Path of the Vampire forum

A sudden rush of pain jolted through Levi’s body. His stomach ached, his arms lost tension, and the pistol in his left hand dropped to the grim, damp floor with a clatter. The preternatural speed of his enemy’s strike had caught him off guard – or more specifically, caught him in the shoulder blade. The Shadow seethed, his wolf-like jaws clenched tight around vile words that built on his tongue with a coppery taste. Umber eyes were deadlocked with the milky orbs of his enemy; not giving an ounce of ground, refusing to do anything less than express just how fucked the creature was now that it had gone and angered him. But the humanoid spirit was unfazed. It pressured forward, its uncanny body weight pushing the lance ever deeper into Levi’s shoulder; slicing further through the white cotton of his shirt, the tension of his cinnamon skin, and the powerful muscles beneath. Just a few more centimetres and the brass head of the lance would have punctured the bone too, but Levi didn’t let it get that far. In response, the Italian forced his left hand around the shaft and pushed back just enough to keep them at a standoff.

It was the proximity that gave the Shadow the opportunity to assess his enemy in greater detail and decide what to do next.

The Magia Topielec looked like the ghost of a man from a different era. Thick, auburn hair framed his squat, pale face in long, frayed tendrils. It was braided in multiple places and his sagely beard was stained with dried blood; not crimson like you’d expect, but a greyish teal like he’d taken a bite out of a sea monster. His outfit was a mixture of light and heavy armour; leather, chainmail, and steel plating; sculpted his body into a square of defence. But the Italian had learned the hard way that his enemy was far hardier than the weathered armour implied. Some dark magic had pulled this drowned man from the depths of Davy Jones’ Locker, imprisoning him in the halls of Dredge, and as part of his curse, had made its body selectively translucent. The Italian had fired several bullets into the creature’s chest already, but the majority had passed right through him to pellet the wall behind. It seemed like the creature shifted between this realm and the next, causing the air around it to thaw and freeze with its movements.

At times, the creature was no more than a chill in the air, like a shimmer of mist. Through it the brick walls, moss, and blooming lime scale became visible and yet slightly out of focus; like a poorly taken photograph. At other times, the creature congealed into a solid human form; albeit corpse-like in its appearance. The pattern gave Levi the impression that the perfect opportunity to strike would be when the creature took on a more substantial form. So he waited until the force on the end of that lance pole was bearing down again, when the metal scraped past his skin and made for further territory inside the socket of his shoulder. There was a long second of stillness, of competing will and focus, where the sound of dripping water filled the space between low growls and grunts of effort until finally, the Italian broke the stalemate.

Without sound or spectacle, spires as dark and hard as obsidian burst out of the shadow between them and pierced the spirit’s legs. The weight on the end of the lance dropped immediately and just as quickly as they were physical, the spires shattered under the skin and fluttered down like flakes of paint to pool beneath them once again. In one motion, Levi steered his upper body to the left to break the creature’s grip on the lance entirely and aimed the snubbed nose barrel of his secondary gun into its face. The room lit up with the bark of war dogs as round after round punched through dead skin, muscle, skull and brain meat, and then out to the other side. The spirit convulsed with each shot, falling backward until its entire body splashed against the tiled floor as an ethereal liquid. Once the crown of shimmering water rose, it faded away into nothing; taking the lance with it back into the realm of ghosts.

Levi breathed a heavy sigh of relief when the solid pain in his shoulder dissolved into an empty ache. Black blood streamed out of the closing wound like it had somewhere better to be than circulating around his body, keeping him alive. He passed a perturbed glance at it, as the abnormal substance drifted to the ceiling like smoke until it too became nothing more than a figment of memory. At that point, the Italian collected his discarded gun and holstered it; breathing sharply through his teeth with the motion. His secondary pistol was still hotter than the sun and stayed glued to his palm, weighing his right arm to his side. Even so, it felt light to his experienced mind; giving him the indication that he probably only had a couple of rounds left before the magazine was completely spent. But the thought of reloading was put on ice as the click of footsteps approached.

“Levi D’Amico,” came a voice from the corridor shortly after.

Umber eyes flicked over his shoulder to regard a gangling man dressed in his grandfather’s suit. The dark grey, moth-chewed two-piece hung from him so poorly in fact that the Italian was quick to redact his first impression and replace it with the image of a scarecrow instead – or maybe that was the accent’s doing. The Southern drawl had met his ears like sandpaper and he smelt of straw, smoke, and liquor.

“I’ve got eyes on that girl you’re looking for,” the hitman added.

Only then did Levi give two fucks about why he was being spoken to at all. He turned just enough so that he didn’t have to crank his neck to snare the man in his angry sights and then growled. “And?”

“Spotted her on the outskirts of the city.”

There was a long moment of silence then where the Italian stared at the man, waiting impatiently for more information. He was used to hearing specific phrases, used to not having to milk answers out of people like him, and used to receiving a little bit of ******* professional courtesy. Levi wanted to hear one of two ideals: that the problem had been taken care of, or that they’d shot at the *****, but lost a dozen or so men in the process. The point hadn’t been to kill Isabeau, just annoy her – because the Italian had been bored and a little intrigued, thinking that it would make an interesting point of discussion when he came across her at a later date. That, and, it would stir the waters for any other potential ghosts out there – after all, you could never know anything for certain where the Valachi family were concerned...

“******* Christ,” the Italian seethed after his patience broke. “You’re gonna make me drag it out of you, huh. Fine, ****-face,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose, aiming his pistol past his own ear. “So where the **** did you find her, and, what the **** happened when you did?”

“She’s at Algonquin Caves,” the hitman spat nervously – like no self-respecting killer would do before payment and completion of their services. “And, uh… Actually going in there? Well. I’m afraid that’s extra.”

Levi let his gun arm fall back to his side, but his grip was tense and purposeful. Umber eyes stared with such unrelenting fury that it was any wonder that the man hadn’t been caught on fire. He was sweating under the heat of that gaze, however. That salty musk emanating into the room just made Levi angrier somehow. There was no need for words at that point and Levi felt no remorse when he pulled the trigger, just relief as the man’s grey matter fell out of the back of his head and pooled on the tiled floor.

“Porca vacca,” the Italian growled, his low voice rumbling like a syrupy mass in the still silence of the hall. “At least I know where she’s at, you useless piece of ****.”

The Italian unceremoniously spat on the recent corpse before he passed; his route to the exit remaining unburdened even as the man’s blood mixed with the thin layer of surface water. His loafers were already soaked through from the agile movements he’d made dancing with spirits tonight and by now he felt the cold grip seep into his calves. Add the discomfort to the pain in his shoulder and it was easy to see why the Italian had reacted so extremely to the hitman’s lack of action. Killing the guy wouldn’t put the money back into his account, but, it did make him feel like he’d gotten something out of the deal. After that, it became just a case of finding new ways to torment the woman – because: boredom. In the very least, the Wraith would be sent ahead as a spy now that he’d narrowed down the search.

Luck was a funny thing. Get a string of numbers in the right order and you’ve won it big – you’re one blessed ***********. Get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, get struck by lightning, get hit by a bus, and you’re one unfortunate ********. Most people are willing to concede that some instances are straight up fortunate and unfortunate; for some people to have survived a freak accident and for others to have perished was just a matter of chance. But in other arenas, randomness can play out in more subtle ways, causing people to naturally resist explanations that involve luck. In particular, many seem uncomfortable with the possibility that their personal success might depend to any significant extent on chance.

As the essayist E. B. White once wrote, “Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”

Chance plays a far larger role in life outcomes than most people realise or are willing to acknowledge, and it turns out that the luckiest people are usually the most unlikely to appreciate their good fortune. People in higher income brackets are also much more likely to say that people get rich primarily because they work hard rather than taking into account factors such as luck or being in the right place at the right time. Because when people see themselves as self-made – rather than as talented, hardworking, and lucky – they tend to be less generous and public-spirited. It may even make them less likely to support the conditions (such as high-quality public infrastructure and education) that made their own success possible to begin with because as far as they are concerned, they made this outcome happen – luck had nothing to do with it.

Psychologists use the term “hindsight bias” to describe man’s tendency to think, after the fact, that an event was predictable even when it wasn’t. This bias operates with particular force for unusually successful outcomes. Even lottery winners are sometimes blind to luck’s role, thinking that they had some kind of strategy to win. In his 2012 book, The Success Equation, Michael Mauboussin describes a man inspired by a succession of dreams to believe he’d win the Spanish National Lottery if he could purchase a ticket number with 48 as the last two digits. After an extensive search, he located and bought such a ticket, which indeed turned out to be a winner. When an interviewer later asked why he’d sought out that particular number, he said, “I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights. And 7 x 7 = 48.”

The tendency to overestimate the predictability of events extends well beyond lottery winners and hindsight bias. Human cognition provides one more important clue as to why people may see success as inevitable: the availability heuristic. Using this cognitive shortcut, people tend to estimate the likelihood of an event or outcome based on how readily they can recall similar instances – you vividly remember being slapped across the face as a child, so this must have happened a lot and so the outcome is that you were chronically abused as a child. Successful careers, of course, result from many factors including hard work, talent, and chance. Some of those factors recur often, making them easy to recall, but others happen sporadically and therefore get short shrift when constructing our life stories. In other words, we’re much more likely to attribute poor fortune to poor outcomes as we recall those instances outside of our control, than good fortune for positive ones as we recall all those events that were made to happen.

Whether the Italian wanted to acknowledge it or not, there were many instances in his life that could be attributed to being in the right place at the right time. But he wasn’t just going to hand over his achievements because psychology spoke of retrieveability and errors of the brain. As far as he was concerned, that was other people’s problem because he had the evidence to support that his fortune was controlled, not haphazard, and came from choice not happenstance. Some of that choice had been his own, but not all of it. There were players that used him like a pawn as effortlessly and poignantly as he had used others. It was only now that he’d found their strings of influence had been severed that Levi truly became aware of their weight. Now that he was free – truly free – he’d found that he didn’t know what to do with himself.

So he chased shadows and busied himself with temporary entertainers – not willing, or perhaps not ready, to be tied to anything more substantial.

It was why he hadn’t greeted Isabeau personally since their respective returns and kept his distance from the girl. At first he’d sent the fine hitmen of Harper Rock to suss her out and when they’d come back lacking, it became Leveret’s job to track her, but that hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing either. The wispy darkness had apparently gathered itself a solid backbone over the years and was far more willing to answer back than take an order at face value. In fact, it seemed to Levi that the longer the Wraith was away from the trappings of the Shadow Realm, the cockier it became. Leveret Rey was less about following an order to the letter these days, and even had the gall to wander off and do its own thing. It was almost as if the Wraith was becoming more and more alive the longer it persisted in the living realm, and apparently Leveret had had an attitude when he’d been a Vampiro…

“She goes by an interesting name these days,” the Wraith reported, keeping its ethereal voice low.

And despite being nothing more than a splash of ink against one of the walls inside the casino’s private space, Levi sensed that the Wraith’s demeanour was beaming so brightly with pride that it outshone the collective glow of slot machines and the giant wheel of fortune. Levi also sensed that Leveret expected some kind of reward for being a good boy and delivering as expected; he scoffed at both the news and the expectation.

“That’s cute,” the Italian purred darkly.

“I suppose that means—”

“Nothing,” Levi interrupted, his umber eyes still focused into the crowd to keep his eyes on anything potentially untoward. “It means nothing.”

“Well…” Leveret smirked. “Excuse my ignorance, but, I’ve learned enough to expose that as a lie. Valachi’s quite the nefarious surname in your… what do I call it? Malavita?”

“Nefarious?” Levi questioned, arching a brow and looking directly at the wisp.

“It means—”

“I know what it means,” he growled, turning away again. “I just wouldn’t use it to regard his ilk. Too plain. Predictable.”

“What would you use?” Leveret asked, his voice lifting with a sense of child-like wonder.

Levi accepted the challenge of flexing his linguistic skills alongside the airing of his bitterness. His elbow came up on the armrest of the square leather chair, his head lowering so that smile sank below a curled index finger. “Pompous, belligerent, stubborn, deceitful, self-serving… Determined. Careful. Clever. Dangerous...”

The longer he considered it, the more his descriptions became flattering in nature. Only, Levi had mixed feelings even in that regard. Because while he had always respected Gino’s capabilities of being an underhanded, pig-headed smart-***, Levi just hated when those same characteristics were used against him. They hadn’t exactly been the best of friends in the last few years and the Vampiro had learned things about the Sicilian that he would have preferred to be ignorant of. One of those things was the blood ties between Isabeau and Gino, which put a whole other spin on the reasons why the older Italian was always quick to deliver his less than complimentary sermons on sentimentality.

The Wraith apparently found all of this amusing and was now tittering to himself quite loudly. Fortunately, there was no one within earshot and the collective snaps, bangs, and whistles which folded into the chatter, grunts, shrieks, and whirring of the people and the machines would drown the Wraith out at any rate. Levi wouldn’t bet on anyone noticing him here, sat at the back of the establishment like a shade of grey against the shadows. Diversion in the form of chrome arms, wooden basins, and mounted fields drew in the crowds and made them ignorant of corner plots and darkness.

“Sounds a lot like how I would describe you,” the Wraith declared once the laughter had died into a sad echo.

Levi rolled his eyes.

“Does that make the two of you cousins?” Leveret teased again, watching Levi’s umber orbs tighten into a hard scowl as he’d caught sight of the woman in question.

“Not in the least,” he rumbled the words deep from his chest.

“Hmm… I suppose you can’t paint spots on a housecat and call it a cheetah.”

This time, Levi laughed with him.