Jared’s arm itched; the scratches were healing faster than he’d expected, but the healing was itchy as hell. He looked around the dingey hotel room. He was lying on the bed, and just across the room, Dani slept on the couch. The wallpaper was peeling in places and there was a massive rip in the curtain. It still worked well enough to hide that they were there, at least.
He wanted to rub at the scratches, to make the itching lessen somehow. Fucking scabs, how can I make this less awful?
“Those are recent,” the Inquisitor’s voice crept into Jared’s mind out of nowhere. He froze, a hand hiding the scratches as if the Inquisitor were in the room with him, studying the scabbed grooves.
It won’t happen again. She caught me by surprise…
“Scratches imply resistance. Resistance implies hesitation. Hesitation implies attachment.” I
Attachment? Jared’s eyes drifted over to Dani and his gut clenched. Don’t think about her…
“Think about who?” the Inquisitor asked.
Jared’s mind was a hurricane as he tried not to focus on Dani. On anyone else who could fit the bill. Perhaps … Ellie . He clung to her name like a lifeline. Memories of her began to flood him, as if just thinking her name had opened a giant file in his brain.
He had a memory of her stepping in front of his mother when she was in a rage, taking the brunt of the woman’s fists and venomous words. Of Ellie pulling him away, nails digging into his arm as she dragged him out. She was the only one who looked out for me growing up.
For a moment, the scratches felt more like a reminder than a failure. Dani shifted on the couch, a small noise escaping her as she got comfortable once more. He watched her sleep as his mind drifted from Ellie to her. She’d been with him nearly since the start. Well, since the start of what he could remember. They’d both been under Nikola’s compulsion for weeks as he prepared his plan, and those times were fuzzy. Just hunger, a constant thirst that wouldn’t go away.
When they’d found each other in that alley at Pike Place, he’d felt an almost immediate connection. They’d bonded over these past several weeks. She was the only one he knew who could truly understand the horror of what all had happened to them.
Jared’s mind latched onto something suddenly: Dani’s mercy. The Inquisitor said that mercy was one of the weaknesses that a vampire must overcome. If he ever decided that she was a problem… he’d eliminate her. No hesitation.
“Compassion is a subtle infection. A sword should not need permission to fall. Interference is rarely malicious. It is usually affectionate. But attachment narrows judgment. It is natural to preserve what comforts us, but the trial becomes complicated when something is allowed to matter.”
A pause, as if the Inquisitor’s attention shifted back to the arm. “Someone challenged your discipline. Resistance leaves marks when control is incomplete. You would not allow interference, of course.”
Of course not. But his mind drifted to Dani again. She was good, kind. She was like Ellie, someone who had his back and—
“Kindness is often mistaken for virtue. It is usually avoidance. Compassion has ended more crusades than any enemy.”
What do you need me to do? Jared tried not to shake, clenching his fists and his jaw and willing himself to be still. He was stressed; the Inquisitor hadn’t mentioned her outright, but he definitely had Dani on his radar now.
The silence lingered longer than usual, and Jared felt his palms grow clammy as they gripped the sheet. The Inquisitor was thinking, evaluating. When he spoke again, his tone was even calmer. More deliberate.
“Judgment does not require presence.”
Jared thought about the words for a moment as the Inquisitor paused, then continued.
“Only witness.”
He then began to list names. Each one was spoken slowly and clearly, like a formal charge in a courtroom. He paused between each name, giving every defendant weight.
“Thomas Garvey. Patina Haywood. Vinny D’Angelo. Corrine White.”
Jared hadn’t recognized any of the names. Like the people he’d killed before, they were strangers to him. All he knew was that they were also vampires because none of them had had heartbeats.
He’d noticed something unsettling as the Inquisitor had listed the names. He never hesitated. Never searched for a name. Each one had been delivered with quiet certainty. The voice in Jared’s head sounded less like someone remembering and more like someone reading a verdict.
The Inquisitor continued on calmly, saying, “These abandoned discipline after the incident at the Sirens of Spring.” There was no anger in his voice. Just quiet judgment. The statement was not an accusation, but a fact. “You will act as the witness.”
Jared understood the implication: these vampires must be found, must answer for what they did. The Inquisitor hadn’t said kill, but he didn’t need to. The meaning was clear.
Without emotion, the Inquisitor said, “We’ll begin with the first.”
No urgency. Only inevitability.
❖ 🩸 ❖
Thomas stood just ahead, hood pulled up against the rain. He was waiting at the crosswalk, an otherwise lone man on the corner. His hands were shoved in his pockets, and he shivered for a moment in the wet weather, glasses damp with droplets of water.
A large man stepped up behind him, his own hood lowered, shadows concealing part of his face. “I know what you did,” the man’s voice rumbled just before a crack of lightning lit across the sky.
Thomas whirled around, coming face to face with the gigantic, hooded stranger. “What?” the man sputtered, squinting through the rain.
“After the Sirens of Spring,” the man clarified. His features were impossible to make out in the low light.
The spectacled man blanched and looked around. There was no one, just him and the behemoth of a man towering over him. H-he knows? But how?!
The walking signal changed, and the mountainous man began to move past him. “The warehouse on Vanguard. Midnight. Come alone.”
Thomas stood there in shock for a moment before he yelled, “W-wait!” The departing figure turned down an alley and out of sight. “Shit!” He ran across the street and turned the corner at breakneck speed, but there was no one there. Oh, my God. I’m fucked!
❖ 🩸 ❖
The night was foggy and damp. The smell of salt and rotting fish this close to the docks was thicker, coating the back of Jared’s throat as he waited in the nondescript warehouse. It was silent, not even the squeak of vermin. There was a constant drip-drip-drip coming from a leaky spot in the roof, filling a puddle on the cement below.
Jared took out his phone only long enough to spot the time. 11:58 PM. His improved hearing picked up the sound of hyperventilating, coming closer and closer. He stepped backward, the shadows engulfing him entirely as he put away his phone.
A moment later, a shaky hand pressed against the slightly ajar door, pushing it open further before the spectacled man – Thomas – slipped in and looked around, harried. “Hello?” he called out, only to be met with silence.
Jared observed the man as he continued to freak out. Thomas swore, trying to wipe his glasses dry.
Now.
Jared stepped out from the shadows behind Thomas, looming over him as he kept trying to fix his glasses. Sensing the motion behind him, he spun around, coming face to face with the giant hooded man from the corner – Jared.
“W-what do you want?” Thomas begged, attempting to shrink away.
“Order.”
Jared’s hands snapped out, grabbing either side of Thomas’s head. Before his scream could escape, his neck snapped. Thomas slumped to the ground bonelessly, his limbs akimbo on the damp cement.
His eye twitched; he may have been internally decapitated, but he was a vampire and could recover from that if given enough time. Jared didn’t intend to give him that kind of time however. He picked up Thomas in a fireman’s carry, the latter’s head and arms flopping loosely.
Entering another room, he dumped Thomas’s body on top of the bodies of two others. Thomas was vaguely aware of the sensation of liquid on his face; it smelled like lighter fluid. He heard the sound of a match striking before something hot pricked his face. Then all he knew was flame.
Jared stood back, ensuring that the head fully burned, just as the Inquisitor had instructed him. The bodies of Patina Haywood and Vinny D’Angelo, necks broken and heads also burned, lay in a heap underneath Thomas Garvey.
He pulled out his phone: 12:43 AM. Only another seventeen minutes until Corrine White would show up, likely as freaked out as she had been when he had contacted her with the time and location, if not more so. He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes. Anything to keep his eyes off Dani. If the Inquisitor sees her as a weakness…
Corrine White arrived on time, and before she saw him, he’d stepped up behind her and snapped her neck. All of the “meetings” had been more or less the same, ending with the head set ablaze.
Jared watched the flames until they died. It’ll be morning soon, I need to get out of here before workers start coming in. Something in him wasn’t sitting right; yes, he’d killed before, but not like this. Not one after the other in the same night.
He suddenly felt the need to explain himself somehow. Taking paper and a pen from a nearby desk, he scribbled something down before walking back over to the bodies. He tucked the note under one of Corrine’s cold hands and left. In his mind, the question kept rolling – was this the Inquisitor’s doctrine, or something he was becoming?
Something about the scale of what he’d done felt wrong. He’d wanted to prove control. Instead, it felt like something spiraling.
❖ 🩸 ❖
It was morning, grey and bleak as Antun and Syla walked toward the crime scene. The killer had escalated, just as they had feared.
They walked into the warehouse, Antun holding the door for his companion. Officers and people with CSI jackets were busy around one of the rooms near the back of the space. Syla followed Antun as she glanced around, mistrust in her eyes.
“Ah, Antun, you’re here.” Jones walked over to them, stopping on the inside of the caution tape. “It was four this time, and preliminary findings are showing no connection between the victims yet again.”
As Antun and Jones continued discussing the case, Syla’s mind couldn’t help but wander to the multiple policemen around her. Nikola had been a policeman back in the 1920s, back when he’d tricked her into servitude. While she knew that none of these policemen were vampires due to their beating hearts, she still had a hard time trusting any of them except for Jones. Antun trusted him, and she trusted Antun, so trusting Jones was almost automatic for her. The rest of them though, she kept a good distance from.
Her eyes drifted to the bodies of the victims as the people in CSI jackets handled them, unstacking them and preparing to bag them. Who had those people been? Had they also been vampires before they were killed? The method – internally severing their heads and burning them – was one of the only ways to kill a vampire.
“He left a note this time,” she heard Jones saying as she brought her attention back to the conversation. “Simple script, just says, ‘Purity demands sacrifice. Cleansing restores order.’”
“So, our killer is trying to cleanse something? But what?” Antun looked at Syla as if he didn’t already know, acting for Jones’s sake. Both of them already knew that the victims were probably vampires, so it stood to reason that the killer was cleansing vampires. But why? What would their goal be? Extinction? Control? Purity demands sacrifice, but purity of what? And restoring order? What order?
“I don’t know,” Jones sighed. “All I know is the sooner we get this guy, the better. Maybe we’ll get prints off of the note, we’ll see.” He rubbed the back of his neck, exhausted. “These cleansing killings are going to be the death of me,” he muttered under his breath.
Syla rubbed the knots on her thread bracelet between her fingers – oh, how she wanted to get out of here already.
A man – the medical examiner, if she had to venture a guess – stood after studying one of the corpses and walked over to Jones. “What’ve you got?” the detective asked without greeting, his tone tired but enduring.
The medical examiner merely nodded and began. “I’ll need to have the bodies x-rayed to know for certain, but it appears to be the same as before; death by internal decapitation, and postmortem, the killer burned their heads. Testing will tell us what accelerant was used.”
He glanced back, then added, “If you’ll excuse me,” before going back to the bodies, which were being loaded onto gurneys that would go into the back of a van just outside. She watched him go, knowing in her heart that the bodies themselves wouldn’t hold any new clues. But where to find them…
“We ought to be heading out ourselves,” Antun mentioned in an offhanded way, which told Syla that he had thought of something but couldn’t tell the detective. It must be about their vampirism, she thought as she followed Antun back to the car.
After getting in and buckling, they pulled away from the warehouse district and began driving back towards Antun’s house. “You’ve thought of something; what is it?” Syla asked him bluntly. There was no time for being polite and waiting until they got home.
Antun sighed, hands gripping the steering wheel tighter than usual. “It feels too systemic, it can’t be a rogue killer. It feels like a hierarchy – someone judging, someone enforcing, someone executing. But we haven’t been able to figure out who’s judging.”
Syla couldn’t help the chill that ran down her spine. “Are you saying that you think there’s more than one person involved?”
“Could be,” he said. His phone buzzed and he glanced down at it. His eyes went wide, “That’s from Argir, it must be about the samples that we sent the other day.” He looked up at her before unlocking his phone and handing it to her. “Do you mind reading it to me?”
Syla took it from him, opening the message and reading from the top.
“To Antun Morina and associates,
“Below are the findings that I have about the sample, but to put it in simpler terms, the DNA from under the nails appears to be from a person of similar condition to the victim. Both the victim’s blood and the killer’s blood are low in monocytes, indicating a lack of mana… wait,”
Syla stopped reading the letter. “I thought there was no way to measure mana.”
“There isn’t,” Antun said, confused. “At least, the last I had known. It’s not like I’ve known many doctors who are aware of the undead condition who could research it. There’s a good chance that Argir has found a way after all these centuries. Keep reading.”
She scanned to the spot she’d left off and almost continued, when she gasped. “He said both the victim and the killer had low mana. That means the killer—”
“Is also a vampire,” Antun finished, stunned.
