You Better Not Be Her Prey 3

Chapter 1: The Chase Is Afoot

Several days after the prologue... 

I knelt by the bodies of the four humans arranged artfully, in a rather grotesque way, in a circle of some kind. 

'That's the third vampire den that we've found this week,' I heard Bucky say near me. 'What's her play?' He stood over me. I looked up at him. 

'I don't know...' I said, my voice trailing off. 'All I do know is that she loves putting these poor people in a circle once she's done with them.' I stood, dusting off my hands. My stomach roiled from seeing all the death around me, my body also partially protesting in hunger. I looked around at the macabre circle of bodies. 'The Angel will return tonight to collect the souls of those deceased,' I added in a monotone voice. 

'Are you okay?' he asked. 'Seeing all this death - it can't be good for your self control.'

'I'm fine,' I said, biting back a grimace. He was right. All this death was getting to me. I surveyed the rest of the scene, noticing the two other circles of bodies, four in each one. 'I don't understand what she's getting at with all this death. Why leave the bodies all in a circle if she just wants to cause trouble?'

'I think it's part of her M.O., like the "A" symbol carved into each one of their wrists,' Bucky replied. 'Or maybe she's just doing it for fun.' 

'Whatever her objective is, she certainly leaves a lot of mess laying around,' I muttered under my breath. I turned and began to walk away. 'Call the cops to clean this up. Our work is done here. All we can do now is try to find her.' Bucky pulled out his phone and began to call the police as he and I walked away. 

Later that evening... 

I studied the map, with a pen behind my ear, looking at all the spots where our vampire doppelganger had murdered humans all over Manhattan and Hell's Kitchen. 

'Still at it, huh?' Bucky asked, coming over and sitting down with two cups of coffee in his hands. He passed the mug in his right hand to me. I sipped it, detecting the coppery hint in the coffee that indicated there was a small bit of blood from a blood bag in the coffee to keep me full and happy, so I didn't try to chow down on him. Or anyone else, for that matter. 

'Yeah. I just don't get it. She shows up from another universe, attacks me, then starts attacking humans, and then young mutants, and then turns me into a vampire, and is now back to hurting more humans. Her pattern confuses me, if there even is a pattern.'

'She might sense that we're on her trail again. She could go back to hurting mutant kids.'

'No, she wouldn't fall back on that tactic. We would know if she was doing that.' I looked over the map again, taking a sip of the coffee, then opened my phone. 'Nothing from the police.'

'Did they text or call you earlier?' he asked. 

'They said as soon as they found something worth taking notes on, they'd call me. As far as I know, they're aware who's responsible, but then again, who's going to believe that a vampire's in town?'

'Says the person who is a vampire and is actively working with the police to catch the killer.'

'The killer is me. Well, not me, technically, but me from another universe.' I rubbed my forehead in exhaustion. 'This whole vampire thing is getting on my nerves,' I muttered softly. 'It's been two months since I was turned into a vampire and there's been no verifiable leads except that of the dead bodies, and that's not enough. We need more.' Just then, my phone rang. I turned it over to see my dad's name on the caller ID.

'Why is your dad calling this late?' he asked. I swallowed. My mom hadn't been too well lately, and my dad had been taking her to heaps of doctors' visits. The first few batches of tests had revealed that she had two tumours, one on her pancreas and on the right side of her liver. A few days later, we were told that those tumours were cancerous. They'd operated, and she was in remission, but then it had come back, and we were then told that the regrowth was benign. I picked up the phone, answering the call. 

'Dad?' I asked. 'Is everything okay?'

'It's your mom, Adelaide. You've got to come quick.'