“Come inside for coffee?” Karl said, with a broad smile from his slightly-too-wide mouth. Maja found the effect slightly creepy, but the man's honest eyes, bright against his dark skin, diluted the effect.
“No, I only wanted to follow you home,” Maja (that Mi-ya, German pronunciation) said, “then disappear mysterious into the night.” They spoke in German, Karl without a traceable accent, and Maja with a slightly Slavic slant of the Erzgebirge region.
The apartment was extravagantly decorated, and comfortably spacious for a single man – good signs, they spoke of wealth. Maja liked wealthy men. Not because of nice clothes or presents, these were perks, but because wealthy men always have a force of personality; None of youth's insecurity or artist's passivity in a successful businessman. Maja excused herself to wash up while Karl went to prepare drinks.
The bathroom struck Maja as strange, though it was difficult to see why at first. As she did a tiny touch up to her eyeliner, the difference become clear. The mirror was slightly distorted, like a fun-house, her face was a little wider at the bottom that it should be. She ducked to look at the mirror from the sink level, and found the effect more pronounced. As she ducked, she felt (rather than saw) a tiny delay between her movement and the movement her reflection. Then an idea struck her; she turned out the light, and saw the mirror still glowed very slightly. Not a mirror at all, then, but a television imbedded in the wall, linked to a camera which it displayed. “You kinky dog, likes to watch the girls,” Maja muttered to herself. Everyone had a kink, but to indulge one implied good money.
When she returned the older man, though, not much older by her guess, maybe thirty, held two brandys. “That is not coffee,” she said. Her tone continued to sound hostile, but a suppressed grin reversed the meaning.
“Humm, true. Here, taste it, then tell me if you mind.” Karl led her by the elbow to a long leather couch. The brandy was sweet and rich. A distant corner of Maja's mind pointed out it was also very strong. She complimented his apartment, and they talked mildly about its artwork – pieces Maja didn't recognize, but that reminded her of Goya's Black Paintings but with cubist influences. They might have seemed creepy, but Karl explained that he 'valued their emotion,' that 'life truly exists only in the strongest moments.'
The room swam a little as Maja relaxed. She put her feet up on the coffee table – an elegant item which looked like it might have been cut from a giant glass lily, with veins of finely wrought iron. The petals touching the ground and the table balanced between them. Or maybe a spider with wide, smooth legs, the table balanced on its knees. How many petals did a lily have?
Maja realized she'd let the conversation drop, and turned to Karl, “I'm sorry, my mind just wandered there,” but he wasn't seated next to her anymore. He was behind her, reaching over the low back, and grabbing her wrist. His grip was strong – no more than she'd expect of a farmer's handshake, but more than she expected of a wealthy stockbroker. Another plus, he must work out. And then, something like a gauntlet snapped around her wrist with a click. A pin prick stuck her in the neck. Maja sat up very straight, terror coursed through her. She screamed, as any would do. Karl ignored her, so she tried to stand up. And a shooting pain in her neck immobilized her.
Maja no longer felt like a woman being courted and wooed; she was a child, tricked into a monster's den.
“An animal,” Karl said in a tone darker than his skin, “will chew its own leg off to escape from a trap. Cripple itself in fear. A human will understand the trap, and endure it. A human would lie in wait for the hunter, preserve itself and remove the threat to its kind. A human knows when it is being tested.
“Behind your neck is a large injection of a psychotropic compound. Combined with the drugs you consumed in your brandy, it is quite certain to be lethal. Do not move. If you understand, raise your left hand.”
Maja swallowed hard. He was psychopathic. And she was trapped. She slowly raised her left hand, the one without the strange handcuff-gauntlet.
“Good. Endure, and you will live. Move, and you die. These are the conditions. Do you understand?”
Endure what? But Maja raised her hand again, too afraid to struggle. Then the pain started. She'd never been hit by a Taser, but had once stuck her barrette in a power outlet. This was like that, a thousand-fold. Her hand burned, it screamed. It was like dunking a frostbitten finger in boiling water. At some point during the momentary eternity she became aware she was screaming. She wanted to hit him, to run, to do anything, but that pinprick in her neck was still there. Maja concentrated on it, trying to ignore her hand. It didn't help, the fire only got worse. And worse. But she only flinched a little. Her wordless banshee scream was her only expression. Perhaps the walls were soundproof, because anyone in twenty blocks should have heard it. The pain spread, it seemed, because her neck suddenly erupted in agony. From there, it echoed up and down her spine.
Karl was talking still. “...the purpose of the Kindred to weed the livestock from the human. We survive on livestock, but we also encourage the human; livestock would breed human out completely if we let it, and with that all art and culture, all music and worthy knowledge would vanish...”
Then, suddenly as it began, the pain stopped. The fire echoed in her hand, but when the handcuff-gauntlet fell away, there were no scars, no sign of the damage she'd felt. Maja felt weak, and sick. She wanted to run, and puke, and curl up somewhere to hide. She doubled over with it.
Then fear turned to fury. Her mind seemed to restart, and she slipped off a high-heeled shoe. With the improvised spike out, she swung around, hoping to catch the sicko in the mouth or the face. But he was gone. No where in sight, and she wasn't about to go looking for him. So she smashed the table glass with her shoe and ran out into the night.
She called a cab to pick her up several blocks away because she didn't dare sit still and let that negro psychopath catch up with her. She wanted to claw his eyes out, scar him so he couldn't seduce anyone ever again, but she ran. She would call the police, as soon as she'd calmed down. They could arrest him for this. He'd go to prison for it.
Street lights played pools of light around the fashionable apartment buildings and narrow old streets. Intricate carvings in the stonework spoke of the age of these buildings, which were lucky to avoid the bombing of the last war. In daylight they seemed charming, but now they were shadowy beasts of gothic nightmares.
Out of these shadows a very tall woman suddenly appeared. Her eyes were frozen blue, like marbles. Though she stood in front of Maja, she'd gotten there more quickly than Maja's eyes could follow. She stood so close, Maja craned her neck to look up at her, but was too surprised to move. They locked eyes for a long moment, until Maja shivered involuntarily. Then the woman vanished again, her straight blond hair following her into an alley.
She reached the corner before the cab arrived. Maja considered phoning the police, but decided to wait until morning. She would be calmer then, more rational, and they were more likely to believe her when she could explain everything. Only when the cabby pointed it out did she realize she was bleeding – after the trauma to her hand, she hadn't realized – but her neck was bloody also. It was running down her dress, ruining it. The cabby insisted she put a handkerchief on it before getting in; perhaps more concerned about his upholstery than her well-being.
“What in god happened to you?” He asked. Only when she was safely inside the cab did Maja answer.
“I met this guy; charming, rich. And he turns out to be a psychopath.”
“I'll say. Who bites your neck? I mean, necking it one thing, but fukkin blood.”
In a compact mirror (she was thankful to have remembered her purse) she cautiously looked at her neck. Two holes, puncture wounds, not one. A large. These were not from the needle, certainly, but something else. She shivered involuntarily. The cabby must have seen her gesture, and said something inane by way of sympathy before the car lapsed into silence.
An electronic mirror? And... puncture wounds. Bite marks. Fangs. All charm and politeness... and what had he said... “the Kindred's function?”
She refused to consider the possibilities. Karl was a psychopath, maybe one who thought he was a vampire, but that was all. He certainly couldn't be a vampire. It was impossible. But Maja dreamed of vampires that night.
In a dark alley, the woman with frozen blue eyes conversed with her cell phone.”
“Yes, but the prey will live.”
“His compulsion is good. She'll have no memory of this in the morning; She's no...”
“Were we any different at his age? The whole of the Fatherland...”
“But his is also a genius broker. He's just going through the second youth; idealism and rebellion.”
“Not the food, only humans. And he's careful, he doesn't feed them to death, he poisons them. The Police, if they look, will find only a drug overdose. Nothing leads to him, or to the V...”
“Very well, my sire.”
The next morning Maja awake with vague memories of nightmares. She decided never to visit that club again, because whatever she'd drank there not only blotted out her memory, but made her head pound the next day. She never called the police, and never thought again about vampires. Occasionally she would wonder what had happened to that slinky black dress she liked so much, but it passed, unnoticed, to the dump somewhere and the evening similarly slipped out of her mind.
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