Twenty ways to kill a Hitman (Invite)

[Pi dArtois]

Two hundred thousand dollars. That was a lot of money. In the deflated US housing market that amount could buy a person a really decent house, picket fence, two car garage and neighbours who wore polos with small crocodiles on them.

She was impressed, maybe even a little flattered someone cared so much.

It was a lot of money for someone to put on her head. If Pi were paranoid she’d have suspected her previous employers. Government agencies didn’t like to lose assets and Pi had been a good one. Too good maybe. Except, it was Crow and there were no agents, government or otherwise posting vampire bounties for other vampires to view and add to hit lists to kill.

But she had to consider the possibility, even just for a moment, before discarding it for unlikely. Which left her with, vampires.

Pi couldn’t remember the last time she’d caused waves in this city (if she ever really did), either personally or publicly. Even when she was more vocal, words were things she guarded jealously, a miser who only shared what was absolutely necessary. Except, something had happened with this one person to inspire them to put a rather astronomical amount on her head and Pi had no idea what it was.

For the last year Pi had done nothing more strenuous than pull beer behind the bar at Lancaster’s and killed Lionelli in the castle. She’d spoken on one topic on Crow in the and that had been merely fact finding than anything even closely resembling … dramatic.

Because Pi just wasn’t the dramatic sort. She didn’t have flaming tantrums where she spit the dummy, pelting everyone around her with vitriol and venom. Except when it came to Elliot, maybe only Elliot, her Achilles. Except even there she was learning (slowly) not be a crazy nut bag (which she knew she could be).

Sure the bounty was impressive and a bit flattering but it was also a conundrum. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out why exactly anyone cared that much. She did little, caused little harm, never impacted the masquerade and in her own quiet way, worked quietly to help. A quiet word with new vampires. A place for them to stay. Even now the project for the new vampire building was underway, decorators contracted and pulling together each location, the upper and lower floors in the finishing touches before the big opening day.

She sat back in the office chair staring at the computer screen with her name in black and white. Those six figures playing across the screen as Pi steepled her fingers, touching the tips to her lips.

“Well Papi.” She spoke quietly to herself. “How did you manage to get yourself into this muddle”

[Doc]

Doc was a voracious reader. He liked learning things. Since his turning he found that he enjoyed it even more. It was almost as though he craved knowledge and information. He rarely had a moment where he was bored, because with the kindle app on his cell, he could take his books anywhere. However over the last few weeks, he had grown somewhat restless, what his mother had referred to as his antsy mood. He didn’t know what brought it on, but he was feeling the repercussions of it. In the last few weeks he had sired three vampires. This was an anomaly for him. With the exception of the first one, the last two were instant reactive turnings that had been a mistake and a spur of the moment thing. His typical modus operandi was to stalk the subject for months before actually siring them. But this was not the case in the last two sirings. He needed to get a handle on himself; before things got completely out of hand.

He had been doing some introspective thinking and analyzation of what could have been the cause of his current restless mood; so that he could adjust that issue and move past it. But the side effects of his restlessness were that his attention span became shorter; his focus drifted easily and his ire with a subject could rise quickly. This meant that reading did not hold the allure at present, that it would normally. So he found himself reading the family forum. It was a quick read usually. Just simple one liners that everyone used to update the family with their comings and goings, their weddings and reception invitations, or ask questions. However this evening as he was reading the family forum, he saw that his sire had a 200,000 dollar bounty on her head. Who the **** did she piss off?

Doc pondered over this question for a while before he responded to his sire’s query. Someone who was willing to lose 200,000 dollars by putting up a bounty was either seriously pissed off, or was dumb as ******* ****. Knowing Pi, he was guessing it the was the latter of the two, because even as angry as he had been with her in the past, and he had been pretty damned pissed off, it wasn’t worth 200,000 dollars to get retribution. So having come to the conclusion that the person who put it up, was ****-for-brains, he posted his suggestion to his sire.

[Pi dArtois]

There were no good options.

She was as limited in her avenues of response as she was by any certainty of why the bounty had been put on her head to begin with. She could conjecture until the cows came home but none of her assumptions (which were made with little information with which to base them on) would give her an answer that would give her better choices.

Without knowledge of who had put the bounty on her head, or why, she was left with dealing with it on her own.

And her plan had been…. Flawed.

For her the shadow realm didn’t hold the terror it did for so many. Unlike Elliot, who had never felt its bite, she knew exactly what waited for her if she chose that option. She understood the absolute nothingness it represented. Like the black open space of the universe, it stretched in a lacklustre grey emptiness. Void of love and hope and terror, wiped clean of sights or sounds and emotions. Life was paused, a muted potential that sat in waiting for a resurrection the mind could only hope came sooner, rather than later.

But that void, which housed nothing by a grey emptiness, didn’t scare her.

It was their humanity which gave it the sarcophagus of death. As if calling what they experienced as death, it made it so, when truth really was it was more a purgatory. An in between twilight where there was no light because light had been leached from it. And there was no darkness either because darkness represented a lack of cognizance that also wasn’t true.

In its purest sense it was a waiting place. If she were a religious person she would believe it was the price they paid, a repudiation of their spirit from either heaven or hell because their very nature removed them from mother earth’s natural cycle. So if they could not die, what then could God do with them?

The Shadow Realm was their hell, and their heaven and their salvation all wrapped into one grey nothing. And since she wasn’t a religious person, it represented nothing more than a probation. Or a jail sentence. Seven days of nothing, as payment for their sins it seemed a small price to pay.

Which really, was the basis for her flawed plan to begin with.

Pi, could live in purgatory, if it meant that the rest of her family stayed safe, that the issue this person had with her would be neutralised, and the end result was that she would be the only one to pay for it. She knew Elliot would hate it. He would hate her self sacrificing insanity.

Until Charles. And his Plan B.

It wasn’t much better. On the scale of sensible things a person should and should not consider, it sat pretty damn low. Near the bottom. Right above offing yourself as a viable solution (barely)

But in a scenario where her only other plan was the ‘die’ (other people’s words, not her own), it held some merit. Elliot wouldn’t disown her for slitting her own throat and she wouldn’t have to give the person the satisfaction of facilitating said throat cutting.

So she tried it. Find the hitman, let him shoot her, reduce her bounty by 10,000 rinse and repeat.

No, it wasn’t a good plan at all. Not after the fourth time. Not after the fourth body she had to dispose of and not for what amounted to being only 10% of the bounty as a whole. If things kept on this way, her body would be so riddled with bullet holes she’d start to look like a sieve. One big walking wound.