It was one of those evenings again. When the wind suddenly turns cold and lashes out. When the sky rolls over to show its dark underbelly and growls an ominous warning. When the air is heavy and carries the sweet scent of moisture and summer flowers. Every lightning storm brings with it a want to shun the world, to shun nature; there is a dramatic decrease in the human populace on the surface of the world when the rain falls like bullets, when lightning crackles and thunder crashes. Although, it wasn’t always disgust and fear that pushed man into his house, under his shelter; many found the patter of rain on the roof, the dappled sound of droplets against windows, to be a soothing and glorious experience. Regardless of their reasons, however, the fact remained that with fewer souls on the streets tonight, hunting would be more difficult, people-watching would quickly grow tiresome and the Telepath would be bored too rapidly.
The rain was beautiful, but rain was water – spritzing water – and this man’s vanity was such that the damp look didn’t really appeal to him. Of course, rain-soaked clothing that clings to the body like a lover has a certain charm to it, but Myk’s
clothing possessed the appeal already. In the end there was but a single consequence for his bone-white tresses meeting rain – the look of an Old English sheepdog. No, he couldn’t stand it. The Telepath could tolerate the smear of red lipstick, the obverse shadowing of mascara and eye-tints as they leaked over his cheekbones, but the hair was precious. Myk grabbed at the lengths of those skeletal tendrils and tossed them over his left shoulder; all save a long strand that clung to his pale cheek. Myk ignored it. He gave a quick side-glance to his left, then to his right, and with a deep unneeded breath, stepped into the streets.
Under the shower of rainfall, Myk barely missed a young man as he ran by holding a newspaper over his head.
“Idiot,” the Telepath murmured, staring after the Human. He was annoyed, yes, and could easily snap the man’s neck for the innocuous intrusion, for the near-miss. Besides that, just for the stupidity of it all, for thinking a bundle of papers would protect him from the rain. In the end, the Telepath decided to overlook the entreaty; Myk could not bring himself to follow. Instead, he headed southeast toward Newborough where probing wants brought him to unguarded commercial buildings. As he passed under the countless streetlamps, he came to realise that being picky wasn’t an option tonight. The streets were damn near empty, save for a few homeless shrews sheltered beneath cardboard boxes. They made him feel uncomfortable, judged, so his pace quickened.
The rain lightened and eventually stopped as Myk crossed the streets to discover more fertile territories. He found one building in particular that caught his attention and decided to slip in from the rear where the shutters were dropped. No curtain of iron could deter him, but the window to the logistics office just a few feet to the right was certainly more inviting. Myk crept hurriedly to its position, stepping out onto the sodden mulch that lined the perimeter. He kept his body close to the wall, the panels of white and black – the bared flesh of his toned abdomen and arms, the inky wrapping of his clothing – helped him to camouflage well into the brickwork, under the flood lamps and shadows. Myk was proud of his dexterity, his ability to slip through undetected. Excited plots swarmed in his head about how he could further up his game. All that excitement, however, fled him like startled birds. To his disappointment, Myk found that the window had not been locked correctly.
“Oh for the love of God,” the Telepath crooned, his pewter eyes revolving.
“It’s like they want you to steal from them…”
The window might have been open, for all intents and purposes, but it was not wholly obvious. Myk had to slide his fingers into the tiny crack in the seam, dig his nails in to get some traction and wrench the thing open. He had to hope that breaching the window wouldn’t set off any alarms so there was a silent, breathless second where Myk held onto the PVC frame and just waited, expecting, cursing. Unless his ears deceived him, no alarm was chirping or yelping or beeping away a few seconds later. A sigh of relief escaped the Telepath and he pushed the window up higher. First things first, Myk slung his bag through the window and heard it drop into the room. The sound of the soft thud prepared him for the short drop his body would make once he entered. Lifting one leg up and in through the window, Myk pushed his body up to straddle the frame. Bending his knees, he lowered his head and body, then pushed himself in headfirst, bringing the last leg in after. Unfortunately, his toe caught on something on his way in, he felt his damp hands slip from under him, and the Telepath took a tumble, head-first onto the floor.
There was no time to throw his arms forward and break his fall; Myk landed inelegantly on the carpet, on top of his bag and right before the desk. Thankfully it was not occupied. Myk unravelled himself from the confusion of limbs and tacky hair, and quickly took to his feet. He would have liked to dry off somehow, but Myk must tolerate the clinging dampness of his clothes and hair. The bag was thrown over his shoulder again, his clothing brushed down to remove the dust and carpet fibres which had adhered to him. Before doing anything else, Myk looked about the room he was in; the typical office décor stared blandly back at him. He could lift some computer parts effortlessly enough, the hard-drive might prove useful, but the drawers on the desk only offered staplers, elastic bands and pins. They might seem useless to the ordinary thief, but Myk could make no claims to being ordinary in anyway.
First he grabbed a handful of pins, ignoring the tiny pricks against his palm when he’d fisted them at the wrong angle. With the one hand, Myk drew the drawstring on his bag open and dove inside to find a small silk pouch. It occurred to the Telepath that he probably should have done the latter first – it wasn’t exactly easy to perform these tasks with his left hand, the other one tenderly clutching miniature spikes – but the results were about the same. Myk poured the fistful of pins into the little pouch and then returned it to his bag along with the hard-drive he had lifted from the computer’s tower. Finally, before shutting the drawer to the desk with his hip, Myk had taken one of the elastic bands. There were a variety of colours, but he’d plainly snatched a white one. He could have lifted them all and made them come in handy somewhere down the line – he was practically MacGyver – but Myk’s intentions for the elastic band was simple.
Myk slipped the white band over the fingers of his left hand, splaying those slender white digits enough to keep it in place. He combed his hair back gingerly, gathering as much of the bone-white tresses as he could and then folded in the elastic band in like sugar into egg-whites. The slip of his meringue-like hair made the process quick and easy, and he tied and twisted the band as tightly as he could tolerate. Once his hair was secured in the ponytail, in-line with his small white ears, Myk was on the move again. It probably wouldn’t take long before the shorter tendrils broke free and dripped around his face like milk, but for now everything was in place and Myk was ready.
One cold, pale hand gripped the handle of the door and twisted evenly, quietly, to open the door inward. Myk forced his head out through the space he’d made, evaluating the corridor that stretched both to the right and left of him. The lights were off, just as they had been in the office, but of course that was no hindrance to the man who had eyes like a cat. In fact, he was relieved to see that the lights were off. Myk had a penchant for sneaking like a Shadow and recently he had even been learning their tricks. Also, with the lights off, it made finding Human security guards much easier. The flicker of their flashlights gave them away, gave him enough notice to flee or hide before they’d even known he was there. With a smile that would make a Pope blush, Myk strode into the corridor.
His decision to make his way toward the right, where the corridor bent at a ninety degree angle, had no more wisdom or meaning to it than why, when you eat a gummy bear, you always start at the head. Excitement settled on his breast bone, making the ribs stiffen and close tight around his lungs. As a Human the resulting breathlessness might have been unsettling, but the Vampire inhaled strong, gasping breaths just to make that sensation bolder. Light-headedness followed and there was even pain; it brought stars behind his eyelids and made his ears feel like they’d popped. Myk heard nothing and saw nothing as he drifted around that corner like a ghost ship, but his body was not so ethereal.
When he collided with the other Vampire, their bodies connected with a hard slap. Myk had staggered back one step from the force of the blow, but had stepped back purposefully with the other two steps. He blinked himself awake, pewter eyes stared vacantly but for a moment before their ferocity returned. The Telepath cursed his foolishness and was prepared to draw the
dagger sheathed to the back of his belt and cut down the other party, but, he soon realised that he was looking at a kindred spirit. The Telepath’s red lips parted in a fiendish smile that showed the tips of his sharp teeth. Yet his was no display of hostility, but a welcome from one devil to the other. In fact, Myk hoped that by presenting some familiarity, the other male Vampire would relax his hackles too.
“Bonsoir,” Myk said; the voice was respectfully low, not quite a whisper, but a soft, deep purr of sound.
“What a surprise you are…”
Pewter eyes remarked the contours of the young man’s visage. Blue eyes that shone like sapphires hid behind spectacles; spectacles which disguised his cheekbones and were far too old for him. There was a bookish charm about this man, some reserve and mystery which beckoned the Telepath a little closer to him. Myk breathed in the scent of smoke with a simple inhalation; his palette left wanting and expecting something more… spicy. This Vampire, an Allurist by all accounts, was taller than Myk, but the Telepath had no concerns for encroaching on his personal space. Although, Myk didn’t realise how far he had stepped into this man’s space until a sound from behind struck his attention. It was the sound of footsteps, coming up from behind the other Vampire. Rather than wait to ask questions about any cohorts he might have in the area, Myk chose to act now and risk the painful consequences later.
Instinctively, the Telepath thrust his hands through the short gap between them, grabbing the man by the shirt – his sharpened claws scraping the skin beneath even so. Then, with a pirouette to make seasoned ballerinas across the continent bleed with envy, Myk span the Allurist around. He drove the man – back first – into the wall around the corner from whence Myk had come; the speed and force of the motion dazzling. The Telepath’s strength wasn’t great, so Myk used his entire body weight to press the other Vampire against the wall and pin him there. In any other situation, Myk might have paused his thoughts to focus on the slide of their skin beneath the imposing layers of fabric they wore, to breathe in the heady scent of an attractive male, but as it was, pewter eyes looked resolutely across the man and to the corridor’s maw.
“Be very quiet,” Myk compelled the other Vampire with telepathy.
“We have a visitor.”
And sure it was, the moment his thoughts were pushed into the mind of the other Vampire’s, the tell-tale waver of light from the darkened corridor was visible on the flat wall beside them. The footsteps of the guard were still far enough away to give both men the chance to escape, but that wasn’t their only option. Eyes as sly and unflinching as a raven looked out of their highest corners to analyse those blue gems, those remarkably handsome expressions. Had this one been a Killer perhaps, the choices might have been far more apparent. As it was, Myk’s experiences with the Allurists of this world were fleeting, leaving him to guess at how things could be handled here.
“Should we hide? Or would you like to cut his throat?” Myk questioned with the use of telepathy again. The approaching footsteps were counting down their window to escape, so Myk quickened his tone.
“Nod for one. Shake your head for two.”
