"Stop right there!"
Not panting for lack of breath, forehead shiny but somehow ruddy-looking, she ignored the policeman's order and kept right on running. Rounding a corner, Emily saw a mostly open sidewalk in front of her so she opened into a sprint. Turning up her hearing a notch, she knew without looking that the idiot was following her. A burst of speed could get her out of this, but there were too many people watching...and that would get her into the kind of trouble she couldn't just run away from. So she put her faith in being faster than some dumb cop.
Everything had been going according to plan. She had gotten into the city quite easily, though Chicago hadn't yet shown her much of interest. Lots of pretty lights, the kinds of things that a certain class of vampire liked to see, but nothing significant. If they even patrolled their own territory she'd not seen any sign. They were plump. Decadent.
She happened to walk past an unconscious man lying in an alleyway. The moonlight caught his features in a way that made his nose stick out, giving him a hawkish quality that she found endearing. There's always time for a little top-up, her sire had taught her, so she knelt down to do that thing that vampires do. Which was when the cop showed up.
He'd told her to let go of him, and she had done so. He looked at the blood dribbling from her mouth, and she gave an impish shrug. He looked away to call a fellow officer to assist him, and she disappeared from sight. When he looked back into the alley his brow furrowed in surprise. She broadened her grin and waggled her fingers at him in a schoolgirl wave.
His face turned sharp and he said, "I don't know what you think is so funny, Miss." And that was when she knew she was in real trouble.
All of which culminated in the here-and-now. He had to look for her to find her, so if she could just get into another alleyway...
Emily turned another corner and then quickly turned again, becoming invisible as she did so, and this time it stuck. The fool ran right past her and she had to suppress a chuckle. She didn't feel until the last moment that a sharpened shaft of wood slipped discreetly through her back and into her heart, like a sharp knife into a sack of grain.
"Never try the same trick twice..." were the last words she heard.
--
Simply, slowly, fairly mechanically, he knelt down to her crumpled body and began to drink. It's about time I got something I can use, he thought to himself as he drank pint after pint after pint.
It was that thought that sobered him.
Scuttling like an insect he backed away from her, quickly, harshly. The moonlight raked across her face, turning her nose into something like a hawk's beak, and he found it endearing.
Endearing.
Composing himself, Lord Quinn stood up and straightened his red cravat just as Officer Connelly arrived on the scene. Breathless from the chase, the young man saw that his master had brought down their mutual prey and smiled. "What do you want done with her?" he asked.
He ordered her interred in the cement foundations of a nearby building "along with all the others," and stepped back into his carriage. Ordering the driver home, he began writing out instructions on a sheet of paper in the cab.
It has to be soon, he thought, I must tell her that it has to be soon. It has been too long.
I almost did something...regrettable.
