Midnight. Jacob woke from his troubled dreams with a start, drenched in sweat. He felt like every cell in his body was a smoldering ember, on the verge of bursting into flesh-searing flame. Bloodlust. The ancient hunger was consuming him, as if his veins flowed with caustic acid. He needed to feed. He must feed.
He threw back the bedclothes and crawled out of his rumpled bed. The bloodlust was building in him, writhing through his muscles, pulsing in his brain like the beating drums of the Jivarro. He began to pace around the room, struggling desperately to subdue the ravenous yearning within himself. But no matter how valiantly he tried, Jacob knew he could not escape the inevitable. He must go out. He must hunt. He must feed.
The night air felt like cool silk against his bare skin. Jacob stood, naked, in the deep shadows alongside the duplex. In the blackness of the moonless night, the pale sheen of his body seemed to glow with a supernatural luminescence. He was motionless, his concentration turned inward as he waited.
Even though it took mere seconds, in his state of focused introspection time seemed preternaturally slow to Jacob, and he could actually feel the transformation occur. There was pain, but oh! such exquisite pain as his body re-formed itself into that of a creature of the night. Molecules altered in shape and structure, sinews expanded and contracted and even migrated, senses heightened, flesh shrank and stretched. Jakobus lived. He closed his eyes and raised his arms/wings, and felt the bonds of gravity loose their hold upon him as he soared upward, up into the sweet velvet indigo of the midnight sky.
Jacob had a second rule: Never hunt in your own town. In long-ago times, that personal regulation had resulted in much longer hunt times; villages were few and far between back then, and it was often difficult to find anyone out and about in the middle of the night. Back then he, like all of his kindred beings, had cursed the ancient canon forbidding entry into a home unless invited. Because of a perhaps unintentional loophole (the edict failed to specify when you had to have been invited), Jakobus and his fellow vampires had discovered they were in fact able to enter the dwelling of anyone with whom they were acquainted, and whom they had visited socially. This marvelous realization had resulted in two things: a sudden increase in the social activities of vampires (leading eventually to the stereotyped debonair playboy), and the truly unfortunate necessity of feeding upon one’s friends (leading eventually to vampires becoming an emotionally distant bunch — after all, who wants to murder your closest friend?).
Hunting was much easier nowadays. For one thing, there were millions more people. For another, in the civilized parts of the world, people lived in vast cities, and those cities tended to flow together into massive metropolises. And those metropolises were filled with cafés and theatres and bars and hospitals and places of employment, all of which encouraged the hapless human race to be coming and going at all hours of the day and night. The world had become a veritable smorgasbord for vampires — indeed, for all creatures of the night. And for that, Jakobus was most certainly grateful.
It took him mere moments to fly to another community in the San Diego region. True, he could have thought himself there in an instant, but where was the fun in that? Jakobus truly enjoyed his night flights. He was not particularly pleased with many of the ways in which the world had changed over time, but from 1,000 meters up, the world looked breathtakingly beautiful — especially at night. The darkness hid all the ugliness that progress had wrought. And the lights! From above, they looked like carpets of stars. Despite his unnatural appetite requiring the cloak of darkness to protect him, Jakobus had a genuine fondness for electric lights. They might not have the romance and charm of candlelight, but they could be damn convenient at times!
But not when he was hunting. Jakobus had no desire to spend eternity incarcerated in some dank, amenity-free prison cell. He had, briefly, contemplated allowing himself to be captured in a region where the death sentence was still applied, but abandoned that idea when he observed how long it took modern-day humans to get around to actually executing convicted criminals. There must surely be a quicker path to eternal peace! If only he could find it. Ah, for the good old days when they actually killed a man when they said they were going to! Not that it had ever worked for Jakobus, but hope does spring eternal.
Soaring above the countryside, his ribbed wings flexing with power, Jakobus pondered that word, “eternal.” How he loathed the sound of it! It had sounded so sweet, so seductive when first murmured to him in the throbbing heat of an Egyptian night. So very long ago, yet he remembered it as clear as yesterday. Ibis, her raven black hair unbound and flowing over her breasts, her onyx eyes staring into his as she rode him. Ibis, her small, graceful hands caressing him, coaxing him to join her for eternity as their bodies were joined in love. Ibis, her beautiful lips bare of their usual paint, sucking greedily at the flow of his lifeblood from the wound on his neck. Ibis, slashing her breast and offering it to him as the vessel from which he first drank the blood of eternity. How could he not want what she offered? He loved her more than life. To take the soul-searing joy of this moment and spread it over the eons to come? He drank, drank till he lost consciousness, cradled in the protective arms of his beloved. And awoke as a full-blooded vampire.
They’d had a mere few hundred years together. Glorious years, but passing as quickly as the blink of an eye. Ibis had steadily grown more and more ravenous. While Jakobus, ever ill at ease with the killing aspect of immortality, conditioned himself to require a single monthly feeding, Ibis eventually deteriorated to the point that she needed to feed nightly. In her, the bloodlust became not merely a hunger, but an irresistible addiction. She would leave their abode the moment it was full dark, and not return until dawn. Jakobus could not bring himself to think on what might have transpired each night. Ibis hunted, yes, but was the sanguine elixir of life all for which she hunted? Or did she feed her rampaging sexual proclivities as well? The question haunted him until the last night of her life. Ibis was careless, taking a victim too quickly, failing to seek proper obscuration. She was seen, caught, impaled on a wooden stake which had torn through her heart, and paraded, naked and quite dead, through the streets of the village. Jakobus, his very heart and soul dying with grief, had wished in his agony to be home, sitting peacefully on the banks of the Nile. And, to his utter astonishment, suddenly found himself there. That was the very first time Jakobus had transported himself by thought.
It had been completely unexpected. As indeed had many, many of the other times he had merely thought briefly about someplace and all at once just been there. Jakobus had soon realized he must learn to control this new ability, and had undertaken to master it. Practice sessions had often resulted in his frustrated, unintentional arrival in such undesired locations as the slave-crowded hold of a Phoenician sailing vessel, and a sealed tomb in Jerusalem occupied by a young, frightened Jew who’d been mistaken for dead. Jakobus had obligingly transported himself and the grateful young man out onto the road to Emmaus, where he’d been greeted with amazement by his joyous friends.
Eventually, Jakobus had learned to make his thoughts very specific, and exactly which phrases would trigger the folding of time. Now he was able to travel as he wished. Still, on hunt nights he preferred the old-fashioned mode of travel. The sheer freedom of his night flights was the closest thing to peace he had ever known in his entire 2,000 years. To shed the shackles of gravitational pull and float effortlessly above the realms of humankind — was that not the privilege of angels? The grim fact that such tranquility was followed by the most heinous of actions made it that much more precious to Jakobus.
He tucked his wings back and allowed himself to coast down to near-ground level, on the outskirts of one of San Diego’s suburban communities. Gliding through manicured neighborhoods with streets named after trees and gemstones, past strip malls and shopping centers, Jakobus made his way into a section of town teeming with nightlife. He was careful to descend into a secluded, pitch-black alley so that his metamorphosis would not be seen. Even after he had resumed human form, Jakobus retained the vision of a night creature, and had no difficulty navigating in the darkness. Moving steathfully, lean muscles taut with tension, he prowled the dimly-lit service alleys in search of an appropriate victim. There was little of the man Jacob left in him now; the creature Jakobus was awake, hungry, all-powerful. Only the smallest vestige of Jacob’s conscience remained, but it was enough to keep Jakobus from simply snatching and feeding upon the first unfortunate human who happened by. Even in extreme hunt mode, Jakobus remained aware of the rules Jacob had formulated, and — albeit reluctantly —abided by them.
Jacob had a third rule: Leave no vacancies. Don’t take anyone whose absence will be noticed. So Jakobus preyed on those he thought of as the Insignificants. In times past, his victims had been beggars, thieves, harlots. Nowadays, they went by different names: homeless, transients, hookers. Street people. But the menu had expanded to include pushers, pimps, carjackers and the occasional politician. Until that mindbending taste of Jess’s blood, Jakobus had not tasted purity in centuries. Nor would he tonight. Tonight, once again, he would feed from the dregs of society.
The woman wandered into the alley, reeking of cheap alcohol and even cheaper perfume. Her excessively curly hair was a shade of red never seen in nature. Jakobus had little doubt that those frighteningly firm breasts were bought and paid for as well, since there was certainly no visible means of support for their exaggerated bounty. Jakobus had seen more fabric in codpieces than this woman wore on her entire body. She was smoking — surely mankind’s most deplorable habit — and her nails gleamed long and red in the glow of her cigarette. How elegant, Jakobus thought cynically, her nails match her hair. He moved, and she turned a startled glance his way. The expression in her heavily made-up eyes quickly changed from fear to interest as she took in his nakedness.
“Hey, baby, you gonna catch cold dressed like that. I mean, un-dressed like that! Seems to me like you need a little honey pie to warm you up. Wanna come home with me, darlin’? I know some tricks that’ll get you pumpin’ in all the right spots.” She ran her tongue provocatively over her lips, and cocked a hip sideways.
Jakobus stepped forward, smiling. He could smell her. Not the Evening In Paris cologne, not the Old Crow whiskey, not even the two-hours-ago sex. Her blood. He could smell it even before it was shed. AB+, vintage 1977. He could see it flowing in her veins, pulsing in her neck. Ahhhhh . . . He felt his supercanines descending as his erection was rising. The two went hand-in-hand for Jakobus, sex and feeding. There was no more powerful aphrodisiac than the scent, the taste of human blood. The anticipation always made him almost painfully hard. He was rarely able to take a female with taking her first.
The woman was neither blind nor dead. At least, not yet. She could barely tear her eyes away from Jakobus’ impressive arousal, but it wasn’t until she looked into his eyes that she was truly, irretrievably lost. They gleamed silver in the dim light, mesmerizing and hypnotic. She felt herself pulled toward Jakobus as strongly as if he’d grabbed her. And then he did. His hands grasped her arms and pushed her against the cold brick wall as he ground his body into hers. He tore open her flimsy shirt and filled his hands with breasts as unyielding as unripe grapefruit. She was panting, gasping, any thought of payment long forgotten. She managed to work her hand down to her crotch, desperately pulling the fabric aside to open herself to his invasion. Jakobus shoved into her hard, so forcefully that he lifted her off the ground with each thrust. Her head fell back, baring the pale flesh of her neck. A growl rose in his throat and he bit, sinking his supercanines into her throbbing jugular vein. The hot sweetness of her blood spurted into his throat just as he came, his semen spurting into her body. Her cry of ecstasy was the last sound she ever made.
