Chapter 1 - Rare nights are rare for a reason

It was a nice night.
The sky was clear, the moon was bright and the air was warm.

That is why Tracey Monroe was out. One had to seize the moments as they went by, especially ones that didn’t show up often—a nice night in Brooklyn was rarer than diamonds.

Despite the warmness of the night, Tracey was wrapped up pretty tight. She wore a blue coloured scarf, with a black leather coat and black boots, her tawny coloured hair billowing slightly in a wind that didn’t seem to be there.

She walked quickly, not stopping to breathe like most people would, or sitting down to enjoy the night.

She didn’t know why, seeing as this is what she would have liked to do, but she felt a sense of foreboding which prevented her from stopping.

As she passed a dark alley, she saw exactly what had been nagging at her.

On the floor, there was a boy of about ten or eleven. He was being beaten unconscious.
And beating him unconscious, were two boys with heavy muscles and a sack.

They then began to stuff him into the bag.

Tracey was torn. She so badly wanted to walk away, after all, how did she know what they were punishing him for? And then she would become involved. Something that she had been trying to avoid, but then she looked at the poor boy, no match for the two hulking people, and what could anyone, especially a young boy like that, have done to warrant such treatment?

In the end, she went with her conscience.

“Hey!” she yelled to them. “Hey you leave that boy alone right now or I am calling the police!” she said as threateningly.

The two muscular boys turned, obviously stunned.

Then someone came out of the shadows.

It was a boy, roughly the same age as the others. He was muscular, but not obscenely buff like the boys with the sack, more lean, leopard like. He had black-y-blue hair and piercing blue eyes. He had an earring in his earlobe and wore a jagged tooth on a leather thong around his neck.

In short, he was the hottest guy Tracey had seen since, well, ever.

Normally Tracey would be inclined to melt into a puddle of maudlin mush at his feet but there was something wrong with him.

His nature seemed to ooze out of every pore, his cold-bloodedness and his lack of compassion.

The boy spoke in a smooth voice, an American accent with a slightly British drawl. “Hey,” he said.

Tracey felt compelled to answer him and when she did, it was in a silly breathy voice that she often made fun of people for using.

“Hi,” she breathed.

The boy smiled at her revealing a row of even, gleaming white teeth. “Do you know what that boy has done?” he asked softly, nodding towards the bag in which the boy was now contained.

Tracey was startled by the question. She had expected him to pin her against the wall and make her promise not to tell anyone, but she answered him anyways,

“No.” then she remembered that she was not here to fall hopelessly in love, or accept any explanations but she was here to rescue a boy. “And I don’t care, there is nothing that justifies harming and kidnapping a young boy, half your size!” she snapped.

The boy smiled again, “I’m sure it looks like we are the bad guys, but this thing,” he began, nodding to the sack, “is not a little boy. I work at a research facility where they are trying to recreate human life artificially. They created this thing, but he developed thoughts of his own, where he saw himself as the victim. He killed his carer and escaped and we were sent to bring him back. Sadly, he refused to cooperate, so my colleagues had to become a little rough with him. You can go home now.”

As he spoke, something began to cloud in Tracey's mind, making everything fuzzy.

Then Tracey found herself saying, “Yes I see. He should be taken back.” But in her mind she was screaming “NO! There is no WAY that this is okay!” but, it was like Tracey’s mind and mouth were disconnected.

The boy continued, ignoring Tracey’s inner struggle, said gently, “Now you are going to go home. You are going to change into your pyjamas and go to bed. You will sleep and when you wake up tomorrow you will remember nothing of what happened. You will not do anything else. You will speak to no one of this. Do you understand?”

At first Tracey was going to say yes.

She was going to give in to it. She was going to go home, go to bed and wake up remembering nothing. But then she remembered how weak the boy had looked as he lay on the ground, and she thought, realized something the boy had said didn’t quite ring true.

“Wait, people can already produce artificial life!” she said like it had just dawned on her (which it had), “They use IVF, test-tube babies, you liar!”

The moment she finished her sentence, the boy scowled. Then he narrowed his eyes like he was concentrating.

Then Tracey felt the pain.
It was like her blood was on fire and her organs were being put in a blender.

It was agony.

She wanted to beg for mercy, but it was like the pain had cut off her ability to talk.

Her screaming, however, was intact.

As she writhed on the ground, she could vaguely hear the boy giving instructions to his “colleagues” as they walked towards a car on the other side of the alley.

“Take the boy to the car and put him the trunk. Then we can come back for her and see if she’s more compliant.”

Then one of the boys answered, “If she doesn’t agree, then can we have a quick snack?” he asked.

Then the other boy chimed “Yeah! We're hungry!”

Tracey was confused. What the heck did they mean by that? What did her cooperation have to do with his hunger?

And then, like some sick horror movie, she saw his teeth.

They were as white as his leader’s, but his canines had grown about three times their normal points with wickedly sharp points.

Then as if by magic, the pain disappeared.

But Tracey didn’t care. She was too scared.

Only one thing mattered.

They were vampires and they were going to eat her, and the boy.

But somewhere in her head something said, “The hell they are! Come on, fool! Save the kid and make a run for it!”Not being one to question divine African-American voices from the back of her head that spoke common sense, Tracey got up and began to free the boy.

The boys, a little way away, were blissfully oblivious.

The leader said grudgingly, “All right, though I told you to grab a bite BEFORE we left.” Then he turned round to find Tracey letting the boy out of the bag.

He stood there with his mouth open. No one had ever managed to shake off his tortures, let alone recover as well.

He thought about what to do and decided that she was just lucky, or it was an accident, but there was no way in hell that he would let her run around if she was impervious to mind torture.

He looked over his shoulder and said softly, “Hey guys, you can have your snack now. Bon appétit!”

The two beefy boys smiled like Christmas had come early, while Tracey, supporting the unconscious ten-year-old, looked like she had just heard that Christmas was cancelled.

She tried to run out of the alley, but quick as a flash, one of the boys was in front of her.

The other came at her from behind.

Tracey was trapped. So she did the only thing she could do.

She jumped, holding on to the boy as tight as she could.

It was amazing. Tracey had never been very good at athletic things like long jump or high jump, she was more a running and throwing kind of girl, so when she leapt six feet into the air, she was slightly surprised, to say the least.

The two lackeys, however were not as happy with Tracey’s new found abilities seeing as they smacked into one another like some third rate cartoon.

Tracey, deciding that while she was there she might as well do something cool while she was up there, did a back tuck before landing on one foot.

The moment she hit the ground, lackey number one smacked her into the wall.

The force almost made her go through the wall and it was surprising that she and the boy weren’t killed. Lackey number two reached for her so she reached about, terrified until her hands closed around something hard and cool. She yanked it up and realized that it was a metal pipe.

She swung it at the boy’s hand but he snatched it and snapped it like a twig.
Tracey was panicking.

She seemed to have gotten several degrees hotter and when the boys tried to grab her, they hissed and jumped back because her skin was searing hot.

Tracey put the boy down.

Then Tracey stood, stepped over the boy, and faced the two vampires, they saw that her eyes had not been the warm hazel-green they had been, but were now glowing orange-red.

Then Tracey turned her palms outwards and unleashed a spiral of fire.
© Eno Ambah 2009

You are not authorized to comment here. Your must be registered and logged in to comment