Teeth

Chapter Eight

Spencer sucked the excess from his fingers. He rubbed his thumb across the corners of his lips and swiped it with his tongue. The tips of his fingers had become pink with the extra blood in his system. Rolling his shoulders and stretching out his neck, Spencer shifted his weight from foot to foot, urging the blood around his body as he pulled the switch knife from his back pocket.

He could have just left him. The police probably wouldn't have suspected anything other than a robbery gone wrong but for safety measures he crouched and dragged the blade across the man's neck, obscuring the marks his teeth had left in his skin. Placing the blade between his teeth, he casually licked the edge clean as he dug the man's wallet from his pocket. No one would be too suspicious, people died in this city every day, when they didn't just vanish entirely. Robberies were common place and it wouldn't surprise the authorities that some went wrong, especially when the man looked the way he did.

He'd had that look about him. A look that he thought himself better than others. Those types were often the quickest to get offed. They fought back, they talked down to their muggers and refused to hand over their cash. They were stupid. Luckily for him, and those like him, it meant that they were also easy and oddly rewarding targets.

Pocketing the cash from the wallet and turning the phone this way and that, wondering if he'd be able to see the prints from typing in the passkey, Spencer ambled away from the scene, back to his pursuit. He'd been tracking the new kid, Thomas, for at least an hour and while he knew August was counting on him, he figured that taking a break to deal with his own hunger would be more productive in the long run. He didn't want to find the guy then be so distracted that he lost him again.

He wasn't sure why August had left him to deal with the new one. According to most of the others, Spencer was still considered half a baby himself. Then, when the lifespan was drastically lengthened, he could see why he might be considered a child. His tracking wasn't even that good, what if he didn't find him?

Following the scent out in the open was difficult. He was used to enclosed spaces, watching people in bars and dark clubs. He was used to hunting those he came across by chance and following fresh scents, not ones that were ten hours old. August had said that it was all the same in principle, that it only took a little more focus. Luckily, with a fresh feed, he was feeling much more attentive to the task at hand.

The apartment had been easy enough to find. There had been so much of Thomas's scent coming through the open window that it was like a neon sign above the door. After that had been a little more difficult. The café had been closed by the time he got there, the waitress just locking the window bars in place. He'd asked her if she'd seen Thomas and she'd said he'd come in earlier in the day, but went home sick. Despite the stench surrounding the man at the apartment building, Spencer knew he wasn't there. He'd walked for a while, returned to the café and followed from there. Now, here he was, stood in front of a bar, watching the man whose scent was on the scrap of rag in his pocket.

He was young, probably a little younger than Spencer had been when he died which surprised him. August and William had both been in their thirties when they were turned. Knowing now that Cleo had sired both of them, he had been starting to think she had a preference for slightly older men. From a guess, he would have put Cleo around thirty as well, which, given how long she'd been a vampire, was impressive. This guy didn't look much over twenty. Perhaps August had been right, Cleo didn't really care about who she turned, she'd just wanted to die.

Why she hadn't ran at a cheese wire and got it over with herself, he didn't know, and he wasn't about to ask August or William. He'd never known his own sire. The man was gone before he'd had any sort of emotional connection to him. He remembered that they'd been having fun, and the next thing he knew, he had woken up with what he liked to call the 'Deathover' and his sire was almost dead.