Path of the Vampire forum

Almost three months.

It had taken her almost three months to bother to show her face to the world that she knew.

Grey sat close to the 8th Dimension Mall, where she worked full time as a mechanic. She was hired nearly two years ago by Brock, a man who owned Auto Doc. There, she worked nights and completed everything from the nightly bank drops after the shop closed to working on the vehicles within the open bays to cleaning up for the oncoming shift in the morning. Grey watched as the people passed on the street.

No one stopped. No one even bothered to look her way. Grey lifted the blood slush to her lips, the dark red liquid chilled and crushed, half dissolved in ice and ignorant of the iron sweetness. Micah had called it progress quietly, but Grey simply drank because that man had threatened her with repercussions she wasn’t in the mind frame to handle. Torture? Grey didn’t want to be tied down and forced to drink the red stuff any more than she wanted to willingly bring it to her lips.

She craved it warm. She wanted it hot and sliding down her throat. She wanted it to come from the flesh of humans and to feel their pain when she sucked their life from their bodies. However, Grey sat there with her legs crossed and the icy slush in a bottle with that hard, plastic straw and she was sucking it as if she didn’t need to stop to breathe. Her opaque eyes watched the lights shining down, the stars blazing in the black clear sky which was surprising for January.

In the air was the hint of blood and criminals, of gangsters and cops. She sat, on her break from the shop, watching people. Because that was what she did now. She hunted. She planned. She moved in a singular entity, cold and dead inside. She’d find her next tattooed victim. They always were tattooed.

They were men or women. They were of brunette hair and fair skin. They were athletic in nature. They had big smiles and an easy way about them. They were often aloof, just like Grey was. However, she slit them. She took her knives and she gutted them. She carved them up from stem to stern and made them bleed. After… Only after she got her fill.

And right now, she stopped drinking. She took her pale lips off the straw and out came no sound from opened lips. Just gasping breaths with no sound. There was no steam from her lips. There was no warmth from her mouth. She just… breathed as she sat there on the bench as if she was fighting brain freeze.


And she hated.


And she hunted.


And she watched those around her, sunken cheeks and dark eyes. She was not lost.


She was death.

The holidays were over, having been ruined as usual by his mother and father. Granted they didn't plan this. No, however the lasting effect of it was, the holiday was ruined again, by them. In fairness he should admit he was woefully remiss in procuring the gifts in a timely fashion. More than woefully remiss. Doc was ******* late. If he did not get it taken care of this evening, it was Valentine’s day before he was caught up.

Truth be told, even if he did not admit it, he liked giving gifts to the females he knew. He liked seeing them smile, he liked the look of softness that cross their face. It made them more feminine and vulnerable, and to him, more attractive. Why was the majority of his spawn females? Because he had a ******* weakness for them, that was why. Doc was not always aware of this weakness. But it was there, and for the outsider looking in, it was there.

So once more, though this, he was a week or more late, he found himself in in the mall. He always did his shopping at Quartermaine’s. It was a great store. They had a little bit of everything. If a person was a looking for a unique gift, Quartermaine’s had it. And if they didn’t, the buyer was too ******* picky. A gift should be from the heart. It isn’t about the item. It was about the thought process -behind- the item. He knew that. He believed that. But .. **** him… he wasn’t having any luck finding the spawns a gift. Doc put it down to the fact that he had not come to grips with the emptiness that was made by the loss of some of his spawn.

Doc knew that not everyone was cut out for this nocturnal life. He knew that he should let those go that .. found it too difficult to bear. But **** it all.. the ones that couldn’t handle it.. seemed to be the ones that wanted it more. Maybe this was a lesson for him.

Sighing Doc stalked out of Quartermaine’s, having found nothing to his liking. He knew it was his mood more than the store. He was in a sour ‘**** you.. and the horse you rode in on’ mood. He headed for the exit of the store, but passing by a bench on the way to the mall exit.. he stopped a few feet past it. He stood there, thinking for several moments. Turning he wandered back and looked at the female on the Bench. “I know you.. you are.. Gr.. “ he paused, and then tried again, “.. Greta? .. Jesse’s Squeeze.. yea?”

Doc.

Grey's opaque eyes turned upwards to look at the man that stopped in the middle of her screen. Her view. The cloudy eyes that covered the blue-grey and dash of hazel around her iris' certainly gave her enough of a window's view to see the man covered for winter. The mechanic herself wore a fleece, black with an emblem of Auto Doc on the right breast while her name Grey had been embroidered on the left breast.

She merely had to take the gloved hand that had been clenched on her lap and point to the silver lettering.

Her hair had been pulled back into a loose braid, some wisps of brunette hair pulled free by the bitter cold breeze. Those lips didn't hesitate while she blinked again. She wrapped the pale lines around the hard straw once more and started to drink her dinner. Her face was devoid of makeup, smeared along the left jaw with a smudge of grease or dark oily substance. Grey didn't much care for her appearance lately, and she had a knack for not checking her rotten flesh in the mirror before venturing outside.

There, however, for the man in front of her was an explicit shake of her head.

No. Grey thought.

She was no longer Jesse Fforde's main squeeze as the man put it. The man that had once been tangled up with Jesse's ultimate irritation - his own Ex-Sire. But, in truth, Grey did not know much about the man with the nickname in the medical profession. Jesse had said he was once... Smooth. Slick.

Instead, she just kept to the bench that she sat in the middle of.

It was still her break time.

Doc had been looking at her face, not her breasts. That was because he tended to remember people better by their face more so than their breasts. Her face had looked familiar, but it was gaunt and strained, not how he remembered it. So yes, he hadn't noticed the name on her jacket. Now that he did, he remembered it. Grey. He vaguely recalled wondering at the time that he met her, how a female received such a non-descript name. Was it a family name? Was it a nickname that had just stuck for whatever reason? She had not appeared at all to resemble her name then. Now however, it was a different story. She embodied the name. Then, in the past, she had been happy and glowing; now, here in the current, she appeared dismally morose and subdued.

Her health, or lack thereof, was not his business. She obviously didn’t want to speak to him, since all she could manage was a halfway apathetic gesture to the embroidered name. Nor did she confirm or deny her connection to Jesse. Doc’s connection to Jesse was a thin line through his grand spawn Kaelyn, since Jesse had left Tytonidae. Kaelyn was in the Fforde lineage, but in Doc’s mind, she was his, not Jesse’s. And that was something Jesse had told him in no uncertain terms was not allowed. **** what Jesse wanted, what was he going to do ground Kaelyn for preferring Doc’s company to his? He would like to see how that would go over. He brought his thoughts back to the woman on the bench in front him. He would ask, if she remained mute, so be it, he would leave.

“You do not look well. Are you alright?”