Heartless

Heartless - Chapter Two

HEARTLESS

CHAPTER TWO

“Have you seen this?” Luna demanded, marching into the kitchen. She threw a newspaper down on the table and it landed with a slapping sound, its momentum sending it skidding across the unpolished wood towards me.

I plucked another grape from the bunch in the bowl in front of me, throwing it into my mouth. I took my time chewing, just to aggravate her. Finally, I quickly glanced down at the paper and then up at my friend. She met my eyes, staring right back at me. Her hands were on her hips, and if I’d glanced down I could probably have seen her foot tapping impatiently on the floor.

“What?” I asked.

“Go to page three,” she said testily. “They’ve tried to downplay it, but if you look properly it’s blindingly obvious what’s happening. Most people insist on carrying on as if there isn’t anything wrong with this city, and the papers are the worst ones.”

“Another vampire attack?” I asked. It wasn’t anything new. The papers normally tried to ignore the attacks, since there seemed to be so many, but they were always willing to print some of the more bloodthirsty cases.

Luna frowned. “Something like that.”

Awkwardly, she managed to pull out the chair next to me and sit down. Our apartment’s tiny kitchen hardly had enough room to swing a cat, let alone house a twenty-three year old were-panther and her vampire-killing friend. All the furniture was cramped and tiny, and we had trouble fitting the both of us in there.

She reached over me, pulling the bowl of grapes closer to her, and scooped up a handful. She began to put them into her mouth one by one, chewing absently as she watched me with an unwavering alertness.

Sighing, I parted the thin pages of the newspaper, speckled with drops of today’s downpour of rain, and turned to page three. I quickly scanned the article, which was crammed in at the side of the page in the smallest print possible. It was tiny in comparison to the article covering the latest baseball match that was next to it, complete with pictures that took up half of the page. As Luna said, it looked like the newspaper was trying its best to hide the article. Although the editors liked their shocking headlines and bloody news stories, nobody would want to know about this. Anything that might cause problems needed to be downplayed.

“Okay,” I said, putting the paper back down. It spread out in front of me, practically taking up the whole of the table. “I get what you’re saying.”

Luna leaned forward, sliding the paper across towards her. “Homicides in New York City have recently gone up by almost ninety percent, say New York police,” she read from the page. “While the reasons behind this sudden series of murders has yet to be determined, police are pursuing a way to solve the cases as quickly as possible.”

“I’ve already read it,” I interrupted. “You don’t have to repeat it.”

“You didn’t read it – you scanned it. And there’s only one more paragraph… the rest of the article gets too vague afterwards,” she said quickly, eager to put her point across before I shot it back down. She kept her eyes focussed down at the article.  “The situation was once again brought to the attention of the police and the citizens of New York City when the body of twenty-nine year old Harper Davies was found in East Harlem. Almost all of these murders have only one similarity; the bodies have been found beaten and drained of blood, each seeming to have endured a brutal attack. While morticians examining the bodies are flummoxed about the true cause of these deaths, gang activity is suspected.”

“Yes. I kind of already assumed that there were vampires behind it.”

“If the paper’s right, then there are ninety percent more vampires than usual,” Luna pointed out, waving the paper in front of me. “This is serious, Anne.”