Building on Faith
Chapter 2
***********************************************
AN: My "rating" before chapter 1 mentioned that the R was partly for sex and this is the chapter that includes it. I want to warn you additionally though, that this isn't a love scene. We're talking child prostitution here. If you think I've handled it poorly, if you think I've failed to communicate that what is going on is a disgusting act, I invite suggestions. If you think this scene is fantastically erotic and you want more, I invite you to remove yourself from the gene pool posthaste. If you think I should burn in hell for even conceiving of this storyline, you're entitled to your opinion but I'm not terribly interested in it.
You've been warned. Enjoy.
************************************************
When the sirens began to doppler toward her, Jo snapped back to reality some and hid the rifle in her coat. She beheld the three corpses in the little parking lot, trying to figure out where the girl by the van had come from and shrugged. None of them would live to be werewolves and there really wasn't anything more she could do to clean up before the cops got there, so she moved out with a dark slayer trailing her unnoticed.
The van was where Teach, the mentor she'd just shot, left it, parked across from the little occult bookshop, locked up and dark. She slid the side door open and looked blindly at the gear in the back. A couple spare rifles. The mold casting setup for silver bullets. Not much else really. Not much at all to show for a partnership that had lasted almost five years.
She took off her jacket and sat on the edge of the van, running a finger over the faint white scars that showed if she wore a midriff-bearing shirt. Teach never approved of that. He had a few scars he couldn't reasonably hide, but he objected to displaying evidence of your failures for all the world to see. A tear rolled down her cheek. Failures? Well, weakness maybe. Weakness and ignorance she still held the day they'd met.
***
The John stepped out of the No Exit Cafe at 7:15, just as the boss had told her he would, and walked up to her, holding out his hand to shake. "You must be Jo."
His hands were clammy, his hairline receding, his face dotted with acne the scraggly facial hair he was working on couldn't come close to hiding. She'd seen worse things in the past month. "That's right. You ready to get going, stud?"
He chuckled, sounding more angry than nervous. Maybe angry that he had to pay for it. Maybe angry that he was such a sick fuck he'd actually asked for the youngest looking girl he could get. Or maybe he just sounded angry when he was nervous - not such an unlikely defense mechanism.
Jo took his wet palm in her own and turned down North Glenwood toward one of the apartments her boss kept as an office for the girls. She squinted in the harsh light of evening in Rogers Park and concentrated on her breathing as they strolled together under the El.
This wasn't her first trick - it had been a long month and she was almost getting used to it... Well, no she wasn't, but she was getting dulled to it already. Still, it wouldn't do to start hyperventilating in the street. Every damn day since she left home, sunset had brought on a suffocating panic that she pretended not to understand.
There was plenty of room in the apartment for a bed, a dresser and two people to stand - but not much else. There were rust stains where the metal bed frame touched the moldering carpet near the window and the sheets were worn thin, but they were clean. The plaster was cracked, leaving gaps in some places where the lath showed darkly through the yellow - perhaps at one time they had been white - walls. There was no toilet in the room, but there was a sink. It dripped constantly and the metal fixtures were caked with rust, but the water was ok to drink if you let it run for a few seconds first.
Jo led the man a couple steps to the bed and had him sit down. She didn't have any instructions on what the guy wanted, but if he was in a hurry he'd let her know. She began to hum a tune she'd heard the other night, something slow and, she hoped, enticing. She unbuttoned her shirt, letting him gradually take in her body as she exposed it. The black lace bra she was left with when she dropped the shirt into his lap was too big, but he didn't seem to mind. He reached out to put his sweaty palms over her breasts and she took that as a cue to speed things up.
She leaned over as his hands fumbled at caressing her and unbuttoned his pants to expose his desire for her. The twelve-year-old girl got on her knees and began to milk him with her lips, stroke him with her now practiced tongue.
The man shuddered and pulled back. Well, she thought, at least this isn't going to last very long. He stood and undressed completely, motioning for her to do the same. She pulled a condom out of the dresser and slowly slid it down his shaft, bringing him dangerously close to an end right there. 'That's probably not a good idea,' she thought. 'He might get pissed if he doesn't get at least a couple minutes inside.'
The sun had pretty much set outside and the apartment was dark, but the guy didn't complain and Jo didn't mind. The darkness just made it a little easier to hide. To pretend this wasn't her - that she was still living the life of a suburban schoolgirl. Still a virgin giggling over the idea of having sex someday. Still alive.
She bucked atop him, howling in anguish that sounded to him like delight. She played the role well, gritting her teeth in something approximating a grin and worked toward his end.
Something pounded against the door, making the wood creak and begin to splinter in the center. The next kick blew out the aged wood behind the deadbolt and the door swung in, revealing a man Jo wished she could forget silhouetted against the lights in the hallway. A man she'd tried so hard to leave behind.
Her father flicked the light switch by the door and blinked at them. He took a step into the room and slammed the door shut behind him. The man on the bed began to tremble, attempting to cover himself and looking for a way out. He had no idea what he'd gotten himself into.
Jo stood naked by the bed, her mouth open in horror. She tried to speak. To ask how he'd found her. Why he'd found her. Who he was...
He dropped a canvas sack to the floor with a metallic rattle and strode to the man on the bed. He ripped the sheet away and glared at the engorged penis that had just been invading his daughter. "You monster," he said. "How could you? How could you do a thing like that to my little girl?" There was something strange about his voice, his posture, his overall presence that fit far too well with Jo's memories. She knew what nightmare was here to terrorize her now.
Jo's father crouched beside the bed in the same spot she had knelt on only minutes earlier and growled. Not the growl of an angry man, but the growl of an animal. The growl of some low beast filled with a rage it lacks a language to express. Then he howled.
The plaster shook, sifting dust down to the bed, the floor. That howl was loud, sure, but there was something more. Such primal force was carried in that sound that Jo and her John nearly joined it. They trembled, frozen by the raw fury they now beheld. The man on the bed couldn't even bring his eyes into focus on the hand just inches from his naked flesh as it grew longer, grew fur. His eyes were open and directed right at Jo's father as his nails became claws and reached toward him, but he didn't see it - or at least he didn't understand it.
As the claws drew deep gashes across the man's abdomen, as they castrated him, punctured his windpipe, severed major arteries in his arms... he felt pain. But it was a distant pain. Clouded by confusion - by a failure to connect what was happening with reality. He was paying for what he'd done. He was being made to suffer for his penchant for little girls. But he didn't have the capacity for enough suffering to make up for it.
When the man was dead, the father turned to his daughter, blood dripping from his mouth and his claws. His eyes glowing with rage, he took the chains from his bag on the floor and strung her up against the bed frame. The John's blood seeped through the sheets and mattress, pooling on the floor where she sat. She could feel it dripping down her back, caking in her hair.
"You know what I loved most about your mom, you little whore?" he asked, crouching down on all fours and looking up at her with pale yellow eyes. "The way she tasted." He grinned, he mouth seeming larger than normal - his teeth looking longer. "The way her warm flesh slid down my throat. The way...." He growled, caught somewhere between the apparent ecstasy of the memory and the agony of his transformation. "The way her blood flowed thick over my hands." he lifted a hand - a paw now - and looked at it. He lifted it closer to Jo. "The way her skin just opened up and let me in..." He shuddered and shook his head. He really didn't look much like her daddy anymore, but he was still able to strangle human words from his throat.
"Doing this," he gestured with his inhuman arm at the bed and the corpse lying on it, "you'll never be able to satisfy a man the way you can satisfy me right now." He shuddered again and what was left of the man was gone. The beast lunged at her, its claws tearing her midsection. Then it stopped. Jo couldn't see clearly through the gushing tears, nor could she concentrate clearly through the pain, but something was distracting the beast.
***
"The 'Beehive', huh? Well, that makes a little more sense than the 'Bronze', right?" Faith asked herself as she stepped into the little coffee shop. The place wasn't crowded, but there were a few people hanging out, sucking on their drugs of choice: caffeine, nicotine, whatever was in the hand rolled smokes. A little heavy on the 'Goth' crowd, but they all looked friendly enough. Faith, dressed in a tight black tank top under a black leather jacket, black denim jeans and black biker boots might fit in. Even without any gleaming metal protruding from her nose, or her chin or her eyebrow - or her tongue, like the chick who took her order.
The tongue stud must've been new, cause this girl could barely talk. "cah ah geh ewe so'thi?" Faith winced as she noticed how purple the girl's tongue looked. She really oughtta get that looked at.
"Yeah, a large black coffee with a shot of espresso in it." Faith pulled a Chesterfield out of the pack she'd stolen from some guy she fucked back in Cincinnati. He'd only lasted about 10 minutes - she deserved to get something out of the night. She lit it and dragged hard on the unfiltered butt, her lungs filling with smoke. 'Luckily,' she thought, 'I'll never live long enough for the cancer to catch up with me.'
Faith paid the clerk, took her coffee to the darkest open corner booth and poured a shot of rotgut sour mash from her little tin flask into the paper cup. It wasn't bad. Caffeine to bring you up. Alcohol to bring you down. Nicotine to smooth you out... Late night snack of champions.
***
Faith sat on the worn mattress of a cot in her tiny, dark cell in solitary. She'd been in yet another "fight" - if that's what you called lying on the ground as three fellow inmates kicked the shit out of you. Really, it didn't matter where they put her. Faith was in solitary sitting in her regular cell as her roommate beat and raped her. She was in solitary walking the perimeter of the exercise yard. She was in solitary in the cafeteria as she slowly, deliberately swallowed food that wouldn't have had much taste if she'd looked for it. Faith was locked within a mental prison of guilt and hate much stronger than the steel and concrete one surrounding her.
Funny thing about prisons: they can do a lot for some folks. They can wake you up like a cold ammonia shower and make you realize who you've been. They can tear you apart. They can break you. But they can't fix you. No, you gotta do that for yourself.
Faith was broken by the time she turned herself in. Confessing to every damned thing she'd ever done felt good. It was a step in the right direction. Of course, no one who didn't already know the truth believed much of her confession. Her conviction for assault on the nurse in Sunnydale was mitigated by the fact she'd just awoke from a coma and obviously wasn't all there yet. Her conviction for aggravated assault on the guy in the train station was mitigated by the fact that her public defender had brought his lengthy record to light and suggested, despite her claims to the contrary, that she felt she was defending herself. That PD was taking orders from someone other than his client.
The DA didn't even charge her with anything else. No murder. No attempted murder. No robbery. The state wouldn't punish her for what she'd done to Wesley, to Buffy... Hell, to damn near everyone she'd known. They didn't believe it. They couldn't prove it.
She'd have to punish herself. Bathe in self-hatred. Wallow in revulsion. Oh, and the other prisoners would be happy to help with the whole beating herself up thing. They were just fascinated by how quickly she healed. Bruises, cuts, stab wounds, broken bones. Give it a couple days and try again.
The outer door to the solitary ward slid open, grating metal on unlubricated metal. Faith heard footsteps approaching her cell and didn't bother to wonder who it was. She'd find out soon enough.
***
Faith crushed another butt in the overflowing tin ashtray in front of her and gulped the chewy dregs of her coffee. Time to do a little patrolling, she thought, standing to leave. Before she could even step out from behind the table though, stabs of alarm went off in her head. A couple was walking up from the back room, hand in hand, headed for the door. And one of them was a vampire. 'So, they'll come to me now, huh? I think I'm gonna like this town.'
Faith followed them out the door and around the corner. There were a few people sitting on their porches in the residential area right behind the shops on Carson Street in this part of town, but when the couple turned down another side street, the houses were dark. The streets empty. Or so he thought.
The vampire's game face came out and he turned to the girl. She tried to scream, but he shoved his fist in her mouth as something between a punch and a fleshy gag. Her eyes bulged and tears ran from them, she went limp and his teeth sunk into her neck.
Faith charged from the shadows. 'Not one more Goddamned victim tonight,' she thought. 'I'm not going to lose another.' She leapt, covering about 5 feet in the air before her right foot connected with the vamp's neck, literally tearing him away from his snack.
The girl crumpled, clutching her shredded neck and whimpering, writhing in pain and woozy from blood loss.
The vamp's neck was broken from Faith's initial attack, blocking his windpipe so he couldn't even scream as she landed on him. A sharp blow broke his nose. Another punch and she drove her fingers into his left eye, popping it like a grape and digging deeper as he lost consciousness. She stood, straddling him, wondering how long it would take him to recover if she let him. He deserved more pain. He deserved to suffer for what he'd done. She staked him on the street, leaving a pile of dust between her legs.
The girl let out a sob, drawing Faith's attention. Her dyed blond hair was turning pink on the left side as blood continued to flow from her neck. It was a good look for her. "What did you do?" she cried. "He was... We were..."
"You were what? Just going to 'neck' in the dark. Did you notice how that was workin' out?"
"But you - what did you do?"
"Listen little girl. And take a good look at what he did," she said, pulling the girl's hand from her neck - though there was obviously no way for her to see herself.
"There are bad people in this world." She pulled the girl to her feet, ignoring her groans and swaying. "You want to blame me?" She smacked the girl - lightly - across the cheek. "For the fact bad things happen." She held the girl's face in her hands, a bit too tightly. Faith was losing it. "There are bad people out there." She shoved the girl back, nearly knocking her down. "Bad *things*." She slugged her in the gut. "Evil things." She kicked the girl's leg, her knee collapsing sideways. "Darkness you can't imagine." Hysteria rising in her voice. "Darkness your mommy was afraid to tell you about." She kicked the girl, lying on the street. "Darkness that would shatter the peace of your worst fucking nightmare," she screamed.
The girl lay unconscious, bleeding in the street. Thunder rolled in the distance. A storm was headed for town.
AN: More to come.
Chapter 2
***********************************************
AN: My "rating" before chapter 1 mentioned that the R was partly for sex and this is the chapter that includes it. I want to warn you additionally though, that this isn't a love scene. We're talking child prostitution here. If you think I've handled it poorly, if you think I've failed to communicate that what is going on is a disgusting act, I invite suggestions. If you think this scene is fantastically erotic and you want more, I invite you to remove yourself from the gene pool posthaste. If you think I should burn in hell for even conceiving of this storyline, you're entitled to your opinion but I'm not terribly interested in it.
You've been warned. Enjoy.
************************************************
When the sirens began to doppler toward her, Jo snapped back to reality some and hid the rifle in her coat. She beheld the three corpses in the little parking lot, trying to figure out where the girl by the van had come from and shrugged. None of them would live to be werewolves and there really wasn't anything more she could do to clean up before the cops got there, so she moved out with a dark slayer trailing her unnoticed.
The van was where Teach, the mentor she'd just shot, left it, parked across from the little occult bookshop, locked up and dark. She slid the side door open and looked blindly at the gear in the back. A couple spare rifles. The mold casting setup for silver bullets. Not much else really. Not much at all to show for a partnership that had lasted almost five years.
She took off her jacket and sat on the edge of the van, running a finger over the faint white scars that showed if she wore a midriff-bearing shirt. Teach never approved of that. He had a few scars he couldn't reasonably hide, but he objected to displaying evidence of your failures for all the world to see. A tear rolled down her cheek. Failures? Well, weakness maybe. Weakness and ignorance she still held the day they'd met.
***
The John stepped out of the No Exit Cafe at 7:15, just as the boss had told her he would, and walked up to her, holding out his hand to shake. "You must be Jo."
His hands were clammy, his hairline receding, his face dotted with acne the scraggly facial hair he was working on couldn't come close to hiding. She'd seen worse things in the past month. "That's right. You ready to get going, stud?"
He chuckled, sounding more angry than nervous. Maybe angry that he had to pay for it. Maybe angry that he was such a sick fuck he'd actually asked for the youngest looking girl he could get. Or maybe he just sounded angry when he was nervous - not such an unlikely defense mechanism.
Jo took his wet palm in her own and turned down North Glenwood toward one of the apartments her boss kept as an office for the girls. She squinted in the harsh light of evening in Rogers Park and concentrated on her breathing as they strolled together under the El.
This wasn't her first trick - it had been a long month and she was almost getting used to it... Well, no she wasn't, but she was getting dulled to it already. Still, it wouldn't do to start hyperventilating in the street. Every damn day since she left home, sunset had brought on a suffocating panic that she pretended not to understand.
There was plenty of room in the apartment for a bed, a dresser and two people to stand - but not much else. There were rust stains where the metal bed frame touched the moldering carpet near the window and the sheets were worn thin, but they were clean. The plaster was cracked, leaving gaps in some places where the lath showed darkly through the yellow - perhaps at one time they had been white - walls. There was no toilet in the room, but there was a sink. It dripped constantly and the metal fixtures were caked with rust, but the water was ok to drink if you let it run for a few seconds first.
Jo led the man a couple steps to the bed and had him sit down. She didn't have any instructions on what the guy wanted, but if he was in a hurry he'd let her know. She began to hum a tune she'd heard the other night, something slow and, she hoped, enticing. She unbuttoned her shirt, letting him gradually take in her body as she exposed it. The black lace bra she was left with when she dropped the shirt into his lap was too big, but he didn't seem to mind. He reached out to put his sweaty palms over her breasts and she took that as a cue to speed things up.
She leaned over as his hands fumbled at caressing her and unbuttoned his pants to expose his desire for her. The twelve-year-old girl got on her knees and began to milk him with her lips, stroke him with her now practiced tongue.
The man shuddered and pulled back. Well, she thought, at least this isn't going to last very long. He stood and undressed completely, motioning for her to do the same. She pulled a condom out of the dresser and slowly slid it down his shaft, bringing him dangerously close to an end right there. 'That's probably not a good idea,' she thought. 'He might get pissed if he doesn't get at least a couple minutes inside.'
The sun had pretty much set outside and the apartment was dark, but the guy didn't complain and Jo didn't mind. The darkness just made it a little easier to hide. To pretend this wasn't her - that she was still living the life of a suburban schoolgirl. Still a virgin giggling over the idea of having sex someday. Still alive.
She bucked atop him, howling in anguish that sounded to him like delight. She played the role well, gritting her teeth in something approximating a grin and worked toward his end.
Something pounded against the door, making the wood creak and begin to splinter in the center. The next kick blew out the aged wood behind the deadbolt and the door swung in, revealing a man Jo wished she could forget silhouetted against the lights in the hallway. A man she'd tried so hard to leave behind.
Her father flicked the light switch by the door and blinked at them. He took a step into the room and slammed the door shut behind him. The man on the bed began to tremble, attempting to cover himself and looking for a way out. He had no idea what he'd gotten himself into.
Jo stood naked by the bed, her mouth open in horror. She tried to speak. To ask how he'd found her. Why he'd found her. Who he was...
He dropped a canvas sack to the floor with a metallic rattle and strode to the man on the bed. He ripped the sheet away and glared at the engorged penis that had just been invading his daughter. "You monster," he said. "How could you? How could you do a thing like that to my little girl?" There was something strange about his voice, his posture, his overall presence that fit far too well with Jo's memories. She knew what nightmare was here to terrorize her now.
Jo's father crouched beside the bed in the same spot she had knelt on only minutes earlier and growled. Not the growl of an angry man, but the growl of an animal. The growl of some low beast filled with a rage it lacks a language to express. Then he howled.
The plaster shook, sifting dust down to the bed, the floor. That howl was loud, sure, but there was something more. Such primal force was carried in that sound that Jo and her John nearly joined it. They trembled, frozen by the raw fury they now beheld. The man on the bed couldn't even bring his eyes into focus on the hand just inches from his naked flesh as it grew longer, grew fur. His eyes were open and directed right at Jo's father as his nails became claws and reached toward him, but he didn't see it - or at least he didn't understand it.
As the claws drew deep gashes across the man's abdomen, as they castrated him, punctured his windpipe, severed major arteries in his arms... he felt pain. But it was a distant pain. Clouded by confusion - by a failure to connect what was happening with reality. He was paying for what he'd done. He was being made to suffer for his penchant for little girls. But he didn't have the capacity for enough suffering to make up for it.
When the man was dead, the father turned to his daughter, blood dripping from his mouth and his claws. His eyes glowing with rage, he took the chains from his bag on the floor and strung her up against the bed frame. The John's blood seeped through the sheets and mattress, pooling on the floor where she sat. She could feel it dripping down her back, caking in her hair.
"You know what I loved most about your mom, you little whore?" he asked, crouching down on all fours and looking up at her with pale yellow eyes. "The way she tasted." He grinned, he mouth seeming larger than normal - his teeth looking longer. "The way her warm flesh slid down my throat. The way...." He growled, caught somewhere between the apparent ecstasy of the memory and the agony of his transformation. "The way her blood flowed thick over my hands." he lifted a hand - a paw now - and looked at it. He lifted it closer to Jo. "The way her skin just opened up and let me in..." He shuddered and shook his head. He really didn't look much like her daddy anymore, but he was still able to strangle human words from his throat.
"Doing this," he gestured with his inhuman arm at the bed and the corpse lying on it, "you'll never be able to satisfy a man the way you can satisfy me right now." He shuddered again and what was left of the man was gone. The beast lunged at her, its claws tearing her midsection. Then it stopped. Jo couldn't see clearly through the gushing tears, nor could she concentrate clearly through the pain, but something was distracting the beast.
***
"The 'Beehive', huh? Well, that makes a little more sense than the 'Bronze', right?" Faith asked herself as she stepped into the little coffee shop. The place wasn't crowded, but there were a few people hanging out, sucking on their drugs of choice: caffeine, nicotine, whatever was in the hand rolled smokes. A little heavy on the 'Goth' crowd, but they all looked friendly enough. Faith, dressed in a tight black tank top under a black leather jacket, black denim jeans and black biker boots might fit in. Even without any gleaming metal protruding from her nose, or her chin or her eyebrow - or her tongue, like the chick who took her order.
The tongue stud must've been new, cause this girl could barely talk. "cah ah geh ewe so'thi?" Faith winced as she noticed how purple the girl's tongue looked. She really oughtta get that looked at.
"Yeah, a large black coffee with a shot of espresso in it." Faith pulled a Chesterfield out of the pack she'd stolen from some guy she fucked back in Cincinnati. He'd only lasted about 10 minutes - she deserved to get something out of the night. She lit it and dragged hard on the unfiltered butt, her lungs filling with smoke. 'Luckily,' she thought, 'I'll never live long enough for the cancer to catch up with me.'
Faith paid the clerk, took her coffee to the darkest open corner booth and poured a shot of rotgut sour mash from her little tin flask into the paper cup. It wasn't bad. Caffeine to bring you up. Alcohol to bring you down. Nicotine to smooth you out... Late night snack of champions.
***
Faith sat on the worn mattress of a cot in her tiny, dark cell in solitary. She'd been in yet another "fight" - if that's what you called lying on the ground as three fellow inmates kicked the shit out of you. Really, it didn't matter where they put her. Faith was in solitary sitting in her regular cell as her roommate beat and raped her. She was in solitary walking the perimeter of the exercise yard. She was in solitary in the cafeteria as she slowly, deliberately swallowed food that wouldn't have had much taste if she'd looked for it. Faith was locked within a mental prison of guilt and hate much stronger than the steel and concrete one surrounding her.
Funny thing about prisons: they can do a lot for some folks. They can wake you up like a cold ammonia shower and make you realize who you've been. They can tear you apart. They can break you. But they can't fix you. No, you gotta do that for yourself.
Faith was broken by the time she turned herself in. Confessing to every damned thing she'd ever done felt good. It was a step in the right direction. Of course, no one who didn't already know the truth believed much of her confession. Her conviction for assault on the nurse in Sunnydale was mitigated by the fact she'd just awoke from a coma and obviously wasn't all there yet. Her conviction for aggravated assault on the guy in the train station was mitigated by the fact that her public defender had brought his lengthy record to light and suggested, despite her claims to the contrary, that she felt she was defending herself. That PD was taking orders from someone other than his client.
The DA didn't even charge her with anything else. No murder. No attempted murder. No robbery. The state wouldn't punish her for what she'd done to Wesley, to Buffy... Hell, to damn near everyone she'd known. They didn't believe it. They couldn't prove it.
She'd have to punish herself. Bathe in self-hatred. Wallow in revulsion. Oh, and the other prisoners would be happy to help with the whole beating herself up thing. They were just fascinated by how quickly she healed. Bruises, cuts, stab wounds, broken bones. Give it a couple days and try again.
The outer door to the solitary ward slid open, grating metal on unlubricated metal. Faith heard footsteps approaching her cell and didn't bother to wonder who it was. She'd find out soon enough.
***
Faith crushed another butt in the overflowing tin ashtray in front of her and gulped the chewy dregs of her coffee. Time to do a little patrolling, she thought, standing to leave. Before she could even step out from behind the table though, stabs of alarm went off in her head. A couple was walking up from the back room, hand in hand, headed for the door. And one of them was a vampire. 'So, they'll come to me now, huh? I think I'm gonna like this town.'
Faith followed them out the door and around the corner. There were a few people sitting on their porches in the residential area right behind the shops on Carson Street in this part of town, but when the couple turned down another side street, the houses were dark. The streets empty. Or so he thought.
The vampire's game face came out and he turned to the girl. She tried to scream, but he shoved his fist in her mouth as something between a punch and a fleshy gag. Her eyes bulged and tears ran from them, she went limp and his teeth sunk into her neck.
Faith charged from the shadows. 'Not one more Goddamned victim tonight,' she thought. 'I'm not going to lose another.' She leapt, covering about 5 feet in the air before her right foot connected with the vamp's neck, literally tearing him away from his snack.
The girl crumpled, clutching her shredded neck and whimpering, writhing in pain and woozy from blood loss.
The vamp's neck was broken from Faith's initial attack, blocking his windpipe so he couldn't even scream as she landed on him. A sharp blow broke his nose. Another punch and she drove her fingers into his left eye, popping it like a grape and digging deeper as he lost consciousness. She stood, straddling him, wondering how long it would take him to recover if she let him. He deserved more pain. He deserved to suffer for what he'd done. She staked him on the street, leaving a pile of dust between her legs.
The girl let out a sob, drawing Faith's attention. Her dyed blond hair was turning pink on the left side as blood continued to flow from her neck. It was a good look for her. "What did you do?" she cried. "He was... We were..."
"You were what? Just going to 'neck' in the dark. Did you notice how that was workin' out?"
"But you - what did you do?"
"Listen little girl. And take a good look at what he did," she said, pulling the girl's hand from her neck - though there was obviously no way for her to see herself.
"There are bad people in this world." She pulled the girl to her feet, ignoring her groans and swaying. "You want to blame me?" She smacked the girl - lightly - across the cheek. "For the fact bad things happen." She held the girl's face in her hands, a bit too tightly. Faith was losing it. "There are bad people out there." She shoved the girl back, nearly knocking her down. "Bad *things*." She slugged her in the gut. "Evil things." She kicked the girl's leg, her knee collapsing sideways. "Darkness you can't imagine." Hysteria rising in her voice. "Darkness your mommy was afraid to tell you about." She kicked the girl, lying on the street. "Darkness that would shatter the peace of your worst fucking nightmare," she screamed.
The girl lay unconscious, bleeding in the street. Thunder rolled in the distance. A storm was headed for town.
AN: More to come.