Diamonds and Deviants
This picture my own - others from Google Free to use images
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
She emerged from the alley and saw her quarry ahead of her. She locked his scent into her brain and she could see his scent print as it drifted to the ground in his wake. He slowed to a walking pace. He imagined he had shaken her off and had had chance to mingle with the crowds that thronged the sidewalk.
No such luck. Her brain wasn’t wired the same way as humans’ brains, she could see him in various shades of red and she wouldn’t lose him.
She dodged ahead of her prey, up and over the low-rise buildings, keeping his scent print in sight. As he rounded a corner, to turn away from the tourists and into an area of wasteland, she dropped down right behind him and he spun around in terror.
“Where did you come from?” he yelled.
“Don’t you remember me? I’m the one that your friend tried to shoot,” her voice had a velvet quality to it, almost like a purr.
He pulled a handgun from his waistband and fired it point blank into her chest.
She slapped the gun away from her chest and he lost his grip on it. He looked down in wonderment and realised that he hadn’t lost his grip, his hand still held the gun. The gun fired again as the dismembered limb twitched once in reflex.
“That’s one pair of jeans and a very nice t-shirt you owe me, human,” she said. “Now, unless you’d like your other hand to follow that one, do tell me who sent you and your rather dead accomplice to sort me out.”
“Maclaren!” he screeched the name out a little too easily for Celtica’s liking.
“No, really... tell me,” she said in a comforting voice and the reassuring expression in her eyes made him feel as though he would have dearly loved to crumple into her embrace, for her to make it all better.
She mesmerised him and if the loss of blood didn’t cause him to pass out, she’d have what she wanted, the first piece in her puzzle.
“No, not Maclaren. He said that we shouldn’t go after you; you‘re too dangerous for us to deal with. He told her not to make us go, but she did anyway.” The supervisor swayed on his feet, he was beginning to smile. She didn’t care if he gave her the name now, she had enough to work with. “Who are you?” he asked in a dreamy kind of voice.
“I think you mean ‘what’, not ‘who‘,” she said.
Her eyes glowed and the pupils became slits that dissected the eye from top to bottom. Her face seemed to protrude and the skin texture was changing, growing less like skin, more reptilian, scales and bony ridges above the eyes, she was beginning to resemble something he’d seen lately, on an old movie… something about dinosaurs.
“Yeah,” his voice was losing timbre and he was close to losing consciousness. “Yeah, what are you?”
“I’m a dragon,” she said. “But what are you?”
“Dragon? There ain’t no such thing.”
She gave him a beautiful and dazzling smile and said, “Just you keep on believing that,” and tore off his head as easily as she had torn off his hand.
Then she scorched the corpse and the hand that still held the gun with a blast of her bluest fire.
There wouldn’t be any fingerprints or evidence of any kind, in fact, unless the SOCO were exceptionally diligent, there wouldn’t even be a name.
The prints and dental work of her victim were gone, melted by the intense heat from her unique flame. Only another dragon would be able to recognise the flame print and there were no other dragons on the continent.
Celtica Diamond, the only dragon that bothered to take the time and effort to learn to integrate.
The rest of her family and species preferred to bask on mountains and secluded beaches, places where they could lie in the heat of the sun or volcanoes, guarding their treasure hoards.
Now all Celtica had to do was find Maclaren and the female that had sent those two morons to try to kill her.
She also had another lead, one that was linked to the attempted murder. There was only one person that knew where she was going right after leaving Daniel’s bar - the person with whom she had an appointment; but he would keep, he was human and would be much easier to track and intimidate.
Maclaren on the other hand, was not human and as soon as he got wind of the failure, he would go to ground, literally, and it may be months before he surfaced again.
Vampires were tricky like that. Celtica needed to get to them both before they found out their minions had failed. She had a good idea where they might be. She went home to change.