Practise Bits: Bitter
January 18, 2012 in Fiction
Ethereal black smoke domed the sky; the grit of it clung to the teeth, and clogged the throat. Looking down the descent of the white marble way, between the awnings of the avenue of merchants, while the distance distorted, blurred, and stung the eyes and the brain for the smoke drifted here too past the unseeing and unknowing residents of the City of Four Hills. But the hunter saw, smelt, tasted the bitter smoke. It creeped as if to jump up on his shoulder when he was not looking, hooked beneath his sole to make the stone unwelcome met, and curdled around ankles seeking trippage and damage.
The hunter knew it of old. He had destroyed vampires in Philly, and in Costa San Rico, and on the streets of Old London with each city a resident of different worlds. All these different in their form, and powers, and sometimes even natures, but all held the taint of the Undead, by their very existence they let into a particular Reality their gritty, bitter entropy.
For a vampire not only is often Damned, and soulless, and a bloodthirsty monster, but he hastens the heat death of the universe, and spreads ill luck by its mere existence. Thus the hunter hunted, but not as a hero. He had been such, but by his second hunt, when the screams of the burned thing echoed in his ears, he knew better. He was not a hero. He was a janitor, a garbageman, a sewer tech.
Still, he had not seen such a mass of mono-taste smoke. It meant several things. The single taste made it clear there was but one Monster. But the steadiness of it made clear that the Monster was a master.
But that saved the worse for last. For most Masters become reclusive and static. The hunter had met one that he had been unable to kill, somewhat unwilling in truth, who lived on a teaspoon of blood a month. Such was the nature of the Master Vampire. But, here…here was different. Here a master had not retreated from the world, and learned economy and durability. Here a master had gone the opposite way and become profiligate and debauched in a sea of blood.
And that worried the hunter greatly.