For the Hopeless

"She...kissed you?" Dameon sounded astounded, as if such an occurrence simply wasn't possibly. He stumbled, swishing loudly in the water of the sewer that they tread through.

Bailey glanced back, cocking an eyebrow as he steadied himself and continued after her. "Or I kissed her," she answered as she turned her attention back to the wet, smelly path ahead. "I'm not really sure how it happened. All I know is..." She trailed off, embarrassed to finish the thought.

"You liked it?" Dameon suggested, following her as she began to climb the rusty old ladder out of the sewers. They were dank, damp, and disgusting. He was glad to be on his way out.

"I loved it," she corrected him. She couldn't see it, but the werewolf's expression turned bitter, downright jealous, and he dropped back a step.

"Then why do you sound so...unhappy?" he asked, continuing to play the part of what was apparently the "gay best friend."

"Besides the fact that you now know what I am?" she questioned in return, glancing down at him as she neared the manhole at the top of the ladder. He nodded, and she went on with a sigh. "I don't know, honestly. It just...It changes things."

"Shouldn't you be happy, then?" He stopped a couple of rungs down from her, wincing as she pushed the heavy metal hole cover aside with a sound worse than nails on a chalkboard. The horrid sound ended soon enough, and he forced his face into a less pained expression. "I mean, things are changing for the better, aren't they?"

She sighed so softly that he wouldn't have heard it in a less echoing environment. "See, that's what I'm not so sure about." Before either of them could pursue the subject any further, a set of long, thin fingers tangled in Bailey's hair, an equally long arm jerking her from her spot on the ladder.

"Well, well, well. Look what we 'ave 'ere," a man said in an exceptionally ugly British accent as he set Bailey on her feet. His fingers still in her hair, he jerked her head to the side, closer to his face. "A pair of worthless Novie do-gooders."

"I told you we picked one too close to the police station," Dameon muttered halfheartedly as he was dragged out of the manhole by a pair of bigger men. He went unnoticed, however, everyone's attention on the scrawny man and the captive Bailey.

"What is it you two were expecting to do?" the smaller man asked, arching an eyebrow at Bailey as their faces gradually grew closer together, certainly not with her help. "Sneak in an' kill us all? Burn the place to the ground with us inside?" He laughed heartily, and the men holding Dameon joined in. "As if we wouldn't notice you!"

Bailey visibly, audibly, and exaggeratedly grimaced, finding the man's face much too close for comfort – his thin, obviously chapped lips were nearly touching her cheek, after all. "No," she began, noticeably mocking his accent. "Actually, we planned on bringing you out into the open, jus' like this." She smiled wickedly, thoroughly enjoying the sight of the man's face as it fell. Dameon's mutter of "That so wasn't the plan" went completely ignored. "The sewer was simply to avoid the other police officers and Traitors patrolling the town." She laughed, low and evil, and her natural accent returned. "Who knew we'd find three of you just sitting here outside of the police station?" She clocked the man holding her hair, and he fell limply to the ground, out cold. "Who knew you'd be that easy to knock out?" she mumbled, cocking an eyebrow at the bony male. Hearing a thump to her left, accompanied by a grunt, she turned to the rest of the men.

Dameon had attacked one of the men, and the two were now locked in a vicious battle. On one side, a set of fangs had started to emerge; on the other, a pair of amber eyes and sharp, claw-like nails had made an appearance. Blood was already beginning to fly.

Vampires, Bailey thought as she paused to watch the fight. I didn't think they were supposed to be so easily conquered. She turned her gaze to the unconscious male at her feet and couldn't help a small smile. Then again, I've never been explicitly told that they couldn't be pussies, either.

She was forced from her less-than-serious thoughts by a fist to the face, an attack she should've seen coming. She staggered back, her arm up to block a follow-up punch in an instant. The other man, sporting the same long, gleaming fangs as the one Dameon was brawling with, had decided to come after her. She swung back at him, but he blocked her fist with little trouble. The foot to the ribcage that followed wasn't quite as easy to stop, however. The man hit the pavement, and she followed him down without hesitation.

"Why are you doing this?" she found herself asking as she pinned him down, his hands held tightly above his head. "Why are you betraying your own kind?"

"You act like we have a choice," was the man's harshly spoken response. He attempted to knock her off of him, expecting it to be easy because she was so tiny, just a mere woman. But of course, she didn't budge. She was too strong for him, too determined.

"Why don't you?" she asked, her expression stern, her hold unrelenting. She wanted an answer. She wanted a reason for all of this nonhuman-to-nonhuman cruelty.

"It's either this, or we end up as experiments," he hissed, leaning up in an attempt to put his face in hers. "We would be just like the rest of you."

"Do I look like an experiment?" she snarled back, gladly getting in his face. "Do I look like some helpless creature awaiting death?"

"To me?" he asked, suddenly becoming eerily calm, smiling knowingly in her face. "Yes." She let out a cry of frustration and tore his arms from his body, blood spattering across her face. He screamed, but she silenced him soon enough. His head joined his arms, both falling down the manhole where she'd so carefully thrown them.

She stood, hauling the rest of his blood-spewing body to the hole and dropping it in. She didn't care if there were evidence left behind – it wasn't as if they'd be able to tell it was her – but she didn't want it out where it could cause immediate alarm. In the dark, the blood covering the street would likely go unnoticed. An entire body wouldn't have.

Once that grisly duty had been taken care of, Bailey turned her attention to Dameon's fight with the other vampire. Dameon appeared to be winning, but it was hard to tell, really. Both of the men were covered in cuts, coated in each other's blood as well as their own, so neither of them were actually doing too well.

"I didn't think a mere vampire would cause you so much trouble, Dameon," she taunted from the sidelines, her arms crossed and her expression void of emotion. He growled in response, ducking beneath an attempted punch from the vampire and springing up to execute a fluid blow to the man's jaw. He stumbled back, against the wall of the police station, and Bailey intervened.

That devilish red glow filled her eyes as it always did, and the man's head was severed from his body by an invisible force. Only a red haze lingered. With blood spraying from its neck, the headless body fell against Dameon, who shoved it quickly away. The head floated slowly through the air, bobbing eerily up and down, until it was resting nicely upon Bailey's waiting palm.

"Throw the body in the manhole with the other one," she ordered, her eyes on the ashy gray eyes of the head. The pale skin was slowly turning the same color. Soon, it would crumble like a poorly composed statue, but not soon enough. It would take nearly ten minutes for the bodies to become dust; someone could easily see them in the meantime.

The head flew from her hand as she was jerked backward, against a lean, bony body. She gasped as a pair of fangs entered her neck, a strand of hair being painfully pulled as it was caught up in the bite. The unconscious vampire had awoken, obviously, and this was his last ditch effort at beating her. She could feel the vampire saliva entering her veins, smell the pheromones seeping into the air around her, but neither chemical had any effect on her. A normal person would've been feeling immense pleasure, falling into a sluggish lull; but if anything, she could see more clearly, feel the pain more sharply. And it pissed her off.

In one fluid movement, she spun, tearing the fangs from her neck with a few droplets of blood, and punched the man full-force in the throat. The power of the blow probably would have killed a human or werewolf or anything less immortal, but it merely stunned the vampire, who staggered back, clutching his neck. Of course, she didn't stop there. Just as she'd done with Dameon's opponent, she separated head from body, a cut forming right beneath the man's spidery hand.

With a well-placed kick to the side, she knocked the body directly into the manhole, catching the head in her hand. She scoffed at it, made a mocking, disrespectful face, and dropped it into the hole. She then shoved the heavy cover back over it with her foot, glaring down as if she could still see the vampires.

"You put the other one down there, right?" she asked Dameon without looking at him.

"Yeah," he answered, "while you were killing the last one. But the head's still out here." She turned to find that he was right. The head lay motionless at her feet, skin substantially grayer than before.

She stomped on it, crushing it with the thick sole of her bloody black boots, and looked at Dameon with an innocent smile. "No, it's not." With a swipe of her foot, she scattered the ceramic-like shards across the pavement, making the head completely unrecognizable. Then, without another word, she led the way into the police station.

The building was small, dimly lit, and seemingly vacant. No one stood behind the desk at the front; no one sat in the ugly plastic chairs lining the walls. Bailey cautiously approached the front desk, peering over in an attempt to see if anyone happened to be hiding behind it. But no one was there.

"There has to be someone here," Dameon said from behind her, glancing about the place. "Those Traitors wouldn't have been left to take care of the place alone. The petty human problems that people call the police about have nothing to do with them."

"Yeah," Bailey agreed distractedly, still peering into the space behind the counter as if she expected to find something. After a moment, she swung herself over the counter and made her way into the back room, the only room in the building besides the main lobby.

A gunshot rang out the moment she entered the room. The bullet would've hit her...if she'd been standing about three feet to the left. She arched an eyebrow confusedly at the lone police officer huddled in the corner between the plain white wall and a dinged-up gray filing cabinet. His hands shook as he aimed the gun at her again, pulling the trigger three times in quick succession. One bullet went into the wall a foot to her left; the second hit a black filing cabinet several feet to her right, rebounding until it hit the cold tile floor with a gentle ting; and the final bullet grazed the tip of her middle finger as she held it out to the side.

"You've really got to work on your aim," she remarked calmly, licking the blood from the scrape on her finger languidly. He pulled the trigger again and again, but there was only the faint clicking of a gun without ammunition, no gunshot. Bailey started toward him, and he chucked the gun at her with all of his might before pressing himself as far back into the corner as he could. She caught the weapon with ease, tossing it just as easily onto the scratched wooden table in the center of the room, and continued toward him.

"Would you kill me if you could?" she asked softly as she knelt before him, her pale skin nearly glowing in the harsh light of the room. "Even if I said I meant you no harm?" Having recently let her inner devil take control, she was able to hold back a violent reaction when he spit in her face.

"You'd be lying," he said in a voice much stronger than that of a trembling, scared man. "You're all scum."

She sighed, wiping the saliva from her face with the sleeve of her black hoodie. "I used to wish I were a human," she told the man, "so I could stop being the evil that I was." She looked from her dampened sleeve to the man and continued. "I've been suppressing it for years in hopes of being a good person." She dropped her gaze to the floor at the man's shaking feet. "Or, rather, I had been suppressing it. This war your kind has started doesn't really leave room for good people."

He spat again, but it was burned away by a red mist before it could come in contact with her skin. "Novie can never be good people," he hissed. "You're murderers! Kidnappers! Thieves!"

"We did nothing until you humans began to attack us!" she shouted, unable to keep her rage in check any longer. "You murdered our families, kidnapped our kin, and stole our freedom! We've only responded in kind!" He went to spit in her face again, but she cut him off. Her red haze tore the skin from his face and ripped his heart from his chest, killing him quickly. The skin stuck to the side of the filing cabinet, sliding slowly down, and the heart hit the floor with one last beat, marring the pure white tile with the red of blood.

"We're no better than they are, are we?" she whispered after several seconds of silence. She stared into the horrified eyes of the corpse before her, held her blood-reddened hand before her face. "We're becoming just like them..."

"We didn't start this," Dameon responded softly, sadly, from the doorway. "They knew what would happen."

"Right," Bailey murmured as she got to her feet, gazing at the young man's corpse for a moment longer. "Right." She turned to the werewolf, all business once again. "Is there anything of use here?"

"No underground secret lab, if that's what you're after. I've felt all the walls, checked all the ceilings and floors. There's nothing here."

"You're quick, aren't you?" she asked, a small smirk playing on her lips.

He shrugged, smiling wryly. "It's not a hard thing to do. Besides, you tend to give me plenty of time."

She laughed lightly. "If you say so." Her smile fell as she returned to business mode once more, glancing around the small room. "Well, I guess we have to check the other police stations in town. They have to be holding the captives somewhere, and what would be easier to protect without catching the attention of the Novie?"

She started to make her way to Dameon, but stopped dead when the corpse's fingers wrapped around her ankle. She spun to stare at the thing, finding its eyes just as blank as before, yet its mouth moved. She could feel something supernatural about it, some sort of power in the air surrounding it. "No police," it whispered hoarsely. "Shoes. Novie surrounded by shoes." And with that strange bit of wisdom, the corpse went still once more, its chilly hand falling from Bailey's ankle.

"What...the...?" was all Dameon could manage, staring in open-mouthed horror at the faceless body.

"Long-distance necromancy?" Bailey suggested, eying the corpse as if it could yield more information. "Or perhaps the necromancer is nearer than we expect?" A smile curved her lips, a mixture of amusement and wickedness. "Either way, I want to have sex with them if I ever have the pleasure of meeting them." She spun on her heel and made her way out the door, brushing past Dameon.

"Where are you going?" he asked, hurrying to follow her. "What did that mean?"

"Shoes," Bailey answered, leaping over the front desk gracefully. "I hear the local DSW has a lot of those."

"Are we going directly there?" he asked, opting to use the little swinging door on the right side of the desk instead of jumping over it.

"Why not?" she questioned in return as she pushed the police station's front door open. "I may look bloody and suspicious, but it's not like they're open at one in the morning, anyway. We're already going to look suspicious breaking into a shoe store."

"Not to mention stupid," Dameon added, following her around the corner and down a narrow alley. "Who would break into a shoe store?"

"Sane people," Bailey said with a half smile, glancing back at him. "It's the weird ones who pay over fifty bucks for a pair of shoes."

Dameon could only stare at her for a moment. "You've done this before, haven't you?"

"Is it that obvious?" she asked with a feigned giggle of embarrassment.

He grinned, beginning to walk alongside her when they emerged from the alleyway. "Now I remember why my brother liked you."

Her half smile returned, and she tucked a blood-matted strand of hair behind her ear. "You'd forgotten?" she asked, giving him a light shove. His grin grew, and he caught her arm as he swayed back to her side. And thus, with their arms linked, silly smiles on their faces, they continued through the night toward their new destination: the ever-frightening, always overpriced Designer Shoe Warehouse.