by Sharon Early

Created on: August 30, 2011

I was lost in a maze, beneath the city streets of Paris. Playing hide and seek with a small blood family of Vampires, who had lured me here to kill me. I wasn't going to be as easy to kill as all that. I had put down numerous vampires over the last decade and my fighting edge was never keener than on this particular hunt. The vamps were whooping, laughing, using their vamp speed to run through the sewer tunnels,they were attempting to herd me through the maze. Probably to some gory killing floor beneath the “City of Light”. Three vampire hunters had been lured down here and dispatched in the last 5 years.

Unfortunately for them I had absolutely no intention of being number 4. As old as the maze of sewer tunnels beneath Paris were probably more hunters and even more innocents met their end down here in the dark. As I slogged through the calf deep water I thought to myself how much I had to thank practicing water witch, second in command of the Hollywood coven, and my best friend, Mist, for chief among them at the moment a personal ward stone that repelled water from me and my gear.

Suddenly a shape blurred in from my left, from a tunnel that split off from the one I was walking in at a 90 degree angle. It resolved less than a foot from my face as a vamp face, fangs extended mouth wide open streaking in to bite my face. Moving almost as swiftly as one of them I dropped my weight onto my right leg behind me, pivoted just slightly and managed to get my silver inlaid vamp killer knife up to just where an instant before my face had been, blade out, braced by my right palm behind it. His own speed and momentum worked against him here.

She expected me to be human-slow. Obviously I wasn't the only one who underestimated the opponent here I thought in satisfaction. The blade struck sparks from the vamps teeth as the silvered blade sliced deep, almost giving the vamp, Pietra, a Reach toothbrush commercial style flip top head. One down two more to go. I am only “lost” down here in the maze of tunnels because I am not looking for an exit. I am hunting for something else entirely, Revenge and Vindication.

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