Return of the Hellbound Heart
By Childe Valancourt
"If Satan had never fallen, Hell had been made for thee." - Edward Young
Respectfully dedicated to Clive Barker.
Disclaimer: I own no one in this tale except the McCullough gang who are original creations of mine. Enjoy!
Chapter One: A Birth and a Death
It was 3 AM. The streets were all but deserted, with only the headlights of some last, late-night straggler illuminating the asphalt every once and a while with an inconstant frequency like the gloaming eye of a broken, rotating strobe light.
"Slim pickings tonight, it looks, love."
The person who spoke had all the appearance of a young man jacketed in a loose, long, leather coat with a shock of peroxide blonde hair crowning his head. An expression of dissatisfaction exasperated his face, the perfect lineaments of which would have defied any artist to suppose them anything either more or less than the features of a rather handsome, though out of humour, young man. It was only the faint, subtle gleaming of violet and crimson that shimmered beneath his eyes when the streetlights happened to fall at a certain angle upon them as well as the perfect whiteness of his teeth as he curled his lip in a faint moue of disappointment that betrayed something of his true nature – though even these would have been overlooked by an eye not already alerted to search for such signs.
"Spike," the dark-haired woman beside him breathed, a sable-gloved finger pointing towards a house that stood across the street from them. "Look."
"What is it, Dru?" he enquired. Then he saw.
Across the street a group of at least half a dozen vamps were approaching the ramshackle structure that Drusilla had pointed at, the foremost of them carrying a poorly-concealed-something wrapped in a length of tarpaulin. Spike thought that he had a fairly accurate idea of what that something was and was about to repeat one of his favourite jokes about a vampire and a sorority girl when Drusilla, as though anticipating his intentions, put a swift finger to her lips and, with eyes that gleamed like candles, whispered, "Shhh – can you not hear it, my love? Thrum – thrum – like the beating of poor little moth upon a window? It fills my head – oh, like flies it does!"
Spike took her fluttering hands and, with a slight smile, said, "It's only because you're famished, Dru. For that matter, so am I," he added with a rather sour look in the direction of the retreating vampires. "Crikey, what are they about in there, I wonder? They're acting like the place is a regular speakeasy!"
For he saw now that the skulking vamps, after looking about to make certain that no human eyes were watching, had now entered the vacant interior of the abandoned house and disappeared from sight, bearing their still burden along with them.
"A group of crypt-less wastrels, I expect," he surmised. "I'm already bored watching the lot of them. Come, Dru – let's find us a new fishing hole, shall we? Don't want to go to bed hungry now, do we?"
"Shouldn't go up there…" Dru was whispering to herself as Spike led her away. "They shouldn't, you know, my love…"
"Yes, of course – right you are, pet," Spike said, his eye already wandering towards a solitary girl walking down a vacant alley a stone's throwaway from where they stood. Pointing, he suggested, "Now, that looks like a pretty little spot for us to take the air, now, doesn't it?"
Drusilla caught sight of the girl. Unconsciously, her tongue flashed from between her teeth and passed over her pale lips as she met Spike's tender, indulgent gaze. Then, with an eager breathlessness, she nodded and the two of them set off in the wake of the girl—two moving shadows mingling and separating with the darkness of that lonely street.
Donnan McCullough had only been a vampire for a month and already he had found the experience exhausting enough to last him a lifetime. Unfortunately, unless he had the good fortune to run into a Slayer, it would probably last him several lifetimes.
"Hold up your bloody end, Donnan, damn you," Ewan hissed. They had now gained entry into the shadowed interior of the abandoned house that Alistair had chosen as their rendezvous point, but Donnan saw no sign of Alistair.
"I guess he's upstairs," he ventured to remark.
"Blimey, the lad's a genius," said old Joseph, his voice rich with sarcasm as he struggled to hold the end of the bundled burden that he was carrying along with Donnan and Ewan.
Donnan had never wanted to be a vampire. It had all been Alistair's doing – the work of a long, agonizing hour down a back alley somewhere home in Edinburgh. Mother of God, how far away old Edinburgh seemed now. Donnan blinked back a very human tear that welled up at the corner of his gleaming, noctilucent eye, threatening to spill down the bridge of his nose. Now was hardly the time to think about home – not when he was thousands of miles away in a sodheap called Sunnydale that, for some reason, Alistair had insisted was the perfect place for them to set up shop. It was a Hellmouth, he had said. Whatever a fucking Hellmouth was. Sometimes he wondered whether even Alistair knew. But there he went again, letting his mind wander, when he was supposed to be concentrating all of his energies into lugging the body of an unconscious girl up the stairs of an abandoned house without attracting any attention from the outside world. Ah, the life of a vampire.
Once they had reached the top of the first floor's landing, a high voice from somewhere upstairs called down: "Lads, is that you? Bring her up here, if you please, as quickly as you may."
"Sure thing, Alistair," Ewan grunted as they shouldered their prone burden up one more flight of stairs until they reached the upper room where their leader awaited.
The attic was dusty and smelt of rats and stale incense. Donnan hated the place on sight but Alistair seemed pleased enough with it, sitting in the centre of the room and watching as they lowered their bundled burden to the ground. Gingerly, Donnan unwrapped the white folds that covered the body, disclosing the form of a young girl, barely thirteen. She lay upon the cloth, limp and softly breathing, oblivious to the monsters that loomed over her, tongues whetted with appetite at the sight of her.
Alistair began first, his lean, spider-like fingers going about her throat as he took her in, her darkness flowing into his mouth like a black, silent spring, webbing in bloody trickles at the corners of his lips. He then relaxed his grasp upon the child's curls and, ever fastidious in his habits, began to wipe the remains of his repast upon the white cloth of a handkerchief that he kept in the pocket of his business suit. Donnan recalled how Joseph had once hinted that Alistair had been a rather distinguished lawyer in some firm, before being blessed with the Dark Gift. Observing the painstaking attention that the vampire paid in cultivating an appearance of cleanliness and efficiency, Donnan could well believe that there was some truth in this whispered rumour.
"Ewan." Alistair nodded at the vampire who stood beside Donnan and, needing no further encouragement, Ewan set about with a will upon the girl's neck.
"They say that the Slayer lives here," Alistair remarked to Donnan, by way of conversation.
"Um," Donnan grunted, little knowing what else to say. His eyes were still absorbed with the sight of Ewan and the child.
"Not afraid, are you?" Alistair enquired, his eyes fixed upon Donnan.
"Uh, should I be?" Conversations with Alistair were generally full of little trick questions, most of which Donnan failed to answer correctly. He hoped that, for once, he had given the right response.
Alistair inclined his head, considering this answer. Then a smile crossed his thin, calculating face, as though Donnan's idiot deference had somehow won him over. "No, you oughtn't to be afraid," he allowed. "So long as I'm not. And there's great opportunity for us in this town, as you shall soon see."
He popped open a battered, leather briefcase that he carried with him everywhere and began to ruffle through a sheaf of papers at the top.
"I have all the dope on Sunnydale," he explained, his gaze snapping from Donnan's face to old Joseph's and back again. His voice had taken on that personable tone that he used when he was, as he himself put it, 'talking business' with them. Donnan wondered how many defense attorneys and juries had melted before that voice that now was being employed so winningly in the shadowed confines of an abandoned attic.
"The Mayor, for instance." Alistair's eyes gleamed as he tapped a long, tapering nail upon the documents before him. "All sources that I have researched and spoken with claim that he is, for reasons unknown to most vamps outside of Sunnydale, looking for gentlemen like us who would be willing to employ ourselves in his service. Not only would this be a convenient source of money, something we are seriously in need of, but it would afford us a considerable amount of protection from persons just like this…Slayer."
"And this Slayer," Ewan chimed in, for the first time lifting his head from the girl's throat. "Know anything about her?"
A frown began to darken Alistair's brow, but he soon replaced this with nothing more serious than a nonchalant smile. "Nothing much to know there, I'm afraid. Just a girl named Buffy Summers, finishing her education up in Sunnydale High School from what I hear. Why, she isn't even old enough to enjoy a good Scotch without being arrested for underage drinking, lads!"
They all got a chuckle out of this, even Donnan – it was hard to resist Alistair's rather mild, deprecatory brand of humour and Alistair always knew when to make them laugh.
"Do you hear something?" old Joseph suddenly asked.
They all broke off laughing. After a long moment of silence, interrupted only by the faint moaning of the child still lying on the floor, Alistair asked, "What was it that you thought you heard, Joseph?"
The grizzled Scotsman shrugged. "Thought I heard something rustling about – must have been the rats, I s'pose."
Cautious as always, Alistair sent Ewan downstairs to scout the place out and make certain they were having no unwanted visitors. Five minutes later, Ewan returned, declaring with a mocking grin, "The place is clean as a whistle, me laird."
"Good enough," Alistair said with a weary shrug. "Donnan. You haven't touched a drop since last evening. Why don't you take your turn? Ewan's had his fill."
Donnan had been dreading this moment since they had arrived at the attic. He hated feasting on children – he preferred the brawlers whom he could catch in the back of bars, take out with a tap on the chin or a good gut in the ribs, and then finish at his leisure. Alistair was the opposite: he enjoyed, as he put it, finer delicacies than a pub or a brothel could afford. A child was his nightcap of choice.
As Donnan searched for some excuse to avoid Alistair's generous offer, his gaze happened to fall upon the child. Ewan, as always, had been a messy eater: there had been blood all over the floorboards while he had taken his fill of the girl. Donnan, staring now at the immaculately clean floor upon which the child lay, wondered rather incredulously where all the crimson stains had gone. It was as though the splintering wood had lapped them up itself, leaving no trace behind.
"What ails you, Donnan?" Alistair's voice broke through his thoughts, his tone carrying in it a faint hint of sportive humour. "Are you not well?"
Donnan was no longer in any mood for Alistair's sense of humour. Crouching over the child, he began to search out a place on her throat that had been left untouched by Alistair and Ewan. He thought that he heard a sound like the dry sucking of sand from somewhere beneath him as he drank, the child's blood dribbling freely now upon the floorboards. But he continued on – he was, after all, in spite of his inhibitions, quite famished after the night's work. And, knowing Alistair, they would be kept busy the next night as well in tracking down this Mayor.
His tongue was beginning to acquire that thick, sluggish feeling that he usually experience when he had drunk a surfeit of blood. He opened his eyes and was about to rise, but was transfixed with the sight that met his gaze as he looked up from the girl's throat.
It seemed that he was surrounded by a forest of tongues: long, thin, serpentine tongues, all dripping with blood and all rising from thin cracks between the floorboards. As he gazed on, however, his impression altered. No, they were not tongues, he decided. They were thin strips of torn, moist flesh rising in an invisible wind like the banners of some daemonic legion. Somewhere close by, he could hear Alistair, Ewan, and Joseph crying out in horror, but his own tongue remained still and speechless as he continued to watch – watch as the floorboards burst free of their nails and two long, spider-like limbs, slimy with blood, rose clambering for a foothold, lifting a gleaming ribcage and mass of coiled organs along behind. Flayed skin still hung somewhat loosely in a few patches upon the body, but for the most part it was a bloodied skeleton that lay beneath the horrified gaze of the vampires. And, as Donnan watched, his stomach churning, the thing lifted its head and begged in a voice frail but undeniably human: "Please…help...me."
That was enough for Alistair. With a trembling finger, he pointed at the thing and looked at Ewan and Donnan:
"Finish it."
Donnan had no clear remembrance afterwards of what happened. All that he knew for sure was that he and Ewan knelt and killed the thing: killed it by lapping and sucking at the blood that covered it, drinking while it screamed for mercy in that horribly human voice whilst Alistair watched with a pale, impassive face. At last, as though it had been nothing more than a dream conjured by the rising dust motes in that old, abandoned attic, the thing fell back and lay still, disintegrating moments later until there was not a trace of it anywhere to be found.
Alistair did not meet their gazes as they stood up. Instead, he picked up his briefcase and nodded shortly at Joseph:
"We're leaving."
"Leaving Sunnydale?" Donnan chimed in.
"No, not Sunnydale," Alistair snapped curtly. "But certainly this house."