Disclaimer: All characters appearing within this story are creations of myself and my friends -- Shelbi Noffsinger, Dian Nyobe, Glenn, and Lonijae Simonton. All locations within this story are also of our creation.
Dilante stood beside himself, back rested against a tree. His head bobbed right, then left, then right -- a generally symoblistic gesture for indecision. No longer was he sure of himself, not in the sense of self-consciousness or deprecation, but in the sense that he straddled the very fragile and very vague barrier between good and evil. It was a simple choice fundamentally: do good deeds and only good will come unto oneself. The conundrum that the tracker faced, caught between a rock and a hard place, was that he couldn't discern good from evil anymore; it had become as blurred as a flock of birds against the backdrop of the everlasting black parchment that sealed the world together.
He crossed his arms, jacket stretching around his shoulders, and tapped his foot in the dirt impatiently. Under the canopy of the forest, only the thinnest lines of pale yellow light sneaked through the foliage from the sphere resting in its nightly apex. I'm the man right? he pondered. So why's everything all...confusing now? It's just another job, like any other.
A rustle of leaves heralded the arrival of another man. That was no phantom whisper of the wind whistling between the bark of trees and sweeping underbrush from its dried and lonely position at the dirt; the pitter patter of fleet footsteps on creaking branches and the swish of a ratty maroon scarf could mean only one man, the man on whom Dilante had been waiting.
"Took you long enough," Dilante hushed, emerald eyes sharply focused on his counterpart under the guise of darkness. Each of them was a veteran in their field, in silence and stealth, and each knew that to aggress upon the other could very well mean death, or worse -- detection.
The Scarfed Man tapped the side of a whirring visor that had been illuminating his path. It was a piece of technology that only the most advanced research departments could have devised, complete with four separate settings to enhance awareness and reaction time. To accompany his progressively metal appearance, the Scarfed Man bore also a cybernetic gauntlet set into his right arm, and a pair of seemingly simple ankle braces wrapped around his legs.
At any rate, the visor disengaged, the four slits which had previously afforded him an almost demonic expression faded, and the Scarfed Man lifted it to more naturally view Dilante in the darkness. "I had other negotiations and matters," he coldly replied.
"Eh. Nunna that has to deal with me. So what's on your mind that you wanted me to come out here in the middle of the night?" Dilante shifted his weight from one foot to the other as a squirrel scampered by with acorns for its family.
"I need you to expedite the operation," the Scarfed Man shot back tersely. "No more of this lollygagging. Your stage of the operation must be com--"
"Did you really just say the word lollygagging? I mean, I don't gag on lollies alright? So don't make me sound like I'm a homo, 'cause that sounds really gay. Just sayin'..."
The Scarfed Man sneered. "Like I was saying, your stage of the operation must be completed for the rest of our project to continue."
"Not my project," Dilante shrugged indifferently. He glanced at the shoulders of his jacket, which had creased from his arch, and flattened it before perfecting a strand of his hair that had been caught in an errant gust.
Anger simmered in the Scarfed Man's eyes, frustration with Dilante's rogue attitude, but there was nothing to remedy such disdain -- at least until the part had been properly played. "You're a part of this too, Dilante."
"Nah. You just think I am.
"Are you an actor now?"
He grinned deviously, "Depends. Do you think I'd win an Oscar?"
"Is my satisfaction not your number one priority?"
"Again with the homosexuality? You're starting to creep me out, guy. Maybe I should just inch away from this one."
The Scarfed Man stepped, malice shown in his motion, "Don't make me kill you, old friend."
Dilante stepped defiantly against his friend. "Even if you had the balls," a hushed, emphatic tone. "You don't have the skill."
The Scarfed Man aligned himself, shoulder to shoulder, with a man whom he had once considered to be his brother. In a vicious voice, almost dripping with venom, he cut his eyes to Dilante and recited an all too familiar oath, "Do not Cross the Assassin. Do not Deceive thy Brother. Do not Wound the Hand. Do not Disrespect the Blade." He lowered the visor, tapped in a rhythmic configuration of beeps, and in no more than a dozen sudden strides, sank into the darkness of the world.
"Do not Deceive thy Brother," Dilante repeated to himself almost silently. "Is Manz my brother...or is Brimstone?" And either way, he continued in silence, agile legs lifting him above the treeline with ease. Which one is good, and which one is evil?
XXXXXXXXXXXXX
Thorn took another hit from her silver flask. It didn't seem like anything really affected her that much anymore: pain, happiness, alcohol. All she really ever felt was angry. Some people claim to be depressed or numb, but not Thorn. Every day was another day on the edge for her, another day awaiting the straw that would snap the camel's back.
Most mortals struggled to deal with the purpose of life, the reason for their being. Why else would they have jotted down the Gospels of gods on high that they had never met? Why else would they worship idols they couldn't so much as see? Or maybe they believed that their gods were omnipresent -- always everywhere at all times.
But to her that didn't make any sense. It was all, in her slurred speech, "Illogical bullshit." Irrelevant. She had been walking the planet for near to three centuries, and hadn't seen hide nor hair of a god, any god, any supreme being that gave one or two craps about whether or not his or her children suffered. Parents tend to care when their children are hurt or in danger or at war with each other, so obviously, in Thorn's rationale at least, there was no god, because no righteous god would ever allow her to come to such a horrible low in her already tragic life.
She sat at a black table, iron with a miniaturized Italian fresco. She recognized it, and although at one point she would have smiled with sweet nostalgia, reminiscing about the vineyard upon which she had been raised along with her twin sister Ivy; now it made her spit in disgust. Bottom line: she was bitter.
Scurrying from one table to the next were scores of busy servers taking drink and food orders, flirting with customers, and trying to earn a few big tips before the bistro closed. Inside the city gates, the streetlights and skyline dominated the world, scraping off a couple flakes of Heaven. The normally innumerable stars vanished against a mauve sky artificially illuminated with neon in the slums, and incandescent and florescent in the uppity parts of town.
On the streets, traffic had come to a midnight gridock, what with so many people trying to speed home to prepare for work in the morning, or smashing into corners and side panels while on a binge. The sidewalks were filled to capacity with gaggles of nameless, faceless civilians -- some thin, some thick, some tall, some short, all human.
Thorn found her solace in the bottom of the flask. The nearly Moonshine-proof whiskey she had been quaffing like the last drink she'd ever have burned her throat with a hot, comforting bitterness. It was no different than Thorn herself -- sour and angry for being caged for so many years. Then, when it was finally released into the mouth of the world, it didn't know how to behave and scorned anything that came into its path, made it pay for punishing it in the first place. The whiskey was her best friend -- at least until she had drunk it all.
With a sour face she slammed the butt of the flask against the fresco tabletop and cracked its surface. Eyes flew to her direction like moths to a lightbulb, but her twisted hiss turned them away like a cat from a swimming pool. It had been so long since she'd fed. There was no particular rule of conduct in the military guidelines stating that she couldn't feed, simply that "unnecessary bloodshed will not be tolerated."
The guidelines, however, said nothing of vampires, or their need for bloodshed, their lust for it. To Thorn, the ends justified the means and suffice it to say, she was only searching for necessary bloodshed when she caught the eye of a young male server with a frosted blond coiff. She winked at him; his face turned red. A few moments later, with his apron shed and his face washed of the sweat and salt that settled from the humidity, the young man took Thorn's hand gently and led her around to the back of the bistro, to a staircase that led to the velvet rope dining area of the roof. Thorn smirked knowingly behind his oblivious head.
He led her to an obscure corner and jimmied open the grate of a broad, curving air duct to give them some sense of privacy. When he pressed his lips to Thorn's harshly, even she had to admit that she hadn't expected him to be so skilled with his tongue.
What a waste, the vampire thought. But there'll be others.
She continued to let him invade the privacy of her mouth, their tongues sliding together in a moist exchange of dominance. Her small, pallid hands with intricately dancing fingers pranced their way to the back of his head, sending shivers down his spine with every contact of her flesh against his. It was almost an electric pulse, the nuances of their bodies molding together and mouths wanting for more, but there was more important pulses on Thorn's mind than the one of their false passion.
As his hands roamed to her waist, then higher and cupped her chest, then around and reached for the hook of her bra beneath the camisol, every beat of his heart jumped, thudded in her ears like a steel drum. She yearned for the hot spurts of crimson that would fill her stomach with ecstasy that not even whiskey could rival; it was all just a matter of timing.
She smirked against his lips. Eyes wide, the server felt his back smack against the wall just as he had been distracted enough to successfully separated Thorn's bra. It fell from her shirt to her feet, and he fell to her seductive ploy like a dog to its master. Head jerked back so that his shocked brown eyes were glued to the sky, the served attempted to scream, thrash, anything to save him from the voracious vampire that had already, and all too effortlessly, rent his throat asunder.
Blood trickled from the corners of both Thorn's lips and those of her victim, though to be sure, he was gurgling, drowning on his own life. Thorn basked in the radiant heat of his being, all of it streaming from him freely, with no ebb to its flow. She spat the last chunk of flesh between her teeth to the blood pooling on the roof, and shook her head at the young man dying at her feet, clawing for life.
She grinned maliciously, "That's why lust is one of the Seven Deadly Sins." She snatched her blood soaked bra from the saturated surface, lifted her camisol and clipped it cavalierly. Then, the vampire planted her foot on the parapet of the building, and performed a cinematic swan dive toward the patrons of the bistro, much to their incredulity, before fading like a wraith into an air of shadows.