Dangerous Game

by Hurlbat

Having been exposed to "Twilight" by my wife, I struggled with Meyer's particular vampire mythos. With no real weaknesses, they are boring as protagonists. But, as antagonists, they provide an interesting problem for a human hunter. Here's how I'd do it. Now updated with new content, many edits, and more explosions.

Dangerous Game

Andrew Vaillencourt

Dangerous Game

Contents

Clubbing 3

Kidnapping is Bad 13

We Meet Mr. Frost 23

Camping in CT 35

Four on One 43

Southern Belles 53

Do You Believe in Magic? 63

New Toys 71

Can't a Guy Get a Burger in Peace? 83

On the Radar… 90

The Vampire Strikes Back 96

Dealing With the Elderly 108

Clubbing

It was 1:00 in the morning and the rain had stopped, at least. That nasty, late Kansas City late summer drizzle that is sticky-hot and chilling all at the same time had been going for hours. It makes my gear even more uncomfortable than usual, and causes my joints to ache. The moon was still shrouded in clouds, but the orange glow of low-pressure sodium street lamps illuminating the parking lot provided plenty of light outside; even if did alter colors into a ghastly bile-hued caricature of reality. That suited me just fine. At least I didn't have to wear those bulky night-vision goggles this time, and by this point reality had become a very subjective concept to me anyway. The squat gray cinder-block building in front of me had no windows, and while you couldn't quite make out the music coming from inside, the incessant thumping of the bass managed to make its way into the humid September evening just the same. It seemed appropriate enough. Between the carelessly scrawled graffiti and the garish, neo-punk signage, this nightclub appeared the freakish love child of Studio 54 and CBGB; a modern testament to unoriginal identity crisis.

Goddamn I'm getting old. Everything pisses me off these days. I was sweaty, cramping, and uncomfortable. My knees hurt, my back hurt and I was highly aggravated. This type of crap had been a lot easier when I was younger, that's for sure. Back then, the pervasive heat and humidity (made all the worse by the gear I'm wearing) would have just been another bragging point for the later re-telling of my exploits. Now, they were the ever-present inexorable enemy of the aging soldier. This hunt had gone on for three days now and I was getting damned tired. But I knew I needed to stay sharp and focused for a while yet; for my prey this evening was dangerous and crafty.

Thankfully, they aren't hard to spot when you know what to look for.

You would think that after millions of years of evolution, they would have developed better camouflage. They are always so pretty, with soft, alabaster skin, classic features and open faces. They stick out like a movie star at a high school pep rally. They are always tall, lean and graceful. Every movement they make looks choreographed. You want to approach them, talk to them, and touch them. They look good, they sound good, and they smell good. They move like gazelles in a sea of wildebeest. Alongside of them, we look like short, misshapen trolls, shuffling ataxically at the feet of these radiant gods. My research indicates that this may be a pheromone reaction augmented by low-level telepathic suggestion. They aren't actually that much more striking or beautiful, but when in their presence they APPEAR to be. This is why they are never models or actors, or even photographed all that much. Without the pheromones and suggestion, they aren't that remarkable.

I had stalked this one for three long, frustrating days. He was crafty, but young for his kind. He was enjoying himself too much and that had put him on my radar. Complacency is my ally when hunting these creatures and this one had gotten very complacent. He liked it here, and so he had stayed too long, and developed too many patterns. Patterns are deadly to predator and prey alike; so I try to avoid them. The local police think they have a serial killer on their hands, for six women have disappeared from this area in the last three months. Without bodies, however, they are powerless to pursue the matter. I am not.

What that tells me is that he is feeding every two weeks or so, which is fairly frequent if you are going to set up a permanent residence. Very sloppy, boy. Most older vampires feed sparingly, to avoid this sort of attention, but the younger ones appear to be completely oblivious to the risks; probably because they never get caught, anyway.

There must have been others like me at some point, because the older ones are more careful. They are subtle, and cagey. The old ones must have some collective memory of being prey to something, because they put much more effort into staying off the grid. These younger ones don't seem to have any fear at all, and think of themselves as untouchable; which I guess they are. I do suspect that word about me has been getting around though. After Vancouver and San Francisco, there must have been talk; and I have noticed that they are moving more in groups than they used to.

I hadn't tried to take down a group yet, I'm not sure how I would do it. At this point I was still not sure how they communicate, or what level of networking they employ for spreading information. It's probably the damned internet. How they keep in touch notwithstanding, I had been at this game for three years now, and Vancouver was very ugly. I don't think I am a secret anymore.

Of course, most of them are not particularly concerned with being hunted themselves. The thought of something stalking them must be hard to imagine, for they are acutely aware of their advantages and superiority. They are far more preoccupied with attracting prey than they are with avoiding predation; that is a fact. I shouldn't complain though, it is this arrogance that has kept me going. Without it, they would have found me and killed me years ago. Ah, that conceit! I bet it makes them think of me as something huge and frightening, like I am some horrific unknown spectre that exists solely to torment them. I must be some kind of rough infernal beast to them, because the thought of what I can do would be too much for them to bear if they knew what I really was: food.

As a species they will kill several thousand of my kind every year, and get away with it. To date I have killed 16 of them. I realize I have a long way to go before the score is even. But I am kind of new to this particular game, and they are very good at staying out of the spotlight and not getting caught. Mystery and terror are their cloak and dagger, and they have had millennia to practice. It is a good system.

As far as terror goes, I know better than anyone alive how frightening they are, and how much I should fear them, but I don't. I think the part of me that fears is dead. For whatever reason, to me they are merely a target to be serviced, a challenge to be conquered, a plague to be exterminated, and a quarry to be hunted. Dangerous game to be sure; but so are bears, and lions, and rhino, and these things get hunted all the time. You just have to know what you are doing, bring the right tools, and try not to get eaten.

I killed my first one three years ago. Circumstances contrived to make my first true interaction with them punctuated by rage, not fear. God, I still remember its face at that moment… it was so smug, and disinterested in me, like I was nothing to him. The look on his face when his limbs were gone and the fire started was much different, and seeing it I knew I had found my calling. It had already killed me (or at least any part of me that mattered) at that point, so I ceased to be a human being that night; and honestly was glad to be rid of it. There was no point to it, anyway. Humanity became superfluous, because what I needed more than anything else right then was to be something that could terrify a vampire, and quite frankly, the bastards are NOT afraid of humans. But I learned three very important lessons that night: they are VERY hard to kill, but they CAN die, and they DO fear.

Tonight's mark was obscenely typical for the species: tall, lean, very good-looking. He had dark brown hair, and looked to be in his early twenties, physically. That doesn't really mean anything, though. I had watched him work the nightclubs all night, which is very common for the type. Prey is gathered in one spot, usually drunk or under the influence of something and therefore easier to manipulate. It amounts to a vampire all-you-can-eat buffet. My guy was obviously doing well with his meal selection, as women were positively hurling themselves at him. The behavior was, quite frankly, disgusting. He was either not very hungry or being discerning, though. I have observed that every vampire had unique feeding habits. Some were indiscriminate with regard to sex or age or occupation, where others were picky to the point of obsessive. Considering how often this one was feeding, I suspect he was enjoying the stalk more than anything the individual food item brought to the table.

With my smart phone tied into the club's security cameras, I could observe my target dancing and carousing with many younger women. Despite adequate selection, he seemed to disregard each individual after a few minutes. I knew that each creature was unique, with unique talents, and therefore each one had unique rituals when it came to feeding. I did not have enough data to speculate as to what my particular friend needed from his food, but he obviously wasn't finding it here. However, at about 1:45AM, he started chatting up a cute little brunette. She was exactly what you would expect for late-night club fare in a city that wasn't as cool as it thought it was: young, vapid and pretty. She was wearing a red tube dress so tight you see her belly button through the fabric, and she played with her hair constantly. Despite this, my ageless friend seemed to lose all discernment at this point, and took great pains to keep a full drink in her hand at all times. The look on his face radiated banal interest in her conversation; in fact he had every appearance of being entirely enthralled with everything she said. It had been a while since I had frequented the bar scene, but I recognized the obscene parody of human mating behavior: when last call comes, you stop being picky and go home with the one in front of you. It is silly enough in humans, but in a vampire it was downright ridiculous. It is bad enough when you kill people for food, but this critter compounded his trespass by doing it for fun. It was hard for me to maintain my composure when I saw this. Typically, hunting vampires is a cold, calculating, military operation for me. It has to be…they are simply too dangerous and powerful to work any other way. But when I see one playing with its food, well, I get…testy. My heart rate quickened, and I knew what would happen next. I moved to my secondary observation post and retrieved the rest of my gear.

He was going to convince her to leave the club and go somewhere else. Most vampires were smart enough to have a safe location to feed close to their hunting ground. In an urban environment, he had to make sure he got his prey to that location without attracting attention. This was not typically all that complex a process. Get the drunk girl into the car, take her to your lair and feed, rinse and repeat. This is the best time to hunt them, as they have a tendency to be entirely preoccupied with getting the meal. The blood-thirst tends to reduce their normally perfect self-control to a level somewhere around a heroin junkie out for a fix. My experience indicated that this analogy was probably closer to the truth than any other way of describing it. It was something I counted on when I hunted. I had not been able to find his particular lair yet, but I had ways of getting him to where I needed him to be.

When I was a young man, I would hunt coyotes for the bounty in my rural hometown. Coyotes are the toughest animal in the world to trap, because they are fiendishly smart and very wary. They will walk into a trap, steal the bait, and walk right out again. They are that good. If you really wanted to get a lot of coyotes, you would need raw chicken. The wily coyote seemed to lose all intelligence as soon as it smelled that bird. Coyotes are just plain stupid for chicken. It is much the same hunting vampires. They are tougher, faster, stronger and meaner than you; but with the right bait, you can level the field very quickly. When the smell of blood was in the air, a vampire was just another coyote to me.

I watched the monster leave the club with his snack in tow. The lot had emptied out quite a bit, and like most people who love their cars too much, he had parked far away from the door to avoid dings and scratches. They were laughing and flirting all the way to the car, like they were just two crazy kids going to continue partying after hours. Naturally, the mood visibly soured when he found all four tires on his BMW flattened. I hate to damage a nice car, but fortunately it was a BMW. A Jaguar would have been physically painful for me.

Another interesting note about vampire behavior: they do not take frustration well. When you spend several hundred years getting accustomed to having what you want all the time, without delay, in a consequence-free environment, the minor annoyances of life can be insurmountable.

I immediately noted the reaction of my carnivorous friend as he began to realize that getting his meal to his lair was going to be problematic. If he was smart, or at least calm, he might get on his cell phone and call a cab, even though that would leave a witness to the girl's last known location. If he was really smart he would give it up and wait for a better night. However, I was counting on him to be impatient and frustrated. A frustrated vampire becomes a coyote with a nose full of chicken, and that is something rather more manageable.

He began jerking his head around, looking either for the perpetrator, or for somewhere to take the girl, I suspect. It was summer, he only had a few more hours until sunrise, and he was getting aggravated. Good. He smiled crookedly back at the girl when his eyes fell on the small building across the parking lot. It was an old guard shack for after-hours private security. It had not seen any real use in ten years, but it still stood. It probably did as much to scare potential vandals and junkies out of the lot now, as it did when the guard sat in there all night. It was small and dark, and well-hidden. Perfect.

I could not hear him from my vantage point, but I imagine he came up with some suave reason to head over to it. Possibly to make a call for help from a pay phone, or ask somebody inside for assistance. It didn't matter, she would believe him if he told her magic tire-fixing elves lived there. They always do. His hyper-acute senses had told him what I already knew: the guard shack was empty. They sauntered over and I could see his humor returning. He was still agitated, but he seemed relieved to have a solution so close at hand. A normal human, who had to deal with real world problems, would have been more leery of so easy and obvious a solution. When you only live a hundred years at best, you get very cynical, I guess.

I began to move to my primary engagement post as they approached the shack. I slipped on my headgear and goggles. To appear less obvious, I pulled my floppy wallaby down to cover my strangely-goggled eyes and headphones. This was the most critical time for me. I carefully stood on the circle I had marked on the manhole cover earlier that day. This gave me a good view of my target, while covering me behind a bus stand about 40 feet away. This is where it got tricky. My gear meant that he probably would not smell me, or pick up my body heat; but if he looked right at me there would be nothing I could do about it. A six-foot, 220-pound man in a long black overcoat, floppy hat, facemask and goggles, who appeared unnaturally stocky (25 pounds of armor under your coat is NOT a slimming look!) hanging out in an abandoned parking lot at 3 in the morning in the middle of September? Nope. Not conspicuous at all.

If he made me, at that point I'd have to make a move to save the girl, or give up the hunt (and the girl) for the night. Saving the girl meant trying to take him in the parking lot, and you NEVER want to engage a vampire out in the open. Their speed is a serious obstacle when they have room to maneuver. Of course, in a cramped space, that advantage amounts to very little. Preparation is the key. The military and self-defense people call it "conditioning the battlefield." You remove your enemy's advantages or turn them into weaknesses. Without a conditioned battlefield my chances were not great. My gear is top-notch, but I like to stack the deck in my favor early and often. It would be best if he didn't spot me before I was ready.

He walked up to the door and gave it what appeared to be a casual jiggle, and of course it opened freely (A casual jiggle from a vampire was more than sufficient to break the lock, after all). He took two steps inside the shack, and his nose crinkled at an unfamiliar scent. This was another critical moment. There was no way to mask the scent of some of my preparations, but as long as he had never spelled high-explosives before, he probably wouldn't worry too much about it. I hope.

He quickly glanced around just to ensure they were alone, and then grinned back to the girl as if to invite her in. That's when all hell broke loose, and by "all hell" I mean: "me." Vampires are incredibly fast, so everything had to be timed perfectly. With my right hand I shot the girl with a veterinarian's dart loaded with piperidine; or as the kids calls it: "monkey tranquillizer." She dropped like a stone where she stood, unconscious in the parking lot. With my left hand, I activated the shaped charges at his feet.

The floor fell out from under him with a tremendous crack as the ceiling fell down. He found himself in a maintenance tunnel platform underneath the shack and the parking lot, more or less trapped by the remains of the shack. I dropped down from the manhole by my post and quickly sealed the access door to the maintenance tunnel behind me. I counted on his hyper-acute hearing to be deafened by the blast and for him to be disoriented (Vampire senses are amazing, but if you surprise them, they are easily overloaded), and I managed to slip unnoticed into the tunnel while he was still collecting himself.

As beautiful as these creatures are when they are hunting, they are truly hideous when angry. Frustrated by the ambush, confused by the strange smells, and deafened by the noise, his face was contorted into a savage, animal, rictus. He was crouched in a pile of debris and dust at the far end of the tunnel. He did not appear to have suffered any injury from the blast, though. If the street had not had so many buildings or people around it, I would have used much more explosive, but I did not want to hurt or kill any civilians. So I ended up using only enough HE to drop the floor and bring the shack down on top of it. Normally, I'd have used enough to break all his bones, or maybe separate him from a few of his limbs. A quick glance told me that I had not brought as much of the shack down as I'd have liked to either. Better work fast.

Unfortunately, this meant that he was pissed off, but essentially undamaged. That is a problem. Gone was the golden god that preyed upon humanity as a matter of divine right, and in its place was cornered animal. Cornered animals are the most dangerous, but I must admit that this is the moment I enjoy the most: That moment when the arrogance of perceived perfection is replaced with the fear, anger and shame of being hurt and alone and unprotected. Something had DARED to thwart HIM, and that's not FAIR!

Battling vampires is like surfing in a hurricane. You never really have control of what is going on while you are doing it, you are just sort of riding the wave and waiting for your opportunities. If you really know what you are doing, really understand the nature of your opposition, and are really careful, you can get away with it. A weak vampire will be three times as strong as the average man. A normal vampire will be ten times as strong, and a strong vampire could have twenty times the strength of an average man. Their skin and bone is incredibly dense and resistant to injury, and they can move faster than your eyes can track. This basically means fighting with the smallest, weakest, infant vampire will be like wrestling with a chimpanzee. Punching it out with a strong vampire would be akin to trading blows with a bulldozer. It is just a losing proposition and should be avoided at all costs. Once you wrap your head around that, you have to factor in the supernatural nature of their physicality: They don't die the same way we do. Any of their biological systems is independent and tertiary to their survival. They can regenerate any lost or destroyed tissue, replace body parts, and will revive and resume lividity even after all observable biological functions have ceased. It's ludicrous.

It all boils down to one salient point: One does not "kill" a vampire. One must DESTROY it.

I have never put much stock in magic or the supernatural, and the truth is, I still don't. Destroying my target is, and always has been, a matter of bringing the correct tools to the workspace. I am a 6-foot, 220lb man. I am a dedicated weightlifter and martial arts expert. Growing up I spent much of my time in the gym, boxing ring, dojo, and shooting range. As far as humans go, I am very hard to beat. But to a vampire, my physicality is completely inconsequential. So if I want to survive I must neutralize my opponent's physical advantages to make this contest competitive.

Case in point: After being dropped though the floor, my target found himself trapped and deaf (Hyper-sensitive hearing and high-explosives never mix) in a tunnel that was 30 feet long and 15 feet wide. At one end there was a reinforced concrete wall, and the other a forged steel door. Basically, he was now in an environment where his speed and senses were much more manageable. I would like to have used enough HE to break his bones and rip a few appendages off, but that wasn't an option at this location. In reality, broken bones only force them to move slower anyway, and they heal fairly quickly, but every edge helps. As it stood at that time, if I allowed him to calm down, he would dig himself out of the hole in short order.

So I shot him.

Vampire reflexes are good to a point, but they don't dodge bullets at short range; and most importantly, the one item my friend had failed to notice at the bottom of this pit, was me. My weapon of choice for this maneuver is a Ruger Super-Redhawk revolver in .454 Casull. If truth be told, standard bullets don't bother vampires too much. They hurt, and can do damage, but they do not present a credible threat to survival. As a result, I do not shoot vampires to kill them; since vampires are entirely too fast I shoot them to slow them down.

Without any modification, a bullet from this pistol will drop any animal on the planet. It was designed as a back-up piece for African big-game hunters, and it is singularly unimpressed by charging rhinos and elephants. Of course, a vampire is far tougher than any paltry 6-ton animal, and so these bullets are 400-grain steel-jacked with a depleted uranium core (I make them myself). This bullet will perforate one inch of steel plate and still exit with enough energy to kill a moose. While most bullets would deform and harmlessly disperse their energy on tough vampire skin, this bullet bores straight through. At close range it often exits out the back as well, which is dramatic but does not really add to the effect. Vampires really ignore superficial damage, and they don't "bleed out" like we do, so I did not waste my time shooting the vampire in the chest as often taught. Vampires can survive chest wounds without much difficulty. I shot him in the hip. Sometimes this results in traumatic amputation of the leg, but this time it merely reduced the vampire's pelvis and top half of the femur to splinters in a shower of thick, red blood and high-velocity bone splinters. The resulting howl was positively terrifying. Or hilarious, depending on what level of sociopath your life's circumstances have made you.

Then he came at me like something out of a child's nightmare.

Even with one leg nearly useless and hanging off his body like a broken rudder, he was able to leap the nearly twenty-five feet separating us in the blink of an eye (or technically speaking, probably faster than that!). If he had aimed his blow carefully he could have killed me outright, but his rage made him blind and he went for the center of mass and collided with my chest. My entire outfit is designed to mask my scent and body heat, as well as provide me with impact protection. To that effect I wore Nomex/Kevlar armor over my chest, torso and legs, with reactive gel padding underneath. My overcoat was Kevlar liberally reinforced with composite ballistic plating and more reactive gel. This tech was designed to protect special ops troops from bad parachute landings, close-range explosions, and incoming bullets. Vampires are strong, but the Kevlar is 100 times stronger than steel, and the reactive gel was rated for 90 g's of lateral acceleration. The suit and coat alone cost $600,000.00 and I could (probably) survive getting struck by an SUV travelling at highway speed in it. Even so, the impact from one gimpy vampire was staggering. He drove me against the reinforced concrete wall of the tunnel with teeth-rattling force. I felt the reactive gel stiffen and I could not breathe for a second while the normally pliable substance thickened to absorb the impact. I felt the whole tunnel shudder from the impact and portions of the wall behind me cracked as cinderblocks buckled. But I had chosen this battleground for a reason, and this was a load-bearing tunnel constructed of reinforced concrete. You would need ten pounds of SemTex to break out of here, and he just didn't have the horsepower. The shock caused me to drop the Redhawk, and he could have easily beaten or crushed me to death there, if not for another tool in my arsenal.

There is no way I will ever be fast enough to stop a charge from a vampire, therefore I cannot stop him from hitting me. This would normally be the end of the conversation, because a vampire can easily kill you with a single blow. They are that fast and strong, and there is little you can do about it. So what do you do if you can't stop them from hitting you? You make the price of hitting you very steep. The instant he collided with me, several pressure sensors in my overcoat registered the spike in lateral g's and PSI along the impact. This triggered a controller that discharged 250,000 volts of electricity along several exposed gold lateral lines in my coat and armor in a one-second burst at nearly 1500 amps (at normal human resistance). Each discharge uses up one entire 6-pound battery and whatever lateral line the creature is touching, but it has saved my ass on several hunts. I carry two of these batteries, and I never complain about the weight. With a tremendous crack (not unlike thunder), a blue-white explosion vaporized much of his right forearm, converting most of it to carbon and acrid smoke in the process, my antagonist was hurled off of me and backwards against the far wall of the tunnel. His howls had lost all semblance of humanity as his primal brain completely took over. The noise and the flash completely blinded him and deafened him again, while my headgear softened the sound and all but eliminated the flash entirely.

Vampires are tough, but not indestructible. The process of regenerating damaged tissue requires energy, and vampires get their energy from human blood. My goal in these encounters is to damage the target faster than he can repair himself, all while keeping him angry and focused on me so he does not suddenly smarten up and run. Some have, generally the older ones, escaped me. But typically, once you have hurt them, their natural feral nature takes over. For my dance partner this night, the battle had only lasted thirty seconds, and he had already suffered catastrophic damage to his left leg and hip, and was now missing much of his right arm. I do not completely understand how they feel pain, or on what level; but I do know that they feel it. I use that to keep them reacting instead of thinking. This guy was hurting bad, and I intended to keep that up. I could see that fear and doubt were beginning to set in, but even if he was inclined to run, I had him trapped in the tunnel. I love it when a plan comes together.

One of the most psychologically damaging things you can do to a vampire is to NOT fear them. Besides, unless you have access to a rocket launcher or a flamethrower, you really can't destroy one without getting in close, so you are going to have to get over that fear, anyway. So I charged him as he attempted to get up, and I was surprised when even with his shattered hip (which was beginning to repair itself) he met me halfway. The strength and resilience of these things is truly fantastic, even to me. He grabbed my overcoat with his good left hand and threw me a full twenty feet against the far tunnel wall. Again the armor took the impact, but not without knocking the wind out of me.

He was on me before I even hit the ground, and going for my throat with his teeth. My heart rate doubled and I struggled with rising anxiety as I felt his teeth gnawing at my neck. Stupid mistake! I thought I had hurt him enough to get close, and I could die for that error. Fortunately, I wore a gorget of the same material as the rest of my armor, and all he managed to do was start choking me. The pressure was incredible though, and spots danced across my eyes. If I didn't get rid of him soon, he was going to crush my windpipe. He was lean, but he probably weighed 250 pounds (vampires are DENSE). His good left arm had a viselike grip on my overcoat, and if not for the reactive gel and ballistic plating, he would have already ground my collarbone into powder. He was not exerting enough lateral force to set off my other shock battery, but he was ignoring my hands completely. After all, what could I do with just my hands to a vampire?

Well, I could certainly jab my thumb into his open hip wound. That got his attention. He sat upright immediately and howled.

As soon as his weight shifted, twenty years of judo and jujitsu was more than sufficient to roll from underneath him to a top position and break his grip on my neck. But even his one good arm was strong enough to unseat me as soon as he remembered to try. Before he could, I quickly placed my palm on his forehead and triggered my staker, a simple device strapped along the inside of either forearm that houses a single-shot tube charged with a 12-gauge blank and tungsten carbide spike. Now, you can't actually kill a vampire with a stake (Incidentally, staking corpses to the ground so they could not rise is how that rumor got started). But if you use a 12-gauge shotgun shell to propel an 8" tungsten carbide spike into a vampire's eye socket at point plank range while grappling, you CAN pin him to the ground with it, and turn his central nervous system into viscous, oozing jelly.

This started a violent spasm in his body that, with his incredible strength, tossed me off him like a drunk cowboy wannabe on the local mechanical bull. With his brain destroyed, the vampire had no real consciousness, but if left to his own devices, he would eventually recover. This was the kind of thing that took a lot of energy and plenty of time to do, however. If he had fed recently, he would probably be up and whole in a few hours, but I certainly had no intention of giving him that kind of time.

It was a horrifying thing to observe; this undead thing thrashing about with a spike in its head holding it to the floor. I couldn't help but imagine a trout flopping on the shore, with a hook still holding it in place. That particular image took a lot of the mystique of this fey creature right out of the picture, and I couldn't help but smirk a little. There was really no time for observation and introspection, though. It was already closing the gunshot wound and knitting the bones back together as I watched. It was eerie, like watching necrotizing fasciitis in reverse. The forearm was charred, and that would take a while to heal, but it had already begun to add new skin and pink muscle tissue was becoming visible. The process was fascinating to watch, from a clinical perspective, and I am nothing if not clinical.

At this point, there was nothing left to do but finish the job before he was whole enough to fight back again. I secured his thrashing limbs to the floor with 4 more stakes, to hold him down while I went and collected my work bag. It was bizarrely satirical, to see this unholy demon, crucified and twitching in iconic fashion on the floor of a sewer. I am not a religious man, but I have nailed more than one vampire to the floor, and the imagery was not entirely lost on me. If the universe thought casting me as Pontius Pilate for the vampire world was funny, then I could appreciate its sense of humor. Somewhere in the great beyond, I think kindly old Father Stephen would approve. I gave a wry grin at my prey and muttered "requiescat in pace, asshole." He did not deign to respond. More's the pity.

From my black canvas duffel, I pulled out five one-gallon air-tight aluminum containers. From each one I removed a slab of white, clay-like substance wrapped in plastic. I picked up the Redhawk from where I had dropped it and emptied the last five rounds into the vampire's chest, each massive concussion opening new huge rents and gaping cavities. His body heaved and gurgled fruitlessly every time the massive bullets tore a new hole in it, while the thrashing creature frantically struggled to repair the massive damage it had suffered. These things simply do not stop fighting, but I had inflicted so much damage at this point that his strength was probably no more than that of a regular man by this time. Vampires may be magical, but energy is a finite resource. With all his reserves going into repairing the injuries, he had nothing left in the tank for superhuman strength or speed. I could still see the wounds trying to heal as I worked, and that quickened my pace somewhat.

In each one of the gunshot wounds I had just created, I placed a block of the white clay. He thrashed and gurgled in defiance, but his brain still had a tungsten carbide stake through it, so no conscious resistance was possible. When all wounds were stuffed, I quickly tore the plastic wrap off the tops of the blocks and let the air hit the big blocks of white phosphorous. As soon as the oxygen touched it, the substance ignited spontaneously, rapidly climbing to a temperature of over 3000 degrees. Five blocks was probably overkill, but I believe in being thorough. When they stopped burning, there would not be enough viable material left of this creature to regenerate a hamster. I could not stay to watch the pyre, as the smoke was thick and toxic, and the heat too quickly became oppressive. But as I slipped out the access door, I stole a look back. Through the smoke, I could make out the silhouette of the vampire as it thrashed and burned in the 3000 degree bright-white flames. I wondered if that's what hell felt like: fire and pain and torment, with nothing at the end.

My name is Martin, and I hunt vampires.

Kidnapping is Bad

Upon exiting the tunnel after my very satisfying hunt, I made a rather unpleasant discovery. The girl was gone. This was not good. She should have been asleep right there, blissfully unaware of the transpired events. Lord knows I had hit her with enough piperidine to put her out for two or three hours at least. Then sudden realization hit me like a slap to the forehead in frustration: What if she hadn't been drinking?

Naturally, I don't want to kill anyone who is not a viable target, and I had planned for a very drunk girl to be the mark. To avoid an accidental overdose, I dialed the dart back quite a bit because alcohol and tranquilizers make a dangerous combo. If she had only been drinking ginger ale last night, then she would have been severely under-dosed. Dammit! With dismaying clarity, the pieces fell into place; I had wondered why the vamp had been so choosy up until that point, and now I knew. He had wanted a sober girl. Shit. I should have picked up on that.

The fight had only taken about four minutes, so she could not have gotten far. Local PD and Fire Department were due any second, though. I figured I had maybe ninety seconds to find her and figure out what she saw.

I began scanning for clues as to where she went, and it did not take me long to find the telltale scrapes of someone in high heels shuffling clumsily through the muddy parking lot. I caught up to her about 200 yards away, all the way across the parking lot and across the street. She was shivering and mumbling incoherently behind a dumpster by a Seven-Eleven.

She was a mess, covered in mud and dust, mascara smeared and streaked, and dark hair thoroughly bedraggled. Despite this forlorn state, she was very pretty, with the kind of body only girls in their early twenties can maintain. Justifiably, she was confused, panicked, and terrified, but pharmaceutically subdued to the point of near-quiesence. She had enough tranquilizers in her system to give her a lethargic, stoned sort of ambiguity, but not enough to put her out completely.

I buttoned up the coat to hide the armor, and tried to question her:

"You all right, kid?" My bedside manner is atrocious, even I acknowledge that.

"MMMMrrmmmmbmleherrrglle?" was all she could manage by way of reply. This was going to be tricky.

"We need to get you out of here. It's not safe." I conveniently left out the part where I was the reason it was unsafe. Those details were best left for later.

"Izzzzzzz nuht zayffff?" she slurred back drowsily.

"Come on," I said and pulled her to feet. She lurched like a marionette with half its strings cut, and hung floppily onto my side with rubber arms. It took us ten minutes to get to the van this way, and by then the local fire department was busily putting out the smoldering remains of the guard shack. With any luck they'd call it a gas leak explosion, but either way I was long gone before anybody started asking questions.

I put the girl down in the back of my van with all the care and gentleness I could muster. There was a sleeping mat in back for me, but I figured she needed it more than I did. Mercifully, she drifted off to sleep while I drove to the outskirts of town and found a nice, deserted spot along a dirt access road. I pulled in and decided to hole up and wait for her to come out of it. I changed out of the armor into more appropriate street clothes, and enjoyed a good Dominican cigar while I waited for the inevitable drama.

And drama there was! She woke up just before dawn, and the panic started more or less right away. She immediately flew at the back door of the panel van and started to scream when she found it locked. I knew better than to try to force her to calm down, so I just sat quietly in the driver seat and waited. She screamed and smashed at the windows (bulletproof lexan) for a solid three minutes before turning to me, wild-eyed and savage, panting almost to the point of a growl.

An absurd thought occurred to me at this moment: The back of my van was filled with weapons. They were all neatly stored in lockers along the sides of the cargo compartment, but conceivably she had access to a stunning arsenal if she managed to get into the cabinets. I still felt pretty safe, since the only loaded weapon in the van was the big revolver under my left armpit, and she'd have to be fairly well trained to get a loaded weapon on me before I could stop her. But if I intended to make a habit of kidnapping young girls, I was going to need to lock those damn things up.

She was half-crouched in the back of the van, hands curled into claws at her sides. She met my eyes without blinking, with just a touch of fear making the corners moist. She was terrified, but not giving in to it. I can respect that.

"Relax, kid. If I wanted to hurt you, I'd have done it already. I just need to talk to you for a second." I was trying to be reassuring, but I don't know that I know how. Most people describe me as "menacing" even on a good day. It was safe to say that today was not a good day.

"Yeah…I get the impression you are a regular gentleman, asshole. Shit, you even have the creepy van thing going on! Lemme guess: You're the sicko that's been kidnapping all the girls around here, aren't you?" She was still outwardly composed, but frantic all the same. Her eyes darted left and right furtively. She would bolt the second she saw her chance. Good girl, you're a survivor.

"Actually, kid, that would be the good-looking gent you left the club with last night. You were almost his next little snack. You should be thanking me for saving your life."

She squinted a moment, I knew the piperidine would make her memories fuzzy for a bit, but it had no long-term effect on memory. "Tommy? He's not a killer, he's from New Yo-," she stopped mid-sentence, as something clicked in her brain, she started talking slowly, "...we went over to that shack to use the phone, and then it blew up…" she looked up at me and pointed, "Tommy fell under the shack…there was some kind of tunnel under it. The floor was gone and I could see right down…There was some weirdo dressed up like Batman or Darth Vader!" She looked up at me, "Was that you?"

"Batman? Hardly. Did you see anything else?"

"You two were in a tunnel…I was lying on the ground, and could see through a gap the floor. You shot him!" Her brow furrowed, you could see her brain piecing together the events, one incredible shard at a time.

"I was so fuzzy. It looked like he was moving so fast! He hit you and there was a big flash, then he hit you again and you went flying, and then you were rolling around…then he was just flopping around and you shot him some more, then you set him on fire!" It was a run-on, stream-of-consciousness synopsis, but it wasn't half bad.

"Did he look like he moved pretty good for a guy who had just been shot?" I asked.

She was confused now, "It was all so weird. He looked different, and made noises like an animal. He moved funny, too."

I smirked, "So you are basically saying you saw me in a tunnel fighting with a guy who moved really fast, even after being shot, was strong enough to throw me around, and was able to change his appearance instantly? That doesn't sound very sane."

"I know what I saw. What the fuck did you do to me?" She wasn't frantic anymore…just curious, and more than a little angry.

I tossed her a vial, "Have it tested. It's called Piperidine. Makes you sleepy. Pretty harmless, really, no long-term side effects. It does not make you see things."

"So what the fuck happened, and why the fuck am I here?" Still pissed. Still looking for an escape route.

"Miss, you are here because I had no idea what you did or did not see, and I have no idea what you will or will not say," I rubbed my temples, a headache was a-brewin', I could feel it, "I do some very dangerous, very unique work. I try not to get normal people involved, but because you (apparently) don't drink, I did not give you enough juice to make last night all just a bad dream. So now you have seen what you have seen, and I can't be sure who you will tell."

She sat down on the floor of the van heavily and put her head in her hands. Tension was visible in her neck and shoulders, and I felt a twinge of regret for the situation I had put her in. She started to quietly cry, and her head and shoulders heaved with silent sobs for a minute, "You are going to kill me aren't you! Just stop talking and do it, you prick!"

Crap, the ol' Martin charm wins over another one. I swear that I do not try to come off so cold. "I have no intention of hurting you, I swear!" I assuaged her, "But I need you to understand that I am now in a very unpleasant pickle. I can't have you talking to anyone about what you saw, and I am not the kind of man who would kill you to silence you. So I am going to try a different track. I'll tell you the truth, and you can decide for yourself."

Deep breath.

"Your little friend 'Tommy' was not strictly human. He was a…" I struggled with the absurdity of what I was trying to convey, "…a creature. He fed on human beings to survive, and he liked young girls specifically. He is not the only one, and my job is to find and kill them all."

Wow. Was it really that simple? You would think a raison d'être would take longer to explain.

She began to sob harder, I thought, until I realized she was laughing. I am never going to understand women, that much is obvious, "Did I say something funny?"

She looked up at me, and it was amazing what laughter can do to a young girl's face, "Goddamn vampire…He actually told me he was a goddamn vampire! He had the fangs and everything! I just thought it was a game he played! No you are telling me he was really a vampire? Life is just too fucking rich sometimes!"

Hmmph. She was taking this rather well.

She went on, "All I wanted was a ride home, too. Now I've been kidnapped by fucking Batman, who says he just saved me from Dracula! How the hell am I supposed to believe any of this?" She laughed harder.

"You tell me, kid. Was the Tommy you saw in the tunnel normal? Or did he seem a bit more? I'm a hefty guy, and he was strong enough to throw me around like a rag doll; he laughed at a bullet wound, survived electrocution and explosion, and was moving so fast you couldn't even see him. Does that sound like just a guy with a lame pick-up line to you?"

She rested her head on her forearms, "Nope. But this is all really weird. How the hell is it even possible?"

"Hell, kid. I don't even know that."

"How did you get involved in this? It's not like there is a college course or something in vampire hunting. How the fuck does this happen?"

How does this happen? Good question. How did a reasonably intelligent, otherwise fairly well-adjusted, and decidedly skeptical guy like me end up dressed like a cartoon character and stalking the streets at night killing mythological creatures? It's a surprisingly short story, and for some reason I could not identify, I felt compelled to tell it.

"Let's just start at the beginning, shall we?" Why the hell not? "I was like any other bright-eyed eighteen-year old after high school. I couldn't really afford to go to the college I wanted to, so I asked a rich Uncle to front me the money: dear old Uncle Sam."

I fired up another cigar. I pulled deeply and took a moment to appreciate the aromatic smoke before I continued with my story.

"Uncle Sam is a generous sort, when you ask him nicely. So in exchange for an expensive education, all I had to do was wear a silly green outfit and promise to play good little soldier for a few years. Sounded like a good gig to me. So after graduating from school with a BS in mechanical engineering, Helpful Uncle Sam sent me to a very warm sandy place for some fresh air and exercise. In their infinite wisdom, the Army put me in charge of building helpful structures, or blowing up non-helpful structures, and sometimes both. After displaying a lot of aptitude for the 'blowing stuff up' portion of my work, Uncle Sam felt that I might be useful in a more pro-active combat capacity. Next thing you know, it's stateside for some more training and back to the sun and sand with a shiny new Sapper patch for my uniform."

I saw the look of confusion on her face, "'Sapper' is a catch-all term for a combat engineer who specializes in traps, sabotage, demolition, and siegework. I was, all modesty aside, exceptional within this role. I had a very real knack for predicting the enemy's movements and employing explosives and traps to hurt them the most. Life is weird sometimes, everybody is good at something, and you just have to find out what that thing is. Some people are good at sports; I am good at making people not alive anymore."

"Now THAT I believe," She spat drily.

"Thanks, kid. I had other skills, as well. I had done a lot of competitive boxing, judo and wrestling in high school and college. Nothing special, but I had a solid amateur record in all of them and was generally considered to be worth keeping an eye on. I liked guns in all their myriad configurations and was a hell of a pistol shot, if I do say so myself."

"Taken individually, nothing here was super-unique. I was a young soldier who was good at his job and enjoyed his work. However, one night I was involved in an operation clearing caves in Afghanistan with a local CIA asset we were calling Odin (he was missing an eye…no joke). It was one of those operations where everything went more or less according to plan for just long enough to make you complacent, and then it went all to hell in a damn hurry."

"Does that happen a lot?" the girl asked. At least she appeared to be warming to the story. I did not get the impression she thought I was going to kill her anymore.

"All the time, kid."

"We had used sonic soundings to map most of the surface caves, but we could not go much deeper than a hundred feet. We had a decent idea of the cave structure, and I employed this knowledge to create a perimeter gauntlet of charges, and then I timed them to cascade from one end of the network to the other. The goal was to flush any opposition forces out the southernmost exits where they could be captured. The CIA, despite what the TV tells you, would rather take an enemy and turn them into an asset, than just kill them. Don't get me wrong though, killing them was always acceptable, just not preferable."

She rolled her eyes, "Naturally. The CIA is a very charitable group, I hear…"

I actually chuckled at that, "You ain't lyin', kid. The charges worked perfectly, and, the tunnels began a slow collapse form north to south, driving Muj out almost immediately. As the rest of the platoon began taking prisoners, we all began to congratulate ourselves on a job well done."

"And naturally, that's when we started taking heavy fire. Somewhere in the mountain, an unfriendly patrol had been alerted by the explosions, and decided to come down for a look. They were on us from the north, and that meant they had the high ground and good cover. Intel had said the perimeter was clear for miles, but in the field intel is only good for two things: wiping your ass with and screwing up good operations. Our position was ideal for assaulting the caves, but our cover was pitiful from the north. We began to lose guys pretty quick: as we were now being attacked from the emptying caves, as well as the patrol north of our position."

"Our platoon began a fighting retreat, but we were outnumbered four to one and had no cover. We were being overrun by the converging groups of enemies, and Odin and I were separated from the platoon in the confusion. It was total cluster-fuck."

"After that, Odin and I spent five days evading the enemy in the mountains of Afghanistan, killing as many bad guys as we could and eventually escaping to a British army base twenty-one miles away. Let me tell you, kid, this guy was a master of his craft. Somehow he managed to keep me alive through it all. I have no idea how he did it, though. During this time I grease men with everything from my bare hands to high-explosives to a sharpened stick."

She snorted, "Now that's a pretty image. Thanks for the nightmares, mister."

"Imagine actually being there," I took another drag on my cigar and continued.

"Terrifyingly, I think I was enjoying myself. It is a horrible thing to realize that you are a natural born killer, kid."

I raised my hands to stall her inevitable interruption, "Now, now; don't get me wrong! I had a normal New England upbringing and I knew that killing people was wrong. I'm no psycho. But when the enemy was right there in front of me, and there was no pressing moral dilemma, I was a relentless and efficient engine of destruction. I was good at homicide and I liked it. That was an eye-opening moment."

I was spilling my guts at this point, and it had been so long, I just couldn't stop myself. I still don't know why.

"Fortunately, having a hardened CIA spook along for the ride helped me to stay sane and not lose myself to that monster within. Odin taught me about having a code, and how to stay detached from the work at hand. He also used this time to convince me that my skills were wasted in the Army. So after one hundred and twenty hours in the mountains, twenty-one miles of escaping and evading, and sixty-seven confirmed kills, I was declared legally KIA and immediately sworn into service as a member of the Central Intelligence Agency. I was officially a 'spook.'"

"Your parents must have been soooooooo proud!" she was quick, I'll give her that. Sarcastic people always amuse me.

"Yeah, well, I'm sure your mom and dad would be just thrilled to see you in that dress, missy." That hit home. She had forgotten that she was dressed for late-night chicanery in a manner that was immodest to say the least. She blushed furiously and tried to cover herself more reasonably, but the one square yard of fabric that comprised her dress was woefully inadequate.

"There's a coat in the locker to your left." She quickly, and with what dignity she could muster, opened the locker and donned the proffered coat. It made her look even younger to see her swimming in my jacket, with just her head poking out the top.

"Now, I spent the next ten years doing for the CIA exactly what I did for the Army: Blowing people up. The only difference was that my gear was much nicer, the pay was much better, and the jobs far more interesting."

"During this time I learned things like infiltration, planning, execution, and exfiltration. What raw talent I had beforehand got hammered into real tradecraft mastery. I trained with the most elite fighters in the world, studied under the most brilliant minds, and learned things about international politics that nobody should ever have to know. I was the best there was, too. My filed op success rate was nearly 100%. To my young mind, it was some of the best years of my life."

She squirmed in the big coat, "Yup. Sounds idyllic," and rolled her eyes. She must have been a fun teenager to have at home. I bet her parents take a lot of Xanax.

"But everyone gets older, I guess. It stopped being exciting after a while. I was still completing my objectives, but I was no longer feeling anything about the work. I was starting to drink too much, and spend pretty much all my time either training or fighting. I was total robot for a while there...I just couldn't feel anything anymore for friend or foe. Objectives were just that: objectives. They were to be executed and a report filed. I lost the ability to empathize, and the psych boys started calling me in for evaluations after every operation. They knew I was starting to lose it, and that was never good. People with my type of skills should not become entirely amoral. When that happens we lose the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. Believe me; the CIA likes its people to be morally ambiguous, but not sociopaths. Completely amoral operatives are a liability, and I was fast becoming that. Then I was sent on a seemingly routine operation in Belgium."

The girl perked up and squinted at me through one eye, "By 'routine' you mean 'blowing someone up'?"

"You've been paying attention! Bravo!"

"While in Belgium, things went completely batshit for the operation, but life-altering for me. I came home from that trip a changed man. Honestly," I chuckled...mostly to myself, "I came home from Belgium with something that changed everything. Because of it, part of me I had forgotten existed sort of woke up. It wasn't some big epiphany, either, just one moment in time where I saw a glimpse of the old me. It was like finding some old trinket that you didn't even realize that you were missing, but now that it's back you wondered how you ever got along without it. It was wonderful. I returned to my life a new man, and even contemplated leaving my years of violence behind, and starting a new life with more grounded principles." I snorted derisively at my own naiveté.

She actually looked interested now, "What was it you brought back?" There was earnestness in the question. I guess we are all looking for something we've lost.

"Don't you worry about that, kid; you'll know when you find it for yourself." I don't know why I chose to be cryptic, but sometimes the wound is still too raw to touch on.

"One brisk October evening, I was returning home rather late. We were working on a new operation that required my specific skillset (blowing people/things up), and had lost track of time. It was supposed to be my last run as a field operative, so I was anxious to get it done. This had kept me out way too late and the sun had long since gone down when I arrived home."

I paused a moment, I had never spoken to anyone about what happened that night. It was a place in my head I didn't like going to, "I stepped into the house and I immediately knew something was wrong. I don't think I have any special sixth sense, but I had been in the spy game long enough to know when something was not kosher. The house was dark, but there were soft noises coming from upstairs. I knew better than to immediately head toward the noise, and instead I pulled my revolver and began to quietly clear the first floor of the house, room by room. When I got upstairs, I moved to the bedroom door at the end of the hall, where the noises were coming from."

I thought of my old .357 fondly. Good weapon, I miss it.

"I could not clearly identify at the time what I was hearing, and in hindsight it was painfully obvious, but it sounded like slurping and grunting. I'm no goddamn ninja and I'm almost never subtle; so with no overture, I kicked the fucking door in. I was shocked to find myself momentarily frozen in place, as I beheld the sort of thing that even a guy like me has to pause and question."

I harnessed the cold thing inside me that had become my greatest weapon against the vampires. The icy knot of rage that absorbed all emotions and converted them into destructive focus allowed me to do things others couldn't: it protected me from their mind games, and allowed me to face them without fear. At that moment, it was the only thing that allowed me to speak of what happened that night, "There on the bed, a vampire was taking from me the only thing that mattered. It was a teen-aged boy, probably freshly turned, and arrogant. He knew I was there and didn't even pause; he just looked up at me, grinned a stupid wolf grin, and kept right at his grisly business."

"Can you believe it?" I waved my cigar for emphasis. I was agitated. Why was I agitated? I never get agitated, "The stupid thing had just waltzed in, and in one fell swoop sent me hurtling backward into the same damn abyss I that had just managed to climb the hell out of. Knowing what I now know about them, I figure that little vampire infant probably felt that there was nothing I could do about it, anyway. I bet he thought that he had just scored a double meal. He probably thought he was the scariest monster under the bed."

I took another puff on my cigar, and realized that it was going cold. I fished a lighter out of my pocket and fired it back up. Nothing worse than a cold cigar. I paused a moment to look at the old lighter. It had been blue at one point, but it was scratched and faded now, showing streaks of dull gray metal underneath. It was a dual-flame torch style lighter, perfect for lighting cigars, and it had been a gift from Odin when I completed my first successful operation. This lighter had seen a lot of things, and the irony of using it now to tell my story would have been humorous if there was anything funny about my tale.

"He was wrong, kid." I fired up the lighter with a 'click!' and let the tip of the blue jet just kiss the end of the cigar. In just a few seconds, it glowed cherry red and thin blue smoke again wafted lazily toward the open van window.

"There is an old proverb that says that there are two mighty creatures that battle inside the soul of every man. One of these creatures is good, and wants to do right all the time. The other is an evil ogre that lives only to destroy. Guess which one wins?"

She thought for a minute, and then answered, "I don't know."

"The one you feed, kid. The one you nourish and nurture. He gets bigger and stronger than the other, and eventually he gets big enough to eat the other guy."

The little brunette chuckled at that, "Why do I get the impression that your 'nice guy' was a little undernourished?"

"Because you've been paying attention. I had been feeding my Ogre a steady diet of rage and destruction and violence for twelve years, and he was plenty big and mean, kid. Now, the only thing that kept the fucker from consuming me had just been destroyed by a stupid creature that no right to even exist." I snapped my fingers, startling the young girl, "And now the monster was out. There was nothing left to stop him anymore, and he finally had a target worthy of his abilities. The bright-eyed Army boy was gone forever at that point, and the big 'ol Ogre was all that remained."

"I killed that vampire with a .357 Magnum, a twelve-pound splitting maul, five gallons of gasoline, and this lighter." I showed her the old torch lighter I carried for my stogies. I'm not typically sentimental, but I held on to this for some reason. "Then I set my house on fire and burned everything I ever was to the ground. It was over. For the second time, I was dead and reborn. I became Martin, patron saint of soldiers and fighters," I paused to chuckle, "and I let the Ogre take the reins. I've been killing vampires ever since."

I sat back in the driver's seat and exhaled deeply.

"So that's my story, kid. That's why you are here, and why I am here. Just so you know; in a minute I am going to drive this van to the closest shopping mall, hand you enough money for cab fare home, and let you decide what story you are going to tell about last night. You can go right to the cops and tell them all about me, but I hope you don't. That will only make my job harder, and the job is all I have left."

She seemed a little chagrined, "They'd never believe me anyway, would they?"

"I hope not. Do you believe me?"

"Does it matter?"

What a great question. Why should I care if she believed me? Why did I bother to spill my guts to her like this? Was it something in her look? Or her voice? Why was I asking for her approval? I didn't even know her name! Somewhere under all the blackness and rage, I felt a twitch. Was there something still alive down there at the bottom of it all?

"I don't know why, kid; but yeah, it does. It matters to me."

We Meet Mr. Frost

It was quite the predicament.

He was staring at me, I was staring at him. I was thinking that he'd made me, but I didn't really know. It was 3:30 in the afternoon and I had just popped over to the 7-11 for a diet Pepsi and a protein bar (I really gotta fix my diet) and there was this guy there staring at me.

He sure looked like one of them, but he was not the one I'd been working that week. He was tall; at least six and a half feet tall or more, and if he was normal like you and me, probably a lean 250 pounds. But I had a sneaking suspicion he was closer to 450. He had that youthful and oppressively beautiful countenance and innocent composure they all seem to have. He was standing completely still, and even then he looked graceful and elegant. It's gotta be low-level telepathy or empathy. They can't all be that pretty.

He was not being subtle in his study of me at all. He was deliberately watching me and he wanted me to know it. I cleared the door and went for the coolers in back and there he was, looking all blank and stoic. His eyes were so dark brown as to look completely black, and his sandy blond hair was short and spiky. He was wearing blue jeans, brown loafers, and a tight pink T-shirt with the words, "define 'girlfriend'" stenciled across the front. This was creepy. He slurped noisily from his blue raspberry slushee and just kept staring at me.

I was in street clothes, and I had almost no gear on except the overcoat, shock batteries (they are sewn into the coat), and the Redhawk in a shoulder rig. At this distance I'd never even clear the holster. Hell, I'd need 100 yards or more to clear the holster from his type. If he made a move my only hope was that the shock batteries would surprise him enough for me to unload the revolver into him and escape. That is, if his charge itself didn't kill me outright. This was going to be tricky.

I let my eyes meet his. No point in acting scared. Let him think I knew something he didn't. Vampires hate when you act like they aren't scary. It felt like a million maggots were having a square-dancing competition under my skin when our eyes met. I stifled a shudder and forced myself to nod an almost imperceptible greeting; just two guys bumping into each other at the quickie-mart. At this show of bravado his face split into a wolfish grin, complete with bright-white teeth and cruelly arched eyebrows. This guy really was something right out of a comic book.

"Walk with me, Martin," he said cordially in a flawless basso profundo with just a hint of an English accent, and flicked his head towards the door. He knew the name I was operating under? It's not my real name, but it meant that he had done some research at least. I really needed to know more about this guy. Not wanting to go at it in the store, I felt compelled to at least feign compliance until my opportunities improved, and more intelligence had been gathered.

I paid for my breakfast and walked out with my erstwhile companion. It was strange to be so close to a vampire and not be trying to destroy it. We walked in silence. The afternoon was cold and very gray, and the sun was already almost completely down. Dark comes early in the Montana winter, and this suits the vampires just fine.

So far we had kept to the streets. If he wanted to kill me, he would really need somewhere secluded to do it; and he was not even trying. I wonder if he knew what would happen if he tried to force me. Did he know about the pressure sensors? Or the defensive contacts in my coat that would discharge enough current to vaporize his hand if he grabbed me? If he did, then he was VERY well informed. I was pretty sure that every vampire that knew about my equipment was dead…because quite frankly, the only way to know about my equipment was to experience it. This had universally led to a bad ending for the vampire.

The streets were well populated with early Christmas shoppers, and at no point were we concealed from public view. So far, there was no indication that he intended to harm me. For some reason, that made me even more nervous. I had always counted on my prey being predictable. This was a very unpredictable vampire. I didn't like it at all. He led me to a city bench in front of a fountain at a busy intersection. We sat. It was eerie.

"Oh, Martin," he breathed, "I assume we shall call you Martin. It's what you've been using anyway, so it will do. Which Martin are you calling yourself after: St. Martin of Tours, the patron saint of soldiers and fighters, or St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of racial harmony?"

I chuckled; this guy had done his homework, "Both."

"I knew you were going to say that," was his dry response. "You may call me Mr. Frost. I know quite a bit about you, Martin; but not as much as I'd like. You have been a very busy man, and not everybody thinks that is a good thing. I, for one, am undecided."

That last word had an air of deliberation to it. It was a carefully chosen word, and I was being studied for my reaction to it. How much did he know? Dry sarcasm is sort of my default conversational setting, and I saw no need to change that for this monster. "Well, my lanky friend, exactly how can I help you with your decision?" I responded glibly. This guy wanted something from me, and therefore he would not kill me until he got it. I had time. "I think you and I have some pretty serious philosophical differences that would preclude friendship, and since you haven't tried to kill me yet, I must assume you have a transaction of some sort in mind."

His laughter was explosive and damned contagious. His emotional pull was affecting even me. "You misunderstand me, Sir!" He boomed, "I would personally LOVE to be your friend. Your enemies have a notoriously poor survival rate! It certainly is not impossible that some of your past enemies were some of my enemies too, now is it? Nor is it entirely impossible that some of your future enemies may not also be my enemies as well. Is it so hard to believe that?" His grin could swallow a Buick.

"Sometimes, however, your enemies are my unfortunate responsibility. Take your current quarry, for instance. You have been stalking Rafael Velasquez. He is a rather noisome insect; we are in complete agreement in that. Under normal circumstances, you killing him would only improve my mood; but circumstances are not normal, and so his death at this time would be problematic. Which is why I am here talking to you. I would like to negotiate."

"Ahhhhh, so you want me to hunt only your enemies, then? What makes you think I care to discriminate in my targets based solely upon your preference? What makes you think I won't hunt YOU?" Now it was time to see exactly what my tall friend brought to the table.

His grin never wavered, "You don't want to hunt me because I can help you find peace. Your crusade is futile. You will never get us all, and you will never avenge whatever loved one you lost. Eventually, you will slip up and one of us will kill you. It will probably be me." He shifted in the seat to bring the full intensity of his gaze upon me. "There are…conventions…that those of my race are obliged to respect when we deal with each other. There are patterns, and codes, and secret cabals within our society. I can give you these keys to our society and help you to purge those animals that infect even us."

His gaze intensified, "You have to understand, Martin, that there are many things you don't know about us that can cause you to inadvertently do great harm to yourself and your soul. Did you know that there are those of us who refuse human blood? Those of us that consume only animals for sustenance? They call us 'vegetarians' and sneer at us, as they believe it makes us weaker than the others. They are fools. There are levels and degrees to everything, even vampires, Mr. Martin. We are not all evil, marauding monsters. If you were to kill an innocent, could you sleep at night? How do you know that you haven't done so already?"

I thought about my hunts for a moment. While Frost's information was new and surprising, my mental inventory concluded that I had only taken down obvious man-eaters. "I do my homework, pal."

"Oh, I know, Martin. Otherwise I'd have already killed you. I don't think you are interested in innocence at all. You have a code, which is obvious. I do too; as does the entire vampire race, ostensibly. We are ALL at least nominally bound by some rules. Sadly though, this code is at best a poorly-enforced honor system, with little honor left and less recourse for justice within itself. That's where I come in, Martin." He smirked an enormous Dr. Suess Grinch smirk, "Every now and then, I get to make an example of some vampire that was a little too egregious when circumventing the rules."

He raised an eyebrow, "You represent a problem, though, as you are not subject to our rules at all. You operate completely outside our system. You are the only human to have killed a vampire in four hundred years, and there are many who cannot fathom or will not tolerate your existence. I myself am much more progressive on the matter, and since our missions seem so perfectly aligned, I am prepared to help you kill my kind. Of course, you'll need to be a little more tractable in the process."

I raised one eyebrow incredulously. Who the fuck did this guy think he was?

"I watched you hunt in Kansas last month, Mr. Martin," he continued. "I do not know exactly what transpired in that tunnel, but I do know that you locked yourself into a confined space with a healthy vampire with a reputation for brutality, and killed him in less than five minutes. I checked, I don't know how you did it, but there was nothing left of him but white ash and those ingenious metal spikes of yours! How do you manage to penetrate our flesh with only regular human strength? You may not realize it, Mr. Martin, but that is extremely impressive."

"I do good work," was my measured response. This was very strange. I had not detected him in Kansas at all. They must have been watching me for a while, then.

"After the mess in San Francisco," He continued, "Sloppy work, that; my people sent me to find and eliminate you." I stiffened a little at that, my hand slowly maneuvering to the butt of the Redhawk in my left armpit.

"Relax, Mr. Martin," he said, "If I wanted you dead, I would have made my move. But unfortunately, ours is not a terribly scientific race, and I still haven't figured out how to attack you without getting one of those horrible little shocks I've observed. You cannot possibly be triggering them yourself, can you? By the way, clever as that is, it will not protect you forever, you know."

I had to chuckle a little bit at that, "So far, so good, though, Mr. Frost!"

"Your logic is unassailable, Mr. Martin," was his good-natured response. This one was obscenely likable. He continued jovially, "Observing you at work I began to realize that you were very unique. Here is a little tidbit about our race you may not have been aware of. Each of us will generally develop unique talents of our own when we are turned; based upon our skills or idiosyncrasies as a human. If one was an overly intuitive human, they may end up a clairvoyant vampire. An excessively fast human will be a remarkably fast vampire." He got very close to me and slowly enunciated, "A man who is uniquely gifted at killing vampires as a human? Well, there are those of us who wonder what he would be like if turned. Imagine it: Our strength, our speed, our longevity, and our durability all at your disposal! You would be a force of nature!"

My skin prickled. I was being tempted by the devil himself with the power to crush my enemies. How many men had stood at this same crossroads, and how did history remember them? It was very compelling. "Force of nature, Mr. Frost?" I cracked my knuckles, "And exactly who would reap this whirlwind?" I asked quietly, "Your enemies? Mine? Who controls me after the change? What do I become?" Niestche may have been a madman, but he gave good advice, "'He who would fight monsters should take care, lest he become one himself' Mr. Frost. I do not see how becoming my worst enemy will help me find my peace."

I let him see my eyes. If they are at all empathic, as I suspect, then let him feel my resolution, unfettered by caution or pragmatism! "You think I am trying to kill all the vampires, Mr. Frost? That is inaccurate. This has nothing to do with killing every vampire, as you will just make more, and doing so won't change anything that has happened. This is about my gift to your race: the gift of fear. I will give you and everyone like you a reason to hide during the day. To stop me you must kill me. Do you hear that, Mr. Frost? This ends with my death, because life no longer means anything to me. Your kind saw to that."

I sat back and gave him a wry chuckle, "If you make me immortal, then my crusade will never end, my journey will never end, and my pain will never end. You are offering me eternal suffering, Mr. Frost, and I think I will decline."

Frost's good humor seemed somewhat dampened, "I see. If I cannot persuade you with immortality, then perhaps reason will be more effective."

He pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose, as if he had a headache or a particularly troublesome child to deal with. It was a strangely human gesture, and I couldn't help but be amused. "Mr. Martin," He began, "I was one of the greatest hunters of men who ever lived. Kings and emperors employed my services whenever their sense of expediency overwhelmed their personal honor. I was a great assassin as a human, and as a vampire I am the most dangerous creature you have ever met. Ironically, despite having killed hundreds of men as a human, I have not killed a single human since I was turned. I feed on only animals." He snorted, "Killing humans is an affront to my skills. We are both killers, Mr. Martin, and I would not insult our craft by lying to you about something so trivial."

He leaned back in the bench with a thoughtful, faraway look on his face, "I do not want to waste your skills by killing you, Mr. Martin. Much could be," he paused, a moment, searching for the correct word, "accomplished, with your assistance." He stopped and gave me a measuring gaze, "You have a great opportunity tonight, Mr. Martin. You can choose to be St. Martin de Porres, and work with me to improve racial harmony by killing those who are truly evil among both our races, or you can choose to be St. Martin de Tours and we will go to war, simply for the sake of fighting. We can waste our lives and let history choose the victor."

His eyes narrowed and a low growl escaped his chest. He seemed to grow and widen in front of me as his lips curled back into a feral grin. His youthful, almost cherubic face contorted into the remorseless façade of a timeless, natural-born killer. The transformation was remarkable, and the visage terrifying. It was a stark contrast to his affable nature up to this point. His voice was no longer amiable or friendly, but the hushed snarl of a tiger at work in its natural habitat, "I have not killed a human being in 400 years, Mr. Martin. None have ever been worth it. I have been killing vampires, and werewolves, and things you can't even imagine since your great-great-great-great grandfather was a boy, and no petty, mewling, flimsy human can compare to that." His face was only inches from mine now, "But I think you will prove to be a very satisfying kill, Mr. Martin. You are like me, and that will be a strange thing; to kill one so much like myself. I have often wondered how I would face death, and killing you may be the only way to know the answer." He leaned back, breaking the intense stare-down between us, and some of his previous composure returned, "It does not matter to me what you choose to do. Help me, or die by my hand. You decide. I will know your decision by your actions. If you kill Rafael tonight, than I know you are not with me, and I will come for you. If Rafael lives come sunrise, then I guess we are friends and I will contact you. Good night, Mr. Martin."

He stood up and walked away briskly. In a few moments I had lost his silhouette in the gathering twilight, and was left by myself on the bench. I did not linger there, but quickly stood up and made my way back to the hotel.

There was much to do.

I did not trust Frost. Vampires are altogether too convincing as liars. Killing Velasquez was a foregone conclusion as well. Velasquez was more than just a vampire; he was a local crime lord and overall rat bastard. He used his mundane criminal enterprises to mask his feeding habits, as well as arrange for a steady food supply to other vampires within his organization. Striking him meant cutting off easy food supply to many of the vampires in the northern US and Southern Canada. No amount of threatening or cajoling from Mr. Frost was going to earn this joker a reprieve from me. This is also why Frost probably wasn't eager to lose him yet; a test to see if I could be controlled. I've never tested well.

Either way, Frost's machinations were immaterial to me. Velasquez was going down. The problem was: when would Frost come for me? He appeared to be very good at this sort of thing, and for the first time, I truly questioned whether I was prepared for the battle.

My schedule called for me to take down Velasquez at 10:30 PM. He was a creature of habit, and he routinely partied from 11PM to the break of dawn. I picked a night where he probably was not going to feed, and this left him alone in his hotel suite for about a half hour while he prepped for another evening of debauchery and excess.

I debuted a new piece of equipment on him, and it worked beautifully. It's tricky, but with adequate prep time, it would give me good service in the future. Velasquez was young for a vampire, and relatively careless to boot. He was too high on his own invincibility to see the threat coming, and he was unprepared for my traps. Taking him down was one of my easier operations. I could not finish him at the hotel (too public), but with the help of a laundry cart, I moved his twitching body to the hotel basement and out through the loading dock. Once there, it was no trouble at all to load him into the van and make my escape. Once I was safely back to my campsite in the Montana woods, I put the white phosphorus to him and let him burn. Solid work, if I do say so myself.

Now I had only to wait for Mr. Frost.

I knew he would be coming. I suspect he knew about Velasquez's death by midnight, but not sooner. If my suspicions were accurate, Frost would have had to keep a little distance from Velasquez for fear of discovery. Vampires trust each other very little, and Frost seemed like the kind of guy even vampire's got spooked by. This gave me some time to prepare.

I moved to the back of my cave. It was located in the side of a steep rock formation deep in the Montana pine forests. It had only one entrance, and the approach was very difficult. Terrain was rarely an issue for vampires, but the cover was thick, and at least he would not be able to come at me full speed. I activated the mines along the approach, and set the perimeter motion detectors. I rigged the cave entrance with claymores, and put on all my armor. This was the most defensible position I could manage, and it was a good one. You always want to choose your terrain carefully when dealing with vampires.

Something about Frost had me spooked, so I added all the extra ballistic plating I had brought to my regular armor, and put on the helmet. All told, the entire getup weighed almost 65 pounds, but the weight was distributed evenly and balanced perfectly. Like a Teutonic knight with his custom-made plate mail, I was only marginally impinged in motion or speed. Of course, no knight was ever so well protected as I was in my high-tech cocoon of plastic and steel. I slipped into the overcoat, checked the batteries, holstered the Redhawk, loaded my pouches with various grenades, and settled down to wait.

The first mine went off at 1:45 AM. How he got past the motion sensors, I'll never know. The tremendous explosion startled me and shook the cave. I heard Frost's booming laughter from outside.

"Nicely done, Mr. Martin, I missed that one!" For a man who had just stepped on a 4-lb anti-personnel mine, he sounded remarkably unperturbed. I had known that he would smell the mines, so I had put out so many that even he would not have been able to pick them all out individually.

"Come out, Mr. Martin!" I heard Frost's voice dangerously close to the entrance of my cave. "I know you have all sorts of nastiness waiting for me in there, so I am disinclined to come in, but then again, I suppose you are disinclined to come out as well!" He laughed some more, "You know, Mr. Martin, that I can wait out here much longer than you can wait in there!" More laughter.

He was right; I would lose a siege. It's not something I had the opportunity to deal with much in this line of work. Usually, a vampire is so angry or hungry, they just sort of charge at me. They are generally very confident that I can't hurt them and so they do not exercise caution. I had hoped for a similar case tonight, but Frost was obviously more refined.

Despite my circumstances, I found myself enjoying this interaction. It seemed absurd, but I could not help but revel in the possibility of this battle. Frost was obviously older and more cunning than my usual prey, and for the first time I really expected to die. This was exhilarating, precisely because I did not WANT to die. Since I started this crusade, I had told myself it was just my way of committing suicide and seeking justice at the same time. I embraced the possibility, nay inevitability, of the death that awaited me. Now that I was facing it, I wanted to beat it. I have not feared death for many years now, but I had been running a slow footrace against it out of spite. At least now, as I faced my greatest foe, I could see death approaching, and I was eager to test myself against it. Come and get me you son of a bitch…

My mind raced. No matter how fast he came into the cave, he was not faster than the speed of light, so the sensors would trip and the mines would go off. He was not faster than the speed of sound, either, so the blasts and shrapnel would hit him. The variable was whether or not he was durable enough to ride that out and still have enough in the tank to take me out. Frost was taking no chances, so that led me to believe he was not sure of his own limits, either. Vampire strength, speed and durability are not infinite. They are limited by age, skill, and the amount of feeding the vampire has done. The fastest way to drain those energy reserves is to do massive damage. Regeneration and damage repair slow vampires down significantly. This is my bread and butter when I work. My old jujitsu teacher always taught me that when you are faced with an opponent that is too big or skilled or difficult to defeat, you do not attack the whole opponent. If they are stronger, or more skilled, or otherwise superior, then attacking them directly is futile. What you should do is attack a small, manageable piece of the opponent and work on that. In the case of vampires, I do not try to kill them, killing them is far too difficult; I try to damage them, and that is much simpler.

But how do I hurt him if he won't come in the cave? I could hear him out there singing "Danny Boy" quietly to himself; mocking me and reminding me he was still out there at the same time. The Redhawk was usually a very good start, but outside the cave he had a lot of room to move around. Hitting a vampire with a bullet outdoors was a losing proposition. They are too fast and their reflexes are too good. My other gear consisted of some 40mm HE rounds and a "bloop gun" launcher for them, some C4 and detonators, an AA-12 automatic combat shotgun, CS grenades, flash-bangs, and some other assorted non-lethal ordnance. The single shot grenade launcher was not going to be loads of help here. I needed him to hold still long enough for me to hurt him bad enough, and the low-speed 40mm grenades would be laughably easy to dodge for him.

My eyes fell on one item. It was the device I had put to good use on Velasquez earlier. The beginnings of a desperate idea began to foment in the back of my head. With this in mind I resolved myself to going out there and dealing with Mr. Frost the old-fashioned way; and I intended to win. It was a silly, macho idea, but I was out of options and it sounded like fun. To hell with the consequences, it was either stay in here until I starved to death or he figured out a way to get in, or go out there and have it out with the bastard. I began to work quickly on my preparations, while starting a running harangue of Frost to keep him occupied.

"Hey, Frosty! Why did you want to keep Rafael alive anyway? He was a dirtbag and you know it! All this talk of doing good and you keep that piece of shit alive? What's the story?"

"Mr. Martin, why does it matter? You must come out at some point, and then I will kill you, so why bother?" Frost sounded bored, but he was still very close to the entrance. I worked faster.

"It's been bugging me. You gave me a big speech about what we could accomplish, and yet a white-slaving, drug-peddling hedonist like that is given a pass? It doesn't add up. Maybe if you were more forthcoming, I could have trusted you." I was nearly done.

"Martin, you may not realize this, but you can't just go around killing 'bad guys' willy-nilly. There are rules, and stratagems. My people had plans for mister Velasquez that you have now ruined. Furthermore, the blame for his death will be upon us if I do not bring them your corpse to prove our innocence. I wish to see order and honor returned to our race, but what you will bring is strife and civil war. You must be controlled or destroyed, Mr. Martin…you are too damned unpredictable."

"That is a fact, Mr. Frost." I strode out of the cave and stared levelly down on Frost from the lip of the cave. He grinned up at me.

"My, aren't you the dashing one! A knight in plastic armor!" he exclaimed when he saw me. I was covered head to toe in black nomex armor. It was periodically and liberally braced with ballistic plating, and underneath it was sophisticated reactive gel. I wore a helmet and gorget of the same. My helmet was patterned after the kabuto samurai wore in feudal Japan. It protected my head and covered the back of my neck all the way down to my cervical vertebrae. The facemask had thick goggles reminiscent of German mensur face gear, and an armored rebreather mask. For all intents and purposes, I closely resembled a reject from a bad sci-fi movie, but altogether it represented nearly a million dollars' worth of the most sophisticated armor in the world. More than one vampire had broken both claw and spirit against this armor, and I was about to add another, I hoped.

"So this is how you survived this long!" He seemed almost gleeful, "Absolutely amazing! I suppose if I just pop up there to break your neck, I'll get one of those nasty shocks, won't I? No, thank you."

Faster than I could blink he grabbed a 40-lb piece of the igneous landscape and threw it at me. It impacted dead center on my chest and threw me onto my back. He was on top of me before I had settled and tossed me down the ravine away from my cave. "You won't be dragging me in there tonight, Mr. Martin! I know what happens to little flies when they come into YOUR parlor!"

When I hit the ground it was only by purest dumb luck that I did not land on one of my own mines. I looked up to find I had been tossed nearly 75 feet downhill. Frost was on me again instantly and lifted me by the helmet. He twisted the helmet furiously, attempting to break my neck, but the helmet and gorget are connected, and he only succeeded in twisting my body painfully. Five seconds into this battle and it was already gone to hell. Wonderful.

"Your armorer is a genius Mr. Martin!" he cackled, and slammed me into the ground with bone-crushing force. My armor was designed for exactly this sort of abuse. It's sort of an inevitable side-effect of my chosen career, but Frost's strength was simply enormous. It was nothing like any other vampire I had faced. He was really pushing all the limits of my gear.

"It seems, Mr. Martin, that your nasty little electrical device is broken!" He tossed me against a boulder with enough force to turn my ribs to splinters if not for the gel under-layer of my armor. "For you see, no matter how I thrash you about, I remain un-shocked! How shocking!" He laughed at his own joke, for that alone I was going to kill him. "More's the pity for you, I should think!"

It was true that there had been no discharge, but that was because he had not tripped the sensors while grounded. He kept fucking throwing me around, when what I needed was for him to be touching me when the sensors tripped. By hitting me with the rock first, he thought he had damaged it. It was very clever of him, as it precluded him having to touch me, but it had led him to an incorrect conclusion: my batteries were showing full charge and both capacitors were ready to fire. Unfortunately, Frost was not cooperating. He was smart enough to avoid grappling with me, as well. He had obviously done his homework, and a cautious vampire was something new and terrifying for me. Instead of being a charging lion into the hunter's trap, he was a frustrated seagull trying to open an oyster by dashing it against the rocks. I was not enjoying the role of oyster one bit; I had to get him to fight me up close.

I managed to get my hand on a grenade in my belt just as Frost threw me again. It was all I could do to hang on to it when I hit another rock. My armor was beginning to show signs of failure, as viscous white fluid began to weep from the seams. Some of the gel packets were starting to rupture, and that was a serious problem. Without them, the impacts would rapidly turn my bones and organs to mush. I was running out of time. Frost was right on top of me again when I managed to pull the pin. I didn't even know what kind of grenade it was, and I didn't care, I needed two fucking seconds reprieve from the thrashing I was taking.

I was rewarded with a loud "pop" and a large cloud of CS tear gas. Frost immediately dropped me and staggered back, sputtering. Without a pause I hauled the Redhawk from the holster and put three rounds right into his face. The effect was rather less dramatic than I had hoped. Typically, the 400-grain depleted uranium bullets rip through even vampire flesh to leave horrible exit wounds; however Frost seemed to be made of some unusually stern stuff. I expected most of his head to be removed and/or pulverized; what I got was three holes in his face and some ugly, oozing discharge. That was about it.

He howled like a wild creature and lashed out at me with all his speed and force. While I certainly hadn't done as much damage as I would have liked, I had succeeded in blinding him completely, and this saved my life. His blows missed me by a wide margin and gave me the time I needed to put a round through his left knee. Again, his strength was astounding, as the he managed to stay on his feet after having the joint all but destroyed by the powerful revolver.

Before I could get off a fifth shot, his hand found a rock the size of a microwave oven and threw it in my direction, missing by a wide margin. I thought nothing of it until a large explosion from behind threw me forward and into Frost. Clever bastard; he couldn't see me but he could still smell the mines! When I collided with Frost he seized me with a vice-like grip and snarled, "I think I'll keep the pistol as a trophy, Mr. Martin." The Redhawk fell from my numbed fingers as his grip on my wrist tightened enough to stiffen the gel and cut off the blood to my hand.

He raised me above his head and I mentally prepared for what would happen next. He was blind until his eyes healed, so I knew he would not throw me away again and risk losing me. That was the good news. The bad news was that this was going to hurt like hell. With tremendous force he slammed me against the ground. My poor, abused armor barely survived and I blacked out. However, Frost's good, tight, grip provided a perfect conduit for the 250,000 volts of electricity discharged by the capacitors in my coat to travel at tremendous speed through his hands and out through his perfectly grounded feet. I don't remember the discharge itself (the impact from his slam had me completely out of it for at least a few seconds), but when I came to, Frost was howling on the ground a few feet away from me. Both his hands had been vaporized by the blast, and charred stumps were all that remained.

From under my coat I removed the device I had prepared and waited for his charge. Against most other vampires, this is the point when I would probably move in to finish my target; but based on what I had observed of my opponent, I knew Frost wasn't done yet. While other vampires had gone down with less damage than what he had endured, Frost was special…I had figured that out already. If I had not hurt him enough, he would still have the speed and strength to crush me. As it stood, my armor was in very rough shape, and I had no confidence in its ability to continue absorbing this kind of punishment. No, I would play it cautiously. Sure enough, only few seconds after the shock, his cries quickly became chuckles as he rose to face me.

"Ohhhhh, very good, Mr. Martin!" He said in a low, dangerous voice, "you are very good, indeed!" His face was beginning to heal, but his eyes were milky white gelatinous orbs, and he still appeared to be blind. His grin was terrifying. "Don't worry, Mr. Martin. I can hear your breathing now, and smell that delightfully clever liquid from your armor. Most intriguing technology you have, sir. Is that why your bones don't break? I knew the shell was going to be tough, but I could not figure out why you were not being crushed inside of it. Now I know. Very impressive."

What was he waiting for?

"Mr. Martin, I will be frank with you," Frost sat down heavily on the ground, "I really have no interest in killing you beyond professional curiosity. I was never sent to kill you, and I did not care one whit about Rafael Velasquez." He sighed and leaned against a rock. "The truth is, Mr. Martin, forever is a long time, and I have no hobbies. It is true that I was a great assassin, and I have longed for a quarry that could make me feel like the old days. When some of my race pointed me in your direction, I was very excited." He chuckled and then coughed, "You did not disappoint, Mr. Martin, that is a fact. But now we find ourselves at the ends of our respective ropes. I don't think your magnificent armor can take a whole lot more abuse, and I know that most of my energy will be needed to heal my face, hands and knee. We are two tigers that have wounded each other far too grievously to continue. One of us will die if we keep at it, and for the first time in 300 years, I am not sure it won't be me. I don't know what other nasty tricks you have up your sleeve, and you can't be sure how much strength I have left. You've already figured out that I am tougher than the usual lot you tussle with."

He was suddenly on his feet, and I braced myself for my last gambit: a monofilament line stretched between two tungsten handles in a garrote. Hopefully, he'd be slowed enough by his injuries for me to get it in place when he charged. The high tensile strength of the line plus his speed should be sufficient to amputate any part of him that hit it. Hopefully, I'd get him before the impact killed me.

Frost did not look like he was about to charge, though, "But I find myself realizing something Mr. Martin: I don't really want to die yet. Oh, I had thought I'd be OK with it, even that I wanted it. I know I am not afraid of it, but suddenly I think I am not yet resigned to death. I find myself thinking that perhaps this tedious existence is going to get a little less tedious with you around, sir." He sighed again, "So I offer you this: Your secrets are safe with me, Mr. Martin. I will not discuss your wonderful little toys with my kind. I will not interfere with your hunts in any way. I will tell my people that I could not best you and that I no longer care to try. This will make you a legend among my people, I assure you. My skills are much respected, and you having survived me will make the very thought of you the most terrifying thing in the world to the vampire race." His mangled face contorted into the approximation of a sterner countenance, "In exchange for this, you will be more selective in your quarry. Those of my kind who do not feed on humans will be left alone, and even protected by you. You will be sure to avoid their homes, and hunt only when you are absolutely sure your prey is a murderer. If you do this, I will not come for you, and I may even aid you when it serves my purposes. If you do not, if you kill even one 'vegetarian' vampire, then I will come for you again, and we will play this game to the end. I trust we have an understanding, Mr. Martin? Otherwise, we can continue or little waltz whenever you are ready."

I allowed myself to breathe for a moment. Could I do this? What would define my crusade? St Martin de Tours was the patron Saint of soldiers; was I fighting a war against the entire vampire race? Did it matter what they ate? They were all still vampires, after all. St. Martin de Porres would have battled only the sin itself. What kind of killer would I be? Am I a warrior, or an exterminator? I thought back to my burning house, and what I left inside there. I thought about the little brunette girl in Kansas and what I felt when I told her my story. Am I really just the Ogre? Could I be more? Do I want to?

I looked over at Frost. We really were much alike. He had had the same revelation battling me that I had battling him: we were not quite ready to give up the ghost just yet. Despite our personal pain and desire for some sort of iconic death, we had each accidentally discovered a reason to keep living. When I looked at Frost, I could see the same indecision, and even trepidation (dare I say fear?) about what would happen going forward that I myself faced. It is one thing to try to die, and quite another to try to live.

"I believe we have an understanding, Mr. Frost," I replied after a long pause.

"Excellent!" his jovial tone had returned as abruptly as it fled. With the understanding between us solidified, the terrifying vampire assassin was gone, and in his place materialized a chatty British dandy. I swear that was the most terrifying transformation of all. "You will not object if I stay here until my eyesight returns and my knee heals?" He began to gimp towards my cave. "The hands are going to take days to return. Mind those mines! I don't suppose you'd tell me how the electrical device works? I thought I had it figured out, but," he waved his stumps," I guess not! And that revolver! What a thing of beauty! .454 isn't it? Excellent choice! It's exactly what I'd have used for this sort of thing. Oh, and you simply must tell me who makes that delightful armor of yours? The kabuto is a nice touch…"

I groaned, "I should have killed you…"

His laughter boomed through the predawn gloom and echoed across the Montana wilderness.

Camping in CT

It was nearly noon when my van finally bounced and rattled up the old logging trail to the campsite. It was one of those delightfully brisk, gray December days in Eastern Connecticut; when the very air itself threatens snow, but nary has a solitary flake arrived yet. I used to love those days as a kid; the days when you just knew that there would be no school in the morning, but the marvelous little white motes had yet to show. Now, with the halcyon days of my youth behind me, I just wanted to get unpacked before I was snowed in at the campsite. I wasn't particularly upset about the potential for being stuck; I knew I'd be a few days here at the least. My gear was a wreck, and my recent encounter with one Mr. Frost had all but destroyed my armor. Harold was gonna be so pissed about that, unfortunately. The suit was his masterpiece, and he takes it personally every time I scratch the damn thing.

The stupid suit always took a beating, but this time it was a nearly destroyed. It would need a complete overhaul; and furthermore, I needed new tricks. That Frost character had almost figured out the shock batteries, and mines were just too easily detected. Not to mention the fact that these higher-order vampires were just too tough and strong. I needed to re-think some of my strategies, if I wanted to go after more substantial foes.

With a sigh I opened the door and stepped out of my snot-green 1985 Chevy Gladiator conversion van. Oh yeah…million –dollar armor, and van worth three grand; that's how I roll. As soon as I left the heavily-heated vehicle, the cold air hit me square in the face. It was revitalizing. So much of what I do is about darkness, and death, that these rare moments of community with life are far more substantial to me than I'd ever realized. When you dance with the devil himself every night, you damn well learn to appreciate the cool winter breeze. I stretched in place for a moment, just working the kinks out of my sore shoulders and enjoying the scenery. We were deep in the woods of eastern Connecticut, surrounded on all sides by two thousand acres of swamps, thick forests, and old glacial rock ledges. In front of me was an Adirondack lean-to (which is just a folksy name for a log cabin with three walls and an open façade), and a fire pit with a wood shed. I had camped here many times as a young man, and its solitude and remoteness made it ideal for my purposes now, both tactically and emotionally.

I walked into the lean-to and sat down on the low canvas cot inside. The place was clean, and mostly devoid of dust, so I knew that either Sam or Harold was already here. I stomped my feet on the plank floor and shouted, "Come on up, assholes! I ain't unloading this shit by myself!" I was rewarded a few seconds later by the sound of the bolts unlocking and the cleverly concealed hatch opening.

A four-by-four foot section of the floor flipped open on hydraulic pistons revealing a steep stairway to an underground bunker. The sound of footsteps on the metal stairs told me it was Harold who was coming up. Like a cartoon mole, his round, bespectacled face emerged from the open hole in the floor, and he grinned at me warily.

"How bad is it?" was his greeting.

"Great to see you too, Harold. Come see for yourself," Oh man, he was not going to like this! We strolled over to the back of the van and I opened the doors. I dragged out the large wooden crate and placed it on the frozen ground. Quickly working the fasteners, I wrestled the lid off and revealed the condition of Harold's masterpiece.

The cuirass that covered my torso was fitted in two molded pieces of Nomex on Kevlar weave, with seams under my armpits and down my sides. These seams had split and the underlying reactive gel pockets had ruptured. The ballistic plate pouches were mostly torn, despite being made of Kevlar. The Nomex structure of the piece was mostly intact, but serious stress areas were showing on the chest and sides.

The leggings were no better. The reactive gel had leaked out through ruptured seams on both thighs and the seat, and the stiff armor plates were cracked and deformed.

"Ho-Lee shit" was all Harold could say when he saw it. He turned his scruffy face to me and asked, "What happened? Did you take on a whole group? Get hit by a bus? Land on one of your own mines?"

"One. Vampire." I held up my index finger to emphasize the point, "One."

"Jeezis!" exclaimed Harold, "How is that even possible? Nothing we've seen so far should be able to do this kind of damage," he gave me a stern look, "until now I guess. Are you alright?"

I grinned, "Of course, Harry! I ain't lucky enough to die just yet!" I lifted my shirt and showed him the purple-black bruising over most of my ribs and lower back, "After the gel packets started to rupture, it got bad. Fortunately I am as resourceful as I am good-looking."

Harold snorted, "I agree that you are neither resourceful nor good-looking, Martin. Thankfully, you are alive, and whatever monster thrashed my state-of-the-art armor is dead."

"Uhmmm….about that…" I started, "yeah…he's not dead, actually." I did my best to appear sheepish.

"Fucking great. Let's just unload the gear, asshole."

When everything was inside, I related the tale of my disastrous Montana hunt. Despite nearly wreaking the gear, I managed to kill one vampire and form a tentative alliance with another. Of course, it was an alliance based entirely on each participants' lack of confidence in their ability to destroy the other, which means it was about as reliable as a minimum-wage teen-aged employee. Still, it may prove beneficial.

Far more disconcerting to Harold and me was the concept of vampires arranging pre-positioned food sources. The now-deceased (re-deceased?) Rafael Velazquez had a system for acquiring vast quantities of blood and storing it. Furthermore, he was managing this without attracting media or law-enforcement attention. I didn't like it.

Harold placed it in very pragmatic terms. "It's a natural evolution," he started, "any system that is allowed to operate unobstructed will evolve more advanced techniques for survival. Humans are hunter-gatherers by nature, but when was the last time you went out and killed your own supper?"

The man had a point. "Stalking and killing individual humans is a risky and inefficient method for acquiring food. It makes perfect sense that clever vampires will have developed a system for mass-producing their food sources; almost certainly for profit I might add."

"Logistically, this means maintaining and/or farming viable humans and regularly extracting their blood. That's easy enough. Doing it without being noticed? That gets tougher. I'll have Sam start digging through the Red Cross records and all blood-gathering charities and companies. Let's look for something anomalous."

When Harold got going, it was pretty hard to stop him. That is the way of the ultra-brilliant. He had lost a mother and two sisters to vampires seven years ago, and had directed his not-inconsiderable resources towards the destruction of them ever since. Harold was a genius and self-made multi-millionaire who had deduced the nature of his family's death with astounding rapidity. A consummate strategist, he immediately discarded the thought of securing justice through mundane channels, and instead sought out the perfect instrument for his own revenge. That's how he found me. It was only through purest luck that he managed to find me before I killed myself going off half-cocked against a superhuman army all by myself. At that point in my life, I was an enraged old soldier looking to put the hurt out on my enemy and damned be the consequences; but Harold knew what it was going to take to wage an effective campaign, and he planned meticulously. Most of what we knew about vampires was a direct result of Harold's obsessive research and study. Certainly Harold's gift for strategy and ingenuity were second to none, but he lacked any skill for actual combat tactics, and was never really the rough-and-tumble type. That's where I came in.

His mechanical acumen and knack for weapons development blended extremely well with my combat and clandestine service experience. Harold knew how to make a plan, and I knew how to make it work. When we added the investigative and research skills of our third member, Sam, we ended up with a perfect synergy of skills and abilities. By combining technology, strategy, research, and ingenuity, we hit the vampires where they are weakest: complacency.

Vampires are not terribly creative or clever. This is not to say that they are stupid, but theirs is a society without disease, adversity, infirmity, or any real problems. If not for the institutionalized murder, vampire life would be damned idyllic. They are an organic system with very little reason to innovate or evolve. Without necessity, there is very little incentive for invention, and as such, the vampire society has very few radical thinkers, creative strategists, inventors, or innovators. They are already as evolved as they need to be, and thus they tend to be very complacent and resistant to change. This is the complete opposite for our little group. We would be helpless against the sheer physical and organizational superiority of the vampire race without the technology of Harold, the research of Sam, or the tactical skills of Martin. It was a concept that had worked, so far.

We needed to elevate our game though. After five years of killing individual vampires, all we had managed to accomplish was to eliminate the young, slow and stupid ones. We still hadn't even been able to find an elder vampire, or even scratch the surface of their organization. Thankfully for me, the next phase of our operation was mostly up to Sam and Harold, so I got to rest up. My injuries, though dramatic to look upon, were not serious enough to require hospitalization. As such I spent the next two weeks resting and training.

Training was constant for me. Vampires had enough physical advantages without me being out of shape on top of it. An abusive set of hobbies and careers had left me with some nagging injuries now that I was past thirty-five, and every year it got harder to stay in peak condition. There was the tendonitis in my right shoulder from repeated dislocations during my competitive judo career as a teen-ager, my bifurcated meniscus from a bad parachute jump in Afghanistan, and permanent arthritis in my hands form a spirited if ultimately unimpressive amateur boxing sojourn in college. We certainly can't forget the permanent back pain from a freak weightlifting accident in my late twenties, either. That one was my least favorite. The tightness and nagging, dull ache bothered me just about every day. It was maddening.

After about a week at the campsite, which I had spent most of practicing with my various weapons and tools while my body recovered, I decided to go outside for a physical workout. My bruising had turned yellowish-green, indicating good healing, and I could finally breathe without pain. I decided to start with some light calisthenics, for a warm up. This alone brought fresh lighting-strikes of pain through my bruised ribs and damaged torso muscles. Goddamn I am getting too old for wet work. I should train some not-too-bright eighteen-year-old adrenaline junkie to do the rough stuff from now on. But I guess that would ruin the fun for me. More's the pity, I guess.

After the warm-up, I went to work on the heavy bag. There was no room in the bunker for a workout space, so I had to hang the bag from a tree. Yup, million-dollar equipment and I have to hang a ten-year-old canvas heavy bag from the limb of an old sycamore. We really need to discuss the budget around here. Something ain't right.

Soon, my muscles started to feel better as I ran through the combinations: Jab-cross, jab-cross-hook, jab-cross-hook-cross. Each blow thudding solidly against the canvas. At 220 pounds with a slightly soft middle, I was not the fastest fighter in the world, but I hit pretty hard (for a human). I was neither as young, nor as lean as I was in my youth, and despite the December chill, a light sweat began to form under my sweatshirt.

Jab-cross-hook-cross, my hands cried out, "Smack! Thud! Thwap! Thud!" answered the heavy bag.

Elbow-hook-overhand-hook, "Whump! Thwap! Pow! Thwap!"

The cadence was like a metronome in my head, and invisible opponents met their doom with each string of blows. Punches, kicks, elbows and knees blended into a carefully orchestrated symphony of destruction. I switched the rhythms to avoid predictability, and began working in circles around the bag, using footwork to carefully place myself at the opportune range for each blow.

This was my quiet place. This was the closest to meditation I ever got. There was nothing but the bag and the rhythm and me. Angles and vectors converged in my head, complex equations resolving effortlessly into intricate patterns of techniques designed to confuse, harry, and bludgeon the enemy into submission. It was a perfect science, and I was a Ph.D.

After a half hour, the sweat was pouring furiously from my pores and my breath escaped only in ragged gasps. Still I pushed. I cannot afford to be tired. I never get tired. "We don't GET tired! The other guy gets tired!" My old coach's words mocked me inside my head incited me to increase the speed and complexity of my combinations. I was a whirlwind, but never wild. Despite the speed and intensity, every blow landed exactly where and when I told it to.

At one hour my body gave up. I was hacking breaths and losing control of my arms and legs. My power had dropped to pathetic little taps, and the bag hardly wiggled in response to my impotent aggression. It was time to wrap it up. My body twinged with the promise of pain later, but for now the endorphins did their work admirably and I felt better than I had in days. I slumped down onto a bench made from an old tree trunk and opened a bottle of water. A few refreshing gulps later, and the rushing of blood in my ears had quieted enough for me to hear the sound of slow clapping from the woods.

The blood drained from my face when I saw the giant figure leaning against an old red oak fifty yards into the treeline. Dammit. Frost was here. He must have tracked me somehow. Not that I put a huge effort into losing any form of pursuit after Montana. I didn't usually leave anything alive behind me to follow, so evasion was never a high priority. That was an oversight that could cost us all.

"Very nice!" he boomed in his deep British accent. He was wearing brown corduroy pants and a white linen dress shirt. Like all vampires, the cold had no effect on him, and he made no pretense to needing a coat. He had his usual wide grin and cocky swagger in full effect, though his impish humor only just took the edge off his enormous stature. At fifty yards, he had already penetrated most of the defenses. I still did not know how he got past the motion sensors. He did it in Montana as well. I'd have to figure that out…if I lived.

"You have enormous potential, Mr. Martin! You are no pro, but your skills are quite impressive. With 50 or 60 years training, I could make you the greatest killer to ever walk this planet." Oh goody. Backhanded complements from a seven-foot immortal assassin. What next?

"What can I do for you, Frosty?" I attempted to sound glib, but I was secretly frantic. I had no armor on, and no weapons within reach. Stupid, stupid rookie mistake. This time it was I who was complacent. If Frost wanted to, he could end the threat to his people right now, and I couldn't stop him.

He wrinkled his face at the joke on his name, "You may have guessed that I have more than one reason to be here, Mr. Martin. The obvious reason was to let you know that I know where you go when you are not killing vampires. I also know about your companions and their contributions. But then again, that sort of thinly-veiled posturing would not be conducive to the health to our burgeoning partnership, now would it?"

Faster than I could blink, he was sitting on the log next to me. I took great pride in the fact that I neither flinched, nor defecated myself when he did so. Trust me, it took some effort. Nonchalantly, I offered him a bottle of water.

"No thanks, I ate on the way over." He grinned ferally, and I surmised that our abundant local whitetail deer population was now less one member. He continued without missing a beat, "Since we have determined that I am NOT here to imply that I can get to you whenever I need to," he cracked his knuckles and bounced his eyebrows knowingly, "then there is only the business at hand."

"Do tell, Mr. Frost," I gestured non-commitally.

"I have implied to you already that there are structures within our society that work with, and sometimes against, each other. There are families, clans, organizations, and other delineations within the overarching vampire community that all have their own agendas. Whenever we encounter each other or are forced to interact outside our sub-group, we all follow certain behavioral guidelines to avoid conflicts. You above all people, understand how destructive we can be as a species, and war amongst ourselves would be…shall we say, dramatic."

I shrugged, "I bet. The last thing you guys want to do is wake the neighbors, I gather?"

"You understand me exactly, Mr. Martin!" He was the very picture of jovial amicability. I swear that was the scariest thing about him. When I faced him, he had single-handedly trashed the armor that had withstood every other vampire I had faced; he laughed after stepping on a 4 lb anti-personnel mine, and took a round from the Redhawk in the face at point-blank range. Now he was sitting six inches from me and chatting like we were old college buddies. It was terrifying.

"Now the group I am working with currently has some issues with several other groups. Of course, I could go and handle the matter personally, but unfortunately, I enjoy a certain…notoriety amongst our race, and such action on my part could result in an escalation of tensions between several groups. This would never do, Mr. Martin, never do at all. But I surmised, since you and I are such good friends, and since I think you will find your little triumvirate in philosophical alignment with my group's needs..." His voice trailed off, expecting me to fill in the blanks.

It didn't matter whether it was 2009 or 1599, human or vampire, this little dance was always the same. How do you make the enemy of your enemy your ally? I was glad to know that some things were universal. "I see. You want me to take someone out for you, don't you?" I laughed. "Imagine that! Vampires sending a human to take care of another vampire! You gotta appreciate the irony of that, Mr. Frost!"

His own laughter dwarfed my own, "Mr. Martin, you have no idea how much mirth I myself enjoyed at the prospect you so succinctly stated!" His laughter shrunk to a chuckle, "But you are uniquely suited for this purpose, and I assure you, you will find it the sort of task you will take great relish in executing. It is a prize you might never come to without our assistance, and it is well worth the effort." He continued faster now, "Because of my notoriety, you now enjoy certain notoriety yourself." He leaned in close, "You now hold the honor of being the scariest thing in the world to the vampires. An honor I held, until recently. The best is that they don't even know WHAT you are! I have taken a lot of joy in building your legend, Mr. Martin. They suspect magic, or worse in how you operate. The fact that you are a normal human is simply unacceptable to them. They can't even fathom it." He leaned back and stretched, an oddly human gesture, "I have even kept your secret from my own people. It is simply too good a thing to give up right away. As a result, you have them all terrified now. They see you in every dark corner and under every bed. Even the werewolves are speculating about you now, and they hate us even more than you do. It has been a great pleasure building you up Mr. Martin, and the result is that you are now perfectly situated to rid us of our little problem, and do both of our races a great service in the process."

"I am glad to be such a source of mirth for you, Mr. Frost. Let's talk turkey, because it just so happens, that I may have need of you for something as well." If anyone knew how to get at the vampire blood distribution network, it would be Frost.

He tilted his head to one side and his grin grew even more (if possible), "I am sure we can help each other out, Mr. Martin. After all, we are the very best of friends, aren't we?"

"Absolutely, Mr. Frost!" I turned and called over my shoulder, "Harold, you can go back in now, it's OK."

Frost whirled around to find a grinning Harold thirty feet away in the lean-to holding a small remote in his right hand. Frost turned back to me with a look of alarm on his face. I winked and pointed to the woodshed. "Inside that shed is a Dylan minigun with motion and bio-recognition sensors tuned to your unique physiology, Mr. Frost. It has 100,000 rounds of tungsten jacketed depleted uranium rounds in there. You are fast, but are you faster than a rifle bullet? You are tough, but are you tougher than 3000 rounds a minute?" I let my own face get smug, "Maybe you are, maybe you aren't, but if you come here again without calling first, you might have to find out."

His grin returned, but not quite so blithely, and when he spoke his voice had an incredulous timbre to it, "You had me covered the whole time!"

"Well, it took about 15 seconds for Harold to calibrate the sensors to your biological signature, but after that, yeah." I stood up and stretched. "Tell me how your people acquire blood and distribute it, and then we will discuss your little problem." The fact that I had absolutely no idea exactly when Harold had realized I was in trouble was something I wasn't going to mention. Harold could have still been calibrating it when I noticed him for all I know.

He looked at the shed, sniffed, and shook his head wryly, "You are a particularly terrifying human, Mr. Martin."

"It's a gift, Mr. Frost, a gift."

Four on One

I absolutely hate hunting in tropical areas. Yet, here I was. While the winter evenings in Miami may not be the hottest in the world, they positively swelter underneath thirty air-tight pounds of body armor. The only thing better than collecting cramps in the prone position watching a warehouse all night long is basting in your own juices while doing it. De-licious!

It was four AM and a slight drizzle was putting the excruciating cap on an otherwise mind-numbing evening. My erstwhile informant, the giant vampire assassin named "Frost," had led me to my particularly disturbing target du jour. I don't trust Frost yet; it's just as likely that he'll lead me into a trap as anything else, but his info seemed good on this one. Having Frost show up at the bunker rattled my cage as well. We were definitely going to need some contingency plans. Self-recrimination aside, what really pissed me off is that I probably never would have found this guy without his help. I really was not comfortable with how much we were coming to rely on him.

According to Frost, Marcus Antonio purported to be an Italian immigrant, with a rather lucrative importing business. He moved mostly in medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, which seemed benign enough; except that it was a perfect cover for trafficking in "feeders."

Feeders… I consider myself a man who has seen some horrific things. I have been hunting vampires for five years now, and in that time I have observed behavior that was so repugnant it defies easy description from the alive and undead both. But this was the most nauseating thing I had encountered so far.

"Feeders" are human beings kept by vampires for the exclusive purpose of providing steady blood supply. Frost had explained to me that vampires will harvest these people (often homeless) and permanently damage the brains, turning them into vegetables. Vampires do not like drugs in the blood, so the brain damage is often done by drilling into the cerebellum indiscriminately to destroy the frontal lobe. The victims are then tube-fed and kept alive in perpetuity to make blood.

It was one of the most horrific things I have ever heard, and thinking about it made the bile rise in my throat and a growl start building deep in my chest. Well now, that's certainly unlike me: wrath and disgust are luxuries I can ill afford in my line of work. It does not behoove me to be emotional, when pursuing creatures that can smell fear, and hear anger. When I am on the job I need to be a machine: a machine that hunts animals. They are the animals. Don't misunderstand me either, this is not a philosophical consideration…The disconnection and distinction is important, dare I say, crucial for my survival. My only advantage over my prey is my calm, cold, detachment. The day I try to match their savagery is gonna be a rough day for me.

The ridiculousness of this train of thought gave birth to a wan smirk, and a thankfully, a sardonic end to my reverie. Fucking melodrama; I've never had a use for it before, and I certainly don't have time for it now. I must be getting old. Nothing left to do but hang up the suit and tell boring stories to teenagers at high school assemblies from now on.

Nah. I got a few more hunts left in me. Hell, I'm just hitting my stride, really. For the thousandth time that night, I checked the Redhawk. I hefted the big revolver from its perch under my left armpit, and let my hand settle into its familiar place on the grip. I had christened it "Big Daddy" when I bought it for dear, boar, and elk so many years ago. A true .454 Casull, it was originally imagined as a hunting revolver for large and dangerous game. Factory rounds for this model deliver the same energy at 50 yards as a high-powered hunting rifle. Tragically, that wasn't good enough for my purposes; a flick of my thumb released the crane and the cylinder swung out smoothly and silently, revealing the six 410-grain, .454 Casull rounds nestled neatly in their chambers. Steel-jacketed, with a depleted uranium core, each unique hand-made round is capable of passing through an inch of steel before dropping a charging rhino. Since bullets don't really do a lot of damage to vampires, they generally don't put a lot of effort into avoiding being shot. More than one vampire has found (much to his/her dismay) that the Redhawk is altogether a different animal than the usual ballistic nuisance. A vampire's highly dense skin and tissue is tough enough to minimize the penetration and trauma of regular bullets, but it might as well be made of soft cheddar when Big Daddy speaks.

The Redhawk and its destructive payload is the only bit of my kit that I maintain myself. I wouldn't be allowed to touch anything if Harold had his way. Nevertheless, every spring, cog, cam, screw and sear had been lovingly nudged, adjusted, filed or modified by me, and as such I felt a special kinship and an ultimate reliance on the big lug.

A gentle tap from my thumb snapped the cylinder back into the frame, and five degrees of rotation brought a round into battery with a soft, almost imperceptible click. It found its way back into the holster under my left armpit almost of its own accord, endless repetition making the motion completely subconscious.

I sighed. Past 4 AM and my target was still a no-show. This guy was old, and cautious. He kept very few patterns, did not socialize much, and having his own supply of feeders, he did not go out to hunt. When he did venture out, he did so with no less than three vampire bodyguards. I did not like my chances against more than one vamp at a time, so many of my tactics did not apply to Antonio, and it was becoming frustrating. I was going to have to try something different. Different meant unfamiliar. Unfamiliar meant dangerous. I hate "different," and "unfamiliar," but "dangerous" I was fairly used to at this point.

As much as I loved spending all night outside a warehouse waiting for someone to walk into my carefully constructed traps, it looked like I was going to have to get proactive. I spent the next day sleeping and planning. Inspiration struck me just before sundown: I had been going about this all wrong.

It was a question of defining victory conditions. I did not need to hunt down and kill Antonio per se. Killing Antonio certainly removed one vampire from the mix, but that was all it did. If I disrupted his operation however, not only would it flush Antonio out, but it would eliminate much of the food supply for the Southeast US. Now those vampires who relied on the easy, no-risk food supply would be forced to come out of hiding to find food. Who knows how many lazy, complacent vampires would then be exposed, and thus ripe for the culling. That's what my old CO called a "target-rich environment."

My real problem was how to bring down the operation without attracting the wrong kind of attention. I did not really want to have to explain to the Department of Homeland Security why I felt the need to blow up a warehouse full of medical supplies. It was just a little too noisy and terrorist-y for my tastes.

Arson was going to be the way to go. Since the front for this operation was pharmaceuticals, I didn't have to hunt too hard for a viable scapegoat. The world is full of radical anti-pharm groups, many of which felt arson was perfectly acceptable. I simply invested one afternoon in a Google search for a suitably radical group of big-pharm antagonists and figured out how to emulate their modus operendi. A liberal spritzing of their oh-so-puerile and poorly constructed propaganda (the flu vaccine has MERCURY in it! Morons. Not since 1955.) around the site, and a 12-page e-mail diatribe to the shell company's webmaster should keep the local PD from straining their resources on this case.

Of first importance during this operation would be my personal safety. While I freely admit to being a touch fatalistic, I certainly am not suicidal. Besides, HaroId didn't have the patience to train anyone else in how to use the gear. I figured the vamps would have a way of ensuring that a warehouse full of comatose human bodies never showed up in a fire-marshal's report; and if they didn't, well they were just stupid, then. Not my problem at all.

Derision aside, it was highly probably that as soon as the fire was deemed irrecoverable, they would set off a "gas" explosion of some kind eliminating all evidence, or perhaps they had the feeders stored over a lime pit. Whatever it would be, it would have to be significant, so distance was going to be of key importance. Strategically, I knew that if I created enough noise and destruction, the vamps would torch the operation themselves to ensure its secrecy, which meant I did not have to bring the whole warehouse down myself. I just had to make a lot of noise. I felt good about that…I can do noise.

Secondly, I needed to eliminate as many vamps as I could along the way. This was the trickiest part. I didn't like my odds with more than one at a time, but I almost certainly would have more than one to deal with once the fun started. I intended to be quite a distance off, but vampires are terrific trackers, and they can move frighteningly fast when motivated. I was going to have to count on their single-mindedness on this mission; but fortunately that was often a very good bet. I had a few tricks for when they arrived that ought to work just fine. I cracked my knuckles and called Harold.

Several weeks later, I found myself in the Florida woods assembling the pieces of our biggest and most expensive hunt ever. The reality of facing several vamps at once had everyone nervous and redundancy was the name of the game. New strategies and new equipment were going to be employed, and Harold and I were edgy as all hell about it. I prepped my gear about three miles from the warehouse. We had selected a densely wooded area for staging, for when this little show got started, it was going to be rather noisy and we were counting on remoteness and foliage to keep from waking the neighbors. There was very little viable road access either, making any unlikely response by the local constabulary very slow in arriving, but this meant I had to lug all the gear from the road to the staging area by hand. The rough stuff had not even started yet and my back was already killing me. That's never a good sign.

I had a lot of prep work to do, and the sun was starting to set already, but there would be no profit in hurrying this job. First I placed two black metal boxes about the size of a shoe box on a heavy square steel base plate. I locked them in place with the attached clamps, and wired them to a plastic control module. Then, at the base of each box, I attached a 2-foot metal tube to a motorized hinge. Each tube was hollow with a diameter of about 3 inches. To the tubes I wired a small motor and cam, and ran that wire back to the control module as well.

A quick test run revealed that (naturally) I had run the wires backwards. I quickly corrected this, and soon my tubes were smoothly and silently traversing neat arcs pointing from 45 degrees over the horizon to nearly 90 degrees straight up. The result was what appeared to be a little battleship gun turret with two barrels pointed in the direction of Antonio's warehouse.

Satisfied, I unloaded what appeared to be ten little bombs. Or more specifically: mortar rounds. Each black little torpedo-shaped device had a round nose and three guidance fins at the back. These I loaded into the boxes behind the tubes, and closed the tops. With a satisfying "clunk," the magazines' springs moved the first round into battery within each tube. So far so good! I moved the arming switch on the control box from "safe" to "arm" and the little red LED began to blink furiously while it acquired a satellite signal.

The LED turned green after a few seconds indicating that the coordinates from Harold had been received, and that the weapon was ready to fire. Years ago, a mortar operator would have had to "fire for effect" and have a forward observer report hits back to him to determine how close to the target his rounds were falling. Then he would make adjustments and fire again, "walking" his fire toward the objective. God bless technology, now Harold's little satellite gizmos could drop each round into a gopher hole on the first try without scraping the sides.

With the high-tech stuff out of the way, it was time to prep my site for the inevitable vampire retaliation. I certainly could have rigged the mortar and just walked away, but the vamps would be on it in a hurry, and finding it might eliminate some of my supernatural mystique. I preferred that every time I executed an operation, the vamps were left with only questions, speculation and ashes. If they began to suspect that I was just a normal human, I would lose a valuable edge.

Vamps move fast and hard. They really are the ultimate shock and awe weapon; all speed and firepower. Strategy, however, was not their strongest suit. Neither was recon. Naturally, some of them were meticulous hunters of their prey, but rarely were they patient with an enemy. Relentless? Certainly. Inexorable? Damn right. Conscientious? Never. So I started with my usual 4-lb anti-personnel mines around the perimeter of my clearing. I also created a gauntlet of my monofilament line, strung tree-to-tree in a fairly random pattern. If nothing else, it would force my playmates to move more slowly if they saw it, and cut down on their freedom to flit around at superhuman speed. I'll take any edge I could get. If I was lucky, one or two would cut themselves severely. Here's hoping.

I added some new tricks as well. 1,000,000 candlepower strobe-lights, and several 18" deep holes with bear traps in them, which I covered with Styrofoam and dirt to conceal. In anticipation of a robust enemy response, my armor was souped up for this dance, too. Harold had added two more shock batteries to the coat, which gave me a total of four discharges before I was empty. My helmet had a powerful LED strobe and a pepper-spray applicator added as well, to increase my chances of surviving at close-quarters with cranky vampires. Also new was a pair of small compressed fluid canisters filled with concentrated hydrofluoric acid. These were strapped to the vambrace on my right forearm and terminated in a half-inch diameter hollow tungsten carbide needle that extended over my knuckles by about 3 inches. When the needles were compressed more than one inch, they delivered about 1 fluid ounce of hydrofluoric acid at nearly 200 psi. If I could punch hard enough to break the skin, the victim would be injected with an ounce of the most reactive acid on the planet. Harold's research indicated that this would almost certainly incapacitate a vampire, but this remained completely untested. Well, no time like the present! All this was in addition to the 12-gauge stakers under my wrists, Big Daddy at my side, and a bandolier of no less than 12 various types of grenades. It was an impressive arsenal, but damn, this rig was getting heavy!

I could still move around, but I could tell that all the extra weight would tire me quickly. Probably best to avoid a protracted conflict, then. Of course, it's ALWAYS better to avoid a protracted conflict. With all this weighing on me both literally and figuratively, I activated the com mike and keyed up Harold.

"Ready when you are, Mom," I said.

"Fuck you, wiseass. Stay focused or your ass is grounded." Harold always got grumpy when he had to do field work. He was in the van several miles away monitoring everything via satellite, sensors, and remote cameras. He could even read all my vital signs via sensors in the suit. From the van he could control mines, flashbulbs, one turreted Dylan minigun on the roof of the van, and a pair of AA12 automatic shotguns on a remote turret between the van and me. He would be in charge of covering my retreat if things went well, rescuing me if they didn't, and picking up my remains if shit really got ugly.

He had a lot of expensive, hard-to-build toys out there, and he was worried about his babies. It always fouled his mood when beautiful tech got in harm's way. But as much as he loved his gadgets, he hated vampires even more; ergo he was perfectly willing to break his toys if he got to chew up some vamps along the way. Quite honestly, Harold's toys always delivered when the shit hit the fan, and lord knows it was never boring to watch. Harold had managed most of his own hunts via remote devices before he met me; and while far more expensive then a grunt like me, the tech did a pretty good job of getting the job done. Too bad it rarely came back.

"Good to go, Mom?" I keyed.

"Let 'er rip, and good luck out there."

"Fire in the hole!" I hit the fire command and the little battleship turret whirred, clicked and let off a "thunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunk!" as it spat ten little bombs into the air. The tubes started at a high angle and arced slowly to a shallow one as they launched, so the individual rounds' flight paths described discrete parabolas to impact at their assigned points simultaneously. Time to target was fifteen seconds, and I caught myself holding my breath. I must have been counting too slowly, because at thirteen seconds in my head the first muffled "WHUMP!" of an impact reached my ears.

"We have impact!" Harold called over the com. "Ten out of ten! Perfect shots! Infrared is showing multiple large fires inside the building! BooYah!" I said a quiet mental RIP to the doomed, comatose souls inside the building. I may be callous, but they did not deserve to spend eternity as comatose food processors. I wished them happiness in the great beyond, and then got back to work.

"Tango's?" I said through clenched teeth, as the adrenaline began to rise in my bloodstream.

"None yet, field is…wait…Four signatures! Two heading this way, 130 miles per hour! 15 degrees north and 10 degrees south vector! They haven't spotted you yet!" When vampires crank up the speed, the quantity of air they displace, and the anomaly of anything moving faster than 70mph at ground level made tracking them by satellite fairly easy.

"Stay frosty! Tango south is slowing!"

I have no idea how the revolver ended up in my hand…I didn't remember drawing it.

"Heads up, Martin! He's onto you. Vector 1-8-0 degrees 140 miles per hour eta 12 seconds!"

One of them had picked me up somehow. Smell, telepathy, clairvoyance, whatever; it was always just a matter of time with vamps. As strategists they were mediocre, but as hunters, they were superb.

In twelve seconds I would know what kind of opponent I was playing with. If he was old enough to have seen combat, he would avoid the mines by smell…and that would slow him down. If he had never smelled C4 before, than he'd step on one; and that'd REALLY slow him down!

Harold knew enough to keep quiet at this point and let me work. Sure enough, my first dance partner streaked through the trees right on schedule, easily avoiding the mines. He leapt at me from 40 feet away, and moving at probably sixty miles per hour. I had an instant to see his triumphant animal face loom huge in my field of view, and just enough time to realize that I didn't have enough time to do anything.

What happened next will haunt me forever.

He collided at highway speed with a mesh of monofilament wire strung between the trees. It was simultaneously awful and awesome. The vampire did not just cut himself to ribbons; he julienned himself. There was a hellish spray of viscous, blue-black blood, and twitching gibbets of animated flesh sprayed like an overripe tomato whipped through a tennis racket. Greasy bits of vampire blood and flesh covered my armor, and I had to wipe my goggles down before I could see again.

"Holy shit!" Harold gasped over the mic.

"Sometimes you're the windshield my friend…" I mused over the open channel.

"Sometimes you're the bug!" giggled Harold. I'm glad he was enjoying himself. I couldn't fault him…this was already going REALLY well. I had observed vamps re-growing limbs and huge hunks of flesh before, but I had never seen one rebuild itself from greasy chunks. A quick glance showed me that the largest chunk was most of a torso, but other than that, the rest resembled a big pile of salsa.

I didn't get the chance to muse on it for too long, because Harold chimed in at that moment. "Three tango's inbound. Vector 1-7-0 degrees 90 miles per hour, ETA 9 seconds!"

"First one, or all three?"

"Six seconds, nine seconds, eleven, MARK!"

I decided to take cover this time to avoid losing the initiative as I did with the first one. I crouched behind the bole of a fallen sycamore, and endured the longest three seconds in recorded history.

I was not as lucky as the first time. These vamps hit the perimeter 30 yards out and stopped. The first to arrive was the oldest. You can tell by how the others deferred to him. He was tall and lean, with long platinum hair and delicate, almost elfin features. He crouched like a gargoyle, but his head twitched back and forth like a bird's. I thought he was sniffing for the mines at first, but careful observation revealed that he was listening for something.

His cronies were definitely younger. One was a hulking, bald stereotype of a goon; all menace and glower and the threat of impending mayhem. The other was a profile in youthful whimsy, with a lopsided smile and tragically hip fashion sense. Perhaps my natural aversion to their type reduced the effect of their glamour, because they both looked positively ridiculous to me.

The leader slowly made his way closer, stepping carefully around the mines at the outer perimeter. At 20 yards, he picked his way around the first bear trap pit without incident. At ten yards, he reached out with a delicate finger and touched a monofilament line. He pondered it a moment and plucked it gently like a guitar string, twisting his face into an expression both bemused and perplexed.

At this point I couldn't take it anymore and triggered a flashbulb. A 1,000,000 candle-power bulb flashed five times in one second, lighting up the clearing like a thousand bolts of lightning. Bright lights don't affect vampires the same way they do you and me. We would be blinded for ten to thirty seconds by a flash like this, but vamps are different. Vampire senses are hundreds of times more sensitive than ours. They can handle all the same stimulus that we can, but if they are unprepared for sudden changes, the effects can be very painful. So the vampires were not so much blinded by the flashes, as they were stunned by them.

All three screamed, and the leader reeled straight back and put his left foot squarely into a pit trap. The trap closed with a "clack!" on his leg at the calf, and a spring designed to incapacitate a 2000-pound grizzly bear drove hardened steal teeth deep into the cold alabaster flesh. He unleashed a scream that shook the leaves from trees overhead, and thrashed in impotent rage against his steel tormentor. If he thought about it for one second, he'd just reach down and pry the jaws apart, but I didn't give him the chance.

I leapt from my hiding place and carefully placed a round from the redhawk in his right hip. I was in full combat mode, and my senses felt as keen as theirs. My perception of time had become so dilated that I felt I could even match their speed as the instincts took over and my body did on its own all the things I needed it to.

The big bullet ripped into the hip and blew out a cantaloupe-sized piece of his right buttock as it exited. The part of my brain that was left to spectate wryly noted that I had in fact, "blown his ass away" and filed that little bit of infantile humor away for later retelling of the event. As I moved past him to my right, I put another round at the top of his right thigh, finishing the job of removing his right leg completely. His face actually became more ashen as he slumped to the ground leaking precious blood in torrents onto the forest floor.

Leaving him alive and flopping around like a landed trout was a calculated risk, but I figured he was hurt badly enough that I could look to his partners. I had invested an entire four seconds after the flashbulb taking out the leader, and I could only hope that it currency well spent; as his cohorts were rapidly regaining their faculties. With any luck at all, they lacked his caution and experience and would fall prey to some of the tricks strewn about the battlefield.

Baldy seemed to be recovering the fastest, so I gave him a round from Big Daddy into the face. Hell of a shot at this distance, too. The entire right side of his head was shorn off, peeling him like an orange and leaving a gory skeleton exposed from the neck up on his right side.

Baldy dropped to the ground howling and Hipster picked that moment to move, and did he ever move! I felt the impact to my left side in a surreal sort of way. It was like getting T-boned in your car: It happens so fast that you don't even know that it hurt until after it's over. Basically I heard a thud and saw a flash of light and I was flying through the air to bounce unceremoniously back toward the fallen tree that had been my cover earlier.

As I reoriented myself, I realized that the shock batteries had discharged and poor hipster was burned badly on the face, chest, and left arm. In typical vampire fashion, he responded by charging me again and I never had a chance to try anything before he landed on my chest with enough force to knock the wind out of me…and set off another shock battery.

That's when things got bad. I had never had two shocks go of before and an unforeseen circumstance arose. My coat caught on fire. The coat itself was fairly fire resistant, but there were lateral lines and power supplies woven into the fabric that just couldn't take it, and they started to burn. For the moment, Hipster was no threat; frankly he was yowling, burned, and blind, and so I took a moment to lose the coat. This complicated things because the batteries were in the coat. No more electric armor for me now, which made it the perfect moment for Baldy to hit me from behind and try to crush the life from me in a bear hug. With the vamp squeezing my chest against his, arms pinned to my sides, I could not breathe. The reactive gel stiffens to prevent deformation of the armor under pressure, so I was not in immediate danger of having my organs squeezed out of my mouth like toothpaste from the tube, but it also prevents my lungs from expanding. My vision started to swim as I frantically wriggled in his grasp until my right hand was in front of my hip. With consciousness fading, I managed to trigger my staker. With a hellish boom, the 12-gauge blank drove a tungsten-carbide spike deep into my opponent and did much to loosen his grip; which is to say, I crashed to the ground in a most undignified manner. A quick glance showed me why. My stake had driven deep into Baldy's groin, causing him to sink to his knees clutching his crotch and yowling piteously. Right now the poor bastard was probably wondering how long it would take for his dick to grow back.

I didn't give him too much time to ponder it. I scrambled to my feet at drove a right hand into his still-healing face, getting a spike right into the eye socket. There was a slightly audible pop as the hypodermic spikes over my knuckles delivered their payload of hydrofluoric acid, directly to the brain of poor old Baldy. The response was rather more dramatic than I anticipated. Baldy's one good eye rolled back in his head and he began to spasm violently. Very quickly this escalated to a full-blown seizure. I did not have time to watch this play out as Hipster was starting to recover. I quickly sprinted over to him and gave him the same treatment I had given Baldy using the left hand…and got the same response. I guess the acid was playing hell with the nervous system when delivered right to the head, and as Harold predicted, the acid continued to eat away at tissue even as the vamps would regenerate it. This meant that healing and regeneration would take much longer. Good.

The leader picked that moment to try to escape, holding his severed leg. He had figured out how to pry open the trap, but was struggling to manage one-legged egress. Vampire strength and speed make them very good crawlers and scuttlers though, and he was making good speed. But crawling and scuttling through a perimeter laced with mines is always poor strategy. He had no problems recognizing the mines before, but his fear and anger had made him lazy and/or forgetful. The first one flipped him into the air and blew his left arm off at the elbow, before depositing him on top of another mine which blew his remaining leg off. I ran over to where I had dropped Big Daddy and quickly put the last three rounds in the cylinder into the torso of the leader, for no other reason than to do massive damage and keep him from dragging himself away.

For the first time in the battle I took a moment to survey my surroundings. The first vamp was still in pieces, but I'll be damned if the torso wasn't starting to regenerate. Pink muscle and white bones were beginning to form at the shoulders and hips and skin was re-growing everywhere. Hipster and Baldy were still twitching, but Baldy's face was growing back. Poor Hipster was going to need a long time for his burns to heal. For some reason, vamps heal burns very slowly.

The leader was still moaning, but he had suffered so much damage at this point that he had no energy to move. All that was left to do now was mop up. I reloaded Big Daddy and started dragging vamps to the center of the clearing. Baldy got shot in the head in the process, as he still had some fight left in him. Hipster must have been pretty young, because he was still unresponsive, and the first guy? Well…he was still McNuggets. I did my best to get all his assorted pieces to the center. I piled those three together, put the white phosphorous to them and let the pyre get off to a good start.

Then I went for the leader. He was a mess, but the healing had already started. His eyes were open and blazing at me as I walked over. He coughed and spat black blood at me when I got close, "Don't you dare touch me, you worm!" His voice was shrill, despite being choked and garbled, "You are nothing to me! Peasant! You will burn for this!" I could hear the panic begin to build, and he began to thrash and claw at the ground in an attempt to pull away from me.

"Careful…mines." I said calmly. He stopped and sniffed about spastically, whipping his head back and forth. He looked back at me to find the barrel of Big Daddy poised to punch a hole in his forehead. He became very still.

"What are you?" He gasped, "What do you want?"

"What am I?" I had to laugh. "I'm food." I sniffed and cocked the revolver, "What do I want? That's a tough question. Let me ask you something…do you ponder the nature of desire when you hunt your prey?"

Realization broke across his face. He stuck his chin out defiantly and glared straight into my eyes. "No," he said.

"Me neither." I let the hammer fall.

Southern Belles

Most people don't understand the real problem that pops up when you dance with the devil. It's not so much that you could lose your soul; there's a fiddle player named Johnny down Georgia way that pulled it off without a hitch. No, it's the fact that sooner or later, as you blithely waltz the night away, the old bastard is gonna want to lead. That's why I am sitting in a dive bar in Corpus Christi, pretending to swill cheap beer and enduring the hellish cacophony that can only occur while fifty drunk Texans belt out "I Got Friends in Low Places" with way too much enthusiasm, and far too little talent.

Frost was here, and enjoying himself immensely. He was comically out of place amongst the stetsoned wannabe's, tragically hip college kids, and the under-dressed cougars prowling the edges of the otherwise under-thirty, too-cool-for-school crowd. We must have presented a ridiculous sight to anyone who cared to observe us. On one side of the pitted and scarred high-top table sat Frost: nearly seven feet tall and having, for all intents and purposes, the physique of a comic-book character. Wide shouldered, narrow-waisted, and muscled to the extreme, he would have been hugely intimidating if not for his chiseled features and goofy, lopsided grin. He should have been hip-deep in young girls in a place like this, but they never seemed to notice him.

On the other side of the table was me. Six feet tall with my boots on, and just about 220 pounds, I looked like a teenager next to Frost. I am a big guy, and my physique, though large and muscular (if I do say so myself) was not quite as lean and bulky as Frost's. Well, nobody living had a physique as lean and muscular as Frost's. To be honest, as I soared past thirty-five years old, some softness had materialized in my belly, and showed no intention of leaving despite a fairly robust exercise regimen. My face was a bit weathered, with some scarring above eyebrows framing blue eyes sunk just a little too deep into the skull. I kept my dark brown hair cut short and severe, and the only modification I had made to my appearance since leaving the CIA was magnanimously allowing myself to grow a scruffy, if cropped beard. I had been told that it was the face of someone just a little too old for his age, and I supposed I agreed with that assessment. Being mortal is not for sissies, people; when you play as hard as I have, it starts to show.

As I sat here enduring what had to be a rough approximation of the seventh ring of hell, I passed the time speculating on Frost. How could Frost be so inconspicuous, when he was so damned … well …conspicuous? I had a theory about Frost. He never seemed to set off my expensive detection devices, and he never seemed to attract any undue attention in public despite his freakish physical presence. Now, all vampires develop some degree of unique ability (generally a psychic or physical attribute) when they are turned, usually an amplification of some skill or ability they had as a normal human. Frost was (according to himself), the greatest assassin, human or vampire, to ever live. Something told me that camouflage had been a great skill of his even before becoming a vampire, and now he was probably completely undetectable unless he chose to be. He had already shown that he could easily pass undetected through sophisticated devices, and travel through public places completely unremarked despite a physical presence that would be noted anywhere. That was something I was going to have to have Harold work on as part of our contingency plans.

But Frost was the reason I was here. I owed him. He had done me a favor in revealing the location and nature of a human blood supplier in Florida, and with that information my team had managed to completely disrupt the food supply to the entire Southeastern US. We never got the ring-leader, but hundreds of vampires now had to leave their safe havens and search for food instead of enjoying the risk-free blood supply culled from thousands of kidnapped, lobotomized humans. It was a good op, and now I had to pay the piper.

Frost had his own targets, and tonight we were stalking one of them. Frost was not particularly forthcoming at first about his reasons for wanting this vamp taken out, but I thanks to my research guy, Sam, I already had most of the story. Like many men's problems, it all started with a girl.

Jeanie Burns was a vampire I'd have never found on my own. Like so many of the older ones, she did not appear outwardly rich, or flashy, or overt in any way. But she was smart. She kept a low profile, hunted infrequently and over a wide geographic location, and she covered her tracks well. She controlled a large territory in Texas, and no vampire hunted, lived, or operated in her area without cutting her in. Those who broke her rules disappeared, those who played by her rules were fine. She was the Al Capone of southern vampires; and rumor had it, she was pissed at Frost.

Frost was the kind of remorseless killing machine that liked to stick to a code. I knew from my own experience that when you found yourself engaging in morally questionable behavior on a regular basis, you either become a monster, or you develop a code. That code can be arbitrary, ambiguous, and indecipherable to others, but it's your damn code and it keeps you together mentally. Adherence to the code means that you still stand for something. Frost had a code, and he only killed when the target was challenging, dangerous, and interesting. He didn't even eat people. Frost had revealed that Burns had, like many other vampires, made several attempts to put him on her regular payroll. Frost was strictly freelance, and his own code had been incompatible with her rather Machiavellian needs. To say that his declining her offer had been met with some animosity may be considered an understatement. Like any good mobster who got frustrated, she put out a hit.

Apparently, vampires aren't supposed to kill each other willy-nilly. Sure, it happened all the time, but it sounds as if there were conventions to be considered when doing so. Burns had consolidated enough power to insulate her from most grievances from her own kind, and there certainly were no courts for the aggrieved to appeal to; but she overstepped herself when she tried to have Frost killed. Frost, who is normally a very jovial sort, practically growled when he told the story of the night four vampires came to kill him. The only time I ever took on four vamps at once, it took three weeks of planning and enough ordnance to stop a mechanized division. Frost made it sound like a particularly unpleasant hangover.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that this incident had occurred over forty years ago. Vampires aren't normally very patient, but they excel at holding grudges it seems.

So why were we sitting in a crappy bar in Corpus Christi? Jeanie Burns likes fighters. Some vampires can be very picky eaters. When I had asked Frost about that, he explained it pretty simply. Feeding on a person is as much an emotional and psychic experience as it is a physical one. Some vampires feel nothing when they feed; others are highly sensitive to the psychic "flavor" of their victims. Certain types of people taste better to some vamps than others. Any blood will do for sustenance, but why eat Ramen when you can have steak? Burns liked the flavor of combat veterans, fighters, brawlers, scrappers, cops, and thugs. Basically, the badder a mutherfucker you were, the more she wanted to eat you. Astute readers will begin to see why Frost needed me, and understand why I did not love the current plan.

All modesty aside, I am a pretty bad mutherfucker. I spent fifteen years killing people for Uncle Sam both in and out of uniform, and not only am I the only human being to have killed a vampire in four hundred years; I have killed twenty-two of them. As Frost had put it, "Mr. Martin, as far as we are concerned, you are the most dangerous human on the planet, and possibly the most dangerous thing on the planet. To even the most obtuse vampire, you positively radiate violence and menace. I can smell your rage at a thousand yards. The only reason vampires don't disappear the minute you show up in their city is that you are often mistaken for a rabid animal, psychically. We just can't comprehend a human who does not fear us. When Jeanie gets a whiff of you, she is going to want to rape and eat you on the spot…and not necessarily in that order."

So I'm bait. I hate being bait. Talk to earthworms about the joys of being bait. Furthermore, the nature of this hunt meant no armor, no shock batteries, no Big Daddy. Goddamn I felt naked without that revolver. Of course, I was not completely helpless. Harold had whipped up a couple of carbon fiber dirks, essentially 8-inch double-edged fighting knives done in space-aged materials rather than steel. Flexible, lightweight, and capable of holding a nearly monomolecular edge, Harold was pretty sure they would go through vampire flesh without too much trouble. I was also packing a stun-gun that Harold had souped up. It didn't pack the punch of the industrial shock batteries in my armor, but it oughtta hurt like hell, even for a vampire.

So, poorly armed, under-armored, and generally pessimistic out the whole operation, I turned to Frost and asked, "So when does she show up?"

He grinned, "She keeps her own hours usually, but I can't imagine it will be much longer."

"Won't she recognize you?" I asked.

"When the time comes, she won't even see me," he gave me a smug look and pulled daintily at his comically effete martini.

"I figured as much. When she asks me to leave, your oversized ass better be real damn close."

His laughter boomed, "Don't worry, Martin, I won't let the mean lady eat you. Do you want me to swoop in before or after she demonstrates her enthusiasm?" His eyebrows waggled suggestively.

I decided to rise to the bait, "Depends on how she looks."

"See for yourself, Romeo," He nodded towards the door.

I turned to look, and it was worth it. She stood there, framed in the doorway with her two bodyguards by her side. The guards were devastatingly beautiful female vampires; dressed to distract men with copious quantities of strategically exposed bits of alabaster flesh. But they were nothing compared to Jeanie Burns. Vampires are always attractive. It's a device to attract and distract prey; and Jeanie was very distracting. Maybe five and a half feet tall and built like a Frank Frazzetta painting, she was the very avatar of sexual allure. From chest to waist to hips, her curves were quite simply impossible. Brown hair to her shoulders in soft ringlets framed a soft, oval face with big brown eyes and a tiny nose above pouting, petulant lips. She was dressed simply in unfeasibly tight low-rise jeans and a plain white tank top that strained to contain breasts that would have caused permanent back problems for most women. She could have bought the whole outfit at Wal-Mart for forty bucks, and she patently outshone any Hollywood bombshell in a five-thousand dollar gown. It was breathtaking; and I felt myself wanting her to notice me sooner rather than later. I wanted her to talk to me and casually put her hand on my thigh while laughing at my jokes. I wanted her to hang on my every word and take me back to her place where we would…

And just like that, the spell was broken. As gorgeous as she was, I suddenly remembered that it was all a show just to lure in prey…stupid prey that thought with its dick, no less. It was insulting to my intelligence and my purpose. My buried rage boiled to the surface and I indulged in some puerile angry internal muttering, "I ain't the prey, bitch. You are." As soon as I snapped out of it and my hunter's instincts kicked in, her head snapped to the side and our eyes met.

"Show time!" I heard Frost whisper in my ear, and suddenly an oversized frat boy wearing a shirt covered in Greek letters behind me crashed off his stool onto the floor. I turned to look and he bolted up screaming "What the fuck, asshole!" and much to my surprise, he swung a meaty right fist right for my head.

Oh god. Frost, you jerk. I suddenly realized what the plan was at that moment. A quick look around confirmed that fully half the people in the bar were wearing identical fraternity shirts. Frost was going to make sure Jeanie Burns saw how tough a bastard I can be, even if it meant I had to fight a bar full of drunken idiots. I had to concede that the plan was a good one, but I hadn't fought in a bar in damn near twenty years. The fallen frat boy was bigger than me, but leaning more toward fat as opposed to muscle. Of course, at close to two-eighty, he could probably still hit like a truck. I pinned my left palm to my temple to protect my head and slipped inside his slow, wide, looping, haymaker and drove my right fist into his solar plexus with the full weight of my body.

He folded over with a whoosh and a gurgle, and plummeted unceremoniously to the floor face-first as his legs turned to jelly. I looked up to the sea of fraternity punks and cracked my knuckles. I locked eyes with the biggest one there and did my best Josey Wales voice.

"All right kids. I am getting too damn old for this dance. If you ain't gonna do shit, pack up your buddy and walk. If you are gonna do shit, then let's get started. It certainly looks like you tools could use the education, and I sure as hell need the exercise."

I'll admit I was laying it on a little thick, and things got kind of out of hand after that.

I had been fighting vampires so long, I had forgotten how easy fighting humans can be. Most young males seem to believe that all you need to win a fight is a big punch. While you certainly can win a fight with a big punch, it really is way more complicated than that when you know what you are doing.

Ninety percent of all bar or street fights begin with a looping right punch. Most refer to this as the "sucker punch." It is delivered without warning and generally speaking, whoever shoots first wins. Because of this, most people never really get beyond this concept. Real fighters know that straight punches are faster than arcing ones, so the first two frat boys learned that their big looping punches arrived just after my crisp, straight, overhand rights. A broken nose is a wonderful reminder of poor technique.

After those two I stopped waiting for targets and went looking for them. When one guy started to move to my right I hooked him around the head with my right arm and grabbed his right wrist with my left hand. With a bend of the knees and a twist of the hips, I sent him over my hip and crashing into the jerk sneaking up behind me. They both went down in a tangle of arms and legs and I was onto the next one before they settled. I was a tornado of fists, knees and elbows for the next few minutes as I hewed my way through the eight or nine frat boys still standing. They weren't clever enough to pile on me all at once, and I was smart enough to keep moving to the extent that doing so would be difficult. Keeping a table or other obstacle between me and most of my dance partners was a little tricky, but my naked aggression and commitment to violence seemed to keep the frat boys a little hesitant to engage. Like most packs of vicious cowards, they were far more enthusiastic about stomping someone when the threat of personal harm was non-existent. Despite their superior numbers, no individual member of their group was committed enough to the prospect of kicking my ass to want to get hurt in the process. Every competitive fighter in the world knows that winning a fight gets a lot easier when you don't worry about getting hurt.

Case in point, the cost to myself of administering a category-five ass-whupping to room full of 21-year-old males could be measured in a nasty bruise spreading across my ribs on the left side, four bleeding knuckles on each hand, what was probably a sprained wrist, and a split lip. Not too steep a tab, but I would definitely be feeling it in the morning.

I spat blood onto the floor, now littered with sobbing, groaning, writhing bodies, and surveyed my handiwork. I had to admit, the whole row had felt pretty good. It was nice not to have to worry about superhuman speed and strength, or regeneration, or stepping on one of my own mines. It was simple, cathartic, almost relaxing to wail on some regular people for a change.

My head was brought back into the game rather quickly when I felt soft but cold hands on my arm; and a breathy voice in ear my whispered, "Nice work, superman…but you'd better clear out before the cops arrive." Jeanie was making her move, I guess. She looped her arm around mine and pressed herself against me. Her right breast pushed against my tricep as she steered me toward the door. "Come on. This place sucks anyway. Let's go somewhere else!" I was finding it hard to concentrate. Her presence was overwhelming, and I found myself imagining what she looked like under those clothes. Would her body be soft? What would it feel like to touch her?

I had to get a grip. What the hell was wrong with me? As we sped out the door with her bodyguards in tow, I struggled to focus. She must be turning whatever whammy she did up to eleven. I wondered if she did that consciously, or if it reacted to her own excitement. Intentional or not, I was losing my grip. We piled into her car, which I only noticed in passing was a late model Cadillac limousine, and sped out of the parking lot. I was alone in the back with Jeanie, and the two guards were in front. I could not focus on which direction we were going, or whether or not Frost was following. I just wanted to be there with Jeanie.

She crawled into my lap and settled astride my legs facing me. Her breasts were situated right in front of my face and she inhaled dramatically, making them heave deliciously. This was insane. Why couldn't I focus? She isn't the first good-looking woman I've ever dealt with, so what's the problem? Usually vampire mind-games don't affect me, either. Harold thinks it's because I'm too angry and focused most of the time. It wasn't working right now though; I just wanted to bury my face in the heaving cleavage two inches from my nose.

"Where did you learn to bang like that, hero?" She purred, "That was really something!" She had started rocking and grinding her hips slightly. My physical reaction was predictable and obvious. I won't belabor it with description here. She giggled girlishly, which unfortunately caused her to jiggle girlishly.

My mind was fuzzy, but I struggled to answer the question anyway, "Afghanistan, Mogadishu, Czechoslovakia, and Kansas City. You know…the usual spots." Good god, I was flirting! Goddamnit, this monster was going to eat me and I was flirting with her! FUCK!

"Got a name, hero?" she breathed. Her hands were in my hair, and I could feel her breath on my forehead. Like a fucking teenager, my eyes were glued to the front of her tank top as her surging breasts strained heroically against the thin cotton of the hated garment. Her nipples were taut and clearly visible through the flimsy fabric. I've never loathed cotton so much in my life.

"Martin…" I managed to wheeze.

"Well, Martin," She laughed huskily, "my name is Jeanie," She pulsed her hips into me and pulled my head into her welcoming cleavage, "pleased to meet you."

I was lost. My hands moved of their own accord and pulled the straps off her shoulders, freeing the most perfect breasts I have ever seen. I buried my face in them and sent my hands over every inch of her body that I could reach. She was still rocking and grinding her crotch against mine and I felt a rising, almost psychotic need to be inside her. I was breathing heavily and, starting to frantically tear at her clothes. She responded in kind and matched my intensity. Forgotten were the two bodyguards in front, gone was the Cadillac, and I no longer cared that she was going to kill me after. I just had to have her. I hadn't been with a woman in a long time, and I never wanted one as badly as I wanted Jeanie Burns.

In the fiery maelstrom of runaway sexual heat that was engulfing me, something cold happened. I saw a feral-eyed teen-aged boy crouched over a bed, sheets covered in blood. I saw the front sight of my .357 superimposed over his temple while he fed, and felt the snap of recoil as I emptied the weapon in impotent rage at a creature I didn't even believe existed. I remembered hacking at it with a splitting maul and I remembered the fire consuming my life. I remember the day that the last human thing alive in me died.

And then I remembered who I was. When the fog cleared I was stripped to my jeans, and Jeanie was down to just her red lace panties. We were a horizontal tangle of arms and legs on the back seat, and Jeanie was undulating underneath me making little moaning noises. I was horrified when I realized how cold her skin was to the touch. How had I not noticed that?

I realized that without my gear, I had no hope of taking out three vampires. I hoped like hell Frost was nearby, because if I stayed in the car much longer, I was going to fall under her spell eventually. Resigning myself to go down swinging, I began kissing down her body, tracing the curves of her belly, while working my right hand down to my right boot. She tasted like ashes. Gingerly, I gripped the loop at the end of one of my carbon-fiber dirks hidden there. I slid my left hand under her panties and gently pulled them down over her hips. She lifted her hips to let them slide off more easily, and that's when I shoved eight inches sharpened carbon-fiber under her chin and into her brain.

Her eyes loomed wide and she spasmed violently. I chose to go under the chin because it would sever her windpipe. She couldn't scream, and though the blade wouldn't kill her, it severed her spinal cord and destroyed most of her brain stem. She seized violently underneath me, and I could only try to hold on like a dammed rodeo cowboy and hope that her bodyguards thought it was all part of the festivities. When she slowed, I pulled the knife out and put it through her eye, destroying her frontal lobe and she went completely still.

I knew I probably had less than a minute before she regenerated enough to fight back, at which point I was a corpse. So I grabbed the stun gun from my other boot and held it in my right hand. Then, still huffing and panting like I was still at play on the back seat, I reached through the partition, around the passenger-side front seat, and ran my hand lasciviously up the side of the bodyguard riding shotgun and let it rest on her left breast. She turned to me with a smile, and I shoved the stun gun into her face and set it off. The little device didn't have the offensive punch of my armor's equipment, but it appeared to be enough to blind her and render her unconscious. That was all I got. The driver swung back with her right arm and caught me across the chest. I hit the back seat with enough force to make me see spots. The car came to a lurching, screeching halt and the passenger side rear door blew outward. I was yanked clear of the car with the force not unlike a parachute opening at low altitude and smashed into the ground. Just before I passed out I saw that we were in a heavily wooded area along an old dirt access road, probably a million miles from anywhere.

I don't know how long I lay there, but soon I was treated to the sight of a naked Jeanie Burns standing over me, one foot on my neck, the other crushing my right hand and the stun gun it still held. Even under these circumstances, she was beautiful. She was going to kill me, but she was going to look good doing it.

"You are amazing, hero," she growled. "Just what the hell did you think you were going to do in there? Take us all out with a knife? Are you some sort of sicko serial killer or something? Like preying on pretty girls, do you?"

I grimaced and tried to flex my broken hand. "Just the blood-sucking psychopathic ones, dear. You know, the moonlight on your skin is really quite breathtaking, but your fangs are really prominent from this angle. Not a good look, lady."

She laughed, it was like glass breaking, "You know what I am?"

"Yeah. You're a raging bitch."

She ground her foot into my neck, "Funny man, are ya?" She stooped down and straddled me, "it's a shame, hero. Things were going so well back there, I might have kept you for a while." She sighed with a little disappointed moue, "But now I have to torture you until you tell me who sent you." She sat back, clasped her arms above her head, arched her back, and let me have a good look of all the real estate that I had just resisted, "so sad!" she pouted.

"Sorry babe, I'm over you already. Do whatcha gotta." With the places I've been, you need a lot more than vague threats of pain to get my attention. I was getting a little anxious for Frost to show up, though. I'll tell you that for free.

"I like the tough guys better anyway," She purred, a feral grin creeping across her face, "Big, violent men who know how to hurt and how to kill. The ones who have seen death close up and spat in his eye? They taste the best."

"That's why I used him," I never thought I'd be glad to hear Frost's vaguely British basso profundo, but it was like angels sighing right now, "Mr. Martin has done all that and more. Not only has he spat in ol' Grim's eye, he has probably kicked him in the balls a few times, too." He boomed comically, "You always went for the burly, scarred, antihero archetype, Darling. It's a real weakness of yours."

Frost was standing on the roof of the limo. Smiling crookedly and looking absently amused. To their credit, there was no hesitation from Jeanie's retinue. The bodyguards moved like lightning, converging on Frost like twin cruise missiles from either side. They were moving almost faster than the eyes could follow, but Frost caught them casually by the throats with either hand. They screamed like banshees until Frost casually snapped their necks, silencing them. Then he nonchalantly hurled one against a tree so hard the body split in half, the other he decapitated with a two-handed wringing motion, not unlike someone tearing the tail of a lobster.

"Frost," I croaked, "Took your damn time, didn't you."

"Quiet, boy!" Jeanie barked, eyeing Frost carefully, "I'll kill your pet before you ever get to me, Frost. You aren't that fast."

"I think you over-value my bait, Miss Burns, and underestimate him as well." Frost, as usual, seemed to find this all endlessly amusing, "Mr. Martin is more than capable of taking care of himself."

She laughed, "Doesn't appear that way right now, does it, Darling?" He is all mine to play with for now, and he appears quite helpless, so spare me the ominously vague innuendo, and move along, now. If you really didn't value him, Frost you ol' softie, I'd be dead already."

"Oh but you are dead already, my dearest Miss Burns. You just don't know it yet!" Frost replied with uncharacteristic solemnity; and I shoved my other dirk up from beneath her into her right ear as hard as I could. The carbon blade sank nearly five inches into her skull, and I hoped desperately that I had hit the brain. Vampires can take insane amounts of damage and stay combat –effective, but the brain still seems crucial for motor control. She started a shriek, but it got cut off as she was torn away from me and slammed into a tree. When the motion stopped and the dust settled, Frost had her pinned against the bole of an enormous red oak, gripping her arms at the wrists while she struggled vainly against him. She must have been quite strong, for I could see the tight cords of the muscles in Frost's hulkish arms straining to keep her immobilized.

"You have been very naughty, Jeanie; and not just to me," Frost growled through his teeth. Jeanie took that moment to try to head- butt him, but missed by a country mile. Frost continued as if nothing had happened, "I am here in an official capacity this time. No less than six families have authorized this action, Jeanie. You have no friends anymore."

Jeanie struggled furiously for another minute before slumping against Frost in apparent defeat. She looked up at the giant assassin with big, scared eyes, "We could be friends again, Nikolai. We were once before. It used to be so good." She was choking up now, fear and finality making her frantic, "I know I've been awful, but I get scared and angry and react badly. I can make it all right if you help me; you once said you'd do anything for me!"

Interesting, so there was more to this story than just mob politics. I didn't know Frost had it in him. Although, when I looked at it logically, if Jeanie really liked the tough guys, then Frost was probably the top contender for many years. It made sense that they'd have a history.

"There was a time I'd have walked through hell for you, Gwinivere," Frost said softly, then with more fire, "and then I did walk through hell for you, remember? People don't really understand what that means when they say it…but I do now. Because of you." Frost released her left arm so he could gently cup her face with his right hand. Jeanie made no move to escape.

"I remember," She blubbered, crying now, "I was young. I broke a lot of things that I loved when I was younger. I was foolish, Nikolai."

"Yes. Yes, you were," he whispered back. Then he took her into his arms for a tender lover's embrace. It was frightening in its incongruity. She did nothing to resist, or try to escape. She just stood there in his arms crying quietly. After a moment he pulled away, whispered something to her softly, and with a flick of his wrist like the flutter of a hummingbird's wing, tore her head off. He managed to let her fall without getting blood on himself (How the hell did he accomplish that?), and he turned to where I was still sitting on the ground.

"Your equipment is behind the car, Mr. Martin. We should probably get started on the pyres, before her friends pull themselves together."

"You all right, Frost?" I don't know why I was suddenly concerned for him, but that whole scene was bizarrely tragic.

"Much better now Mr. Martin," he dusted his hands off on his pants and grinned at me, then he bent over and gripped the limo by the frame rail under the passenger door, and with no apparent effort at all, tossed the 4500-pound car thirty feet across the road into the ditch. It crashed onto its roof and came to rest looking for all intents and purposes like it had gone off the road of its own accord. "Muuuuch better now!"

This shit gets weirder every day.

Do You Believe in Magic?

The mood was somber when I returned to the campsite. There had been a three-hour conversation about the hunt for Jeanie Burns between Harold and me the night before, and he was not happy with the de-briefing. Several aspects of letting me climb into a locked car with a psychotic, psychic succubus hell-bent on draining my blood, alone and unarmored, had not sat well with my team. Both Sam and Harold also agreed that this hunt had relied entirely too much on the assistance of Frost for success. Truthfully, I agreed with that. Frost had swooped in at the nick of time and casually killed three vampires with his bare hands to save me in Corpus Christi. I was never much of a team player in the field, and relying on a vampire assassin for back-up was simply too unnerving for me. A decision needed to be made.

On one hand, Frost had provided a lot of good info for the Antonio hunt. That had been hugely successful for us, and devastating to southern vampires. Furthermore, in the Burns hunt, I was bait, and there was no real reason to save me if he didn't want to. I had completed my part of the operation (Namely distracting her so Frost could get close. Apparently they had a sordid history, and Frost couldn't get close to her without her knowing he was there) when he arrived, and he had not needed me anymore at that point. If he wanted me dead, he had lots of opportunities to make that happen.

On the other hand, he was a vampire; and an admitted killer and nihilist. Several centuries of guilt-free killing can make anyone a questionable ally; no matter how you discriminate your targets. I have myself liberated several dozen men from the confines of their own mortal coils, and despite my fervent belief that they were all "bad," even I have to concede that your conscience can develop calluses.

Can we trust Frost? I was disinclined to trust anyone, ever. Really. I'm a cynic that way. But as a resource, Frost was phenomenal. He was physically the strongest and most durable vampire I had ever encountered. On top of that, he was nearly undetectable when he chose to be. He knew many vampire secrets, and so far he had been willing to help us. Well, on his terms, anyway. It was very probable that he was using us for his own purposes, and that made us all nervous. None of us knew what those purposes might be. It was a conundrum. Our team was purely club-level amateurs before he showed up, but now we were taking out major players.

I brought the van to a lurching halt in front of the campsite. Harold and Sam were outside cooking burgers over the fire pit. Harold was his usual, quasi-frenetic mole-man, talking animatedly to Sam about some obscure technical minutiae that were almost certainly of no interest to Sam at all. Sam, a tall, lanky, balding man, was seated on the low rough-hewn oak bench pretending to be interested. A lawyer in the real world, Sam didn't ever seem to look the part. His clothes never seemed to fit him right, no matter how hard he tried. His gangly limbs seemed to always be sticking out from sleeves and trews alike, and shirts and jackets hung from his lean frame like they were two sizes too big. None of this bothered Sam in the least. A man of nearly preternatural focus, Sam was far more interested in finding stuff people didn't want him to know than he was in tailoring his suits. He was the team's chief (only) researcher and investigator; and probably the most frightening man in the world when going through public records. If you did it, Sam could find it. If you hid it, Sam would dig it up. If you ran, Sam would catch you. It's what he did as a lawyer, and it's what he does now. Sam was a master at finding the vampires hiding among us. As he himself pointed out, it's not so tough when you know what to look for.

Immortality has a few tricky legal ramifications. To avoid these inconveniences, many vampires simply become transient, moving around the country randomly on foot, feeding whenever and wherever. Those are tough to find unless they get sloppy, but they don't really get the chance to establish power bases and expand their influence, either. The ones that stay in one place for a few decades are far more dangerous. They consolidate influence and resources, and use them to secure food, safety, and most importantly, anonymity. Anonymity is neither cheap nor easy to obtain.

To live anonymously, they need to have driver's licenses, avoid tax evasion, and register with social security. That's a little tricky when you don't age or die. Eventually, someone will notice that the guy born in 1867 is still registered to vote in 2010. So they fake records. They fake deaths, births, name changes, social security numbers, ad naseaum. It's tricky business, and though they have gotten rather good at it, Sam can usually catch it if he gets a clue where to look.

"My god," I barked from the window as they looked up, "it's lunch time with Ichabod Crane and the Mole Man!"

"From the nearly-headless horseman I have to endure this?" Sam shot back.

"Awfully chipper for a guy with a broken right hand, Pal," was Harold's humorless retort.

I held up my bandaged right hand, "This little bruise? It's nothing! A flesh wound, I say!"

Harold was not rising to my bait, today, "This shit is not funny, Martin. It's not just your ass or your war; do you have any idea how difficult it would be to replace you?"

Sam made a dismissive gesture, "Settle down, Harold. When you want to strap on the armor you can run the tactical side of ops. We agreed that Martin makes the calls in the field."

"Guys, let's not do this dance right now," I got out and shut the door with a crunch. I gotta replace this piece of shit van. "I'm hungry and tired, and we need to discuss Frost far more urgently than we need to discuss my tactics in the field. Which, by the way, are not open for discussion anyway. My ass in the field means my call in the field. Period." If humor wouldn't settle Harold down, then maybe asperity would.

Sam handed me a sad, overcooked and under-chees-ed burger , and I tore into it hungrily.

Harold took the hint and started in on Frost, employing his customary, logical approach. "Frost is an asset. We know that much. The real question is to what degree and in what manner he is a liability."

"He is stupid-strong and durable," I mumbled through a mouthful of charred beef, "But he only wants to play his way and on his terms. We haven't been able to count on him, tactically or strategically. He's random."

Sam chimed in, "He is a complete unknown. I can't find any evidence of him, or activities that could be attributed to him anywhere, even when I know where to look. I don't like not knowing what his angle is."

"He appears to be completely innocuous when he chooses to be. Electronic devices can pick him up, usually, but he could be sitting next to you in a movie theater, and you'd never look at him unless he wanted you to. He's not invisible, but he becomes completely unnoticeable," Harold added, "I, for one, don't particularly relish the thought of bumping into him at the bunker."

"I still want to know how he beats my motion detectors," I pondered aloud.

"It's because you place them at eye level, Mr. Martin." Dammit! That voice! Like a British James Earl Jones, from above us.

"If you always place them at eye level, then all I have to do is stay above them. Like so," He was in a red oak, up about fifty feet, perched casually on a branch in jeans and sandals, feet swinging jauntily. He looked ridiculous, a seven-foot giant dressed like a college student hanging out in a tree.

"Of course, it also means I am stuck up here" he gestured to the tree," for unless I have greatly misjudged him, I suspect dour Harold probably has an unpleasant surprise or two waiting for me down there." He pointed at the campsite.

"Four," was Harold's terse response.

There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment. Frost broke it first, "Could I perhaps persuade you gentleman to let me down for a little tete a tete? I feel positively silly sitting up here. Though I must confess, the view from this angle really brings out the vein in Harold's forehead. Rather impressive, that."

"I can hit him with a 40mm airburst round from here. I just need one second to adjust the angle of the launcher…"

"Easy, Harold," I assuaged him. "Shut it down. Let's have a chat."

In a moment, and with much grousing, Harold had disengaged the defenses, but not without leaving the Dylan mingun locked onto Frost's signature. If Frost decided to try anything, the turret-mounted, seven-barreled cannon would shred him more or less instantly. No vampire can outrun 3,000 rounds a minute, and no vampire was durable enough to survive that. If I could figure out how to carry one in the field, I would. Of course, with that much lead flying around the clearing, it would probably shred all of us, too…but them's the breaks.

"What brings you out here, Frost?" I asked brusquely, "We don't exactly do high tea around here."

Frost flashed that big, goofy grin he loved so much, "I felt that if you were going to discuss me, I should at least get the chance to participate. Dirty pool talking about a bloke behind his back and all."

"Bullshit!" Harold fired back immediately, "You are just fishing for info. What's your angle?"

Frost's brow crinkled, "At first, I really had you pegged as the good-natured one, Harold. You intellectual types are rarely so…cranky. Naturally I want information. I am a hunter and an assassin. Info is my greatest asset. Hasn't Martin explained to you how we work?"

"I know how you work, well enough."

I decided to interject, placing my hand on Harold's shoulder and gently easing him back down onto the log, which I don't believe even he realized he was not sitting on any more, "Enough, Harold. This is a parley. So let's talk." I turned to Frost, "We don't know your agenda, and we don't know where you stand. If you are going to keep popping up, then you need to come clean. Why would a vampire want to help vampire hunters?"

He shifted (uncomfortably?) in his seat, "I asked you once, Martin, what your mission was. Do you remember?"

I nodded.

"Are you doing this because you hate vampires and want to kill them all, or are you doing this because you wish to right wrongs and bring justice to the dead? If you are just out to kill vampires, then you are no better than any other racist and I will end you all right now. We can all die together in this clearing when Harold's popgun chews us into little pieces because you three are still crying over your lost loved ones."

My jaw tightened. How was the wound still so fresh? Before I could retort, Frost continued, "But if you have turned your rage into something productive; like justice, then well, that I can get behind."

Frost was suddenly very intense, "I know what I am, gentleman. I am a killer. I have no sympathy or remorse in me for those who I have ended, and I am no hero. But years ago, and I mean hundreds of years ago, there was honor among my people. We had restraint, and to be realistic, human lives were much cheaper, then. But what we are now? Hedonists. Roving packs of wanton killers simply feeding whatever desire that pops up. Most of us are little better than animals, and those that consider themselves 'elevated' are just spoiled children living to satisfy their own whims. We build petty little empires of vice and iniquity, and waste our immortality on nothing. Humans have evolved and done grand majestic things in just a scant few hundred years; but what have my people accomplished?" He spat on the ground, "Nothing. We act like predators and gods, but we are really just scavengers. We are too strong, too well entrenched, and too comfortable to grow as a people. We haven't changed as a society in two thousand years, and the world will leave us behind soon enough. How long before humanity catches on and exterminates us all? How many Martins would it take to destroy us? We need to move on, or face extinction."

He shook his head in disgust, "Instead, we are degenerating into the very thing that sustains us. I have no love for 'vampires'. I may not be human any more but I am still a man; I do not eat my fellow man to sustain myself. I do not kill simply because I can. Even as a human I always felt my kills served a purpose."

Frost pointed right at me, "YOU can understand that, Mr. Martin, and it's why I chose to help you. What were you, by the way? You don't shoot like a SEAL, you don't have the patience (or aim) of a sniper, and you don't move like a ranger. You do fight like a man with a lot of experience though, so I'm sure you were combat deployed, and I KNOW the CIA got a hold of you; your planning and attention to detail has "spook" written all over it. You love your traps and explosives too much for infiltration/impersonation work though. I'd guess Army Engineer Corps, sapper probably, and then recruited for wetwork by the CIA." He winked, "Am I close?"

"Essayons!" I responded with the Engineer Corps motto.

He chuckled, "Damn, I'm good. You three are why I chose now to make my move. My honor means more to me than any accidental superficial resemblance to the things we hunt; and the existence of people like you three is why I think that this is the time to restore honor to a fallen people. Without it, we are all dead anyway.

He threw me a knowing smirk, "I was looking for a dramatic suicide before I met Martin, but now that I see the potential you three represent, I am ready to try again. I have taken great joy in killing vampires for the last four hundred years, and relished the irony of profiting through these actions; but every kill has been for me, not them. If I can demonstrate that vampires and humans are not mutually exclusive, then I can help ensure our legacy forever. Sadly, I am unique amongst my kind right now."

Sam spoke for the first time, "What sustains you? And why is it consuming you?"

Frost paused. "Samuel. You know…I know the least about you of any of this crew, and yet you fascinate me the most. You speak the least and say the most at the same time; and you always ask the best questions. If you wanted a token of my good faith, then here it is: I will tell you what takes a man and turns him into vampire. Ironically, so few of us comprehend or care that it consumes the man in the process."

"We are all ears," Harold said without inflection.

"Every mythology and belief system addresses the possibility of multiple worlds. Heaven, hell, Asgard, Olympus, even string theory. How many of them there are, and what exists in these places is always anybody's guess. I am no theologian and I certainly am not a scientist. But for the sake of my tale, do we all concede that other worlds exist parallel to our own?"

We all looked to Harold. "It is fairly easy to concede that other types of realities may coexist with ours. But the simple fact that they are other realities precludes us from interacting with them. If they follow different rules, then we can't even perceive them as a result. It's a weak start, Frost."

"I cannot argue with Harold on that. I am not nearly as well read as he is on the matter." Frost went ahead, "But according to our elders, many thousands of years ago, a magic man of some kind or another managed to open a door into another place. We don't know what he sought, or what type of man he was, but we do know that a denizen of that other place found its way here. It immediately began to die, and in desperation, attached itself to the man, much to the detriment of both. The pair soon discovered that it could stay alive only if the man regularly consumed the blood of living things. To ensure its own survival, the Other made sure the host would be strong enough, and tough enough to secure a steady supply of blood forever. Your first vampire is born, gentlemen. It's not a gift…it's a parasite."

He went on, "The creature is always hungry, and like all living things, it desires to replicate itself. It does not seem to have a personality of its own, but it subverts us, unless we consciously try to control it. The thirst breaks our minds and we lose ourselves into this thing that both empowers us and consumes us at the same time."

Harold looked excited, "It's a stretch, but it does answer a lot of questions, though! It makes sense that it would struggle to exist/survive here. The blood is either a compromise or a metaphor. I would bet Martin's right arm that the real feeding is psychic, not physical, but due to the imperfect nature of the symbiosis, the host has to make the physical act of consumption. Do vampires ever eat flesh, Frost?"

Frost grimaced, "Occasionally, we get a ghoul. We don't know how or why it happens, and we usually destroy them immediately. They eat human, animal or vampire with equal gusto."

"Mutation during replication, I'd guess. How do your other abilities manifest?"

"They are always just extensions of whatever skills you were good at as a human. I could always hide anywhere as a human, now I'm even better at it. I was big fellow before, I'm bigger now." Frost shrugged.

"If this is an extra-dimensional creature, it may have access to energy types we haven't discovered yet. Since these energies probably function unpredictably, vampires would naturally and instinctively manipulate them along comfortable patterns. It would explain how they can regenerate tissue and expend energy significantly in excess of their apparent consumption. It also might explain why they don't like sunlight."

He barreled on, "If they are manipulating some sort of ambient other-dimensional radiation, then it is very plausible that certain types of radiation here would be antagonistic. Like sunlight! Sunlight bombards us with a million different frequencies of radiation all the time, and there is no reason that one or two of them can't be antagonistic to vampires."

Frost looked completely bewildered, "This is all too complex for me…"

Harold sighed, "Frost, what happens when you stand in direct sunlight?"

"I get weaker, slower. I have difficulty concentrating and I sometimes get nauseous."

"But you don't burst into flames or melt, right?"

Frost snorted, "You watch too many movies. No, only infant vampires need to hide from the sun, and that usually goes away in five to twenty years."

"Do infant vampires burst into flames?"

"No, they just get very sick and can die, fairly quickly sometimes."

Harold leapt in, "That's because whatever energy your parasite is using to make you superhuman is being interfered with! It's like trying to talk on a cordless phone too close to your neighbor; the signals interfere with each other!"

Still looking perplexed, Frost inquired, "But I don't need radiation, I need blood…?"

Harold looked exasperated, "When you drive a car, where does the energy come from?"

"Gasoline," Frost replied.

"And when your car is out of gas, what happens?"

"It stops."

"Right! Well, how much energy do you think it takes to propel a 300-pound vampire at 120 miles per hour?"

"I am certain I have no idea!" Frost was starting to get lost, it seemed.

"A damn sight more than you would get out of a few pints of O negative, that you can be sure of! Vampires are always doing things that take enormous amounts of energy. I have never figured out the link between blood and the energy. Blood is an absolutely shitty source of energy. Vampires just don't get enough 'gas' from blood to do the things they do! But it turns out I was looking in the wrong place! It's not the blood…it's the parasite! The blood (or more probably, the experience of feeding) gives the parasite some form or frequency of radiation it needs to stay alive. As long as it is alive it has access to or can manipulate another energy source. Possibly extra-dimensional, or maybe just a type we haven't discovered yet here. It's the classic origin of the concept of magic."

As the tactical member of the group, I had to ask, "This helps us how?"

"Maybe, if I can find that energy source; that radiation, I can either disrupt it like sunlight does, or at the very least, start harnessing it for us."

Sudden epiphany struck Frost, "My dear Harold…you mean to tell me you intend to discover magic?" He boomed that giant laugh of his through the clearing, "Harold…you want to become a wizard!"

Even Harold smiled, "That's the cleverest thing you've ever said, Frosty-Boy. But you know what I really need?" Harold looked right at Frost, "A vampire to study." He waggled his eyebrows, which made his glasses bounce up and down comically, "How committed are you to our little project, Frost?"

Frost actually looked pale. He shook his head, "You really are a creepy little man, Harold."

Well…at least they weren't bickering any more.

New Toys

It's not like I plan for this shit.

One day I was a dedicated patriot and exemplary government employee; and the next I am slogging through the Kobuk Valley National Park in central Alaska chasing undead killers through the endless twilight of the Arctic Circle in late fall. The temperature was a balmy four degrees, with a stiff breeze out of the Northwest. Normally, this would have sent me indoors, but I had work to do here, and like the postal service, a little bad weather would never keep me from my appointed rounds. I have to admit; the armor could be damned warm when worn properly. It's airtight, watertight and windproof. Add one layer of long underwear, and I was fairly comfortable for a change.

I was uncharacteristically chipper this hunt. The winter wonderland around me nearly perfectly complimented the kid-on-Christmas feeling that was threatening to add a playful skip to my stride.

It had been nearly seven months since I had last hunted and just like that stereotypical youth on a yuletide morn; I had a bunch of new toys. God I love toys. Harold and Frost had spent all winter, spring, and fall researching the energy vampires use to do all those annoying things they do: like run a hundred and fifty miles per hour, or toss cars, or mess with your perceptions. Frost's participation had been reluctant, but he held nothing back and Harold had made great strides in understanding what Sam and I were colloquially calling "magic." Harold called it "non-Newtonian physics;" and it explained how vampires could do things that violated those pesky laws of physics that the rest of us are stuck obeying. Apparently, it had to do with a massless particle from another dimension. Imagine that.

The short version is this: because this particle is moving through a non-measurable (in this reality) dimension, it is by definition breaking our own cosmic speed limit by getting from "point a" to "point b" via inter-dimensional shortcut. When objects in this reality exceed the speed of light, all sorts of things (previously only speculated about by the nerdiest nerds that ever graced a Dungeons and Dragons table) happen. As each superluminal particle (or wave…it's technically both) interacts with matter, it knocks other heretofore undiscovered massless particles off as new and exciting forms of radiation. The end result is exponential quantities of energy released from a minor little reaction.

Harold called the process "cold fission" because very little energy needs to be input to start knocking these particles off. I wanted to call the particles "vampirons" but Harold nixed that. Instead, he exhibited uncharacteristic literary flair when he decided to call them "Stoker Particles." We figured out that Stoker particles are extremely sensitive to psychic phenomena, and can be manipulated by influencing the cognitive, sub-conscious, and emotional fluxuations of living creatures. It's why vampires need blood; it's how they develop special abilities, and why some people taste better than others. It has nothing to do with the blood itself, but with the psychic residue of the source of the blood. Stoker particles interact with blood, and the result is blood that is "irradiated" with a certain frequency (flavor) of particle.

The problem in employing these little buggers for our own purposes is that regular humans can't perceive a stoker particle at all. No devices that operate based upon the principles that govern this universe will interact with, or even notice them. Poor Harold had to figure out that seemingly random conditions in this dimension would interact with stoker particles, and that's how he's been studying them. Harold thinks that they leak into our dimension at points where our reality interacts with another. Basically, wherever the laws of physics in that reality are bent to the extent that they sort of resemble ours; sort of the way Newtonian physics become a little inconsistent around black holes in our universe. At these points, both realities exchange particles. Bosuns, photons, and neutrinos go spinning off into the other reality from ours, and Stoker particles come whizzing in from theirs at these points. Places like Stonehenge, Easter Island, and Death Valley are likely examples of such places.

Now, vampires are regular people who are saddled with a parasitic lifeform from one of these realities. Because Stoker particles are in short supply here, these creatures have no access to an energy source. Clever creatures that they are, they create it via a complex reaction wherein feeding on living creatures which creates a frequency of Stoker particle radiation that they can use to sustain themselves. This is probably an anthropomorphic statement. There is no evidence at all that the psychic entity that infects a vampire is even sentient. It manifests purely as an insatiable hunger for blood and the ability to perform superhuman feats in the search thereof.

The biggest problem Harold had was even identifying the particle. We can't perceive it, we can only perceive the results of a Stoker particle reaction; and those are many and varied in and of themselves. Some frequencies affect mood, others perceptions, and still others alter the properties of matter itself. Poor Harold had to re-think the scientific method entirely, and his workshop went from bench grinders, lathes, and welding equipment to ancient artifacts, soil from exotic locations, and various animal parts. Then, as he began to understand the nature of the Stoker particle, the grinders and other equipment came back. Ancient ritual blended with modern science in the basement of a shack to produce a new and frightening arsenal of weapons for our crusade.

And what was the end result? My armor was now only a fraction of the weight it was before. It had been reduced to a belted black leather and nomex body suit with a balaclava mask to protect my face. Various pouches were sewn into the suit to handle my gear, and the grenade bandoliers and shoulder holster were non-negotiable additions. My coat remained, but the shock batteries were now gone, and their effect was accomplished by the weave of the coat itself; which would emit an arc of high-energy Stoker particles just as powerful as my batteries. I told Harold if he referred to it as a "+5 cloak of protection" one more time I was going to start calling him "Harry Potter." The reactive gel and ballistic plating was still there, but it was now thinner, lighter, and smarter; it reacted to my situation automatically without immobilizing me. Much of the bulk of the suit was gone, and it was far more comfortable to move in as a result.

The stakers remained, but they would now burn and disrupt vampire regeneration as well, making the weapons far more effective. Now when I staked a vampire, it would at least stay staked for a while.

But that's not the best part. My favorite new toy was the Cestus. Harold could only find enough raw materials to make one of these, but it was a large vambrace and gauntlet that covered my right forearm and knuckles. Essentially it was a loricated plate glove with one-inch spikes over each knuckle. Fabricated from the remains of an old crusader's sword, it would multiply the force of a blow a thousand times, and would withstand just about any force directed against it. We measured my best punch with it against a 14-inch thick sheet of battleship steel. The result (according to Harold's instruments) was about ten mega joules, or the equivalent kinetic-energy transfer of five pounds of C4. Bizarrely, the energy appeared mono-directional, and I suffered no ill effects from the destruction. Harold was careful to caution me that due to the nature of Stoker particles, the weapon's output would fluxuate with my emotional state, so I should watch my temper.

Harold speculated that the original sword must have been an object of incredible power, probably forged by someone very knowledgeable in non-newtonian physics. Very little of the original metal had survived, however, and no matter how much I wanted one, the sword could not be re-forged. Harold picked up the rusty, twisted-metal remains at a museum auction for a relative pittance, ironically, and incorporated pieces of the old sword into a metal glove. Doing so gave the old –war-blade a new life as a weapon against evil, and I liked that. It felt…right… to wield a magic sword against monsters. It appealed to my sense of poetry. If only I could find a dragon…

Big Daddy was by my side, as usual. I expected Harold to want to scrap it for something more exotic, like a magical uzi or something, but because of my emotional attachment to the weapon, Harold felt that it was the strongest candidate of all my weapons for "magical" modifications. Because it was something I had created and cared deeply for, it would have the most dramatic effect on the particles; thus maximizing any offensive potential the gun would reap from Stoker particle radiation. In that vein, Big Daddy had been modified with one small piece of the same sword that the Cestus was made of. A small rusted metal triangle set into the grip was the only change that was made, but as long as I was committed to my cause, and striking with full conviction, Big Daddy would do the rest. Even Harold was unsure what the big revolver would do under battlefield conditions. The only thing we knew for sure was that bullets from Big Daddy now burned with blue eldritch fire, and were hitting with far more power than ever before.

So basically, it was Martin Mark II on the prowl in the frozen wilderness of the far north. Frost was also on this hunt, and we were stalking a group of five young vamps that had been feeding on hunters and making it look like grizzly attacks. Frost was particularly cranky with this group, as he was a fan of grizzly bears. Apparently, he liked to feed on them because of the challenge they represented. It seems that even vampires respect 3000 pound carnivores that can decapitate you with a single swat.

Previously, five vampires would be a huge challenge. But with Frost on the hunt, and all the new equipment, we figured this would be a fairly simple matter to deal with. The remote location was ideal, since we weren't sure how all the equipment would work, and we sure as hell did not want to get caught in the field. It felt good to be elevating my game. I had been content to pick off the weak and stupid vamps one at a time for a few years, but now I was starting to do real damage.

It had started out well. We set up a fake hunting camp and pretended to be normal guys having a good time. Frost heard the Vamps coming, and thanks to a decent snowfall, the first one failed to smell it and stepped on a mine; blowing his leg off below the knee. Frost immediately fell on one opponent and began tearing him limb from limb, whereupon two of his buddies leapt to his aid. Frost was no slouch, but he was now in a running battle with three vampires and he appeared to have his hands full. This left one fresh one for me and one bleeding and regenerating in the snow.

The fresh one ran up to me, and startlingly, did not slam into me. Instead, it grabbed me by the throat and squeezed. My new armor exceeded all expectations; the gel swam up to the gorget of its own accord and protected my throat without cutting off my blood or air. The vampire looked confused for a second, and that's all the time I needed to slam the Cestus under his arm into the ribs on his left side. There was a "thump!" that shook the firmament, and my assailant crumpled limply to the ground, gasping and gurgling. I did not hesitate for one moment, and brought the Cestus down twice more on his skull. His head collapsed in a bloody mess, and he slumped facedown, pouring crimson into the snow like oil from a broken hurricane lamp.

I was just drawing Big Daddy to finish off the one-legged vamp in the snow when things went very wrong very fast. As I pulled the trigger, wreathing the downed creature in crackling blue energy that ripped a hellish scream from his gullet and disintegrated a full quarter of his torso; Frost came streaking out of the tree line covered in blood, which I (correctly) presumed was not his. He stopped in front of me and simply said "More coming. It's a trap!" This would normally be considered very ill news indeed, but Frost was wearing the most beatific feral grin on his face as he said it. I think the big bastard was relishing this! I know the type; born fighters who only experience true joy in the face of an unbeatable opponent or insurmountable odds.

I did not have to wait long, from the woods came no less than ten vampires, emerging like so many frost giants from the dark and snow with a solemn inexorable grace. Frost could probably outrun them, but I was definitely screwed.

One vampire stepped forward. A big sonofabitch with long blond hair and a handlebar mustache, he nearly matched Frost's stature, but without Frost's irreverence. If Frost was a panther, this guy was a bear. My suspicions were confirmed when he spoke, and the hint of a Nordic accent was audible as he boomed across the clearing at us.

"Oi, Frost!" he called from his side of the clearing, "We don't see you up here too often, brother! I heard you were keeping strange company these days, but him? Tsk tsk, boy!"

"Strange days are here, my friend; can you smell it on the wind? Big changes are coming!" Frost smirked a little, perhaps he already knew what the big guy was thinking, "Things are different now. You really don't need to do this. I should think that you above all others would understand what has to happen, now. You can be part of the future, if you want too," Frost replied evenly. The vamps were spreading out in a line, trying to cover our flanks. It was oddly tactical for vampires; this guy and his group were different. Wonderful.

The blonde giant shrugged and snorted, "Frost, you know better than that. This machine is too big for a little monkey wrench like you and the runt there to break it. I really thought he'd be bigger, you know. The elders seem to think he is some sort of berserker or demon or some other nightmare. He looks like a silly little man with a leather fetish to me." He laughed at his own joke. Man, I hate that.

"He is full of surprises, Erik. If you underestimate him, he will kill you. Trust me, I know." I'm glad Frost had all this confidence in me. At that moment I was looking at ten adult, organized, and cautious vampires attempting a classic envelopment maneuver. There was a lot of new data to process here, and I was not feeling very optimistic.

"Rafael Velasquez, Marcus Antonio, and Jeannie Burns all found out the hard way, Erik. Don't be foolish. This is the future, my brother. Honor is going to be returned to our people, even if that means there will be only a few of us left to receive it."

"Honor is where you find it, Frost. Little man should have killed Antonio when he brought down the blood bank. He was sufficiently enraged to arrange this little encounter, and he spared no expense, I assure you." Erik was looking at me when he spoke, but he turned to address Frost for his next remark, "There is much honor in doing the job you were paid to do, Frost. I thought you would understand that better; but apparently you do not." The big Norske shrugged again, "Future or no, brother, I have a job to do. You have betrayed your own kind, Frost, there will be no reprieve. You come as my prisoner, or stay as a corpse. Either way the runt dies. Make your choice."

"I have betrayed nothing Erik. If you understood me at all you would have realized that by now. A moment, if you would?"

He laughed, "For you, my brother, a moment I give."

Frost turned to me, "This is going to be interesting. Erik wouldn't be here if he hadn't done some reconnaissance, so he will know about your old tricks. He probably watched the scuffle we just had, so he will be aware of some of the new things, but he is not a thinker so he won't have worked out how to handle them." Frost's forehead crinkled, "He knows me well enough to bring ten friends, but he will be unsure about you. I think I can take him, but I don't think you can handle ten vamps on your own. So you will have to take him."

I wondered if Frost could sense my raised eyebrows under the helmet, "Can you take ten vamps on your own?"

He chuckled, "Probably not…but I can distract them and even outrun them if I have too. You can't do that. Be very careful with Erik. He is a Master vampire like me, and one of three or four non-elder vampire creatures on this planet that make me very nervous, Martin. He is almost a thousand years old, by far the oldest you've ever fought, so he will be very durable and very strong. He will want to fight you straight up though. Like all Vikings, he is not fancy or clever when he fights, but he is relentless and aggressive."

"Remember what Harold said. The armor and weapons will respond to your emotions and desires, so just stay focused and I am sure you will be fine." He smirked his lopsided little smirk, "Just do what you do, Martin. Make them fear the dark again. I will keep the others busy for as long as I can. Then you will have to help me or I will have to flee. Got it?"

"Got it. Shall we dance?"

"Lay it on thick, Martin. We need to create some fear. We will have to try to leave some of the others alive to flee, just to spread the terror."

Great. I don't really do drama, but what the hell? Right?

Like a football team breaking huddle, we turned to face the host of enemies before us.

"Erik, is it?" I started in, trying to lift lines from all the tough guys I could remember in film and literature, "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Martin, and I kill vampires. Don't take it personally, big guy, but you seem to be kind of a big deal. Good. I'm kind of a big deal myself."

I started to walk towards him; doing everything I could to exude confidence and power. Big Daddy was still clenched in my right hand, but I did not think I'd get it raised in time, so I let it hang casually. With every step closer I took, the circle of vampires closed in on me, an ever-tightening ring converging on predator and prey simultaneously. Frost hung back, chuckling to himself.

"You see, Erik, I don't buy into the whole 'immortality' mythos you parasites squawk about. I've killed just about everything there is to kill and I got news for you buddy: You aren't immortal. You are just hard to kill," I paused to think of a good analogy, "like a cockroach. If you take away the silly superstition and bad rhetoric, guys like you are just another animal to hunt." I grinned my sickest grin, "You really ought to check out my trophy room some time."

He loomed enormous in my field of view. The frost giant comparison struck me again in a far less poetic and much more ominous timbre this time. "Now me? I am not immortal, but I am many other things. I like to go with 'inexorable' and 'unstoppable' personally, but maybe I'm just bragging." I shrugged, "It doesn't matter, anyway. You don't really think I can do it. You are the same, arrogant, swaggering, ego-maniac I have killed two dozen times already. The names and faces change, but you are all the same. Every one of you thinks that you can just walk over me and get on with this freakish masquerade you creatures call 'life.' Every one of you has been wrong."

"You don't scare me, you don't impress me, and you don't even ruin my day. I was born to kill things like you; I am anathema, I am legend. And I am right here waiting for you, Blondie. So while you stand there glowering and posing like some sort of pro wrestler wannabe, just take a moment to think about the fact that I am going to kill you and all your friends, and then see if you still feel like a big deal."

Ego is a funny thing. When you have spent a thousand years being feared and respected, you start to expect it all the time; and when some insignificant little gnat insults you in front of your friends, you get pissed off. Erik was starting to look a little cranky; so I pushed on. I stopped eight feet in front of him, and looked (way up!) into his eyes. I reached down inside myself and found that cold knot of pure rage that lived at the bottom of my soul. It was born the night my soul was killed, and would always be there. For a long time I took comfort in it, because it was my fuel and my raison d'être. It's what kept going on these insane hunts, and kept me safe from most vampires' psychic influence. Her last gift to me was an inner strength and fire that confounded even the creatures that inhabit nightmares. It was a powerful weapon, and now it fueled both spirit and arms.

I know Erik felt it. I could tell that whatever his vampire senses were attuned to, they could tell that I was not like the others. Though his predator's heart would never admit it, and his façade would never show it, he was afraid. The moment I realized that that my conviction and rage could make a thousand-year-old vampire cringe, the Cestus came alive in response, and arcs of blue fire leapt from the gauntlet's spikes and surfaces in a crackling dance of energy barely restrained. I felt a hundred feet tall, and completely unstoppable.

"How many humans have you killed, Erik? What is the balance on your ledger? How much do you owe?"

I don't know what frequency of Stoker particle transmits pure malice, but Erik was pumping them out big time. He might be afraid of what I represented, but he was an honest –to-goodness Viking and he was not going to back down for anything. He positively seethed with contained hate at this point. It was almost a comical sight, if not for his sheer destructive potential. He spoke through gritted teeth, and his voice was a boulder grinding smaller stones into dust, "Little leather-man, I have killed more humans than you will ever know. I do not care what little tricks you are hiding under your ridiculous coat and your silly fetish gear. I am going to kill and eat you and keep your Halloween costume as a souvenir." The big vampire's voice simultaneously boomed and snarled. He seemed to grow even larger as he loomed over me, and the tension on his face was palpable. The air between us seemed to thicken with the expectation of impending mayhem. Even Erik's retinue seemed transfixed by the tableau, ten pairs of black eyes mesmerized by the struggle about to begin.

I smirked, and channeled Charles Bronson, "Boy, you make noises like a real mean ass-kicker. But I don't buy it."

And with perfect timing, Frost made his move.

The vampire on the far left edge of the echelon slumped headless to the snow with an audible "pop!" and a spray of blood at the exact moment I slammed the Cestus into Erik's midriff with a sound like thunder crashing. In that instant all the built-up tension in the world seemed to coalesce into frenzied activity; and things got very out of hand very quickly.

A veteran of a thousand battles (I presumed) Erik reacted with the speed of an experienced warrior, shrugging off the blow and punching me square in the jaw. This momentarily stunned me, and sent me hurtling across the clearing like a tumbling black-clad crash test dummy. The blow should have killed me outright, but the armor did its job flawlessly, and despite a sound wallop to the Gulliver, I skidded to a stop in the snow more or less un-killed. I was going to have a headache though, I'll tell you that for free.

Since he probably presumed me dead, Erik immediately went for Frost who, despite acquitting himself very well, was obviously in trouble. Watching vampires fight was difficult, because of how fast they moved. I couldn't help but notice that while they could cover distance quickly, once they were close they had to slow down to strike blows or grapple. No time to speculate about that now, though. Frost was out-striking his enemies three to one, but with ten opponents he was aggregating damage to himself very quickly. He was a whirlwind in action, despite the fact that he was being overwhelmed. Each of his blows sent a vampire hurtling into the woods, only to have it return at speed to re-enter the fray. His blows sounded like a twelve-pound splitting maul hitting green hickory, heavy and loud as he pummeled vampire bones into powder. Despite his producing a verifiable maelstrom of mayhem, it was a holding action at best, and it was obvious that he would need respite very soon.

As I picked myself up, Erik entered the brawl and very quickly Frost went under a mass of flying fists and feet as the thousand-year-old war machine added his considerable might to the already overwhelming quantity of opposition. This gave me a rare opportunity, though. Because the vamps were all piled up trying to subdue the still-fighting Frost, they were relatively simple to hit with bullets. That was a nice switch. I hauled Big Daddy up to eye level and snapped off three rounds in rapid succession. The results were incredible. With a sound like thunder, and a percussion that shook the very air itself, blue explosions ripped ragged dinner-plate-sized holes completely through vampire bodies. The impacts threw blood, bone, and gore thirty feet into the air and ripped inhuman screams from those vamps that still had lungs and/or throats. The dogpile collapsed as Frost seized his opportunity to burst outward and drag a screaming vampire into the woods at what had to be a hundred miles an hour.

"GET HIM! DO NOT LET HIM ESCAPE!" Erik yelled to his minions and came at me like fanged freight train. I had just enough time to throw my arm up and get the coat between the hurtling death express and my still throbbing noggin; and I was rewarded by another explosion of blue fire and the sound of dense flesh smacking into a tree. I quickly ascertained (because I'm a clever guy) that the coat had reflected the energy of Erik's charge back at him and sent him into a nearby red oak with enough force to crack the trunk and send snow unceremoniously cascading down over the felled vampire. I realized that for myself, I had not moved at all. This was very surprising, as I was accustomed to getting knocked all over the place when vampires charged me. I am no physicist, but it appeared that the coat had reflected all the kinetic energy of the charge back at the assailant. That was a nice touch I'd have to tell Harold about.

Bemused speculation notwithstanding, Erik was up already and he was mad. He barely appeared human; his face was so contorted by rage. Normally I cultivate this anger, because it made them careless, but Erik was more than a little terrifying. He came at me more slowly this time, obviously still in control of himself despite being in the grips of a homicidal fury. This is why the old ones are so hard to hunt; they maintain their presence of mind even under duress.

I snapped off another round, which he dodged with practiced ease and closed distance to grab my throat, "Nice trick, little one. I will tell of it to my friends for centuries."

He lifted me off the ground and began to squeeze my neck. I don't know what he expected, but the Stoker-irradiated gel appeared to be up to the task, because I felt no more than mild pressure. I dropped Big Daddy and fired three right hooks into his ribs with the Cestus and was rewarded with the dull "thump!" of a muffled explosion and a cry of surprise from the big Viking. Without my feet planted, the blows landed with far less force than I would have liked, but the Cestus made up for the difference. He dropped me and I landed on my feet, and without hesitation I smashed the Cestus into his mid-section, which propelled him across the clearing with another colossal "thump!" I could see that his ribs were smashed, and he was in great pain, for he got up a lot more slowly this time.

Frost chose that moment to reappear, with four vamps in hot pursuit. He looked ragged and his right arm hung limply.

"Little help here, Martin?" He was attempting to appear stoic, but he was a creature at the end of his rope. He caught one assailant with his good arm and pitched him into the staggering form of Erik, sending them both down again.

I charged another, which appeared amused at my temerity, and when he reached out to grab me I juked to the left and drove an overhand right into his chin. It seemed silly that a classic, first-lesson boxing trick would work, but most vampires are entirely reliant on their superhuman abilities in a fight, and are otherwise pretty poor brawlers.

Thankfully this vampire was obviously made of far weaker stuff than Erik, because the Cestus blew the vampire's head into a pink mist of brain matter and bone shrapnel; and the rest of the husk slumped limply into the snow. Another vampire immediately grabbed me by the coat and flung me away with absolutely no thought to my dignity whatsoever. Being saddled with only human reflexes and reaction times was a huge liability in this business. These battles developed faster than I could process, and we were losing control of this one. I came to rest against a tree and tried to steal a moment to assess our situation.

Frost was contending with three vampires and Erik, and it was bad. He managed to crush the pelvis of one with a blow from his good left arm, but Erik and the other two fell on him and began tearing at him and landing horrific bludgeoning blows that shook the ground itself. Frost snarled and thrashed, but Erik drove his hand into Frost's chest and tore out a great, bloody gobbet of viscera and threw off to the side. Frost slumped unconscious, all the fight out of him while he tried to regenerate.

Frost was not my friend. We were not bosom buddies with shared adventures growing up together. He wasn't on my Christmas card list and I found his sense of humor annoying. But this was a mission and he was on my team. Nobody fucks with my team and nobody gets left behind. On my team, there are no dead heroes. I leapt up with a snarl. Deep in that cold place inside me, an ember began to glow. As the three remaining mobile vampires turned to look at me I saw the same blank, confused arrogance that they all had when the food got uppity. Had they learned nothing? What does it take for these stupid, supercilious, oblivious freaks to learn something? How many do I have to destroy before they start figuring out that there is more to a man than the blood in his veins?

I fanned the ember with thoughts of my tragedy, of Harold's family, of Sam's. I thought of all the people I didn't save, of all the times I wasn't good enough. I even thought of Frost, who had joined my team for the sake of honor, and who trusted me as a fellow warrior. By the time Erik turned to meet me, my entire right arm was completely ablaze in neon blue, so bright that it tinted the snow azure for thirty feet around me. I felt entirely fueled by righteous fury, and the Cestus was singing to me in a symphony of wild contradictions: Rage and justice, violence and compassion, love and destruction all woven into a cacophony of honorable bloodshed forthcoming. It was a marvelous feeling. The original sword must have been an awesome weapon. I felt it like a living thing straining at my subconscious. I could feel its need like a caged tiger desperate to be released on some hapless mammal. It wanted more energy, more rage, more sadness. It was a pervasive whisper at the back of my mind, "give me more; I will make you invincible, if you just give me more…"

Erik reached for me with a hand still covered in Frost's blood and I made no pretense to defend myself. I leapt straight for him. The Cestus promised me victory so I had no fear. Erik had learned to avoid the Cestus and dodged easily, but he had misjudged my intent. I sailed past him and let the force of my swing carry me into his remaining henchmen. I planted my right foot firmly and pivoted hard to my left, delivering a tremendous blow to one of them. I felt like I was on fire, the Cestus was calling for more and more rage and sadness all the time. As if it was responding to the presence of evil and my own commitment and I was getting swept along behind its flood of energy. It wasn't just using my emotions; it was feeding on them and magnifying them. I struggled to maintain control, but the Ogre called for destruction, and the Cestus was providing it. It was an unholy union of purpose that had me just a little bit nervous.

My arm proscribed a blazing blue arc and the resulting blow tore the top half of the vampire completely away from the lower, and blew the entire mass into the woods further than I could follow visually. I instantly spun and swung the Cestus in an overhand smash that rendered another vampire into pieces so small that they could not easily be identified. The third henchman took off into the woods without a backward glance and I found myself face to fist with Erik's right hand.

The blow, probably delivered with all the force he could muster sent me across the clearing again, but something was different this time. My head stayed clear and I was able to land with some semblance of grace, and without injury. Things seemed to slow, and the world appeared to freeze in time around me while Erik sprinted across the clearing toward me. Erik was the only thing moving all of a sudden, and I realized that my sense of time had dilated to the point where the world seemed to be still, and Erik's superhuman running speed appeared only slightly faster than normal. A slow-motion rooster-tail of snow was the only indication of his terrifying speed as he came for me at full clip. The ramifications of this were staggering, but I had no time to ponder them as I met Erik in the middle of the clearing. My stomach lurched as my brain struggled to make sense of the temporal distortion. It was a bizarre feeling, and difficult to maintain; but I found that if I concentrated, I could almost match Erik's speed. Soon we were locked in a frantic struggle, but a much more evenly matched one than he anticipated.

On the one hand, I had been training to fight since I was eleven years old. Bare hands, guns, knives, sticks, rocks, or whatever you please, I had studied them all. On the other hand, Erik was a thousand-year-old Viking, and a veteran of countless battles. I found myself employing everything I knew just to keep up with the relentless, unending frontal assault Erik was pushing. He had learned to avoid the Cestus, and my other blows were akin to a 3-year-old slapping a professional boxer. I found myself tiring, and I knew that he would never tire. This was an advantage to him that could spell a bad ending for me. Erik managed to land another thundering blow to my mid section, and while the armor prevented me from experiencing the joy of exploding internal organs, I was again propelled to the edge of the clearing.

Erik was on me instantly when inspiration struck. Well, Erik struck, and inspiration saved me. As his blow streaked towards me, my old boxer's instincts took over and I slipped his punch to the left and it landed on my shoulder: which my coat was covering. The coat did exactly what it was supposed to do when a heavy blow landed on it. All the energy of Erik's blow was reflected back into his fist, shattering it and throwing his hand back and unbalancing the big Viking.

Summoning all my rage, I drove the Cestus overhand into Erik's face. The gauntlet was unrecognizable at this point, completely consumed by rage and determination, the glove burned so brilliantly it hurt the eyes to look at it. Erik's face collapsed in a spray of gore and he hurtled to the ground with enough force to cause a tremor. I did not wait for him to rise. I did not care anymore about reason, or futures, or the war, I cared only for the mission, and for retribution. I ran to where Erik was trying to rise, his head hideously malformed now, and with no sign of healing any time soon. I jumped as high as I could, raising the Cestus over my head, and brought it crashing down on Erik's chest with all my weight and all my fury.

I might have overdone it a bit. The Cestus was drawing so much out of me that I worried there would be nothing left when it was over, but the resulting explosion blew a crater forty feet across, twelve feet deep and more or less completely annihilated Erik the thousand-year-old Viking. When my ears stopped ringing and the smoke cleared, I was seated somewhat bewildered in a gory circle at the bottom of the aforementioned pit. I felt oddly drained and enervated, like I had been awake for two days straight without food or water. I was very tired. I leaned over and vomited violently as the last dregs of energy left my body. Something wasn't right.

I heard a dragging scraping sound, and Frost's sandy blond head peaked over from the top of the crater. His voice was weak, but he still managed to convey his characteristic banal good humor, "That was some show!" he croaked, "You really should watch your temper there, Martin. Someone could get hurt."

"You gonna live, Frosty?"

"It appears so, Martin."

"Damn, and here I thought today was going to be a good day," I managed to croak as I rolled over on to my back. My heart was racing and I was suddenly very cold. What was happening to me?

Frost laughed until he coughed blood, "You wound me, Martin. I shall tell Harold when we get back that you were mean to me. We're quite good friends now."

"He threatened to kill you twice last week alone!" I countered as I limply began to drag myself toward the edge of the crater. Why wouldn't my muscles work? I felt like a marionette with all the strings cut. The Cestus was quiet, but I could still feel it whisper in the back of my mind, "…more…"

"That's a lot less than usual though, you must admit…"

"Yeah, I guess so," I had to concede, "Let's get a pyre started so we can get out of here."

It took four hours for us to get the myriad little vampire pieces burned; most of that time was Frost regenerating and me recuperating. I still wasn't feeling right when we went back to the van, and Frost ended up having to drive most of the seventy-two-hour trip home. Since he didn't have to sleep, it worked out better that way, anyway.

Can't a Guy Get a Burger in Peace?

The universe hates me.

Seriously.

While I freely admit that I stomach any potential cosmic consciousness with apathy bordering on disrespect, it often seems that said singularity of infinity has selected me for special punishment. Despite a world populated with far more deserving prospects, mine was the burden of celestial ire. Apparently, my reward for trying to be a good little government death machine and the inscrutable bane of a mysterious undead army is to have all my faults and sins forever revisited me.

Case in point: In a completely innocent attempt to get a decent hamburger and recharge my batteries following the massacre in Alaska, I found myself seated in my favorite local restaurant staring at one of my least favorite people ever. She was entirely inappropriate for her surroundings, dressed in a stark gray power suit with a burgundy blouse, black pumps, and a sardonic frown. She was five foot six, one hundred and forty pounds, and possessed of a timeless, somewhat school-marmish beauty. She could have been 35 or 55, it was impossible to tell; because while her body could have belonged to any buxom woman in her mid-thirties, her face wore the stoic but slightly tired bearing of a woman who had seen too much and done even more. I knew from experience that she was a woman who had changed the fates of empires and altered the history of international politics more than once, but she had always seemed to me a woman on the edge. Years as a national security analyst and CIA "intervention specialist" had taken what was probably a brilliant young political science post-grad and turned it into a hardened puppet master; a job she had no taste for, but knew no one else would get it right if she didn't do it first. She saw the games of kings and presidents as a delicate plate-spinning performance, and while she hated spinning plates; the damn things would fall if she didn't do it.

Despite the diner being deserted but for myself and one tired-looking, but oddly fit cook, I had seated myself in the corner to the extreme right of the door. This allowed me to see everyone as they came in, and forced any right-handed potential assailant to rotate his or her body to get a clean shot at me. It was a silly old habit, but Wild Bill Hickok only skipped this ritual once in his life and we all know how that ended.

She strode through the door and scanned the room quickly. I recognized her immediately, and she made no pretense as to her objective. After a perfunctory examination of the room, she immediately stomped over to my table and sat down across from me brusquely, and without interaction. She drummed bright red fingernails on the worn plastic of the table top for a few seconds and started in on me with what I knew was her customary exasperated tone.

"Jesus, Martin. Why didn't you call me?"

This was weird. I was expecting a re-enlistment pitch, not this. "Why on earth would I have called you, Sue? I'm retired. Discharged. Whatever. I don't work for you anymore. I'm a private citizen." I was not in the mood for circumspect interrogation, for we had discovered an unexpected side-effect of employing the Cestus: it fed on my psychic energy. Since I never knew I had any psychic energy, it was not something I had trained to cope with. So while my body felt mostly OK, I was depressed, lethargic, and enervated emotionally after the fight in a manner far more extreme and frightening than ever before. I was listless, and unmotivated, and sleeping almost fourteen hours a day. The first four days after the battle, I vomited every bit of food and drink I consumed. It made everybody very nervous.

It hadn't occurred to any of us that the new Stoker-irradiated gear would exact a price, and it was obvious that much more care needed to be taken in the future. No one knew exactly what would happen if I completely burned myself out psychically, but Harold speculated that a coma and/or death were fairly likely. Oh goody. So until I got more accustomed to expending my emotional/psychic energies, we were limiting how much gear I would use at any given time.

Thus, I did not have any vigor for my usual witty repartee. Whatever Sue wanted, she was going to have to come right out and ask, because I needed a damn nap, and the CIA verbal tap dance was NOT on my list of things to do today. Sue gave me a glare that had withered the resolve of at least two Joint Chiefs of Staff and one President, if rumor could be believed. If you had ever been on the receiving end of it, you might concur. I was struggling to feel anything but irritation at that moment, so its effect was somewhat blunted. She ran her fingers through dark brown hair streaked only slightly with silver, and let out an exasperated sigh.

"Martin, you are a prince among assholes," she let her hands fall palms down onto the table with enough force to make me jump, "You have been waging a campaign against creatures we will loosely refer to as vampires, all by your fool self and generally making an uncoordinated ass of yourself while doing it. You may be the most effective operative ever, but you are NOT subtle. For three years you putzed around taking out the odd creature here and there; then for some reason in the last fourteen months or so you suddenly began to take out major players and make a slightly less uncoordinated ass of yourself while doing it. How am I doing so far?"

"No idea what you are talking about, Sue," this was bad.

She glared harder, "Somehow you have managed to secure the assistance of a wealthy financial backer with VERY good computer security…"

The thought of the CIA trying to crack Harold's network pried wry amusement from the depths of my withered psyche. That would be like a chimpanzee trying to hack the DOD with a speak and spell.

"…and some sort of inside man/creature for intel and tactical assistance. You have run operations in San Francisco, Kansas, Montana, Florida, and lately, Alaska. Martin, you twit, blowing up sections of public parks is a federal crime. YOU SHOULD HAVE CALLED ME."

I felt my listlessness receding, and a little fire started in my gut. I felt an echo of the Cestus whisper "…more…" in the back of my mind. Fortunately, it was locked up back in the bunker. I suspect that there may be much about that weapon we need to learn.

I did my best to wither Sue with a glare; it didn't work. "Don't be ridiculous. You are the last person I want to talk to! I'm all done being a spook. I made that very clear, Sue. I am doing my own thing now, so go get someone else to swat terrorists and tin-pot dictators for you. I'm sure there are legions of fresh-faced spec-ops 24-year-olds who are just dying to serve their country as proud members of our clandestine services. Pin a medal on one of them and kick 'em out of a plane over some god-forsaken moonscape, 'cause I'm through with all of it."

"That's a crock of shit and you know it, Martin. You are a killer through and through, and you always have been. You are just saddled with scruples, too, and that makes you bitter and whiney about it. Grow up, I'm not here about wetwork, you thickheaded grunt; I'm here about vampires."

She started drumming her fingers again, a quick staccato tattoo that punctuated her words with subtle malice, "Thanks to you, we (and I am using the CIA 'we') are now acutely aware of their existence, but so far have not been able to do much about it. The damn things are practically impossible to spot and harder to kill, so we've avoided open conflict. The best we could typically do is blow one up when it wasn't suspecting it. We've never been bold enough to capture one, because we aren't sure how to hold one or what they would do in an attempt to retrieve one of their own. The ramifications of open hostility are too difficult to calculate." She snorted derisively, "Of course, you never stopped to consider the ramifications of your actions, did you? Nope. You just grabbed your gear and went all 'Martin the Marauder' on an entire species of super-human killers. Typical."

She paused and gave me a level stare that was impossible to read, "All our projections had you as dead in six weeks, Martin; but surprisingly (to everyone except me), you started racking up the kills. If there is one thing your bitter, uncompromising, ex-Army butt can do better than anyone else, it's make a bad guy die, and I don't have to like you very much to admit that." She pressed on, obviously in full "briefing mode" and would complete her report before she even let me respond.

"I never doubted you would make headway, and so we sat back and watched. You are really easy to follow when you work, you know. I just look for unexplained explosions in the news, and there you are! You engineer corps grunts rarely accomplish any objective without blowing something up. I swear you are like children with firecrackers."

"You may be surprised to know that I have been keeping homeland security off your trail. No need to thank me. That federal park op was a tough sell, though. We told them it was a secret training exercise and wrote them a very large check. You owe me for that one."

I laughed. A short, cynical snort, "Bill me." Sue was famously soft-hearted after five o'clock, but on the job she was all business. If she was helping me, it was because she wanted me to keep doing what I was doing.

"Now we see you are actually doing real damage. Our own operatives can't seem to make any inroads with these things, and right now you are the world's foremost 'vampire' expert. We want in, Martin, and we always get what we want." What Sue really meant was, "We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. But we are going to do this." It was negotiation time.

I gave it a moment to consider my response. Not that I doubted what it would be, but one must always phrase things very carefully when dealing with the CIA. "Sue, I will NOT work for you and I will NOT work for the CIA. This thing is very personal for me, and I am not gonna take orders. You want in on my action? Fine. But this will be MY play." She started to respond, but I cut her off, "Do not give me the scary CIA vague threat speech, Sue, I wrote the damn thing. If I decide for one moment that the CIA is trying to run my op, I will go so far underground you'll need a well-digger to find my hat. If you even threaten me one time in that annoying CIA tone and the next target I service will be Langley. You may always get what you want, Sue; but I always complete my objective."

Sue's eyes bulged for a moment, "Are you threatening me?"

"No, I am threatening the CIA. I don't need you, you need me. The last thing this operation needs is you guys stomping all over my objectives with your organizational arrogance and turning a good thing into a classically bureaucratic cluster-fuck. I have all the resources I need right now, so the only thing you can offer me is intel and cover stories. Great…I'll take that. But there will be no oversight, there will be no progress meetings, and there will be no over-muscled kids fresh from Iraq thinking that they are going to be killing evil monsters in the name of baby Jesus and the U S of A. I will pick my own team as I go, and what I have now is good enough."

She was starting to look pissed, and her voice took a shrill edge I'd never heard before…almost desperate… or concerned, maybe? "Martin, there is no way the US government is going to keep letting you run with no leash. They wouldn't even let me come talk you without an extraction team. You make too much fucking noise when you work. Jesus! They have a guy with your stupid-thick cranium in crosshairs right now, you moron! That's not a threat, Martin; the orders come all the way from the top of DHS. You play ball or they take you down. You know that's what they do. You've seen it a thousand times. If I don't give them a signal that you are on board, then they are GOING TO SHOOT YOU RIGHT HERE IN THIS RESTAURANT."

I actually chuckled, "Susan, there is nothing more amusing to a guy like me than someone who doesn't even know how ignorant they are about something. I told you not to threaten me, but since you don't even understand the paradigm, allow me to illustrate. Mr. Frost?"

I was getting better at noticing him when he did his 'stealth mode' trick. It was all about focusing on the environment, not the man. If you were looking for a man, you wouldn't see him, but if you were looking for a chair, you might notice him obstructing it. I had learned to look for gaps in the environment to find him. It wasn't perfect, but it was working fairly well.

"Hello, Martin!" came that booming, laughing, voice, "I found these outside and thought you might like to show them to that enchanting creature at the table with you."

He tossed me four box magazines from Remington model 770 .300 Winchester magnum rifles. "One magazine each, from four very serious-looking gentlemen covering every avenue of egress. The fifth man did not have a rifle, but he let me borrow this." Frost tossed over a chain with dog tags still attached. I looked at the name and smiled inwardly. With a flick of my wrist I sent them over to Sue. She caught them easily and sighed in frustration.

"The 'cook' is currently locked in the walk-in. I think he was one of those navy SEAL types, so I don't believe the cold will faze him. What he did to the pot roast here was positively ghastly, and he deserves a time-out for disrespecting a perfectly good cut of beef like that. Poor choice for that particular cover story I should think. Next time make him a busboy."

"Did you kill anyone, Frost?" I asked in wary tone.

"Don't insult me Martin; you know perfectly well I haven't killed a human since the 1600's. In a few moments they will all wake up in the bathroom of a local establishment that caters to some, ah, 'alternative lifestyle' folks about eight miles away. The martini's there are exquisite and well worth the trip. I ordered them a round on me."

Sue looked quietly furious. Frost glided over to the table and gave a theatrical bow, complete with elaborate flourishes. "Madame, I simply must apologize for the rough treatment of your men. Rest assured they were consummate professionals and in no way derelict in their duties. Allow me to introduce myself! Martin can be such a dour brooding gargoyle, and his manners are deplorable to boot; to have kept such a jewel as you from his friends and comrades is an unforgivable betrayal." He straightened, "My given name is Nikolai Mikhailovitch Cherenkov, late of the court of Czar Peter the Great and now a Gentleman of Fortune and Leisure. I must admit, I have never felt such fortune as now, to have met a woman of such passing charm and vitality as yourself! I am eternally grateful to make your acquaintance. My friends, whom I am positively desperate to count you amongst, call me Frost." I groaned an internal groan. Frost could be positively exasperating sometimes.

Well, most times actually…come to think of it, he was exasperating all the time.

I fully expected Sue to either laugh in his face, or shoot him on the spot. The thought of the stern CIA team leader being wooed by seven feet and four-hundred pounds of ageless muscle and malice was ridiculous in the extreme. But Frost was oddly dashing in a quirky way, and he conveyed rakish sincerity with every over-the-top word.

Sue neither laughed nor employed violence. This was just as well, actually. She was a murderously good pistol shot, but rarely carried more than a .380. Frost would probably consider that foreplay. No, she just stared up at the giant vampire with an oddly bemused look on her face. I couldn't figure out what she was thinking until she spoke.

"So this is your inside man, Martin? Hmmph!" She jingled the pilfered dog tags in her hand, "What I could accomplish with a few of you Nikolai Mikhailovitch!" That was classic Sue; always angling for the asset.

"Please, Susan, (may I call you Susan?) you will make me blush!" Frost warmed to the success of his charms. "And please call me Frost; I'd hate to confuse poor Martin. He is dreadfully clever when it comes to the business of battle, but his other social graces are, shall we say, underdeveloped?"

"You don't have to tell me. You should have seen him at an embassy function!"

Frost pulled up a chair, "Really? I have to hear this story! Do you mind, Martin?"

What the hell? I worked with this woman for seven years, and she never seemed to like me despite a perfect (if unorthodox) operations record. Frost incapacitates her entire team and she flirts with him like a blind date. Why does the universe hate me?

"If you two don't mind, can we deal with the fact that the CIA is trying to absorb me and won't take 'no' for an answer?" I was just the teeniest bit cranky with the old office sending a hit squad to help convince me to come in out of the cold. I will NOT be strong-armed! "You two can spend the entire afternoon chatting afterword, I promise. I'll even buy you guys a malt over at the soda fountain."

I shouldered right into my tirade, for if the universe was going to send in any two people to try my patience, it would be these two, "Sue, this thing is going to be an open war very soon, and you guys are terrible at winning wars. Too much sneaking and analyzing has made you spooks forget something any goon in camo could tell you: Eventually you gotta say, 'fuck the consequences' and go kill the bad guy. Vampires are not like governments, or terrorists, or criminals. They don't react like you think they should, they are incredibly factionalized, and they are relentless hunters. If this becomes a big multi-million dollar CIA romp they will take us out faster than you can say 'analysis paralysis.'"

"This little exercise was a perfect example. You treated this just like any other op. You treated me like any other potential asset, and you stuck to the book like you wrote it. Guess what? You flopped horribly because you don't even know how much you don't know. Your ignorance would kill us all. Literally and figuratively."

I just barreled along, despite Sue's obvious desire to interrupt, "Once again: you can help, we can talk, this can be cooperative, but nobody at Langley knows shit about what we are doing and they can only fuck it up. I've worked too hard on this and I will fight you tooth and nail to keep you from screwing it up. I know you Sue, you are the best analyst and operational leader in the game, and I can use that, but you can't run the field work like I know you and your people want to. If the brass hats can't be made to understand this, then we can't do business."

She sighed and looked back at me, "So what are the terms then?"

I relaxed. I was in control now. Sue hated that but she was far too cool and competent to give me anything.

"This is how it goes. You cannot give orders. You cannot give me a budget. I do not report to anybody. Ever. If you need something you do it on my schedule. I do not go to meetings, I do not give briefings. I pick my own team. You will assist me in procuring items for my operations when necessary."

"In exchange for this, you can feed me targets and intel. You can ask for specific operations to go a certain way. You will be informed on my targets ahead of time to help prepare and avoid civilian casualties. I accept that it is becoming necessary to expand our scope to avoid this conflict spilling over into America's living rooms, but that doesn't mean you get to run my show."

"A rare moment of clarity, Martin?" Sue could not resist taking that shot.

"I'm not finished. I do not kill vegetarians. Those are vampires that do not feed on humans. Frost will identify those for us. This is not a race war, Sue, it's a law-enforcement operation." Frost gave me a nod of appreciation.

She looked right at me, "What about tech?"

"What do you mean?"

"Don't be coy. That crater you left in Alaska was not made by any known explosive. Electronic devices go dead around it, but it is not radioactive. There are signs of over-pressure but no sign of heat. It didn't even melt the snow. Whatever you used is brand new, portable, and nasty as hell. The boys at Aberdeen are completely stumped."

"Sue, don't you worry about how I do what I do, besides, I don't own the rights to that tech; the inventor does, so unless you want to sue him for it in public court, I'd drop it."

She gave me a level gaze, "I don't have to tell you what will happen if any of this tech finds its way into the hands of a foreign power, right? I won't be able to stop the repercussions if that were to happen."

"Sue, nobody touches this stuff but me and my team. If I don't trust dear old Uncle Sam with it, you can bet your ass I won't let anyone else near it."

She sighed again, "That will have to be good enough, I guess. You are treading on very thin ice, Martin, and you've never had the head for intrigue. Just trust me a little and let me handle the suits, and I think we can make this work. You saw the name on those dog tags?"

"Yeah. Hammer is going to be pissed that he got caught. He hated being number two."

"When you left he became number one. He won't be happy to hear you are back."

"Yeah, well. My heart bleeds for him."

Frost picked this moment to interrupt, "If the dreary business of threatening and ultimatums is quite finished, I should like to remind the lovely Susan that the sun descends, and I am if anything, a creature of the night. Madame, it would be my great pleasure to bring you to your men, and incidentally, there happens to be a delightful little bistro along the way that does a divine chicken caprese. I shouldn't think your team would begrudge you a decent meal? Naturally it would be my extreme pleasure to provide what small conversation I can while you eat."

Sue smirked at me, "Mr. Frost, I am completely perplexed as to why a gentleman of your obvious wit and culture should be associating with our Martin? I just don't see how you two would ever get along."

Frost boomed his big laugh, as he stood up and offered his arm to my old handler, "Well I did try to kill him on the night we met. Things went poorly and I decided that despite his boorishness, poor breeding, scruffy appearance, bad manners and terrible haircut, that he was far better kept a friend than an enemy."

"You tried to kill him? That couldn't have gone well," she stood up and took Frost's offered arm.

They walked out, arms linked, and Frost at least conceded, "I should think not, Madame. It took three days for my face to grow back."

So there I was, back in with the CIA, my old boss was for all intents and purposed going on a date with an immortal assassin, and there was a pissed off Navy Seal/CIA killer locked in the restaurant's walk-in cooler.

Worst of all, my burger had gotten all cold and rubbery. I told you the universe hates me.

On the Radar…

Things were starting to get serious around the campsite. Because the highest levels of vampire culture now knew that Frost was rogue, we had to move him in with us, which bothered Harold a lot less than I thought it would. Apparently, having a live-in test subject for his research outweighed his aversion to Frost's demeanor and, well, existence for that matter. The rest of us resolved to pack it in and move to the bunker as well. As of Alaska, the game was afoot, and it was time to go to ground. We were no longer just a bump in the night, and the enemy would be coming for us soon. Every one of us had understood that the day would come when going back to our cushy homes was no longer an option. When the vamps were actively hunting us, and hunting was indeed their forte, there would be no way to hide in our everyday lives.

We were not short of room either, for that matter. The bunker was really much more than a hole in the ground. It was an old fallout shelter that Harold's paranoid grandfather had built in the middle of his favorite hunting area for when those damn commies inevitably invaded. Harold often remarked that his father's greatest disappointment was that the commies never actually attacked. It really was a shame when you consider the care taken to make the bunker impenetrable.

Isolated, supremely defensible, and almost entirely self-sufficient, the bunker was a perfect place to hide. Short of advanced satellite imaging, it was nearly completely undetectable.( Someday, Harold had promised, he would shield the generators' exhaust vents so even a satellite would be unable to find us, but he had not gotten around to it yet.) At nearly 12,000 square feet, there was room for all Harold's work areas and some meager living quarters. Sophisticated monitoring systems had been added, as well as vampire-resistant blast doors around key areas.

Harold looked to upgrading the defenses, and the addition of Stoker Particle tech had him very excited. We could not sense Stoker radiation yet, no matter what technology we tried. The radiation did not even interact with our universe consistently, so any sort of logical testing protocol was completely useless. Harold refused to be daunted by this, and had figured out how to produce a consistent effect out of little devices he called "wards" during his experimentation. These resembled little stick figures made of local tree branches, wrapped in copper twine and treated to Stoker radiation of a certain frequency. Basically, when anything that manipulated energy or matter as part of the Stoker spectrum went near a ward, the ward would produce a tiny arc of magical blue incandescence. This may seem insignificant, because naturally we could not detect a small flash of light a mile away, but Harold had little devices that could. So instead of sensing the Stoker radiation directly, we could at least detect the effect of the radiation on the ward. It was now virtually impossible for a vampire to approach our camp undetected. We made Frost try it twenty times, and even he couldn't avoid tripping the wards. They were easy to mass produce, had good range, and were very reliable. Harold was positively insufferable with pride the week they were deployed.

We had also augmented the perimeter with anti-personnel mines triggered by Stoker radiation. With the fusible links removed and replaced by special fetishes that reacted to vampire radiation, these mines were incapable of detonating on their own. Since the triggering mechanism was purely magical in nature, a regular person could dance a jig on one of these and it would not go off. Frost would have to remember to use the trees to approach the campground, but otherwise, these mines could be buried and left on their own with little risk to a regular human.

Then there was the piece de resistance: the Stunner. While studying ways to overwhelm vampire senses, Harold and Frost had stumbled upon a combination of effects that obscured vampire perceptions on the most basic level. To achieve this, a device was cobbled together from spare parts and items irradiated with Stoker particles and assembled in the center of the bunker as our final line of defense if attacked.

When activated, it blanketed the area in random frequencies of Stoker radiation. At least Stoker radiation behaved like regular radiation in some ways, because many of the frequencies were disruptive or overtly antagonistic to each other. Basically, any vampire caught within the device's radius would be unable to see, hear, feel, or think normally. Think of it as sensory interference; all the frequencies that vampires perceive would go to static for several moments. The effect would vary dramatically from vamp to vamp, but overall, it would at the very least render any vampire in the area combat-ineffective; and that was a huge advantage. During testing Frost was completely incapacitated for almost four minutes, and he was not himself for at least a half hour afterward.

The downside is that the device required a blood sacrifice. The Cestus had taught us that producing a noticeable effect in the Stoker spectrum usually required some sort of psychic price, and in this case the death of a living creature was necessary for the proper output. Magic can be a bitch, sometimes. Ironically, a local coyote had been captured and stored for this purpose. It lived comfortably in a kennel near the device, and would be dispatched humanely should the need arise. Hey, I never said we were the good guys. We were more like the "not-as-bad" guys; but this was war, and I hate coyotes almost as much as vampires.

Altogether it was a fairly impressive perimeter when you added in our usual arsenal, now much easier to acquire and distribute with the CIA on board. Susan was as good as her word, and had arranged for us to continue without direct oversight, with the exception of a 24/7 mandatory liaison. Naturally, that would be Ms. Brown herself. This delighted Frost, but left me with a sour stomach. She had been a tough boss back in the day, and I wasn't sure she could help herself when it came to not interfering with my game. I could not argue that her organizational acumen and operational expertise were the best in the world, and the part of me that understood how to run a good op knew that she would be useful. I just knew she didn't like me and that I didn't really like her. She was used to being the pack leader, and I frankly, was used to not having a pack at all.

Already, the rest of the crew had warmed to her completely. Frost was a shameless flirt, Sam responded to her ravenous desire for vampire knowledge, and even Harold was won over when she showed up with several million dollars' worth of expensive Defense Department technology. Hmph. Here I was still driving the shitty van.

I was being sour and petty and grouchy about the whole thing. I tried to be a good sport but there was a nagging issue I needed to deal with that had me uneasy. Part of me knew what the real problem was. I just wasn't willing to say it yet. Unfortunately, Frost had a yen to wrestle it from me.

I was sitting a few hundred yards from the main campsite, essentially feeling cantankerous and unpleasant. I heard Frost approaching; which naturally meant he wanted me to hear him coming. "Why, hullo, Mr. Martin! Fancy meeting you here!"

"Mr. Frost, how do you do?" If he wanted to play at nonchalance, I would bite.

"Delightful, I'm sure, Martin. But you appear to have applied extra glower today, if such a thing were even remotely possible. Fancy a chat?"

"I rarely 'fancy' anything, least of all chatting, Frost."

"Wonderful! Don't mind if I do!" He plunked down beside me and stretched his legs out with a very satisfied sigh.

I grunted, "So this is how it's going to be then? What do I have to say to make you go bother someone else? Shouldn't you and Sue be sharing a vanilla coke at the malt shop or something?" A cheap shot, I knew, but I was in a bad mood.

He chuckled, "Ms. Brown is a charming creature, but sadly, she is a little too preoccupied with the work at hand to delight me with her company today, and every time I go into the bunker, Harold wants to poke me or burn me or fry my brains with whatever new gizmo he has jerry-rigged together with twine and chicken entrails, so I am afraid you have me all to yourself. Which reminds me; you sir, seem remarkably un-preoccupied with the work at hand these days. Things are going to get very exciting very soon, and you seem to be very scarce. Rather unlike you."

"Sue and Harold are getting it all done just fine without me up in their space. When it comes time to break something, I'll be there."

"AHHHhhhhhh…I see." Frost chuckled, "You can be such a fool, Martin. But you are my kind of fool. Don't tell me you are feeling displaced by our charming new CIA liaison?"

I scowled at him, "I do not feel 'displaced' Frost. I just don't know how I feel about having her around. She brings lots of bad memories, and as a result, lots of tough decisions to make about them."

"What kinds of decisions are we talking about, here?"

"What, are you my fucking therapist now?"

"You may not get this, my little friend, but nobody is going to understand you the way I will. A wiser man would accept and utilize that to his advantage."

I shrugged, "I've been accused of many things, Frost, but never 'wisdom.'"

He chuckled; that annoying far-off rumble from deep within his chest, "Martin, despite all the resources of our little group, you and I are the only members who go out and get dirty. We are the ones who face death and deliver it. We embrace and encourage the darkest most horrific aspects of ourselves to do equally horrific things to an even more horrific enemy. All the others get to be heroes; you and I are monsters. You may not believe it, but I know you better than anyone here, better than your best friend, better than your mother. If don't understand something about yourself, than just look at me. We are the same creature, you and I, and you had better get used to it. Pretending otherwise could get you killed. So why don't you quit wasting everyone's time and just tell me why you are throwing this little pity party so we can get back to killing the enemy?"

"You want to know what's bugging me? Fine. Here you go:"

"Sue reminds me of what I was". This wouldn't normally be a problem; introspection was rarely a vice of mine before. But ever since that girl in Kansas, and that night in Montana with Frost, I was suffering from a severe crisis of identity.

"It was so easy before. I was young. Sue gave me a target, I'd go kill it. Rinse and repeat. Then I met a girl. She was the one thing I had never really seen or understood before: innocent. Suddenly all I wanted to do was preserve her innocence, because I couldn't bear to be the one who ruined it. She made me feel so ugly, and I didn't want to be ugly any more. I told Sue I wanted to retire."

Frost nodded sagely, "I've seen this movie: a vampire killed this girl."

"Exactly. And suddenly I was very ready to be ugly again. Hell, it felt good to be ugly again. It was so damned easy to shut down and go back to war. Like putting on an old comfortable pair of boots, I oh-so-easily resumed my role as the grim soldier; trundling off to coldly slay the enemy and ultimately die in glorious battle against the implacable foe. Cliché bullshit, to be sure, but it suited me just fine."

I snorted, and dug in my coat pocket until I found a cigar. The old blue lighter came out and I fired the stogie to life.

"But of course, you can never go back. I had to deal with a witness, a little girl in Kansas, and she reminded me so much of that innocence that I told her the whole story. As if one silly Midwestern chick could absolve me of all my sins or something." I laughed at that. I can be a sap sometimes. "And then I saw my future mirrored in you that night in Montana. It made me realize that there was no glory in my path. Hell, there wasn't even a real purpose." I puffed blue smoke toward that chilly sky. "It took one look at the empty, tired eyes of a four-hundred year-old killer to make me realize that despite the fact that he was a vampire, he was just like me. I was the enemy, and he was me. No offense intended, Frost."

"None taken. Do go on."

"Fuck, you had done the implacable killer routine for several lifetimes, and you were just as listless and soulless as I was."

Frost nodded, oddly sour-looking, "Too true, Martin. "

"That kind of thing will make even a thick grunt like me stop and think about the future. I haven't wanted a future. Futures mean responsibilities. I wanted to be free of all that. But I realized that there was no point in all of it. It had started the night I met you, and it's been brewing ever since then; I need to deal with my own identity crisis before I lose my whole team and my whole operation to someone else. Someone who has their head in the game. The correct game. Because lord knows I have been faking it for too long."

"Martin, Sue can't make you go back to what you were, even if she wanted to. You are too far away from it now."

I laughed out loud at that, "What I am afraid of, Frost, is that I will want to. Don't you remember how it felt? What it was like to just be the weapon and not the wielder? How free that feeling was? I know for sure I want to be more than that empty killing machine Sue had helped me to become years ago. I know it's not her fault, but having her here now reminds me of what it was like to have no fear, no responsibility, no remorse. Under her leadership I was no more than guided missile: just point me at the target, push the button and BOOM! No more bad guy. It was empowering and intoxicating and goddamit I liked it."

Frost looked wistfully out into the woods for a moment before he looked back at me, "Of course I remember. I relished it."

"Now, through complete half-assery, I have built this team and somehow managed to not get anyone killed yet. My suicide mission is becoming an all-out war, with people counting on me to lead them, and all of a sudden I don't know if I can. Sue reminds me of what a real leader is, and I guess I'm just wondering if I shouldn't leave her to it."

Frost chuckled derisively, "That would certainly be the easy option, wouldn't it? She is good, you know she is, and letting her run the show would make your life easier. Except you can't do that, can you? No you can't! Because you know what I know. Leaders need fire and conviction." He started ticking off his points on his fingers, one at a time, "She can pull a trigger, but she doesn't have the conviction to strap on a device that kills her a little each time it's used to go wade hip-deep into the enemy."

Another finger, "Sue can plan any operation to the slightest detail, but she can't tear her way through ten vampires to save a downed squaddie."

Still another finger, "Sue can acquire 'assets' to add to her team, but she can't turn the enemy's greatest weapon into a brother-in-arms. Do you know how long it has been since I've had a brother-in- arms, tovarisch?"

I was touched, I think, "I never knew you cared, Frost."

"I didn't," now he pointed a finger at me, "until I met you, and stalked you, and one of the first things I realized was that you had something I didn't. It's why you would have beaten me, you know. You had passion, Martin. I knew then that you were a man I could follow, and maybe earn some of my lost honor back. Until you, all I wanted to do was kill and die. Sound familiar? Now, because of you, I want live for something, even if it means dying for it. Susan can't give me that feeling. She's a good boss, but she is no leader."

He smiled, "Believe me Martin, Sue is a wonderful amazing person, but she can't do this. Hell, even she knows it. That's why she's always needed you. You two are classic partners; each one thinks the other one is responsible for all their successes."

"Wow. A pep talk from Frost? What next? Werewolf strippers in my birthday cake?"

"You have expensive tastes, Martin, but I'll see what I can do…"

"Don't bother." I clapped him on the shoulder, "Thanks, Frost. I guess I had forgotten what it was like to have squadmates who have been through the same shit you have. You annoy the fuck out of me, but I am glad you are on my team."

Frost looked aghast, "Was that…wait, could it have been…a compliment? Dear god, what have I done! Don't go toward the light, Martin! Don't go toward the light!"

I had to laugh, "Relax, it was painful but I got it out. I think I'll pull through."

What's it gonna be? Can I lead an army into battle, with all the responsibility that entails? Can I care about the mission again? Can I feel every death like my own? Or more importantly, like hers? I wasn't sure, but Frost was right (damn him!); Susan could not handle this, and I could. I had to. I guess I just didn't want to admit that I really had something to live for here, and that other people now were depending on me to live through this and lead them. I had been far too enamored with the concept of dying in this war, and now I had the very real responsibility of living through it. Hell, I now had to accept the responsibility of living at all. It sounds stupid, but I had given that up years ago. It seemed selfish now, though; to crave death. Dying is easy; living is work.

Which is a good thing, because things took a real serious turn later that week.

The Vampire Strikes Back

Sam spotted it first. We were gathered in the bunker's main control room, scouring news reports and web traffic in an attempt to figure out if our recent activity had shaken the vampire tree at all. It was a tedious process for everyone except Sam, who seemed to thrive on this sort of thing. Frost's leads were no longer trustworthy, as now that he was exposed, any info he had was dangerously out of date. It would be just like the vamps to use Frost's knowledge against us, and so we all agreed that site-specific vampire data needed to be dug up the old-fashioned way; ergo we were back to relying on Sam's keen analytical mind to find targets. Sam stumbled upon a news report out of Lawrence, Kansas; it concerned a young girl's disappearance, and it caught Sam's attention. No big deal, right? Then I saw a picture of her.

It was my witness from that hunt; the girl in the red dress. My heart leapt to my throat. Not this! Not again! Why can't I protect them? I felt the anger grow in me. I let it. That tight knot of suppressed rage began to swell and seethe in my gut. I welcomed it. The ogre wanted out, and I was highly inclined to oblige him. I felt the Cestus, locked up three rooms down the hall, come to life in my brain, 'give it to me…' it was a dulcite whisper, 'let me help you...' Subconsciously, I felt the glove begin to consume and amplify my rage, and I didn't mind. My vengeance would be swift and terrible and to hell with the consequences!

Several alarms went off on Harold's control panel, but it was Frost, with his vampire senses, who picked up on my mood shift first.

"Easy, Martin. I don't think she's dead."

I blinked, and the Cestus went quiet in my mind. That was creepy. I was prepared for the Cestus to want my rage, but this time it had crawled right into my head and taken it. Not to mention the added issue of me not even wearing it when it happened. Frost gave me a knowing look; he must have felt it stir as well. Harold frowned at his instruments and growled, "What the fuck just happened?"

I tried to bite down on my anger, "That's the girl from my Kansas hunt, they got to her."

Harold wasn't fooled, "No." He pointed to the alarm panel, "What the fuck just happened? Six wards just signaled that there was Stoker activity inside the building, but it wasn't vampire radiation."

I shrugged, "I think the Cestus was trying to tell me I should go hunting."

"It talks!?" Harold was aghast, "Like with words? It's alive?!"

I sighed, "I don't know. I just hear it in my head sometimes. It wants me to get mad and feed it."

Harold gave me a look not unlike a parent dealing with a particularly stupid teenager, "Jesus, Martin! You need to be more careful around that thing! If it is a living creature, you could end up no different than a vampire, stuck in a loop of endless parasitic interaction. It's using you."

"And I am using it. Can we focus on the innocent twenty-three-year-old, please?"

Frost spoke up again, "I think she is alive."

"Me too," I chimed in. "It's too simple. An obvious trap. Like Alaska. They are calling me out, and testing my resolve. There will be another clue or message somewhere out there as well, to draw me out. They are counting on me wanting me to come charging in to rescue her." I was back into a calm, tactical mode. This seemed to keep the Cestus quiet. When I was planning, my emotions went into a neat little box until I was done. That's how good planning works. Apparently, this also seemed to keep dangerous magical weapons from influencing my thinking. I made a mental note of that. If I was going to keep using that glove, I needed to get control of it.

Sam, who was already googling at frantic speed, spoke up in his usual, no-nonsense manner, "They will not be overly subtle, but they will be circumspect. What am I looking for, Martin?"

I thought about it, "A message. They will want to talk first. They will want to rattle my cage and give me a target. That's what they did in Alaska; gave me a juicy target to make me jump, and then they sprung the trap. Bu they didn't know about our new weapons and they underestimated our firepower. This time they picked bait that would limit my offensive output. I can't go lobbing mortar rounds and swinging the Cestus about when they have a hostage. No, they are going to try to get me alone and as unarmed as possible. That means they have to talk first."

Sam pushed his glasses back up his nose while his fingers flew across the keyboard. He had search engines up on three monitors, and was reading through links at blazing speed. Half the reason Sam was so good at research was that he could read eleven-hundred words a minute. As for myself, I still preferred comic books. As it was, it took him almost thirteen minutes to hit the answer, during which interval the rest of us tried gamely to appear helpful and/or competent. Finally, Sam crowed, "Ahh, there it is! Clever buggers!"

There it was, a Craigslist personal reading, "MISSING: RED DRESS. SIZE SEVEN. BLACK KNIGHT WANTED FOR RETRIEVAL. CONTACT BELALUGOSI_ "

Sam scrunched his face quizzically, "Vampires on the web, huh? Cheesy domain. Let's just take a look at what we have." Sam's fingers began dancing over the keyboard again, bringing up a tacky vampire-themed S&M website.

Frost, as usual, looked a little confused, "Why don't we just e-mail them?"

Harold rolled his eyes, "Come on, Frost! Think like a human! Sam and I can find out more about an organization from their online presence then most people realize. This website was built using quality code and the latest software, which indicates that they spent some money on it; but whoever threw this together has probably left all sorts of clues as to their location that they don't even know about. All you need is the right tools and know-how to pick them up."

He chuckled, as he sat down at his own computer station, "The only real question now is who will find them first, Sam or me."

Sam did not even look up, "You don't have a prayer, Mr. Wizard."

"Eat me, Conan the Librarian!"

At almost seven feet tall and over four-hundred pounds, Frost made the most ridiculously cartoonish "perplexed" face ever. "What the bloody hell are they talking about?" he lamented.

I chuckled, "Welcome to the twenty-first century, Nikolai. It's the information age! Apparently, your brethren are trying to merge onto the information super-highway in a '54 Studebaker."

Frost nodded solemnly, "We are notoriously technology-averse. Especially the elders. We distrust it."

"Is that why you never used a gun, Frost?" I asked.

He grinned at me, "Until you came along, guns never worked on vampires well enough to justify their hassle."

After an hour of fidgeting and strained conversation, Harold claimed victory over Sam. "Got it!" Harold cried from his chair, "Suck it, lawyer-boy!"

"Dammit." Sam grumbled.

I leaned over Harold's terminal, "Whattaya got?"

"The domain is registered to a series of dummy companies, seemingly unrelated. But when I started bouncing the contact e-mail around, I finally got to the actual guy who built the page. Turns out he has done a lot of IT work for several of these companies, and tends to get a lot of e-mails from the CFO of several of these companies. That's a lot of high-level correspondence for an IT guy…"

He looked over at Frost, "Vamps don't like tech, huh? How do they feel about high finance and corporate greed?"

A wolf grin split the big vampire's face, "Why, Harold, are you referring to an environment where a privileged few prey upon the weak and drain them of their resources for power and profit; all while enjoying a bacchanalian lifestyle completely unencumbered by the thought of consequences?"

"Sure am."

Frost did an excellent version of a deep southern accent, "Oh, no Br'er Fox! Please don't throw me in that briar patch!"

Harold chuckled, "That's what I figured."

"But I don't know how this helps us!" Frost sighed.

I took over the lecture, "The vamps want us to e-mail, so they can set up dialog and an exchange. They will claim they want to parlay or ransom or whatever, but it will be a trap. Instead of immediately replying and tipping our hand, we will simply go find this web-nerd they hire, and encourage him to help us identify our antagonist and his operation. Since he appears to be their senior tech-dork, he probably has access to a lot of records, and even facilities they own. He can probably deactivate alarms, open vaults, intercept e-mails, and do a lot of other helpful things."

Comprehension bloomed on Frost's features, and a feral grin pulled his face into a smug, predatory countenance, "So by skipping the whole tete a tete, we leave them thinking that we are still mucking about with our heads up our arses looking for clues. They all pat themselves on the back, make plans and set traps; all while we waltz in the back door, steal the child out from under their noses, and send them a thank you card when we are done?"

I shrugged, "If by 'thank-you card' you mean 'a hundred pounds of SemTex' then yes, you have the gist of it."

Frost let out a low whistle, "Our trade has come a long way from second-story windows and poisoned drinks, hasn't it, Mr. Martin?"

"Sure has, Mr. Frost! Goddamn I love it!" I lit a cigar, "Someone should call Sue; we'll need her when we talk to the tech nerd. She is an expert at convincing people to help her. Well, as long as they survive the conversation, anyway."

Frost sighed a wistful sigh, "My kind of girl…"

Sue was on scene in less than an hour. She bustled into the command center like she owned it and plunked down in an empty office chair. "What's the story, troops?"

Long experience and ingrained habit had me dive right into the briefing. I brought Sue up to speed on the situation. She was not happy.

"A witness, Martin? Really?" She threw her hands up theatrically, "I would think you'd know better by now! It's Belgium all over again!"

"Careful, Susan." It was a low growl from the base of my throat.

"Sorry, Martin. That was unfair," was that a legitimate Susan Brown apology? Things had changed!

Her moment of compassion over, she went right back to her passionless administrator persona, "Can she hurt us? What does she know?"

"She does not know anything, really. She knows that Martin is a guy who dresses up like Batman and kills vampires in an ugly old van," Frost replied.

I added, "She knows I'm ex-Army and ex-CIA, but she doesn't know about anyone else or where we are located."

Frost jumped in again, "But those are things they probably already knew. If I could work that stuff out on my own, so can others."

Sue frowned pensively, "So if we have no logistical or operational exposure, what is the downside to ignoring them and letting them have the girl?"

I gave Sue a level look. I was getting better at not being intimidated by Sue. Frost's little pep-talk had me thinking pretty clearly about a lot of things, "The downside is that we do not let vampires take defenseless kids as hostages, Sue. The upside is that this gives us an opportunity to save an innocent life, and kill a bunch of vampires."

Sue fired back, "What makes you think she is even alive? Or that they haven't turned her into one of them?"

"It doesn't matter. If she is dead, I kill them all. If she is turned, I kill them all. If she is fine, I rescue her first, and then kill them all. There really is no downside; and to be blunt, no discussion, either. We are going for the girl. Am I understood?"

Sue looked over the top of her glasses at me, six feet and 220 pounds looming over her chair. (Was I looming? I don't consciously remember looming…)

"Understood. And for the record, I agree with your assessment that there really is no downside to going after her. I just needed to know what our liabilities were on this operation."

I felt a little sheepish, "Oh. I thought you…"

"Martin, I did not join the CIA to let monsters kidnap American citizens. Remember that. I am one of the good guys, too."

"We ain't that good."

She rolled her eyes turned to Harold and Sam, "What do we know about locations and logistics, boys?"

Sam took the question, "We have a web-designer and overall IT guy who appears to be in regular communication with high level officers within several of what we believe to be vampire-held corporations."

Sue began writing things down in a small memo pad, "Name? Address? Social security number?"

Harold snorted, "Are you serious? I can tell you all of that plus his bank balance, credit score, the name of his mistress, where he buys his cocaine, and what porn sites he prefers."

Sue smiled, "Have you ever considered working for the CIA, Harold? It'd be a big improvement over this cracker-jack operation."

"Not gonna happen, missy," Harold's grin belied his brevity.

Sue turned to Frost, "I need some heavy, vampire-type recon on him. If his people find out we are leveraging this angle we are screwed. I want a running schedule on him for the next week: what time does he wake up? Where does he eat lunch? What route does he take to work? How many times a day he takes a shit. Everything. You up to that, Big Guy?"

Frost gave a deep bow, "For you, milady, I am up for anything." That last word was accompanied by a look that was dangerously close to being a leer. Sue rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

"Work first, Chernenkov. Then we can discuss 'anything'."

Sam put his head down on the desk, and Harold groaned, "You two are gross."

I decided to jump in, just to keep Sue from accidentally taking over the operation as much as anything, "Sam, start crawling through the legal shit, because I am going to need everything on these companies."

Sam nodded, "Of course."

"Harold, I need plans and schematics on all the buildings and real estate holdings. If they own an office somewhere, I wanna know it better than the architect who designed it."

"On it," Harold threw a mock salute.

"Sue, I am going in the field with Frost. We are far too exposed for anyone to be running solo at this point. Besides, I want to get a look at this IT guy before you roll in. Do you want to do the interview here or at his place?"

Sue thought about it for a moment, "Unless we find something compelling in his background checks, I say at his place. I don't want to disrupt his routines and tip off the opposition." She switched tracks on me, "Martin, if you insist upon going in the field with Frost, remember that secrecy is paramount to success here. Frost can operate quietly far better than you can. Don't forget that."

I grinned and waggled my eyebrows at her, "You mean I don't get to blow anything up? Not even a little?"

It was an annoyed Susan brown who responded, "Don't even think about it!"

"What about just a tiny little explosion?" I wheedled, "nothing fancy…"

Frost came in on my side, "Yes, well, perhaps something small and tasteful is in order…"

I took the ball and ran with it, "Just enough to let the world know that we are here, and all that stuff."

Sue looked positively agape, "What the hell are you…" right about then she noticed the barely contained mirth on the faces of Sam and Harold, and she growled in frustration, "This is some seriously pathetic romper-room bullshit you guys are pulling around here," Sue sighed, "I have gone from elite operators to a bunch of toddlers. There goes my career!" She stood up in a huff, "I need a drink."

Frost immediately went to say something, but Sue cut him off with a glare that could stop a charging elephant, "Not a goddamn word, Frost. I'll deal with YOU when you get back from your mission. I can't wait for you to take Martin the Comedian here out of here for a week. Maybe then we'll get some goddamn work done."

Frost and I left the next morning. It was a bright day and Frost opted to ride in the back of the van. While sunlight couldn't really hurt him all that much, it was uncomfortable. Like having the flu or mono, direct sun made Frost weak, lethargic and often sick to his stomach. The lack of windows in the back of the van suited him just fine.

Our destination was New York City, which was only a three-hour drive if you miss traffic. Through some divine miracle, we did miss traffic, and we checked into our hotel before lunchtime. That was one welcome benefit of working with the government: no more sleeping in the van. Harold had instilled a healthy fear in me as to how easy it was to track someone via hotel records and credit card usage; and so until now we had made our operations more or less completely 'off the grid'. Now that we had government sanction, we had access to as many forged ID's and documents as we needed to avoid detection without resorting to camping out. I won't lie: it was nice.

For convenience, we had selected a hotel directly across from the apartment of our unsuspecting target: One mister Wallace Michael Hawthorne. He was forty-six years old, five foot nine, and 235 pounds of pure high-school wedgie-bait. Balding, bespectacled, and badly dressed, he looked exactly like three-quarters of my graduating class in engineering school. I was underwhelmed.

Apparently, the vampire IT dept was well-funded. While his firm consisted of all of three modest offices on the third floor of a converted apartment building just north of midtown, his personal bank account was well into seven figures. This was an extremely well-paid man, despite the unpretentious trappings of his offices.

Like a lot of guys who make good money but are otherwise socially unimpressive, Mr. Hawthorne had purchased the most ridiculous automobile he could find. From an operational standpoint, purchasing a Bugatti Veyron when you are supposed to be keeping a low profile was a pretty big mistake. But apparently he just couldn't help himself. He probably needed that car just to get New York girls to talk to him. Thankfully for us, it made tracking and trailing him moronically easy.

Frost, with his 'stealth mode' gimmick was able to keep a very close watch on Wallace, while I began to track his car and tap his phones and internet connection. Wallace was way too smart to let a virus or any other software onto his machine, but I resorted to a more old-school method: I piggy-backed onto his cable lines at the box and duplicated the signal. We could now see every online interaction he had. Harold was anxious to test his hack-fu against another IT guy, but after receiving twenty minutes of streamed data from his computer, Harold was disappointed to find that Mr. Hawthorne was not very good at securing his data. I believe the term Harold used was "script-kiddie." I don't know precisely what that means, but it was delivered with a level of disgust that was applicable to feces-consuming insect life.

Based on phone conversations we had listened in on, we knew that Hawthorne was aware that his employers were vampires. Frost was very uneasy about this. He had remarked, "That is new and unsettling. In the past, we have never revealed our natures to humans. It's bad precedent. Humans are incapable of keeping secrets."

This was a wrinkle that we needed to sort out, because it changed the flavor of our interactions with the enemy significantly. "So what is the advantage in starting to blab now? What's the angle?"

Frost though for a moment, "It doesn't make sense. This fellow could manage their IT department just as well not knowing about the nature of his employers. There is no angle I can think of."

I always did my best thinking with a cigar, so I went onto the hotel room balcony and fired one up. It took me forty minutes to have the epiphany, and it was so simple I wanted to kick myself.

"Frost!" I called as I went back inside, "Why did you reveal you were a vampire to me in Montana?"

Frost frowned, "I didn't…you already knew."

"Exactly!"

Frost started to laugh, "I'm glad Susan wasn't around to see us miss something that obvious."

Hawthorne must have found out on his own. Guys like him and Harold were good and finding things out and our boy must have stumbled upon the truth somehow. Apparently, he not only was OK with it, he decided to profit from it. That's why the vamps paid him so much: to keep him quiet. It was probably convenient to have an employee they did not have to mask their true nature from, and handle things that they could not. This was actually a relief. I had been dreading the prospect of having to torque information out of some civilian. It wasn't my speed. Knowing that he was in on the game made my job much easier philosophically; since now I was not dealing with an enemy pawn, but a willing agent. No need to bring my scruples to this particular operation. Hawthorne was fair game, now.

Once Harold had all the passwords, access codes, and secret files he could get from Hawthorne's machine, it was time to move on him. We decided to up our timetable and start the interview only four days into the operation. Timing would be critical, since once we hit the IT guy, there would be very little time before vampires were on to us. I was acutely conscious of the clock ticking on the life of an innocent twenty-three year-old girl, but undue haste could only hurt her situation.

In order to avoid tipping off the opposition, it was important disrupt Hawthorne's routine as little as possible. Frost had identified at least two rotating vampire watchmen that monitored Hawthorne around the clock. We were pretty sure that even Hawthorne didn't know about them, as they managed to maintain distance fairly well. The vamps were not entirely content to let their pet human run without supervision, it seemed.

We opted to run the interview just before dawn, at about 0430 hours. The watch dogs would be looking for cover at that time, and Hawthorne never left his apartment before 0830. That gave us four hours to extract what we needed from him. Sue arrived the afternoon before and prep work began after dinner.

Frost would be lookout, as he could sense the watchdogs far better than any of us. He would create minor distractions to keep the watchers from paying too much attention to the apartment while Sue and I would infiltrate Hawthorne's abode. Sue would then convince him to give us all the info we needed. Then it was a quiet exfil and back to base. It was a good plan for a simple op.

Of course everything went to hell. I don't know why I even bother having a plan anymore. Fortunately, I do my best work extemporaneously.

The infiltration went well. Sue and I began pounding on Hawthrone's door right on schedule. Sue was wearing her perennial non-descript gray suit, and I was dressed in a government-issue black suit. I had forgone armor and heavy weapons, as this was supposed to be a quiet op, and Frost could handle two adult vampires on his own if it came to that. Instead I was carrying my trusty Taurus Model 66 .357 Magnum. I had not used the weapon since the night I killed my first vampire, but it had always been my favorite carry piece. It was a solid, seven-shot revolver, and when loaded with 180-grain high-velocity hollow points, even body armor was useless against it. Part of my new resolve was to put away my damaged past and let go of my guilt and self-pity. It was a damn good gun, and it was high time to dust it off and let it do what it did best. Anything else would be silly.

When the bleary-eyed Hawthorne came to the door, resplendent in his pwder-blue bathrobe, Sue flashed an authentic Homeland Security credential and told Hawthrone she needed to speak to him about some suspicious e-mail activity in one of the companies he did IT for. We had decided on that story because we felt it was serious enough to make him pay attention, but defensible enough that he would not panic.

He panicked. Sue had not even finished her spiel when Hawthorne slammed the door and hit the dead bolt.

"Your turn." Sue said curtly to me and I did not miss a moment. My size twelve boot blew the door open and off its hinges with one strike, and I was already in the room with revolver out and ready. I heard Hawthorne in the bedroom, struggling with the fire escape window.

I am not stupid, so I entered the room carefully, slicing the corner cautiously and sweeping the room with my weapon before committing to entering. Hawthorne wheeled when I came in and awkwardly pointed a small automatic pistol at me.

My instincts nearly blew the whole damn operation when I came an inch from reflexively drilling him in the face. But good sense and his own fear-wrought hesitation saved the mission when I spun to my left, and covered the intervening distance in two big steps. My left hand closed over the top of his sub-compact 9mm, half-racking the slide and taking it out of battery. The partially ejected round stovepiped nicely , blocking the breach and rendering the weapon useless; while my right hand whipped around in a vicious arc, sending my meaty paw with the added mass of a three-pound black steel firearm against the side of his head with enough force to put the fat computer expert to sleep.

He slumped instantly to the floor, groaning pathetically. I kicked his gun away and said tersely, "Clear, Sue."

Sue strode in and surveyed the damage, "Dead?"

"Nope, but I thumped him a good one. Concussion, definitely."

She sniffed, "I can work with that. Let's wake him up."

It took a few minutes to get him awake. He came to slowly, blearily getting his bearings and collecting his wits. He woke up seated on the floor next to his bed. His head must have been throbbing, because the whole left side of his knob was a massive, swollen, purpling hematoma. He saw us and tried to stand; and immediately sat back down with a whimper. Sue placed a green plastic cleaning bucket in front of him; into which he promptly vomited. When he was through, Sue pulled the bucket away and handed him a glass of water. He took it tentatively and then drank.

"Don't try to move, Mister Hawthorne; Martin was extremely magnanimous in not killing you, and it would be best not to tempt him twice. Do you know who we are?"

Hawthorne seemed lost, "DHS?"

"No, Mister Hawthrone. I think you know better than that. You may not have heard of us, but we certainly know who you are; and more importantly who you work for." She smiled benignly at the shivering blob of man-flesh before her, "Actually, Mister Hawthorne, I am afraid it is much worse than even that: we know what you work for." Sue paused for dramatic effect, "We are from a group of individuals that have been antagonizing your employers for several years now. Still not ringing any bells?"

Hawthorne was starting to panic, "OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod! Don't kill me! Please! I don't know anything! I'm just the IT guy!"

Sue was icy calm, "Focus, Mister Hawthorne, and listen very carefully…"

We had lost him to hysterical terror, however, and he was reduced to pathetic sobbing.

Sue sighed, "Martin?"

I didn't really like this sort of job, but this guy was a willing collaborator, and had profited for years on the misery of his employers' victims, so I was going to do what I had to. Besides, there was a twenty-three-year-old girl from Kansas who was counting on me for a rescue. That was motivation-a-plenty as far as I was concerned. Just think of the girl, Martin…

I grabbed him by the lapels of his bathrobe and dragged him roughly to his feet. I shook him roughly until he looked me in the eyes. I gave him my best thousand yard stare, "You don't appear to be listening, Mister Hawthorne. We need your full attention. As a matter of fact, I insist upon it."

I let my grip on his lapels shift, and I crossed his left lapel across his throat in an ever-tightening noose. Hawthorne's eyes bulged as the pressure on his carotid artery made itself known, and he began to slap limply at my arms. With a derisive sneer I twisted my hands while rotating my hips. Wallace Hawthorne found his world topsy-turvy as he wheeled over my hip and landed with a crash on his back. Morote seonage was tailor made for guys in bathrobes. He began a frantic, spastic crawl towards the bedroom door. I grabbed his ankle and dragged him scrabbling and whimpering back to the center of the room.

"I don't think he's getting it, Martin." Sue said helpfully.

"I was afraid of that." I trapped his leg at the knee, locked his foot in a figure-four grip, and twisted until his ankle popped. I stopped short of tearing it completely out of joint, but it was a savage dislocation all the same. He wouldn't suffer any permanent damage, but he was going to need crutches for at least four weeks. Served him right.

Hawthorne would have screamed if Sue hadn't immediately clamped her hand over his mouth. The muffled howl was at once both piteous and satisfying; depending on whether you were hearing it or delivering it. Sue held his mouth with a steel grip and pressed his head down against the floor. She placed her nose an inch from his and spoke very slowly, "I am becoming somewhat irritated with you, Mister Hawthorne. You really don't want that. If you can manage to quit your sniveling and calm down enough to talk to me, then this can be over soon. You can forget it ever happened and go back to your silly little life." She bounced the back of his head off the floor for emphasis, "Or, you may certainly choose to continue to irritate me. At which point I will be forced to leave the room, because watching Martin work on a man's joints makes me sick to my stomach. Literally." She shuddered, "It's disgusting to watch and hear. Have I made myself perfectly clear? Or shall I go powder my nose and let Martin work for a few more minutes?"

Hawthorne was crying now, but he nodded 'yes' behind Sue's hand.

"Good. Martin, help him to a chair, please." I hated to play the brainless goon, but it was important to reinforce his preconceived notions. Hawthorne's own imagination was our best tool right now; so if Hollywood had convinced him that I was a mindless pain machine, then so be it. The more his imagination demonized me, the less I would actually have to hurt him. Not that I minded hurting him, but there was little sport and no profit in making a pathetic blubbering pansy like him squeal.

I grabbed him by the lapels again and tossed him into an easy chair. He yelped when he instinctively tried to put weight on his ankle, and the subsequent stumble sent him crashing woodenly into the plush cushions of the overstuffed chair. He started to cry again. What a wuss.

"We are not going to waste time here, Mister Wallace," Sue sat on the bed facing him, "We kill vampires. Lots of them. You are an employee of theirs, and you have information we want. You talk. We leave. It's that simple."

Hawthorne whimpered, "They'll kill me…"

Sue laughed, "So will we."

Soon Hawthorne was singing like a canary. Intel gathering was never my thing, but I had seen what it took to break hardened operators and religious fanatics alike, and Hawthorne was a soft-boiled egg compared to those guys. He didn't know about the girl, but once he was told about it, he knew exactly where to look. Harold had cautioned us not to let him near the computer during the interview, so we had him give us instructions on how to locate her.

When he was done spilling his guts, Hawthorne hung his head in his hands, "What are you going to do now?"

Sue gave me a knowing look, stood up, and walked out of the room without a word. Panic began to creep back into Hawthorne's eyes. I gave him a level look for a moment, and then started talking.

"Today is Thursday. You are going to call in sick today and tomorrow, and you are going to enjoy a quiet weekend at home. Monday morning, you are going to empty your bank accounts, buy a ticket to someplace very far away, go there, and never come back. If you go anywhere except the emergency room between now and Monday, you will not live out the day."

Hawthorne didn't look convinced, "You are just going to let me go?"

I shrugged, "Why not? Vampires are the greatest hunters in the world, and you aren't bright enough hide well, or tough enough to run very far. You'll last a month at most, probably less. So run. You've enjoyed profiting from their good will, now you can see what kind of profit the rest of us earn."

I pulled my revolver, "Or I can just finish you now, if you prefer?"

He actually thought about it for a moment, before shaking his head, "No. I'll run."

"Figured you would," I got up and left the room.

Dealing With the Elderly

Hawthorne's intel was good as gold, and Harold's hacking had netted us a huge database of vampire holdings, passwords, security protocols and financial data. Sam was in his glory. But there was one piece of data that had as all very much on edge: It was highly likely we would be dealing with an Elder vampire.

The day after Hawthorne's interview, we had re-convened at the bunker to try and throw together a quick plan to rescue the girl, who we now knew was being held in a storage unit in Missouri. Cleverly, the vampire elite owned dozens of storage companies, and used the units to house local vampires during the day. It was like a vampire underground railroad. Any vampire in any major area could now find a place to hole up and hide from the sun, (or police). Even Frost was surprised.

Sam asked the pertinent question, "Why did they never tell you about this?"

Frost frowned, "Vampire culture is boxes within boxes, factions within factions. I always operated outside of the system in my role as Authoritat. I enforced the conventions that keep us from getting too out of control. Nobody wanted me around, because that usually meant you were to be made an example of." He shrugged, "I suspect that this particular faction did not want the Authoritat to know where they hid. Would you want the police at your party?"

Sue asked, "So there is no real central vampire leadership to speak of? No head to this snake?"

Frost shrugged again, "None to speak of. We all listen to the elders though, for obvious reasons. Which are now very relevant to our operation, because unless I have lost my instincts for this work, there will be an elder involved with this kidnapping. It's too many parties working in unison to not have one in charge. Otherwise, there would be no one to keep them in line."

Generally, vampires are categorized as infant, adolescent, adult, master, and elder. Frost had explained that to us. Infants are less than fifty years old, and tend to still be uncomfortable with the transformation. Sunlight can kill them, they are not as strong or as fast, and facility with their unique abilities is generally poor. They have trouble coping with the constant thirst for blood; and being in the presence of prey can turn them into mindless animals. The first vampire I ever killed was an infant, and in that I was very lucky.

Adolescents are between fifty and one-hundred years old. Until I met Frost, I usually encountered these. They have better control, can tolerate sunlight if they have fed recently, and are far better hunters. Until I met Frost, these were my usual prey.

Adults were between one-fifty and three hundred. Strong, savvy, and subtle, they were much tougher to spot, and very tough to kill. The silver-haired vampire in Miami was an adult, as was the Lawrence vampire.

Master level vampires like Frost and Erik were over three-hundred years old and could go as high as one thousand. These were bona-fide nightmare creatures. Frost fought me to a stalemate despite all my gear, and Erik would have crushed me if not for the Cestus.

I needed more data, "What's our liability with an elder? Strengths? Weaknesses? Strategies?"

Frost paused to think, "I've often pondered how to take down an elder, but the Authoritat has never had the mandate. I have seen them in battle though, and it's daunting, to say the least of it."

Knowing this made the prospect of dealing with an Elder vampire particularly terrifying. Frost tried to convey the reality of it to us.

"An elder vampire is every bit as strong and fast as a master, and even more so in most cases. But that is not what differentiates them. It's their abilities. These are creatures that have had several thousand years to cultivate their skills and powers. Some of them can get inside and dominate your mind, others can burn you with a look, I have seen one kill with a wave of its hand. I am not sure how to even get close enough to kill one."

Sue snorted, "Lovely. Well, aren't you two the greatest killers who ever lived? What's the plan?"

My mind was already churning.

"How many?"

Frost wasn't following, "How many what?"

"How many elders are there?"

Frost thought a moment, "Less than twenty. Despite being immortal, vampires tend not to play nice. Living for two thousand years takes a lot of skill and even more caution."

"How many will be at the unit?"

Frost laughed, "In four hundred years, I have never seen an Elder vampire in the presence of another. They don't like each other, and are their own sole predators. They keep their distance from each other religiously. But don't get too excited about that. One Elder is one more than you want anywhere."

"If I find out which one it is, will you know their abilities?"

Frost beamed, "Almost certainly! I have studied them for some time for just such an opportunity. No one has killed an Elder in a thousand years; I've always wanted to try…"

"Can they be harmed, physically? What works?"

"All the same things that damage other vampires work on Elders; just to a lesser extent. Sunlight makes them weaker, but not by much. Fire is painful and heals slowly. I doubt conventional firearms would be more than a nuisance, but the .454 as it is now modified will probably be effective to a small degree. Explosives always work, but Elders will be very tough to wound seriously."

I was stumped. With that much opposition power, I'd have been happy to just lob mortar rounds on it until there was nothing left. Or maybe just have Sue bring in an airstrike or an artillery barrage. But they had hostages and they were in a public place, so no gross-motor tactics were available. My thoughts turned inevitably to the Cestus. It was a hell of a weapon and it had already turned a Master vampire into shrapnel. But could it handle this? Could I handle it when it did? The gauntlet extracted a hefty toll on me when it took out Erik, what would it need to take out an Elder? I didn't like it.

Frost broached the question for me, "We have the glove…"

I sighed, "I know, and I don't see any way around taking it, but I don't want to rely on it. Killing Erik took a lot out of me because of that thing, and I don't like it crawling in and out of my brain all the time."

Sue perked up, "The glove?"

Harold looked nervous, and I knew I had to say something, "It's our secret weapon Sue. Very secret. So secret that nobody can know about it. Even the boys at Aberdeen, if you know what I mean."

She frowned, "It made that crater in Alaska, didn't it? I see. If it's so great, why the hell are we worried? Can it kill an elder?"

We all looked to Harold, who pantomimed flipping a coin, "Couldn't say. Its power output is variable, and proportionate to the toll it exacts on Martin. The amount of juice it takes to bring down an elder may kill Martin in the process."

"Well that's hardly viable then," she thought for a moment, "What if Frost used it?"

Frost laughed, "Just touching that thing is excruciating for me, and it blocks my ability to regenerate or access my other abilities. That's why Martin likes it. It was created to kill monsters, and I am nothing if not a monster. No thank you, Sue!"

"Then I'll be extra careful, team," I continued strategizing, "What are our advantages having you in the field, Frost? Are you immune to anything they can do? Can we exploit that?"

"Well, I can probably sneak up on them still. I am old enough and skilled enough that as long as they don't already know I'm there, I can probably avoid detection. I have never been susceptible to psychic intrusion or manipulation, but then again, I've never tried it against an Elder before, either."

The beginnings of a plan began in my head, "Harold! I need the layout of these storage units. 3D if possible. Sam, I want to know the name of the Elder I am dealing with. You two have four hours. Go."

Sue tapped her pen impatiently, "As for me?"

"I need the entire area evacuated. Without alerting the vamps. Make it believable. I also need a military plane to Kansas. One big enough for the van. Have it prepped and ready in four hours."She blew a wayward wisp of brown hair away from her face and began furiously dialing her cell phone, "Roger that."

"Frost?"

Frost snapped to rigid attention, complete with clicked heels, his seriousness belied only by that predator's grin that indicated when a hunt was on and he was sublimely happy, "Jawhol herr general!"

"We need to load the van. We're taking everything."

In four hours we met back in the command center. Sam had determined that we were dealing with an un-dramatically named vampire called John Smith. Seriously? You'd think it would be something a lot more comic-book-y. But no such luck. John Smith it was. There goes my sense of melodrama. Sam surmised it was an easy name to forge documents for, and the volume of duplicate hits anyone digging would encounter would slow down any investigator. Smart vampires make me nervous.

Frost briefed us on Smith, "He was born a Visigoth in the fourth century, and was present at the fall of Adrianople in 378 AD. That is about the time he was turned, and many speculate he may have been only the fifth or sixth vampire ever. It is hard to say though. The first generation of vampires reproduced only sparingly, and often by accident. Like all elders, he is very strong, extremely fast and tough as a coffin nail. He was a warrior by trade, sixteen hundred years ago, but has not seen battle in a thousand years. He doesn't have to. He is a powerful telepath. He can and will use your own mind against you."

Sam asked, "Like demonic possession?"

Frost shook his head, "I don't think so. It's usually more subtle, but it is possible he has that capability."

Sue was furiously writing notes, "Strategies for combating this?"

"Your brains. Frost's strength. My steel." I couldn't resist the quip. Sue rolled her eyes.

"I'll have that engraved on your tombstone, funny man."

"Morbid woman."

Harold brought us back on track, "Can he put that whammy on Frost?"

We all looked at the big vampire, whose shrug was non-committal, "I would like to think not, but it's hard to say. I am willing to bet my resistance will be very good, either way. For that matter, Martin is nearly impossible to influence when he has his dander up. His rage is so intense; trying to get into his mind is like staring into the sun. I have only very limited psychic abilities, and he is painful to be around in battle. I would bet Harold's salary someone who is more sensitive may have a lot of trouble with him."

Sue nodded, "Good to know, that."

I began to outline my ideas, "The key to victory here is going to be surprise and speed. It would be great if we could extract the girl without bumping in to Smith at all, but I am a pessimist by nature, so I am going to treat a hostile encounter with Smith as a foregone conclusion. We go in hot, and we leave nothing behind."

I turned to Sue, "how goes the evacuation, how much room do we have to play with? How much noise can we make?"

She cleared her throat, "The facility is approximately seven acres, on a main road. Town population is 34,714 souls. I have cleared an area in a one-half mile radius around the target zone. That gives you enough room to make a lot of noise, but the brass hats have instructed me to warn you that too much noise will be very hard to cover. You can be loud, but try not to be too exotic."

Basically, don't let any civilians see any undead monsters waging war in their back yard; and keep the explosions from spilling out into the night. I can do that.

She continued, "Furthermore, I secured far support assets in the form of two F-16 aircraft. They will be armed with JDAM guided 500-lb bombs."

I chuckled, "That oughtta put down an Elder!"

"And anyone within a hundred yards of him," admonished Harold.

"Good point." I acknowledged,"Let's call that protocol 'Scorched Earth' and try not to use it. Tell me about the place, Harold."

Harold called up an image on the big 47-ich monitor. It showed a pretty innocuous storage rental facility with corrugated steel buildings with roll-up doors. The image switched to an isometric wire-frame, which allowed us to see more clearly how things were laid out.

"Martin, there is a metric fuck-ton of cover and concealment here, and god knows how many vampires. There are a total of two-hundred storage units, and vampires don't have much of a heat signature. With Ms. Brown's assistance, I parked a satellite right over the place, and surveillance indicates that this facility could have as many as thirty vampires staying there but no less than fifteen. Preliminary indications are that most of these individuals will leave the premises at night to feed or entertain themselves. So despite night time giving them the advantage, it is probably best to run this op after dark."

"And the girl, Harold?"

"Fortunately for us, Miss Natalie Fisher does have a heat signature; she is located in unit one-zero-one, smack in the center of the compound. I don't have to remind you people that this is a very strong indicator that she is alive and not turned into a vampire."

I sighed, "Of course. Thirty vamps plus one Elder. There will be no fuck-ups on this op, people. Zero."

Frost nodded, "What's the plan, boss?"

"Frost goes in first. Get to the girl, and verify her condition. If she is alive and uncompromised," meaning not turned into a vampire,"I make a distraction and you exfil the objective. When she is clear, you come back and we go for the high-value target if feasible, or we exfil if we cannot compete with target."

I took a deep breath, "If she is unrecoverable, we beat feet and go Scorched Earth. I will be relying heavily on real-time updates with respect to targets and resource status. That's you Harold. Sam you will be monitoring all emergency frequencies. I don't want a local hero getting his fool self killed. Sue, you are on military duty. No Pentagon interference, please."

She nodded assent.

"Frost, when we hit Smith, it's going to be shock and awe. I am going to throw everything at him including the kitchen sink. You let me get good and engaged, and you move only when Smith is fully committed to me. Then do what you do when he isn't paying attention."

I looked to my little group, the spymaster, the nerd, the lawyer and the monster; a ragtag of profoundly exceptional people, brought together by tragedy and commitment. This is what Frost was talking about that day in the woods with me. This whole unique group had dropped everything in their lives and pinned their hopes for redemption and justice on me. It wasn't about me being the perfect killer anymore. It had nothing to do with revenge. This was not a question of how I chose to die, but a question of how we chose to live. It wasn't about me at all anymore, was it? It was about us. It had been a long time since I had an "us." It reminded me of how I felt with her. It felt right.

I felt a kind of grim satisfaction when I looked at them. I dared to hope, even; because quite frankly, at that moment, I felt fucking unbeatable. And God help anything that stood in our way.