Maria's Hunt

The air was getting chilly. But it usually does this time of October. Especially at night. And what a night it was. Despite being in the downtown city, a few unrelenting stars fought their way through the muck and haze of light pollution to give the night its due.

Maria shrugged her narrow shoulders and buried her face into the scarlet scarf that was wrapped around her slender throat. Her body would always be narrow and slender. She was perpetually a child of ten. Never would she go through the change of puberty. Never would she find the form she would have taken as an adult. Then again, she would have never made it to adulthood anyway.

Nearly a century and a half ago. A plague had broken out. So many families were destroyed. Friends were lost forever. And then the sickness had come to her own home. It had started with her father, who must have contracted it from in town when he had gone to gather supplies for the winter that had been headed their way. An innocent little cough. That was the first clue. Her father had never been sick, as far as Maria could remember. He had always been robust, healthy as a horse. He was the man of the house and, therefor, God himself. He provided for his family. He was the one who earned their living.

And he was the one to be their downfall as well.

A black fog rolled into her mind at that thought, but Maria shook it away. She had spent a long time forcing control over herself. Control over her darker urges. Such things were not acceptable. She had learned that when she had seen her own death in her brother's eyes.

Another shake of her head, but this time it was at the wariness of the memory. Maria remembered when her brother had come back home, eyes bright and golden, shining in the darkness of her room. Her mind had been fogged with sickness, her body tormented with pain. Her parents had been bedridden for a week by then, her father far more sickly than her mother. She remembered Lucian explaining things, things she hadn't understood then, but became intimate with very soon. He had spoken of their parents, and how the sickness had them, how there was no saving them. That they wouldn't survive the change. Maria hadn't known what the change was, not that night. But Lucian had assured her that Maria was just strong enough to survive it.

Yeah, her body survived it, no problem. But he hadn't accounted for the mind that went with it.

Many had died that night. And the next night. And the next. Maria was pure hunger, an unquenchable force with the strength to take what she wanted and no conscience to tell her it was wrong. Not even Lucian told her she was wrong. He simply watched her, face contorted in emotional agony, his feelings just another sort of fuel to her blazing hunger. But he didn't tell her no. She had come later to find, on her own, that he had hoped she would come to her senses. He had prayed to a god that no longer acknowledged them that she would find herself again.

But what god would want them? They were creatures of blood and death. They had cold, unbeating hearts. So it was only right to destroy those who still had what they had lost. Their souls. So Maria gorged herself on their blood, their life essence, killed without being sated, fed a hunger that had no end.

And then her brother had tried to kill her. That had snapped her out of her rage. Her only family had been prepared to destroy the very creature he had created within her.

Another cold draft wormed its way through the streets and as her lifted coat showed her thin child legs, Maria abandoned the past as she caught the look of a man standing huddled in front of a cellphone shop. Opening herself to him, she absorbed the hesitant lust coming off of him in stunted waves of heat. He was a man who liked little girls, but knew better than to advertise that by blatantly staring at her.

With a cold smile to herself, Maria stepped closer to him. Three steps before she would have reached his side, she allowed herself to stumble over an uneven patch of sidewalk, tripping and falling down to all fours. Her skinned knee registered as nothing more than a dull twinge.

“Owww,” she complained, her little girl voice snagging into the man's brain and upping his libido. She sat back, hand over her slowly bleeding knee.

“Are you alright there?” His voice was gruff, mixed between his sick lust and a pack-a-day scratchy throat.

Maria sniffed. “Yeah, I think so.” She rubbed at her eyes with her balled-up hands before raising her face to his. The moment her eyes met his own, he sucked in a breath and that stunted wave of heat became steady and unrelenting. He was in full-blown lust with her. Perfect. “Can you help me, mister? I lost my kitty and I can't find him.”

The man cleared his throat and hunkered down next to her. “Sure, I can help.” He placed his hand over hers, his fingers just barely brushing the edge of the pleated skirt she was wearing. She allowed her other leg to stretch out straight, giving him the tiniest view of the white cotton panties with their little yellow daisies all over them.

His hand minutely tightened over her own. “What say I help you up and we go look for him?” His head swung from left to right, eyes scanning the street. “There's a side alley next to that little Chinese place over there. Maybe he went there looking for food.”

A gotcha grin tugged her lips but it was gone before his gaze came back to her. “Okay.” She allowed him to take her hand and help her to her feet. She even allowed him to use his other hand to run down her thigh, ostensively to brush her skirt back into place.

He held her hand as they crossed the street and ducked into the narrow path that ran the side of the building before it T-boned with the larger alleyway. His thumb made lazy circles as his heartbeat tapped out a rhythm through the palm of his hand. His heatwaves were laced with ice — he was scared of getting caught but he didn't have the sense of mind to fight off his sick sexuality. Which was perfect for her.

“So, uh, what's your kitty's name?”

“Nibbles.” At least, that was the name of the cat she had that century and a half ago.

The man started calling out the cat's name, half-heartedly, as though just filling in the silence with a reassurance toward her that he was helping her find her kitty cat. His eyes were moving between the darkness ahead of them and the distancing opening behind them. Soon he would make his move, and then she would make hers.

As though the thought put the action into process, his hand moved to her back, rubbing in slow circles. His other curled beneath her chin as he stopped her and knelt to her height. “Don't worry. I'm sure we can find him.” He ran the back of his hand across her cheek, as though rubbing off tears. He would freak at the tears she had, if she had allowed herself to show them. The hand that had been at her back moved around to her waist as she brought up one arm and rubbed it across her eyes. She kept her eyes hidden from him as she nodded at his words — no use scaring him just yet with the inhuman glow of impossibly golden irises. “That's a good girl.” The hand that had brushed across her cheek trailed down her slender neck, drawing the scarf away just a little. “You're a very pretty girl, you know that?” Maria put her head down, as though humbled by the compliment. He didn't seem to care if she were looking at him or not. That ice bath was receding as his lust grew. “A very, very pretty girl.” The words were mumbled, as though to himself.

His hands worked down her body before slipping under the hem of her skirt and dragging it up one inch at a time.

“What?” He hesitated at her mumbled words, softly spoken under her breath.

She grinned, her fangs in full display beneath the fall of her auburn hair. “I said humans are so pathetic.” She raised her eyes, the golden light shining off of his pale features as he gasped in horror.

She had promised Lucian she would never kill again. But, then, he had promised to always protect her, and he had been willing to swing the ax. Some promises were best left broken.

After feeding on another two wastes of flesh Maria headed back home, her full belly still casting the echoes of perpetual hunger. No vampire was ever fully sated. It was one of the curses to eternal life.

Back home, Maria passed through the front door to a welcome of her brother babbling frantically and his common-law wife Kareen demanding him to shut up.

“What's going on?” she asked, eyes wide and glancing from one to the other.

“She's having the baby!” her brother shouted, his body looking as though it wanted to go in ten different directions at once.

Maria brightened at the news. “Oh, my God! Hold on, I'll be ready in a sec.” She took the stares quickly, Kareen's “Hurry! The kid's the one calling the shots, not me” following up after her. Removing her coat, Maria discarded the bloody clothes for future washing before cleaning up and donning the surgical outfit she had stolen from the local hospital.

As she ran back downstairs and delivered her nephew, she never once gave a second thought to the lives she had taken that night. That night was all about the life she was helping bring in to the world. A few deaths of insignificant humans wasn't going to have any bearings on the family surrounding her.

Derk stood over the third body they found tonight. The slightest smear of blood, indiscernible from the surrounding grime if you didn't know what you were looking at, had lead from the first death they found to the second, and the second to this one. And as his men looked around, they discovered the nearly-impossible-to-discover trail leading out of the alleys and through to a section of woods that he and his men were familiar with. Though they lived more toward the east, the trail headed north-north-west.

“Get ready, men,” he told his hunters, gripping the butt of his gun. “I think we just might have found where the vermin lives.”

As the men grunted their glee, Derk led the way, following the trail of the parasitic creature whose own sin gave it away. Tonight was going to be blood for blood.