Excerpt of The Pet by Kris Fox

Five murders in the stink-hole he had just come from. Five murders. “Grizzly,” the local reporter had called them. One man with his neck snapped, another shot, another stabbed, and two with their throats cut across the jugular. Throats cut across the jugular. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

He had not made a habit of backtracking. Appearing to, perhaps, but not actually going back to the same place twice. Not for safety’s sake, he did not give a damn about that, but because it was dull, boring to see the same dribble a second time around. Not that it was not all dribble. All but the hunt, that was. The hunt and the chase. On either side of it. He smiled to himself with the thought of it. Smiled as he had when he had read the article beneath the headline on website for that local’s news. He always made a point of following the local news, headlines, and various blog sites for whatever area he had recently departed. It helped to track his hunter. Made it ever the more enjoyable. And this time, Oh this time…

He had had to return. Had to. It may have been dangerous, greater than the usual danger, though he doubted it. With a scene like that, one that had not been expertly covered up, the way it should have been, Caleb would have fled the place. Run. Now you run. He had laughed much of the way. Laughed in the cars of the unsuspecting who had so kindly picked him up, hitchhiking the roads. They were all dead by then, of course.

He drove around the town as he waited for darkness to descend. He had crossed the boarder just after dawn, arriving deep into New York’s ‘upstate’ by mid-morning. He had reached the stink-hole by mid-afternoon. He had had to change cars on the way and had decided to leave its owners in their vehicle when he left it behind. One of them was already in the trunk, the other sat in the passenger seat. He did not want to leave them behind here, in the place he was certain Caleb had killed. It would cheapen the irony. He would wait until he abandoned the car on the road outside of town. He usually left them with the car, when he planned on changing cars, otherwise he left them somewhere off the road, where they would not be found right away. He wanted to leave a trail, but not one humans could follow easily. Occasionally he kept them as passengers, but that depended upon his mood. “It can be pleasant to have company,” he said, to the one he kept now. Of course, the woman did not answer. She had been dead for over and hour.

When finally it was dark, well after dark, he went to inspect the crime scene. He wanted be certain he could take his time…

Blood. Ah the smell of it. Even stale. There was a fair amount of it the police had left behind. Dried pools of it in places. Between the blood and the news reports, combined with what he knew of the killer, he could trace the scene. The snapped neck would have been the first victim. That one happened just east of the alley, on the little walk behind the buildings that flanked the sight of the primary battle. That would have left it behind, more accurately to the side of, the primary local. The police would not think this way, but he knew that it meant that killing had to come first. Never leave an opponent alive while you went to face others, if you could help it. The first rule of combat. Never be outflanked.

He walked the scene, inhaling the blood. The stabbing had to have come next. The blood pool was smeared and deleted in places. This one had fallen into its own blood to die. And it had died there, but not instantly. The smears told that tale. The wound, however, had been certainly fatal, made to be certainly fatal. Never leave an opponent alive behind you. Oh, this was certainly worth the return trip.

The second had to have been the gunshot. They bled differently than knife wounds, so he knew it by its remnants. The scent of gunpowder was there too, but it was… confused… and spattered. There had been more than one shot fired. The blood pool from the gun lay between the stabbing and the slashed throats. The stabbing was clean, and further back in the alley. That meant it had been a trap. You laid a trap. The throats were further up the alley, closer to the street. Sloppier. They had had to have been the last, likely the clean up kills.

He walked the outer edge of the gunshot sight, then paced the distance back and forth between the stabbing and the gun. Caleb hated guns. Far too uncivilized. The gunshot would not have been his. That meant it probably came from the throats, by the direction. So the first man had not been alone, there had been two, one with a knife, the other the victim of it. Then the knife had been the victim of the gun. Could it have been a fight between the dealers, as the police, incompetent as they were, had thought, and his hunter had, for some reason, stepped into the center of it? He doubted that. Caleb was arrogant, but never so crass. No, this had to be his. Entirely his. The neck that had been snapped outside the alley and the pacing of the first two victims here told him that. The stab wound had come from the gunshot’s companion. The hunter had turned one man’s knife against the other man and then had… what? …used that man then as a shield? Likely. The position of the final victims, the distance between that, the gunshot, and the stabbing suggested it. So one man tried to stab you, another to shoot you. But the first you set a trap for. So you are the killer of humans now. Oh, yes, this was well worth the trip.

So there were four of them in the alley, one on the way to it. And here, in the alley, there had been a fight. A decent fight, by the looks of it. A fight with four humans. Why would you find yourself in a fight against humans? Hunters perhaps? Doubtful. That had gone out of fashion well before he had been born. Oh, there had been reports, here and there, but in this age, the age of computers and science, the idea was absurd. Well, absurd in America, certainly. Even here, in the middle of nowhere, life was faced strictly on quantifiable facts, and myths and legends were not quantifiable. Not yet at least. So not hunters… Then what?

He followed the blood to the site of where the throats had been cut. He sniffed the air. Two males. All of the blood spilled on the pavement belonged to human males. But then… there was something faint… something the police would not have known to look for…

Sanguineous blood.

Another species altogether. Homo sanguineous. The blood man. The vampire.

So you bled. Now it was getting interesting. You bleed. He laughed quietly to himself. So you can make mistakes. Potentially fatal mistakes. This was lovely. But why were you in this alley? Hunting?Have you grown so confounded as to have made such a mistake while searching for food? He hoped not. That would be disappointing indeed. Then why were you here?

He paced the alley, scanning the walls, sniffing the air. There it was, a fair distance from the killings, a bloodstain on a wall. There was less blood there than at the killing sights. Perhaps one of the men had been hit before he fell? He examined it closer, smelling it, tasting the remains against the brick. Female. Now he laughed aloud, unconcerned for who might hear. So that is why you were in this alley, and that is why you killed those men. It was a woman, a human woman. Your weakness. He tasted the blood again, breathed it in deeply. I find her and I find you.

He tried to catch the scent again in the alley, on the walls or pavement, to follow it, hoping it had not gone cold…