The Lost: Book Two of The Whitechapel Chronicles

Chapter 2

Whitechapel. The East End of London. Streets of tawdry degradation and grisly dark crimes of such unlimited horror, that it was hard to believe that those blood-stained hands of the Ripper had belonged to a human.

Yet ask many vampires and they will tell you that the Old Jack who haunted the shadows was not human at all. He was a beast, a Varúlfur, or Lycan if that sits better on your tongue, and he slashed and ripped in a way only they can, driven insane by the taste of human flesh and unable to suppress his madness any longer. Eventually he was pulled back into the fold and held on a tight leash, his identity quashed and his crimes never to be solved.

Well, whoever he really was, he has never really left these streets. Somewhere, in the darkest corners where most would fear to tread, Jack remains, lurking, watching, maybe waiting for that one unfortunate person to take a wrong turn. Once upon a time and not so long ago, I would have scoffed at the notion of ghosts reaching out to harm the living. After all, what can a mere wraith do against muscle and sinew? What can a spirit do to bone and blood?

But things were different now. A dream it might have been, but the pain and the terror still chilled me to the core and standing here, not that far from Spitalfields market, it wasn't the Varúlfur I kept an eye out for. It was them. It was her.

I needed to feed. I needed to shake off this sense of foreboding. I just needed to focus on something else. And what better way than to hunt; to find myself lurking in the shadows. Watching. Waiting. Looking for that one unfortunate person who would take the wrong turn, who would see this young woman, alone where the street lights barely touched and be unable to resist the pull.

The great thing about Whitechapel was that it never took that long to attract attention, especially if you knew the best places to haunt.

Across the street, a man had stopped, with the pretence of trying to light his cigarette with a defunct lighter. He drew his thumb across the flint once, twice, three times, trying to shield the flame from the harsh winter wind that had picked up over the past couple of weeks. The weather reports had been screaming about the onset of one of the coldest winters in twenty-four years. Those bringers of doom had forewarned that two months of ice and snow was almost upon us and the country would freeze to a stand-still. Funny, I thought, as I watched the man, because I felt nothing but the roaring heat of hunger firing up my veins and making my stomach ache with yearning.

The man glanced around but if he feared the bothersome nuisance of passers-by, he need not have worried too much. Only a certain type of person would pass by here. People like him. Men like him. Men who were dealing with a particular kind of yearning of their own. I could smell his arousal from here and looking around again, his eyes darted back to me and I smiled as he approached, crossing the road, his feet scuffling against the pot-holed Tarmac.

I leaned back against the wall of the alley, wrapping my arms around my torso as if to protect myself from the cold. I hoped he would mistake the blush on my cheeks for wind-bitten skin. But of course I knew he would barely notice those little tell-tale details. All he would care about would be the heat between my thighs and not the heat of my flushed face. I had come to realise this only too well recently. These meetings were invariably the same every time. Megan Walden always came in useful when I was on a hunt. Her vulnerability, her naivety, her fresh faced innocence were all worn like a costume because to men like these, a hardened old pro was never going to get them off. They needed the sweet, supple flesh of a street virgin. They wanted to see a desperate resignation that the newbie didn't really want to do this but that she had no choice. And they would teach her that she really didn't have a choice. Oh yes, they would teach her the hardest fucking lesson she would ever get.