It was one of those days I exulted in being a vampire because it had given me a chance for revenge.
I was in one of the abandoned tenements of Old Detroit, a real shithole called Lincoln Park Heights. The place had been evacuated because they were moving out the majority of the inner city’s populace to better digs paid for by the vampires as part of their city renewal plan. Many of Detroit’s die-hards had resisted the resettlement, having been screwed in the past, but it hadn’t worked because it just meant the gangs had taken over instead.
The worst of those gangs were the 6th Street Knives, a group containing a lot of people I’d once called classmates and friends. In the nineties, when the city had been at its worst, Carl Jackson had recruited half of my neighborhood with promises of paper and a chance to improve their life. What he’d really given them was jail sentences, addictions, and or bullets in the chest as he spent their lives like dollar bills at a strip club. One of them had been my brother.
I’d been willing to let the past rest when Jackson was in jail for possession and trafficking, but he was out now. Worse, he’d thrown a party that he’d stupidly invited old friends of mine to. Ones who’d told me about it. I was a vampire now, and there was no way I was going to let this human piece of garbage escape justice. I was going to rip his goddamn throat out and suck every bit of warm red juice from his corpse. I was at that stage in my unlife where the only things I thought about were the Need and getting even.
“Jackson!” I shouted, at the top of my lungs, pumping the shotgun in my hands. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”
The third story hallway was riddled with bullets and more than a few bodies as I’d decided to go full-on Matrix through the place. I’d told the Knives to get the fuck out of my way and let me deal with Jackson, but they’d stupidly decided to defend their boss to the end. I’d pulled my shots, but the fact was I was a vampire and could heal anything they dished out at me as long as I had blood. As far as I was concerned, they were all guilty if they were protecting Jackson.
“Please, Peter, don’t kill me,” a man on the ground I recognized as Tyrone Davis whispered, grabbing at my leg.
Tyrone had been in my brother Damien’s class and was bleeding badly from the bit of buckshot he’d caught. He wasn’t dead like his fellows but that was likely to change if he didn’t get to a hospital. My eyes glowed silver in the dark as I stared at the blood and wanted to lap it up like a dog. It made me sick but also excited me. There weren’t people around me anymore, just 7 billion Big Macs, only the Big Macs were like sex as well as a jolt of electricity to the brain with every order. I’d never done drugs harder than pot but, goddamn, blood was better than anything else in my life. Except revenge. That, alone, calmed me down.
I aimed the shotgun at his head. “Where’s Jackson? He needs to pay.”
“Come on, man, I loved Damien—”
I grabbed him by his now blood-soaked Detroit Pistons shirt and lifted him up against the wall before baring my fangs. He smelled good.
“Where is Jackson?” I hissed in his face, fangs bared.
He closed his eyes and started crying. “Down the hall, man. The last door on the right. He’s got like six guys with him, though. Don’t—”
I dropped him on the ground and started walking down the hall. “If you’re still alive when I get back, Tyrone, I’m going to give you some vampire blood. It’ll fix you right up. If you’re not, then life’s a bitch.”
I was talking tough but the smell of blood and sweat was causing me to shake with hunger. It took every single ounce of my strength to just hold onto the shotgun in my hands versus going after his blood. I would have killed him right there if not for my desire to kill Jackson above all else. That was when I heard Tyrone’s fingers wrap around the Uzi on the ground beside him. The one he’d dropped when I shot him.
I immediately spun around and grabbed him, lifting him up into the air and stabbing my fangs into his neck before tearing a chunk out of his neck. Vampires could make it so humans didn’t bleed fast but, some kind of magic in the Bite, but I didn’t do it this time. Tyrone’s blood shot from his carotid artery into my mouth like a firehose. It kept spilling until his heart stopped and I ended up sucking the blood from him like a children’s juice box.
I stepped back, looking down at the dead man who’d used to play basketball a block down from my house and shook with a mixture of both guilt as well as ecstasy. He wasn’t the first person I’d killed, not even the first person I’d drained but he was the first person I’d known. It made me sick to my stomach, but the Need was quieted for a moment. The ever-present, all-consuming hunger that was always demanding to be fed only ended completely when you’d killed someone to feed.
“Jackson’s fault. This is on you,” I whispered before suddenly shouting, “Jackson! I’m coming for you!”
No answer. All of the other Knives had fled, and I couldn’t smell their wounds anymore. No one else had been killed, but some of them had gunshot wounds to the arms or legs. They’d fled the moment they’d seen I wasn’t human. Vampires were only recently revealed but it had taken a live demonstration to get them to flee. Good, I didn’t want any more mothers mourning the deaths of their children… like Damien. Like Tyrone.
Fuck.
Walking across the rat-infested hallway, I could hear the heavy breathing and smell the fear of those people hiding behind the doorways present. People who just wanted to live their lives in peace away from the worst of the violence Detroit had to offer but who had been pushed by both vampires and now gang warfare.
I heard at least one heartbeat fading away and saw bullet holes from where the people who’d tried to engage me had shot through me. Inside, I could smell death. Fresh blood that no longer pulled at the Need because I’d killed tonight. An old woman in her seventies whose body was rapidly cooling. Another innocent who had been killed because of my decision to go Death Wish on these bastards. I closed my eyes and forced that thought away.
“Keep it cool, soldier,” I said. “There’s always a price to violence.”
The door at the end of the hall, Room 33, wasn’t guarded and I shot the lock off before kicking it open. The interior apartment beyond had the lights off, and I didn’t see any sign of six guys. Instead, in there, I didn’t hear a single heartbeat or breathing, but I was too pissed off to care.
Marching down through the doorway, I ended up in the apartment living room where Jackson was sitting. He was smoking a cigarette, unarmed, and looking smug in a way a man who had just had seven of his crew killed shouldn’t. The window behind him had rain pouring down as moonlight streamed in from beyond. There were stacks of cash and an Uzi on the table in front of him. A full ashtray was there as well, full of a dozen or so stamped out cigarettes. On the wall, in red spray-paint, was Fuck the Police, Knives 4 Life.
Carl “Red” Jackson drew his name from the fact his hair was a bright shade of red, rare but not as much as you’d think for a black man, with it stylized into flat-top. The side of his face had a tattoo of a knife, and he was approaching forty even as he dressed like a teenager with ripped jeans and a Wolverine’s jersey. He didn’t look scared in the slightest. I briefly wondered what angle he was playing before deciding I didn’t care.
“It’s time to pay,” I said, tossing the shotgun on the ground. I intended to rip his throat out and drink every drop of blood in his body.
Red leaned back, chuckling. “Pay for what, Stone? Your brother? Your brother went hard and killed a member of the 88s. Wanted to be a big man and threatened the whole order. Someone had to pay the price, and I made the call it should be him rather than my brothers.”
I growled. “Lying sack. Damien told me you sent him to kill him not an hour before he was dead.”
I’d hated my brother in that moment, finding out I’d returned from watching my friends blown to pieces and having to kill my own commanding officer to discovering my little brother had become a murderer. I’d served two tours in that place, sending back every check to my family and I’d returned to find he’d thrown it away. I’d called him garbage and worse only to have those be the last words I’d ever say to him.
“And your brother was such a fine upstanding citizen,” Jackson said, crossing his arms. Not afraid in the slightest.
I almost ripped his throat out then and there. “You warped my brother. Turned him into a killer like you did the rest of my neighborhood. I’m going to remove you from this place and make it better.”
“Yeah, you just a force of righteousness now. Mister Big Bad Soldier, always trying to make us feel bad about our choices, only now you’re a murderer like the rest of us. What about Joshua? You remember him? Used to hang out at your house with Damien every Saturday. He talked about it all the time and now he’s dead. That’s on you, Stone, not me.”
He was right, at least partially, and I should have killed him by myself. I could have used my powers to sneak into his place and killed him in his sleep. I’d wanted to make a statement, though, and I still planned to. “They died because of you, Jackson. They tried to get between me and you. Where’s the rest of your thugs? You’re all alone now.”
Jackson stood up, smiling. “I sent them away, Stone. No sense in getting them killed for something I intended to handle myself. You should have just said you wanted to throw down and we could have saved the others too.”
Okay, this was all wrong. He should have been quaking on the ground, terrified of what was going to happen next. Vampires hadn’t been around long enough people could just shrug off their presence.
I took a step forward and he moved around to engage me.
Jackson continued talking. “You think you’re the Big Bad Vampire out to avenge your brother, but it’s a big world out there. You’re not the only one who has changed in recent years. How do you think I managed to get out of the system?”
Jackson’s face changed as the bones of his forehead extruded while his teeth became shark-like rather than just typical vampire fangs. Hair sprouted all over the sides of his head and palms as his loose baggy clothes became tight around him due to him gaining a foot in size as well as a hundred or so extra pounds of muscle. His eyes turned into eerie moons that caused the monster within me to take a step back. I could feel the power and strength radiating from him, every bit as great as my own.
“You’re a fucking werewolf,” I said, growling.
Jackson laughed. “Stone, I was a werewolf before your vampire sugar daddy had me sent up the river. Now I’m a vampire, and I’m going to rip your head clean off.”
I didn’t give a crap and launched myself at Jackson, grabbing the hybrid and throwing him against the wall before he grabbed me back and smashed me through the window behind him. I pulled on his shirt before the two of us went tumbling out of the window onto the ground twenty-five feet below.
The two of us landed with a thud in the overgrown muddy courtyard beneath Lincoln Park Heights. I hit the earth while Jackson slammed into a rusted, broken bicycle. I didn’t hesitate to grow a pair of iron-like claws from my fingernails and start slashing at the hybrid before he did the same, slashing a bloody ribbon across my chest.
I tried to bite his throat, only to have the hybrid slam me across the face with an elbow and sending me flying backwards across the muddy ground. Hybrids weren’t really a mixture of werewolf and vampire, you were either one thing or the other, but you maintained elements of the other if you changed. Jackson had all the strength of a werewolf added to that of a vampire and it felt like super-strength was also his power. Fuck, it was like being hit by a car just being grazed by the bastard.
“I bet you wish you’d kept your gun, Stone,” Jackson said, his voice distorted by the face a few of his teeth were missing and hadn’t yet regrown.
“I threw down my shotgun,” I said, reaching into the back of my pants. “I’ve thrown away all of my guns.”
I pulled out two shiny Desert Eagles full of silver ammo that I’d dropped a paycheck on and started shooting into Jackson’s chest. A half-dozen bullets, walking back as I fired. I’d been Thoth’s bodyguard as well as his blood servant, and he made it a point to enchant each and every round of my weapons to make sure whatever was thrown at him by his enemies stayed down. Silver wouldn’t kill a hybrid but it sure as hell would hurt twice as bad.
Jackson howled, the agony of each bullet reflected in his cry, much to my enjoyment. I wanted him to suffer before he died. Unfortunately, I’d underestimated just how powerful a vampire he was, and he charged at me, knocking away both of my guns even as another silver bullet buried itself into his right arm.
“This is my town!” Jackson shouted, his voice quavering from the enchanted bullets burning up inside him. He grabbed me by the throat with both his hairy palms and lifted me up, squeezing. It felt like he was trying to squeeze my head clean off.
“Detroit is not your town!” I shouted. “It belongs to the people!”
“Who do you think the people here are rooting for! You? You just tore into here! They prefer me to your bosses!” Jackson shouted in my face, giving me the distraction, I needed to kick him with both my feet in the balls. “Argh!”
Jackson dropped me as I rolled around on the ground. If I hadn’t been so pissed and terrified, I would have muttered something like, “Wolfman got nards.” Instead, I crawled on the ground, going for one of my pistols that I couldn’t see in the overgrown grass around me.
I didn’t move fast enough, and Jackson was soon upon me, slamming one of his big meaty clawed hands into my stomach where he then twisted his hand. I screamed in agony as he slowly started clawing his way through me.
“I win,” Jackson hissed in my face, laughing.
I bared my fangs at him. “Fuck you.”
“Desist!” A powerful voice spoke over the field of overgrown grass.
“No!” Jackson said, crying out as if someone had just stolen his favorite toy. Yet, miraculously, he pulled his hand out of my chest.
Vampires only felt a fraction of the pain normal people felt. It was more a distinct echo of pain, existing to let us know just how much damage we’d taken but not crippling us the way it would a normal human. I, right now, was crippled by pain and was trying to hold my organs in my body even as it required every bit of blood in my body to stitch together my insides. Regeneration was a nasty, brutal process even for a vampire, and it was leaving me starving for blood. So much so I could barely hear the conversation going on beside me.
“He came in here!” Jackson shouted, pointing at me. “He came here to kill me! He killed my people! My crew! I deserve this!”
I looked over to one side and saw the figure of Enil the Second Eldest was standing next to Thoth. Neither individual had come in a car, and I wondered, for a brief moment, if they’d turned into bats before descending down or just flew here directly. I was still getting used to the fact some vampires could fucking fly and considered it to be their preferred means of travel.
Enil the Second Eldest was, I shit you not, an eight-thousand-year old vampire, at least if you believed the legends about him. He was a bald, Count Orlok-looking bastard with a scaled body and claws like a werewolf’s even without changing. He was dressed like a monk with clothing that was loose and free-flowing but new, making him vaguely resemble Uncle Fester. His inhumanity was such that it would be years before I discovered he was every bit as Black as me under those scales.
“It is forbidden to kill another of our kind,” Enil said, using deliberately accented English even though I knew he could sound like someone from the Bronx to Ancient Greece thanks to his mastery of languages. “This is our most important law. Everyone else is expendable but to slay another vampire is to die unless the law has decreed they must die.”
“He killed my brother!” I hissed at him, refusing to let it end like this.
“Your brother is from your mortal family,” Enil said. “You have a new family now.”
Both Jackson and I did not respond well to that statement, unleashing a torrent of obscenities that didn’t help the situation.
Enil walked over and placed his hand on Jackson before leading him away. “I made you, Carl. like I have made hundreds of others over the centuries. Thousands even. You are to assist in keeping the peace in the city as well as making sure ample entertainments are available to the tourists who are to come. I command you not to engage in further violence against Stone even as I insist you also clean up this mess—”
Thoth meanwhile came over me and tossed me a blood bag that I tore into like a wolf, covering my mouth with blood I licked away.
“It’s over,” Thoth said.
“It’s not over,” I hissed at him. “He killed—”
“You lost,” Thoth said, his voice cold but not unsympathetic. “If I hadn’t brought Enil here, you would be dead, and Jackson would be destroyed as your only comfort post-mortem. You are worth more than he is. Do not let yourself be destroyed for his sake.”
I tried to argue, but I found myself thinking of all those dead bodies I created to get to Jackson. “I can’t let this go.”
“Wait and be patient,” Thoth said. “Or be the better man. Your brother made his own choices and creating more corpses is sometimes the answer but not always. Take it from one who knows how sweet and horrible vengeance can be.”
How little I’d known Thoth then because he wasn’t just talking platitudes.