In Darkness District: Part One

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to any persons, living or dead, or any events or situations are entirely coincidental. Some use is made of actual locales, landmarks and institutions. All of these usages are fictional in nature and intent, and are not to be misconstrued as attempts to disparage or recommend.

Part One

Another evening. He walked the streets in search of the mystery woman from his night-school class. He looked in bars, in restaurants, everywhere around the campus, all of the little hole-in-the-wall places. He had no luck in his search, and the rain began to fall. He went home.

She was there in his living room when he turned from locking the deadbolt of his apartment door. She wore black Spandex, and nothing else, and her luxuriant raven hair, which he had before seen only bound, fell about her shoulders, framing her pretty young face. Her face, feet and hands were all that was visible, and scarcely so, as she stood in the half-shadow of the poorly-lit room. Nothing else showed, yet he was all too aware of a vague sensation of curves in the darkness.

His mind leapt back to the time when he had first seen her, sitting shyly in the back of the classroom at school. She had dressed in the androgynous style, lumpy sweaters and baggy pants. She said little in class, just the occasional question, and otherwise had given little indication of personality. He recalled the way that she had never raised her hands (in fact kept them hidden in her sleeves) but instead wedged her voice into gaps in the instructor's lessons. Her hands were still hidden now, but the shy huddled girl he recalled was gone. She stood proudly. At ease, as a superb, yet modest dancer might, in total control of a perfect body that she was well at home in.

She stood there, and let him take it all in. She was absolutely lovely. Firm. Healthy. She was no exaggerated Playboy Playmate, she was merely flawless in an almost unremarkable way. She was absolutely silent, and stood there, perfectly poised, a vision in black, waiting in silence with downcast eyes.

He found his tongue, and said, inanely, "Uh... Hi! How've you been? For that matter, where've you been?"

She brought her gaze up towards his, and their eyes locked.

Her eyes were an incredible shade of emerald. They seemed to glow with an inner light. Tiny flecks of luminous color seemed to float in them, and as he watched, entranced, they changed hue to a deep turquoise. He felt as if he could fall into those eyes, forever fall...

A tear brimmed over the edge, jerking him back to reality as she said, "I have to tell you, well, I ...I guess I have, like, a very serious crush on you...but... I... can't see you anymore."

"Look, don't you know how I feel about you?" he said. He was surprised at the sudden intensity of his feelings, and knew that this was no mere infatuation. He had dreamed of seeing her again, and his dreams were being realized.

He dared hope that she felt the same way, for she began to smile that shy, closed-lipped smile, to come towards him, then stopped herself. He wished she would come closer. He wanted another of those hugs, at least, but she had halted, and said, "Yes, I do know how you feel, (and she whispered) I know exactly how you feel, but it's because of how I feel about you that I can't ever see you again." She turned half-away from him. Conflicting, uninterpretable emotions warred on her face. She said, "I shouldn't even have come." It looked as if she wanted to run to him, yet she stayed where she was. It seemed to take an effort.

It occurred to him that he'd had to unlock the deadbolt to enter. "How'd you get in?"

She looked at the ground and shuffled her feet, and seemed to make up her mind about something, then began to walk toward him. "I climbed," she said.

"Four stories up brick?" She stopped a short pace away from him.

"I climb well." For the first time, really, she showed him her hands. They had been held behind her back, but she brought them around for him to inspect. They were relaxed, soft, delicate, flexible - pretty hands. He reached out his hands to take hers. A moment before contact, she tensed, flexed her hands, and they changed. Tendons stood out, muscles knotted, and her hands were no longer quite human. They were dexterous, agile, sharp, irresistible talons - killing claws.

Before he could react she was across the room. He hadn't seen her move; as he blinked, shocked, she just seemed to suddenly have put distance between them. He didn't mind. Halfway through the door to the balcony, she was one with the shadows, a part of the night. She was silently beautiful, was black panther death in the room with him, and was crying, soundlessly, tears as of lost love.

She was faced a quarter-turn away from him, and the hands which had so frightened him were relaxed again, just a pretty girl's hands, wiping away tears, and she seemed suddenly much less dangerous, and he took a halting step towards her.

She turned to him, met his gaze, and her eyes... they held him captive.

"You understand?" she whispered. He couldn't move. Those blue-green eyes were hypnotic, and there seemed to be something in them he must strive to see, his own soul perhaps. He felt a funny shivering tingle of goosebumps, then she noticed his hair standing on end. She spoke. "You should be afraid. Like I said, I really shouldn't have come." She smiled, really smiled for the first time. He had been totally wrong in his guess at the cause of her habitual tiny smile.

She had nice teeth. Lots of them. They were perfect - for a sentient predator which lived by mimicry of its sentient prey. "You do understand."

He understood he was in serious trouble. Then she began to back out of the door, and whatever had held him still and quiet released him. Strangely enough, he said, "Don't go! Talk to me!"

"I've got to go, Ron. I'm very... hungry. As I said before, you're special to me. I like you. You've helped me in ways I hope you can't understand. All of the logic you taught me, it has helped me solve more than math problems. You couldn't know, but you've helped me get my mind back. But Ron, I am very hungry right now, and I don't want to eat you. I knew how you felt, even when you thought I was just some poor white dope fiend, I could... feel it. I loved the selflessness I felt in you, despite your class loathing of what you thought I was. Despite all of the class differences, you were falling in love... You still feel the same about me, now that you know what I really am?"

He nodded, not entirely sure why.

"I don't think it would be good for us to see each other. Our ways of life are too different. Falling for someone like me wouldn't be good for you at all, and I don't know that it would be safe for me to fall in love. There, I said it! I've been falling in love with you, too, and it's dangerous for both of us. I've got to go! Just accept me as one of life's little mysteries, and as far as I'm concerned, don't be afraid of the dark..."

Suddenly, she was across the room, her arms around him, a kiss of red lips on his cheek. He felt two tiny sharpnesses edge into his skin, heard her gasp as she leapt away from him, saw the look of frustration on her face as she licked her lips. "Gotta go!" she moaned, blinked back fresh tears, and leapt out into the night.

It had all been a dream, he knew. As weeks and months passed, he felt himself beginning to flow through a haze of mixed realities. He tried to avoid thinking about his encounter with Lace. To even begin to think about her made him feel as if the rational world he lived and worked in was losing its structure. Madness, in other words. It was quite mad, it had no place in a world of technological reductivism, but he had seen her in his apartment, he had felt her soft steel embrace. He had two tiny razor scars upon his cheek.

Insomnia had taken a hold on him of late, and he had taken to bemused evening walks through the streets and alleys of his neighborhood. He saw little except trash, rats, weeds, and the occasional tiny glint of a discarded hypodermic. Once the needle had been still in the arm of a man blue and dead in the heat of D.C.'s muggy summer night. He knew that he was being pretty stupid but it was the only way for him to get to sleep.

He saw nothing of Lace.

Why was he even looking? he asked himself. Why did he care? Was it some kind of emotional whiplash resulting from his infatuation with a cute young thing, one who he'd been teaching? What could she see in him, was she similarly smitten (she had said she was) only in a gratitude reaction? What was this, a teacher-student relationship gone weird?

He'd fallen for a gutter babe, and she had turned out to be much more than that.

What was she? She had been warm, and strong, and she smelled very sweet, a hint of musk and Pepsodent. She had blended smoothly with the shadows of his own apartment, uninvited, and she could move incredibly fast. She had teeth edged like razors, and really scary hands, and she had told him that she'd loved him, and she had cried.

His mind was filled with such thoughts as he drifted along the streets near his place. Sometimes his wanderings took him far afield. He certainly hadn't seen her in any of the nightspots.

Ron had scored rock cocaine a lot back in the late eighties. Almost as soon as it saturated the streets of the District, Ron, being a hip, happenin' kind of guy, had made for himself a walk-on part all over that scene. When shadowy figures walked by whispering to him the street-language of the score, he had known the right words to make them keep on walking, to look for a customer who had cash to spend. At quite a few of the corners, he was slightly known. So somehow he mainly never stopped to think that he might have gone too far.

He was wandering around the seamier side of the Shaw when a scuffing sound broke him out of his reverie to see three shadows detach themselves from inkpool blackness. Belatedly, he looked about for an exit. There was none. The wail of an ambulance rose up, heading in his general direction; Ron found himself unable to smile in appreciation of that irony. He prepared himself for sudden impact of the cause of death. It wasn't long in coming.

Shadow within shadow, felt rather than heard, flashing past. He saw her strobe-silhouetted against a momentary flash of speeding ambulance lights. Her left hand crushed a knife from the biggest man's right wrist. Her right hand slashed loopingly through his throat. Blood sprayed. The ambulance went past, and in the darkness, Ron thought he heard a horrible bubbling, gulping sound through the siren's diminishing scream. The body of the man slammed into a dumpster.

The other two were sprinting down the alley about thirty steps away. She dropped down like a track star and lunged into a run like he'd never seen. Her back curved like a speeding cheetah's. Very rapidly, she was moving cheetah-fast.

She took them from behind, simultaneously breaking both of their necks with a blurring strike that started like a cartwheel and ended with a midair spinning that reminded him of nothing so much as ballet. She sailed past them as they fell and did a perfect gymnasts' stop. She snatched up one of the fallen, struck him across the throat so fast that Ron couldn't really see the motion. Her mouth opened outrageously, and locked onto the man's jetting neck. She gulped ponderously several times, then stiff-armed the body into the pavement. It cracked loudly.

He stared, shuddered. Ten seconds, less, three lives. He blinked. She was gone.

He turned his head to the right to look for her, and her voice came from behind and to the left. He wanted to jump right out of his skin, he was so scared, but he didn't move.

"I could have told you that you didn't want to see me hunt," she said from somewhere behind him. He shuddered, and found something of his voice.

"Y-y-y-y-yuh," he said, ineloquently.

"When I told you not to be afraid of the dark, I didn't mean wallow in the worst of it!" she hissed. He was shivering like a man in a fever. "Oh boy, you're almost scared to death!" and appallingly, she chuckled. He had no response to that, except incontinence.

"Sorry, we can't stand here and chat," she said, and grabbed him.

She ran up a wall with him under one arm, leapt across the alley to a fire escape, ran up it and threw him to the roof above. She paused for a second to reconnoiter, then grabbed him up again and ran across the roofs. Ron couldn't resist at all, his shaking was so bad. He was completely dizzied; some of the accelerations and shocks almost broke his neck. Several minutes later, he was leaning against the wall of a brutally cold shower.

She'd taken him through alleys and across roofs to Sixteenth Street, NW, thrown him into a taxi, and held her finger against his lips all of the way to his house, fished in his pocket for his keys. He hadn't resisted at all. He was in a zombi-like state, and seemed unaware of anything, so she had stripped him bare, turned the shower on and unceremoniously dropped him in.

She had wiped herself clean with a Handi-Wipes before they had gotten into the taxi, and now she finished washing up. Ron heard water running at the sink, and incredibly, the sound of a toothbrush scrubbing.

Now, what he'd just seen all hit him as the mind-saving effects of shock began to fade. Ron had a belt in unarmed combat, but he'd seen people dead in car wrecks who had not looked as bad off as the guys in the alley had. He thought about the last man, and vomited, then cleaned himself off. He was steeling himself to get out of the shower when she yanked the shower curtain aside and said, unimaginatively, "Boo!"

Ron didn't know what to say. What do you say to someone you've just seen kill three people when they are watching you in your shower?

"Would you stop shaking? Please?" She had a furrowed-brow look of genuine concern that Ron couldn't reconcile with what he'd seen her do in the alley. He couldn't stop shaking, and he told her why.

"The shower's fucking freezing!"

"Oh!" She gave him a towel. "Look, I'm sorry, I... guess I can be pretty frightening..." he shivered again, "I guess I am..."

"Boo." he said, shaking some more, drying himself off. He also began to blush a bit.

"Forgive me! I guess I'm a little mad at you for making me save you like that...usually I don't go for junkies. What were you doing out there?"

A little mad, he thought. What the hell - die like a man. He answered, "Looking for you, I guess... Don't know why..."

"You shouldn't have done that. It was kind of stupid. That was a really lousy neighborhood, and besides, why would you want to find me, of all people?" She was grinning again, but thankfully not very widely.

"Let me explain, I mean my head's in a mess - I meet this young woman, I'm tutoring her in math, she's obviously got some sort of bad home situation, and despite myself, I get attached, I start to fall in love with her. She vanishes, I try to find her to tell her she fascinates me, and I can't - instead she finds me and tells me that she loves me but can't see me because she's undead? Well, it looks as if you found me again. Just in time, too... Thanks for the save." At least he wasn't shivering so much now.

"You're welcome. Oh, by the way, I'm not exactly, ya know, undead. I'm just well, different. I think I grew up more."

"Grew up into what?" he asked, kind of quietly. He had dried himself off pretty much, and despite the way she looked only at his face, he now felt more embarrassed modesty than fear. He had reached the conclusion that if she had intended to hurt him, she could have easily done so already. One naked white boy standing on wet tiles wouldn't be much trouble. He pulled his towel off of the rack and wrapped it around himself.

"Well, I mean it's sort of obvious now, but it's not like in the movies or anything - I was just a normal girl, I thought, and I guess this is just - how I turned out. I can't say myself exactly what I am... not a TV dracula but... really, that's always the question. What am I? How did I come to be..." - she gestured down at herself - "this? You went to college, right? Maybe you know something I don't - got any answers for me?"

"I was a math/programming major. I never really got much into, ummm, supernatural studies. It wasn't offered at the University of Maryland," he told her, and risked a small smile of his own.

She laughed, an explosive little "aha", and said, "I see you're getting used to me."

He nodded. "Good," she said. "The smell of your fear was putting me on edge. I really don't want to be scary, at least not to you, not now. Anyway, supernatural studies wouldn't help. I've been through all of that nonsense, and it doesn't have anything to do with what I am."

She tapped her right front canine with a longish fingernail. "These are what I got instead of wisdom teeth," she said. "I did some reading recently on Man's closest relatives and ancestors, and I found some interesting things that I can't reconcile with myself.

"Wisdom teeth are a recent addition, evolutionarily, as are the modifications for meat-shearing to the bicuspids, but the canine replacement I can't explain, since our hominid ancestors lost simian fighting fangs more than a million years ago."

"Hey, you seem to be pretty well-read on the subject!" Ron was kind of surprised. It wasn't in keeping with his image of a highschool dropout, but then he remembered that math and reasoning were the only subjects where she'd scored badly. Instantly, he was reminded that she had, the last time he had seen her in his apartment, shattered all of his preconceptions about who she was. "You probably know more than I do about this stuff. Umm, maybe, you're some kind of, well, (sorry) mutant or something?"

"I don't know. It doesn't seem likely. No obvious major deformity, most mutations are very detrimental and don't even get born. This is too defined, it's like a color-phase variation or something, you know, where everything is normal except for pigmentation or pattern. I'm basically very healthy except for... once a month or so, when I must do what I must do."

"You really have to do that, Lace?" Ron asked her. "How did this happen to you?

"I just changed...

"I was sixteen, I was hitching to a rock concert. I'd been eating like a horse for about six months and getting skinny as a rail, and this guy gave me a ride to the concert. He pulled over and stopped, and tried to rape me. We fought, and I tore out his throat with my fingernails and drank. I just did it, it just sort of came naturally, and I wasn't hungry any more. It's like an addiction. I try to hold off as long as I can, but I can't really help myself. I don't want to do what I do, but it's like a madness, a temporary insanity. I just find myself out on the street, and rather than be driven by blind hunger, I try to hunt while I still have a little judgement left, a little bit of choice of when, and where, and who. I have to prey about once a month, and when I can, I cover my tracks. Like, when I can, I only do wrists. Looks more like suicide."

"Damn," he breathed. "Sounds like you kind of hate it."

"Well, of course! I've tried to learn to like it, just to get my mind together. I just can't learn to like it, though. If I could, I guess I would be a real monster. I know something about evil, Ron, things you don't want to know, and I really don't want to be evil. I guess it comes down to choices, and in the absence of choice, the lines between good and evil become less distinct." She paused and looked pensively at the floor. He was struck by the contrast between her quietly cheerful voice and her expression, which most of the time seemed to be of slight embarassment - one of the things he'd found most attractive back when he was teaching her in night-school.

He was dry now. "Look," he said, I gotta get some clothes on before I die of a cold." He led her into his room, and he picked out a pair of jeans and slipped them on. "This is really weird, ya know?" He finished dressing. He continued. "How can I be this calm? I've never seen people killed on purpose in front of me before... I was sure I was a goner, and didn't mind being rescued but! You hit them like the bomb! You ate them!" -she nodded - "For lunch" - she nodded - "like it was nothing!" - she nodded.

"The one thing that I do like about myself," she told him, "and it's something I take a bit of pride in, is the way I can fight. I've had some badassed street dudes try to take me out, and let me tell you, I surprised the hell out of them." She grinned fiercely, and a wave of paranoia swept through him, despite his medication. He couldn't keep himself from blurting, "Are you still hungry? Will you eat me, 'cause you can't help it? Are you sure you're not just toying with me?"

"Asshole!" she hissed. She spun away for a moment, then turned back, and he saw that she was crying. He couldn't believe it. She locked eyes with him through her tears, and a peculiar feeling went through him. He seemed to have no self, and he actually felt her mind within his. "Sorry..." she said, and looked away from him, and his volition returned.

"I've been dreading that question, so I have a ready answer for you. I don't toy. Believe me, I know how, but I do have a choice on that score, and I choose not to toy with you... at least not now. I'm being as honest as I can be. It's very stressful, honesty is not something I am very good at these days. I've had to become expert at double-think, at living a lie, maintaining a mask at all costs, and this is incredibly different. For now, have no fear.

"I'm not going to eat you. Probably not any one like you. You're about, what, ten years older than me? I'm more a product of television than you are. I was raised on prime-time police shows! I once thought I might want to be a cop! I had a very standard morality, crime and punishment, good guys versus black hats, and look at me now!" He couldn't not look. Her look of embarassment was gone, replaced by chagrin. She paced about the room, moving like a T'ai Ch'i dancer, unpredictable curves fading into linear flails. Ron hoped she wouldn't tear the place up. "I thought I might look good in a police uniform, but now I have to wear black. No! I won't hurt you! It's easy to find one robber or mugger, or rapist a month. You're a nice guy. You needn't fear me. What I prey upon is the predators among you."

She was passionate about it. She made a complex, deadly motion with her hands. Suddenly, Ron's fear returned and he sat down on his bed. He was sure she was about to trash him, but then she became very still, and turned to half-face him, one eye looking directly sideways at him. She said, "Do you think that it's easy to grow up to be what most scared you in your childhood? To have been religious, to have held life sacred, and to know that someone will die soon, that you will kill them? Even with scum, as I drink their life, I know that their nightmares have found them, and I feel what they feel, and God help me, I feel for them. Where would I have learned to deal with this?"

As she spoke, she came closer, turning towards him. Now, her face was right in front of his. He could not look away from her, nor move. She smiled that closed-lipped smile bitterly, then turned and sat next to him.

"I was going to be pretty, I thought maybe beautiful. Now, I can't smile my pretty smile for anyone, not without them shaking. Not smiling gives one a somber attitude. Fitting, I suppose." She was clawing at the bed-spread languidly. She seemed to be lost in thought, then looked up at him, saying, "Depression is my curse. I always get depressed after I hunt, and well, there's only one cure for depression for this white girl... Let's shop! Do you need groceries, or anything?" She rose to her feet. Her motion was totally normal. He rose with her.

"Shopping, are you serious?" He wasn't sure he'd heard that right.

"It is well known that shopping can alleviate depression," she told him. "It works for me, usually. Besides, this conversation is itself depressing."

"But I'm so intrigued, I have a million questions... Oh, this is all too weird. I'm sitting here with the woman I've been lusting after, who has incidentally just saved my life from crackheads from hell, and she turns out to be...".

She put a finger to his lips. "Don't remind me, OK, Ron? I know what I am, and what I really want to do is forget that as much as I can, for as long as I can."

"I guess I don't blame you. I'm still incredibly curious though. A lot of your appeal for me has been the mystery of it all, you just sort of showed up in class, and then you vanish into the night afterwards. I was thinking up all of these little imaginary histories about you, and none of them were even close. I was wondering what you've been doing, how you've been staying alive."

"About like an animal most of the time." She paused, sighed, and continued:

"I ran away after my... first. I'd kind of wanted to run away for a while - that made it definite. I went on to the show after I ate that guy, then I just kept on hitching. I hitched across the country a few times. I've done some, well, very shady things, things I can't believe I really did, and I was well fed. But things got hot for me where I was, and I needed to escape from the place where my mind and soul were held captive by... something monstrous, even to me... Something told me that if there was a place to go in this country to be at the center, a logical place for the weird to meet, that place would be the District of Columbia, so I came here. There is so much weirdness in Washington that I feel perfectly at home here. If I get too hungry and nobody around here has pissed me off enough, there are major cities galore within two hundred miles. Ready?"

She had a lot of money. She insisted on paying when they got to the checkout stand. Ron was struck by the normalcy, the near banality of Lace's conversation; it was almost as if she had learned her English and manners from television, and then hadn't watched television for a while.

Ron knew that he had fallen for an image, had been in love with mystery and moved by a poignancy of contrasts between the obvious poverty and the desire to learn... all of which had turned out to be a deception. He wasn't sure how much of those motivations remained, but Ron was at this point just flat out intrigued.

They cashed out of the convenience store. The 7-11 had been the only place open, and they had to walk past quite a few bums and rockheads, but nobody gave them any trouble, as there was a Metropolitan Police car parked in front. Ron was secretly amused by the thought that the lovely woman next to him was a greater threat than the criminals and the cops combined... somehow, he found himself caught up between lust, and fear, and fascination.

The walk back to the apartment was totally uneventful, and again Ron was struck by the banality of the conversations. There was a lot to talk about in current global events, or cheesey local politics, but she seemed to prefer to talk about the weather. It was a beauty of a night, by District standards, which basically meant that it wasn't raining. It had cooled off quite a bit, and one could even see the glimmer of the occasional star.

Soon, they were back at his place. It was clear to Ron that he would not be sleeping tonight, and he was, despite recent events, hungry. They talked as he cooked breakfast. Ron was able, through some peculiar trick of the mind, to act as if he'd just had the (for him) singular luck of bringing home a nice girl from a bar. He just chatted, and cooked. She ate a small helping of eggs (in a bite), and as he began to eat, she said, "Ron, I should go soon, so I won't get caught out in daylight. It's bad for my complexion." She smiled. Ron was getting used to it. He laughed.

"Lace..." he said, "People like you are the basis of legend, I guess. You don't, like, sleep in a coffin, do you?"

She giggled. "At first, I wanted to know the same thing. Like, should I sleep in a coffin? I mean I didn't get like this all at once, remember? I matured into - " (again the self-depracatory wave at herself) " - this. I began to lose pigment, I started sunburning terribly if I didn't stay totally out of the sun. At the same time, I pretty much stopped sleeping. I ate everything I could get my hands on and was actually losing weight... but the sun... I sometimes just hang out in empty apartments, or parking garages, but usually I stay at transient-hotels. As far as sunlight goes, I think that on a totally overcast day, I could last all day in the shade, if I wore enough sunscreen."

They had a bit of a laugh, and Ron thought about the situation, and had to laugh at himself. Here he was, doing breakfast with a... hell. Ron rose and began stacking plates in the sink. "If you want to, you can stay here." Suddenly her arms were around him. Startled, he dropped a glass. She stepped back and picked it out of the air absently. It didn't have a chance to fall far. She placed it on the counter.

"Can I really stay here?" she asked. She looked like a found puppy realizing that it wouldn't be driven away.

"As long as you don't eat the mailman or anything. And would you please not move so fast? It's unnerving!"

"I should have let that glass break after I made you drop it? Sorry... Look, I just don't really know how to be around people these days. I've had to keep myself apart, for reasons that should be obvious... All I ever say is hello, excuse me, to go and how much... I've been on my own for three years, mainly with no friends, and no one to talk to...certainly nobody to confide in... " She broke off and turned away. When she turned back, she looked angered, betrayed, as if something had been stolen from her. "I went from popular girl to... "

She stepped back a few steps and was... different. Tendons stood out along her arms. She rose digitigrade, and her spine recurved, neck down but head up, a peculiar non-expression on her face. She was scary as all hell. She turned her face to the side, and snarled. "...Vampire. " Her arms blurred, describing a full block all about her in an instant. Then she was wound about him, saying "This is the real me. What I am. Look at my hands." An arm and a leg still about him, she slowly undulated her hand in a figure-8 pattern. She speeded it up. A whipping motion like the snapping of a towel came in and a barely visible blur came flickering towards him, away from him, a foot away from his head. "See how I move? I have a set of instincts, needs. I'm... programmed by those needs.

"I have a weird skill. I harvest. To some, I am Death. But to you I was a nice girl." She looked him in the eyes and she was his universe. Her eyes were green flame as she kissed him gently. As she relaxed, she said, "See! I am a nice girl. Don't I look like a nice girl? I can sure act like one, and it's what I'd rather do.

"I like being a person, or pretending to be one, but it's just a mask, a facade, what's left of the child I was. That child loves you, and I'm sorry to scare you like this, but I really want you to know what you are dealing with. A young adult, of whatever kind I am. Still, I'm mostly a child, and I'm scared of myself and lost. Now I have somebody to talk to. I'm secure in my person, and a fight doesn't scare me at all, but I do have my fears: of being insane. Wanting, instead of needing, to kill intelligent beings for food. Getting evil, like mad doctors in old movies. I've done the evil thing, and I've done the insanity, and you might think that I shouldn't be capable of fear, but I know what evil is, firsthand, and it terrifies me! More madness - let's see:

"Dressing up like Transylvanian nobility, beating up restaurants, not caring whether or not anyone believes I'm possible. These are insane things, blowing my cover. For true insanity, try thinking about going to a doctor and letting them sample me. Volunteering for vivisection. I've thought about and forgot about all of that, except for getting evil. Like I said, I've done that, and it was me for awhile, but that had to end. Sometimes I brood over all the things I'll never do, can never be because of what I am and I just sit and think of revenge, horrors to inflict, terror to inspire, nasty things to do or be. All just fantasy, thank God. I've developed a strong sense of... empathy... I just sometimes wish that it was strong enough to let me starve."

She released him, and stood a short pace away from him, and was indeed a nice girl, one fighting a raging battle against an internal emotional tempest.

"It sounds like hell," Ron said. He was wondering about his own sense of empathy, and unreality washed about him as he again tried to examine his position... he'd invited her to stay, and he was not too sure that it had been a good idea, but somehow it felt right.

He was no psychotherapist, a little bottle of pills in his medicine cabinet assured him of that, but he could tell when someone was hurting, and he hurt with her. He guessed that he had been, in a way, hurting with her even when he thought her just a poor white drug casualty... he decided that he felt almost comfortable with a modified version of that assessment.

He didn't think that any amount of Narcotics Anonymous style approach could help Lace shake her addiction any more than it could help him shake his habit of breathing... but perhaps there was something that could be done for this young woman whose terrible secret destroyed lives.

"Hell on earth, Ron. I sometimes just can't stand myself, but I really don't have much choice about anything." Lace said, and he moved towards her this time, and it was he who gave a hug, and he told her...

"Perhaps we can make a way for you to have some choices."

Lace somehow didn't give it much thought. It somehow didn't seem to require any thinking; Ron was familiar to her, more familiar than was anything else in her life besides her hunger... and familiarity was something that she greatly craved. Besides, she thought, some of her Cult schooling coming forth before she could suppress it, if I'm living here, I'll know where he is, what he's doing, this man who knows me for what I am.

She gathered her scant personal possessions from the Dives' Motor Lodge. She didn't have much, mostly a few changes of clothing, some make-up, a few bangles. She had moved so many times, though, had so often surrendered her possessions to the vicissitudes of chance that she was she was loath to part with anything that she could keep.

Basically, she was tired of running, tired of transience, tired of animality. She wanted to again have something like the easy familiarity of the life she'd led with the Cult, but never again did she want to live in a life of evil. Ron seemed about as far from evil as one could expect to get.

She thought back to the conversation she'd had with Ron when she'd chosen to reveal herself to him.

Good and Evil...

What was Good? She really didn't feel qualified to answer that question, not seeing her self as good at all. Good couldn't be simply the opposite of Evil. Life wasn't a simple collection of opposites... She knew what Evil was, firsthand, and in the eight months that she'd spent haunting the environs of the Greater DC Metropolitan area, she had certainly had plenty of time to ponder the nature of Evil, and she was quite impressed. Evil had a power to it... a power that she'd been unable to love. Why had she remained with the Cult for so long?

Belonging, pure and simple.

What was it about her, that made her so susceptible to the spell of the Cult? Was it the nature of her Hunger, which the Cult had kept satisfied? Was it her need for acceptance within a society, any society, no matter how vile? What made her, who (she thought) should by all rights be a loner by nature, so needful of a position within a social structure?

It was just another thing to ponder.

And as she pondered, she examined her memories, and reasons for some of the choices she had made.

Choices...

She had once, when she'd first arrived in town, been utterly overwhelmed with questions of this sort. She had been so obsessed with such things that she had literally been unable to think of anything else for more than a second at a time, and only the logical operations knowledge that she'd gleaned from Ron made it possible for her to sort out some of this endless whirl of supposition and conjecture into answers she could use.

When Ron had first shown her how to set up a simple truthtable, she had seen it almost as a gift from on high. Here at last was a tool to help her mend her shattered mind. She had left the class, and had gone back to the Dives', and filled an entire legal pad with the chickenscratch notations of the logician. She had started with simple truthtables, conjunctions and dysjunctions, and, not, nand, nor...

She slept every day, slept soundly. She had gotten over her catnap habit, and was actually able to sleep for four hours at a stretch, and, waking at noon, she had spent the time before class reading the textbooks over and over, trying to make sense of the things she needed to know to graduate the class. The history, civics, and English grammar were all simple, those had been the courses she'd excelled in back when she was just a normal kid in a normal life in a normal school. Even now, it was simple memorization, and her memory had always been superb.

It was her memory that was so often her enemy these days.

One night, she had been standing over the body of a biker-gang type in Queen's Chapel, Maryland, and she'd found herself flashing back to the Sacrament of the Hornless Goat, and she'd been mumbling a litany to Satan when she stopped herself. This had nothing to do with Satan, did it? She wasn't so sure about that, but it certainly had nothing to do with the Cult... so she had silenced her voice, and had fed on the man, who had tried to ply her with alcohol, and PCP and crack cocaine. The man had eventually given up on sweetness (or getting her wasted) and had gone directly to the rapistry, and she had gone directly to the vampiry. He had worn the emblems of Satan, but not the Cult, and she figured that serving him up to the Dark God was justice of a twisted sort.

When the litany of the Cult had come crawling unbidden from her throat, though, she'd had to pause, and even her Hunger had been momentarily stilled by her confusion. She might have given this man over to Death, but all of her knowledge of religion, however dated and secular, had reminded her that only this man had the ability to save or lose his own soul. He had been the one to make choices of Heaven or Hell, and it was then that the concept of choices had kicked her in the figurative teeth.

She didn't have many choices. So she fed, and left another monument to her hunger in the alley to be found by mystified police. The cops wrote this one off as a drug deal gone bad, with the victim getting killed by a pit-bull. It was the most reasonable choice of theories.

Choices again.

She chose not to repeat the litany of the Cult, and she consigned the soul of this man, as she fed, to whatever Deity would claim his soul, if indeed such things as souls or deities existed, and that brought up another question, that being the question of her own soul.

Did she have a soul? If she had a soul, was it damned? She thought about that one for a long time, as she walked along the Paint Branch of the Anacostia River, headed for University Boulevard. She passed several churches, and as usual, wondered at the conflict between the life she led and the legends about her ilk. The crosses atop the steeples bothered her not a bit, and she had, since arriving in the DC area, often skulked outside the churches which covered the city, remembering the days when she had been a nice Unitarian girl. She was often tempted to enter, to sit through a service... she wondered what would happen to her if she were to take communion. She remembered the excellent Public Television production of "Dracula", and remembered how Mina Harker, half-transformed into a creature of darkness, had been burned by the Consecrated Host. She wondered if psychosomatic effects would do the same to her, and decided not to chance it.

She wondered about her sanity. She was right to wonder, and it was indicative of the inherent stability of her mind that the question of her sanity should come up. Questioning one's sanity is almost always a sign that, while one's mind might be disordered, one still had a rational capacity. It is the person who has no doubts about their sanity who is at risk of complete madness.

She found herself spinning into an irresoluble cycle of questions about her soul, her damnation, her possibilities for salvation, and her mind did the right thing, simply put it out of the range of conscious thought.

She was beginning to heal.

She got back to the Dives', and, suddenly, strangely exhausted, fell into a deep sleep. Her dreams were intense, but not anything she could remember upon awakening. She woke in a sweat-soaked bed at noon, feeling both well-rested but strangely subdued.

She studied hard for the evening's upcoming class, tried to make sense of math that had once been a piece of cake for her, and couldn't do it at all. Her unconscious mind was a churning mass of conflicting inchoate conundrum, and understanding would simply not come.

When this funny, laid-back guy had been assigned to teach her, she was almost resigned to the likelihood of failing the class, or at least the mathematics part of it, and he had told her that her calculations weren't at fault; it was the way that she was approaching the more complex problems. She didn't seem to be able to get a clean grasp of where the problem originated, of where she needed to get to, of the intermediate steps needed to solve the problem, or so he said. He remarked that on examining some of her scratch paper, he'd arrived at the conclusion that she was just slopping it, doing endless permutations through unnecessary steps, randomly approaching solutions through a simple process of elimination, jotting down answers that had all of the required factors, often in absolute inverse of the correct solution.

So he taught her the elements of logic, and in fact recommended a book for her to later peruse, Introduction to Logic, by one Irving M. Copi. He advised her to read it after she finished the course, as it was a very detailed, in-depth book, college level... but for now, here were some suggestions...

She spent that entire night doing truthtables, and fell asleep at dawn, and this time when she awoke at noon, memories of her dreams were less frightening and more vivid. In her dreams, which had a flavor reminiscent of the fightdreams, truthtables had floated before her, and in the little boxes, rows and columns, snatches of experience had been inserted.

She had seemed to float above a vast checkerboard, each square a window into some aspect of her new life. Vignettes had flashed by at fast-forward speed, and slammed to halts, only to skip from one square to the next, to superimpose on another moving vignette. The process had gone on and on, really rather interminably for a dream, but when she woke, she was at ease on waking for the first time in years.

She could also think much more clearly when she arrived at class.

This was apparently just what she needed to get her mind in order. Such an obvious (to her, and also to her tutor, whose name was Ron Smith, just call me Ron) improvement must mean that she could regain her sanity, or at least some equilibrium. Certainly she could learn to order her memories, to gain some control over the freewheeling cascade of unbidden associations and occasionally quite mad desires.

As class went on, her studies were occasionally interrupted by the more-or-less monthly need to find someone and kill them, draining the life's blood from some person whose evil she could palpably feel.

Her strange low-grade telepathy grew ever more intrusive. She could feel the major emotional component of most people, and despite her ever more ordered mental processes, the unwanted intrusion of peoples' desires and feelings into her awareness was becoming a real problem. When she wasn't Hungry, it really didn't intrude any more than quiet Muzak intrudes when one rides an elevator. As her killing time approached, what must be another hunting adjunct became less ignorable; she would find herself drawn to the mental smell of evil people, of twisted souls, of the mentally unclean.

It made her feel dirty to be around such people, and in the state of rage that usually marked her emerging blood Hunger, she simply couldn't tolerate being around such people, but that rage drew her to them, and she found herself stoking their evil fires, as their wickedness stoked her own.

Once, immediately before she took the life of a thin-moustached Mediterranean-looking man, she had felt his desire coiling like some venomous snake within him, and she had found herself posing and strutting in the timelessly teasing manner that she had learned in the slut-stable of the covenhouse. She had hated herself for it, had hated the man for the way that the reptile in his mind responded to the provocation. Provocation it was, and was intended to be, for it was in this manner that she had most often lured her victims, pretending to flee to provoke pursuit. Her prey would find himself gripped in the lust she knew so well, so instinctually, how to inspire. He would find himself scheming on ways to get her alone, to work his evil will. Well, isolation suited her needs as well as his, and she had posed, and simpered, and basically acted the part of a hormone-addled airhead, and her growing rage had been increased by her own actions more than the way the man responded.

The rage had been slaked by his blood after she struck him down in a cheap hotel room in north College Park, but a foul memory remained, of them both dancing like puppets on the strings of her need and her growing Power. Her memory, which was a bit of a curse (for she could really forget nothing, perhaps could bury it for awhile, but memories, like bodies in water, would pop up at the most inconvenient times), retained the foul taste of evil minds long after the taste of blood had faded.

At class, she improved her scores, and had found that her new habit and skill of visualizing problems whirling through permutations toward solution sets (even the terminology she was learning helped her think more clearly) could help block out the worst of her perceptions of others' mental states, but it couldn't block out her growing awareness of Ron's growing infatuation. At least his was not an evil lust, nor the more conventional kind of lust she felt from almost anyone who saw her dressed in clothes that fit.

She had long since taken to wearing baggies in a effort to both remain unremarked as a beauty, and not incidentally, to protect herself from an awareness of that sort of notice. She simply didn't want to feel men wanting her, mostly because she didn't trust her own reactions to that lust.

Once she hadn't had a thing to wear besides one of her hunting outfits, a black parachute-cloth jumpsuit that, while not particularly revealing, left little doubt in any man's mind that Lace was one healthy babe. She had to go shopping or starve, and she'd eaten delivered pizza night and day for the previous week, and so shopping she went. She had, all along the length of her walk to the Safeway at 17th street and Corcoran NW, caused remarks, catcalls, and nearly a few car wrecks, but what she noticed was the constant intrusion of all kinds of lusts, great and small, into her awareness.

In the Safeway, she had loaded up on various foods, eschewing vegetables (which she basically despised) in favor of high protein foods, red meat, peanut butter, cheese and yogurt. In her meanderings down the aisles, a guy had been following her, basically shopping like anyone else, but for some reason his thoughts had come through loud and clear, lust, desire, and ridiculous overwhelming horniness. Nothing vile at all, but still quite shocking in its mere proximity and intensity. It hit her like a blast of birdshot, a simultaneous impact in both her crotch and her adrenal glands... she wanted sex, then and there, and she wanted to kill... then and there.

He wound up in line behind her, and she thought that she might either kill or die. As the cashier dragged produce and canned goods across the barcode scanner, much too slowly to suit Lace, she could feel the poor guy, who was having unremitting horniness attacks staring at her ass, which admittedly was one of the better ones in town, and she felt herself almost moving into the imaginary puppeteer's little dances. She managed to restrain herself from doing anything other than paying the cashier when at long last she was rung up. She gathered her bags and left, followed by every male eye in the place, and quite a few of the female eyes as well, some of which flashed jealousy, or cold appraisal, or occasionally a strange little feeling she could scarcely recognize as female lust.

She was getting into one of the cabs that always lurked outside of the Safeway, when she realized that instead of the usual "hand-off" of one lust-perception for another (as she passed the originating individuals) she still felt the desire of the original smitten lust-puppy. She looked back at him, and realized with a sort of horror, that she had been walking her best walk, and had done a major job of sticking her tightly-clad butt out at him, God and everybody, as she had bent to load her bags of groceries into the taxi. To make matters worse, she felt his arousal touching her in kind, and that was about the last straw. A funny shivery feeling worked its way between her legs, and outraged at this latest example of her body's betrayal of her mind's desires (wasn't her monthly Hunger an inexorable drive enough?) she felt herself doing a smile, a wink and a quarter-second long koochdance, felt the emanations of lust from behind all of the admiring eyes upon her peak, and to her total self-loathing, and inescapable amusement, felt a responding flash of pleasure and heat from somewhere inside herself. It took the rest of the taxi ride home to calm herself down, and she had thought that she would go nuts before her arousal went away.

Thereafter, she wore only lumpy, shapeless clothes in public, but the next man she slew died more horribly than most, and for the first time in two years, she truly hated herself and her traitorous body as she fed. Again, she had felt a (to her, horrifying) response to her victim's arousal.

Her self-loathing remained this time, stuck with her long after her meal had been digested. This was feeding, not sex, and certainly had nothing to do with love... it had less to do with love than had the constant servicing of the desires of the male (and occasionally female) Cult members she'd performed in the past, and that thought brought another set of memories to the surface where they bobbed like corpses at a swimming-pool party.

She hadn't been laid in almost six months.

The sex she'd had with the Cultists hadn't been anything she'd looked forward to; it had just been another part of the ritual structure of Cult life. Sex is, however, good even when bad, and none of the Cultists had done anything truly abominable to her, other than raping her virginity from her when she was out of her mind on Doctor Diablo's weird mix of chemicals. They hadn't hurt her, really, hadn't had to use excessive force, as the razor Willa had held at her throat precluded much struggling from her. By the end of that incredibly twisted evening, she had almost liked it. At any rate, it had stopped being pain, and a certain amount of physical pleasure had crept in behind the fear, humiliation, and degradation. As months went by, she had learned to turn her own body's arousal response on more or less at request, if only to speed the action and to demonstrate her acquiescence to the Cult's dominion over her. It never occurred to her that months of undesired (but not contested) very recurrent sex would have left its mark on her in the fashion it had.

Whatever her mind's desires, her body had gotten used to frequent sex, and after a six-month hiatus, wanted to get laid.

She was damned if she was going to let the pattern that was emerging become established and fulfilled. The association between the evil drives of her victims, which chose her victims for her, her technique in leading them into her killing fields, and her increasingly-instinctual response to all of that had to be stopped. She saw herself as becoming akin to a mantis, in whose species sexual attraction inevitably leads to the death and devouring of the male by the female.

She remembered the book on operant conditioning (by Skinner) that she'd read, and thought morosely again (only momentarily, considering past attempts) of suicide.

She didn't at all like the thought of her own body rewarding her with sexual pleasure for killing people. She decided in no uncertain terms that she'd really had enough of evil, and that evil was possibly too weak a word for feeling that warm heat between her legs as she killed to feed. The image of the mantis again flashed to mind.

It was choices time again, and in this she felt she still had a choice, for only once had she felt that horrifying sexual pleasure as she fed. It had been too damned good a feeling. A couple of repetitions, and she might come to like that feeling, and she could surely consign herself to the legions of the damned if come to like it she did.

So she wore her shapeless baggies, and confined her next three kills to a different stalking mode, flashing money in dives, and doing the sting on men who tried to rob her. She got no sexual response from that, and she felt no remorse whatsoever for enticing men who would maim or kill for money to their dooms.

She learned to sort of hunch and scurry within her shapeless clothing, to walk gracelessly, and she never used any make-up other than the obligatory eye make-up without which no woman would be seen in public. She considered actually dressing as ugly as possible, horrible incompatible color schemes flashing through her mind's eye, bringing one of her very rare laughs to her lips, but she decided not to become an eyesore. Besides, she would be sure to attract unwanted attention to herself that way.

At class, her scores improved, and Ron became ever more aware of her baggies-as-disguise, and ever more, she felt his infatuation grow, and her Power ever grew in sensitivity and discernment, and as he became more unable to ignore his feelings towards her, she became ever more unable to ignore her feelings towards Ron.

She liked him.

It scared her.

She actually went so far as to feel around in his mind, deliberately opening herself to what could have been an onslaught of emotion, and what she found was really intriguing.

She couldn't actually "read" minds, but she could certainly pick up on emotional states, and there was a maze of conflict within him, but he was unusual "tasting" to her Power, and she examined her perceptions as to why this should be so.

He simply didn't seem to have any strong feelings about much of anything, or her Power was really spotty, or he just didn't transmit well. She leaned towards the foremost choice. She "peeked" and "peeked", and what she got was this: Ron had a very low emotional output, but far above the other emotions she felt was a (for him) intensely piqued curiosity, and for some reason, something that felt like pity, and a really intense desire to help her. This last motivated him to spend the extra time with her, and explained his elaborately structured essays into formal logic, and applications thereof regarding her math difficulties.

The math difficulties went away, and her dreams were ever filled with larger, more elaborate, faster-moving stacks of checkerboard vignettes. She felt her mind daily moving towards ever-increasing speed and organization, and she was also able to more closely examine her own feelings and needs.

She felt Ron becoming more infatuated with her, and she examined her own responses as closely as she dared. She wasn't at all used to any kind of attention (basically dreading being noticed), and the lust she so dreaded feeling wasn't what Ron was emanating. It almost upset her that he wasn't emanating that lust, and the fact that that almost upset her did upset her. What was she thinking? She remembered the last few times she'd felt varying types of physical lust for her body, looks and moves, and memories of her responses and worse yet, her responses to her responses came back to her. She damned sure didn't feel like inciting or inviting Ron. She knew where that would most probably lead. That would be no way at all to repay this man who was going so far out of his way to help someone who (she felt this as well, and really didn't know what to make of it, considering the other things she felt from him) almost held her in slight contempt. It was down to choices again. She found herself conscious of operating on a couple of different levels. One level was absorbed in his lessons, and one level simply and obviously, despite her attempts at self-control, basked in his growing affection for her, his diminishing class-disaffection (she finally was able to rightly read that) for her. She caught herself lost in reverie, gazing raptly at his moving lips, not even hearing his words, and he caught her at it a time or two himself.

At the Dives', she found herself working the math she needed to graduate the GED class rapidly, efficiently. She found herself doing problems not assigned, and she had picked up the Copi text on formal logic, and did exercises from that book in order to pass the time, and to keep her mind off of Ron.

When she slept, and dreamed, she found that the stacks of truthtables, which appeared like layered stacks of transparent TV-walls at some disco of the imagination became ever more like some science-fiction movie simulation of a room-sized holographic display. They also became less and less chaotic, became more organized, cohesive, germane. She dreamt less and less of old unresolved feelings and images, dreamt more of current worries and events.

One morning, she was held in the grip of something that looked like dream, and felt like nightmare. She relived a few of her last kills, and it was as if on one TV-wall of the unconscious mind, her kills were violent assaults on those who would rob a flighty rich little airhead, and on the other TV-wall were scenes of something that looked like love but was no less deadly than the martial-arts extravaganzas of the fightdreams.

The one view was really quite straightforward. Men attacked her, she effortlessly dispatched them, and she fed, and in this dreamview, she felt dreamfeelings of Hunger satisfied, repeating in a strange SenSurround loop.

The other view was more devious. It was a compendium of all of her Cult lovers slaking their desires upon her acquiescent body, which aroused itself unbidden by anything other than the men's needs, with dreammemories distorted by the scenarios her unconscious threw up in an effort to solve some of the more pressing questions of her waking life.

As the men approached her in this dreamview, from which she struggled to turn ceaselessly but fruitlessly, she felt herself responding to their felt need, and upon different screens of the TV-wall of her unconscious she saw different plays of the same hand of cards, as it were.

- Her body responded, and she grew wet, and he came to her, and she halfheartedly pushed him away, but yielded...
- Her body responded, and she pulled him to her, with a woman's gentle but surprisingly insistent clinging, and the man, faceless as the dreamthings she fought in the foggy warzone of fightdreams, gave her as much pleasure as she could feel, considering that she was just a covenslut doing her duty, and that pleasure was not her objective or right...
- Her body responded, and she pulled him to her, and as he grunted toward quick fulfillment of his drives, she pulled him to her inescapably, and wrapped him tight in an embrace he could not break, her deadly kiss on his neck opened a major vein, and his orgasm and death were simultaneous with a pleasure she had never before felt...

She woke with her fist in her mouth, tasting her own blood, an unvoiced scream in her throat, the vaginal contractions of her first orgasm throbbing from the juncture of her moist thighs.

An hour later, she vomited up three bottles of aspirin, a bottle of cold pills, and a pint of cheap vodka. She passed out and woke again at sunset, with her slashed wrists healed, and peeling skin flaking from raw red sunburn, which quickly translated to a deeper nighttan than she'd ever before had. She left her digs an hour later, clean, fresh, and dressed to kill.

Somebody was going to pay for the way she hated herself. It couldn't be her, she'd just given it her best shot to date. She'd thought that four hours of the sunlight should do her right in. It hadn't. She was miserable, and madder than hell, and she'd never in her life, not since Minnesota, been so Hungry.

She was going straight to the worst parts of PG biker hell and ask a lot of stupid neophyte dope questions and show a lot of money to the most unscrupulously greedy assaultive bastard she could find, and damn was he gonna be a sorry motherfucker.

Choices again.

Lace was now quite convinced that if she didn't get laid soon, she would become worse than evil, worse than a pervert, and she'd rather die than have that happen to her.

It looked like dying was not an option, ever. So she had to make some choices... hard choices.

Hard choices called for close self-examination.

She was a nineteen year old woman, in better health than most people would ever see. She thought about it directly for, really, the first time, and decided that it was not at all wrong in any way that she should have an adult woman's needs. She decided also that she'd not felt this before only because she'd been so involved in her... other needs. Food, shelter, and a functional substitute for sanity (or perhaps even actual sanity... what was sanity for her?), those needs had all been assuaged. That (dream or nightmare? she couldn't really put a label on it) sleep-theater had convinced her, as did a wealth of other inputs, that she surely needed sex.

She didn't want to find herself loving a man to death. She was absolutely determined on that score. She must never again allow herself to use her looks, her moves, and especially not her Power to entice any man, no matter how twisted that man might be. No more of the Sex Equals Death scene for her, no way, not even in her dreams, most especially not in her dreams. Only a clean hunt would do from now on.

If she was to avoid loving (Face it, Lace, that's not love!) a man to death, she'd better be damned sure of who she did choose for a lover. That tendency of hers to respond assaultively to perceived lust would have her dining, mantis-like, on any man whose lust was strong enough to start her on that feedback loop. His lust would incite her, she'd incite him, and as his lust for her body grew under the insensate, remorseless, instinctive prodding of her Power, so would grow her lust for his death and her Hunger for his life's blood.

She needed a man with relatively low-key emotions, and she thought she knew just where to find such a man.

Besides, she really did like Ron.

At class, Lace was ready to go to town on the math. She was studied as could be, and when the quiz came out, she was one of the first to finish, but she was the last to turn her quiz paper in. She spent the time checking and rechecking, and found nothing wrong.

Later, Ron called her over, and told her, with a grave, mock-serious look on his face, that she'd scored 100 percent. Since everybody else in the class was doing fine on the math, but scoring poorly on the English and History parts of the course, and his English skills were not the best, he would be willing to tutor her on the logic she so seemed to enjoy. She was greatly pleased. She thanked him from between barely-parted lips, and looked at the floor in mock shyness. Actually, she didn't want to chance him seeing the sparkling of glee in her eyes.

They were at it for the remaining hour, and Ron seemed quite pleased and in fact surprised by the depth of her questions. She risked a tiny "peek" inside his head and was elated to find that he was struggling manfully to keep his interest in her from getting out of hand. For him, out of hand seemed to mean having feelings at all, and that was in line with her new goal. She almost felt like tweaking him a little bit to get him to like her more, but that would have been stupid. She didn't want any lust-feedback flare-ups, most particularly not with Ron. It wasn't really required anyway.

Ron simply didn't seem to have much on the way of emotions, and what few he did have seemed to be mostly concerned with liking her. So Lace left well enough alone, and bided her time.

She followed him home after class.

It was simple enough. He took a taxi, and so did she. It was an incredibly cliche event, but she actually hopped into a cab waiting directly behind the one he got into, moments after Ron's cab left. She more or less threw a football-player type into some bushes to beat him to this one remaining cab, but when she offered the driver fare-plus-twenty bucks for following the cab that had just departed, the driver grinned a sunny Caribbean smile, and drove like a detective. Ron lived in a fourth-floor condo near Fifteenth and Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest. She paused and chatted with the driver, who was curious as all hell, but kept it all to himself. Soon, she saw the reflection of Ron's bedroom window lighting up, and she was sure of where he lived.

Class became ever easier, and she found herself exercising the logical facility of her mind ever more. She thought that she'd almost solved her most pressing mental problems.

One of the most pressing, of course, was her state of being and way of life. She had never really learned to love the kill as she had learned to love the fight.

The fighting was her main thrill in life.

Nothing could match it, she thought. Whatever it was that substituted for adrenaline in her physiology was like no drug she'd ever heard of, it was speed, and power, and an incredible rush. When it hit her, and this could happen at the slightest provocation, on and off like a switch, her perceptions changed modes like a car going suddenly from a dead stop to freeway speed in an instant. She could watch a falling object slowly descend. She could count (leisurely, it seemed to her) to twenty in the time it took a stone to fall from the height of her head.

She would turn on the speed in a fight, and a man's best punch would be a lazy thing, looping slowly towards her face, and she would just as slowly dodge. She could move fast, much faster than an ordinary person, but her perceptions and thoughts moved much more quickly than did even her body. So she would toy with the man, looking for the perfect opening, the most elegant means of killing. She really did prefer to feed from the wrist, where the veins and arteries were closest to the surface, and where the wounds might be attributed to suicide or to injuries acquired in a fight. Also, she wished to never leave anything even remotely resembling a double puncture wound above the jugular vein. She didn't want cops looking for vampires.

Elegance in a kill was her form of art. She dearly loved to "barely" dodge a punch, to back up slightly to lead a man into a charge, to turn as if to flee from the charge. She would duck under the reaching arms as she stopped dead in her tracks, and bring her heel up and around behind the man's head in a sweeping, hooking crescent kick. The man would fall right into her rising other knee, and she would feed upon the stunned, skull-fractured victim.

She so dearly loved the fighting that when the fightdreams came, she would drift lucidly through them, fighting to remain asleep to remain in the dreams. It was as if she were enrolled in some ancient school of instinct, and she loved her classes.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, she'd been waiting for the bus directly across the street from a karate studio, and had been intrigued by the way that the students all lined up, and then all went through a series of intricate steps, resembling nothing so much as the choreography of a lethal ballet. She remembered every move of those steps, and had even tried some of the moves out on her next main course.

The moves worked great, but they were slow compared to the techniques she had herself devised. They had a great power, though, and she had shattered a man's chest so thoroughly that her arm had come out of him red to the elbow. Clutching his heart, she had almost wept with a savage joy. She greedily slobbered up the blood that it had spewed as it pumped its last throbbing beat. The man had gushed blood for a moment, soaking her, and she was suddenly aghast, and had fled as if the Furies pursued her. She had wrung out her cotton shirt in another alley, sucking avidly at the sleeves, and had been enough satisfied so as to not hunt another man that night, then she had bathed in a fountain that luckily was nearby.

It was too much power.

She didn't dare use it. She didn't want to leave such evidence of a supremely powerful killer lying about for cops to wonder over, and so she began to cultivate elegance.

With her new logical skills, the elegance came more easily.

She loved elegance.

She wanted to be elegant, yet there was her need to scurry about town in shapeless baggies... So when alone, she practiced her poise, her grace, and she often daydreamed about possible combinations of moves. She was developing her own form and style. Endlessly she would run her imagination through slightly varied permutations of sequences of moves, and she began to perceive an underlying rationale and scheme. Occasionally, she would have more fight- dreams like those she had so often had when first the entered into this new life, and within the holographic mists of probability, vectors aligned themselves into combat forms... and she remembered more of these everytime she awakened. She often stood alone in her room in the Dives' with one foot raised, slowly turning, stretching, extending and retracting in a wild T'ai Chi of her own devising. Thus did she keep her fitness, and in fact filled out her once lanky frame into a firm, muscular, very well-rounded and even slightly padded shape.

Her muscles became like spring steel, and she firmed her mind with logic, and she began to adjust. She almost began to like herself.

Depending on what one wished to find admirable, there was a lot to like.

She stood five feet, nine inches tall, and weighed one hundred seventy pounds. She had no idea where she kept all of the "invisible" weight. She didn't know enough about anatomy and physiology to figure out where it might be hidden. All she could guess at was that she might be somehow much more densely constructed than normal people were. She certainly didn't have much fat at all.

She had lovely (even she had to admit this, with no reservations) eyes, of a strange color that was not merely green, nor blue, nor turquoise, nor topaz, but a combination of all of those colors, never for a moment remaining any particular shade, but constantly shifting tone and hue. She had never seen their like. They had always been chameleon eyes, picking up the colors of her surroundings, but before she had Changed, they had been nothing like this. Sometimes, she would stare at her reflection, and within her eyes would seem to float a slightly incandescent fog, twisting and writhing as if churned by some unseen force within her.

She had a pretty, if not spectacular nor exotic face, smooth curves and planes fading into her rather large mouth. She had a very strong jawline for a woman, nothing frail about that at all. Her eyes sat wide apart below a very strong and really quite noble brow, but her skull seemed to curve in at the temples somewhat. She had long ago noticed that she could turn her eyes directly to the sides, a bit to the rear even, and with her neck slightly bowed, she could look... sort of down and out to both sides, and could see almost directly behind her with a very slight turning of her head. It seemed to her that her peripheral vision must be much, much better than was a normal person's. It came in very handy. She often invited attacks by people who thought that because her back was turned that she must be looking away from them.

Her hair was that raven shade that seems darker than black, and it had the incredible body that no amount of cosmetics can ever impart. She wore it loose tonight, and it hung to the bottom of her shoulder blades. Usually she wore it loosely braided or in a simple ponytail. When she hunted, it was done up in a tight braid coiled at her nape. Her complexion was so flawless as to be practically alabaster, but the nighttan kept her from looking unhealthily pale. Even she found herself to be almost invisible in low-light conditions. In the rare instances where she went out by day, she seemed to be somehow both very white, but not particularly noticably so.

Her body was quite firm, especially now that she ate well, and she surveyed herself from the top down. She wasn't spectacularly built in the sense of overendowment, but she knew (all too well due to her ability to feel what men saw in her) that she was a package deal. Her breasts didn't much bounce when she ran or fought or exercised, but were quite large enough for any man who liked such things to desire. Her belly was as flat as a washboard, and if you felt through the tiny bit of fat that she was at last accumulating, it felt like a washboard as well. She had a thin high waist, sheathed in muscle, and while she couldn't really understand the attraction, she evidently had a butt to die for... many men had. It was the legs, though, that were the real killers.

Long, and shaped... there was none of that male blockiness, but she had the smoothly curving legs of an Olympic gymnast, and if ever, short-skirted, she crossed her thighs for a man, there his gaze would remain, and there his mind would wander, even without the use of her Power.

Lace regarded herself in front of the mirror, and was in most ways quite pleased with what she saw.

Some things she wasn't too pleased with, though; and her hands were the most glaring.

They weren't exactly ugly, they just weren't like anybody else's hands.

The nails extended far back into the first digit of her fingers, and the nails themselves were three times as thick as were anyone else's nails. They were quite inflexible, but not at all brittle. They had a tiny bit of spring to them, but what they mainly were was sharp. She had never, not since she'd begun to feed, broken a nail, and some of the things she'd done should have broken her fingers as well, but that also had not happened. Her fingers were large for a woman, long, strong fingers on small blocky hands attached to oddly flexible wrists.

She often found herself looking oddly at her own hands, as she found herself grasping something or another in a grip that felt instinctually right to her, but looked quite odd. Her thumbs seemed to attach differently to her hands than most people's thumbs did. She had much greater mobility, and could exert bone-crushing force throughout the range of motion of her wrist. She had a great capacity to spread her fingers, and this capacity was not limited to the fingers' movement outside of the hand proper, but she could spread the metacarpals within her hand as well. She was capable of using both her thumb and little finger as opposable digits, and her feet were similarly adapted, with full prehensility of toes, which she exercised whenever otherwise unoccupied. She could almost get her great toe to rotate enough to oppose the second toe. When it came to climbing, she was well and truly adapted.

Functional, she thought, but not pretty. Sort of like my teeth.

Lace didn't have teeth like a TV Dracula, not at all. Instead, she had replaced the lost canines with slightly larger, slightly longer teeth, which were really more like additional bicuspids than anything else. They protruded more than her canines had, and they curved towards the back of her mouth into a slight secondary point. The leading edges, though, were amazingly sharp. She had developed little callous pads on the inside of her lips from the constant abrasion.

Her ears were smallish, and tight into her head, but they were more complexly convoluted than is common, and her auditory directional acuity was phenomenal.

Then there were the things that didn't show...

There was the speed, and there was the Hunger, and especially there was the Power.

The Power sometimes seemed to have a will of its own. When her need was upon her, the Power would synchronize itself with the rage and deviousness that came with the hunger. Sometimes it seemed as if it was her Power that motivated her to feed. She tried to not use the Power when she hunted, especially now that she had noticed the association in her mind between hunting and sex... but the Power often had, or so it seemed, other ideas.

When she had gone to Ron, she had been slowly falling victim to some weird form of lust.

She had been amazed by the ease of the finals in the class, which she had been dreading. She had completed her test early and had spent the rest of the time in class checking. Others in her class simply finished up the test, and then left as soon as they were done. The time allotted to the test was much greater than the test required, but still she spent all of her time checking and rechecking. Finally, the lead instructor called time, and she gave her test to Ron.

One of the reasons she had dawdled over the test was that she wanted to be able to thank Ron, and also because throughout the test, she had been aware of him as she had never before been aware of anyone. She was conscious of his eyes on her, and she could not ignore the piquant feeling she was receiving from him. He was already missing her. So when she handed in her test, she handed it to Ron, and she gave him the little speech she'd been rehearsing.

When she felt the upwelling of emotion from him, she couldn't help herself. Some strange feeling of her Power's activity came through to her... nothing she could place, but it seemed to be moving her, instead of being applied to another.

Perhaps it was just impulse, but she had become, necessarily, so adept at blocking impulse that she was herself quite surprised to find her arms around Ron. She didn't mind. She liked him. And he liked her. What so scared her was the way that she reacted. She had to run from him, and to run from the desire she suddenly had to ask him to go out with her, to follow her into the night. The last fifteen men she had asked out into the night had suddenly become meals for a very fast and hungry girl, and she had to bite her tongue to keep an invitation from coming out.

Outside in what would have been darkness to most, she sat and wondered at herself. To make matters worse, her Power seemed to be locked into full-volume reception, and she could feel him, even at this distance, feel him wanting her. She wanted him, too, and not in the way that she usually wanted a man. For this she was grateful. But it also placed her in a dilemma, since on the one hand she wanted a lover, and she wanted one that wouldn't want her so much as to activate her Hunger. On the other hand, she wanted Ron. And on the third hand, she wanted nothing more than to forget all about all of this and avoid Ron like the plague - how could she keep her secret from him? But she couldn't stop thinking about him.

At the Dives', she tried to while away the time with some truthtables, trying out the exercises in her Copi logic text, but she couldn't keep her mind on it. She tried to distract herself with some magazines she had lying around, and they couldn't retain her interest either. The sound of dope arguments came through the thin walls of the hotel, and she decided that she'd had enough.

She donned her heavy coat (it was just before Christmas) and hit the streets.

Two hours of walking made absolutely no difference. She went back to the motel, and sat around, staring at the walls, basically in a funk, and tried to shake her mind free of whatever it was that so bothered her.

It simply didn't work.

Finally, she managed to fall asleep from sheer boredom, having exercised for almost three hours. When she woke, she didn't remember her dreams, but she woke with the same sort of drowsy happy feeling that she normally associated with the fightdreams. She kept trying to go back into whatever dreams she'd been having, but to no avail.

The next three weeks were repetitions of the same. She wandered lost through her waking hours, of which she generally had twenty a day. She had alleviated the boredom a bit by going down to the local video emporium and buying one of those little pocket televisions, and she spent a lot of time watching TV. Mainly, she was distracted, and found herself moping for no good reason.

She finally knew what it was. Despite her solitary habits, she really did have a great need to belong, and so it had been that she had fallen prey to the Cult. She had satisfied that need as well as her need for a GED by enrolling in the equivalency-course. She was just alone again, that was it.

Still, her strolls took her all over town, and she was walking out of the grocery store at 21st and "L" streets, NW, when she saw him. Ron. She felt him, instantly, and he was feeling almost exactly what she was, a sort of bittersweet depression. Nothing like the painful depressions that she often experienced when she had recently killed, or when she was feeling her isolation and differences in her very guts... No, this was something different.

It came as a shock to her how glad she was to see him, and she almost began to follow him there and then... but she held herself in check, ducking around a corner, so that he couldn't accidentally happen to spy her. She thought to herself that she must get a grip, do a reality check, do something, anything to get her mind off of this man. For one, he was too old for her, he had to have ten years on her. For another, well, she was what she was, and even if he was willing to see her (C'mon Lace you know he'd see you, he'd like to see a lot of you, he's out looking for you for God's sake! You can feel it, Lace, you know he wants you...) not knowing what she was, what if he found out?

What if he found out...

Could she see him? She was hiding from him at this very moment, wanting him, knowing he wanted her... it was a chapter direct from the tacky romance novels she'd so loved when she was a prepubescent kid. (The heroine is totally smitten by the scion of a noble family which has unfortunately ill-gotten its fortune from her ancestors, and against whom she has sworn undying vengeance...) Well, she, the undying, would probably get some sworn vengeance if she did see him and she stood revealed as what she was.

(C'mon, girl, how could any man love a woman who could kick his ass all over the street? Well, for that matter, how could a woman love a man who could do the same? Hmmm...)

There was only one way to get over this. She had to lay the matter to rest once and for all.

His seemed to be a kind heart, and it would help to cure him of his lovesickness if she were to let him know exactly why she'd fled from him as if in panic that last time in class. Also, if she let him know what she was, she'd never dare show her face around him again, and she'd know it, by God. So, she made up her mind. She'd do it. An idea came to her, and she knew where he lived...

After she did her best tacky TV Dracula act for him, there'd be no way he'd want her, and they could both get over it. She really needed that, this weird telepathic linkage had to end.

She sure didn't want to hurt him though. She didn't think she could stand that. Just thinking of that made her feel pretty blue, and more than a bit crazy... She hopped into a cab, and headed for Logan Circle, and pondered her next moves.

Perhaps you'd like to read Part Two?
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