Title: The Ultimate Prey Author: Amiroq. aka Gypzy Email: fitchett@netaccess.co.nz Size: 27K Series: Vampire's Kiss Rating: R (eventually, for blood and guts.) Codes: Au?, V; K/T Teaser: Sequel to Vampire's Kiss. Harry comes face to face with an old foe. Disclaimer: Paramount owns Star Trek, I own Kalisha and the Vampire's Kiss possible alternate universe. Note: Currency. 190 gold reysins is equal to about NZ$1710... 20 silver resos is about NZ$60. To convert to US currency, try halving the NZ dollars. For Brits, try I *think* dividing it by three. Although you may want to check the exchange market, I hear we're getting stronger now. Warning: last time I wrote a story with this much violence, I think it was the Price of Love, I was told by an irate mother to put little warnings on my stories like 'do not do this at home'. Me, being me, took her advice to heart and this is my little list of warnings for kids. Do not play with stakes without adult supervision. These may cause serious injury, blindness or death. Do not attempt to fly out of windows if you are higher than one storey, or off the top of a cliff. This will most probably result in broken bones, the number of these being relative to your altitude. Do not suck blood at home. If you take more than two litres from an adult, they will start to feel dizzy, and no matter how much you take you'll probably be carted off to a looney bin. Do not pick up drunk, seedy men in bars. This can result in sexual assault and/or emotional trauma. Most importantly, do not forget to leave donations of food on my front porch with a label reading, "For Amiroq. aka Gypzy, because I love her stories so much." Forgetting this may result in lack of feedback from said author, refusal of archive rights and the silent treatment. The Ultimate Prey "Wait..." Harry cautioned B'Elanna gently, seeing her tense and begin to stand as the man in front of them began to collect his things. With some subterfuge, they'd taken his very full bag, taken out some money and put in B'Elanna's bracelet, a gift from Harry a week ago, and returned it to his side. It may have been easier to just take it, but the fee for theft here was good, and this way they could get away scot-free. The man stood. "Stop!" Harry cried out. "Thief! That's my bag!" The man turned as Harry ran up to him. "You're mistaken," he said, forcing civility. "This is *my* bag." "No way. That is like, everything we *own*. I'm not going to let you just take it." "Is there a problem, gentlemen?" The commanding voice broke through the gathering crowd, and they parted humbly as the Guard stepped through. Perfect. "He stole my bag!" "He's *lying*," the man insisted, the look on his face so stricken and even terrified of the Guard that B'Elanna kind of almost felt sorry for him. "What is the content?" the Guard asked the man. "One hundred and ninety gold reysins. I was just going to the bank." There was a slight muttering among the crowd at the huge amount - could one man carry so much with him? "And you?" He turned to Harry. "One hundred and *seventy-five* reysins, and a gold bracelet belonging to my fiancee." He glanced at B'Elanna. "It's a family heirloom." The crowd exchanged murmurings of favouritism. The Guard took the bag from the man and poured the contents into his hand. As he did so, a gold bracelet slipped to the ground, and he picked it up. "Madam, I believe this is yours," he said, handing it to B'Elanna with a slight nod before counting the reysins. "One hundred and seventy-five. I suggest, sir," he gestured toward the man while putting the money back into the bag and giving it to Harry, "that if you do not have the 20 silver resos fine on you you hand it in to the Yainam Centre as soon as possible before you find yourself... incapacitated. In the mean time, sir, madam," he took out the coins from a pouch at his belt, "I am terribly sorry for any inconvinience." He disappeared, the crowd dissippated, and Harry and B'Elanna slipped away, an extra 15 reysins in B'Elanna's pocket as well as the money the Guard had just handed to them. "A hundred and *ninety*!" she whispered. "We could live on that for... weeks, months." "I told you he looked rich. Let's go drop this stuff off, then hit the bars. Time to eat, I think." --- The second nightclub they found looked promising. Near the Red Light Zone, but far enough away to avoid inspections by the Guard, it looked seedy enough to make them inconspicuous; it would be common enough for people to pick each other up in a place like this, and the prospect of making a little money on the side was good, too. They split up with a silent agreement, one heading to the bar, one to the corners. B'Elanna spotted her Prey quickly enough. Sitting alone, half full glass in hand, a little flushed and woozy, by the looks of things he'd probably had a few too many to drink. "You alone?" she asked, sitting down on the next barstool. "I hope not," he slurred, raking her with his eyes. She fought not to shiver under his gaze. "Got cash?" "Dependsh. How mush you want?" "How much you got?" "Enuff." "Well, that's a matter of opinion, isn't it? How about nine in silver?" "For you, yah." He drew it out sluggishly, much more than the nine she'd asked for, although not enough to fill his wallet. He'd probably come from the bank, or else had just been paid. She reached for it, but he pulled back. "Later, honey." "Seven now, two later." "Kay." She pocketed the cash he handed her, knowing she could just take more later. Not that they'd need it, with today's booty, but it was always good to have as much as possible. "Maybe we should head somewhere more private," she whispered, purposely making her voice slightly husky. "You got a place near here?" "Yah." He stood, draining his glass, and lead her outside. --- Later, she walked calmly away from his flat, acting as if there wasn't an unconscious man lying on the bed inside, the weight of his money in her pocket and the taste of his blood in her mouth. --- Back in their room, she found Harry already there, lying stretched out on the king-size bed, looking very pleased with himself. "What?" she asked, taking off her light jacket and stashing some of the cash in their increasing supply, the rest in her wallet. "You'll never guess what I found out." "Probably not. What?" The bed was soft, and bounced slightly as she sat on it, then more when he pulled her down on top of him, eliciting a smile from her. "I found a sort of messege-sending place on the way back, and turns out Voyager just caught up with us. They've given up on getting home and are just exploring now. Tom's got things back into some semblence of normality, and him and Reagen Lang - one of those two who was on guard before the..." he swallowed, then finished, "the mutiny - are going steady now." She waited until he'd finished before asking, "They're in orbit?" "Been and gone, apparently. They didn't realise we were here, or they would have stopped by." He steadied her, slipping hands around her waist to rest on her back, and kissed her long and slow. "Tom says hi." She mumbled something incoherent, re-capturing his lips with her own and working at his collar, trying to focus her motor functions enough to get his shirt undone. This was the sort of thing she enjoyed about being with him; being free to work their own hours and just mess around if they wanted. Living two lives, one as respectable fiancee, one as Night-Stalker, picking up men in seedy bars and sucking them dry of blood and cash. It was the sort of dark existence that had always intrigued her, ever since her father had read her stories of vampires and werewolves as a child. He flipped her over onto her back and pinned her hands to the bed, running kisses down her neck toward her collarbone. He'd just slipped one hand under her shirt to pull it off when the sound of the window shattering pulled them both back to total awareness of their surroundings. "What the hell was that?" B'Elanna whispered, grabbing the lamp from the bedside table and pulling it out from the socket. "What's that for?" Harry asked. "Weapon," she answered, then realised what she was doing and set it down. "Oh." She didn't *need* a weapon. Harry walked slowly toward the source of the noise, and paused before the doorway, listening. "There's no one there." He went through into the other room, and she followed hesitantly. She was still getting used to the idea that she could hear people breathing from a hundred metres away if she wanted to, or the mechanic hum of a bug that would be silent to human ears. He was right, there was no one there. But the window facing the countryside that they had admired earlier was broken, and amid the shards of glass on the carpet was a rock that had presumably had a piece of paper tied around it. The paper was now in Harry's hands and he read it with an expression that she now associated with trouble. "What?" "Kalisha," he said grimly. --- "I was still young, only about a thousand year old--" "Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?" They were sitting on a small cliff - actually, it was hardly a cliff, more like a ledge, about a metre high - in the middle of a field from where they could see anyone coming towards them. It had been Harry's idea, of course, although they agreed it wouldn't be much help if a vampire decided to run toward them at full tilt. He grinned and shook his head slowly. "You don't know how good it is to have someone take you seriously and still tell you when things sound ridiculous. Alright, in vampyr terms I was young. It was 16 AD, I was in Aswan, in what's now Egypt. I was working the feluccas on the Nile when we met, about the only job I could get there, actually, under the name of Rahan. We.. dated for a while. I knew who she was, she knew who I was, or she would have just killed me. Eventually she found out something else. She was my inuktu. I'd been hesitant, I guess, because..." He hesitated, staring at the ground, then continued, "I was in love with her. But when she found out, she disappeared. Left a note saying she knew. I never saw her again. I heard things, though - she got powerful. Really powerful. Some things were probably exaggerated, but I heard she could hide her aura from other vampyrs, make it look red, like Prey, and the vampyrs she created could survive after she died. I didn't hear anything that could explain how she got out here, though." B'Elanna was silent a moment, then said slowly, "So she's here to kill you, because you didn't kill her in Egypt because you were in love with her." "It gets worse. She has some of my soil." "She has your dirt," she repeated. "Okay. This sounds really strange." "I'm serious, B'Elanna. If I know her, she'll have kept it all this time, and that means she can use it against me." "How?" "Well, I don't know, I've never done it. But I know whatever she can do with it, it's not good." "I would generally say that *any* past lover from two and a half millenia ago who is a vampire and has come from halfway across the galaxy to kill you is not good." "Well, yeah, generally, but this makes it doubly not good." "That's not good." "Exactly." "So what do we do? How do you kill a vampire anyway?" "Wooden pointy things usually hurt. I'd normally tell you to steer clear of them, but I suppose these aren't normal circumstances." "Believe me, these haven't been normal circumstances since before I found out you were a bloodsucking vampire who took people under your power by kissing them." He started laughing, and after a brief second she joined in, glad to be free of the tension that had surrounded them previously, if only for a few moments. --- Harry was already up the next morning when he heard B'Elanna's breathing increase, a sign that she was about to wake up. He frowned. He'd been up for about an hour, thinking about Kalisha, trying to remember anything that could help him kill her before she could kill either of them. Instead, his thoughts kept returning to the small amount of Chinese soil she'd taken the first time they'd been involved in anything. She was powerful enough to be able to use it for almost anything. Behind him, he heard the bed moving as B'Elanna sat up, fully awake, and turned. His eyes took in the scenario immediately and he recoiled in shock. The formerly white sheets were covered in blood - B'Elanna's blood, and a sharp wooden stake was submerged in her flesh. Her skin was blackened as if burned, and dropped off in large clumps as she got out of bed and walked toward him menacingly.... Harry awoke with a start. The room was dark, and when he glanced at his watch he saw that it was only about four in the morning. His head hurt. He climbed out of bed and wandered into the bathroom, splashing cold water on his face to cool off after the fevered sleep that was the best he could achieve. There was no point trying to get any more rest before dawn, so he just went into the main room and sat down, head resting in hands, and tried to *think*. --- B'Elanna woke the next morning to the soft thud of restless footsteps on carpet, and if she listened closely, she could hear the rouch 'scritch scritch' of the wiry fabric rubbing against shoes. The other half of the bed was cold, she realised, and figured Harry had probably been out of bed for a few hours. She sat up, wiping the sleep from her eyes as a matter of habit. "What are you *doing*?" He stopped pacing to stare out the window - they had been moved to a different room after the incident the afternoon before, so the view here was slightly different - before turning toward her and walking back slowly. "Thinking. I found this slipped under the door." He held up a piece of paper, similar to the one that had been wrapped around the rock. It was a floral print, lavender scented - obviously she'd gotten it on earth, as the chances of finding another flower smelling like that on the other side of the galaxy were remote at best. He started reading it. "'R. Meet me in the ruined warehouse on cnr Swahain and Yole, sundown today. Come alone. K.'" "That's only.. ten hours away." "I know. And somehow, I don't think she wants a friendly chat." He sighed, and picked up his jacket from the floor next to the bed. "I'm going for a walk. If I'm not back before sundown, don't come looking for me." "Harry..." "Don't go to the warehouse, B'Elanna. Just wait here." She felt his mind pressing against hers, forcing her to agree, and she nodded. "Okay, I get the point. Now get out of my head." She felt the pressure ease gradually as he left, but a piece of it remained nonetheless. --- A cacophany of birdsong arose from the trees on the top of the cliff; rocks were scattered nearer to the actual edge and on one of these sat Harry. The sun was sinking, slowly, a reminder of how little time he had before sundown. Around him was his day's work - stakes, mainly, carved with symbols he remembered learning as a child, symbols of death and life and war. Now he was etching a silver medallion of protection with a knife he'd bought with some of the money he and B'Elanna had stolen from the man in town, before he'd found out Kalisha was around. He paused a couple of times to glance at the city below, stretched out toward the horizon at the foot of the cliff. He'd located the warehouse a few hours ago by reading the street signs from his vantage point on the rocky ground, glad once more for his enhanced eyesight, and now as he looked he saw somebody entering through the back entrance. He looked closer and noticed long, luxurious black hair. Kalisha. He waited a few minutes more, completing his work and packing his stakes and such into a bag before lacing the medallion onto the silver chain around his neck, from which hung another medallion, this one with a jade symbol on it. If opened, there was a small area packed full of soil from his hometown, which was the source of his life and power, along with the jade. Slinging his now full bag over his shoulder, he looked at the hotel where he knew B'Elanna was for a moment, sending her one last order - "Stay there" - before looking back at the warehouse and taking a breath. Sundown was in just a few minutes. He took a few steps back, then ran toward the edge of the cliff... and jumped. --- B'Elanna stared out the window, watching the very last rays of light from the sun blink out as it sank below the horizon, leaving her with a black pit in her stomach. Sundown. She wondered vaguely what Harry was doing now - had he arrived at the warehouse? was he talking to Kalisha? or fighting? - then shook her head quickly. "Just don't think about it," she whispered fiercely. It was going to be fine. But her thoughts returned to what he'd told her, how powerful the female vampire was, how she had some of his soil, where they were meeting... "Cnr Swahain and Yole," she said aloud. She knew where that was, they'd passed it on the way to the hotel after picking that guy's pockets, the guy that had got them set up for the next few months. And then to what Harry had said, before he'd left: "Don't go to the warehouse, B'Elanna. Just wait here." He was still in her head, too, holding her in the room like a padlock. But it was faint, like he was seriously injured, or wasn't really concentrating. Of course he wasn't. He was at the warehouse, right? Facing down with Kalisha. A chill tingled down her spine at the thought, and she shivered. She pulled the window closed, and walked back into the bedroom to wait. --- A few minutes later, she changed her mind, and strode back toward the window. It opened easily, and she climbed onto the ledge nimbly before looking at the ground far below, taking a breath... and jumping. The wind rushed against her, below her, holding her weight. Weight? She almost laughed. It all seemed so effortless, she was totally weightless. She was a feather, soaring through the sky like an eagle. So this is what flying is like, she thought dimly. She landed on the outskirts of town, softly as though she hadn't been four storeys off the ground a moment ago. Glancing at a sign, she orientated herself and started walking. --- A sound at the entrance of the warehouse caught Kalisha's attention, and she smiled slightly, feeling Rahan's proximity as a sharp tingle in the back of her mind. "You came." "You thought I wouldn't?" "Perhaps." "You were the one who ran in Aswan." She turned around slowly to face him. He'd aged, slightly, matured in some inner way that wasn't entirely visible. Well, it had been more than two thousand years. His hair was shorter, in a style similar to an undercut, a few inches long. In his eyes, she saw... a fire, like hatred, or rage, or something, that engulfed them, lighting up the dark colouring like a floodlight. He looked more alive than when they'd last met, somehow. "I was younger, then," she whispered, and glanced at the bag he carried, and the medallions round his neck. "I see you came prepared." "It seemed prudent." She slipped her hand into her pocket, feeling the comforting weight of the small silver box she kept a sample of Chinese soil in - his soil. Hers was in a locket round her neck, like his, although the jade symbol on hers was vampyr, not Chinese, and meant 'Baby Dragon'. Clutching it, she reached out with her mind to his, touched it tentatively, then wrapped around it. "It was a pleasure to see you again," she said under her breath, but knew he heard. She walked toward him, watching him walk back as if in a trance until she had him pinned against the opposite wall. She explored his mind slowly, savouring the experience, knowing it would never come again after she squeezed tight enough to kill him. The fire in his eyes faded, then disappeared, as she searched deeper and she watched, entranced. Memories came to her mind as if from a babbling stream: a woman with short reddish hair in a Starfleet uniform, scared for her life; a young man with strikingly white hair and a cadet's uniform; fireworks, dark green trees with scarlet bottle-brush flowers, a sunrise. She pressed more, felt his strength ebb, and dug with sharp claws. A woman with black hair and laughing eyes - half-Klingon, from the looks of it. She felt an aura, black like a vampyr, and realised the wench was one of them. A creation. "The wench will die with you," she muttered hoarsely. "Don't count on it," a voice said behind her. She tore away, spun around and moved forward all in one movement - and felt herself be impaled on a wooden chair leg. Energy poured out of her, and as she looked down she saw it wasn't the only thing - there was a red sticky fluid coating her front, the makeshift stake, and the dusty floor. She tried vaguely to pull the wood out, but her hand fell limply down, followed a moment later by her body. --- Harry felt himself being pulled back to reality with a throbbing headache. It was dark. He groaned, and a soothing hand stroked his forehead gently. "Ssh," a disembodied voice whispered, and he settled down. After an undefined period of time, his headache simply.. dissolved, and he realised why it was so dark. His eyes were closed. He opened them to find himself still in the warehouse, with B'Elanna sitting next to him. There was a shape past her on the floor, but when he tried to look at it his eyes wouldn't focus. "What happened?" he asked, trying to sit up. She pushed him back down with a hand on his chest, then left it there, much to his pleasure. "I saved your ass. Your girlfriend over there was sucking your mind out or something." Now he *did* sit up, ignoring her efforts to stop him. "I told you to stay in the hotel room!" "And if I had, we both would have been killed. Are you okay?" "I think so. I'll deal with you later," he added with a low growl, just to let her know he wasn't going to drop it. She just grinned back, and helped him up. "Come on, it's nearly dawn. Someone might notice us if we stay here." As they left the building, he noticed the first rays of light appearing over the horizon. FINIS