Memories

Christopher crept through the darkened hallway, his footsteps light and inaudible. There was a tension in the deafening silence of that place. The only noises that reached his ears were those of his own heartbeat and the heavy breaths he drew in to try to catch his wind. His eyes struggled to adjust to the surreal darkness, struggling to see what he knew should be able to see him much more easily.

He leaned against the wall for a moment to collect himself and closed his liquid blue eyes for a moment. The sweat that weighed down his dirty blonde hair had been dripping into his vision. Of course, the mix of blood oozing down his face from the fresh gash across his forehead was not helping either.

The sound of a door shutting echoed off the red walls of the long hall and he turned quickly, his gun drawn and pointed at the direction of the sound. He took a few steps backward. The monster he was tracking had gone in the opposite direction, and although his heart told him to follow that noise and save whomever it was the other beast had taken, his mind and gut told him to stay on course. He drew in a deep breath and turned to follow down the hallway again.

The moment he turned he found his angelic blue eyes level with the blackened eyes of the demon he had been hunting. He felt the vampire’s hand wrap around his throat and lost his wind again as his body was slammed against the wall.

The vampire smirked as he leaned closer to Christopher to whisper into his ear. “You’re not very good at this, are you?” When the boy did not immediately respond he continued.

“What made you think that some amateur coming into a blood letting party was a good idea?” He put his hand on the hunter’s forehead to draw forward the memories of earlier that night - he always enjoyed seeing what ill luck had brought his victims into his grasp.

The flashes were surprisingly incoherent at first as the vampire drew out Christopher’s memories, but as they became more consistent the vampire’s ebony eyes widened in surprise. The thoughts were violent and bloody. Images of a large, white room came forward, and Christopher’s own screams echoed off the gleaming walls as he was cut into, his blood dripping rubies onto the cool ivory tiles of the floor. It was all so vivid, as if the vampire had been standing there with the men in the room.

Christopher was tied to an old wooden chair. He was tired and sick from the blood loss of the interrogation. One of the other men in the room bent down before him and put his hand under Christopher’s chin to lift his head so their eyes could meet.

“Do you know now? Do you understand what they did wrong? What you all did wrong? Why this all had to happen?”

Christopher paused before responding. No, he did not understand. In the beginning he had. He had understood that it was no ones fault but the organization that they all had worked for, now he had lost sight of that and did not understand at all why his best friends had been so brutally murdered and why he had been thrown into that Hellish place. Finally, he shook his head. “No, I don’t understand.”

Another flash forward in his mind. Everything rushed quickly around the vampire in a fast-forward before it settled with the boy strapped to a medical bed. The gleaming white lights above him were all but blinding - not that it mattered; the only other things to look at in the room where the white walls, the white tile of the floor if he could manage to turn his head that way, or the one way mirror. Initially, in his first few weeks in the Clinic he had screamed at that mirror for hours, but now, months later, he simply laid in the bed and awaited the next torture session or the next time that they would pull him out to interrogate him. Meals came and went, but he still was not eating normally. It was not something he looked forward to.

Another flash as things soared around the vampire, he was completely drawn into the memories of this boy. He had never seen anything quite like it. When things slowed again it was the hunter he held pinned to the wall, standing in front of a large oak desk in a beautiful room. Cream walls and red carpeting were a welcomed change from the white, white, and of course, white that he had been stuck in for the past two years - at least he thought it was two years, it may have been more or less, but the deranged way that they had worked to warp his mind kept him from questioning what they told him.

Christopher took the manila folder and opened it, paper clipped inside were papers and a few photographs. That was when it hit the vampire. This boy was not an amature, he was being paid a great deal to seek out and kill him. He pulled out of Christopher’s mind just in time to see the cold metallic barrel of the hunter’s gun and his wicked smile. There was no pop. No bang. No shot rang through the air, the silencer on the gun took care of that. Blood and bits of flesh splattered across the already crimson walls and against Christopher’s blanch skin. The body -or what was left of it after the close range shot - sank to the floor. This once-titanic creature was reduced to nothing but the hollow chunk of flesh that it should have been hundreds of years before.

Christopher pulled out a phone from his pocket. “Target Appleton silenced,” he reported nonchalantly, his British accent heavy in his voice, “blood spatter and grey matter. But it’s a blow out, so why not end the party with a bang?” He shut the phone and waited a few minutes until he heard the crash of the front door being kicked in and the mixed screams of vampires and their blood-bound servants as they were gunned down or pulled out of the building.

Christopher pulled out a cigarette as he walked into one of the spare rooms and crawled out the window. He did not need to get involved with the task force. Since his friends had been picked apart he absolutely refused to hunt with anyone else. Solo or not at all, that was how he worked. He could not bare the thought of watching anyone else he was close to die, so he kept a distance from everyone. He pulled out the photograph from his pocket, he kept it on him at all times. It was the only connection to the old days that he had. He looked down at it in his blood covered hands and a soft smile crept across his lips.