Candy Mulder...The Vampire Slayer? (3/4)
"There were ten of them, and they were all HUGE! One of them was four times bigger than me." I spread my arms out to illustrate my point. "And me, without any weapons. All that practice with a stake and mallet - all for nought."
I was perched on a table, relating the story of my first official slaying to my watcher, Thomas Winford. Winford was paging through one of his thick, dusty volumes, barely listening, but I was so excited, I had to tell someone.
It was seven at night, and I had just paged my mother at Sunnydale General, telling her where I was. My father was with her, asking her opinion on a article on a stigmatic he had found in the morning newspaper. My father may teach paranormal psychology at UCLA, but that does nothing to explain his obsession with the strange and downright weird. My mother claims he's been a little "out there" from the first day she met him. They worked together for years, investigating unsolved cases, with my mother rationalizing my father's craziness all the way.
Well, that night, I was the one who was "out there". I was on a weird kind of high from slaying my first batch of vampires. It was a morbid joy, and I couldn't really explain it. Fortunately, I didn't have to. My parents had no idea that I, their teenaged daughter, Samara Candace Mulder, was the one girl in the world strong enough to slay the worst vampires of all - those on the Hellmouth. My dad believed in vampires, but I don't think he'd go for my being the slayer, so he was in the dark about it. And my watcher? Well, my watcher, my scholar/trainer, was looking kind of worried, which just killed the moment.
"Candy," he began slowly. "...exactly how many vampires did you say there were?"
"Ten."
Winford's eyebrows knitted. In the three months I had known him, eyebrow-knitting had come to denote displeasure. "Okay, so maybe less." I admitted, still refusing to stand down. Let me have my glory.
"How many?"
"Less than ten." I offered.
"How many, Candy?"
His eyebrows were practically fused into one long caterpillar. I knew when I was had. "Four," I finally relented. "Four, okay? The drummer, the keyboardist, the guitarist and the lead singer."
I counted the number off on my fingers as Winford got up and began to pace. "And you say the one that got away had orange-spiked hair?"
"Horn melon material," I clarified. "That's what I said."
He stopped pacing and came back to the table. He flipped open the volume to a blurred page of writing and illustration. "Did he look like that?" Winford jabbed the page with his forefinger.
I leaned forward and examined the scribble. "Um...yeah."
Winford gave an audible sigh, under which I heard a swear word, although with his unidetifiable accent, it was hard to make out. "Those four," he continued jabbing at the page. "are known...correct me, *were* known, as the 'Fearsome Quartet.'"
I cocked my head. "Sounds like a better name than 'Sanguis-Bound'." Which was the name the wily vamps had used when they were posing as a local rock band playing at the Bronze, Sunnydale's hang-out joint.
"So, okay, I slayed some real legends. So what? Do I win a trip to Hawaii or something?" I joked.
Winford's eyebrows knitted. "Maybe more along the lines of Hoboken, huh?" I said, more subdued this time.
"Try the gates of Hell." Winford informed me. He turned the page to a full-color drawing of a really evil-looking vamp with all sorts of majorly bad symbols painted in red on his face and neck. I spotted anarchy and a pentagram. Not good.
"This is Raphael." he said.
"The teenage mutant ninja turtle?" I tried. Winford almost snorted.
Winford began to lecture. "He's almost one-hundred and seventy-four years old. One of the oldest living vampires on record. And one of the evilest." Winford began to pace again as he spoke. "He disappeared from the watcher diaries during the nineteen-sixties, and most assumed he was dead. He fought one slayer in the early nineteen-hundreds, and killed her."
I bit my lip. This Raphael guy didn't sound good. "It was a rather gruesome death, as well. However, he fought a second slayer in the sixties, about the time he disappeared. The slayer vanished as well, but most assumed they had killed each other."
"Where are you getting at with this?"
Winford stopped his pacing. "Raphael amassed many loyal followers, and he was a very good master. He took care of his people." Winford came back to the book and turned it back to the Silly Four. "The Fearsome Quartet were his men."
I didn't like the direction this conversation was going. The last bubble of happiness over my first successful slaying popped. "If the Fearsome Quartet were bold enough to hold an entire nightclub hostage, it seems that Raphael is not dead. So in all likelihood, he will come after you. And, by his record, he is sure to kill you."
Major problem. I slowly slid off the table. I suddenly wanted to go back three months and be the miserable, but ignorant, Candy Mulder whose biggest concern was fitting in and making California friends. Now, not only did I literally have the fate of the world in my hands, but I was most probably going to die. Horribly.
I looked at the drawing of Raphael again. He seemed to be leering at me. "Should I skip town or something?" I asked. I felt a chill go down my spine at the thought of this guy coming after me. I wanted my mommy.
Winford shook his head. "He'll hunt you out, and that will make it all the more fun for him. He enjoys torturing those he kills. I'm quite sure that the slayer from the nineteen-sixties met with a particularly awful fate."
"This isn't doing much to assure me, Winford." I complained.
Winford shook his head even more violently. "There's nothing to do but take the utmost care. Watch your back. I think it's safe to say that he will act swiftly, try to catch you off guard. That seems to be his modus operandi. He snatched the first slayer as she was slaying one of his men and wasn't looking."
I nodded to show that I understood. I found my purse and prepared to leave. "Candy," Winford called just as I was opening the door. "I know you're worried, but don't be quite so much. You *are* the best slayer in the world, or else you wouldn't be here. Congratulations on a job well done."
Smiling, I saluted him and went home, praying a vampire wasn't waiting to twist my thumbs loose.
I managed to get home in one piece, but from the moment I approached the porch, I knew something was wrong. The door was ajar and all the lights were on. My mother, the conservationist, would have never allowed it, and my father, the ever-paranoid, wouldn't have stood for the door being open for more than a second. I raced up the walk and burst in.
"Mom?" I yelled. I ran up the stairs to the second floor. "Dad?"
My parents' room was dark, so I flipped on the light. Nothing was out of order, the bed neatly made, my mother's hospital corners intact, my father's copy of the latest JFK conspiracy theory on the nightstand with his neon-colored bookmark in place. I wondered briefly why the FBI had ever admitted my father as I left to explore the rest of the floor. My own room, which was adjacent to theirs, was also in perfect order. I sprinted back downstairs, calling my parents. I was becoming more and more frantic.
I went into the kitchen, expecting them to be cooking dinner, my father joking that the spaghetti looked like the insides of a body my mother once autopsied. But the kitchen was empty and silent, save for the banging of the screen door.
I walked towards the sound, then saw that the back door had been forced open. I wheeled around, and there it was. Stuck with a knife into one of the cabinet doors was a note reading, "If you want to see your parents alive, Slayer, come to the Bronze tonight. Raphael."
The note was written in blood. I had no idea's who, but I prayed that it wasn't one of my parent's. I ripped the note from the cabinet and left through the back door. I had to get to Winford. I needed his help. Any lingering joy at my first slaying was completely erased. The only thought left in my mind was how I was going to kill this Raphael. This guy had gotten personal. He'd gotten my folks.
He was dead meat.
