The Lost Sheep Found
AN: Characters and the Night World belong to L.J. Smith. Title and quote at the end come from Lawrence Claxton's seventeenth century spiritual autobiography "The Lost Sheep Found."
The environment inside the club was darker and more wicked than all the moonlit skies outside.
The edges of the room faded into blackness, with only the flickering red of the tip of the occasional cigarette or cigar breaking the darkness. In the center of the room, brightly lit in comparison to the rest, couples danced in a manner that felt obscene to the Quinn's puritan roots. The vampire part of Quinn, the hatred and coldness that had long sense enveloped and eclipsed his moral core, found the atmosphere to be a haven from the stuffiness of Hunter Redfern's enclave.
He moved around the edges of the light, though he did not immerse himself in the shadows yet. He watched, captivated, as girls twisted and shook to the pulsing, bright beat of the music, skirts that would not even brush their knees flying up around stockinged legs with wild abandon. More importantly, their breaths came hot and quick from breathless, panting lips, and heartbeats drummed loud, fast and delicious.
He had come here for a meal, and looking at the eager, desperate eyes of the jazz babies and lost souls of the club, he knew that he wouldn't have to go hungry tonight.
The girls that moved past spoke in the honeyed accents of the south, words falling slow and sensuous from painted lips. The men whose hands disappeared into their vibrant dresses were unerringly polite, and smiles and laughter decorated the room with the privileged abandon of youth who lead carefree lives.
These were yesterday's respectable young men and polite, demure ladies. In Quinn's life, this behavior would scarcely have been appropriate in a brothel, and any girl showing as much skin as even the most prudish of these women would have been branded a harlot. Of all the things he had adjusted to since finding himself transformed at Hunter Redfern's whim, adjusting to the changes time wrought was the most difficult.
In this delightful, modern world, he no longer had to seek out someone to feed from. Girls would present themselves in a convention-defying manner.
He did not buy the rotgut that was all the beverage available at the bar. He moved around the perimeter of the dance floor, keeping visible, just out of the darkness. A girl would come.
They always did.
He settled down at a small table, leaning back into his chair confidently and watching the young vicariously live their lives. The band played, none of the musicians displaying any true talent but for the most part they avoided sour notes. The dancers whirled and shimmied the night away as Quinn watched dispassionately, earnestly, jealously.
A brunette broke away from the masses and came his way, hips swinging as her buckled shoes clicked across the floor. She rested a pale hand on the back of the empty chair beside him, and asked if she could sit.
He let her.
"I'm Gladys," said the brunette in a voice that tried slightly too hard to be sultry. Her features were sweet and innocent, and Quinn imagined her in a calico frock that covered her modestly, with the speech of the southern belle she would have been had she been born a lifetime earlier. It was all too simple. The times changed, but the people- the people were the same, no matter what they wore or how they spoke.
She leaned forward, her fringed skirt sliding higher on her silk stocking-covered thighs. "What's your name?"
"Quinn," he replied shortly. What the young vixen didn't realize was that the sound of her quickened heartbeat beneath her bound breasts was much more enticing to him than all the glimpses of leg she had provided him.
"You are a handsome sheik," she said, giggling slightly at her own boldness.
"Am I?" he said.
"Quite," she said. She stood, and held out her hand. "Dance with me? I think the Charleston is about to start . . . "
"I don't want to dance," he replied, rising gracefully.
Her painted lips fell into an understanding round pose, and her eyes widened slightly in anticipation. "What would you like to do?" she said coyly.
He trailed a finger down her bare arm. "Put your imagination to it and you might figure it out," he replied, letting the promise of sin lace the words.
"Let me get my coat," she said, and hurried off, the buckles on her shoes flashing brightly in the meager light. He stood alone, picking up his drink and sloshing it around a bit in the cup. The scent of the cheap, illegal liquor almost stung the inside of his nostrils, and he wondered whether Gladys would manage to walk all the way to the apartment he had appropriated for the evening's entertainment.
When she returned, she was wrapped in a thick wool coat, her flushed neck rising from the black fabric as enticing as Aphrodite rising from a shell in a Botticelli painting. His eyes watched the thin, pulsing skin avidly, feeling the familiar ache for the coppery ambrosia that tasted so much sweeter when it came from such a lovely fount.
"You've got a place around here?" Gladys asked as they stepped out of the club into the chill outside. Above, the moon was naught but a sliver of pale light leaking into the rich dark blue of the sky.
"Yes," said Quinn. He started to walk briskly toward the left, knowing that the night air would bite into his meal's limbs, infusing them with coldness. He didn't want her to feel dead before her time, so it was imperative that they hurry. He had no patience for warming up his meals after he already had them trapped in his snare.
After a few minutes they arrived at the small ground-level apartment. Gladys was smiling with a sort of anxious desperation as she shed her coat and dropped it with over-familiarity on a chair near the door. She looked around with scrutinizing eyes, and he could see clearly that she was scouting for valuables.
"See anything you fancy?" he said, and she jumped guiltily.
"You have a lovely home," she lied, smiling coquettishly. She moved further into the living area, trailing a finger along the back of the ratty sofa. She moved clumsily in the dark, losing her seductress's sway and moving more like the lost fawn that she was.
He moved easily through the dim light and took her arm gently. "Wrong direction," he murmured, pulling her away from the barren fireplace and leading her to the yawning blackness of the short hall.
She pressed her breakable body against his immoveable one, and pressed her warm lips against his cold ones. For a half-second, his lips were warm and his body was fragile again, and his breakable arms seemed to wrap around a delicate-looking yet stronger than iron body, belonging to a girl he had known for years. She pulled away, and smiled at him, innocent eyes lowered and whispered, "I can't marry you, John."
The girl who existed in his arms squirmed away, saying, "Ouch." She pressed her human fingers to her mouth, and pulled them away smeared with blood. "You bit me!"
Quinn took a step back. He didn't lose control, and he definitely did not hallucinate about dead girls while kissing live ones.
Gladys took a tentative step toward him.
In the sunlit field he stood in, Dove did the same. Her hands flitted before her, and then clutched uselessly, desperately at her calico dress.
"Quinn," said Gladys. "You didn't mean to hurt me, did you?"
"I'm so sorry, John," Dove said. Tears sparkled in her eyes like the sun off the bay. "I don't want to hurt you- I love you!"
"No," he said quietly, shaking his head like he had on that day so long ago.
"I guess I can forgive you for being a mite enthusiastic," Gladys simpered.
Dove looked at him sadly before murmuring that she was sorry, and that she had to go. "My father's calling," she said.
He had wondered how she had heard him, since the only noises reaching his ears were the calls of the birds in the trees and the far-off sound of horses. "But Dove," he said, despairingly. "Why can't this be? I'm a good man!"
"Too good," she replied. "Too good for me. Too good for what I am."
"What you are? You're a wonderful girl from a good family. How am I too good?" John was desperate. He'd never felt anything as fervent as his adoration for the lovely, youngest Redfern daughter. The religion that his father believed in so paled in comparison to his love for this sweet young girl, or so he thought when he looked at her bewitching brown eyes
"You don't understand! John, I can't be with you. I can't marry you. My father won't allow it. We're just too different." Dove looked as though the words burned her as they spilled from her lips.
"We aren't that different," John said quietly.
"We are," Dove insisted.
"Let me speak to your father. He'll see that my intentions are pure and that I'm worthy of your hand," John said.
Dove shook her head, mouth forming silent protestations but he took one of her dainty, soft hands and said, "Please, Dove, let me speak with him."
And reluctantly, oh so reluctantly she tightened her hand around his with hesitant acceptance of what he knew he had to do.
"I'll speak to him tomorrow," John promised. He moved forward, taking her other hand, and Dove pressed her cool lips against his.
When he pulled away, Dove had become a frightened, weak girl smeared with perfume and fear, huddling in his arms with chill bumps on her exposed limbs and blood on her lips, and the idyllic woods had become a darkened bedroom in the heart of an industrialized city.
"Please don't hurt me," she cried. Her frail shoulders shook.
He didn't know what he had done to the girl. He influenced her mind, and her fear melted into cattle-like complacency. He pressed closer, feeling the beadwork on her dress and the ridges of her undergarments binding her weak, human body through his own layers of clothing. The breath of humanity that filled his lungs when he pulled in a deep lung full of her scent was intoxicating, filling his normally impervious form with sensation. Fear and weakness and mortality were rare vintages that he needed to savor.
He pushed her backwards, maneuvering her against a wall that was grey in the darkness, and gave himself over to instinct. This was all the rapture and sinful ecstacy that a mortal preacher's son had never indulged in, this was what made him feel alive long after his own death. Sinking fangs into tender flesh, the rush of blood in pounding in his ears as it slid slickly down his throat, the coppery taste of triumph and power.
Quinn finally let the girl go, feeling her slump to the floor as he leaned heavily against the wall, tilting his head up and sliding his tongue around his mouth to get every taste of blood from himself. He couldn't resist pressing his fingers against the empty wound and licking the very last drops off, like a child with a bowl of cake batter.
For the longest time, he simply was. He basked in a feeling akin to happiness, contentment, and refused to think of what the next moment would bring.
He wondered if Dove had ever felt this sort of languid glow after feeding. Somehow, she had seemed too innocent for it, though he knew that she had been as much a vampire as he was now. He cast his eyes to the floor, and nearly gasped as, for a second to his blood-drugged mind, the corpse on the floor belonged to his Redfern love.
Dove had been sweet and docile like this. Dove had had the same soft brown hair and eyes, so sweet and loving. Dove would have been as warm as this girl had been in his arms, had he ever been able to take her. He'd never gotten more than a few stolen, heated kisses with the love of his life. Even when his hands pressed over her soft body he had felt nearly none of her curves through the thick muslin, petticoats and whalebone that had stood between her thin cotton dresses and her soft sweet skin.
She was limp, and her formerly blushing skin was now a delicate, dove white.
The scent of a new corpse was no longer an exotic perfume to him, with its layers of perfumes and scents of a living body mingled with the new delicate overlay of decay and rot, but had faded into the mundane, and he mourned the loss of the freshness and joy that it had formerly gifted him with.
Her hair was still coiffed in its wavy, fashionable do, but a few strands of brown hair had escaped and now lay across her cheek and on her open eye. The eye was as brown as Dove's had been, and in death lost its false, jaded light and faded to innocent blankness.
Dove's eyes had had that terrible blankness, that glassy look that meant that no thoughts could ever flit through her delicate mind ever again. The scar that marked his side ached as he remembered the piercing pain of the stake that had taken his love from him.
The corpse remained motionless and limp, and he felt more tired than before. He wanted nothing more than to leave immediately, and run through the oppressive streets until reaching the forests, and then running and running until he emerged back in his human life, when things had been simple and easy, and he had had love.
All he had left was death and obedience to the man who would have been his father-in-law, in a kinder world.
He looked at the night's death, before taking a knife from the kitchen and slashing her bloodied throat, hard and deep. He could still see faint thickness at the fang marks, so he made a few more slashes until the throat was a mass of meat and skin. He was the heir of Hunter Redfern, for what the dubious honor was worth, but he knew better than anyone the sort of fate that awaited those who were careless. He'd been to one too many Council meetings over the years where a careless vampire had his fate brought to him, quick and cruel.
He was, if nothing else, a survivor. Even though there was nothing for him, he couldn't help but feel that someday things would improve. He'd never have Dove back, her body and soul had long since faded into the depths of time, though her memory still haunted him, but he knew that he had to keep existing.
He left the apartment then, not giving the body a second glance. He would be more careful next time and pick a meal who didn't resemble his dead love. Slipping through the darkened streets like the predator he was, Quinn was content to continue embrace the life that had been forced upon him so long ago. His belly was warm with the blood of the girl, his limbs and body weary and sated, and his mind purged of the images of the woman who he blamed and loved and cherished despite the fact that her body was long since dust.
Her screams would still haunt him at night. He feared that when they did stop, that meant the tattered remains of his soul had finally lost their fight with the darkness.
For all his wickedness, he feared what would become of him when that happened.
... So that now I can say, of all my formal righteousness, and professed wickedness, I am stripped naked, and in room thereof clothed with the innocency of life, perfect assurance, and the seed of discerning with the spirit of revelation.
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