Chapter 2: The First Hunt
Sarah came back down the alley with her chin slick and her eyes wide open, and she was smiling.
Blood ran from her mouth to the collar of her ruined blouse, black in the lamplight. She walked loose and easy, the way people walk after a long shower. Amy stood with her back to the brick and watched her fledgling come, and something cold slid down the back of her neck that had nothing to do with the rain.
Danielle felt it too. She pressed up against Amy's back, chin on her shoulder, breath warm at her ear.
"She's not shaking," Danielle whispered.
"No."
"I shook for an hour after my first. Couldn't hold a glass."
Amy said nothing. Sarah stopped a few feet away and licked her lips, slow and thorough, and her tongue came away dark.
"There were two of them," Amy said.
Sarah's head tilted, like she was listening to something behind the walls. Her pupils had gone to slits in the lamplight, and her voice came out lower than it had in the bar.
"One ran."
"Told you," Danielle murmured. Her hand found Amy's hip and settled there, thumb rubbing a slow circle through wet denim. "She's bigger than us already. How far are we taking this before sunrise?"
Amy watched Sarah's nostrils flare. Down at the end of the alley, past the dumpster, something scraped. A shoe on wet gravel. Small, panicked, badly hidden.
Sarah's whole body turned toward the sound like a compass needle.
Amy took her by the wrist. Sarah's skin was cool, already going gray at the knuckles, and the pulse under Amy's thumb was slow and even. Not the frightened rabbit thump of a human. The steady beat of something that had stopped being prey.
"Easy," Amy said. "You still hungry, sweetie?"
Sarah looked at her, and for a half second there was nothing in those crimson eyes but arithmetic. Then the smile came back, and with it a kind of joy that Amy recognized. She had worn that face in a mirror once, the night she'd woken up on her own kitchen floor with her mouth full of her own blood.
"Starved," Sarah said.
Danielle laughed against Amy's shoulder, quiet and pleased. "Oh, she's going to be a problem."
Amy let go of Sarah's wrist and walked her down the alley, one hand flat between Sarah's shoulder blades, steering her past the dumpster. The rain had thinned to a fine mist that hung in the air and caught the lamplight. Somewhere out past the bar a car door slammed. The scrape came again, closer, and a man's breath went ragged behind the rusted steel.
Amy leaned over the dumpster rim. He was folded up in the gap between the dumpster and the wall, knees to his chest, phone in one hand with the screen cracked and dark, a wet patch spreading down the front of his jeans. Maybe thirty. Wedding ring. He'd watched his friend die in the street and had run eight feet and hidden, which was the worst decision he could have made and also, Amy thought, the most human.
He looked up at her. She let him look.
"Please," he said.
Amy smiled at him and stepped back. She turned to Sarah and tipped her head at the gap.
"Go for it, sweetie."
Sarah didn't hesitate. She went over the rim of the dumpster like water, and the man screamed, and the scream cut off into a wet, throttled noise.
Danielle came up beside Amy and slid an arm around her waist. They stood shoulder to shoulder and watched. Sarah had him by the throat against the wall, and she wasn't drinking the way Amy drank. Amy took her time. She liked the slow pull, the way a body went slack in stages, the little rattling sounds at the end. Sarah fed like a woman coming off a week of water, in fast greedy pulls, her throat working, blood sheeting down her chin and into the collar of the man's shirt. His heels drummed the gravel once, twice, and stopped.
Amy watched Sarah drain him past the point of anything useful and keep going anyway, and she felt the cold thing behind her sternum again, sharper now.
"She's going to drink him dry and then eat him," Danielle said. "Aren't you, baby?"
Sarah didn't answer. She just kept pulling.
Amy stepped over the dumpster rim and dropped down into the gap behind her. The space was narrow and reeked of garbage and copper. She put a hand on Sarah's shoulder, and Sarah hissed around her mouthful, a low, animal warning.
"It's me," Amy said. "Keep eating. I'm just going to feel something."
She slid her hand down Sarah's back. Sarah's skirt was cheap and soaked through, and it took Amy one yank to get it up over her hips. The panties underneath were plain cotton, dark with rain. Amy hooked her fingers in the waistband and tore them off in one clean rip that left a red line across Sarah's hip, and Sarah didn't even flinch from the feed.
Amy shifted her weight onto her heels, brought her hand between Sarah's legs from behind, and found her already wet, slick and hot despite the gray skin, the smell of her cutting through the alley's stink. She slid three fingers in.
Sarah's whole body seized. She came off the man's throat with a snarl, twisting to look back over her shoulder, fangs out and dripping, and for a moment Amy thought she'd made a mistake.
"Easy," Amy said, and curled her fingers.
Sarah's mouth opened. The snarl frayed into something else entirely, a soft, startled moan, and her hips pushed back against Amy's hand. Her eyes fluttered, red light going thin behind the lids, and then she bent her head and went back to the man's throat, drinking slower now, deeper pulls, her body rocking back onto Amy's fingers in an easy rhythm that matched her swallowing.
"Jesus Christ," Danielle said from behind them. She'd climbed over the rim too, and was crouched on the dumpster's edge, watching with her hands on her knees, mouth open. "She's feeding and getting fucked and she doesn't know which one she likes more."
Amy worked her fingers deeper and spread them, and Sarah made a high, wounded sound against the man's neck. Blood ran down her chin and off her jaw and onto Amy's wrist, warm and thick, mixing with the rain.
"That's it," Amy said, low, right into Sarah's pointed ear. "Take it all. Both things. Don't you dare stop."
Sarah didn't.
Amy kept her fingers deep and let her wrist go still, and Sarah's swallowing went slack, her throat working in slow, uncertain pulls. The man's pulse had already guttered down to nothing, so there was nothing left in him but the last dregs, and Sarah nosed at the wound like a dog trying to find the bottom of an empty bowl.
Then Amy drew her fingers back to the first knuckle and pushed in again, hard, and Sarah's whole jaw clamped down and she pulled a mouthful like she was starving.
Amy blinked. She did it again. Three fingers in to the knuckles, a slow drag out, and Sarah's feeding tracked it exactly. Faster, and Sarah gulped. Slower, and she sipped. Amy curled her fingertips up against the rough spot inside her and Sarah's hips bucked and her fangs sank in deeper without her meaning to.
The rhythm was hers. Amy held the whole thing in one hand.
She looked up. Danielle was still crouched on the dumpster rim with her knees apart and her mouth open, and what was on her face wasn't lust. It was the look a person gets when a card trick goes wrong and they can't find the seam.
"You feel that?" Amy said.
"Feel what?" Danielle's voice had gone thin.
Amy pushed in again, and Sarah moaned around the man's throat and drank like she'd forgotten to breathe. Amy pulled out slow. Sarah's pulls went thin and dreamy.
"She eats when I fuck her," Amy said. "She stops when I stop."
Danielle's hands tightened on her knees. "You're controlling her. With your hand. Like a fucking dial?"
"Looks like."
"That's not a thing. I never heard of that being a thing."
"Neither did I." Amy twisted her fingers and Sarah whimpered into the corpse's neck, and the man's body gave a last wet twitch against the wall. "But she's been dead nine minutes and she's still standing. So it's a thing now."
Sarah pulled her fangs free and let the man drop. He folded down the wall and stayed there, and the alley went quiet except for the rain ticking off the dumpster lid. Sarah turned her head and looked back at Amy with her mouth running red, and she was still rocking slowly back onto Amy's hand, chasing it, glassy and pleased.
"Don't stop," Sarah said.
Amy didn't. She gave her the fingers slow and deep, and Sarah's eyes rolled shut, and she came like that, standing up, one palm flat on the wet wall, thighs shaking, a long groan dragged up out of someplace new. It soaked Amy's wrist to the bone.
Danielle climbed down off the rim and landed soft on the gravel. She walked over and stood in front of Sarah, studying her the way you study a stain you can't get out.
"How many of these am I supposed to finger at once?" Amy said.
Danielle looked at her. "What?"
"Fledglings. If I turn five, six more. Am I standing behind all of them with a hand in their cunt every time they eat? Because I've got a life, sort of."
"You could just let them gorge."
"And then we're cleaning up bones and the whole thing gets noticed." Amy pulled her fingers out at last. They came away slick and tacky, blood and pussy both, and she turned her hand in the lamplight and considered it. "Renee can only bury so much in one night."
Sarah slumped against the wall and slid down it, boneless, her ruined skirt bunched at her waist, her torn panties hanging off one boot. She was grinning at the rain.
"I'm so full," she said, dreamy. "God. I'm so full. Is it always like that?"
"No," Amy and Danielle said together.
Amy wiped her hand on the man's jacket, two quick swipes, and then wiped it again because the jacket was wetter than her hand. She crouched by Sarah and took her chin, tilting her face up, looking at her own work. The gray skin, the pointed ears, the slits of her pupils drinking the streetlight. Sarah looked back at her with pure adoration, the kind you can't fake and can't earn.
"There's a problem," Amy said.
Sarah's grin faded a notch. "What problem?"
"You don't know when to stop."
"I stopped. I'm right here."
"You drained a man dry and then ate him for dessert," Amy said. "If I hadn't had three fingers in you, you'd have gone through the throat and down into the chest. Then we've got a body with no blood in it and bite marks through the sternum, and that's a news story, not a missing person."
Sarah looked down at the corpse, then back up, and something moved behind her eyes that wasn't sorry.
Danielle crouched on Sarah's other side. She reached out and thumbed a smear of blood off Sarah's jaw, then licked her thumb clean, unhurried.
"She's got the hunger worse than either of us," Danielle said. "You can smell it on her. She's not going to learn patience by being asked nicely."
"So we don't ask nicely." Amy stood and looked at the two of them in the lamplight, her first and her second, and the cold thing behind her sternum had settled into something that felt like planning. "We pace her."
"With your hand."
"Not with my hand, every time." Amy started walking back toward the mouth of the alley, toeing the dead man's cracked phone away from his reach out of pure habit. "There's got to be something out there. One of those remote things. The kind that go inside and buzz. Batteries last, what, an hour?"
Danielle laughed, sharp and real. "You want to buy your fledgling vibrating panties."
"I want a knob I can turn from across the room," Amy said. "You wear them, someone else drives them. She eats at whatever speed I say, and I'm not standing in a dumpster pit getting my wrist soaked."
Sarah got her legs under her and stood, pulling her skirt down. "What if I don't want to wear them?"
Amy turned and looked at her, and let the look sit.
Sarah put her hands up, grinning. "Fine. Fine. What if they don't work on us? We're dead. Dead girls might not do batteries."
"Then we test it." Amy pulled her phone out of her back pocket and shielded the screen from the rain, thumb already moving. "Overnight shipping. We test it on you before I turn anyone else. If it holds your feeding, Danielle wears the remote on hunts."
Danielle's eyes went bright. "And when you hunt?"
"Then Sarah's got the knob." Amy looked up from the screen. "You two will have to fight about it."
"Oh, I like that," Danielle said.
Sarah wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked at the dumpster, at the dead man behind it, at the blood on the gravel, and for the first time since she'd come back down the alley there was something in her face that wasn't just hunger. It was appetite. The kind that plans.
She asked, "How soon can we do it again?"
Amy put the phone away and took Sarah by the back of the neck, and steered her toward the street.
Amy walked her to the mouth of the alley and stopped her there, one hand flat between Sarah's shoulder blades while she fished the phone out of her pocket again. The screen lit her gray knuckles.
Two bodies behind the Nail. Dumpster side. One behind it, one in front. Text me when it's done.
She sent it and looked back down the alley once. The dead man's shoe still poked out past the dumpster rim, and the rain was thinning to nothing, and somewhere past the bar a jukebox was playing something slow and stupid. Renee had done this before. Renee would come with the van and the bleach and the tarps.
Amy tucked the phone away. "Come on. We're walking."
Sarah went willingly, one boot heel loose and flapping where the panties were still tangled around her ankle. She kicked them off somewhere around the corner and nobody said anything.
The street past the bar ran flat and wet toward the highway, a strip of shuttered storefronts and a laundromat and a nail salon with its lights off. Amy kept them on the sidewalk, out of the road.
"You still think I need a hand in every one of my fledglings when they eat?" she said.
Danielle looked over at her. "Do I?"
"You and me, when we hunt, we pace it. We pull off before it goes stupid. That's not something we were born with. That's practice."
"Practice," Danielle said. "You've known me nine days."
"And you didn't eat the last one's hands. So it took."
Sarah walked on the other side of Amy, quiet, listening. Her head kept ticking toward every sound, a car door, a screen door, a dog behind a fence. She was still chewing the inside of her cheek and she didn't know she was doing it.
"So what's the plan, then?" Danielle said. "We hand out remotes like party favors?"
"New ones wear them. Until they learn."
Danielle didn't answer right away. She walked with her hands in the pockets of her jacket and her eyes on the wet asphalt. Amy could practically hear it going around in her head.
Because it wasn't about the toy. Danielle was quick, and she'd gotten there before Amy had even finished the sentence. If you could throttle a fledgling's feeding from across the room, you didn't have to be in the room. You could turn six, eight, ten women in a season and let them hunt on their own, and none of them would ever tear a throat open in public. Amy wouldn't have to be standing in a garbage pit with blood drying on her wrist every time one of them got hungry.
Which meant the thing Amy had said in the alley about an army wasn't a line.
"You're not talking about pacing them," Danielle said. "You're talking about scale."
"I'm talking about not doing this myself for the rest of my life."
"How many are you planning on turning?"
Amy stepped over a puddle. "Enough."
Sarah piped up from her side. "Can I have one first?"
"No."
"I got my fingers in you first," Sarah said, and grinned, and she still had blood in her teeth.
Danielle snorted. Amy kept walking.
The shop sat between a vape place and a check-cashing place, and it was the only lit window on the block. Pink neon in the shape of a heart, one tube of it dead so the heart had a flat spot. The sign said Lovers' Lane in cursive that had been sun-bleached almost to nothing, and under it, smaller, Adult Novelty.
"Is this place open?" Sarah said.
"It's open." Danielle pushed the door.
A bell rang. The air inside was warm and smelled like vinyl and cherry lube and carpet cleaner, and it was bright, so bright after the alley that Amy squinted. Fluorescent tubes hummed overhead. Racks of lingerie, a wall of dildos in blister packs, a carousel of cheap beads, and one bored woman behind the counter with a nose ring, reading something on her phone.
She looked up at the three of them. She looked at Sarah's ruined blouse, and the blood that was mostly dry now but not all the way, and her hand moved on the counter like she was thinking about the phone still and the door too.
Then she went back to scrolling. People walked in here wet and weird at two in the morning. It was the whole business model.
Danielle drifted to the toy wall and started reading packages out loud, upside down, obnoxious about it. "Six speeds. Ten speeds. Rechargeable. App controlled." She held one up. "App controlled. You could run her off your phone."
Amy took it out of her hand and turned it over. The package showed a woman on a couch with her head tipped back, which was at least honest about the shape of the thing.
"This is the wrong kind," Amy said. She kept scanning the wall. "I don't want to hold a phone up during a hunt. I want a button in my pocket. Small one."
Sarah had wandered to the lingerie and was holding a red lace thing against her chest, looking at herself in a mirror that showed nothing back. Not her, not the rack behind her, just the wall. She stared at it for a second. Then she grinned and moved on.
Danielle came up behind Amy, close, and put her chin on Amy's shoulder, the way she had in the alley. Her breath was warm even in the cold shop. "You're going to hand these out to everyone you turn," she said, quiet, right at Amy's ear. "Every single one."
"Sounds right."
"And who holds the knob?"
Amy turned her head just enough to look at her. The pink neon filtered through the window and laid a red stripe down one side of Danielle's face, and her eyes went bright in it.
"I do," Amy said.
Danielle pulled a package off the hook and held it up against Amy's chest. Flat black box, clear window, a pair of latex panties with a small bullet-shaped thing riding the gusset and a thin wire curling off toward a controller pad.
"Here," she said. "Latex. Panties. And the dildo's built right in."
Amy took it and turned the box over in the fluorescent light. The latex looked matte and thin, cut high on the hip, and the insert was short and fat, maybe three inches of molded silicone with a little silver nub at the base. The controller was a flat black paddle with one dial and a button.
"Does this come with a remote that works through walls?"
"The box says twenty feet." Danielle tapped the plastic with a fingernail. "Which is further than a dumpster."
Amy looked down the aisle. Sarah was still at the lingerie rack with the red lace against her chest, but she had already hung it back up. She'd moved on to the wall of hanging garments at the back, the PVC and the vinyl and the cheap Pleather, and she was dragging hangers along the rail one at a time.
"Twenty feet's enough," Amy said. "Get two."
Danielle's eyebrows went up. "Two?"
"One for her, one for you." Amy put the box in her basket. "You said you wanted the knob when I hunt. So you'd better know what you're turning."
Danielle laughed and pulled a second package off the hook. She dropped it in the basket and went browsing, working her way down the toy wall with a hand trailing along the pegboard.
Sarah's voice came from the back of the shop. "Amy."
Amy walked over. Sarah had pulled a catsuit off the rail and was holding it up by the shoulders. It was black PVC, wet-look, long-sleeved, zipped from the crotch to the throat with a ring pull at the collar. Thigh high boots hung beside it, black patent, stiletto heel, the kind of thing you'd have to lace up in a doorway.
"Fifty percent off," Sarah said. "End of season."
Amy looked at the price tag. Then she looked at what Sarah was still wearing, the ruined white blouse with the collar gone brown, the cheap skirt, the wet socks in the boots.
"How do these work? Do I put the dildo in first or just wear the panties?"
"Latex first," Amy said. "Then the suit over it. Then you can't get at it and neither can anyone else. That's the point."
"I want to wear them out of here."
"Do it."
Sarah kicked her boots off and started unbuttoning the blouse. The clerk behind the counter glanced up, looked back down at her phone, and turned the volume up on whatever was playing in her earbuds. Two in the morning. It was the whole business model.
The blouse came off and Sarah dropped it on the floor. Her bra was soaked through and she unhooked it and let it fall, and her tits came free, gray-skinned and small and still smeared with blood around the left nipple where it had run down. She peeled the skirt down over her hips. Nothing underneath.
She sat on the little stool by the boot rack and opened the first package, and the latex crackled as she pulled the panties up her thighs. They fit tight and high, the band cutting a line across her hipbone, and she had to work them up with her thumbs. Then she took the insert and pressed the fat little head of it against herself, found the angle, and pushed it in with two fingers while Amy watched.
Sarah's mouth opened a little. She pushed until the nub at the base sat flat against her clit, then stood up and pulled the latex snug over it.
"Fuck," she said, quiet, testing her hips. "That's a lot to walk around with."
"Good," Amy said.
The catsuit went on in pieces. Both legs, then the arms, then a wiggle of the shoulders to get the back seated, then the zip up the front. It sealed to her like a second skin and showed everything under it: the line of the panties, the nub, the shape of her ass, her nipples hard under the PVC. She pulled the collar ring up under her chin and Sarah looked at herself in the mirror and got nothing back but the wall and the empty hanger rack, and she bared her teeth at it anyway.
The boots took longer. Knee-high patent, laces to the top, and she had to brace her foot on the stool to get the last eyelets done. When she stood up she came up three inches taller and had to take a step to balance, and the heels clicked on the linoleum like a metronome.
Danielle came around the end of the aisle with the basket and stopped.
"Are you buying that too?"
"I'm wearing it," Sarah said.
"That wasn't the question." Danielle looked at the boots. "Those are four hundred dollars."
"They're fifty percent off."
"They're still two hundred." Danielle looked at Amy. "She's got no money. She got turned two hours ago."
Amy dug her wallet out of her back pocket and handed Danielle a card. "Pay it. Then get yourself something."
Danielle took the card and looked at it for a second, then at Amy, and something crossed her face that Amy couldn't read and didn't try to. She walked to the counter and set the basket down.
The clerk rang the panties, both pairs, the suit, the boots. She bagged the second pair of panties separately and rang everything else together and didn't comment on any of it, which was professional.
Danielle signed the slip. She tucked the card back in Amy's jacket pocket herself, patting it flat, and leaned in close enough that her mouth almost touched Amy's ear.
"One more time," she said. "Who holds the knob?"
Amy looked past her at the counter, at the clerk already back on her phone, at Sarah standing in the doorway in the black suit with her heels on the tile.
"I do."
They left. The bell over the door rang and the night came back in cold and damp and half-lit. Sarah's first steps on the sidewalk were careful, toe first, one hand out for the wall.
Down the block there was a dumpster by the vape shop, its lid propped open on a crate. Sarah walked to it and dropped her ruined blouse and skirt in, then her boots, then her torn socks. She dusted her hands off.
"There," she said. "New woman."
Danielle set the bag down on the sidewalk and pulled the controller out of it, turning it over twice. Then she pressed the button on the paddle once, and out of the PVC of Sarah's suit came a low, steady buzz.
Sarah's knees went soft and she caught the dumpster edge with both hands.
"Danielle," Amy said.
"I'm just showing her how it works." Danielle turned the dial up a notch. Sarah's head dropped between her shoulders and she made a sound low in her throat, hips tilting forward, heels scratching the pavement.
Amy reached over and took the controller out of Danielle's hand. She turned the dial down to nothing. The buzz stopped. Sarah stayed where she was, breathing hard through her nose, grinning at the concrete.
"We're going home," Amy said. "You can wear it the whole way."