So I wanted to write something slightly depressing, but you know me, it means almost everything I write and also none of it. Let's only sum it up this way: Alaric will complete his task soon, but hallucinations of Damon are following him around...
Each a monster, part 5: Blankness
Philadelphia.
Alaric absentmindedly thought he had been there before, not for long, only passing through, surely.
Well, it was another big city, with skyscrapers and everything. He may have enjoyed the city, if the circumstances of his being here had been different. But he was here to find a freaking serial killer, who used his cousin's modus operandi as a hitman, and to kill said serial killer the way both of them killed people. He was so not in the mood to be pleased with the view.
If he had been someone else, Alaric would have run away as fast as he could at the simple mention of a serial killer, let alone the part about his family issues and the fact that they had asked him to casually dismember a human being. Truth be told, if he had been himself, though he wouldn't have run away, he certainly wouldn't have accepted the job.
But lately, the hunter hadn't been himself.
Why? was a very interesting question.
Perhaps the fact that every single person he loved always ended up dead in dreadful events was a good enough hint.
Once had been hard enough to deal with.
But in the past week, he had had to live it again, not only a second time, but a third one at that.
Deal with it.
Seriously.
Ric snorted, still sitting in his car, reluctant to get out and go to his motel room.
In fact, he didn't want to do anything. His greatest dream, right now, right here, was to fall asleep and never wake up again. Dying could do, too, but sleeping was something peaceful. And Alaric wasn't sure death would be peaceful.
He had, not long ago, learned that for some people, death wasn't the end.
He wasn't supposed to be one of them, after all, he wasn't a magical being. But he was still a cursed man. So who knew what would happen when he would die? Would he simply disappear? Or would he be trapped, same as a vampire, a triggered werewolf or a witch, in the unnamed purgatory of the supernatural? No one could tell, as long as he was alive, and he wasn't willing to risk an eternity of ghostly existence for the sake of knowing. And what did he really know about this shitty purgatory? Not much, really. Only that he didn't even know if it concerned untriggered werewolves as well, which were the closest beings to his own situation he could think of. And, after all, humans might have had the same afterlife bullshit, only not in the same place.
Alaric really didn't wish for an eternity of brooding.
The only thing he wanted was to die and let it go. Or maybe not. Not being in the first place could have been great too. But now it was too late for that, right? Like, thirty-one years too late.
Whatever, he couldn't.
Not if he didn't know for sure what was awaiting him on the other side of the door of the deceased.
So instead of cutting his own throat open with the dagger he kept in the glove compartment – because he was growing freaking paranoid all over again – Ric got out of his car and walked to his motel room. There, he locked the door, turned on the light, and drew the curtains.
He was pretty sure the bed was begging him to lie down and sleep and forget everything for the night, but he didn't have the time.
Still, he'd have loved to lie down and sleep and most of all to forget about everything.
As if he could.
Alaric glanced to the edge of the bed.
As expected, he was here.
The others had gone away at some point, they had disappeared, vanished into thin air. Even Isobel and Jenna had left, smiling fondly as they looked at him for the last time. They had been pretty nice for hallucinations, once he had gotten used to them. Isobel had been as she had always been before she had left him. The only difference was that she had asked him to look after Elena, if he felt like it. Jenna, well, Jenna's hallucination, had been kind, and asked him to go back for the kids, but only if he felt like he could.
For now, he wasn't sure. Maybe he'd go back to Mystic Falls, but not right now. He needed rest. Blankness, even.
But him, he hadn't left.
The vampire's shadow was still sitting on the edge of the bed.
Damon's hallucination had been sitting there for five days, now. He wasn't saying anything, only staring at him angrily, as if it could change something.
For a while, Alaric had wondered why this hallucination wouldn't wear off as the others had. But well, he was hallucinating, so even if there most likely was an explanation in his subconscious, he wasn't anywhere near close to finding it.
The hunter sat next to the figure of Damon.
No matter how he looked at it, the eyes, blue, ice-blue eyes, were eyes of resentment. The hallucination had always stared at him, with a painful look in its eyes. As if Alaric had let him behind when he shouldn't have. As if the real Damon was waiting for him somewhere, alone.
But Ric knew. He knew Damon was dead.
How could he not be?
Alaric reached out hesitatingly to the figure of a vampire he had once known.
His fingers didn't pass through the hallucination, but even when his arm was outstretched, the figure was still as far away from his hand as before.
The hunter didn't sigh.
He couldn't see the point to.
So he searched for a piece of paper and a pen. In the anonimity of the motel room, he thought about the task that had been given to him.
Mobile Maker's copycat was a clever person, but they had gotten a pattern, to kill thrice in the same city before moving, sometimes to another state, sometimes to another continent. They were either rich enough to travel, or working for an airline or something like that. Maybe they had chosen the pattern to play cat and mouse with the police, the FBI and any other law enforcement agency they'd find in their way.
Since they didn't know exactly what they were looking for, and were surely disturbed with the serial killer's sudden change of habits, the copycat had gotten away with it for now.
But Ric knew what he was looking for, and he also knew which murders were Mobile Maker's and which weren't. He was abnormally good with murders, murdering and murderers. It had taken him four days only to figure out who he was going to kill and dismember this night.
Well, if that wasn't a happy thought.
He still had to check one or two things, but it was nothing he couldn't verify with a simple talk with his favorite suspect – a man, as most serial killers were.
And if he was wrong, he'd only have to try again. The informations he had gathered, looking from far away at the two first crime scenes of the cycle, tailing the man, everything had being duly noted and verified, so if there was an error, it was due to a flaw in his reasoning.
The answer was somewhere there, on this sheet of paper he used to put in writing once again the hints and proofs. It was most likely to be the name he had circled in red, but if it wasn't, then it was something else, on this piece of paper.
Alaric closed his eyes, trying to remember the face of the man. Immediately, grey eyes and a wry smile showed up in his mind. No need for much effort, eh?
The killer wasn't special or anything. He looked quite plain. That was actually an advantage in the field of murdering, because he wasn't striking in any way.
That'd make Alaric wonder, how were the Saltzmans, even the ugly ones, even the beautiful and handsome ones, always able to disappear into the background as easily as any plain man, but well. Ric was a Saltzman. He knew how to do it instinctively, and had had years of training, always willing to be anyone, but not a Saltzman.
He didn't question his abilities.
Nor did he question his instincts.
They were what they were. Ruthless killers, the Great Assassins.
The man had hidden it well, when they were talking, sooner in the afternoon, about how the coffee in this place was great and all. But he had hidden too much, it was obvious to anyone in the field, and would have certainly seemed suspicious to a detective.
You couln't see who he really was in his eyes.
And while it concealed what should never be seen in the eyes of any man, the glint of hatred, the glow of madness, the gleam of cruelty, it also concealed everything else, and left to see only the falsity on a blank front.
Many men masked their feelings. This was old news.
But when you knew what it was like to be empty in the inside, or at least not complete, as only a Saltzman could know, the facade was nothing. Some killers were able to tell their own kind apart. Everyone in Alaric's family could do as much.
The hunter would check anyway. He wasn't feeling like dismembering and displaying a corpse only to find out later that he'd have to do it again. As much as he didn't mind the killing, it didn't mean he liked to do it. And cleaning the blood afterwards was always a hassle.
And, well, even if he didn't have real feelings about that, even if he didn't feel it was wrong to kill innocent people, he still knew it was wrong, in a logical,-cold,-but-still-better-than-nothing, way. And there was also the fact that he didn't feel good about depriving a family of a family member. That he felt wrong about stealing the future of a man.
He lacked a part of his soul, not a whole soul.
Damon's hallucination was there, glaring at him from afar, to remind him of that incomplete soul.
He struck a match and watched the piece of paper, with his notes on it, as it became ashes.
Ric set the alarm, then turned off the light.
He needed to sleep, not because he was tired, not because he had an appointment with a serial killer at eleven in the evening, not because he was going to kill someone in less than five hours.
He needed to sleep, because he was disgusted with life, and yet couldn't choose to die without risking to end up stuck as a ghost for all eternity.
Slumber was a good medicine to get rid of thoughts.
Silence.
Dreams, perhaps.
Nightmares, certainly.
But nothing he would remember once awake.
Alaric wasn't the kind of man who remembered his dreams.
No, the hunter was the sort of man who could only rest by sleeping, even if being asleep might have been worst than being awake.
Who knew, after all, what his dreams were made of?
What were the dream of a man, who could kill on instinct, and never feel anything about it?
No one knew. He himself didn't know. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe it was for the worst. But he'd have wished he could be put to sleep forever, it that meant he wouldn't have to worry anymore.
Alaric closed his eyes.
He was unnaturally stiff on the bed, not even under the sheets, but he couldn't bring himself to unwind. Not after everything that had happened, the deaths, the betrayals, the sacrifices.
He couldn't bring himself to unwind, even as he drifted into sleep.
Ric didn't see the figure of Damon vanishing next to him, since it happened at the exact moment his eyes were shut with tiredness.
The vampire's shadow, as the hunter called it sometimes, had no reason to exist anymore.
After all, it was nothing more than an image of Alaric's mind.
It didn't really exist.
Hours later, not long before Ric would be awakened by the ringtone of his alarm, the sound of a car stopping was heard outside of the motel.
It wasn't unusual per se, it was a motel, after all.
What was unusual was the stricking likeness between the hallucination that had disappeared from the hunter's mind as he had fallen asleep, and the man who got out of the blue Camaro. He had the same raven hair, the same incredible eyes, the same handsomeness.
