Bad Day
Pouring rain brought the city to a crawl and sent all the rats scurrying for higher ground. I stared out my window, trapped inside those four walls. Never before had I felt as trapped; not even in the belly of the Initiative surrounded by walls of transparent lightning and terrified demons waiting for involuntary lobotomies. The city was closing in on me. It knew what I was, an abomination, and I could feel its eyes staring at me every time I crawled out of my woolen cocoon on the bed.
Despair was seeping through the cracks, slithering across the floor and biting its way up my tingling legs. Wrapping its tentacles around me, determined to drag me into Hell kicking and screaming. My soul was in rebellion. Why had I thought I could be something? Why had I wanted a life? I didn't deserve a life. I didn't deserve to walk the earth among the creatures of nature or god or cosmic chance. Everything around me was pure and bright, bathed with dirty diamond rain. My hands tightened on the windowsill, cracking the wood and shooting splinters into my palms. The physical pain was soothing in a world of mental anguish. There was nothing I could take; no pill, no drug, no amount of alcohol would dull the cacophony of voices in my head.
Hands clawed and tore at my sanity. Dying voices screamed and begged in words long forgotten but never lost. Dru was dancing with the stars. If I was going mad, would they talk to me as well? How much of her sight had been insanity and how much had been her gift? Where did her madness end and her demon begin? Did becoming a vampire make her worse or had Angelus done all the damage there was to do in that pretty head of hers? I hated her. Hated with such passion and vengeance that it surprised me. I hated her for finding me in that alleyway decades past. I hated Angel for siring her. I hated Darla for choosing Angel. The hate kept going on up the line, past names and faces I couldn't even begin to know. All the way back to the first vampire who had ever walked this earth as a monster, hiding from the light of day and all that was blessed.
My wealth is in my head, my heart. That's what Dru had told me. My strengths were my passion, my fire. I had embraced all that had come my way. I had never backed down from a fight in a hundred years. Not until Sunnydale. Not until my identity, my very reason for being, had been stripped from me with the callousness of the self-righteous. I was nothing more than a lab rat. No feelings, no emotions. I was a demon. Demons can't love. Had I ever loved? Those memories only fueled my anger, beating back the clinging tendrils of despair with primal rage.
I had to get out of the cage. Out the window, down the unsteady steps. Feet hitting the pavement, spraying water over my boots and calves. I kept moving, running as fast and hard as I could. Dark clouds rolled over each other, twisting and writhing as they spit down rain furiously. I didn't care that they were the only thing between me and a sun who hated me and all my kind. All that mattered was the city racing by me. The speed. I had to keep running.
Desperately I wished for a working heart and blood flowing through my veins, longing to feel it pounding inside my chest, blood burning through my limbs as I pushed myself further and faster. I needed the pain of air searing my lungs and human muscles trembling with exertion. Slipping on slick asphalt, I fell, rolled, and climbed to my feet to keep running. A gash on my thigh was bleeding and the heels of my palms had been scraped raw from crashing to the ground.
I was running from my demons. I was running from my past. I was running from everything I had ever been and everything I would never be. I would never be a lover, husband, father, grandfather. It was all gone, beyond my reach. The price of strength and immortality. There would never be anything to tie me to this world. I would never belong. I would never be forgiven. I could never atone.
South to Canal Street. I dodged startled and angry motorists as I kept going, still hoping that I could somehow leave everything behind me if I just ran fast enough. Northwest. Into the driving rain that had already soaked my clothes and body completely. Grass felt like ice beneath my feet when I vaulted a concrete wall, scrabbling to the top and falling to the damp, spongy ground on the other side. Weather stained walls that had once gleamed with white stone were now covered with mineral deposits and graffiti. The earth had begun its reclamation of the old cemetery, moving in an army of plants, lichens, and other life forms capable of dragging the monuments to the dead back into the dirt they had come from.
I was shivering without being cold. One hand stretched out to trail along the dripping stone as I wandered through the cemetery. Night was coming. The sky overhead still thundered down sheets of rain. It poured down my face in rivers, washing away the tears burning my eyes. Death was on my heels. It was all around me. Everywhere I looked there was death. In my teeth, in my throat. My head and my heart were filled with death. Was that what Dru had meant? That my value came because I was somehow destined to be a killer. A vicious creature who raped, maimed, murdered his way across continents with a smirk and a song in his heart. Was that all I was meant to be?
The soul screamed out in defiance. Against fate, against what or who was counting the threads, cutting the strings. The man behind the curtain. I wanted a second chance. I needed a second chance.
I stumbled, leaning against a small iron fence surrounding a grave. It swayed against my weight, fighting to keep its grip on the soft soil. I was on my knees, face turned toward the clouds with my eyes closed. Letting the tears wash away. There was nothing left for me. No dreams. No love. No hope of something better than what I was. Forever damned.
"Please." I choked against the rain, feeling it slip past my mouth and trickle down my throat. "Please. Forgive me." I was screaming into the storm, wind whipping my words away into the darkening night. Begging the souls around me, the souls I left behind when I ripped them from their bodies. Hundreds. Thousands of souls surrounding me, staring down with accusing eyes at their murderer. Behind them, their families and those they left behind. Children I had orphaned. Women I had widowed. Men who had lost wives, mothers, daughters to my fists, my fangs.
"Forgive me." There was nothing left in me but a whimper as I collapsed onto the ground, trembling and squeezing my eyes shut tight against the battalion of victims come to seek their revenge. Every dead cell, every drop of stagnant blood in my body ached with the weight of my guilt and my shame. I was dead. I have never felt more dead that I did lying there on the rain soaked grass surrounded by tombs. There was life all around me, twisting away as it felt the darkness in me. I was made, shaped, sculpted out of death itself. My hands, my face, every part of me was just a piece of pain and hell molded into a facade of humanity. Reduced to senseless muttering of the same two words over and over again, I stayed there, unable to move long after the rain had continued its journey down the coast.
I could smell the night around me. Hear the traffic beyond the walls and the scurrying of nocturnal creatures. Bats darted noiselessly through the humid air, catching the insects that sustained them. I should feel at home with them but I don't. I'm not a creature of the night anymore. I'm nothing. Not a monster, not a man. Nothing.
It was not lost to me that I was lying in one of the many cemeteries in New Orleans crying over my crimes as a vampire. Some bird had written a slough of books about vampires in this very city. I hadn't read them but I had heard that one of her fictional vampires regretted taking lives. He must have had a soul. I knew the books were rubbish. Not a lick of truth in the pages. Their only use was to keep the gullible population lax and convinced that vampires were secretly a noble race worthy of respect. I had a few memories of a group of kids playing at being vampires years ago in Sunnydale. Damn writers giving them rotten ideas.
Yet here I was. Lying in a puddle of grass and mud, sobbing like a child because of the blood I had shed. I was fulfilling the fantasy. It was sickening enough to get me back to my knees, hands resting once more against the iron fence. I had no more tears to cry and no more heart to break.
"H-hello?" The soft female voice catches me by surprise and I see a girl standing a few feet away, flashlight in hand and dressed in cute little red galoshes with a matching hat. Looks like a bloody postcard standing there in the moonlight.
"Go away." I pull myself to my feet and take in my surroundings. The night is getting more Anne Rice by the minute. Bloody Hell.
"Are y-you al-alright?" Her stammer reminds me of Tara and I soften for a moment. She's not coming any closer and I can't see any stakes. Never can be too careful with the cute little girls. The dumb blonde in the alley might turn out be the goddamn Slayer and there goes the landscaping.
"You shouldn't be out here alone." I try to give her a stern look. Well, I was aiming for intimidating but I don't have the stomach for it.
"Y-you were c-crying."
"Yeah." I'm watching her more warily now. How long had she been standing there? Droplets of water were dripping from the shiny red hat on her head and meant that she'd been out in the rain. It had stopped almost an hour ago. "What of it?"
"Y-you're a v-vampire." She didn't sound surprised and I was officially spooked by the little girl in the red galoshes. When did little girls dressed like the Paddington bear ever turn out not evil anyway? It had to be one of those unwritten laws. Right up there with vampires who fall in love with Slayers will inevitably get their fool hearts broken, soul or no.
"Who are you?" I stalk toward her, trying once more at the intimidation factor. She doesn't budge, doesn't even blink a pretty little eyelash. "What's going on?" That tremor in my voice is anger not unease.
"I c-can h-help you."
"Lovely. How's that?"
"The ch-chip."
That deserves a very loud snort and a laugh. "Right. Let me guess. You're not really a little girl at all. Probably some all powerful witch or demon who just plays dress up with oversized Barbie clothes. And you've come to offer me a chipectomy in return for a small favor that I won't want to do. Blood of a virgin or something else out of the stone age. Did I miss anything?" There was still no change in her inscrutable pre-teen face.
Finally she smiled. "No. That is concise." No more stammering. Guess the witch was done playing the lost lamb.
"Get on with it, then. Give me the vision quest speech or your demands or what have you." I'm paying more attention to wringing the water out of my T-shirt and jeans than the illusion in front of me.
"One condition."
"Just one? Why not a few? You know I'm good for it or you wouldn't have come. Good ol' Lurky had a whole line up."
"One death."
That stopped me for a bit and I noticed that the girl's eyes were dark in the night. Two empty holes would have had more color to them. Definitely evil. "Demon?"
"Human."
"Knew I wouldn't like it." I wince, once again battling the voices in my head. "What's the poor sod done?"
"Betrayed us."
"Us? More than one of you in there?" That would make anyone nervous. Always hated talking to crazies. Never know what they're gonna do. "I'm not saying I'll do it. Just tell me 'bout it and let me make up my mind."
"You must decide now."
That's never good. Commitment before details ruins more lives regardless of species than anything else I can think of there in the cemetery. Again, I wonder what kind of creature sought me out in the middle of the night. More strange since I had just started looking into ways to get the damn thing out of my head. Word travels fast in the underground. If I said yes, the brat would ask me to eat some old lady like Mother Teresa or another wonderful person destined for sainthood. If I said no, I might never get the chunk of silicon out of my brain and I'd never be free to live my own life. Would I ever be free?
She was still staring at me with those empty eyes and I decided to save the existentialism for when I was back in my quiet, one room flat with a glass of blood liberally mixed with vodka.
"Fine." I try to sound casual and it comes out more like a dying frog. "I'll do the job. Take the bleedin' thing out."
"Very well. You must fulfill your end of the bargain. If you do not you will suffer eternal torment."
"That's original. Why not boils and sores?" More bravado. What is it with these evil types and their eternal torment gig? As if my demon cares a whit for torture. Hell, the combination of Dru and a branding iron ought to erase that misconception.
Halfway through my blast from the past the girl reached out and the chip fired. Maybe it was one last jolt for old times sake. Maybe it was afraid of the evil behind that sweet Madeleine face. Whatever the reason, I was back on the ground in a puddle of water and grass, screaming and clutching at my head. Just when I thought it would never end, the pain disappeared and I could feel it. I could feel the spot where the chip had been. I could tell it was gone. Gone. I almost laughed. I was free.
There wasn't a smile on the girl's face when I pushed up off of the ground, feeling better than I had in weeks. A few bar fights with my name on them and I'd be right as rain. I sobered for a moment when I realized that I had just agreed to kill again. It had to be worth it. What was one more face in the sea of people chanting for my head?
"Who do I kill?" I didn't feel like chatting with a demonic entity in a dark graveyard in New Orleans. There were stranger things than vampires in this city.
"The Slayer."
Damn. Always the bloody catch. Why didn't I ever read the fine print? Why the bloody hell did I always fall for these too good to be true offers? My mouth was still flopping open like a washed up trout. "What did Buffy do?"
"Not Buffy. The Slayer." The girl repeated, looking at me with a strangely annoyed expression.
"Faith." I whispered, remembering the rogue Slayer hell-bent on ruining Buffy's life a few years back. It wasn't good but it was better than Buffy. Although the blond would most definitely run me through with the nearest pointy wooden thing if I did it. Not if. I had no choice now. The Slayer of Slayers would be adding another notch to his tally.
"Kill her." The little girl began to fade away, only her bottomless eyes remaining like a twisted tribute to the Cheshire Cat.
I sighed and headed out of the cemetery. Last I had heard, the bird was in jail and would be for a few more years. The evil little monster hadn't said when I had to kill her. Just that I had to. It could wait. I was sure that I'd be blessed with another visit if I waited too long.
Despite the guilt doing a pre-homicidal workout in my soul, I left the graveyard with a lighter heart and a lighter head. All in all, things were looking up for me. I was a free man. The price of my freedom was the life of some crazy bitch who'd whacked a few people in her day. Maybe if I thought about it long enough I'd be able to twist it into some sort of postponed justice. Maybe not. Either way didn't really matter to me. I'd burn that bridge when I came to it.