Dead of Night: Preview 3

DEAD OF NIGHT: HOUSE CALL

A man with no name. An unsuspecting but concerned coroner who should have been an artist. A vampire with a penchant for scalpels. A dead little boy who wants to find out what he left behind.

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Around three am, Conrad surfaced from a deep sleep and lay in the dark of his bedroom, warm and snug in his comforter. He rustled around for a moment, searching out cool bits in the sheets with his bare feet, then rolled over and looked up into the face of a vampire, its blood-red eyes caught in a bar of moonlight.

All breath died in his body as Luce drew back his lips and grinned.

"Boo."

Air punching into his lungs, Conrad yelled and struck out, kneeing up and flinging outwards. He scratched and panicked and flailed, then scrabbled flat to his headboard only to find the vampire on the floor five feet away, coat swinging around his feet as though hit by a wind. He hadn't even seen the fucker move.

His house, apparently, hadn't either. Where were the alarms? How had he not heard breaking glass? God, what fucking time was it? He clapped his hand to his forehead.

"Wh-what—how—"

"F'you keep askin' me how I get places, this is gonna get real boring," Luce drawled, looking horribly superior. He winked. "Toldja. Magic."

Then he fished in his pocket and tossed some wires on Conrad's bed: mangled, stripped wires that looked like they had been ripped out of something very important and expensive.

"And yer alarm system's shit."

"What the fuck! You--now I have to pay for that!" Conrad exploded when he found his voice, 'apoplectic' fast outpacing his 'mystified' rating.

"Lucky cutting up dead folk is pretty lucrative, eh," the vampire sneered, turning on his heel and bending to mess with Conrad's gorgeously organized bookshelf.

Five awful cavernous seconds passed, then ten, then one-hundred, and Conrad realized he couldn't get out of bed. It would have been like a challenge to the reality of the vampire flipping through Grey's Anatomy five feet away, so he just sat there, staring at the undead invader. Then he realized, in the quiet, that he finally had a chance to study the other man—er, thing. Without, er, being distracted by teeth or screaming.

His yellow-blond hair was chopped short, sticking up at odd angles and washing out his grey-white skin. He looked to be in his very-late twenties, with a high hair-line and a few extra years hiding in the lines around his perpetually grey-ringed eyes. Whether that number was three or one-hundred, Conrad had no idea. But the main point of interest was that Luce looked filthy, felt filthy, but he didn't smell it. Or, rather, all the smells he'd accumulated were mainly mildewy and plain dirty, but there was no human rankness, no sweat or urine. He smelled almost earthy, but definitely with a hint of whiskey and dust and… rubbing alcohol?

"Why the hell are you here?" Conrad demanded, headache already budding. It shot out so naturally, he had a sinking feeling it was a phrase he was going to get very, very used to.

"Got any more word on the zombie?" Luce asked without looking up, abnormally sharp nails carding through the medical volume's hair-thin pages almost luxuriously.

Fuck you're impatient for someone who's never going to die, he almost said, but he shut up because he actually had heard word. Sort of. Or, he'd tried to get word but all he'd found was silence

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Interested? Unnerved? Mortally offended? Continue on, good reader: www.fanfiction.net/s/6062841/3… as I am too much of a lazy-ass to bother with dA's infernal HTML system.