Primacy of Darkness
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Authors: Brock E. Deskins
Primacy of Darkness
By
Brock E. Deskins
Copyright ©2015 by Brock E. Deskins
Dingo Dog Publishing
Cover Illustration Copyright © 2015
Copyright, Legal Notice and Disclaimer:
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Books by Brock E. Deskins
The Sorcerer’s Path
BROOKLYN SHADOWS
Blood Conspiracy
THE TRANSCENDED CHRONICLES
OTHER BOOKS BY BROCK E. DESKINS
CONTENTS
How he missed New York. Not as much as his beloved London, but the ghosts he had left behind more than a century ago seemed much more haunting to him than the ones here. There was far more decadence infecting this grand city as well, decadence he needed to purge. He watched the news and read the papers. The world, especially the Americans, lived in fear of faceless terrorists thousands of miles away. It was time he reminded them all what real terror was. Besides, his dearest friend, Vincent, called this repugnant pit of iniquity home, and it would not be a proper reunion without him.
It was night, as he preferred, but true darkness never settled on the city as it did in his youth. Lights flooded the streets and created a shielded dome over the great metropolis so impermeable that not a single star penetrated the luminescent barrier.
He had only just arrived in the city, but already he missed the twinkling pinpoints of light piercing the black shroud surrounding their ever-shrinking planet. There was something pure in their presence, and their absence only helped to reaffirm how far humanity had fallen. In his mind, blocking out the stars was akin to casting the angels out of heaven. However, this star, this angel, was not cast out but was sent to earth amongst the mortals to punish them for their wickedness. He was the archangel, Michael, commanded by God to cleanse evil from the world with his fiery spear and to cauterize the festering wound that was humanity.
Of course, he was not Michael. He was not even Jack, but he liked the name and kept it as his nom de guerre. It was so much more fitting, and frightening, than his real name. Montague might be suitable for mingling amongst the English gentry, but it was about as threatening and fear-inspiring as an old man’s flaccid cock.
Jack sniffed the air as he tried his best to block out the cacophony of background noise. The constant shouting, honking of car horns, and multitude sources of the city’s din was a distraction, but, like the tiny oasis of darkness spotting even this coruscating cesspool, it was also his camouflage.
His tongue flicked out of his mouth, licking at the moist, stagnant air. He could smell and taste the fog brewing and creeping in from the sea not far to the east. Another wave of nostalgia swept over him and he once again became lost in a memory.
He shook off his momentary wistfulness and bent his mind back to the task at hand. The world had largely forgotten about him and it was time they became reacquainted. An artist’s introduction was almost as important as the masterpiece itself and he was nothing if not an artist.
Jack did not have to look far to find a proper canvas. The city was full of them, standing on nearly every street corner, for sale to whoever had a few dollars to spend. Such a paltry sum they placed upon their lives, yet it was vastly more than their true worth as human beings. Their only real value was the message they would relay, the message he penned with their blood.
He did not skulk from shadow to shadow like some petty pickpocket or brutish mugger. Such a mannerism would mark him as a criminal and he was anything but. He was a doctor, sent to cure the world of the disease infecting it. His was the highest of callings and he practiced his art with the pride and dignity it deserved.
Like most animals, prostitutes often flocked together with the false assumption that there was somehow safety in numbers. Such a concept was unadulterated fallacy. He approached the women, three in total, standing a few paces apart so as to watch each other without crowding into one another’s space.
The women watched him walk toward them, the tapping of his cane alerting them to his presence. The prostitutes sized him up in an instant, making note of the fine suit beneath the long overcoat. His clothing, posture, and grooming marked him as a man of money and class.
“Hey, baby, looking for a good time?” one of the women asked as he drew near.
She was white, rail thin, and had the gaunt look of a drug addict. She might have once been a high school favorite before drugs and her decadent lifestyle carved out the hollow shell now standing before him.
The other two women were black and equally dressed in what he could only assume they thought passed for seductive attire. The gaudy colors and large feline patterns looked ridiculous to him and only served to make his job of identifying his prey that much easier.
“Indeed I am, but likely not in the manner you assume.”
The prostitute popped her chewing gum and tilted her head to one side. “You got a kink? That’s cool. It will cost extra. So what’s your kink?”
“Oh, it is no kink, I assure you. You see, I am on the job, but the only job worth having is one you enjoy.”
The woman blinked vapidly. “You mean like a blow job?”
Jack smiled as he drew the falciform amputation knife from inside his coat. “No, I mean like killing whores.”
The knife was an antique even in his day, but he liked the shape and the feel of it in his hand. It was also ideally suited to his purposes. He moved impossibly fast and was behind the woman, his left arm holding her in a vice-like grip and the razor-sharp blade pressed against her throat, before she could complete the scream building within her lungs.
Jack paused just long enough to savor the scent of terror streaming from her pores before drawing the knife across the soft flesh of her neck. Blood erupted from the gruesome wound, like a fountain.
Her herd mates screamed and bolted, praying that the man was satisfied enough with his kill to let them flee. Jack ignored them, intent on his victim. Let them run. Let them spread the word of his return, like a pair of debauched prophets. He let the blood flow ebb before clamping his mouth over the still pouring gash and drank.
The woman’s blood filled him with energy, as exciting as the murder itself. His vampiric hunger satiated, he lowered the woman’s body to the sidewalk, but he was not done with her yet. He wiped the curved amputation knife clean on her ridiculously short skirt and drew his catlin knife. No work of art, whether visual or literary, was complete until signed by the artist.
I can’t quite shake my disgust as I peer through my camera’s telescopic lens and snap a dozen photos in half as many seconds. My antipathy is not directed toward the man in the house, but at myself. It’s vulture’s work, but every animal has to eat even when live prey isn’t available. Technically, this isn’t what I do to eat, but I do need to keep the electricity on even if it’s just to keep my refrigerator and security cameras running.
Despite calling myself a private investigator, amongst even less reputable vocations, I don’t normally take the cheating spouse and other pedestrian jobs that are the staple of most PIs. Due to my inability, or psychological refusal, to maintain a proper savings account, I find myself short of cash once again, and the pay is enough to make me lower my usual high standards.
Besides, I’m still mentally exhausted from the enormous clusterfuck from a few months back. I haven’t heard a peep about any federal investigations into the matter, so either Vincent and the council’s people within the government had been able to quash it, or they were willing to let it die quietly to avoid what would be a massive scandal resulting in mass hysteria.
The world has enough things to be afraid of without the knowledge of vampires feeding willy-nilly on the population. Not that we’re out of control and committing mass murder on a daily basis. Things like that are squashed as quickly as they manifest, and as Brooklyn’s warder, it’s often my foot inside the boot doing the squashing.
Things have been quiet lately. So quiet that I had to take a job snapping dirty pictures of some Giants’ linebacker banging a swimsuit model who wasn’t his wife, who was of course also a swimsuit model. I guess I can’t blame a guy who regularly doses himself with steroids, makes a couple million bucks a year, and doesn’t want to wear the same swimsuit model to bed every night. But that’s what you’re supposed do when you are stupid enough to have all that and decide to get married.
I lose my target and search the other rooms of the beachfront house through my camera lens, but I can’t find him. I sit against the seat of my new motorcycle, the only thing I have to show for my last big job. My old Yamaha was way past its prime, and after that debacle with Homeland Security, rogue SEAL team vampires, and that hellhole called Yemen, I thought I deserved something nice for once.
My new ride is a Harley Davidson Night Rod. I know, it’s a bit of a cliché with me being a vampire and all, but I like what I like, so to hell with it. I refuse to change my wardrobe, my craphole of a home, and favorite sidearm, so my ride is about the only personal upgrade I can make.
I stand and search the house again, but my target has become unusually shy and elusive. It doesn’t matter. I have enough to satisfy my contract and get paid.
It isn’t often that someone gets the drop on me, and for a guy his size, he manages to get pretty damn close before I realize he’s there. He’s a dozen paces away when I take note of his approach, and his long, angry steps eat up the distance in seconds.
“Who the fuck are you?” he shouts as he storms forward, gripping a baseball bat made tiny in his meaty hand.
“Easy there, big guy. Put down the bat. You don’t want to do that.”
“Is someone paying you to take pictures of me, or are you just a goddam pervert out here jerking off while I screw my girlfriend?”
“I’m just doing my job, buddy. It’s nothing personal.”
His face is sweating, his eyes are bulging, and veins start popping out all over his head as he hulks out. “It got personal when you started taking pictures of my naked ass!”
He swipes the bat one-handed with the speed a major league ballplayer would envy and manages to knock the camera from my hand. It all but shatters on impact and goes skittering across the ground.
I look at my destroyed camera, sigh, and shake my head. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“I shouldn’t have done that? Is that right? How about if I do this?” He raises a foot and kicks my bike over. “What are you going to do about that, little man? You gonna take some pictures of it?”
I want to make a wisecrack about the stupidity of his statement seeing as how he has just smashed my camera, but what little sense of humor I possess flees before my anger, like a cat being chased by a pack of dogs.
I give my beautiful new bike a glance and crack my knuckles. “You
really
shouldn’t have done that.”
***
The scratch on my bike is like a raw wound, burning away at whatever is left of my soul with no salve to soothe it. I check my mirror and my anger spikes. It will take me days to get it positioned exactly where my OCD likes it.
I ask myself how he managed to sneak up on me, but I know the answer. Just like I know why he was able to knock my camera from my hand and kick over my ride. I don’t need my shrink to tell me that it happened because I let it. It’s the same problem I have with my mirror. It bothers me because I want it to bother me. I let him get close because I wanted an excuse to hurt him.
Life has been dull lately, and there’s a monster inside me that needs let out once in a while. It’s chewing on the bars and clawing at the door, and if it doesn’t get its exercise, it will destroy my house. I feel like an old woman with a vicious Pit Bull. I don’t dare take it out because if it jerks hard enough, I might not have the strength to hold onto the leash.
I thought I had gotten better over the years, and for a time, I think I had. But this last event with Homeland Security and the rogue vamps has me rattled. It brought some old feelings and memories to the surface, ones that are best left buried.
I don’t know what exactly stirred up the sludge lying in the deepest pit of my psyche. It’s not as though I have led a sedentary, cozy life these last forty-odd years. Maybe it was being used in a military capacity. Maybe it was seeing Lesile again. Maybe it was trying and failing to kill her. The police never found a body in the car, so I can only assume the crafty bitch got away. Knowing she is out there and likely none too pleased with yours truly would rattle the most stalwart of people and I’m about as stalwart as they come.
My stomach, or whatever passes for my stomach these days, grumbles, but I tell it to shut the hell up. I haven’t had a proper feeding in weeks and I know I’m pushing the limits of my physical and emotional boundaries.
This thing, feeding on people, is supposed to get easier the more you do it, but it hasn’t, not for me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel sorry for the people I have to kill in order to survive…usually. My problem is liking it too much. I’m a recovering drug addict that has to use a moderate amount to survive, only my heroin is human blood. My methadone is blood in a bag, but that can only carry me so far.
I push my simpering thoughts and nagging hunger to the back of my mind as I pull up to my loft. I park my Harley in the steel shipping container that now serves as my garage and lock it up. No one is stupid enough to come anywhere near my place, but I’m not stupid enough to underestimate human stupidity. If people weren’t as dumb as I think they are, I’d hardly ever get to kill anyone.
I check the locks on the metal blast door to my loft prior to opening it. I pause inside the doorway, listening and sniffing for anything out of the ordinary before closing it behind me. My refrigerator is humming away in the corner, beckoning me. I cross the cavernous chamber, pull out a bag of blood, and lay back in my recliner as I sip down the bag’s contents.
Because I am a creature of habit, and I seemingly enjoy torturing myself, I allow my mind to drift into what approximates sleep. She is there, waiting, as always, to condemn me. She has lurked within the shadows of my nightmares for the last forty years, coming out whenever I have a really bad day, which is most of them. Forty-seven years, three months, and sixteen days to be exact. I look at my watch. Seventeen days.
I can hear the crying from within the grass hut. I know what is waiting for me inside, but stupidly I go in just as I always do. One minute I’m standing amongst the corpses littering the small village outside, the next I’m in the hut holding the furious young girl by the throat. Her legs kick futilely in the air as I hold her aloft with one hand. She curses me in Vietnamese as she repeatedly plunges the knife into my arm.
I’m laughing, covered only in the blood of her family and friends. I vaguely realize that I am aroused. She is slipping from consciousness and her final act is one of defiance. She utters one last curse and spits in my eye.
I drop her to the floor and stare at her as I wipe the spit from my eye. I look at the knife still gripped in her hand as she teeters on the edge of consciousness. I shift my gaze around the room to look at the younger children she was trying to protect, pressed into the corner of the hut. Most are wailing. Some just stare vacantly as they accept the fact that they too are about to die.
My eyes drop and it is only then that I become fully aware of my physically aroused state. What kind of monster have I become? Something in me snaps. Every horror I have committed over the months, or has it been years, comes flooding in with more clarity than I ever thought possible. I barely have the strength to stand, but I command my legs to move. I flee back into the jungle that spawned me, with only one thought in my mind. I need to get home.
I jerk awake with a gasp, the empty blood bag clenched in my hand. Some of it had squeezed out and dribbled over my hand onto the floor. I toss the bag into my incinerator, wipe my hands and the floor clean with a paper towel, and pull out my phone.
“Leo, you really need to work on getting proper business hours,” Dr. Morison grumbles into the phone.
“My business hours are the least of my problems.”
“What’s the matter, as if I need to ask?”
“I’m coming to see you tomorrow.”
Dr. M sighs. “Leo, we have been over this time and again.”
“And yet you bring it up every time I call.”
“You need to establish boundaries, and that begins with making and keeping an appointment instead of simply barging in demanding immediate attention and gratification for your problems.”
“You’re right, Doc. We can talk about that too when I come see you tomorrow.”
Stanley groans. “Fine. I will fit you in at noon, but I am eating my lunch while we talk.”
“That’s fine. I can bring mine with me too. We’ll make it a lunch date.”
“Not even funny, Leo.”
“Which part? If it’s bringing my lunch, I’m more than happy to swap out for that old shrew you call a secretary, despite how sour she is.”
“Good night, Leo.”
“Night, Doc.”