Killing Time

Genoa was leaning on the brick wall of the school of arts building when the three girls walked past.  He was in the shadow cast by a sculpture of three glass balls suspended by gravimancy but the constant glitter of the coin he was flipping up in the air gave him away.  He wasn’t much of a figure.  Skinny to the point of being unhealthy and deathly pale.  Even his hair was sickly, giving him the appearance of an effeminate albino.  The girls looked in his direction, he nodded, caught the coin for a second, flipped it again and they kept walking.  It was a game to him.  The coin could only stay on his hand for a fraction before it started burning into his skin.  After all, it was a silver coin.  

Three was not good odds.  But one of the girls split away, a small one with two brown pigtails, and started walking towards the junior dormitories.  The others kept walking in the same direction.  Genoa smiled and pocketed the coin, feeling it briefly sear into his fingers as he held it for seconds longer than he should have.  His mentor had told him that one day, with practice, he’d develop immunity.  He’d develop a lot of things, his mentor said.  

Right now he was working on silence.  Predators could stalk in utmost quiet and so he too, must mimic that feat.  The tricky part was not using ‘mancy.  It was so temping, so very tempting, but his mentor had said repeatedly that he’d never develop his abilities if he kept giving himself a crutch.  So Genoa swept across the pavement like a wraith, black coat wafting behind him and his footsteps utterly silent, and the girl didn’t hear a thing until he had an arm over her shoulder and a hand around her neck.

She turned.  He brought his other hand up to grab her hair, to tilt her head back.  He bared his fangs.  And froze when the muzzle of a pistol settled just under his ribcage, angled up to his heart.

“Oh,” he said, “Um.”

“And here I am with no silver bullets,” she said, “Well, I suppose plain lead in the heart will still hurt?”

“Intensely,” he assured.

“Good.”

She pulled the trigger.  Genoa was thrown onto his back and for a moment he thrashed, screaming, until the pain crested and started a downward slide.  He curled onto his side, cried out once more – a sharp and broken sound – and managed to stand.  The bullet would dissolve.  The hole would heal.  And his dinner was running away.  Genoa ran after her and in a few short bounds caught up.  Seized her by the neck, knocked the pistol out of her hand, and slammed her against a tree trunk.  She was young and so her feet were clean off the ground, kicking somewhere around his waist.  The pistol lay well out of either of their reach and her eyes darted desperately to it over and over again.

“I said that it would hurt, not kill me,” he said, “and you just ruined my shirt.”

She tried to say something but Genoa’s grasp on her neck cut off most oxygen.  After a second she grew still and quiet save for a faint gasping attempt at breathing and he lowered her so that her feet touched the ground, then carefully pulled her head back by her pigtails, and bit into the vein.

The girl went rigid for only a second and then fairly collapsed.  Genoa was ready for it and lowered her to the ground, still not taking his head away from her neck.  The blood welled into his mouth – sickly sweet – and he drank for only a minute or two before pulling away.  There were bandages in his back pocket and he pulled these out and bound the wound.  It’d stop bleeding soon enough.  He didn’t puncture her neck very deeply.  She sat there, her back against the tree, her eyes wide, while he turned and wiped off his mouth then wiped his hands on the grass.  After a moment he reconsidered and wiped them on his shirt, which was stained with what little blood that had escaped when she shot him through the heart.

“You’re not going to kill me?” she asked.

“I do that and the Cadre drags me out into daylight, Academy’s protection or not,” he replied, “Besides, I can’t bring myself to drink someone to death.”

“I thought vampires liked blood.”

Genoa made a face.

“The taste yes, the act, not so much.”

“Oh.”

He turned and regarded the girl.  Small and young.  Probably a first or second year in the Academy.  Thirteen, at the oldest.

“Where are you from?  Your accent sounds like a hick, to be honest.”

She bristled and tried to stand.  Failed.

“I’m a Stormrider!  And my cousins are going to be horribly upset when they hear what you did.”

“Stormrider?”

He chuckled and stood.  Retrieved her gun and tossed it into her lap.  She stared at it dully.

“Stormriders don’t scare me, especially ones that can’t fight off a fledgling vampire.”

“I would have killed you.  The bullet went into your heart.”  She sounded defiant.

“Yes, but you didn’t, and then you ran instead of further dissuading me from making you my victim of the evening.  Use ‘mancy next time, that’s why you’re being sent here, after all.”

He brushed himself off, a useless gesture where his shirt was concerned.  She sat there, silent, and after a moment he walked off.  She called after him.

“You’re leaving me here?”

There was a note of panic in her voice.  Genoa sighed and put his hand to his forehead.

“You can walk yourself back to the dorm.”

She pleaded a bit more, something about being weak from blood loss, how the least he could do is get her back to the dormitory after his assault, and so on and so forth.  It wasn’t until she started crying that Genoa changed his mind about just leaving her there, and after a bit of grumbling picked the Stormrider up and carried her back to the dorm.  He left her in the lobby.  Even tears wouldn’t get him to venture into the female wing of the junior dormitories.  Preteen girls en masse.  They frightened him.

It was a quiet walk back to his own dormitory.  His mentor would be most annoyed that he had gotten himself shot and Genoa probably had a lecture in front of him.  Maybe even more work to further hone his skills and vampiric reflexes.  That worried him more than anything else.  Classes were already pressing in hard on him and being a night student presented a lot of difficulties.  Unable to access certain resources save for a small window of time in the early evening.  Professors reluctant to make office hours past midnight.  He was just lucky that he’d managed to schedule all the classes he wanted after the sun had set, much less keep his grades up this semester.  If his mentor added on more work… Genoa started to sigh and stopped himself short, reminding himself that it was a pointless gesture, a last remnant of humanity he had best abandon.  He stuck his hands in his pockets and slouched instead.  Well, if his mentor added on more work then he’d just drop a class.  It wasn’t like he was in a rush to graduate or anything.

There were some lights still on and doors still open in the wing he lived in.  His floor was the basement level of the dorms where there were no windows.  Fellow hallmates called it the dungeon but it was the safest place for a vampire to sleep.  He also had no roommate, another concession to his unique position.

Their resident advisor, Brin, was up as well.  He was a chronomancer approaching graduation and had opted to be a resident advisor as an excuse to take fewer classes and thus prolong his stay at the Academy.  As Genoa passed the man stepped out into the hallway.

“You’re a mess,” he said.  Genoa stopped and slouched against the wall opposite him.

“My meal fought back,” he said without humor, “Put a pistol against my heart and fired.”

Brin winced in exaggerated sympathy.  The vampire shrugged and staggered off towards his room, muttering something about studying.  Brin just watched him go.  The Academy had a strange sort of truce between the students.  Everyone was fair game and if someone got injured a little bit the officials just turned a blind eye.  If Genoa had a student for a meal, well, that was all part of the game and so long as bodies didn’t start turning up no one cared.  The Academy was a world of its own, a war ground, where even the Cadre looked away and let the internal workings sort themselves out.  Brin had been part of this strange little battle himself on numerous occasions, and as a resident advisor he had only been drug in further.  Already he had helped stage a raid on another dormitory that had ‘confiscated’ their lounge furniture.  Put two people in the infirmary and got them their couches back.  

Now if Sabreur were there, Brin couldn’t help but think, the furniture would have been set on fire at some point.  He chuckled.  Sometimes he missed those two.

The chronomancer had only sat down at his desk for a few seconds before someone burst into his room.  He jumped and his pencil went flying off onto the floor.  

“They smuggled the penguin in my room.  The zombie one.” Genoa said, “It has a bow, a box of chocolates at its feet, and a card asking me to be its sweetheart.  How the hell do they even know what gender that wretched thing is?”

Brin put his fingers to his temple.  Third even-numbered room pranked this week.  There was definitely a pattern developing.

“Just… get rid of… no… go put in one of the shower stalls.  Yes.  That’d be a good place to hide it.”

“They’re not targeting me?  Cause I’m a vampire, you think?”

“Definitely not,” Brin assured, “Now go hide that thing in the shower.  It’s time to fight fire with fire.”

Genoa rolled his eyes and vanished from the doorway again.  Whistling, Brin dropped to the floor to retrieve his pencil.  He could hear squawking and swearing as the vampire wrestled the penguin off towards the bathroom.  There would be lots of screaming to rise out of this, he hoped.  Oh yes.  Lots of screaming.

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