Chapter Fourteen: What A Waste.

  A great wave of emotion washed over the thief as Kain’s melodic voice filled his ears. Kain could have shown him anything. He could have drowned his mind in trust and forced subservience, bent him cleanly to heel.

  Instead, he showed him the stick.

  Terror tore through Joe’s mind.

  THUD. THUD. THUD.

  His heartbeat skyrocketed until it sounded like a trapped mouse scrabbling in his chest. He hovered on the edge of cardiac failure, vision tunneling, breath shredding in his throat. Then, just as suddenly, the illusion released him.

  Kain leaned down and placed a hand upon the man’s shoulder.

  “You wish to keep me pleased… yes?” his voice flowed forth, soft and amused with its hissing almost Slavic quality.

  Joe’s hands trembled. The stiletto slipped from his grasp, nicking his finger as it clattered to the pavement. He nodded vigorously, still wiping drool from his chin.

  Kain tutted, clicking his tongue as he bent to retrieve the dagger.

  “You know, little one, I too once dropped my weapon. I was taught it was the second worst mistake one can make. This is how they informed me.”

  He drove the blade down into Joe’s shoulder.

  The knife sank to the hilt just behind the joint, deep enough to maim but carefully placed away from anything vital.

  “You serve something higher than yourself. Failing yourself is not an option. Now come. Your first task will be to restore my dignity.”

  Joe squealed.

  It was not a manly sound. It was not even a girlish one. It was the shriek of a piglet bound for slaughter. The noise thinned into a wheezing groan as his lungs emptied, and he forced himself to master the pain, to shove it down into something usable.

  I will not be made an example of.

  He could endure. He had spent a lifetime swallowing humiliation and hurt for just enough to survive. He had sat down and shut up while filthy men who could afford thousands to watch him do terrible things poked, prodded, and displayed him like a prize breeding animal. He would swallow this too. He would get through the night.

  Then I can go back to my life. My life where I do this every day.

  A deep apathy seeped into his bones as the apex predator within him strangled his human pride into submission. Survival first. Always survival.

  He cradled his wounded arm at the elbow easing the weight on his shoulder and shuffling after the departing bastard who had just stabbed him.

  “Give me your name, child of man,” the monstrous awakened said, not even glancing back as he led him through the alleyways with unsettling certainty.

  “It’s Joe,” he replied simply, offering nothing more.

  “Interesting,” Kain murmured as he felt the faint pulse within his unholy mana core. “Take the lead. You will know better than I where to obtain proper apparel.”

  His voice was once again devoid of emotion.

  Joe quickened his uneven pace to overtake him.

  “Understood.”

  Kain studied him anew as they walked. Joe was a large man. Shorter than Kain, yet taller than most of his own kind. Broad shouldered and thickly built, thin layers of fat stretched over dense, powerful muscle. Not enough to soften him, only enough to pad.

  His hands told the real story.

  Smooth in some places, but his fingertips were calloused. Scars littered his hands and arms, burns, blade marks, old damage layered upon old damage. His knuckles were grotesquely enlarged, the unmistakable mark of bones broken and rebuilt over and over, returning thicker, denser, meaner. The skin stretched over them was pale and marred.

  “Tell me, Joe, what makes you live this way? There is more in you. I see it. It is what keeps you alive even now.”

  “I missed my chance to get out of it… sir.”

  The word carried a faint, nearly imperceptible heat.

  “Fate, my most cruel mistress, came early, leaving one low and lost. Crueler still.”

  The phrase sent a chill down Joe’s spine despite himself. Speaking with the awakened felt strange. His speech was often stilted, his mouth slightly out of sync with the words. But that sentence was different. It carried rhythm. Weight. Something older and wiser than the thing wearing the flesh.

  “Give me your picture box, little one.”

  Joe arched a brow but kept facing forward until he puzzled it out. With a wandering hand, he dug into his pocket, releasing his injured arm and groaning softly as he reached across himself to his left side. He pulled out the slim metal rectangle, glanced into its camera as it scanned his retina and unlocked, then handed it back to Kain.

  “Competent service. A rarity these days,” Kain mused, claws clicking faintly against the glass.

  He found himself begrudgingly impressed with this plucky human. Terrified, injured, cornered, and yet still functional. Kain had been deliberately cryptic, practically inventing reasons to punish him. Yet each time, Joe anticipated what was required and fulfilled it immediately, without complaint.

  “Prattle, child of mankind.”

  That earned genuine confusion. Joe turned slightly, incredulity flashing across his face before he smoothed it away. Kain caught the edge of it all the same.

  Still, Joe obeyed.

  He began talking. Not cautiously, not strategically, but in a flood of useless, deeply specific information. He launched into an in depth explanation of something called Halo and then pivoted seamlessly into Warhammer, outlining factions, lore, and heated opinions as though his life depended on it.

  Which, in fairness, it might.

  Kain listened as they cut through alleyways, as Joe unwillingly guided this creature toward his own home. Meanwhile the awakened absorbed a passionate monologue on why SPARTAN IIs were superior to every other generation and why anyone who thought otherwise was a fool whose parents should have subjected them to the Spartan program.

  He was accustomed to the city’s apathy, but even he found it surreal that no one paid attention to the monstrous, half naked figure stalking behind him. He filed the thought away in a mental drawer labeled not my problem.

  Still, it gnawed at him during the walk. It clawed at him as they climbed the stairs to his apartment. It lingered when he unlocked the door to the dark studio.

  He stepped inside and finally let his rambling trail off.

  When he heard Kain release an amused hum at the sight of the place, Joe forced himself to think of it as his apartment, not his room.

  “I’ll find something that can accommodate your frame,” he said, pausing as he mentally measured what he suspected, with growing horror, was merely a juvenile with more growing left to do.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  He hurried to the closet, swallowing his anger. He could imagine the thoughts in that thing’s head. The way it looked at him, as if it had already mapped every corner of his life. As if it knew exactly what he was capable of and found the smallness of it entertaining.

  Joe hated that expression.

  I hate what I’ve become.

  He admitted it silently, to himself and no one else.

  Joe pulled a set of large, baggy black fabrics from his closet and presented them with a strange, misplaced pride to what certainly was the highest form of divine nobility any human had stood near in centuries.

  He presented before his lord gym sweats.

  Kainen for his part accepted the offering with grace and dignity, and a shocking lack of reprimand for the insult to his station. Making no effort to preserve what little modesty he had left, he shrugged off the ruined jacket and drew the oversized sweatshirt over his head. He stepped into the sweatpants and pulled them up, then deftly found the drawstrings and tightened them around his waist.

  “Mm. Roomy,” he chuckled. “Well done, I suppose. You may remove that dagger, if you possess the skill to do so without killing yourself.”

  Joe did not waste the mercy.

  He shuffled to his dresser and yanked open a drawer, pulling free a red metal first aid case embossed with a large white cross. He set it down, flipped it open, and extracted a knife, a small blowtorch, bandages, and a vial with a needle.

  Kain watched him with growing interest.

  “This one has grit. Intellect. What a waste.”

  Joe clenched his jaw and went to work. He bit down on cloth as he forced the blade free, then pressed the blowtorch flame to the wound. The apartment filled with the thick, porklike scent of searing flesh as he cauterized it himself. He gurgled through the pain, but he did not stop. Flesh melted and fused. It was crude, but effective. Like patching an iron golem’s armor just enough to send it back into battle.

  And as predicted, he would have to continue.

  “Follow, this one,” Kain said. “The wicked wait not, pursuing our father Death and brother Famine.”

  Joe swallowed. He filled the syringe, jammed it into his thigh, and depressed the plunger. Fire flooded the muscle for a brief, violent instant before warmth spread through him and dulled the pain to something distant.

  He sprinted for the door, slammed it shut behind him, and hurried to catch up. The vampire had not waited even a heartbeat after issuing the command.

  The silence between them was deafening.

  Ordinarily, Joe valued quiet. Now it scraped at his nerves. The creature beside him was utterly unpredictable. His commands were strange. His motives opaque. And the longer he delayed killing Joe, the more Joe needed to understand why.

  His thoughts were cut short as Kainen broke the silence.

  “Tell me, Joe.”

  He spoke the name with a thick, foreign accent that blurred somewhere between Slavic and Nordic. Beneath it lingered something sharper. Almost disdain.

  “What do you know of this place? What is it like? Where are the things men like you find important? Can you show me maps? Can you teach me of this land?”

  The young Ebonhart’s voice was hungry. He wanted to know everything he could about this world, and every step he’d taken through this city that Joe had guided him through had engorged his curiosity. Their buildings were so strange from up close—beautiful and artistic, lines of steel and glass carved with intricate motifs and etchings that hummed with energy. Their chariots screamed like an elder vampire in the heat of a blood rage when they raced past. And the people were somehow even more expressive and individualistic than the humans he was used to; every fashion trend he could think of from the last ten centuries had been present in the night folk of this city.

  And so many more articles of clothing—coloured and dyed hair, dyed eyes, implanted claws and fangs. Metal piercings littered them from ears to nethers. Living tattoos crawled across bioluminescent skin patches. Teeth replaced with chrome, and even limbs that hummed with enchantment made of steel. It all fascinated him; the sense of lively hysteria that almost bounced around this place’s denizens made him feel alive.

  Yet it only served to trouble him more.

  How do people like this get bound so tightly and stay there? Live happily in their tiny cages. Live happily under a microscope.

  “Was born n’ raised here, sir; practically born into this world too.” He paused for a long moment before continuing. “And I’ll tell you anything you want to know. And if you don’t know what you want to know, I’ll figure that out and tell you whatever it is you’ll need.”

  Kain looked down upon Joe and smiled lightly, exposing a set of large interlocked fangs. “Oh my, aren’t you eager.”

  The pure-blood’s eyes scanned Joe again, his look invasive and uncomfortable, raising the man’s hackles as he evaluated him once more. His position in Kain’s eyes had been steadily increasing all night. He’d originally been planned as a victim; then his quick wit and understanding of the situation upgraded him to blood bag. However, he was steadily rocketing into potential henchman territory—assuming Kain doesn’t get too hungry, pissed off, or petty in the next thirty or so hours… or explode, killing Joe and magmafying everything with a shred of mass in a several-thousand-mile sphere.

  Sadly, a great many hurdles stood between poor little Joe and surviving the next couple of days.

  Kain abruptly chuckled to himself, startling the man who was still waiting for a real response from the vampire—his own thoughts having amused him greatly. Kain, however, didn’t feel a need to explain or address his behaviour, instead picking up as if he’d never begun laughing about the man’s very probable demise in front of him.

  “I want to see maps of this city and the surrounding… ah, he called it a state… yes? Then you will explain to me what kind of resources this place contains; how much human capital you possess. Then we must locate a place.”

  Pointing directly to his left, he continued on. “Somewhere that way; far away, is a profane font of power… it would be a place something quite awful happened at some point in time. A place where an incredible amount of suffering took place, or that would have been the focal point of great hatred.”

  Once again, the awakened made that infuriatingly condescending humming sound as Joe started thinking about the task. Meanwhile, Kain was deeply interested. He could feel the little mortal’s psi pumping through his brain, and by the gods was it some of the densest mental energy he’d ever felt from a human.

  It is such a shame you became this. With that much energy coursing through his brain—hells, if he had the wisdom of a rusted fork mated by a wrothsgar, he’d still be valuable by merit of his thinking speed and memory alone.

  Yet Joe wasn’t unwise, and he didn’t need a lick of help interpreting Kain, no matter how purposefully vague and cryptic the vampire was with him. He had gone out of his way to be contrite and difficult and vague in his requests, and even still, Joe delivered.

  The gangbanger licked his lips for a moment, wetting them before his mind finally stilled. All the information he could think the awakened was asking for was ordered in his head, and all that was left was to put it into words—and fortunately for Joe, talking out of his ass was practically ingrained into him.

  He pulled out his phone and opened a map feature, zooming out to show the entire city and surrounding lakes and rivers. “Alright, important shit about the city and its layout. We’re on the edge of a giant freshwater ocean. It’s called Lake Michigan. Ships and freighters go in and out; the docks are a huge entire district of the city. They move just about everything you can think of, especially food and machinery. That’s Milwaukee—and Wisconsin as a whole’s—big thing. We make machines and a whole lotta food.”

  He paused, looking into the vampire’s dead eyes that pulsed with violet light, trying to gauge how well the creature was following him—but there was nothing to read. Actually, he wasn’t sure he was breathing anymore. He filed that information also into the not my fucking problem cabinet.

  “The city itself is split up by a couple things—rivers, a few of ’em, and highways. And then you have the districts. Downtown is where the precincts, financial districts, and city buildings are; it’s nice, pretty. It’s rich, with a lot of blue skins and blue-bloods. Next up you have the residential blocks; those are where people live—actual human beings and not soulless automatons. And where people like me work and live. Then you have the industrial zones, half abandoned, half not. It’s the beating heart of the city and its underbelly.”

  Again, he searched for any kind of reaction, and again he found nothing, so he just kept going, endeavoring to get even more specific—to try and tell him what he wants to know, to figure out what this question really is.

  “The big industrial zones are on the south and west side of the city, and our state’s pretty big.” He zoomed out further on the map, showing him Wisconsin. “Most of it’s farmland, orchards, that sorta stuff. We’re one of the country’s biggest food producers and exporters, and Lake Michigan supports all of that. Although things get dicey in the winter. The ice sheets combined with the gates have led to some nasty shit seizing vessels. And we got a few hundred thousand people livin’ here in the city. Couple million in the state as a whole.”

  Well, isn’t he delightful and annoyingly competent. Kain thought with mild contempt that the crook hadn’t given him a reason to punish him. But he wouldn’t do so without a reason, and his explanation was actually incredibly helpful—especially when compared to Andrew, who managed to tell him everything that didn’t help in any way when it came to laying the land and understanding its values.

  Although, in hindsight, perhaps that was on purpose.

  He was different after he came down to get me from the basement.

  He wiped away such thoughts, letting them pass on—entirely unhelpful to him at present. Instead, he refocused, finally deciding to set the petty thug at ease.

  “Very good, little one. Now tell me of the place I seek.”

  At this, Joe froze. His entire body stilled, mimicking his own undead demeanour—yet this was fear, not a meagre attempt to breed familiarity.

  “I’m sorry; I can’t tell you where that might be without something else to go on, sir. This country has been home to a host of tragedies throughout all of time. Hell, this city has a foreign name to our language because we took this land and place from people—” then he snorted, “with extreme prejudice at that,” he said, stressing the word prejudice.

  “Well, that is a shame. But I forgive you, Joseph. I suppose you shall simply have to accompany me towards that direction until you figure out where I’m going.”

  Before Joe could even hang his head at the proclamation, Kain delivered the details of his next task.

  “For now, I wish you to guide me through this city. Until the night ends. And tomorrow you will do the same, from dusk until dawn. I wish to immerse myself in your humanity. I want to see who’s hungry and who deserves to be consumed.”

  Shuddering internally, Joe nodded. A fresh wave of adrenaline coursed over him as he got the sickening sense that he didn’t mean that last part metaphorically—and that same thought made him wonder if he’d been on the menu earlier. Or if he still might be.