White Knight in the Black Night || Blake & Lea
“You know,” he said, and there was a sigh in his voice that he did not mean to air, “You really do know how to work up one’s appetite.”
The vampire before him was perched atop a particularly sturdy tombstone, the remains of the coyote corpse it was feasting on dripping blood onto the soil beneath. The words were dry as they escaped his mouth, and Blake watched the creature with an interest but not a vested one, having seated himself at the base of another grave out of a certain feeling of ennui, the cold stone pressing into his back as his long legs jauntily laid ahead. The vampire looked up, affixed him with a beady gaze, and scooped out the liver to chew on with the same dumb look a cow gave while chewing cud, never dropping eye contact.
Wonderful. Blake shook his head in defeat, casting his eyes up to the sky to search for the first stars of late dusk. His most trusted and timeless companions, but they didn’t have anything more interesting to offer than the beast that served as the Terror of all Coyotes that was feasting before him. Getting up, he dusted himself off and gave one final glance around the cemetery, hoping in vain that he might finally see a ghost. But there was nobody – his quest to find someone to give insight into the Civil War, his latest topic of historical research, was going unanswered and he’d successfully wasted time, again, as he was oft to do as he still grew used to how to spend it. But he had enough of it.
A wind was beginning to pick up, shaking the leaves of trees nurtured by the dead. Between them, a low howl was building, a dreadful moan, and foolishly it somehow still made him nervous even after all this time. And there was no reason why, either; slayers no longer scared him, as he doubted in this era they would be so unskilled as to botch the job. There was nothing to fear aside from fear itself.
He was not the first to notice her, the blonde girl running, hair trailing behind her in the wind. He might not have even noticed her at all if it was not for the vampire darting past him, hell-bent on escaping from the cemetery to catch even better prey, vastly enjoyable to the malnourished snack it just had. It ground to a halt a few metres before Blake, perking up and sniffing the air, before scuttling its way down the hill to continue the hunt. Blake hesitated in his step, confused, until it hit him too – the wind gusted, the scent carried, and he knew at once what the vampire was after. Looking wildly around, it took him only a second to pinpoint it – her – and then he himself was running, boots pounding the ground with frenetic energy. He snatched the vampire, bracing his body as the pair of them skidded an inch in the mud, tightening the creature to him as it thrashed to escape – its chosen prey so achingly close. His own fangs elongated and red eyes flashed, a hiss cutting through the creatures own, turning desperately scrabbling claws limp in his grasp. He could see the girl properly now at the base of the hill passing by the gates, and uncertainty immediately grabbed his mind – if he simply left, there was zero doubt in his mind that the other vampire would attack. Grinding his teeth, he made his decision, pushing the vampire away from him like it was diseased – “Leave,” he snapped, jabbing a finger in the vampire’s direction before he turned on heel again for the entrance, but he knew that the creature would not obey to that extent. Stay was as much as he could hope for. As he walked, he could feel the creature’s eyes on his back like a renegade wolf split between listening to its alpha.
Making his way out of the cemetery, in fury he headed towards the girl – jogging as she was, her scent was as thick in the air as if it were already dripping from an open vein. In the recesses of his mind, he knew that if the vampire had attacked her, drawn blood, he stood too high a chance of turning on her himself. The knowledge clouded his judgement – he needed to be angry at himself not at her, but she had no escort and if he had not been here she would be dead, any escort would be dead, she would be ripped to pieces just like the coyote that lay shredded and abandoned, and…
“What on earth do you think you are doing out here?” he demanded, stalking the footpath to approach her until he was upon her, looming over her like a shadow made man with anger burning in his eyes, as if she, too, had the same clarity towards the situation as he did – that there were things waiting in the shadows to kill her, and he was more like them than he was like her. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? Do you have no escort?” His eyes flicked up and down, encapsulating her in a steeled look. “A child,” he said, as if it were an accusation. A child. A final comment that drifted off into the dusky air; there was more to that observation than she would ever know, and more than he could ever express.
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