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Who was it who needed to get shot?

Vivi's head hurt as she sat up in the Harper Rock City Morgue. She attempted to touch her forehead with her right hand, but found it missing. Her arm had been severed halfway through the forearm. "******* bastards," she muttered. The words were just what came to mind.

Thankfully, the coroner had not put her into a body bag, but her right toe had acquired a little tag in it. Reaching down with her left hand, she saw what else was wrong.

"****!" she shouted, realizing that she had two limbs severed. Her left leg had been hacked off just above the knee. She pulled the tag from her toe and pocketted it. It might come in handy. Or she was collecting odd things. She didn't know.

There was a body bag on the table across from her, but that was not her concern; what she needed was to get home. She swung her legs off of the table, putting her right foot flat, and let her torso fall forward, ignoring the spattering of blood her injuries caused on the tiles and knocking the table onto its side, ripping out one of the base bars.

This was the base of her makeshift cane. For a grip, so that her remaining hand did not get cut on the jagged edge, she grabbed a stress ball from the nearby desk, stabbing the pole through it and shoving herself up.

"Someone needs to die for this," she muttered, using the cane as her left leg. "Why can't I remember who?"

A charm on her right hip distracted her. A coiled king cobra, black enamel on silver.

"Damn it all to Hell! Baby hasn't eaten in days!" Her pace quickened and she grabbed two thick cotton cloths, which she tied around the stumps that were her left leg and right arm, before she started to make her way to the apartment.



Once at the apartment building, she ducked through crowds and into the elevator, jabbing the button for level 2 and leaning against the back of the tiny space.

The elevator ride was blissfully short.

"I'm coming, Baby...I'm almost home," she muttered, leaning against the wall just beyond the elevator and digging in her pocket for the key to the apartment before she approached the door, holding the decorative Hawaii keychain - a gift from her grandmother - between her palm and the makeshift cane.

Something about the word cane played tricks on her mind. She knew it was important somehow, in a way other than the thing she was using in place of a left leg.

Leaning against the doorjamb, she unlocked the door and shoved it open.

"*****, Baby, I'm home!" she called, maneuvering to slam the door behind her.

The cat, *****, came howling around her solitary leg.

"Are you hungry?" Vivi inquired. "Where does Hari put your food, hmm?" The blonde made her way into the kitchen, staggering a bit with every step and shouting, "****, *****, don't trip me!"



By the time the cat's food was down, Vivi could hear her snake slamming the tip of her tail against the glass of her terrarium in greeting. She made her way into the smaller bedroom and plunked down on the bed, reaching in with her remaining hand and letting the snake nudge her fingers.

"Hi, Baby. I don't have any food for you right now. You'll get fed soon enough."

She pulled a laptop from under her bed, opening it up and clicking a few keys to get into the CrowNet and send a note to her sire and her sire's lover, who was also was in some way a boss to the blonde. She couldn't remember what the name of the place she worked with him was, though...

Vivi flexed her newly-regrown fingers, sparing a vaguely disgusted glance at the still-forming muscle of her toes. She could walk just fine now, but she kept the cane nearby at all times.

She remembered now who had done it. No wonder the word had played tricks on her mind.

Cane....Caine. Same pronunciation. Just one letter difference.

Baby was now being regularly fed -- the blonde wrapped her foot in a plastic bag before slipping on her boots to go for a walk. In fact, the snake was happily chasing a medium rat around the bedroom.

A journal sat open on the desk, a pen with Piglet on a spring laid across it. notes were scrawled across the page, abandoned drink ideas. Blood milkshake. Blood ice cream. Bloody fudge-pops.

She missed real food.

"Baby, you're lucky you can eat what you want...all I really want is a good, strong hot cocoa with whipped cream. Or a Starbucks venti mocha Frappuchino with extra whip," she said, watching the snake catch the rat and gulp it down.

Caine had been her doom. His strike against her sire, her loyalty to the woman, her promise to make things right. The shadows were not fun. She had problems with dark rooms now.

Maybe that was the turkey lacers talking.

She was still easily distracted, and the sound of *****'s yowling beyond her bedroom door brought the blonde to her feet.

The door flung open and she scooped up the cat for just a moment, tossing her three feet away to slam the door.

"You know Baby doesn't like you that much," she said, getting out the feline's meal. "She would've eaten you before she even tried to eat me."

Vivi would never admit it to her sire, but in some ways she wouldn't mind being rid of the cat. She was so lazy.

She'd been considering the idea for quite some time, tossing around thoughts for what she'd do when she had the chance. A tattoo seemed the perfect way to continue the connection between the two identities, her human self and her Killer spirit.

Now she stood outside of the tattoo parlor, nervous as anyone else would be getting their first tattoo, but she was even moreso. A vampire putting her identity in the hands of humans who could, at any moment, identify her for what she was and pull out a gun.

She didn't even know if it'd work properly.

Taking a deep breath in her standard method of calming, she pulled open the door and smiled at the receptionist.

"Welcome," she said in reply to the smile. "First time?" Vivi nodded slowly, like the average nineteen-year-old would when getting their first tattoo. "Your name?"

"Mia." With a smirk, she delighted in her ingenuity of using her middle name as an alias.

The receptionist checked her pages and looked up with a grin. "Yvonne?" she called, turning her head slightly. "Your 5:35's here."

A voluptuous petite beauty with a rose-red pixie cut and tanned skin, arms covered in full sleeves and a flicker of inked flame on the side of her neck suggested a dragon or chimera on her back. A welcoming smile lit up her face and she gestured the young blond back.

"First ink?" she said. Vivi nodded. "Well, Mia, just lay back, relax, and let me take care of the rest." With a snap, she pulled on a pair of medical-grade gloves. "You came with an idea, I take it?"

Vivi nodded, digging into her left pocket for the printed page she'd brought along, handing the folded thing to Yvonne, who unfolded it and smiled. "Edgar Allan Poe?"

"Yeah. Masque of the Red Death."

"That's my favorite story of his. The Tell-Tale Heart is another good one, but there's just something about Masque of the Red Death that I just find provocative," Yvonne replied.

"Isn't there? I always thought it was the fact that the central character, the guy throwing the Masquerade, thinks he can just outright escape from death," Vivi said, sighing just a little. "It's a normal thing, though, wanting to dodge dying as long as we possibly can...isn't it?"

"I suppose. Mind if I free-hand it?"

"Not at all."



The first sting of the needle made her flinch, just a little. Yvonne was incredibly easy to talk to, offering her view on the philosophy of life and her own thoughts on the existence of vampires.

"So, you think they're real?" Vivi said, grinning.

"Why not? If being a witch is just a religion, who's to say that vampirism isn't just an illness?" Yvonne replied, returning the grin.

"What if the undead sort of vampire, like in Anne Rice's novels, for example, were to make an appointment with you for a tattoo?" Vivi asked, trying not to laugh at the perfect irony of the situation. An actual, real-life vampire was at Yvonne's tattoo station, and she hadn't even noticed it.

"I don't know. I guess I'd just hope and pray it was Lestat -- isn't Stuart Townsend just yummy?"

And with that, they relaxed into a normal sort of conversation, discussing good-looking actors in Hollywood.



About an hour later, Vivi walked out of the parlor, grinning under the cover of the growing night. She'd made a friend. A human friend. And she'd finally gotten her first tattoo.

She walked a few feet more, out of sight of the windows, and took off running for her sire's Beta Towers apartment.

Arriving in seconds flat, Vivi leaned against the wall of the elevator, rubbing the smooth, white bandage that covered the soft underside of her right forearm. When the elevator doors dinged open, she moves smoothly to the front door and, feeling the familiar itching of a healing wound on her arm, began peeling the bandage away.

There, on the white flesh of her arm, gleamed the words;

And now was revealed the presence of the Red Death