Things left unsaid.

[Donovan Hood]

1924. New York City.

It was an autumn night, and although it wasn't especially cold, the random breeze passing through the city streets had a chilly bite against the skin of Donovan's cheeks. Blood rushed to them giving them a rosy hue barely visible under the incandescence of the moon.

He was on the hunt tonight, perhaps the most ambitious of his career, a move that might give his superiors a reinforced resolve to promote him to the newly vacant Captain position. The plan was take down Alley Cat Guisseppe and Gats Malone, two mobsters that have given the entire department fits for the last two years. Everyone knew Donovan was possibly the best, and this would cement the claims.

Hood had done his research little by little over the last few weeks, checking and rechecking sources and informants and shaking down known thugs with promises of jail time. He had moved the operation along a little quicker than he normally would, but visions of grandeur in a new promotion to Captain lit a fire under him. Lately he could hardly sleep more than a couple hours. Everything was to come together on this night.

He approached the docks on foot, having parked his car a few blocks away, and now shuffled his way between empty crates, canisters and stacks of wooden pallets for the fork trucks. The chill wind rolling over the ocean water left a tang of salt hanging in scent of the air. He moved cautiously like a cat stalking prey.

He posts up next to a small terracotta brick wall lending him a panoramic view of the entire operation. Gats and Guisseppe were both present, ordering around young hired help. They were bringing in weapons by boat that were manufactured farther down the coastline. "Perhaps Boston." Buddy Raymond, a fellow detective had figured. Buddy was still fresh into the Force and thus naive in a lot of things, but Hood liked his moxie anyways and would often shoot information back and forth with him during downtime.

Everything was right on schedule, and then began to go horribly wrong.

He heard the telltale click-click of a revolver round being readied as he felt the cold tip carbon steel of a gun barrel being pressed into the his hair.

Betrayed.

Donovan Hood was so cocksure of himself that he never figured the tip offs as plants. He had run headlong blindly into a trap.

"Stand up," the thug ordered him loudly, and he slowly began to rise from his crouch behind the wall. In the distance Gats and Alley Cat heard the commotion and spun about on their heels, grinning.

Everything had to gone to plan alright. Their plan.

Hood whirled around quickly before the other men could approach and put him at even larger disadvantage, a struggle for the thug's firearm ensued as the two fell to the wooden dock planks obscured from the view of the two notorious mobsters. The kid had to be no more than nineteen, still too green and proud of his accomplishment in capturing Donovan and what it meant to his career in crime that he wasn't prepared for the bigger man's quick movements.

On the ground he was no match for Donovan's superior skill and size and with corded muscles and a lifetime of experience the grapple was over quickly and he snuffed out the youngin's life with a bang

He quickly scrambled back to his feet and was propping his newly acquired firearm over the top of the wall when a slug ripped through the flesh of shoulder, shattering the bones on impact. The force of the bullet sent him spinning backwards out of view, his body slumped and wracked with pain. And after a few breaths.. he tumbled into the darkness of unconsciousness.

Malone and Guisseppe put two more bullets into his stomach before tossing his body and that of the young gun-for-hire from the docks, and they splashed into the water.

Hood woke momentarily as his body hit the waves below, coughing up blood into the ocean only to be replaced in his lungs with a mouth full of the salty liquid. He was consigned that this was his death, that his story was over, when strong arms wrapped around him and easily hoisted him from what was surely to be a bedrock grave.

The vampire was a scavenger, she hated the thought of drinking the blood of a human and often kept to docks, searching for rats and other small creatures of the night that made their way in with the goods on the boats. This time she made an exception, an excuse only to herself because this man was surely dead anyways. Just a little bit , she justified in her own mind, and she slowly sank her teeth into his flesh.

That night, Donovan Hood became a vampire.

[Donovan Hood]

New York City. Present day. 10 PM.

Donovan was staring out over the water below, casually hunched over the rail, his forearms pressed firm on the top bar and he knees slightly bent to put his weight over it. He heard Father Joseph coming close now. Enhanced senses allowed him to pick up the subtle crunching of frosted grass from across the docks and nearly across the park.

"Don? It's Father Joseph, you left word that you wanted to talk?" he asked he stepped up onto the wooden planks at the edge of the park, and Don swiveled his head slightly to make eye contact.

The Father wasn't what most would consider when imagining a man of the cloth; he was clean-cut, young too, maybe mid or late 30's and didn't look much a day older than Hood himself. He wore tight denim jeans a long over-coat in place of his robes, since he was out and about in the city. His face squinted up at the sight of Don in the gentle glow of a nearby lamp-post as he stepped up beside him, not because it was hard to see but because out here at the edge of the metropolis there was nothing to block the bite of the wintry gusts making his features contort as if huddling together for warmth. He tightened his overcoat around himself.

"Yeah. . and thanks for coming. Evelyn and I would come here and talk while walking along the edge of the city here, our own little corner of the world. But this holds other significance for me as well, " Donovan continued as he turned and stood upright.

"Do you know what this place is, Father?"

"Tell me." he replied, understanding from his tone that he must be leading to something.

"This is where I died."

The Priest furrowed his brow impossibly closer together, regarding the man with narrow slits for eyes. Between his mashed up profile and the long jacket he looked every bit the gunfighter character in one of those spaghetti western movies the young Father Joseph enjoyed watching as a boy with his grandfather. He wasn't entirely taken aback by the comment because although he didn't know the truth of Don's existence, about a year past in another conversation like this he had told him a brief explanation of what transpired that night almost a century ago.

"This wasn't always a park," he continued on, gesturing with a sweeping hand to regard all the scenery surrounding the two that seemed to stretch all the way into the horizon in either direction. "50 or 60 years ago it was different. This was all warehouses and abandon apartment buildings back then."

He turned again, gesturing down by the water far below.

"That's where they tossed my body, and over there was some more docks, I woke up underneath them a couple nights later. I can't say with any certainty anymore how long I was down there, I was in and out of consciousness over that time. This whole damn place still haunts me to this day."

"When I finally crawled up from the banks and got back onto the land, Malone and Guisseppe were here again to push another shipment. More hired help too, probably 11 men total with the two of them."

He paused for a moment, a brief break from the flashback.

"Father, did I ever tell you my father was a minister?"

"What? Oh. Yes. Fundamentalist type right? Tent preacher?", he fumbled to reply, caught off guard by a sudden question in the story that absorbed him so completely.

Don nodded "That was him alright. Old-fashioned fire and brimstone preacher. Scared the crap out of me with images of damnation and punishment. . . and I was such an impressionable young boy."

"They saw me coming as I furiously ran up the docks towards them... I felt like an instrument of vengeance and part of me wanted to laugh as bullets slammed into me harmlessly. I could hear the old-man's sermons ringing in my ears, drowning out the shouting and gunfire as I killed every last one of them."

A few minutes of silence passed between the two men, highlighted by the eerie and almost musical intonations of the breeze whipping through the bare-bone trees and lamp posts before Pastor Joseph thought to ask, "Is this why you asked me out here today, to repent these sins to me?"

"No Father, I'm cursed beyond salvation at this point, I think, but I try to keep my head down and my compass pointed in the right direction. May I continue?"

"Oh yes, pardon my interruption, go ahead."

"From that moment I knew I could never return the life I had enjoyed before. I moved out west and started all over again. For a time I even tried to continue playing detective with the LAPD, and finally .. I met another like myself. He taught me all the ins-and-outs, how to use my abilities with control instead of instinct. How to master these drastically more intense feelings and emotions, to cloak my disposition and be absorbed by the world around me, so that I might move among people undetected, a blank space, a ghost in a crowd. He taught me that there was many of those like us all over the world.

"And that the world has a blacker heart than you know. That is why I come speak with you when I find the time. I feel if I can find a light inside of myself then sometimes it doesn't all feel so. . dark."

Donovan Hood stepped out onto the frozen grass of the park talking over his shoulder at the suddenly speechless pastor who didn't know quite how to comfort this man, "I'll explain more later, Father, let me walk you back to your truck. It's getting late and you'll have others that need your services tomorrow."

[Donovan Hood]

Vegas - Present Day. 1 A.M.

Just another night on the town, Donovan found himself inside one of the high class Vegas strip joints, he was hungry and on the prowl for prey.

Over the idle chatter and billows of nicotine laced tobacco smoke, the laughing and the scent of cheap perfume and alcohol filling the air, the music thumps back on as a new performer takes the stage. As she stepped onto the stage, Donovan had to do a double-take. Memories of his fiance' from his human life flooded over him. The similarities were remarkable.

Evelyn was the love of his life..You probably knew someone like her. The smart girl. The shy girl. The one who wore glasses and was a little socially awkward. The one who screwed up the curve in biology so you got an A- instead of an A.

She was a geek girl before anybody knew what a geek girl was. And that was kinda awesome, because you were a nerdy boy before being nerdy became culturally acceptable.

You liked her because she was funny. And she was smart. And you could actually talk to her. And she read books.

And sure, she was girl-shaped, and that was cool. And she was cute, in an understated, freckly way. And sometimes you’d stare at her breasts when you were supposed to be paying attention in math class. But you were 16. Boys stared at everyone’s breasts back then.

And yeah, you had some fantasies about her, because, again, you were 16. But they were fairly modest fantasies about making out in a car. Maybe you’d get to second base. Maybe you could steal third if you were lucky.

And maybe, just maybe, something delightful and terrifying might happen. And yeah, it would probably be awkward and fumbling at times, but that’s okay because she’d be doing half the fumbling too. Because the only experience either one of you had was from books. And afterwards, if you make a nerdy joke about it, she’ll get it, and she’ll laugh….

That’s the girl you fell in love with in high school. The one you'd eventually ask to marry you. You didn’t have adore her because she was some simmering pool of molten sex. You loved her because she was subtle and sweet and smart and special.

And now here she is in front of Donovan. Except now she’s wearing a thong and a black leather halter top. She’s wearing fuck-me red lipstick and a lot of dark eye makeup. Her breasts are amazing now, proud and perfectly round.

Someone’s taught her to dance, and she does it well. She’s flexible and milky-white skinned. She has a flat midriff and walks the stage with the authority of a high-class runway model. Her eyes are dark and smouldering. She has a riding crop, and probably likes to be tied up, and her too-red mouth forms a perfect circle as she sighs and moans, and tosses her head in a performance designed to win any number of theatrical awards….

And what’s the problem with this? Well… in some blindingly obvious ways, nothing.

But in another way... It's clear that this girl has nothing in common with Evelyn at all.
She's just a perversion of her image and memory.

Donovan made up his mind - He was going to kill her.

[Lucia Drusa Severa]

The lights were staggeringly bright. Sure, the pamphlets on the plane ride over warned her, but Lucifer was it blinding. Even in Europe tales had been told of the illicit beauty and boisterous charm of Las Vegas; but somehow Lucia hadn't expected it to be so sleazy.

Still, there were some redeeming qualities. Nearly everyone was dressed exquisitely in their best. The women shone brilliantly from their ears, wrists and neck, practically calling out to be preyed upon. Expensive shoes and dazzling dresses and gowns of all styles graced the boardwalks as the humans tried their best at floating with dignity. Yet even more enchanting were the men; Christian Dior, Oscar De La Renta and Ermenegildo Zegna bustled through the streets in drows. Slick ties and pressed jackets and pants with polished shoes arm in arm with smiling, laughing women. It was one of the more glorious sights in recent memory that Lucia had seen.

Wanting to be part of the scene, the Hybrid found herself briefly in the company of one such illustriously dressed man. It had been disappointingly easy to charm him, though, and after that, getting into the more risque businesses had been a cake walk. At the beginning of the night, the humans had fascinated her with their expensive clothes and delicate tastes with food and alcohol. Yet it quickly became apparent that for most, these were temporary preferences; that perhaps there was no more to these creatures than only their carnal desires to satisfy ones physical needs. Not that she was one to complain of such, but the daughter of the Vampire king felt more enlightened than your average, lowly human.

More interesting to her than the humans, were the amount of Nightwalkers present; that is, how many Vampires and Werewolves were here in Las Vegas. They mingled perfectly in with the blood donors, and seemed at once aware of each other and oblivious. From Lucia's vantage point, Leeches had the higher numbers, but neither race seemed openly hostile toward the other in this human hot-spot. Never before had the girl seen this, seen each race minding its own business as they went on each individual hunt, and she wondered if all of the U.S. was like this.

Her chosen companion for the night proved to have no more depth to him than the majority of the people here, and Lucia quickly freed the man of his blood and disposed of him in a nearby bathroom. His blood wasn't as satisfying as the Vampires she'd fed on in the past and had a strange effect on her, like she'd been drugged; or he had. The objects and people around her began to blur and slight euphoria came over the girl, such that could not be compared to anything else she'd ever felt, not even the elation that came with drinking from a Vampire. It felt sinister though, and Lucia stumbled slightly, losing her sense of grace, and left the club, walking out into the streets, into the air for the feeling to fade.