Is Your Bark Worse Than My Bite?
[“The weather had turned colder than our ex-wife’s heart. Whether the mist had something to do with the shift, or whacky weather was copacetic in these parts was anyone’s guess. Either way, we were thankful to discover that Carcinogen kept us warmer than our previous suit. We still layered up and kept our vest, trench, and fedora smooth— a doggy P.I. was a beat P.I.
Not that a lack of sawbucks was what was currently gumming the works.”]
Noir had thought that hunting for a meal wouldn’t be all that difficult. He was a dick, finding things was, literally, his job. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that most people weren’t willing to just let a vampire bite them, and Noir was still getting a hang of the compulsion thing. With Carcinogen in his head and his spider-sense on a constant, muted hum because of the red mist it made it difficult to concentrate on asserting his will on others.
What all that meant was that Noir had had two meals in the last three days, and both he and Carcinogen were ravenous. It had gotten to the point that Noir found himself in the park debating whether or not it was worth it to try and catch a squirrel. Thankfully, before he had to make that decision one way or the other Carcinogen was getting his attention.
Noir turned to look in the direction the tendril of tiny spiders that had risen up out of his suit was pointing, eyes narrowing as he caught the sound of a heartbeat head cocking in that direction. Living mortal…or, at least alive enough that he was fairly certain he could feed off it.
The one vampiric ability he had gotten the hang of almost immediately once he discovered he could do it in the first place was melting into the shadows. He honestly wasn’t sure if it was a vampire thing, or a Carcinogen thing, or a result of the two combining, he just knew it was useful. Taking a step backwards Noir let a patch of inky darkness consume him, his body falling away in a waterfall of tiny spiders and dark mist that evanesced into nothing more than shadow.
Both spiders and mist spilled out of a hollow knot hole in the trunk of the tree next to the largest in the park, Noir not quite reforming yet. Instead they crept forwards, hundreds of tiny spiders shrouded in dark mist crawling along a branch that nearly touched the bough of the tree that the heartbeat was coming from, the spiders piling on top of one another to form a constantly writhing mass of arachnids. Peering through hundreds of sets of eyes in this form the image Noir saw was shattered, but he could see well enough to discern shapes, and at the moment he was trying to pinpoint the location of the heartbeat before he fully reformed his body.
