Just another night in New York City.

Edward Parker walked across the street, careful to look left and right first before dashing across, his windbreaker hood raised to keep his head from getting wet with the pouring rain beating down on him from above. A taxi driver almost ran into him, stopping at the last possible minute before the driver started yelling obscenities to him from the window, blaring the horn for all the good it would do. He was already well on his way up the sidewalk, past the Arabic hot dog vendor and the Coke vending machines, and down the stairs into the subway, the mouth under his hood kept in a slight grin as he considered what would’ve happened if the taxi driver had run into him.

Not much of a difference, he decided. Only difference was that the people would panic when they saw him get up again- and then he would have to make a run for it, especially if hunters were in the neighborhood. No human being would get run over and yet be able to get up and start running as though nothing had happened.

It had been another busy day at the office. Having being recently assigned to his fifth murder case this year, he was beginning to wonder why he always ended up defending idiots. The guy was a husband. Beat his wife to death with a steel pipe when he got drunk. Then he’d went and tried to disappear- sold all his belongings, got the car ready and all. Then it had turned out that he hadn’t weighted the body properly, and it had been found not a day after it had been dumped. Police managed to get him before he so much as got out the front door on the day he had planned his escape.

And now he wanted to plea insanity.

Idiots, every last one of them.

Sure, he would no doubt be able to save him. All it would take was some few trips to most, if not every last member of the jury, and all would be fine. The man could even get away with the jury declaring him innocent, if he had had enough money to pay for that. As it was, he hadn’t, and so insanity was as far as the firm was willing to help him. Why the man was wiling to choose life in a padded cell over death was beyond him, but then, humans have always been afraid of death.

Until of course, they see the alternative.

As he got onto the train, he found a seat beside a young woman with straight, blonde hair kept neatly above her shoulder. She was wearing a dark red jumper and faded blue jeans, her blue eyes glued to a textbook held up on her lap.

A college student.

Lowering his hood, he glanced over at her and put on his widest smile.

“Hey,” he said.

She met his gaze, looking rather startled to have a she hadn’t even seen before greet her. Hesitantly, she smiled back and said replied his greeting with another, “Hey,” before turning her attention back towards her book.

“Cramming for a test?” he pressed further.

She looked at him again, looking a little bit surprised. “How’d you guess?” she asked.

“Well…” he grinned. “If you’re still holding your textbook on your way home, you’re either cramming, or you have no life. And I seriously doubt the latter.”

She finally returned his smile, and so he found his opening to enter small talk. The fact that she was a law student made it that much easier. She asked him mostly about his job, his cases, that sort of thing. He, on the other hand was more interested in getting to know her personally, extracting her name and other mundane things like whether she was into movies, or books, that kind of thing. She seemed a little stiff at first, but eventually he managed to warm up to her, and somehow managed to land a coffee date for the weekend.

By complete coincidence, they got off at the same station, which prompted the question of where each other lived.

Only to find that they lived in the same apartment block. Another complete coincidence.

And so he offered to walk with her home, since it was in the same direction anyway. As they walked, she continued talking and talking, about her damn lecturer, about her thesis, about her annoying roommates, about her mother, who wouldn’t stop calling her every week, unable to accept the fact that her daughter was now halfway across the country. As she talked, he found it hard not to smile- though she was the one who’d seemed hesitant to talk at first, now she was spilling everything to a complete stranger.

He wasn’t really listening to her. He just stared at her, smiling.

They took a cut through a back alley, just past the basketball court, and as they disappeared from the glaring lights from the shop windows and into the smoke and shadows, he stopped.

She stopped too, after taking a few steps ahead. She turned around to face him and asked if anything was wrong.

He replied, “Nothing.” For indeed, nothing was wrong.

It didn’t take much effort, really. Before she could do anything, he was already behind her, one hand on her head, clutching her hair, the other around her chest, holding her tight.

She only had a second to scream when he pulled back her head, exposing her neck.

Her short-lived scream when he dug his fangs into that soft, white neck and started drinking, her textbook now lying open at her lifeless feet. He savored every drop- after all, it wasn’t every day he had the time to hunt like this. Other times when work kept him out too late, he’d have to settle for blood packs from the fridge back home or homeless people they gathered at the shelter across town. The ‘farm’, as his colleagues called it.

None of it was ever as sweet as this.

Once he was done, he pulled her body over beside a dumpster and covered it up with some old newspaper before he started walking back in the direction from which he came, back to the subway. He was still another five stations away from home. In the meantime, as he walked he took out his cellphone from his left pocket and called up one of the Order’s ‘disposal offices’. In less than twenty minutes, blood-bound humans would be here to clean up the mess he’d left behind.

Once they were done, it would be as though she had never existed, filed at most as a ‘missing persons’ case.

As he reached the subway, he stopped at a vending machine and got himself a can of Coke, popping it open as he got on the next train.

Just another night in New York City.