The Ruler and the Killer {Javier & Jusztina}

[Florence Vulpes]

It was never the smartest thing to live in the middle of Main Street. All the constant commotion, the ruckus, the things that could possibly go unnoticed by the general public. At least, it wasn’t the smartest thing to live here if you were someone like Florence Cashmere Vulpes. Someone who was hiding from someone . . . or something. Of course, she didn’t know this. When she moved to the city over fifty years ago, there was no inclination, no hint, that this city was the one stop head quarters for some of the most dangerous creatures in the world. Florence needed some place to stay that wasn’t home, somewhere she could stay hidden in the midst of a bustling city. She now knew that the particular decision to choose Arc City, might have been a fatal mistake.

About fifty years too late.

She had stayed hidden for quite awhile, no one knew of her existence in this city, she knew nothing of anyone else’s existence. She would steal out into the night to get the blood she needed, only what she needed, and stay indoors for the rest of the days. It was a boring and miserable life. To her though, she didn’t have much choice. Then, she found out about the other creatures. Sure, she knew about vampires. She was one. However, werewolves, gifted, demons, angels, she knew nothing of these. It was by chance that she found out. Hints here and there made a glint of suspicion in her eyes, but it was when she took a fateful trip to the cemetery one day.

She felt lonely, and isolated from the world, which she was. She thought that if she visited a place where other people were lonely, it would help her. She wanted to feel the lonely spirits, and let them know that she was there, and that she knew how they felt. She got more then she bargained for though, when they spirits formed in front of her and spoke. She collapsed on the spot, they were the ghosts of her mother, aunt, and grandmother. They told her of the city she lived in. What else was lurking there. That the vampires would soon be after her, as soon as they caught wind of her existence.

Florence ran. She never returned to the cemetery, and was shaken by what she experienced. However, she now knew the truth. She now knew what kind of danger she was in. From then on she barely left the house. She was weak from hardly feeding, and had hardly any will to live. One night when she was feeding there was a close shave with death when someone, she wasn’t sure who or what creature, stalked her through the alleyways back home.

That was this night. The night when Florence decided that she better get the hell out of Arc City. She was scrambling inside of her old, ramshackle apartment. Dresses and shoes were cluttered everywhere in piles. She slammed shut an old black suitcase that was filled with clothes, and one more that held shoes, and other valuables. Her head shoot towards the window as she heard something hit a flower pot on the emergency fire escape. No one was there though. It was just a squirrel or something. She shook the nonsense out of her head, and slung a small beaded back over her shoulder filled with necessities. She wasn’t dressed for travel, but she didn’t care at this moment. The only thing she could think about as her black heels quickly strode to the front door of the apartment, was that thing in the alleyway.

Yes. Florence Cashmere Vulpes was about fifty years too late to be making an escape now.

[Javier de'Saavedra]

Javier was a powerful vampire due to constantly feeding from his Queen. However, he did not choose to remain a Calmae – the war of power was over, and the Draculesti coven had wrestled control over its own sector of the city. Everything was quiet in the city now, or at least much quieter than before. Arc City could never be truly quiet, and the screams and the gunshots still rung a chorus in the night. Javier had chosen to leave his position of power and instead become the shadow of Jusztina Draculesti. He chose it because he wished to be as close to her as possible. If the world was ideal and if all his wishes came true, he would have made it so that he would never have to leave her side.

But such things were unimportant and they were the flightless fantasies that belonged to the stories of sunshine and rainbows. Javier didn’t belong in those stories; his story was grim and dark. Sunshine could kill him, and rainbows never showed themselves at night. Right now, he was away from his Queen, but it was by her own instruction. The Draculesti Coven was the largest and most powerful coven in the city. Sure, others existed but they were barely worth a second glance. If any of them tried to set even a toe out of line, the Draculesti brand of vampiric justice was swift and merciless. Their coven kept tabs on all the other vampires of the city, whether aligned to their cause or not. The Queen believed that service was not something forced, and that her subjects were there of their own accord. But of course, it was rare that someone could say No to the Queen of Vampires.

There was one particular vampire who had always been watched, but never touched. The Draculesti coven had never even chosen to reveal itself to her directly. Florence Vulpes was her name and she was born sometime during the prohibition and was a product of a night with a vampire-lover. As a vampire she was rather unremarkable; however she did possess a rather unique gift. Her voice was hypnotic, as if a vampire’s beauty was not enough. But her voice carried in it some traces of magical working that caused those who heard it to be more amiable to her. Javier had to admit that pangs of jealousy washed through him. He missed singing, he missed being a star on the stage…but his voice was now revolting and he was deeply ashamed of it. That was the reason he refused to ever talk, communicating either by sign language or in rare moments his Mind Gift.

As for the source of this vampire’s powers, he didn’t know how they came to be, and his non-vampiric powers told him nothing else. Some of the other elders speculated that she was perhaps a new breed of vampires, a starting lineage with new Dark Gifts. They watched her, and on more than one occasion kept other interested parties at bay. But now, they received word that she was planning to leave the city. His Queen couldn’t have that, not without having a little chat with her at least.

The rooftops of Main Street were no place for rational men to be in, but fewer people who were awake at this hour of the night, would have their eyes on the roof rather than on the trail in front of them. A cold gust of wind blew over the roof, but Javier ignored it like he had done for the past centuries. He was perched at the corner of a building looking like some marble statue. He was dressed in a plain white shirt, but the overcoat he had on was an extremely vintage piece from the renaissance era. It was black, but had silver scroll work on the collar and on the sleeves. Naturally, Javier didn’t button it up to the neck anymore, he wore it open and flaring with the sleeves pushed back. He also wore some dark denim pants and black leather shoes. A tiny golden cross with a cut-ruby-zirconium on the center hung from his left ear.

The house of his target was separated from his rooftop, by two more rows of houses and a broad street or perhaps a narrow plaza. Javier managed to stop himself before he began to debate whether it was in fact a street or a plaza, but whatever it was he had to go over or through it. There was another moment of silence before Javier decided that over was the better option. He straightened up but in the course of the action he exploded in a cloud of bat-like creatures. Each creature shared one collective mind – his.

In this form, Javier silently flew over the houses and the street making his way towards Florence’s house. The bat-like creatures seemed to converge into each other forming a vaguely human shape before solidifying back once again into Javier’s more human form. He was right outside her house now and he walked straight up to the door. He gestured at it and at once the lock came undone. She would have heard it, she was a vampire after all, but Javier wasn’t going to assassinate her. He was merely going to “invite” her to an audience with the Queen. Now, the question how he was going to do that given that he didn't speak.

[Florence Vulpes]

On any normal day she would have heard the sound of that lock clicking. Not today though. Even with her vampire hearing, something would have to be loud for Florence to hear it. Trying to hear it over the immense buzzing of her own thoughts inside of her brain, the clanging of her heels, the bustle of the luggage against each other. Because of these reasons, she only began to expect that something was wrong milliseconds before she opened the door.

The fact that she was able to turn the knob without unlocking the door, nearly stopped her dead in her tracks. It was too late though. Late was certainly what Florence tended to be nowadays. Her arm continued to fling the door open to the site of a pale, young, and handsome man. No doubt he was a vampire. No doubt that they had finally found her. She didn't know what they wanted. She didn't know if they wanted to kill her. All she knew was that this is what she had been warned about by the spirits. She was looking at the thing she had also became. What she feared and at the same time, what was a reminder or herself.

After years, and years of hiding. Long, dreary, and lonesome years, she thought they never knew. What had she done wrong? She had barely shown herself. Perhaps . . . perhaps they were far more powerful then had ever crossed her mind. Whether she had been careful or not, it didn't matter. Not much mattered at this moment, though.

Florence dropped the large suitcase to the floor, and bolted backwards through the apartment. Part of her mind knew she would never make it. part of her mind knew she would have to try. The fire escape was twenty feet ahead. Maybe she could make it. Probably not. Why on earth did she always have to wear heels? And of course her knife and gun were inside of the bag over her shoulder. It would take far too much time to wrench them out. The vampire would be on her before the finished unclasping the bag. She didn't even think of the weapons though.

One thing that you had to hand to her, was that she was trying. This woman, this creature, who had never physically fought a day in her life, and didn't believe in violence, was running for her life. She was doing the only thing she knew how to, which was fleeing. It had been what she always did. The weapons she had were useless to her, even though she knew how to use them. She never would. They were mementos if anything.

Florence threw herself against the door frame to the fire escape, and threw open the glass paned door. The wooden handle ripped off of its bindings with more force then Florence ever knew she had, and the glass shattered from its frame as the door slammed into the wall. Her wild red hair, flung across her shoulder as she threw herself onto the fire escape. She faltered though, her heel slipping right through the mesh wire flooring. She was done for.

[Javier de'Saavedra]

She ran, why did she run? Javier couldn’t really decipher her emotions, but then again he had never been adept at social interaction. It begged the question, why had he been the one sent over to try and convince this rogue vampire to join their cause? Perhaps it was because time was of the essence and Javier was one of the fastest movers in the coven. Sending him would assure the coven that this Florence Vulpes was reached in time, and that they wouldn’t need to dispatch vampires half-way across the country in pursuit of her. He actually didn’t want to do it, in fact he wouldn’t have if his Queen hadn’t asked her himself, he wouldn’t have. He found it bothersome, and the fact that she ran away just seemed to be proving his point all the more.

Javier moved at once, he may not have been good at interacting with people but he was an epitome of a vampire assassin. He moved silently and he moved fast. As Florence ran for the back exit, Javier exited the front door, scaled the wall, traversed across the roof, and went down the fire escape all in the time to catch her by the wrist as her heel got stuck in mesh-wire flooring. The sight of Florence’s predicament perplexed Javier. In his centuries of existence as a vampire, he had never met one who was in anyway awkward or uncoordinated. Even the youngest of his brothers and sisters could traverse across a telephone wire without difficult, not to mention that all of them could walk on walls. If so, then how did this vampire find herself somehow trapped in the flooring of her fire escape? She must have been at least 100 years old or getting there. She had been turned during the 50s after all, or so Javier was told. She should have been accustomed to her vampiric abilities by now.

The only way that Javier thought she could retain traces of human ineptitude was if she never practiced her dark gifts at all, not even the most basic, practically reflexive ones. He let his eyes move behind her and found the shattered remains of the window. She didn’t even seem to have a good gauge on her own strength. Why did the coven want to get their hands on such a weak vampire? Was her uniquely developed gift really so crucial?

Javier maintained his hold on her wrist. His grip wasn’t tight or uncomfortable but he never slackened it enough for her to wriggle free. He let his eyes wander back to meet hers. She was afraid, if her scent didn’t betray her feelings than her eyes did. How could he let her know that he didn’t mean any harm that he was just here for the purpose of inviting and escorting her back to his Queen? He could attempt sign language but he wasn’t sure if she would be able to understand. He could have her bite him and by sharing his blood she would understand his purpose. Well, by the looks of it she wouldn’t have any idea about vampire customs and he didn’t think that his Queen would favor him sharing his blood to another female vampire. Of course there was his Mind Gift, not only did he have the ability to move objects but he could also speak to others with his thoughts.

He did just that, reaching out with his consciousness to touch hers. The immediate feelings of dread flooded into him when he touched her mind, but he refused to pay attention to them and as a matter of courtesy he didn’t delve so much and only remained a light stroke over her consciousness, just enough for her to hear him speak.

”I will not hurt you…” telepathically spoke Javier, although his voice wasn’t fitting the face of a handsome boy frozen in his teenage years. It was a small voice, beautiful still like the ones that belonged to choir angels. There was a marked Spanish accent with which the voice spoke in Florence’s mind. The voice was still Javier’s, but it was the voice he spoke with when he was young and before puberty ruined his career as an opera star. “…The Vampire Queen insists on meeting you before you leave the city. So, I will not hurt you…unless you give me a reason to.” with that Javier retreated from Florence’s mind. There was an obvious threat in the words, and they were unnerving coming from such an innocent and angelic sounding voice.

[Florence Vulpes]

Florence was quite correct in thinking the end of her was imminent following her careless mistake on the fire escape. As she went to place her slender, pale hand on the railing to pull herself up, it was grabbed by her pursuer. Florence yelped in surprise, completely taken aback by his appearance from above and not behind. Her mind was still reeling from the unexpected spurt of power she had that ended in the unfortunate demise of her window.

The vampire's grip on her was tight, not painful, but Florence could sense the underlying danger and urgency underneath it. He could certainly snap her wrist like a popsicle stick if he so chose to do so. Even impulsive Florence knew that they time for fleeing had passed for now. If she knew her own powers, maybe she stood a chance, but as her lack of self awareness just proved, she had no way of knowing how to control her dark gifts.

The classic red headed beauty was about to ask what this vampire wanted with her, when he spoke first. Well . . . not exactly spoke. The voice the seeped into Florence's mind was surprisingly soft and calm. It soothed her, and she could feel her heart rate slightly decrease with each word he uttered into her brain. Only towards the end of what he had to say, did anything seem off putting. The unnerving threat seemed to snap Florence's slight trance out of her eyes, and bring her back to the situation. She processed his words, and struggled slightly against his grip.

"I am not one of . . . of those vampires," Florence hissed with a surprising amount of courage that she seemed to muster. Her lips recoiled into a slight snarl on the word "vampire", not bothering to hide her disgust of the word, and the species. Whether or not she was in denial about being a vampire, or simply was trying to get away from Javier, it was hard to tell. Possibly a little bit of both. "I have no doings with you and your Queen, and you need to unhand me! I want nothing to do with your lot." This was, of course, not very wise of her to say at this moment. Florence was one to sometimes put her foot into her mouth though. However, she had not had many chances to do this in a very long time, for she had been in hiding for so long.

[Javier de'Saavedra]

"I am not one of . . . of those vampires, I have no doings with you and your Queen, and you need to unhand me! I want nothing to do with your lot." She said, and Javier couldn’t help but arch an eyebrow at her. For someone who had just attempted to run away like a startled cat, she was quickly proving herself to have some degree of back bone. If only a glimpse, he could already see someone who would prove to be useful to the coven. He slowly unfurled his long white fingers from her wrist, if that was her request then why should he insist? Either way, he already showed himself fully capable of keeping up with her, perhaps if she had more practice with her powers this would be more of a challenge.

”I don’t think you have much of a choice Ms. Vulpes,” said Javier telepathically. He hopped down from the scaffolding of the fire escape so that he was level with her. With a languid, almost bored, movement he leaned against the railing and crossed his arms over his chest. This was proving to be very bothersome, and he detested all the effort he had already put into going here and trying to talk to this vampire, who was ashamed of what she was.

”You can run, but I think I’ve proven myself fast enough to catch you. You can fight, but I highly doubt that would end well for you. So I beg of you, please don’t make this anymore difficult than it is supposed to be. It’s really just a small chat with my Queen, what do you have to lose?” he asked, that was one of the longest things he had ever said in his life. Javier wasn’t a man of many words, if he could afford not to say anything, he wouldn’t. But this was a specific task, and unfortunately it involved persuasion, which involved a lot of words. Maybe his words would get through to her, but maybe she’d view them as something else entirely and do something stupid. Javier didn’t know, he wasn’t very good with these kinds of things if that wasn’t so obvious yet.

He thought about just picking up this vampire and carrying her on his shoulder. It wouldn’t be a very comfortable position for her, and Javier honestly didn’t want to go through so much unnecessary actions. But if it got her to his Queen faster and all this babbling would be over and done with, then why the hell not? He began debating with himself whether the diplomacy track or the manhandling would be less troublesome for him. It would really depend on this girl, but Javier highly doubted that she would make things easy for him.

[Florence Vulpes]

Surprisingly, the vampire released Florence's hand, like she had asked. It certainly did not make Florence much happier, but that small gesture led her to believe that maybe there was some civilization in this thing. She gently rubbed her pale, then wrist in discomfort as he put himself into a more comfortable position, leaning against the railing.

He spoke to her once more. Also like before it was telepathic, and his mouth didn't open at all. It was still as equally unsettling as it was the first time he had "spoken". It sounded like he wasn't giving her much options though. And sadly, she knew he was right. She would never be able to get away from him, not now at least. She certainly did not want to stoop down to any levels beneath her, but talking to this Queen for whatever reason was not really stooping down. She was only to speak with her, if this vampire was telling the truth. If only she had to listen to this woman, then maybe everything would be okay. As in, maybe Florence would be let go. If she refused to speak to her . . . well, Florence was bond to get hurt.

"And why is this Queen supposed to talk to me? What does she want with me?" Florence asked him, even though she thought she knew the answer. They would want her to join them, most likely. Join the ranks of their vampire cult or kingdom or whatever it was. It was partially what the spirits of her relatives had said in the graveyard. Florence wouldn't . . . couldn't let that happen though. She would stick to her own beliefs till death. Just talking to the Queen though . . . she might have to let that happen. It could buy her time to figure out how to escape these vampires. Figure out their inner-workings, their flaws, and kinks. Yes, maybe talking to her was the thing to do after all.

"If I do talk to her, I accept to be aloud to take my things," Florence said, straightening herself up, and gesturing to her backpack, and suitcases. Her heels were now firmly on the cross sections of the metal flooring, and no longer dangling in between. "As you can see I was . . . er . . . in the middle of something, so I wold like to make sure I could take my things along with me. I only naturally would like to continue my business as soon as I finished "chatting" with her."