SLAYER, SLEW, SLAIN
By Niels van Eekelen
TelltaleProd@Hotmail.com
www.TelltaleProductions.tk
"Faith!" Maria yelled at the top of her lungs. I could still barely hear her over the noise.
"What?" I called back.
"Turn down that lousy excuse for music!" Reluctantly, I reached out at the radio on the nightstand and cranked down the volume a few notches. Then I listened for a moment, noticed that it didn't make much difference, and lowered the volume a few notches more.
It was two weeks after we'd burned the vampire called Mordred to a cinder. Much to my chagrin, my Watcher and I had returned to my hometown of Boston, and were planning to stay. Maria insisted that I should go see how my parents were doing. Personally, I was worried I'd run into them each time I went outside, no matter how large the city was. My parents seemed to be part of some other life, and I really preferred the one I had then.
It was amazing how hard it had been to find a place to stay. In my memory, Boston was a place that wasn't exactly worth visiting, so I'd half expected every other place in town to be empty. Not so. The opposite was true. Added to that was the fact that Maria had 'fessed up that a lot of the money we'd been spending in the last couple of months had come from private funds she had inherited from some relative, and not from the Watcher Council, as I'd thought. Now that money was running low, and instead of being nice for once and jumping in--it wasn't as if Maria and I hadn't both given up pretty much any chance at a regular job to do whatever they wanted--the Council decided we should make do with the little funds they had provided us with all along.
Maria and I had ended up in what weas practically the only affordable appartment we had been able to find in the entire city. It was small enough to have only one bedroom--though, fortunately, it fitted two beds. It was that room that Maria entered, and I hastily pulled in my legs under me when she dumped the groceries on my bed.
"Only you could put rat's drool in the same bag as the pasta sauce. Gross," I muttered, sitting cross-legged.
"They call it Saliva of Rat at the magic shop," Maria corrected me absently. "And the bottle is sealed tight. Look," she added, gathering a few things in her arms, "with these, we'll be able to ban that succubus from earth, and it'll never seduce another man and take him to Hell."
I shrugged. "I still don't see the point, M" I told her.
"Funny," Maria commented dryly. "I'm going to do the banishing spell right now." I opened a bag of crisps and watched half-interestedly as my Watcher mixed the ingredients she'd bought with the slime I'd had the decided unpleasure of collecting the night before. I think I've mentioned it before, but I kinda suck with the incantation stuff. Give me a clean fight--or even better, a dirty fight-- over hocus-pocus mysticism any day. Maria took a deep breath, and started--
"And that were the Red Hot Chili Peppers!" the radio interrupted loudly. "Coming up is Korn, but first: the news!" I couldn't help but laugh at the miffed expression on Maria's face.
"Could you," Maria growled, "please turn that infernal thing off?"
"Sure, sure," I said, still laughing. I reached out for the radio.
"In local news, the Boston PD still has not arrested any suspects in the case of the Mall Massacre."
Maria's hand suddenly grabbed my arm, with my fingers inches from the on/off-switch. "Hold on," she said. "This stinks of demons."
"Late last night, after closing time, twenty-three stragglers and shop-owners in Providence Mall fell victim to a series of gruesome murders, the details of which the police has still not disclosed. Meanwhile, temperatures keep on rising across the country, and the Boston area will hold at 115 degrees over the weekend. This is Boston Voice FM."
While the opening chords of 'Freak on a Leash' played, Maria and I looked at each other. Twenty-three dead. That was something major, and it was surprising we hadn't heard of it sooner. "You do your spell," I told her. "I'll go check for bite-marks." Maria nodded, and I hopped off the bed, put my shoes on and was out of the door.
The mall was still closed off to the public officially, but like any city in the civilised world, Boston had too few cops for too many crimes. It was a piece of cake to sneak past the few guarding the place.
There were about a dozen of those white-line figures on the ground in the food court, which was near the main entrance, but the bodies had been removed. From the shape of the lines I judged that either the artist was very bad, or something totally disgusting had happened to these people, either just before or after they died. I went upstairs to check out the clothes section. It was eery. I mean, heck, the sun hadn't even set yet, but I knew this place. It was just a twenty-minutes' walk from where I'd lived my entire previous life--before being chosen yadda yadda.
I didn't really like thinking about my old life in the first place, and to see my relatively normal and pathetic life mixed with my weird and adventurous life made it feel as if one of the two was just a dream. I did not want to wake up and found out which was the real one, 'cause if it was my dream, chances were that it was a weird one.
The corpses in the clothes section were still there, five of them. "Yech," I told them. They didn't reply. Not even those whose jaws were still attached to their heads. Two of the bodies were practically intact; there were only the bite-marks on their necks. They were definitively vampire kills, and this vamp was clean and methodical. Not a drop of blood had been spilled. The remaining three were a different story. They certainly had the bite-marks--enough of them to make them pretty hard to miss. But it was obvious that they had not been snacked on by the same vampire as the others. The one who had done this was the ritualistic kind of vampire, as well as much more of an animal. Their jaws had been ripped off, and when I took a closer look, I found that their tongues were missing. Maybe someone's idea of a delicacy. "Talk about sick and twisted," I muttered. What really bothered me, though, were the claw-marks. There were puncture wounds placed randomly over the bodies. It didn't seem to me that the victims had put up much of a struggle--it was more like mice that had been played with by a particularly nasty cat.
I found a payphone and called to tell Maria everything. The phone had a nice clear view of the dead, so I had no trouble describing it all. I think Maria found hearing about it more gross than seeing it, 'cause she sounded a bit sick when she told me to stop. "I'm gonna hang out here for a while," I told my Watcher finally. "If this is some non-intelligent beast, there's a good chance it'll come back tonight."
"All right," she replied. "Just be careful."
I chuckled. "Who? Me?"
"I mean it, Faith. Not that I do not normally want you to keep yourself unharmed, of course, but I want you to look your best when Mr Duke arrives tomorrow."
"Don't sweat it, M. I didn't forget." Actually, I had, but now I remembered. This guy Duke was some sort of big noise from the Watchers' Council over in England who was coming to visit to see if Maria was Watching me correctly, and didn't secretly keep one eye closed or anything. As a personal favour to Maria, I had promised to at least try not to insult him, no matter how stiff he was.
I hung up the phone and made myself comfortable while I waited for the sun to go down. That lazy, shiny bastard certainly seemed to take its time to travel that last little bit to the horizon. I figured that I might as well make use of the fact that I was in a mall, and helped myself to some pretzels. I wondered if, since it was a separate stand in the clothes section, the pretzel place was still part of the food court, which was downstairs.
While I was immersing myself in that filosophical question, the sun had finally slipped away. It was only minutes until my standing guard over the mall delivered results. But it wasn't the animalistic one that returned, as I'd thought. No, he was cold, cruel and sadistic, as I would learn, but not subject to animalistic rages.
"Credit card, credit card," the man muttered. I wouldn't have been able to hear what he was saying were it not for my Slayer-enhanced senses. "Come on, I know I dropped you here somewhere. Come to poppa, li'l credit card." He was a black man in an extremely chic suit, for as far as I knew anything about that kinda thing. For a moment, I considered that he might be of the living, and just hadn't been able to wait for the police the let the mall open again before he could find his credit card, but when I concentrated, I could sense his vampishness.
I stepped out into the open, onto the ledge of the balcony a floor above him. "You really should be more careful with your stuff," I said. "There's criminals everywhere, these days. You should know that."
the vamp looked up at my and smiled, happily surprised. "My, my, my, what a service. Dinner is served, and I didn't even have to ask."
"Oh, yeah?" I asked. "Bite on this, you blood-suckin' bastard!" And I jumped down, stake forward, ready to slay.
Our fight was brief. He was better than I expected--though certainly not so good that I wouldn't have taken him out eventually.
"I've never eaten a person who fought back--or at least not effectively," the vamp commented wheb we took a short breather.
"Well," I told him in between heavy breaths, "then you've never met a Slayer before."
That raised Trick's eyebrows. "A Slayer? Here? Extraordinary! The boss will love hearing that."
"You have a boss?" I questioned doubtfully.
"I'll take you to meet him. After I beat you into a bloody pulp, of course."
"How 'bout I just torture his address out of you?" I countered. We'd been circling each other, and once again I charged the vampire. I dived into his blind spot, suckerpunched him, and quickly mowed his legs out from under him. I would've nailed the S.o.B. then--in fact, I had my stake raised in the air and was ready to plunge it down into the vampire's chest--if not for the Boston PD. The coppers standing guard around the mall, which I'd earlier sneaked around, must have heard the noise from the fight and taken the hint. They came in, flashlights shining and shouting at us to put our hands on our heads or to identify ourselves.
I looked up reflexively, and was blinded for a moment when a flashlight shone straight into my eyes. Trick needed no more. He twisted somehow, and suddenly, instead of sitting on top of him, I was lying on the cold floor. I lashed out with the stake I was still holding, but Trick wasn't pressing his attack--he was running off.
As the police closed on me, I considered my options. If I ran, the cops might try to shoot me--something that was happening to me way to often recently. Then again, it would cause major trouble if Maria had to try and bail me out from the police station again--especially with the Watcher bigwig that was coming.
So I ran.
Story written by Niels van Eekelen. © Copyright 2004 Telltale Productions.
In a perfect world, I would own the series 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and 'Angel'. Alas, it is not, and I bow my head to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. Ah, well. It's probably for the best, me not having a contract to put the show on the air and all.
A special thanks to Paul Leone and Teresa Owens, from whose story 'The Deliverer' I nicked the name of Faith's Watcher, though not the character.