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PROM QUEEN OF THE DAMNED IS A SERIAL ADVENTURE, PUBLISHED ONLINE AT THE RATE OF ONE CHAPTER PER WEEK, FROM JANUARY THROUGH SEPTEMBER, 2010

All characters and events depicted herein are either fictional or satirical in their respective portrayals. Any similarities between any one of them and any real world entity is entirely coincidental. This holds true invariably and across the board, despite any claims their real life counterparts may make to the contrary.

This story contains some mature and some not-so-mature content. Younger readers are advised to keep it well hidden from their parents.

PROM QUEEN OF THE DAMNED by Rob Callahan

Copyright © 2010 Rob Callahan

Cover by Vera Chazen

Published by Banthese Books

www.RobCallahan.com/PromQueen

Lily rose from her slumber, which is to say that she simply opened her eyes and sat up. She hadn't actually been asleep, for the undead did not require sleep to function. They were, in fact, incapable of it. Her existence lacked not only sleep but the consequent states of grogginess, crabbiness and that of having eye lids riddled with gunk that so often followed a good night's rest as well. Not that her feignings of sleep took place at night. What she did - which was more akin to meditation than it was to the catching of any winks or Zs - she did during the day, for while the sun shone she sheathed herself away within a shroud of shadow. She was ensconced in a darkness achieved by thick curtains hung over windows angled to avoid the day's direct light. Gone the way of her dear departed mortality were a good number of life's often unnoticed virtues, daylight and eye gunk being just two of many.

Determined not to be bothered by these many losses, she smiled broadly and bore her fangs to the emptiness of the room around her. She may have been dead, cold to the touch and bloodthirsty to the core, but she would not let a little thing like her own inherently abominable nature get her down, so as her thoughts began to drift in that direction, she turned her attention instead to the still-new room in which she had settled. Her bedroom was spacious and tidy, with little to fill the vast space between its walls and beneath its ceilings. The bed from which she'd risen and the aforementioned curtains were joined in the space only by her coffin. It served no practical purpose, but when she'd clawed her way up from the grave all those years ago, there had been no others of her kind waiting to join her. When no pale, caped gentleman stepped forward from the night to explain in a Transylvanian accent the ways of the vampire, she had resolved simply to proceed with that which she knew (which she had learned mostly from monster matinees and campfire stories) and to keep the pine box in which she'd been laid to rest. In the decades that passed since then, she gradually came to realize that the comfort of a large bed over a small box outweighed any need she might have felt to keep up appearances simply for their own sake. Her need to keep the coffin from then on had been for purely sentimental reasons. She just couldn't bring herself to throw it away.

Her toes hung just above the floor as she floated from the bed to the window. Once there, she angled a single finger around the curtain's edge and poked cautiously at the unknown level of luminance on its other side. The skin on her fingertip warmed, touched by the dying embers or another day diminishing to dusk, and she pulled it back quickly, shaking her hand as if to cool the damaged digit. She had tested the waters of the world outside and found them mearly nearly ready for further wading. The last direct rays of the sun were disappearing over the horizon and, while the day's fading traces among the din of another encroaching night were not dangerous, they were at least painful. Reflexively, she put the injured finger between her lips as if to soothe the pain away via just the right mix of suction and saliva. The act was, like the keeping of her coffin, both ineffective and essential to the maintenance of her disposition and piece of mind.

She floated back to the bed and removed her varsity jacket. His varsity jacket, to be precise, was a few sizes too big for her small frame. It lent her an awkward, clumsy look unbecoming of a vampire, yet even in the early days of her undeath, when she practiced the presumed pomp and appearance fitting a creature of the night, she had worn it to bed every morning, religiously, and remembered with much fondness her living days within it. He'd given it to her with the promise of many more gifts to come - his class ring, his undying love, his eternal devotion, his immortal soul and so on - but her untimely death had barred the giving of any other gifts and, as a token of his ongoing devotion to his dear, deceased high school sweetheart, he had placed the jacket in with her before they closed the lid. It had been the first thing she noticed when she awoke from death and it had become the last thing she noticed each morning as she drifted into a pretense of sleep.

Folding the garment and laying it neatly atop the bed, she turned and floated from the room. Flight was among the various vampire skills she had had to teach herself and, having finally mastered it after so much painstaking effort full of failure, she did it proudly and whenever possible. On she went down the length of the second floor hallway. She descended the stairs and hovered briefly at their base before moving on through the downstairs hall and the living room - taking care, on principle, to avoid the sun room - until she came to rest, gently lowering her feet to the dining room floor.

Within the dining room, within the modest home within the Levittonian community known formally as Sherman Park, Lily's servant sat with her elbows on the tabletop and her cheeks against her fists. Tired from the trials of her mortal servitude to an immortal master, the woman hung from her own frame, slouching against herself for support as she sighed wearily at nothing in particular. Even affected as she was by the throes of exhaustion, a vibrancy lurked just behind her sunken eyes, as if waiting for its cue to surface. Lily was that cue and, upon noticing the vampire's entrance, the servant got quickly to her feet and stood suddenly resplendent in her own height and curves. The vampire, drawing near, imbued her servant with life simply by virtue of closeness.

Her master called her Lorna although her birth name might as easily been Penny, Susan, Samantha or Gertrude. Lorna was the name Lily gave to each of her servants, for reasons she kept to herself, and each of them in turn learned quickly to respond to it. The servant's bond with the vampire infused her with strength, stamina and a near ageless quality that fell just imperceptibly shy of her undead counterpart's. She was pride and perseverance personified, coolly comely and almost matronly. She was a charming specimen of the sort of adult woman into which Lily so often longed to grow and, as such, she lent felicity to the vampire's already rosy disposition, simply by entertaining Lily's longing for vicarious maturity. Each smiled sincerely to the other as they took their respective seats on opposite sides of the table. Lily waited quietly for her servant to speak, which she did soon enough.

"I'm not warming up to this house," Lorna rolled her eyes as she spoke, as if to encompass the place in her circular gaze.

"I think it's keen," said Lily, cocking her head and rolling her own eyes, making as if to see what her servant saw. "I used to live in a house like this, back when I lived, and I don't mind telling you how I've missed this kind of mid-century charm."

"Not me," Lorna huffed. "I liked our last house." A single curl worked its way loose from the rest of her hair and fell to dangle between her eyes. She blew at it several times, hoping to move it back via the strength of her breath and will alone, without success before giving in and using her fingers instead.

"Come now, Lorna. You're just adjusting to the move. Before you know it, you'll come to love this house every bit as much as you did the last." Lily reached across the table and placed her hand upon her servant's, petting her soothingly as one might to calm an anxious house cat. Then she smiled warmly.

"The last house was enormous, Lily, and there was land. There was so much land! This," she protested, pointing at no particular part of the abode, as if to point at it all at once, "is tract housing. I've always hated tract housing."

"Well," offered Lily, "maybe we can find something better once we've gotten a feel for the community."

Lorna eyed her master suspiciously, for in all the years she'd served her she had not once known the vampire to harbor such concerns. She wanted and waited for an explanation. When none was offered, she considered the undead girl across from her with a confused kind of sympathy, as if all the better to understand her shift in focus. Lily had previously sought only solitude, but suddenly she seemed poised to adopt the presumed idyllic lifestyle of a suburbanite. What was more, she had missed her mark. The suburb into which she'd moved Lorna and herself was on a path to decay that took it dangerously close to the precipice of urban blight, with little to keep it from falling over. Such a place of residence was unbecoming of a vampire, according to everything Lorna knew about them. Which was everything Lily had taught her about them. Which, as has been noted, may not have been entirely canon.

"Putting your new-found fascination with community aside," Lorna argued, "this is hardly the kind of community one willingly joins."

"I was born here, you know." Lily pouted, ever so slightly, as she argued back.

"I don't want to die here, you know," Lorna retorted. "I'm sure it was a great place back in the nineteen fifties, but times have changed. Half the houses on this block are foreclosed and I shouldn't have to point out the questionable repute of our remaining neighbors."

"Lorna," Lily snapped, a hint of the bestial and guttural intruding into her voice. "After all these years, I can't believe your view of the working class hasn't changed. It makes me wonder sometimes why I ever thought to bond you."

"It's not the working class that bothers me," Lorna protested. "It's the criminal class."

"Even worse," Lily lectured. "Have you forgotten what you were when I found you?"

"I was different," she said, her voice rising in both volume and tone as she became defensive. "I was a harmless cat burglar."

"A criminal is a criminal is a criminal," said Lily. "Even if she's a self-hating criminal."

"Oh, no you don't." Lorna leaned into the space between the two of them and levelled her gaze. "You know better than anyone the difference between the thugs roaming the streets today and the elegant kind of thief I used to be. I was never a danger to anyone, but thieves today have no respect for human life. It's not enough to take your money. They want your life, too."

"That's hardly any concern of mine," said Lily.

"Good for you, Lily, but I'm not immortal and this so-called community you've moved us to is dangerous."

"My dear Lorna," Lily cooed, "you and I share a bond that gives you so many advantages over the men you fear. For one, you're stronger and faster than any other mortal."

"Yet slower than a speeding bullet," Lorna muttered.

"Fine," she acquiesced. "You and I will find a better place to live. I'll even promise to look tonight, if there's time between meals."

"Thank you," said Lorna, making a show of her own relaxing.

"Speaking of which," Lily went on, "have you found me anything?"

"Of course," said Lorna. "You've got a date in Saint Paul tonight."

"A date," Lily grimaced at the sound of it. "Not another pervert."

"These are difficult times, Lily. You can't pick and choose which right thing to do. You have to take what comes to you."

"But they're always so creepy," Lily protested.

"I don't disagree," Lorna offered, "but they're easy to find. A few suggestive lines here, a flirty text there, and they're falling out of the chat room and into the palm of your hand." That said, she stood and left the room. Lily could hear her rustling through papers in another part of the house as an address, a time and a name were collected and written down.

"I suppose a good deed is a good deed, and their blood tastes the same as any other's," sighed Lily.

"That's the spirit," Lorna called from afar. "Of course, you could always take your chances with a random hunt. Especially in this neighborhood. You never know what kind of scum you'll dredge up."

"The hunger, Lorna," Lily replied. "I haven't fed in far too long and you know perfectly well I can't turn down a guaranteed meal in favor of some remote possibility. It's as if you do this to me on purpose, as if you were using me for some personal vendetta you've got against child molesters."

Lorna reappeared in the dining room and placed a hand-written note on the table before her master, ignoring the vampires prying implications and saying instead, "You should enjoy them when and while you can, Lily. Even the stupid ones are getting harder to lure these days. They keep arguing, telling me I'm not really a young girl and thinking I'm setting some kind of trap."

"Which you are," Lily noted.

"Some of them," she went on, "have gone so far as to accuse me of being Chris Hanson."

"Who?"

"Never mind," said Lorna dismissively. "It's from a show."

"Oh, TV." Lily looked at her note absently as she mused over the notion. "When I was alive, hardly anyone had a television. We mostly just went to the movies." As Lily went on to recount the long lost days of her youth, Lorna mouthed each word as if she'd heard it all before, and often enough to memorize - which she had - and when Lily noticed the mockery ensuing from her nostalgic waxings, she promptly cut herself off and left, note in hand, to meet her next meal.

She left via the front door and walked boldly across the yard, for the sun had receded far enough below the horizon so as not to cause any harm and the street itself was devoid enough of working lights that shadows were abundant. Pedestrians, however, were not. Looking left, right and left again, Lily got the distinct feeling that she could walk back and forth along the road before her house from then to dawn and never see a single soul. Lorna was right about the neighborhood in that it was far from the safest into which they could have moved, and the threat of some manner of accosting seemed sufficient to reroute all but the most imperative of foot traffic to some other adjacent neighborhood. Even police, she noted, seemed reluctant to drive by her house after dark.

So, satisfied that no one of consequence would see, Lily launched herself into the night sky. Merely hovering through the house was one thing, something akin to stretching her legs before walking, but actual flight with speed and height was what she really loved most about being undead. The cool, crisp air of early Spring cut at her skin like grains of sand in a desert storm as she soared to an eagle's vantage and peered down to the distant ground below. The wind grew fiercer the higher she climbed, rapping her skirt against her thighs and her sleeves against her forearms with a sharp sting that would have reddened the skin thereupon, had the vessels beneath been conducive of living blood. Lily inhaled deeply, not for need of breath, but to catch the open air's scent as she relished in the sensation of the sky's barrage upon her body. So much of what walked upon the ground failed to affect her but, when braced alone against the draft and flutter, she was flooded with sensation and she felt as close to being alive again as ever she could hope.

Having enjoyed the single, solitary moment aloft, she exhaled. Her breath symbolic of the anger over her minion's mocking of her many fond memories, he long sigh its release. Then she dove at a sharp angle toward the ground. When she came near Terra firma, perhaps a hundred feet or less, she curved her body, conforming to some imagined current, and soared upward again. So she went as she made the journey from Sherman Park, across Minneapolis and on to Saint Paul, reflecting as she went on the many reasons she had kept Lorna alive and in servitude, in spite of her defiance.

Lorna was not her first but, of them all, she had proven herself the best. When they met, Lily was a mad, tormented beast filled with hunger and fueled by the need to appease her appetite for mortal flesh. She had been driven all but insane by her need to feed on the blood of the living. The natural optimism and love of humanity she'd harbored when alive had been pressed and scraped against the hard reality of her uniquely and necessarily predatory existence, like so much cheese against the grater, and all of the cheer and hope she'd struggled to retain from her living days had nearly disintegrated into her undead nights. Having seen the inner turmoil that tore the vampire apart from within, Lorna had proposed a simple solution to her dilemma. She'd offered a fix, albeit not a perfect one, but one so naturally obvious that Lily was still amazed from time to time that she hadn't thought of it herself.

After decades of feeding randomly on every mortal man upon whom she had happened to stumble, and after just as many years of hating herself for it, she now fed only upon those deserving of the fate. Her meals were now only made of the evil among men. Her predatory predilection, once aimed indiscriminately, had been directed toward those who sought their own prey among the innocent. For each of them she drained of blood, Lorna had argued, countless others would live the full and happy lives they deserved and Lily, while still an abomination at her core, could channel her hunger toward a more heroic outlet. Her sustenance via the blood of those who preyed upon the weak and, when necessary, that of those who hunted her own kind, was enough to strike a balance between the sweetness within her still, dead heart and the fiendish frenzy that drove her to feed.

Do unto others as they deserve, Lorna had argued, and learn to recognize the deserving. She had dubbed this compromise between famine and feeding frenzy the Crimson Rule and she had stayed true to it since Lorna's earliest days as her minion. For that, and for the serenity it afforded her, she was grateful and needful enough of Lorna's insight that she kept her. She not only kept her, but did so far longer than she had any of her past mortal pets, and with little attention paid to the sort of behavior that might have left her predecessors dead or mad.

Observance of the rule lead to less frequent feedings, but Lily's self image climbed high and, she noticed as the years passed, other advantages followed as well. The Crimson Rule resulted in frequent hunger and, as in any predator, from hunger was born a heightened alertness toward the world around her. Lily's tendency to keep a sharper eye out had saved her more than once from those who walked the night in her pursuit. Hunters, as she knew them, had come upon her during her own hunts - crucifixes and wooden stakes in hand - and she had done to them that which they had sought to do to her every time. Her own survival was contingent on the acuity found in her appetence, her existence prolonged by her own longing. The rule was a reflection of the Karma of the Damned and her adherence to it was Lily's primary concern. Her secondary, the cessation of her hunger, and as long as she maintained her priorities just as such she could maintain her existence, which was tertiary.

Her flight came to an end over a small cluster of bluffs overlooking the river's egress from the capital city. Lily brought her feet to the ground atop one of them and surveyed the area before and below her. A breeze wafted up from the water's surface and carried with it the scent of rust and rubble from the train tracks that ran, infrequently used, parallel to the riverbed below. Satisfied that she had come to the right place, she left her perch above this scene and floated slowly downward. She scanned the area as she went, looking for the locale that was her designated point of rendezvous. The note she had from Lorna said the meeting was to take place at the Lowertown Depot near Mounds Park in Saint Paul. In addition, a list of landmarks, easily visible and recognized from above, had been included to guide her. Lorna had many qualities and, while not all of them were appreciable, her thoroughness and accommodating attention to her master's general ease were prominent among them.

She found the place with little effort. In fact, she saw it from above long before she finished her descent through the thickening shadows. The abandoned building's shell crumbled behind broken and boarded windows, its disuse marked by the many piles of rubble and detritus around it. An intangible, dingy pallor hung over the face of it, creeping out at its base into the surrounding grounds, all gravel and weeds. Wind howled through the place, coming and going through empty window sockets and holes in the brick and mortar, whistling haunting omens, warning away the living and rocking the building's only identifying feature - a massive, hanging sign to proclaim the name of the place - as it creaked back and forth on corroding chains. The darkness of the place was worsened by the shadows of the bluffs above, leaving it far enough removed from both sight and mind that no one came to it, or even harbored an awareness of it, without a very good reason (or perhaps a very bad one) and this made it the prefect place for clandestine meetings and seedy intents. Such were undoubtedly the intents of the unseen owner of the only thing failing to conform to the crumbling, musty makeup of the place: A clean, white and windowless van was parked in plain sight and, as Lily came to the ground, still obscured from sight by the shadows through which she'd come down, then stepped forward from those shadows, the van's occupant stepped forward from it. She from the black of night and he from the white of the van, they closed the distance between them, each entertaining entirely different expectations.

She felt his gaze long before proximity revealed his wolfish smile. His eyes burned from a fury within that stoked the ever-smoldering embers of a killer instinct as he leered and licked his lips. His mass was easily twice that of Lily's small frame and this, along with however many past conquests he'd had, fed an overconfidence that lent to a swagger that spoke to the nature of his intent. Lily couldn't discern whether his plan was to rape, kill or maim. She could only tell by the way he used his walk that violence was imminent, that he would waste no time on niceties. He'd exhausted his capacity for social graces in his online exchanges with Lorna, under her anonymous guise, and now that he deemed his victim successfully lured within his reach, he focused only on closing his grasp around her. Lily approached him with much the same manner of confidence and expedience but, unlike him, hers was justified.

The predatory persona was fertile ground for the cultivation of a dark and perverse narcissism. A perceived invincibility led the would-be attacker in an incessant pursuit of new risks - and the greater the better - to face, providing yet another notch for the proverbial belt. Others were little more than a means to the satisfaction of the sociopath's intensifying, misanthropic calling. Lily knew this for, herself a predator, she'd struggled against the very same temptation. Having fought and faced the darkness for, in all likelihood, longer than he had lived, she knew it intimately. Her familiarity with his inner workings lent her the knowledge to guide him purely via her own body language, to tug him this way or that, as a cat might toy with the proverbial mouse before the kill. She'd met men just like him so many times before and always they were like sheep transformed to wolves at the sight of a thin, helpless young girl.

She slackened her stance. A slight slouch and a limp posture projected the look of a victim-in-waiting and he went for the bait, quickening his pace and closing in upon her within the span of a heartbeat - from what she could remember of heartbeats - and was poised to take her by the neck when she took control. Swift as the wind, so silent she was drowned out by the near distant lapping of waves, she pulled him close and sunk her teeth into his throat. Warm, fresh blood flowed over her lips and through her gums. She held the first mouthful for a moment, savoring the flavor as she probed and sloshed the rusty wet elixir with her tongue, then she swallowed and filled her mouth again. She took his life quickly, more humanely perhaps than she judged he deserved, and allowed him no time to struggle.

Her victim vanquished, her hunger appeased, she lowered the empty shell of a body to the ground and slumped over it. She would need a moment to recover, for to take the life of another was to take their life force as well. That which made the the sick and deranged flowed through their blood, and into Lily as she drank. She had to take a moment, to collect herself, so as not to be overcome by the essence with which she was infused. She must remember the Crimson Rule in the crucial moments after a feeding, so she relaxed and thought calming thoughts, regaining her composure, so that no part her victim would taint any part of her. Vampires, more than anyone else, are what they eat. If they're not careful. Which Lily was.

So she fell deep into her own psyche as she sorted and subdued the new cravings she'd ingested and, so intensely focused was she on this task, she failed to note another approach. The other man stepped lightly from another shadow and crept, cloaked in the camouflage of black clothes beneath a black trench coat and hidden within the protection ancient wards and incantations against evil. He slunk unseen, closer and closer to the catatonic girl as she sat, obliviously, with her back to him. Placing a hand inside his coat and removing it again in a single fluid motion, he gripped a sharpened wooden stake as he closed in. His fingers closed tightly around the weapon. With only a few small steps left between himself and his target, he raised his arm for the final strike and angled it to strike her heart. As he moved, his foot came down for the final step and landed on a dry twig, snapping it loudly in the relative silence of the still night, and he thrust all of his weight behind his attack.

Even as he thrust with all of the weight he could muster, Lily stirred at the sound of breaking wood and moved, not in enough time or over enough space to avoid the piercing attack, but in just enough to remove her heart from its path. The stake broke forcefully through her chest, piercing her left lung and tearing dead flesh from cold sinew and bone as it penetrated her back and protruded through the front. The wood wedged itself between two of her lower ribs. It was an uncomfortable hindrance, impeding her full range of motion, and her blouse was ruined by the broken and torn shards of torn flesh and victim's blood but she was still intact. She could still fight back, which was as much boon to her as it was bane to the man she spun and faced.

The sight of him, cloaked in black and magic, was a familiar one. She had faced so many hunters since her death she could no longer keep count. As far back as the moment of her own death, when the only other vampire she had ever seen had sunk his teeth into her tender flesh, they had been there. While she had died, pinned beneath the other creature of the night and held firmly down, forced to watch wide-eyed as he drained her of life, she had felt his fear of their pursuit. In that moment she had come to know, instantly and intimately, his hatred for their kind and their relentless pursuit. She had absorbed the essence of the vampire's disdain humanity, and specifically for the secret human society of vampire hunters and their relentless hounding, in those final moments as the last vestiges of her life faded away beneath her assailant and, just before death wrapped her within its cold embrace, she had seen him deliquesce to dust as a pair of hunters converged upon him in his moment of vulnerability. The same two hunters had waited at her grave, waited for her to rise, innocent and unknowing about what she had become. They had waited to return her promptly to the dust from which she'd risen, and they had waited in vain. They had, instead, become her first living meals. Of all the hunters she had faced since then she had only allowed one to live. But that is a story about which we'll learn more later.

Vampire hunters were a rare treat for Lily. Within their veins flowed a sweet, delectable essence like liquid candy. They had all the flavor of the driven, obsessed criminals to which she was used, but none of the vileness. They were driven not by sickness, but by an ancient code of holiness and righteousness. They were modern Knights Templar, shadow-clad paladins questing to rid the world of all evil and, if Lily's many lonely decades were any indication, they were very good at what they did. In their blood flowed cessation not just of Lily's physical hunger, but of her spiritual hunger as well. An encounter with one of their kind was enough on its own to turn her almost feral with anticipation. This clash, coupled with the newly-absorbed and still-unresolved ravenous craving for violence she'd taken from her still-warm last victim, transformed her from mere creature of the night to force of nature, if not natural disaster. For the state into which she sank, she might just as well have been Hurricane Lily, and she braced to come upon him with a gale force fury.

Her lips curled and her fangs, already pink from her last victim's blood, dripped as she salivated. Rising into the air, just above his reach, she took the stake by the end protruding from her front and pulled it through. Ribs snapped as the thickest part of its taper passed through her body and she held it up, regarding the failed instrument of her demise, before throwing it with all her might back down toward the hunter. He dodged the missile and the stake struck gravel and ground instead, splintering with the force of its impact and sending wooden shards through the air like shrapnel. A few wodden shards hit and penetrated the hunter's leg and side. His blood wept out around the many small wounds. The scent of it pushed Lily to the brink of berserker rage as she swooped back in for the kill, telling him, “You missed.”

The hunter dodged and took to retreat as Lily crashed, face first, into the hard ground where once her enemy had planted his feet. He ran as fast as he could. She got to her feet, picking small chucks of loose gravel from her eyes and face, then shook her head as if to shake away the delirium of her sudden and unexpected impact. Then she spun around to find her fleeing foe. He had retreated back into the shadows and become invisible by virtue of his dark clothes, but the scent of his blood and the noise he made as he thrashed through the brush was as a beacon to her. He was running to the river, hoping she'd lose his scent under water, but Lily would never let him reach his goal. She flew into the air above the abandoned depot and hovered, silent as the dead, and triangulated from the sounds and smell where next she should swoop.

The time that lapsed between her first flirtation with blind, famished fury and her descent upon the fleeing hunter had been enough, although just, that she had regained some sense of self control. She restrained herself as she came down on him, pinning him to the jagged ground just in time to prevent his underwater escape. His face crashed to the hard ground and he grunted as the jolt of the impact forced open his hand, freeing a second stake he had brought to the ready. She held him, helpless, and regarded the hunter with hesitant satisfaction before turning him over on his back, exposing the flesh of his neck, beneath which coursed the succulent fare she craved. His face, fear epitomized, stared wide-eyed into hers as a whimper wheezed through his lips.

“Hold still,” she whispered. “I'll be as quick as I can.”

“Beast,” the hunter groaned, regaining a bit of brazenness at having accepted his inevitable fate. “One day, we'll take you down. One day innocent humans will be safe again.”

“Innocent!” She spat the word as though the taste of it soured her mouth. “I haven't killed an innocent in twice your lifetime.”

“I don't believe you,” he spat back. Her grip loosened as she contemplated the prospect of argument, of proving somehow that what she said was true, and he took advantage of her momentary distraction as he squirmed with a final, futile effort to break free. Jarred, Lily abandoned reason and let the predator instinct consume her. Then she consumed him, exhilarated by the rush of power and purity than came from turning her predators to prey.

When he ceased to struggle, and then to breath, she left him limply alongside the river and reflected on the night's events. She had been careless, if only for a moment, and in giving in to her hunger before assessing the safety of the feeding ground, she had almost been destroyed. She wanted to blame it on any number of things. She wanted to say that she had simply gone too long between victims, or that the internal struggle between the beast she was and the lovely young woman she longed to be again had distracted her, or that the existential angst inherent in the impending act of absorbing her victim's sickness along with sustenance was simply too much to handle.

These and a dozen other excuses rushed through her mind as she danced around her real concern. Her constant and prime source of distraction was the now deceased old man who had once placed his varsity jacket over her shoulders as he'd formally requested the honor of going steady. He was the reason she had returned to Sherman Park after having wandered the world in a fruitless search for others of her kind. She had wanted to see him again, even if only one last time, before death encroached, as it had with everything else she'd ever loved, and took him from her.

So she flew, higher than ever, as if sufficient elevation was all she needed to escape the memories that wandered wraith-like through the world below. Her hunger satiated, she stayed suspended above the world of mortals, illuminated only by the scant light of the crescent moon above. Where the air was too thin to breath, where not even birds could join her, she brooded moodily until the sky turned from black to deep blue on the horizon. Then, with little time left, she traversed the early morning sky and came to rest at the gates to the vast plot of land that was Tranquil Repose, known more commonly as the Sherman Park Cemetery.

She bounded the gates and floated like a ghost between the gravestones. In many ways, she was a ghost. Not only was she bereft of life, but she was frozen frozen in the form she'd once worn as a teen-aged trespasser roaming through the place at a time when the space between graves had been far more ample. She paused briefly at each plot that showed signs of a recent burial until, at last, she came to the one she sought. Her feet sank to the cool, wet ground and she knelt upon the mound of dirt too fresh to grow grass yet. Her fingertips traced lightly over the inscribed name and she noted the dates before noting, more importantly, that the name was carved alone. His matched no other marker around him.

He had never married, never had a child and never sought the comfort of another after her own death. His obituary had listed a nephew as his only surviving relative. It had painted a life of solemn loneliness in text upon the canvas of the reader's mind. She had already known of his solitude, for she had checked secretly in upon him every few years. For so long, she'd endured the solitude of her condition with optimism for she knew that even after her death, there was another whom it affected as deeply as she. He had lived alone in her honor, with only her memory for company, and he had withered as she watched from the shadows. She hadn't spoken with him since her death, but his share in their mutual loneliness had served as just the sort of distant, presumed company for which her misery longed and she had never felt truly alone so long as he lived.

But she would never feel that comfort again. The last echo of her mortal life had faded away unnoticed. He was survived only by his jacket, and even that was beginning to fray.

Lily Rose had returned home to recapture some tangible piece of the life from which she'd been forced. She found instead that it had all slipped through her fingers, into oblivion, and she was truly alone for the first time in her death. It was a prospect with which she did not want cope so, as she hurried home to the safety of her shadowy shelter from the sun, she began considering other means by which to live the life she had never had.

Next week: An Unearthly Young Woman