Shades of Grey
Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out,
somebody goes and changes the rules.

            “Unless I am a completely lackbrained dullard, I would assume that you gentleman wish to have some form of audience with me,” said Screamin’ Willie casually, not even bothering to glance back at the forms skulking in the shadows of the ramshackle tenement he’d just passed by.

The figures froze at the sound of his voice and made no reply at all, their minds racing with adrenaline and surprise, unable to fathom how he’d managed to notice them when they’d taken such pains to be quiet.  Not just ordinary pains, either, unless you counted years of relentless training, genetic enhancement, and cybernetic implants to be within the realm of ‘ordinary.’  They were among the best that their clan had to offer, so silent that even the finest machines couldn’t detect their presence, and yet the unassuming black man in the dapper navy-blue suit had done it, seemingly without effort.  Impossible!

“In case you were wondering, I am not on my way to commit any nefarious deeds that require your intervention.  I am, in fact, on my way to a reputable barbershop for a nice trim and an evening of agreeable conversation, and perhaps a spirited game of chess as well,” said Screamin’ Willie, patiently leaning on his favorite cane, a jet-black affair topped with a stylized silver weasel head.  “If I were to be placed within your shoes at this juncture in time, I would turn around and take my leave of this city of Los Angeles at your earliest convenience, because you are asking for trouble of the worst sort if you continue to loiter about this metropolis.”

After a few moments, the dark-clad figures, moving like liquid shadows, stepped out into the sputtering illumination provided by one of the avenue’s dying streetlights.  There were four of them in all, and as they moved into the light, the flesh of their stern, Oriental features lightened, shifting from a deep black to a more natural hue, much like a chameleon’s flesh changed colors.  Their nearly-identical faces were set in firm, determined expressions that betrayed nothing but confidence in their abilities, though Willie could smell the consternation on them nonetheless.

Finally, the vampire turned to face the foursome, and he eyed them for a few moments, looking reproachful.  “I hope that you are aware of the fact that your presence here violates the terms of the Frog Accords, which, among other things, states that vampire hunters shall not bother any vampires they encounter within the city limits, and vice versa.  The Accords were drawn up and agreed upon by not only myself and the estimable Frog Brothers, but also by several of this city’s elder and highly-formidable citizens of the immortal persuasion, and were written up in the wake of the—“

“The Frog Accords are meaningless to us,” spat one of the figures contemptuously.  “Where the evil of the vampire goes, we go, and the clan of the Rising Sun shall not be bound by such hollow agreements.”

“To agree to any terms with a vampire is sheer madness!” said another of the figures, his voice identical to that of the first.

“Dishonorable creatures such as yourselves are not to be trusted!” chimed in another.

“We of the clan Rising Sun shall not be denied our opportunity to slay a cold, bloodsucking monster like you!” exclaimed the last one.

“Your name is legend, but today a new legend shall begin, one that bears the name of the clan Rising Sun!” said the first, and he set himself into a fighting stance, a fierce expression on his face, which the other three mirrored in perfect sync with him.

“Through honor, blood, and technology, we shall defeat you!” shouted all four in unison, “For we are the Hunters of the Rising Sun!”

Willie chuckled and then smoothed his neatly-trimmed mustache and pointed goatee thoughtfully.  “So it would be fair to assume that you wish to do this the hard way, unless I am completely misreading this rather sorry situation.”

The four hunters drew the katana blades from the scabbards on their backs in unison, the glittering black swords not making even a whisper of sound as they were drawn.

Screamin’ Willie nodded and then rolled the muscles of his shoulders for a few moments and cricked his neck from side to side.  “That does not surprise me in the very least.  Despite the wisdom of the Frog Accords and the respect that many of your profession show them, there are always the ignant ones that just have to do things the hard way.  I should also advise you that I find your swords to be quite the eye-catching examples of weaponry, and that once I’ve relieved you of their burden, I intend to add them to my rather extensive collection, so at the very least, you will have given me a new conversation piece when all is said and done.”

The hunters lunged forward in a blindingly fast flanking maneuver, blades raised and ready to slice their target to ribbons, but Screamin’ Willie tapped his cane against the cracked sidewalk and disappeared in a thick puff of smoke, and their swords whizzed through empty air.

Before they could even begin to puzzle about this, all four of them were smacked on the backs of their heads by a firm hand, and laughter filled the air.  “One of the oldest tricks to be found in any book, and you ignant pups fell for it!” cackled Willie, nimbly dancing backwards as the hunters furiously spun around and swung their swords at him.

He dodged so fluidly that he seemed to flow through the air like a mist, the blades coming so close to him that they missed by only the barest of margins, and the vampire’s expression was one of clear amusement.  One of the hunters barked commands in Japanese, and the other three immediately slipped into a tight formation around Willie, hemming him in with his back to a dark alley.

“Stand and fight!  There is no honor in your actions!” snarled one of the hunters, pointing his sword at the vampire accusingly.  “You are supposed to be a warrior of great renown, and instead you refuse to engage us in combat!”

“A warrior?” asked Willie, raising his eyebrows.  “A warrior is not a term I would use to describe myself in any way.  However, I would freely use the adjectives ‘sneaky’ and ‘son of a bitch’ in conjunction with myself.  Ta-ta for now.”

He tapped his cane against the sidewalk again, creating another thick cloud of smoke, but instead of cleanly vanishing this time, Willie’s movements were betrayed when the smoke swiftly flowed in the direction of the alley, indicating his course.

“Ahead, sword-brothers!  We will surround this coward and force him to face us honorably!” shouted the lead hunter, charging through the smoke and into the dark, filthy alley, his blade held out in front of him.  The others were right behind him, the flesh of their faces and hands immediately shifting to dark tones as they plunged into the shadow-clad alley.  Their camouflage abilities were so thorough that even their eyes and teeth darkened, truly making them a squad of shadow warriors.  Even most vampires would have missed them, especially with how swift and silent their movements were.

Unfortunately for them, as good as their camouflage was, it didn’t do a thing to protect them from an exploding dumpster.

As they shot past the rusty, grimy trash bin, it suddenly transformed into a large and very deadly shrapnel bomb, thanks to the detonating cufflinks that Willie had tossed into it on his way by.  Though small, each cufflink contained more explosive power than a hand grenade, so two of them were overkill.

The rushing hunters were blasted against the damp brick of the alley wall from the force of the explosion, and while their scientifically-enhanced skin and bones were highly resistant to damage, the proximity and ferocity of the blast, not to mention the impact against the wall and the subsequent shrapnel assault, proved to be a bit too much for them.  The hunters were shredded, battered, and burnt by the crude attack, and two of their number died instantly, reduced to harmless mangled human rubble; the survivors weren’t in great shape, either, but to their credit, they sprang back to their feet and fearlessly charged at Willie, who was standing a short distance away, idly replacing his cufflinks with spares he kept in one of his pockets.

They were scarcely a second away from the vampire when he held his cane up in front of himself and pressed down on a spot between the weasel’s two ears.  Dozens of tiny needles shot from the weasel’s mouth and peppered the attacking hunters, exploding upon impact, violently ripping them to pieces so swiftly that they didn’t even have time to scream as they were reduced to gory salsa.  A few large chunks of bloody flesh and muscle spattered to the ground around the vampire’s neatly-shined shoes, a metal-coated bone protruding from one of them.

Curiously, Willie picked up the chunk of meat and sniffed at it, and then tapped the metallic bone a few times, noting how tiny wires extended from the bone to the flesh around it, creating a mesh that ran through the piece of the hunter.  “Why would anybody, regardless of their mental state, willingly wish to place metal and electronics within the sanctity of their corporeal form?” he asked aloud, profoundly puzzled.  “Not only is it a disgusting violation of nature in my own humble estimation, but it also didn’t do these ignant fools a damned bit of good.  These parts would have better been utilized in a compact disc player.”

Frowning, the vampire tossed the piece into a nearby trashcan, simultaneous ducking the sword aimed for his head.  A split-second later, Willie calmly slipped behind the hunter, wrapped his arm around the hunter’s neck, and gave it a sharp twist.  A loud crack filled the air, and the vampire threw the twitching hunter’s body to the ground, then stomped on his neck several times, nearly severing the head altogether.

He turned and took a second to watch the pair of hunters running towards him, one on each wall of the alley, defying gravity as their feet silently pounded over the brick surface as though it were the ground.  Their swords were out and ready, and the walls of the alley were close enough together that the hunters’ attack areas intersected each other, granting no zone of safety to anybody in the alley.  Ducking was also out of the question, as the hunters were close enough to the ground that they could have easily dispatched something as low-slung as a cockroach if they needed to.  Jumping probably wouldn’t work, either, because with their momentum and agility, it would have been child’s play for the hunters to match his course and intercept him in mid-air, where he would be at a disadvantage.  While some vampires’ feet never seemed to touch the ground, Willie had never been one for aerial maneuvers, so he wasn’t even going to try that.  Time for another approach.

He deftly twisted the weasel head on his cane, rotating it around by several notches until its dark eyes lit up with a red light, and then he moved over to the wall closest to him.  He grinned and waved at the two hunters as they silently rushed towards him, their features nearly invisible even to his ultra-sharp eyesight, though he could see enough to catch the grim determination on their faces.  They really wanted him dead.  Good … he wasn’t losing his touch in the least.

Then the hunters were upon him.

Willie’s leg snapped out and kicked a crater into the brick wall directly in front of the closest hunter’s feet, giving the charging man no time at all to avoid it.  The vampire neatly sidestepped as the hunter tripped on the hole in the wall, aiming the mouth of the weasel head directly at the other attacker.  As the first hunter violently broke his leg in Willie’s pothole, the second hunter was hit in the face by a searing fireball shot from the silver weasel’s mouth.

The hunter didn’t even have time to scream as the fireball incinerated his head, taking him out of the equation entirely, and Willie spun back around to grab the first hunter’s sword as he slammed against the wall, his momentum causing him to bounce along the vertical surface several times before gravity could reassert itself.  By the time gravity was able to snatch the hunter back to the ground, his head had been cleanly sliced off by his own sword.  At that point, the second hunter’s beheaded body also hit the ground and skidded to a stop.

Willie hefted the unfamiliar katana blade and took a moment to study its design, which was all he needed to get a feel for it.  He rolled his wrist and spun the sword around a few times, appreciating how finely balanced and light it was, and made a noise of approval: this clan of the Rising Sun group at least knew how to make a proper blade.

“I see you are familiar with the katana,” said a voice from above him.

Willie stepped back and looked up as the hunter dropped down from a fire escape and landed a short distance in front of him.  The hunter drew his sword and whipped it around in a rather impressive display of swordsmanship, spinning it so swiftly and expertly that it was a blur in the shadows of the alley.

Holding his newly-acquired sword in a defensive stance, Willie said, “I am in possession of a passing familiarity with every form of sword combat in the world, both ceremonial and martial.”

The hunter chuckled softly and shook his head.  “Not every form.  You have not had the privilege to study under the masters of the clan Rising Sun, who have created several new styles.”

Willie said nothing, but thrust the end of his cane into the hard asphalt of the alley and left it there, so that he could wield the katana with both hands, and he assumed a stance that was a hybrid of several different styles, not-so-subtly showing off the depth of his knowledge.

Giving him a nod, the hunter pointed at Willie with his sword.  “You know much, bloodsucker.  But what you do not know will be the death of you, because at the end of this duel I will use my superior skills to defeat you, so that the clan Rising Sun will stand triumphant!  Prepare for death, vampire, for you cannot beat a swordsman of the clan Rising Sun in glorious, honorable combat!  Now we duel!”

Whipping his sword around himself like a hurricane, the hunter let go with a fierce battle-cry and shot towards Willie like a bullet train from his native country.  Just from the way this one moved, Willie could tell that he not only believed his own hype, but was also likely justified in a lot of it, because no swordsman moved that confidently and smoothly unless they were a veteran of many battles.  There were things that could only be learned in combat, and this hunter had clearly learned his lessons well.  With his enhanced speed, durability, and unfamiliar style, he presented an actual threat to the vampire.

Willie had been in the business of killing vampire hunters long enough that he knew simply being a supernatural creature didn’t immediately give him the advantage over a mortal attacker.  Mortals, properly armed, skilled, and motivated, could easily take down an unprepared vampire, and could sometimes even overcome a prepared vampire.  He’d seen some pretty formidable vampires get completely punked by mortals that were on top of their game, and in his younger days, he’d nearly gotten killed a number of times by vampire hunters that knew exactly what they were doing.  Hell, he still had trouble with some of them to this very day.  Fortunately, his difficulties in the past had been very instructive, and he’d long ago thrown aside the pride and overconfidence that had caused many a vampire to fall prey to a skilled hunter.  So when the hunter charged him, he was ready.

As the hunter galloped towards Willie, the vampire tossed his own katana aside and yanked his cane out of the ground.  Moving with easy, fluid motions, he twisted the weasel head around a few more notches, until he heard a click from within the body of the cane itself.  He lifted the cane up and held it exactly as he would a shotgun, leveling it at the hunter’s chest.

All of this took less than a second to execute, and when the hunter was upon him, Willie’s finger squeezed down on the weasel’s lower jaw, closing the weasel’s mouth and causing a heavy slug to fire from the end of the cane.  The report of the blast was louder than thunder as it rolled and echoed through the narrow confines of the alley.

The slug hit the hunter at point-blank range, ripping through his enhanced flesh with ease.  Willie had designed the bullet himself, and it split into hundreds of tiny fragments as it impacted; the fragments flew in all directions within the hunter’s body, shredding almost everything into pulp instantaneously.  Just for good measure, Willie punched him a good one in the chops, too.

The hunter collapsed to the ground of the alley, gasping and thrashing about as everything went to hell within his body, and Willie crouched down by him to quickly reload his cane with another slug pulled from one of his pockets.

“Why?” hacked the hunter, terribly upset by the sudden turn of events.  “Why have you chosen to dishonor yourself by not engaging me in glorious combat?  We were to duel with the swords, and you broke the rules!”

Willie grinned at him.  “Allow me to present to you one of life’s truths before you pass beyond this crazy little world.  Fighting is not, as so many people would like to make it out to be, a glorious or honorable endeavor.  Fighting is base, ugly, and mean, and anybody who thinks in a manner contrary to that is only lying to themselves.  Fighting, my friend, is not about glory and it is not about honor.  It is about one thing and one thing only: winning.”

“You have dishonored yourself!” rasped the hunter, blood gushing from his mouth as his body began to shut down.

“I won,” said Willie, raising his eyebrows at the dying man.  “And you’re dead.  You may cling to your precious code of honor if you gives you some form of comfort, but you should also be aware of the fact that honor does absolutely nothing to stop bullets.”

The hunter gurgled something incoherent, coughed out a spray of blood, and then died.

“Mister?  What’s going on?” asked a quavering voice behind him, and Willie sprang to his feet and spun around.  A little girl, no more than six years old and dressed in her pajamas, stood by a doorway set into the alley wall.

The vampire cursed under his breath: she must live in the tenement that made one of the alleys’ walls, and as children were wont to do, she’d come out to investigate when she’d heard all the racket outside.  Truth be told, he was a little surprised nobody else had come out to check on the noise yet.  But then again, he’d noticed that people in the bad parts of town tended to just keep their heads down and bolt the doors when they heard gunfire and explosions.  It was an urban survival instinct, and while it wasn’t very humanitarian in nature, it was also effective.  Unfortunately, this little girl hadn’t yet picked up on it.

Willie’s eyes darted around the alley, looking for signs of the next attack, but he couldn’t see anything just yet, though his instincts told him that this wasn’t over, and that the next round would probably bring some heavier artillery into play.  He shuddered to think of what would happen to this little one if she got caught in the crossfire, and he hurried over to her.

Years ago, when he’d still been a mortal slave in the South, Willie had helplessly watched his own son die a brutal, needless death at the hands of his master, and as a result, he was even more protective of children than most of the city’s other vampires.  As long as he lived and breathed, he would never allow harm to come to a child, even if doing so put himself in harm’s way, and he had to get this little girl out of here before any more hunters arrived.

“Here is a not place you want to be right now, young lady.  It would be best for your continued good health if you’d head back inside where it’s much safer.  What is going on in this alley is business that one like yourself should not get involved in,” said Willie, reaching out for the little girl’s hand.  “Allow me to escort you back inside, where I assure you that you will be out of harm’s way.”

Just before Willie was able to take the youngster’s hand in his own, something shot out of her torso and skewered him through the shoulder with enough force to throw him backwards against the wall.  He dropped his cane as shock and pain flooded through him, and he cried out, fearing for the little girl’s safety.  “NO!”

But he needn’t have bothered.

As Willie fell to the ground, the shape of the girl flickered and blurred, looking like a reflection on the surface of a rippling pond, and she was replaced with a crouching man dressed in urban camo gear and armed with a high-tech crossbow.  The vampire gaped, momentarily confused, and he clutched at the wooden stake lodged in his left shoulder, directly under his collarbone, trying to get his thoughts back in order.

The burly man, whose face was painted in urban camo colors, grinned at Willie and patted the heavy black vest fitted over the top of his combat fatigues.  “Intelligence said you had a weakness where kids were concerned, and looks like they were right.  Suckered you good, didn’t I?” he asked in a sneering tone, keeping his crossbow, which had automatically reloaded with another stake, leveled at the vampire.  “Figures it’d take a real hunters’ guild like the Wardogs to bring down a son of a bitch like you, instead of those goofy chop-socky twerps.”

He took a step forward and kicked Willie’s cane down the alley, not taking his eyes off the downed vampire for even a split-second.  “Can’t wait to get that thing into the lab where we can tear it apart and figure out everything you’ve got crammed in there.  That cane of yours is something a lot of guilds have been wanting to get their hands on since the 70’s, and it’s gonna help us build a lot more things to take down bastards like you.  Though I gotta say, this little holo-projector the boys cooked up sure did the job well, and they came up with it all on their own.”

Willie yanked the stake out of his shoulder and tossed it aside, eyeing the man’s vest curiously.  The hunter eyed Willie’s wound just as curiously, and he gestured towards it with his crossbow.  “Why ain’t you sizzlin’?  My stakes are coated so heavy with holy water that you ought to have smoke pourin’ outta that new hole I made you by now.”

The vampire grinned darkly.  “You would be positively amazed at the adaptive powers of the supernatural body.  After exposing myself to multiple mixtures of your holy water compounds for extended periods of time, I have developed a rather keen immunity to the stuff.  I can even drink it, if I so feel like it.”

“Is that so?  Too bad that ain’t gonna do you a bit of good in the here and now,” said a new voice, and three more urban-camouflaged figures stepped out of the shadows, their crossbows aimed at Willie, with conventional machine guns strapped across their backs for additional firepower.  They also had numerous pistols, blades, and other weaponry holstered all over their bodies, giving them the appearance of military commandos as opposed to vampire hunters.  Willie had had dealings with members of the Wardogs guild in the past, and knew that to be an accurate comparison, as the Wardogs were composed of hunters that had had experience in the various branches of the military, and did a lot of mercenary work in addition to vampire hunting.

The three newcomers took positions around Willie, professionally hemming him in and giving him little opportunity for escape.  “Keep your hands where we can see ‘em!” barked the Wardog with the black vest, which Willie was still looking at in intense interest.

“So you have invented a holographic projector device of some sort?” he asked.  “That’s a rather impressive feat of engineering, I must say.”

“Heh, thanks,” said the Wardog with the vest.

“I would like to have it for my own uses, actually,” said Willie, holding his hand over the wound in his shoulder, mentally directing his body to heal it up as quickly as possible.  “Such a device could be very useful in a myriad of different situations.  I could likely make some considerable improvements to its design, as well.  I am quite skilled in the arena of electronic micro-circuitry.”

“Not for much longer,” growled one of the other Wardogs.  “We ain’t takin’ no chances with you.”

“Yeah, we’re doin’ you right here and takin’ what’s left of you back to Archer and gettin’ paid,” said the Wardog with the holo vest.  His crossbow clicked as he cocked it and prepared to fire, and the other three followed suit.  “You’re too damned much trouble to do anything else with.”

Willie drew in a deep breath, which the Wardogs took to be his last gasp, but instead turned out to be an attack they weren’t the least bit prepared for.  What the Wardogs didn’t know was that Screamin’ Willie had acquired his nickname for more than just his raucous performances in various jazz and blues circuits around the country: he’d also received the moniker from other vampires who’d witnessed the eccentric vampire’s secret weapon in action.

As the Wardogs prepared to fire their stakes through his head and heart, Willie opened up his mouth and let fly with a hypersonic scream that shattered every window in the immediate vicinity, set nearby dogs to furiously barking, and wreaked such havoc upon the Wardogs’ bodies that they almost literally went to pieces.  The human body wasn’t meant to handle such an intense aural assault at close range, and eyeballs exploded, blood vessels burst, bones shattered, muscles unraveled, and internal organs imploded as the Wardogs were pummeled by Willie’s high-frequency attack.

It was a unique and devastating ability that he’d never seen in any other vampire except himself, and even though he had no idea how he’d gotten lucky enough to have it in his arsenal, he was extremely happy to have it. He’d discovered the ability years ago quite by accident (not on stage, fortunately), and after much experimentation, he’d honed it into a deadly attack that he usually saved as a last resort.

While this really wasn’t a situation that he’d think of as a last-resort scenario, he considered it worthy of his scream, seeing as how the first Wardog had so casually used an image of a child as a lure.  As far as Willie was concerned, that was dirty, dirty pool.  As far as he was concerned, children were precious and sacred, and should never be dragged into any sort of war in any kind of way.  Even using an image of one was wrong by his estimation, and while Willie tended to be less than sympathetic towards his varied vampire hunter attackers, he was feeling downright cruel towards these bastards, and wanted them to suffer a bit before they checked out.

The scream bounced off the walls of the alley and hit the Wardogs again and again as Willie continued the vocal attack, and the vampire felt his own body groaning and trembling under the intense energy of the supersonic shriek, but he kept on going, practically liquefying his attackers before he finally stopped.  The gory, pulped remains of the Wardog contingent fell to the ground with a wet splat.

“That’ll teach you inconsiderate assholes to play on my sympathies towards children,” he heavily panted between gasps, feeling dizzy and shaky.  “That’s not something to toy with.”

The scream always took a lot out of him, and after letting go with one, it took him a little while to recover before he could unleash another one, so he usually kept going with a scream until the target had definitively been defeated.  Of course, that meant he kept on screaming longer than he probably should have, which was likely why the scream wore him out so badly.  But as much hell as it played on him, it was nothing compared to what it did to the targets of it.  The remains of the Wardogs lay in a twisted, bloody heap that looked more like a pile of rags and military hardware than four corpses, and the destruction of their muscles and nervous systems had been so complete that the bodies didn’t even twitch.

Concentrating on getting himself back together, Willie got to his feet, glanced around the alley for more attackers, and then quickly retrieved his cane before any more arrived.  He also took a few moments to remove the black holo-projector vest from the body of the lead Wardog, softly cursing his shaking hands.

He studied the vest for a few moments, feeling giddy at the thought of being able to get it back to his workshop in the Catacombs, where he could spend endless hours examining its inner workings and learning new things from them.  The vest appeared to be intact, but Willie knew from long experience that his scream tended to play hell with electronics, so he’d probably have to fix the damned thing before he could really learn anything from it, but he was up to the task.  And even if he wasn’t, he knew that Katheryne, a gentle half-vampire friend that was even more skilled with electronics than he was, could help him puzzle it out.  But if he was going to be able to do anything with the vest, he first had to get his ass out of this mess alive.

He once again scanned up and down the alley for signs of more attackers, but he still didn’t see anything, though from the yelling, barking, and cursing running through the immediate neighborhood, he could tell that his scream had gotten the attention of more than just the four Wardogs.  That meant that he was going to have to clear out of here in short order and try to get any other attackers to follow him, so that nobody got caught in the crossfire.  While some vampire hunter guilds went to great lengths to make sure that no innocents got hurt during their hunts, others, like the Wardogs, didn’t care who got nailed just so long as they got their target.  If people came out to investigate and the Wardogs, or some other group, decided to attack him then, he’d have huge trouble on his hands.

Thus far he’d been attacked by two different groups of hunters, and he had no idea if any others were going to get involved.  He did, however, have a pretty good idea of the general gist of the attacks; this sort of gauntlet happened to him on occasion, so this wasn’t really anything new, and all he had to do was ride it out until his last opponent had been dealt with.  What irritated him, however, was that the Frog Accords had been violated, and he shouldn’t have been fighting this battle in Los Angeles at all.  He was fine with this sort of nonsense anywhere else, but he didn’t like having to deal with it in the city where he hung his hat; a man’s home should be a safe haven, at the very least!

But he supposed that it was inevitable that this would come to pass.  After all, not every group of vampire hunters held the infamous Frog Brothers in high esteem, and sooner or later somebody was going to decide that the treaty the Frogs had signed with Willie and several of the city’s elder vampires was a load of crap.  He’d hoped that the treaty would not only help further make Los Angeles a city safe for vampires, but would also help eliminate a lot of the bullshit that surrounded the ages-old conflict between vampires and vampire hunters.

Never one to be naïve, however, Willie also knew that not everybody wanted to be enlightened, and not everybody would allow themselves to be dragged into a new era of understanding, so it was up to guys like him to take out the assholes that were intent upon ruining everybody else’s fun.  Though he was still irked at having to deal with this in his home, he couldn’t deny the fact that he was enjoying doing one of the things that he did best: killing dumbasses that needed to be killed.

Not having anywhere else to stash it, Willie put the bloody vest on over the top of his coat and secured it in place.  At the very least, its thickness might help slow down any other projectiles he got hit with.  Hopefully he wouldn’t further damage it before he could figure out its inner workings.

He also grabbed one of the Rising Sun hunters’ katanas and scabbards, as well as a few other knives and undamaged guns off the bodies of the Wardogs for good measure; it never hurt to be prepared whenever you were facing an unknown number of enemies.  Willie was certain he looked ridiculous with all of the hardware and accessories strapped on over the top of his once-dapper suit, but he could care less if he looked silly.  Just so long as he was dangerous, he was just fine.

Willie started down the alley, heading back the way he came, just in case there was more trouble lurking in wait for him.  If there were more vampire hunters about, which he was sure there were, he wanted to be the one to deal with them, so they could be gotten out of the way before they ran across some less-experienced vampires.

“Just damned rude, if you were to ask my opinion of this whole disarray,” muttered the vampire to himself, saying it just loud enough that any potential ambushers could hear him coming.  He’d just about gotten rid of the shakes from using his scream, and he knew from experience that all it would take to finish them off entirely was a fresh shot of adrenaline, which would come into play as soon as any other hunters appeared.  “Gettin’ to be so that a respectable vampire can’t even mind his own business in peace anymore.  Damned ignant, I say.”

Other than the yelling and cursing coming from within the nearby tenement, everything was quiet as he walked along the length of the alley, which was littered with corpses, mutilated pieces of vampire hunters, and assorted broken weapons.  He stomped flat any weapons that weren’t broken, not only for the sake of thoroughness, but also just in case any civilians were to find them before the proper authorities could round them up and dispose of them.  Once he’d settled this little feud, he’d have to contact some of the half-vampire officers in the LAPD to come in and take care of it, to make sure there weren’t any serious loose ends dangling.

Fortunately, Willie had discovered time and time again that people in big cities like L.A. tended to look the other way when confronted with the absolutely fantastic, and even if one of the locals were to snag a bent katana or smashed crossbow, they likely wouldn’t think of it as anything but a curiosity to show to their friends, and then toss in a closet and forget.  He’d seen it happen time and time again, and if anybody actually did come forward and try to present it as anything significant, it would quickly be taken care of by one or more of the city’s alert vampires.  Sometimes money would shut up possible troublemakers, sometimes sex was all it took, and other times a good mugging took care of it.  Occasionally someone needed a visit from one of the city’s more telepathically- or empathically-skilled immortals to make them forget everything they’d seen, and if worse came to worst, the person in question was quickly and painlessly killed.  Willie, like many of the other vampires, didn’t particularly care for that solution, but they accepted it and carried it out if necessary, because sometimes you had to do a bit of dirty work in order to keep things peaceful.  That’s just the way life was.

            An electric charge ran down Willie’s spine as he heard a powerful engine approach, and he gripped the head of his cane tightly, feeling nothing but anticipation.  He was primed and ready now, and he was eager to bust a few more heads before the sun came up.  The vampire didn’t consider himself a violent man by nature, because he truly and honestly did his best to avoid trouble if it was at all possible, but at the same time, he couldn’t deny the fact that he really enjoyed kicking the asses of people who had it coming.  Not only was it always a good time, but he also felt as though he was accomplishing something with it, since there were that many less jerks running around after he’d gotten done.

            “C’mon, you ignant, hostile-minded sons of bitches,” he murmured.  “Come on and get a load of what ‘ol Screamin’ Willie’s got cookin’ in his kitchen of doom.  Even if you don’t like it, you’re gettin’ a whole damned bunch of it anyway.”

            When the beefy, modified SUV appeared at the entrance of the alley, Willie laughed out loud in his most antagonizing manner, pointing at the vehicle and shaking his head.  “You have got to be putting me on!” he called out, hoping they could hear him.  “If you are bringing anything less than a tank into combat with me, you are coming onto the battlefield with a severe disadvantage!  I suggest you turn tail and run home to your mothers, so that she can dress you all up in your pajamas and send you on to bed, because I assure you that you are not going to survive the ugly business ahead of you!”

            The vehicle had likely started life as a civilian vehicle, but it had undergone so many modifications and had had so many additions applied to it that it was no longer recognizable as such.  Everything was protected with urban-camouflaged metal plating, including the windshield, which had only a narrow slit for the driver to look out of.  Though the design of the vehicle had ‘Wardog’ written all over it (meaning that it looked like something that the members of television’s A-Team would have concocted at the last minute), the beady, slightly-wild eyes peering out at Willie from the viewing slit told him everything to know: nobody had that kind of look except for screwy ex-military types.  Giving the SUV a wave, Willie yanked out one of the heavy-duty pistols he’d taken from a dead Wardog and fired at the viewing slit.

            His aim was flawless, but the bullet bounced off the thick glass, leaving only a tiny score-mark right between the Wardog’s angry eyes, exactly as Willie had expected.  The Wardog revved the engine a few times, and Willie dutifully shot at the SUV’s reinforced tires, which the bullets harmlessly ricocheted off, causing the Wardog to rev the engine again in some sort of noisy threat.  Continuing along, Willie shot at the hardened metal grating over the vehicle’s grille, and the bullets didn’t get through that, either.

            Doing his best to look concerned, Willie pitched the pistol at the SUV, but it bounced off the thing’s armor without leaving a mark.  Then he whipped up his cane, twisted the weasel head until the weasel’s eyes were red, and let fly with a big fireball.  Despite the searing heat of the fireball, the SUV’s armor was more than up to the task, and it weathered the flaming assault without difficulty.  The Wardog again revved the engine, clearly growing excited, and Willie’s sharp ears could just pick up the sounds of his comrades hooting and hollering in confidence within the safety of their souped-up urban war machine.

            “Now let’s see if you know the rest of this script,” murmured the vampire, turning tail and running down the alley like an upright cheetah.

            Predictably, the Wardogs peeled out and tore down the alley after him, plowing right over the remains of the exploded dumpster and the Rising Sun carcasses near it.  The vehicle barely fit in the alley, and it sent garbage cans and boxes flying as it shot down the tight corridor like a bullet hurtling down the barrel of a gun.

            “You got nowhere to run, bloodsucker!” screamed a voice from the SUV as machine gun fire bit at the ground behind Willie’s feet.  “No way can you reach the end of this alley before we get you!”

            Willie snorted as he galloped along.  “You have a gift for stating the obvious,” he growled, not bothering to glance back.  “If you troglodytes think I that I am not aware of that fact, you are very stupid, indeed.  I think the gene pool will actually stand up and present me a commendation after I am through ridding it of your particular DNA strains.”

            More bullets chewed up the asphalt behind him and whizzed past him, and Willie knew that a couple more guns had come into play, judging from not only the quantity of bullets now coming for him, but also the racket echoing down the alley, which he used like sonar to get a clear picture of his enemies.  The SUV was steadily closing the gap between them, and Willie actually had to slow his pace a little bit so that he didn’t clear the alley before they reached him.  He zigged, zagged, ducked, and jumped as he ran, dodging almost every bullet thrown at him, and though he took one to his previously unwounded shoulder and one in his thigh, plus several other flesh wounds, overall he was doing quite well for himself.

The wounds he’d taken didn’t bother him in the least, because not only were vampires by nature able to deal with pain much better than their mortal counterparts, but also because he was so loaded up on vampire-grade adrenaline at the moment he probably could’ve taken a bazooka shell without slowing down.  He could feel some tingling and mild stinging where the bullets hit him, telling him that they’d been dosed with the caustic chemical mixture which vampire hunters called holy water, but as he’d told the other Wardogs, he’d gone to great lengths to make sure the stuff didn’t bother him.  For all the good they were doing, they may as well have been shooting at him with BB guns.

Willie allowed himself a small stumble, which enabled the Wardogs to get right up on him, and just as their spiked front bumper came within inches of hitting his legs, the vampire launched himself upwards in a supremely graceful acrobatic arc.

Twisting and turning through the air over the front of the SUV, Willie drew the stolen katana as he dodged the erratically-fired bullets of the surprised Wardogs positioned in the two gunners’ hatches fitted into the roof of the vehicle.  Their aim was totally off, and despite the extremely close range, Willie wasn’t grazed by even a single bullet.  Fortunately, his aim was a helluva lot better.

The finely-honed blade whistled through the rushing air and neatly sliced through the necks of the gunners, making short work of the fang-resistant collars they wore.  The severed heads bounced off the top of the SUV and skipped along the surface of the alley, somewhat protected by their sturdy helmets, not that it really mattered if they got brain-damaged at this point.

Slipping the bloody sword back into the scabbard on his back as he dropped onto the vehicle’s roof, Willie took his cane in both hands, raised it high above his head, and with a roar of effort, plunged it through the metal plating, where it stabbed through the driver’s thick helmet and mercilessly speared his brain.  The SUV jerked sharply to one side, loudly scraping the alley wall with a scream of bent and torn metal, and Willie jammed down the button between the weasel’s ears, sending a fireball directly into the driver’s head, partly for good measure and partly out of sheer meanness.  The SUV jerked to the other side, sending up a tremendous shower of sparks as bricks met metal, and Willie could hear the passenger of the vehicle screaming bloody murder.  He wasn’t sure if they were screams of pain, but he hoped that the fireball he’d shot into the driver’s head had caused the passenger no little discomfort, because Willie was sure he was an asshole, too.  The SUV didn’t slow down in the slightest, and if anything, it was moving even faster before; the driver’s body had probably seized up in death, leaving the pedal to the metal, as it were, so this hell-ride likely wasn’t going to end for some time yet.

Willie jerked and snarled in sudden pain as a strong electric current suddenly surged through the metal roof, and his fangs involuntarily snapped into place as he hissed in anger.  As he twitched and held onto his cane for dear life, he silently thanked evolution for giving vampires such a strong resistance to electrical current, because from the feel of it, he’d already be a charred ruin if he were mortal.  Whoever had set up the charge had either been a fan of overkill or had known that the average vampire could go for a ride in an electric chair and come out of it with little more than muscle spasms, some painful tingling, and a few scorch marks.

“So you wish to engage in this game, do you?” barked the vampire down towards the roof, hoping that the passenger could hear him.  The SUV had righted itself, so Willie figured that the passenger had gotten control of the wheel to some extent.  “It’s time to educate you as to what happens when you get into a pissing contest with a gentleman of my caliber!”

Gripping his cane with twitching hands, Willie twisted the weasel head until its eyes glowed a soft blue.  He pressed the button between the weasel’s ears, sending a powerful electric surge through the lower part of the cane.

The vampire screamed as his cane added to the current flowing through the vehicle, but even as he yowled in pain, he could hear the Wardogs within doing the same thing as electricity arced from their overloaded equipment and gave them a dose of their own medicine.

The surge from his cane lasted only a few seconds before the tiny battery within it was drained, but it did its job admirably.  When his cane ran out of juice, he gasped in relief from the sudden lack of voltage running through his body; the super-charged surge had not only given the remaining Wardogs an agonizing jolt, but it had also shorted out the SUV’s electrical defense system.  As a matter of fact, it had probably shorted out most of the vehicle’s circuitry, because the headlights had gone out, plunging the alley back into darkness.  For a few moments, he hoped that it had gone so far as to take out the SUV’s alternator, thus putting the damned thing out of commission, but the truck just kept blindly rolling along, and the vampire sighed.

“I suppose it would have been too much to ask for,” he said.  “Oh well, I shall endeavor to make the best of my current situation.”

He sharply yanked his cane to the side, forcing it through the metal so that the puncture hole he’d made became a foot-long tear over the driver’s side of the SUV.  After swiftly extracting his cane, Willie dug his hand into the rip, grabbed hold, and tugged back, pulling back a strip of metal from the roof like the top from a can of sardines.  Willie stuffed his hand into the pocket of his pants and pulled out the rest of his cufflinks, six in all, gave them a squeeze to prime them, and then tossed them inside the vehicle, right in between the charred, headless body of the driver and the scorched, unconscious form of the Wardog in the passenger seat.

“If this doesn’t put an end to this unruly hunk of junk, I shall eat my jacket,” said Willie as he glanced up and saw that the end of the alley was rapidly drawing closer, and he most definitely didn’t want the runaway vehicle zipping out into the road, where somebody could get hurt.  The vampire crouched on the roof of the SUV for a moment, gathering his strength, and then launched himself straight up just as the cufflinks exploded with a tremendous racket.  The unified explosion was so loud in the echo-chamber of the alley that it felt like Willie was getting kicked in the head by a furious donkey.

The cufflinks did their job well, and they blew the blazes out of the Wardogs’ SUV, shredding its engine and ripping its very frame to pieces with the force of their combined blast.  The vehicle’s four wheels were torn to bits and blew off completely, leaving only the SUV’s momentum to carry it forward, and it skidded along the asphalt and one of the walls with a horrendous screech.  Fortunately, in addition to creating the awful noise, the friction against the two surfaces also rapidly reduced the SUV’s remaining momentum, quickly slowing it down.

Willie hit the ground a few seconds later, tucking and rolling to ease the impact, and when he hopped back to his feet, he was treated to the sight of the SUV’s battered, fiery remains loudly dragging to a stop at the opening of the alley, ending up on the sidewalk.  He thought he heard the surprised shouts of some crackheads, but his ears were ringing so badly from the thunderous explosions that he wasn’t entirely certain.

“Just because something is sturdy on the outside doesn’t mean that its insides are equally as durable,” said the dirty, disheveled vampire with considerable satisfaction.  “That should ensure that that particular set of goons won’t be bothering anybody else any time soon, and it also ensures that I will not be making a meal out of my jacket.”

His triumph was cut short as something heavy slammed into his back and knocked him onto the ground, and a foul, unnatural scent hit his nostrils as hard as the asphalt hit his face.

Before he knew what was happening, Willie felt claws sinking deeply into his wounded shoulder, causing him to howl in considerable pain.  Yanking the claws back, his attacker leaped off his back, relieving the weight from his spine, and he heard the clack of claws landing on the asphalt next to his head.  He started to push himself up, but a powerful blow to the back of his skull bounced his forehead off the unyielding ground, causing him to see stars.

Then the world turned topsy-turvy as he was yanked up off the ground and flung against the alley wall hard enough to leave a Willie-sized indentation in the bricks.  The sound of rapidly clicking claws filled the alley as his attacker, an indistinct figure to the vampire’s crossed eyes, rushed towards him and speared him like a football lineman, knocking the wind out of his lungs and further driving him into the wall.

A leathery hand clamped against his head and smashed it backwards into the bricks over and over again, apparently intent upon cracking open his cranium like an egg.  Amidst the sounds of abused bricks crumbling against his blessedly thick skull, Willie could hear inhuman snarls and growls, as though his attacker were bestial in nature.  That didn’t entirely surprise him, because lately he’d been hearing rumors amongst those in the know, and the Frog Brothers themselves had shared suspicions of their own with him the last time he’d spoken with them.  From past experience with them, Willie knew the Frogs were an excitable pair, and he’d wondered about the veracity of their suspicions, but now he was starting to wonder …

The vampire started to bring his cane up to skewer his attacker with it, but to his dismay he found that he’d lost his cane somewhere along the line.  That only slowed him down for a second, however, because even though Willie had gotten quite used to his versatile, homemade companion since he’d first constructed it back in the 1970’s, he’d had nearly a century of experience dealing with hostile types before his weasel-headed friend came along, so he was far from helpless.

“Unhand me!” he roared as his eyes blazed bright red in vampiric anger, grabbing hold of his attacker’s thick wrist in a crushing grip, driving his hard-as-steel fingernails into the tough, leathery flesh, drawing hot, unnatural-smelling blood within moments.

His attacker let out a metallic screech and slammed Willie’s head back against the wall in fury, nearly knocking him out.  As rational thought slipped away from the vampire, his instincts took control, and he immediately twisted his head around and chomped down on the attacker’s other hand, sinking his fangs deep into the flesh and muscle.  The taste was horrible, but that was of little consequence to Willie, and as soon as he had a good grip, he started shaking his head from side to side, like a dog worrying its prey to death, and the shadowy attacker let out several angry screeches in response.

At the same time, Willie sharply twisted the attacker’s wrist in his hand, cranking it around in directions that it wasn’t meant to go, and as soon as he heard the gunshot-crack of a bone breaking, he started wildly pounding on his attacker’s head with his free hand, giving it something else to worry about.  Using his shoulders, the vampire pushed back from the wall, getting back to his feet again, and he started kicking for all he was worth, eliciting a bunch of pained screeches for his efforts.

Biting down on his attacker’s hand even harder, Willie tore loose a gross-tasting chunk of muscle and tissue and spit it to the ground so that he could get a good look at just who was giving him so much trouble.  Willie’s eyes widened marginally as he took in the sight of the vicious, feral creature gnashing at him with inch-long, razor-sharp teeth.  From as near as he could figure, it looked as though it were a cross between a frog and an ape.

Though it was in a hunched, ape-like posture, if it had stood up straight on its clawed, three-toed feet, it would have stood as tall as Willie, if not a bit taller, and it appeared to be pure muscle beneath its rough-textured, greenish black hide.  Large, pointed ears sprang from either side of its ape-like head, and its large eyes were a sickening shade of yellow, with vertical pupils like a cat’s.  Just from looking at the creature’s eyes, Willie immediately knew two things.  Firstly, its eyes were specifically suited for use in dark environments, and secondly, this thing really, really wanted to kill him.  Well, it was about to find out just how hard it was to kill Screamin’ Willie.

He drew in a deep breath as he struggled with the snapping, clawing creature, getting ready to blitzkrieg it with a scream that would blow it straight through the alley wall.  But before he could unleash his secret weapon, the creature clubbed him across the face with the clawed, three-fingered hand Willie had bitten a piece out of a few seconds before.

The vampire reeled from the hit, which was easily on par with what a strong vampire could dish out, and he twisted the creature’s other wrist even further, splintering its bones.  “This should give you a considerable case of arthritis whenever the weather changes!” snarled the vampire as he gave the creature a kick in the face, rocking back its head.  “I have no idea what pit spawned the likes of you, but I daresay that I am going to send you back to it in numerous pieces!”

The creature roared in pain and anger, and when it swung its bitten hand in a wide arc, intending to slice Willie’s head off, the vampire ducked and rammed his wounded shoulder directly into the thing’s midsection, rising up as he did so to get the creature off its feet.  The vampire lifted and rammed the creature backwards into the alley wall, ignoring the pain of his shoulder, and he finally let go of the thing’s wrist so that he could hammer away at its head and massive, muscled shoulders with both hands.  He didn’t just punch, either: he clawed, ripped, and tore.

The positions of predator and prey were suddenly reversed, and the creature found itself on the defensive against the growling, relentless vampire that kept slicing and pounding away on it.  When it tried to lunge forward, Willie headbutted it hard, slamming its head back against the wall, after which he started punching and kicking at its midsection with the unwavering intensity of an anti-aircraft cannon.

Willie didn’t take his eyes off the creature’s for a second, baring his fangs and snapping at it as he attacked, letting it know that not only was he not afraid of it, but also that he was as intent upon killing it as it was on killing him.

He’d heard whispered tales of creatures being genetically engineered specifically for the purpose of hunting and killing vampires, and while he had never encountered one in the flesh, he was almost certain that this thing was one of them.  The eyes and ears spoke of enhanced senses, the creature’s strength was comparable to a vampire’s, and its claws (and likely its teeth) were sharp enough to easily cleave through a vampire’s flesh.  Its foul smell and horrid-tasting blood also spoke of origins that weren’t exactly normal in nature.

He’d tasted some awful blood in his time, but all of that had had a distinctly “real” flavor to it, while this thing’s blood and scent had a sharp chemical tinge to them, and it practically stank of a laboratory.  The sheer unnaturalness of it deeply offended him, just as the cybernetic enhancements in the bodies of the Rising Sun hunters had, and Willie wanted to put this creature down and put it down hard.  If this was the sort of thing some of the hunters’ guilds was putting together these days, he was going to have to step up his efforts against them.  But that could come later … right now he just wanted this blasted thing dead at his feet.

When he threw a punch at the creature’s face, it moved fast enough to dodge and clamp down on his hand with its mouthful of wicked teeth, and now the creature returned an earlier favor when it started to worry Willie’s hand back and forth.

“You damnable bastard!” bellowed the vampire as he rammed a knee into its stomach, but the creature didn’t let up.  “I am not anybody’s chew toy, least of all yours!”

A sudden rush of wooziness ran through the vampire, and to his horror he realized that the creature was secreting some sort of poison or sedative into his body through its teeth!

Luckily, Willie had been zapped with almost every poison known to man, and a few others to boot, as that sort of thing came with the territory when one hunted vampire hunters, and he knew some quick and dirty ways to counteract their effects.  So he punched himself in the side of the head, something that always severely pissed him off at a very basic level.

Adrenaline surged through his system, immediately combating the poison, and clarity returned to Willie’s world with refreshing sharpness.  Then it started to get blurry again as the creature kept right on secreting its stuff, which was a lot more powerful than he’d originally reckoned.

Willie punched himself in the head again to summon up more adrenaline, but no matter how mad he got, the poison pouring into his body kept overwhelming him.  He punched at the creature’s mouth, trying to get it to let go, but its jaws must have been like an alligator’s in that they were designed to clamp down with nearly unbreakable strength.  The thing’s teeth were also ridiculously hard, and punching them was like slugging a diamond wall; they might have even been harder than vampire fangs, which were notoriously difficult to break.

No matter how the vampire kicked or punched or clawed at the creature, it wouldn’t let go, and with each second that went by, more poison entered Willie’s system, dampening his reflexes and slowing his brain, taking his strength and cleverness away.  If he could stop the influx of poison into himself, he knew it wouldn’t take long for his body to counteract it, as he’d taken great pains to ensure that his body was superb at overpowering poisons and dangerous chemicals, but the only way he could do that was get his hand out of this damned creature’s mouth!

He tried to stab at the creature with some of the knives he’d taken from the Wardogs, but by this time he’d been slowed down enough that the creature was able to block his attacks and send the knives flying.  The vampire managed to sink one into the creature’s shoulder, but considering that he’d been aiming for its eye, it wasn’t very reassuring.  To make things even more difficult, the thing kept clawing and swiping at him as it bit down on his hand, not giving him even a second’s peace, and all the squirming and dodging he was forced to do certainly wasn’t helping matters any.

Finally, in a move of desperation, Willie drew the katana from its scabbard on his back and sliced his own hand off at the wrist.

“Hellfire!” he roared as the super-sharp blade, driven by his frantic might, slashed through his flesh and bone.  Blood sprayed out of his wrist in a crimson gout that splashed all over the creature’s face.

The effect was immediate.  The moment the poison stopped entering him, Willie’s body began to ferociously combat it, pumping him up with adrenaline and other vampiric chemicals to restore his strength and mental clarity.  The agony from slicing his own hand off didn’t hurt matters, either, and Willie’s mind was as sharp as a razor within a scant few seconds.

His attacker was dumbfounded by this sudden, unexpected move, and it momentarily stopped short in surprise, apparently unable to comprehend how Willie was now several steps away even though it still had his twitching hand in its mouth.

Always one to press an advantage, Willie rushed forward and snarled, “Return my damned hand, you malformed cretin!”

The bleeding of the stump of his right wrist already slowing down thanks to his body’s furious repair-work, Willie kicked the creature squarely in the midsection as he brought the katana down on its shoulder.  The blade went through the creature’s skin like it was nothing, and partially made it through the beast’s collarbone before its momentum was finally stopped.  Not to be discouraged, Willie yanked the blade back and forth, intending to simply saw through the bone with it.  Not the most sophisticated of assaults, but then, Willie was flat-out mad by this point, so it was understandable.

This got the creature’s attention, and it finally figured out that holding onto the severed hand was doing it no good whatsoever, so it dropped it to the ground and let out an angry, pained roar.  This was a terrible miscalculation on its part, because that’s exactly what Willie wanted it to do.  As soon as the creature’s mouth had opened to its fullest, the one-handed vampire stabbed his katana directly into the gaping maw, twisting the blade in the process.

The ultra-strong metal of the blade proved more than a match for the creature’s soft inner tissues, as well as its spinal cord, which was directly in the sword’s path thanks to the creature’s hunched posture.  The blade emerged from the creature’s back, slick with its nasty blood, and Willie kept on pushing until he’d embedded the sword deep into the wall behind the creature, pinning it in place as it screeched and spasmed in what the vampire hoped was great discomfort.

Willie let go of the sword, drew one of the guns he’d swiped from the dead Wardogs, and pumped round after round of holy water-treated bullets into the thing’s midsection.  Reeking smoke surged from the entry wounds as the holy water ate away at the creature’s flesh like high-powered acid, and the beast’s spasms got even worse.

For a few moments, the vampire feared that the creature was even tougher than he’d reckoned, and that his efforts had been in vain.  But then the thing’s yellow eyes rolled back in their sockets and it suddenly went as limp as a sock, giving one last groan before going silent.

Willie watched it for several long moments, waiting for it to spring back to life and come after him, cautious from past experience.  He’d nearly gotten killed a number of times when foes had played possum on him, and he wasn’t about to lose his other hand to this bastard.  But the creature stayed where it was, hanging on the sword rammed through the back of its head, and Willie carefully knelt at its feet and retrieved his hand from the asphalt.

“Sorry about that, old fellow,” he said to the chewed and dirty hand as he brushed it off on his pant leg.  “I would not have taken such a harsh course of action if not for the desperation of the situation.  I shall try not to let it happen again.”

He pressed the end of the hand to his slowly oozing stump, taking care to line everything up as closely as he could manage in his battered state.  A sudden, searing jolt of pain in the hand told him that his body was already getting to work on reconnecting it, and a brief rush of wooziness rippled through him as the leftover poison in the hand was absorbed.  The vampire gasped at the sharp agony of reconnection, which was so keen that his knees actually trembled.

He stumbled forward and ended up against the wall next to the creature, leaning on his shoulder as he cradled his injured arm to his chest.  “I shall definitely try not to let this happen again, because I had forgotten just how much this hurts,” he growled, shaking his head.

The sound of sirens in the distance reached his ears, and Willie hissed in dismay, though he knew this was inevitable.  Though it seemed like a full night had passed since the Rising Sun hunters had made their presence known, it had in actuality only been about ten minutes, if that.

Under normal circumstances, the police would have taken longer to respond, but Willie knew that the multiple explosions, gunshots, and assorted mayhem he’d been a part of wasn’t exactly considered to be “normal circumstances,” and the cops were going to be very curious as to what the hell was going on.  That meant he needed to get out of here, because he not only didn’t want to get tangled up in a police investigation, but he also didn’t want any other moron hunters or their mutated beasts cutting down any cops that accidentally got in the way.

Hoping that any remaining foes held off for another minute or so, Willie carefully moved his good hand down the wrist of his reattached hand and got a good grip on it, making sure that he was keeping the hand firmly against the stump.  Reattachment wasn’t something that was done in just a few minutes, and it wouldn’t be solidly reconnected to him for at least another hour or so; actually, taking all of the blood he’d lost into consideration, it would probably take several hours in his current state.  However, just as there was more than one way to skin a cat, there was also more than one way to reattach a hand, especially when he needed it now.  It was going to hurt even worse than it already did, and he’d likely have some painful arthritis in it for a day or two, but that was the price one paid for expediency.

Holding onto his hand and wrist tightly, Willie concentrated on the wound, reaching down through his nerves and veins to feel both sides of the wound, focusing on them with his practiced mind.  He took a breath, put his wrist close to his mouth, and loudly called out, “Isie ahksnei'rhs'hdh lei!”

It felt like his arm had been hit with a live wire as the powerful healing spell did its work, and it hurt so badly that the vampire threw back his head and shrieked loud enough to shatter any glass that had survived his previous scream.  He fell to his knees, panting and gasping as his head spun, and he came uncomfortably close to passing out altogether.

Though he was a full-blooded vampire and didn’t have access to all of the strange and wonderful magickal powers that half-blooded vampires did, he’d learned numerous incantations and spoken-word spells to help him out in times of need.  The most basic magick spells were invoked by the unique aural vibrations that could be created by speaking their tangled and complex incantations, and putting his wounded wrist directly in front of his mouth ensured that it was hit by the vibrations, thus making certain that the spell went where he needed it to go.  Focusing and concentrating on the necessary area didn’t hurt, either, he’d found.  Too bad the action of the spell itself did hurt.  It hurt like a motherfucker, as a matter of fact.

“I have … got to sit down … with that irascible gypsy … and have her impart some … of her vast knowledge on me … so that maybe I can do this without nearly … causing my head to explode,” Willie groaned in between gasps, getting back to his feet.

The sirens were drawing closer, nearly upon him, and he could hear various shouts and exclamations coming from the buildings around him.  He had to get moving and soon, because from the sounds of it, everybody in the area knew that something wild was going on in the alley.  He wasn’t worried about the burnt-out hulk of the SUV or the various mangled bodies at the other end of the alley, because those would be far easier to explain away than the strange creature pinned to the wall by a black katana blade.

Willie glanced down at his formerly-wounded wrist and carefully flexed his hand.  It stung a bit, and there was a ring of dark scar tissue marking the spot where he’d sliced the hand off, not to mention the patches of it in the places where the monstrosity had gnawed up his hand, but even though it wasn’t as pretty as it was before, it worked and it was once more firmly attached.  The scar tissue would go away on its own after awhile, and was of little consequence, especially at this point in time.

Moving quickly, Willie yanked the sword out of the dead creature’s mouth and let it fall to the ground as he slipped the blade back into its scabbard.  After waiting several seconds to make certain that the damned thing wasn’t going to jump back up and bite him again, he bent over and picked it up, silently thanking his vampiric muscles for being so useful in lifting dead weight.

Slinging the corpse over his shoulder, Willie glanced around, located his cane, and retrieved it with a grin, glad to have it back in his hand.  The vampire then darted down a side alley, easily carting his burden along through the shadows.  After a short distance, Willie sprang into the air and nimbly landed on the lid of a dumpster, and then jumped again, letting his momentum carry him forward until he landed on a fire escape.  From there, the vampire leaped across the way, rebounded off the wall, gaining height, and when he reached the fire escape, he repeated the process.  It only took a few seconds of bouncing between the wall and fire escape to reach the rooftops, and as soon as he skidded to a stop on the gravel-coated surface of a roof, he stopped and rapidly scanned the area with his eyes, ears, and nose, looking for trouble.

He unconsciously filtered out all of the other noises of the city, concentrating on anything that struck him as unusual, and after a few moments, his ears picked up something caught his interest.  It was a faint, hurried voice, which in and of itself wasn’t unusual in L.A., but the fact that the voice was talking about him made it stand out.

“He k-killed the predator!” rasped the voice, which sounded like it belonged to a very scared man.  “You said if n-nobody else could get him, the p-predator would!”  The voice paused a few moments, and another voice spoke, but it was very faint and overlaid with a cloud of static, so Willie couldn’t make out what it was saying.  The first voice returned a few seconds later, whimpering, “N-no, I lost sight of him!  He t-took the hunter and disappeared down a-another alley!  Y-you’ve got to get me out of here!”

Willie dumped the body of the creature, which he assumed was the “predator” the scared man had mentioned, behind a row of air-conditioning machines, where it was nice and shadowy.  The predator’s corpse was unlikely to be discovered here; he could just come back and get it later, because he really wanted to get it underground and study it.  After a moment’s thought, he also removed the holographic projector vest and tossed it on top of the predator.  The vest had already taken further damage in all the chaos, and he didn’t want to tear it up even further, because it was probably already going to be a major bitch getting it to reveal its secrets to him and he didn’t want to make it worse.  He kept the remaining guns with him, though, just in case.

Turning towards the voice, which was coming from a tall building on the other side of the alley where all of this bad business had gone down, the vampire took off across the rooftop at a dead run, moving so fast that he was a blur.  Without the slightest hesitation, he flung himself into the air, hurtling across the alley where the remnants of the Wardogs and clan Rising Sun hunters lay, and he snagged onto the side of the building on the other side with his bare hands, holding on like an insect.  His cane held between his teeth, Willie scrambled straight up the side of the building, slipped over the ledge, and dropped low to the roof, mixing in with the shadows.

He heard footsteps rapidly retreating across the rooftop, though he instinctively knew that he hadn’t been spotted yet.  Keeping low, Willie darted along the rooftop in the direction of the footsteps, and as he ducked around vents and air-conditioning units, he caught sight of a man wearing a small microphone headset, binoculars, and a long black leather coat hurrying towards the fire escape.  The vampire vaulted a big, rattling air-conditioning unit, zipped across the tarred rooftop, and slipped his arm around the man’s neck just as he took his first step onto the fire escape.

“Ohmygawdhe’sgotme!” shrieked the man as Willie hauled him back into the shadows and slammed him up against the air-conditioning unit he’d jumped a few seconds before.  The man’s screechings came to an end when Willie laid his cane across the man’s throat and pinned him in place with it, though he continued to uselessly struggle and squirm about while making choked sounds of protests.

“Were you in the process of heading somewhere else?” Willie asked softly, grinning at the man, who was a nondescript, slightly balding fellow in what looked like his mid-30’s.  The vampire yanked the man’s wireless headset off, looked it over for a moment, and then slipped it onto his own head.

A rush of static filled his ears, and Willie heard an impatient voice snapping, “Repeat, are you there, Zinsky?  Have you made contact with the target?  Give me a sitrep immediately!”

The vampire adjusted the headset’s mic and then said, “The good Mr. Zinksy is currently occupied at the moment.  Can I extend you the courtesy of taking a message, perhaps?”

“Who is this?!” demanded the voice on the other end.

“The target,” answered Willie.  “I would like you to know that you have inconvenienced me greatly this evening with your ignant business, and I most certainly do not appreciate the way your friends have interrupted my trip to the barber shop for a nice trim.”

“Fuck you, bloodsucker!  This isn’t a game!”

Willie rolled his eyes.  “Well, of course I realize that this isn’t any damned game.  Why do you think I have taken the liberty of killing everybody and everything that has been sent after me?  If this were a game, I would have simply knocked everybody over and sent them home to their mothers.  What this has been, however, is a gross violation of the Frog Accords, which were established several years back so that this sort of ignant nonsense would not happen in the confines of Los Angeles any longer!”

“Fuck you, fuck the Frog Brothers, and fuck the Accords.  I refuse to recognize the authority of a treaty signed by a couple of vampire hunters who were gutless enough to make a deal with the vampires infesting this city!  Those two little pricks don’t even have any business calling themselves vampire hunters!”

“On the contrary,” said Willie, “Those two young men are the finest vampire hunters in this entire state, and are among the finest vampire hunters I have ever had the pleasure of doing business with.”

“That’s exactly why they don’t have any business calling themselves vampire hunters: they deal with the likes of you!”

“If you are in possession of any sort of brain at all, you would be wise to deal with me, as well.  What do you say that we meet in the Collins Cemetery?  It is only a few miles east from my current position, and since I am familiar with the technology of this headset, I know its range is relatively small, so I know you are somewhere in the area, as well.  It would be a simple matter to meet you there within the next half hour or thereabouts,” said Willie, casually holding Zinsky in place with his cane while he rifled through the man’s pockets and relieved him of several weapons with his free hand.

“Do you think I’m stupid, bloodsucker?”

“I am rapidly moving in the direction of that particular opinion, yes.”

“Fuck you.  Why should I give you the chance to round up a few of your buddies and ambush me when I get there?”

“I will not be rounding up any of my buddies, due to the fact that I handle this sort of business on my own.  This is my part and parcel, as it were.  Believe it or not, I actually do wish to reach some sort of peaceful agreement with you regarding your presence within Los Angeles, and I also wish to impart some valuable knowledge about the real world to you, as well.”

“What do you mean, ‘real world?’”

“At this juncture in time, you are currently ensnared in the tangled web of a fairy tale regarding your chosen profession, and I wish to help remove the scales from your eyes.  The Frog Brothers were man enough to sit down and discuss matters with me; are you?” asked Willie, inspecting the silver insignia, which was in the shape of a dragon, pinned to the lapel of Zinsky’s coat.  He nodded at it, immediately recognizing what guild it represented.  They were a young, hotheaded bunch from what he understood, though this was the first time he’d ever had direct dealings with them.

“You’re not going to goad me into a stupid move that easily, bloodsucker.”

“Very well, if that is how you wish to play it.  I should warn you, however, that if you refuse this offer of a reasonable meeting, I am going to make it my top priority to wipe the entire Silver Dragon guild off the face of the Earth, as well as those of the Wardogs and the Rising Sun clan.  Seeing as how I helped write up the Frog Accords, I take this violation of their terms to be a very serious thing indeed.  It is written in the Accords that violations on either side, be they committed by mortal or immortal, will be dealt with harshly, and I will not continue to suffer the existence of guilds that will so blatantly ignore the rules.  Either you speak with me, or I will embark on a crusade that will leave you and all of your comrades very, very dead.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

Willie simply laughed at that: the history and legends surrounding his career as a vampire hunter hunter were perfectly capable of speaking for him on that matter.

After a few moments of chuckling, the vampire said, “Well, look at it this way.  Perhaps you will have a streak of good luck and be able to kill me, which would certainly solve the problem of having me on your tail.  I shall be arriving at Collins Cemetery alone because I have no fear of you.  Do you even have the intestinal fortitude to show up at all?”

Willie then yanked the headset off, threw it to the roof, and stomped it to pieces.  Zinsky struggled to free himself, but it did him no good, especially since the vampire was feeling rather hungry at the moment.  The rapid-fire combat he’d survived had taken its toll on him, and his captive held more than enough blood to fully reinvigorate him and prepare him for the task ahead of him.  Not to mention the fact that there was also likely plenty of useful information within Zinsky’s mind, which would be Willie’s for the taking if he fed from the man.

“Terribly sorry to put a damper on your day, Mr. Zinksy,” said Willie, giving the struggling hunter a grin, “But I am afraid that you are worth far more to me dead than alive, so this is where you check out.  Just be thankful that I am going to be far more merciful with you than you and your ilk would have been with me if you were able to get me at a disadvantage.”

Zinsky’s eyes widened in terror, and then they crossed and rolled back into his head as Willie struck a precise blow to the side of his neck, knocking him unconscious.  The vampire eagerly latched onto the man’s neck and had himself a very educational feast, and then made a phone call to a half-vampire friend in the LAPD, tipping him off to the origins of the mess in the alley, before he started out towards the cemetery.

*     *     *

            Archer, flanked by two other well-armed members of the Silver Dragon guild, cautiously strode along the cracked and weedy path winding its way through the heavily-overgrown Collins Cemetery, not liking the looks of the place at all.  It appeared to have been abandoned for quite some time, and it wasn’t anywhere to be found on the electronic map of Los Angeles he brought up on his handheld GPS unit.  He considered himself lucky to have found it at all; the cemetery’s gates were so stupendously entangled in vines and weeds that they were almost completely hidden from sight.  Like everything else on the dark, lonely street it was at the end of, the cemetery looked to have been forgotten a long, long time ago.

Before he’d gotten into the vampire-hunting business over a decade ago, he never would have suspected that such places even existed within many of the metropolises dotting the United States, which was still rather young in terms of urbanization as compared places like England and China, but to his surprise every major American city was loaded with hidden nooks and crannies that nobody seemed to know about.  Nobody save the vampires of that particular city.  He wasn’t sure if the secret areas had become forgotten due to some design of the vampires or if the vampires just naturally latched onto such places, but what he did know is that these dead zones were definitely vampire turf.  Regular people usually never entered them, likely by instinct, and he’d discovered that most people didn’t even like to talk about them, and preferred to simply act as though they didn’t exist.

He’d made numerous attempts to make officials in several different major cities aware of the dead zones, and had shown them his maps of the zones, as well as pointing out that such areas were potential hotbeds for trouble, without actually mentioning the whole vampire thing.  But his efforts had been ignored every single time, and the officials all treated him as though he were some sort of basket-case conspiracy theorist, so he’d given up trying to do them a favor in that aspect.  He’d just take care of the vampires infesting their cities instead.

He glanced upwards at the night sky, which was tinged with an orange hue from the city’s overwhelming light pollution, and he wished some of that heavy-duty illumination would find its way into the old graveyard.  Despite being located on the edge of the second-largest city in America, the Collins Cemetery was as dark and silent as a graveyard along a sleepy old country road.  Overhead, the branches of the countless, massive trees growing throughout the cemetery twined together and choked out the light entirely in many places, bathing the necropolis in stygian darkness.  Tilting, cracked, and untended tombstones dotted the rolling landscape, as well as numerous large vaults, monuments, and statues, creating literally thousands of places to hide; simply put, it was a tactical nightmare.

The further they ventured into the cemetery, the more Archer began to think he was just better off getting the hell out of here and waiting to see if the vampire really had the guts to back up his threat.  But then, showing fear to a vampire often wasn’t the brightest thing in the world, even though some of them tended to view it as a sign of respect whenever a mortal showed fear of them.  They were such a mercurial and varying species that it was hard to determine just what the right course of action was when dealing with one.  Usually, it was just best to kill them and get them out of the equation entirely, which was easier said than done.

Their footsteps along the path were muffled by the deep quiet engulfing the cemetery, and Archer was unable to hear any of the omnipresent sounds of the city, even when he stopped and listened for them.  It was as though the cemetery was its own little world, separate from the vast urban sprawl outside its gates.

            “I thought it was understood that you were to arrive at this location unaccompanied by anybody else,” Willie’s voice called out from somewhere amongst all the trees and tombstones.

            Archer and the other two hunters twisted around this way and that, trying to determine where the vampire was hiding at, but it was impossible to locate him.

            “And I thought it was understood that I’m not stupid,” Archer growled in response, hefting his electric crossbow in defiance.

            “That remains to be seen, Mr. Archer,” replied Willie, stepping out from behind a mossy, vine-entangled angel statue over ten feet tall, his cane in one hand and a human skull in the other.

*     *     *

            Archer scowled in disgust when Willie stepped into view, and both he and his two cohorts leveled their crossbows at him, the weapons’ laser sights pinpointing his heart with three glowing red dots.  He almost scowled at that; as much as lasers and their various applications fascinated him, he thought that laser sights were a crutch used by incompetents that weren’t good enough to shoot with the eyes they’d been born with.  But he had other concerns at the moment besides his opinion of laser sights, so he let that matter drop without a word.

            “Is … is that Zinsky’s?” demanded Archer angrily, indicating the skull with his crossbow.  Just the mention of such a thing made his two companions look even more uneasy than they were already.

            Willie shook his head.  “No.  I left the earthly remains of your friend safely ensconced in a dumpster close to where I found him; you may retrieve him from there following this meeting.  That is, if you are actually intelligent enough to be able to survive this meeting.  But I am getting off the subject, aren’t I?  This gentleman in my hand goes by the name of Henry, and he is a souvenir from one of my earliest adventures in this strange little profession that I have dedicated so much of my time and energy to.  He is something of a good luck charm, you might say.”

            The three vampire hunters all looked derisive at that, but were professional enough not to actually exchange looks of doubt with one another; as they never took their eyes off the vampire, not even for a second.  Willie wasn’t surprised at their doubt, and was used to that sort of reaction.  Most people underestimated Henry when they first laid eyes upon him.

            “Now, I am going to ask your companions to depart with all due haste, so that you and I may have a productive discussion, and I am only go to ask them once.  If they do not leave, I am going to have Henry deal with them,” said Willie evenly, motioning towards Archer’s Silver Dragon cohorts.  “Seeing as how I’ve taken Henry away from his revelry, you most especially do not want to deal with him at this point in time, because he is a most coarse individual when taken away from a party before he is ready.”

            “Fuck you, bloodsucker,” growled the tall, bearded hunter on Archer’s side.  “We don’t take orders from your kind.”

            The skull in Willie’s hand began to cackle in amusement, its empty eye sockets glowing with a bright green light, and in a thick Jamaican accent it said, “So ya don’t wanna be doin’ what ya been told?  How’s about if I was tellin’ ya to die?  What would ya be doin’ den?  You’d be dyin’, wouldn’t ya?”

            Henry suddenly lurched forward through the air, floating upwards to the height of a man, and the spectral form of a colorfully-clad, long-haired voodoo priest took shape around the hovering skull, revealing what Henry had looked like back in his fleshly days.  He looked at the surprised vampire hunters with disdain, the long bone through his ghostly nose twitching as he made a face of disgust at them.  “White boys still chasin’ de black boys, is it?  How ya like it when de black boys fight back, eh?”

            Wind swirled around the voodoo priest’s see-through form, and he cackled again when the hunters let fly with their crossbows and the stakes passed through him harmlessly.  Willie had taken advantage of the hunters’ surprise to duck behind a nearby tombstone, away from their laser-sighted crossbows, and he had a great view of the action.  Henry pointed at the trio with his gnarled ceremonial staff, which was topped with a red human skull, and gleefully barked out several ancient words of power.  The two hunters on either side of Archer screeched as they were turned inside out and then torn apart by the forces commanded by the specter.

            Archer somehow managed to keep his cool despite his two men more or less exploding on either side of him, and he dashed off the path and ran through the thick grass, aiming his crossbow as he ran.  He fired off a stake at Henry, and his aim was true.  The stake hit the floating skull right between the eyes, but unfortunately for Archer, Henry’s skull as a great deal more solid than it looked, and the stake shattered against the sturdy bone.

However, even though it didn’t damage him, it did have the effect of annoying the ghostly voodoo priest, and Henry growled and turned in Archer’s direction, pointing his staff and barking out arcane syllables, apparently determined to give the lead vampire hunter something to think about.

“Dead for over a century, and the man still has a terrible temper,” Willie murmured as he hopped back up from behind the tombstone and moved towards Henry.

Tombstones were yanked out of the ground by the voodoo priest’s fury, and he launched them towards the galloping vampire hunter with a wave of his hand.  “Go plinkin’ me skull, will ya?” Henry laughed as Archer narrowly ducked a flying tombstone.  “Nobody does dat and gets away wit it!”

The specter clapped his hands together, and two tombstones rose into the air and slammed themselves together, trying to squash the vampire hunter between them like a giant pair of cymbals.  The dead priest clapped his hands together again and again, and the tombstones eagerly chased after Archer, as intent upon him as a pack of dogs on a particularly tasty mailman as they clashed together over and over.  This was getting bad.

Willie reached through Henry’s ghostly form and firmly grabbed the top of the skull, the only solid part of the priest.  “That is enough for the moment, my dead friend!  I wish to speak with this remaining straggler, and I will not have you flattening him into an unrecognizable puddle of protoplasm before I have a chance to reason with him!”

<