Power Trip - Act 2
Pearce slowly laid the girl back on his large bed. He was starting to like this flavor, this desire for him. She wanted it as much as he did. But he wasn’t the one about to die.
At first, after he had been cursed, Pearce had been unable to find any good meals. Everywhere he went, people were already terrified of him: destroying his power over them. If they were afraid of him, he couldn’t stand to even be near them. One night in front of all the remnants of his gang he had vomited at the terror he inspired in a young couple as they pleaded for their lives in a back alley. After that he changed. The Prince had retired and he had sunk to feeding off prostitutes whom he was forced to knock out first. Soon he was known in those circles and pimps would hire thugs to try and hunt him down.
Now that was all changed. With his new resources, those same pimps were offering up the best of their fang junkies for his own personal collection. Perhaps he was slowly rising back to his position? The vampire scoffed at this thought. Not with the IXI he carried. That was the badge of shame that only he knew about.
He slowly lowered his mouth to her neck and gently kissed her, drawing her warm flesh into his mouth. He could taste her skin, nipping it playfully. She giggled.
With a loud crash, his bedroom door burst inward and four men in black body armor and automatic weapons rushed in, red laser lights playing over him.
“Slowly get out of the bed and get down on the floor,” one of the masked figures ordered in a no-nonsense tone of voice.
Pearce sighed with annoyance. “Do you have any idea—”
“Get on the floor or we will open fire,” the lead figure ordered. The vampire sighed and rolled off the bed onto the floor where he sat with his arms crossed. The four figures approached and one lowered his weapon to speak into a radio.
“We have him, lieutenant,” the commando said. Before he had even replaced his radio in his belt, a strutting man marched over the remains of the door and walked between the guns to examine the vampire sitting annoyed on the floor.
“Well, well, well,” he said with as much self righteousness as he could muster. “What have we–”
Pearce lifted his arm and his silver bracelet suddenly attracted all the laser lights in the room. Glinting and sparkling with the lasers and the candle light, the bracelet stopped the lieutenant’s boasting dead. There was a silence which only the lieutenant and the vampire shared.
“Uh... oh.” He sighed and patted the lead commando on the shoulder. “Okay boys, well done... this training session’s over. Return to base.” There was confused silence for a moment.
“Training session?” someone muttered. The lieutenant turned at the door to shout.
“You heard me! Back to base, double quick!” The soldiers hustled out of the room with all the stealth and muscle with which they had entered. The lieutenant stepped backwards over the remains of the door with a sudden apologetic smile. “Sorry about all this... the... uh, Council failed to inform us of your new address.” The vampire said nothing, then glanced at his watch, sending the lieutenant out into the living room where he stepped over the remains of the front doors. “Have a good night!” he called out as he left the vampire’s condo.
“Damn government agencies,” Pearce sighed. Several girls wandered into his bedroom. “It’s alright,” he reassured, standing and ushering them back to their bedroom. “Everything’s fine, back to your rooms.” When the last of them was gone, he jumped up onto his bed beside the girl who was now just staring at him with wide eyes. He studied her nervously for a moment. Fear? “It’s fine! Everything’s—” with an instinct honed since he moved in, he drew the extra covers over her head, twisting so as to appear alone in the bed.
An instant later there came an uncertain knock on the wall beside the doorframe. Niki stepped through with a frown as she examined the broken door. “Did I come at a bad time?”
“No,” Pearce laughed loudly, partly because of the ridiculousness of the situation and partly to cover the dissatisfaction of the girl under the covers. “Of course not! I was redecorating.”
“Uh, good. Then we should get going...” she examined him as he did the same to her. “I have the location for that gang you tipped me about... sooo... we should get going before it gets light.”
Pearce nodded, standing up quickly and moving out of his room, the Slayer in tow. “Good idea. We should go. In fact, we’re leaving right now.”
“Are you okay?” Niki asked, raising an eyebrow. “Are you high?”
“What? No!” he laughed nervously. “Of course not!”
Niki cocked her head. “Stop saying that.” As they moved down the hallway, they caught one of the elevators just as the doors were closing. The Slayer and the vampire squeezed in between the many men in black body armor carrying automatic weapons.
“Going down?” one of them asked. Pearce gulped.
When the elevator got to the bottom they all piled out, Pearce dragging Niki as far ahead of them as he could. They skidded through the lobby and out onto the dark streets where the vampire stood panting for a moment.
“Who do you suppose they were?” Niki chuckled, ignoring Pearce entirely.
“What?” Pearce jumped. “I don’t know, nobody... I have no idea.”
Niki shrugged. “Whatever. Let’s go, it’s this way.”
The fight broke out the instant they set foot in the alley. These vamps were unlike the usual riffraff of the New York City sewers. They were dressed in robes and all carried identical daggers.
“Shit,” Niki hissed as she kicked one in the chest and drove a stake through another, “looks like we walked in on a cult party.” She leapt into the air and grabbed a vamp’s head with her thighs, using her arms to twist them both down to the ground. Once down she drove a steak into its chest. “Sorry to intrude,” she winced as he turned to dust.
As they battled, even Pearce noticed that the majority of the vamps were abstaining from the fray in order to stand around a figure tied to a chair at the back of the alley. He was curious enough about this, but he had enough to deal with considering even the minority of the cult of vampires still consisted of at least twenty.
Niki, on the other hand, managed to fight her way towards the back of the alley, jumping above the watching, robed figures, onto the balcony of the fire escape. From there she could watch the amusing fighting tactics of her partner and the figure of importance tied to the chair below.
The Slayer didn’t recognize her but she was obviously in distress. By this time, Pearce had fought his way towards the group that was just standing around and when the Slayer dropped down on top of them, he sprang into action again.
Niki did her share of staking, but when the opportunity presented itself, she grabbed the gagged figure and pulled her through a doorway into one of the adjacent buildings. It was quite dark. By feel alone, Niki set the woman down, removed her gag and began untying her bonds.
“Thank you,” the woman hissed, keeping her voice down as shouts went up among the vampires that their prize had been stolen. “You have to get me out of here.” The Slayer took the unidentified woman’s hand and led her deep into the maze of unlit cubicles and reception desks. Soon they found a hallway which was still lit. Crouching by the end of it, the woman pulled the Slayer into a rough embrace. “Thank you so much.”
“Who are you?” Niki asked, pulling away and getting a good look at the woman. “Do you know why they were after you?”
“My name is Nancy Hatt,” the woman said trying to slow her breathing down again. “I came here on a business trip a couple of months ago... I’m a geological consultant– just last night I was attacked by those creeps out there and they’ve been interrogating me ever since.”
“What did they want to know?” the Slayer asked, her fingers tight on her stake.
“They were looking for this,” she slid her hand into her suit jacket and lifted a large silver medallion. “I don’t think they thought I’d be stupid enough to carry it on me. But that’s just what I was counting on— you see if I’d left it my hotel room, they would have found it—”
“Wait a minute,” Niki stopped her with a gesture, two pieces connecting in her memory. “Nancy Hatt... from Birk and Hatt?”
Nancy’s expression didn’t change. “Yeah, why?”
Niki blinked. “Nothing, go on.”
“I don’t really know what it is,” Hatt went on. “My crew found it in an open pit mine in Argentina a year ago... it didn’t take long to figure out what it did.”
“What does it do?” the Slayer squinted at the silver disk engraved with a circle crossed by three spears.
“This.” Hatt held the amulet tightly and reached for the doorhandle on the nearest door. With no effort at all, she tore the knob from the door and brought it back to the Slayer so she could see more clearly. Without hesitation, she crushed the steel knob to dust in her hand.
Niki blinked. “Ah. That kind of medallion.”
“Here,” Hatt stuck the silver thing in the Slayer’s palm. “You need this more than I do.”
Niki’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you sure?”
“Sure,” Hatt said with a hint of sudden suspicion. “You are the Slayer, right?”
Niki was thrown off guard. “Uh, yeah. How’d you know that?”
Hatt scoffed. “My business partner was a jackass demon: I picked up a thing or two over the years.” The two stood and began to make their way back towards the door to the alley. “Anyway, your friend out there needs you; go help him.”
Niki’s frown was stuck on her face as she left the woman in the darkened office lobby. “Um... sure.”
Upon jumping back into the battle, however, she realized how difficult it must have been for Hatt to give up her precious find: With a single punch, she drove her fist through one of the remaining vamps’ rib cage and out past his spine. She looked at the thing stuck on her arm with a wide grin. “Fuckin’ A!”
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