1
I’m alone in the elevator.
It’s the antique kind with iron bars and smudged windows. As it rises, creaking, through the building, I watch the floors pass, one after another. Slabs of cracked concrete give way to views of long, dark hallways lined with closed doors. It’s midday, and most of the apartment’s residents are at work or school. If I get in trouble here, I’ll be on my own. But that works fine for me. I work better with no witnesses. Less chance of getting arrested.
The elevator stops on the sixth floor. The inner grate screeches, folds up into the wall. I open the exterior door and step out. The hall stinks of cigarettes, old laundry, and booze. Some guy slumped against a closed door mumbles in a drunken stupor; he clutches a half-empty Moscato to his chest like an infant. I spy on him for a second. He mutters and clutches his bottle. No sign that he’ll wake or choke on his vomit. A non-issue.
At the end of the hallway is apartment 604. I glance back at the drunk, but his head is hanging against his chest, breaths slow and even. Soft snores? He’s not getting up anytime soon. So, I reach into my pocket and kneel down on the grungy carpet, carefully slotting my lockpick into the keyhole. The first quakes of nerves hit me as I’m feeling around inside the lock.
Years I’ve been doing this shit. You’d think it’d get easier. But as Bill would say, “The day you stop being scared is the day you gotta retire. The fear is what keeps you alive.” I tend to agree with her. Fear, and a healthy dose of murderous intent, are all that keep me going on some days.
A few minutes later, the pins shift out of the way, and the lock gives a satisfying click as it opens. Before I can pocket my tools and twist the knob, the door to the apartment behind me, 603, suddenly opens as well.
Shit.
I turn fast and find myself looking up at a tired-looking middle-aged white woman dressed in cheetah-print sweatpants and a damn-near transparent tank top that does nothing to hide the fact that she isn’t wearing a bra. She stares down at me, a twenty-something-year-old Hispanic guy clearly breaking and entering, an unlit cigarette dangling between her lips.
“Hey,” I say lamely.
She stares at me. “You a bounty hunter or something?” she asks, bringing a lighter up to her cigarette. Really, it’s the best conclusion she could have jumped to. It’s better than assuming the truth, which is: I’m here to murder her neighbor.
My smile feels stretched and flat. “What gave it away?”
The woman grunts and locks her apartment. “Well, have a good one.” As she passes the drunk, she gives him one swift kick in the thigh. “Get up and go inside, Marty. For fuck’s sake.”
Once the woman and the drunk are both gone, I exhale and let myself appreciate that the days of “What are you doing, kid? Why aren’t you in school?” are over. I’ve never had anyone assume I was a bounty hunter before. I’ve gotten criminal, jilted lover, and in one unfortunate case, male prostitute…I still don’t understand that, though. I’ll have to let Bill know about this one. Then I turn back to 604 and turn the handle.
Most people don’t know vampires exist. Used to be it was because vampires were so rare, but more and more of them have been showing up lately. We don’t know why. Entire nests cropping up out of the blue. Bill says you could hunt for an entire month and not come across a single vamp back in the day. Now, if you look hard enough, you can find one in just about any crowd. They seem to be incredibly good at concealing their existence, though. Through hypnosis, intimidation, and good old-fashioned murder, they’ve managed to keep the public at large from believing in them. To most people, vampires are what you see in horror movies and nothing more, and that works just fine for the bloodsuckers. The sheep are easier to stalk if they don’t know the wolves exist.
There’s been a lot of buzz in the hunting communities lately about the startling vampire population spike. Some say it’s because the population of humans has gotten so high—more people equals more food and all that.
Others say there’s some darker, more insidious reason. I think the vampires are just getting bold, not hiding as well as they used to. Maybe they think in the modern world, it’ll be harder for hunters to kill them without getting caught, or we’re not as scary as we were a hundred years ago when we carried torches and pitchforks. Either way, they’re dead wrong.
It’s pitch-black inside because of course, it is. I close the door behind me and stand in the entry for a moment, letting my eyes adjust. It smells bad in here. Not like the hallway did. This is a sharper odor—harsh cleaning chemicals not quite covering a rotten stink of death. I take a few seconds to adjust to that, too, breathing through my mouth as my eyes water, and I fight the urge to gag.
The UV flashlight I keep in my back pocket casts a beam of violet light across the bare floors and walls, making the whites glow, and the dusty surfaces appear speckled with electric-blue dots. I think it might have been a carpeted room once, but the owner has ripped it up, unable to keep up with all the spills. The boards underneath are ugly and covered in stains that show up black under the UV light. It’s blood, of course. Wild splashes of it go up the walls and spatter the ceiling, each one the dying story of some poor victim this monster lured into its nest. I wonder if anyone has ever gotten out of here. But then I step into the living room, which is practically empty of furniture but full of blood stains, and I decide no. Probably not.
The kitchen is small and attached to the living room. A warm fridge that has never met groceries and more stained tile, like someone tried to dye it pink just by throwing buckets of paint around.
After that and the empty bathroom, there’s only one other door to look behind. I approach it slowly, UV light in one hand and my silver knife in the other. Silver burns vampires like acid. If you stab one close enough to an artery, the toxic effect can even travel through their blood like poison and kill them hours later. It’s pretty neat. But I usually try to finish them off before that.
The door to the bedroom (I assume it’s a bedroom) doesn’t want to open. The handle twists easily enough, but even when I throw some of my weight into it, it thunks against something and stubbornly stops. Only when I shine my light down at the floor do I see why.
“Jesus,” I say quietly, stepping back from the body. He’s lying face down, tangled brown hair splayed around his head. The blood underneath it makes a nasty squelch sound when I lift my foot. Still tacky. A fresh kill.
And then I whirl around. I don’t know why. I never know. Bill says it’s instinct. The same prey instinct that tells a mouse to stay still when the hawk is overhead. Because that’s what I am in here. We might call ourselves hunters, but really, we’re just the brave mice who lost too many of our friends to the hawk and have decided to take it down before it kills us, too.
I turn just in time to see a dark shape descending from the ceiling. It lands noiselessly. If I hadn’t turned, he would have dropped right on top of me and killed me before I could make a sound. There’s no time to yell at myself for missing him. Vampires can blend into the dark if they try hard enough, and even the most experienced hunters can walk right by them. This one rises slowly into a standing position and watches me. Even though I can’t quite see his eyes in this dark, I feel them on me. He’s curious about me, not afraid. After all, why should he be? I’m just some big-boned, chubby dude in a hoodie who broke into his apartment. Probably a petty thief or, at most, a junkie looking to steal some shit.
He doesn’t know I’m a vampire hunter.
Not until I turn my UV light on him, and his flesh explodes in a ball of flames. The heat blasts off him, licking the ceiling, turning it back. It might have set off a fire alarm if the vamp had bothered to have one in his shithole nest. But the fire goes out fast, like it’s been smothered or drowned with water. Always does with vamps. They light up in a flash, but they burn themselves out like matchsticks. Don’t know why.
The vampire howls in agony, thrashing, and punching. Then the flames start burning down, and even though his skin is red and raw and black in some areas, he’s still alive. If it had been natural sunlight, he’d be dead in a second. UV hurts them, but it doesn’t always kill. The alien sound of his wailing scream cuts off as I lunge forward, sticking my silver knife in his chest. I mean for it to be a death blow, but vampires are supernaturally strong; the myths get that part right. Getting a knife in the heart works – but only sometimes.
He staggers back as all the fresh blood he just drained out of the body in the bedroom starts oozing out of him. The shocked expression on his face morphs into something darker. “Fucker,” he growls wetly. “I’ll rip your throat out.”
And he tries. The vampire yanks the blade out of his chest and throws it with a clang to the floor and leaps at me. I dodge out of the way, banging my shoulder into the wall and rattling my teeth, before I roll off of it and vault over the only piece of furniture in the hallway: an arm chair that looks like it’s been shoved in here for the sole purpose of getting in my way.
The vamp jumps up onto the ceiling and starts crawling along it like some kind of fucking horror movie Spider-Man. I sprint for my knife and grab it off the floor. Just as an immense weight crashes down on top of me. My teeth crack together. A shooting pain like a needle stabs through both ears. A wrenching jolt of pain radiates from my spine to my ribs, so hot and bright that I might have even screamed if the vampire’s weight wasn’t pressing the air out of me. For a second, I’m truly terrified that my back is broken. I try to move my legs. They respond, scraping against the floor. The relief I feel is in dizzying contrast to the terror of feeling the vampire’s weight bearing down on me.
He leans down, bringing his warm, wet mouth to my ear. I think he’s going to whisper something into it. Instead, he licks the side of my face. Dragging his rough tongue up the line of my jaw, like a lover. His breath carries the coppery sharpness of fresh blood, and my mind instantly leaps to the corpse in his bedroom, and I gag.
I start to thrash, no matter how badly it hurts. Thrashing like wild person, like a madman. Normally, it wouldn’t do any good. Vampires are so much stronger than we are, but I’ve already burned and stabbed this one. And I’ve got my knife. Even when he grabs my wrist and squeezes until the bone creaks, I’m able to nick his skin with it. And it must burn like a sonofabitch because he lets go, and I’m able to buck him off.
I scramble on my hands and knees across the hard floorboards, putting as much distance as I can between us, before getting up. I feel half-crippled as I pry myself up, using the wall for balance. But I still haven’t lost the grip on my knife, and I hold it out in front of me, threatening with it until I’m upright. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse the vampire also struggling to get to his feet. The silver is working.
My shoulder and my back throbs. My chin stings where it tore on the ground. I back up toward the window, gripping a handful of the curtains, then remember they’ve been nailed down. I switch the knife into my other hand as the vampire stands, statue-still, on the opposite side of the room. He blinks hard, like he can’t see right.
I could slice the curtains open with my knife and let in the sunlight. But then I’d have to turn my back on him.
Even suffering like he is, the vampire has a deep voice fit for radio. So pleasing that it makes my skin crawl. How many people has he lured to their deaths with that voice? “I think I’ll turn you,” he says. His breathing hitches. “And when you wake up, I’ll kill you again.”
I say nothing. Instead, I watch the vein on the side of his neck slowly turn black, imagining I can see the poison go straight to his brain. The silver in his blood spreads in branching paths of infection across his body like a net – or a spider web. Either way, he’s caught.
The vampire’s face darkens with rage. And he runs at me. Even dying, his speed is terrifying. But by the time his body slams into mine, with the force of a swinging sledgehammer, he’s already dead.
I stay on the ground for a moment, dazed and hurting. A hot dew has collected on the small of my back. I’m sure at least some of it is blood. Blood and sweat. I feel scraped as I slowly peel myself off the floor, scooching away from the dead vampire so his blood can’t mix with mine.
The body is a hideous sight. All charred, skin peeling and oozing. The stink of barbequed flesh and burning hair choke me, and I have to cover my nose as I lurch into the kitchen and begin pulling open cabinets and cupboards. Evacuation—or getting the hell out of here before the cops show up to investigate the screams—is sometimes more stressful than the hunt itself. And I have to move carefully like an old, decrepit man. I’m pretty banged up.
From a lower cabinet, I find a roll of sturdy black trash bags covered in dust. That will do. I pull off one—then, on second thought, grab another and take them back to the vampire corpse. Vampires have a nasty habit of turning to ash when they burn up completely. This one won’t do that—there’s too much of its body left for it to crumble—but little pieces of its skin are sloughing off in dusty chunks, and even after all these years, it makes me want to gag.
If I had my way, every vampire in the world would die the same gruesome, painful death.
Bill says I’m the most brutal vampire hunter she’s ever met. She says it like it’s a compliment—and also like she’s worried about me. But there’s nothing for her to be worried about.
I’m fine.
And every vampire I kill makes me even better.
