Excerpt: Untitled

The front door, which I could not see from my languid position, came open with a slam and a whiff of flowers in the cold night air, along with another deeper, coppery smell I could not identify at first.

It was a girl. That in itself was strange enough that I expected the guys at the table to at least look at each other in confusion and ask what she was doing there, but again, none of them even glanced at her. She was tall, for a woman—at least six feet. She was wearing a pair of tight jeans, which had seen better days, though they hugged her hips and ass in a way that made me glad I had a good view of the whole room, which was the reason I had chosen my solitary seat in the first place.

She did not seem to notice my presence as she walked over to the table, her stride long and confident. As she did so she removed the leather jacket she wore, tossing it on a stray wooden chair in the corner. She was wearing one of those men's sleeveless white undershirts, which are sometimes disturbingly referred to as "wife-beaters," but this one had some kind of design on it—big, haphazard streaks of red. The shirt was tight, revealing her long, muscular arms and toned shoulders, in addition to more excellent curves. I averted my eyes quickly, lest she think I was ogling her admittedly admirable body, but not before I noticed her startlingly blue eyes which stood out all the more because of the paleness of her skin and her dark brown hair, pulled up into a simple ponytail. She had a sharp nose and high cheekbones, and her features were a little gaunt, as if she had recently lost some weight.

On the left side of her face was a long, ragged scar—five long-healed slashes that extended from just under her hairline, across her eye and mouth, to her chin. Her left eye drooped slightly, as well, but despite those deformities, she was lovely. It had been quite a long time since I had even seen a girl, let alone checked one out, but she was quite an attractive woman. It was a hard beauty, a strange kind of toughness, though, and again I looked away from her and pretended to be reading my paperback so that she would not catch me staring at her. I was fairly sure she could kick my ass.

She walked up behind the guys and stood watching them for a moment, one hand on her hip and the other on the back of Big Jason's chair. Big Jason Jones, a massive bear of a man with a white handlebar mustache, a bald head, and more tattoos than I could count, turned and nodded at the mysterious woman.

She nodded back and watched the game for another minute before speaking. Her voice came out deeper than I had expected, and she had a thick British accent. "How goes it?" she asked.

"Same old," Big Jason grunted, and a couple of the others nodded. "You?"

"I’m on a trail," she said nonchalantly, but I noticed that the game had suddenly stopped. None of the guys at the table was looking at her, but suddenly the room seemed tense and thick with something—anticipation? Fear?

I had forgotten my pretense of looking at my book, so when she suddenly raised her head and looked at me, her face expressionless, I met her eyes briefly and smiled before averting my gaze.

"Who's the kid?" she asked, with a nod in my direction.

I had to make an effort not to roll my eyes. She was three, maybe four years older than I was, which made her about twenty-nine. Kid? Whatever.

Big Jason looked up from his cards with a frown. He glanced at me for a second and said, "That's Smith. He's okay. Nose stuck in a book, as usual."

The girl shrugged, dismissing me. It appeared as if whatever Big Jason said was good enough for her. She reached across the poker table and grabbed a handful of chips, which crunched loudly as she chewed them. Nobody moved or said a word. She looked at them all with disdain, frowning deeply.

"What’s the take?" Fontaine finally asked, with a sigh.

The girl turned to look into Fontaine's craggy face. "There's a barn on the outskirts of town…"

"I know it," said Chow. As he stood up I couldn't help remarking on how much shorter he was than the girl. "It's old and looks like it's about to fall down, but it's big."

"That's the one," the girl said. “I’ve been following it for two days, and the trail led there. It killed a family…a whole family. A little girl.”

Her face had never lost the blank look she had been sporting since she walked in, but her voice quavered a little. Whatever had happened had been very, very bad, and I began to feel a familiar hard fear inside my chest.

"And what are we talking here?" Fontaine asked.

What she said next made me sit straight up in the chair, all pretenses of disinterest gone. I vaguely heard my book clatter to the floor, but made no move to retrieve it.

"Demons," she replied, her face and voice expressionless again.

Big Jason let out a loud guffaw, and Chow sat back down again immediately, waving his hand in dismissal. "Give me a break, girl," he said.

Fontaine looked a little more sympathetic, but he too sat back down in his seat in between Chow and Father Anubis, and looked back up at the woman, whose face was still without any emotion or expression whatsoever.

"Honey," he said, his deep, grandfatherly voice over come with concern, "There are no such things."

At that, I leapt from my chair, feeling a white-hot anger rage in my belly. No one reacted when I walked over and stood next to the table, crossing my arms over my chest. The girl glanced at me briefly, meeting my eyes just for a moment. She was even taller than I had first thought—she did not even have to look up to see into my eyes, like most women did. I found this strangely attractive, because I was six foot five, and could count on one hand—hell, two fingers--how many women I had met who could do this.

The girl reached over the men again and grabbed a vodka bottle from in front of Chow, and took a long swig from it. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and stared at the men as she calmly placed the bottle back down on the table. As she reached across, I realized that the red streaks on her shirt were not a design—they were dried blood. In fact, she also had some on her arms and hands, in thick, nauseating splashes.

"Father Anubis," she said. "Do you believe that?"

The tiny Catholic priest looked up into her striking blue eyes with his duller gray ones. "I do not know, my child," he said. His accent was thick and I had to listen closely to understand what he said. "I have seen a great many abominable things in my time, but I have never seen a demon. Nor, I regret to say, an angel."

"But you believe," the girl persisted.

"Yes," the priest said, after a minute hesitation.

Fontaine immediately scoffed. "If they were for real, we would have seen one."

"Not necessarily," the girl said. "You blokes believe in any number of impossible things, including the fact that holy objects repel vampires. If these objects are, in fact, holy, then why is it so far-fetched to believe that there are messengers of God and the devil on earth?"

Big Jason spoke up. "Because it's the vampires themselves who have the superstition. They believe that crosses and holy water an' shit are going to hurt them, and so they do."

"That is preposterous," the woman said, with a scowl. She pointed at Big Jason. “They're afraid because they're unholy freaks who know we're going to send their asses straight to hell."

"You all forget," the little Egyptian priest said, quietly. "There is one among us who has seen a demon."

He turned to look at me with sympathy in his dull gray eyes. As one, the rest of the men and the strange woman all turned and regarded my face, as well.