Excerpt: Unknown

The key was in her hand. She was just returning home from the market, as she did every day. As she placed the key in the lock to open the door, she realized something was wrong. Was it the smell, or did it just not feel right? She didn't know. All she did know was that something was not at all normal.
Cautiously she opened the door and stepped inside the small apartment that served as a headquarters and safe house to her operation. The front room was in shambles. Chairs were upturned and lamps were broken. A picture of her and her mother was shattered on the floor, glass sparkling on the hardwood floor that made it look like a firework show that never quite made it off the ground. Where there had once been a television, there was now a plastic box full of broken glass and electric and optic wires.
Blair stopped, a breath caught in her lungs as she thought about what had happened. As it dawned on her, she ran to the small bedroom where she slept and ripped the closet open. Tossing shoes aside and out of the way, she opened a small hatch at the bottom of the closet. A sigh of relief escaped her mouth as she realized that all of her hunting equipment was still there and in tact.
Slowly, checking the rest of the two-bedroom apartment, she made her way to the kitchen where the phone was. Before she made it to the phone, however, she saw a small sheet of paper resting on the counter next to the block of knives. It was written in the elegant, spiraling text of one who has had too many years to practice his script. Picking it up, she read. Dearest Blair,
As I am sure you are aware by now, that you are no longer a secret to me. I know what you do, and hope that you will not take this as an idol threat. I am sincere in what I am about to tell you. If you continue to hunt me, you will be killed. You will not be found, ever. Hopefully it will not come to that.
Your friend, Argyle
Blair crumpled the paper in her hand. Hastily picking up the phone, she called Kenzie. She answered on the first ring. "Hey Blair, what’s up?" she asked.
"Where are you? You need to get home now." Blair demanded, a hint of concern in her voice. "He knows where we live. Argyle trashed the apartment and left a threatening note."
"Hey, calm down. I am just up the street. I will be home in just a few minutes. How did he find out? This is bad. We can't have a vampire knowing where we live."
"I don't know. He just trashed the place and left. Nothing is missing. He didn't find the weapons. Just get home. I can't deal with this alone."
With a comforting voice, Kenzie replied, "I will be home in just a minute. Can you hang tight for that long?"
"Yes, just hurry. See you in a minute." Blair said and hung up. As she did so, she headed back into the living room and turned a chair back up. Sitting down, she ran a hand through her long, blond hair and stretched. Rubbing her sapphire blue eyes, she realized how stressed she was. At sixteen years old she didn't want to be that stressed.
Moments later, Kenzie burst in the front door looking panic stricken. Blair had always been surprised at how well her best friend has been able to handle pressure and was startled to see her in this state. Kenzie was tall, almost a whole foot taller than Blair, and had a perfect skinny figure. Her shoulder length red hair seemed to change with the season and seemed it's lightest during the fall. Kenzie had those eyes that make you think of a warm, comforting, dark chocolate. She had always been able to stop men in their tracks when they looked at her. Now she had her hair in a tangled mess and stress was clearly evident in her eyes. Only a year Blair’s junior, they had been best friends since they had met, almost two years earlier.
"Are you okay?" she asked as soon as she was in and had the door closed tight behind her.
"I'm fine, just a little rattled, I guess." Blair said with her eyes closed. "We need to finish him tonight. We can't let him go on knowing where we live."
"How do you plan on finding him? We only just started hunting him."
"We know he is a fan of the drink, right. So let's go to all the pubs in a five-mile radius and see what we can find. Then we can go from there."
"Okay, lets go." Kenzie said, the twinkle of the hunt in her eye.
"Okay, let me just go change my clothes." Blair said, walking to her room. Opening the door to the closet for the second time in five minutes, she thought how lucky she had been to not have the weapons found and destroyed. It had taken years to build the armory that she now had hidden in the bottom of her closet. She took out a clean t-shirt and pants and put them on. The shirt was a tight black under armor shirt that molded to her figure almost instantly. The pants were made of the same material. Putting on a pair of tennis shoes, Blair was ready to go.
She returned to the living room to find Kenzie turning furniture upright. "Ready to go?" she asked.
"Well, well, well, don't you look hot?” Kenzie had never considered herself pretty. Even though she was just about as pretty as it is possible to be, Kenzie thought that she was lanky and unappealing. "Yeah, I'm ready. Lets hunt this jerk down." As they were leaving, however, Kenzie thought better of it and went back into the apartment. She walked into her room and returned, slipping a small gun into her sock. "I would bring one for you, but with what you are wearing, it wouldn't be hidden very long.
"That’s okay," Blair, laughed, "I have a knife hidden in my sock. Are you ready to go?"
"Yep, lets get out of here."
Walking out the door, they started discussing how they would search for the vampire called Argyle. "I like your idea of checking all the local pubs and going from there if we find anybody who recognizes him. There is one just around the corner." Kenzie started.
"Okay, want to start there?" Blair suggested.
"Sounds like a plan." They took the short walk to the pub. It looked like a run down hut. As the girls walked in, the owner looked at them with a creepy interest. Reluctantly, they walked up to the bar and waited for the bartender. The creepy old man quickly looked and saw them. He hastily rushed over to greet them.
"What can I get for you honey?" he asked in an overly sweet, honey voice that Blair would have guessed was his attempt at being seductive. "Wine or something with an edge?"
"Neither, I want information, if you have it." Blair replied dryly. Did you had any suspicious customers early this morning?" Apparently he had decided that Blair was not going to give him what he wanted and thought that he should not give her what she wanted either.
"Why should I tell you about my customers?" he retorted in a completely different tone. "That's none of your business."
"I have a hundred pounds that says that you do want to tell us." Kenzie said, her voice as dry as Blair's. At that, his eyes grew wide and the girls could see greed playing at his mind. After several moments of silence Kenzie spoke again, "So how about it? See anybody suspicious?"
"Give me the money first," the creep demanded. Blair pulled the money out of her purse, careful not to let the bartender see that she had more, much more. As she pushed the money toward the creep, he greedily took it and counted it twice before he looked up. "What do you mean by 'suspicious?'"
"Anybody who looked strange or acted weird? Maybe there was some weird feature."
"Now that you mention it, there was someone weird. Had red eyes. Creeped me out. He was tall too. Too tall."
"Do you know where he was from?" Blair inquired.
"Called a taxi for him when he left. He said he wanted to he dropped off at the north outskirts of town." Kenzie and Blair had a feeling that this was all the information that they were going to get. As they stood to leave the bartender told them to wait. "When he was drunk he said something about living in a cave exactly north of the city. Does that help any?"
"Yes it does. I think that that is exactly what we need." Blair betrayed a touch of excitement in her voice. "Thanks you, bye." When they were out of the of the pub, Kenzie said, "Let's go home and make a plan. We can't go off without a plan." Five minutes later they were home, sitting at the kitchen table that they set right. They spent the better half of the day planning for the night. They decided that it had to be that night. With Argyle knowing where they lived, they couldn't put it off.
As evening rolled around, Blair and Kenzie piled into a taxi and asked to be taken to the north end of town. The cab pulled up to the side of the road and let them out. Blair paid the driver and they started walking out of the town and toward the vampire's den. As they walked they went over the plan, as not to mess up. About a kilometer out of the town, they stopped to set up for the planned ambush. Carefully placing all of their weapons on the ground, they hid in the bushes on the rolling green hills of the lowlands just north of Edinburgh.
It was only three in the afternoon and that left the girls with a lot of time to kill. "So how are you?" Kenzie asked Blair. It was her way of starting a stakeout conversation.
"I'm pretty good. How are you?" Blair replied.
"Just hoping that the stakeout doesn't take too long." Kenzie said, hopeful. "How lucky is it that the first pub we went to was the one we needed? Bar man was kind of an ass though. He creeped me out."
"I can't believe how obvious he was, he didn't even try to hide the fact that he didn't want to help us if we didn't help him. What a creep." Blair expressed her feelings with disgust.
"I did wonder why he was not wearing a ring," Kenzie said with extreme sarcasm. Soon later the talk turned to how they got into the vampire hunting game. "One day I heard a rumor of a vampire living in Dublin just off of Finglas Road. That was just up the road from where I was living with my parents.
"I got curious and went to check it out. Just to prove to the other kids that I was brave and to prove that there was no such thing as vampires. I was wrong, dead wrong," Kenzie explained, probably not even noticing the pun that was in the last comment. "I broke into the deserted house that was said to he home to the vampire. You know what made it worse?"
Intrigued, Blair asked, "What?"
"It was dusk when I decided to be brave. He was just waking up when I broke in." Kenzie's eyes were becoming reminiscent. "I bumped into him just inside the parlor. At first, I thought he was just a hoax that my friends thought would be funny. I soon realized that it wasn't. Just about pissed myself, when I saw that he was real. Started praying like there was no tomorrow. Mind you, if I hadn't started praying there wouldn't have been a tomorrow for me. I didn't know any Latin at the moment. Latin, the language of justice." She said with finality.
"Anyway," Kenzie said, returning to the present, "It was an addicting experience, dealing with the supernatural. I was hooked and tried to find as many as I could. Then I met you and had more fun than ever. How did you come to enter this dark fugue with the paranormal? This majestic waltz with the abnormal?" She spoke with such a love for the hunt that warmed Blair's heart in a strange sort of way. The way one feels when they find that someone that they love is coming for a visit, but will have to soon leave.
"Well, I have never told anybody this," Blair reluctantly managed to say. "I never knew my father. He left when I was born. I was raised an only child, with a single mother. We were close, like sisters. Every waking moment that we had, we spent together. Like two peas in a pod, we were. Nothing could separate us. Whenever I had a problem, I went to her. Have you ever had somebody like that in your life?" Blair asked, a tear starting to play peek-a-boo with the corner of her eye.
"Not until I met you, you keep me sane Blair. Or as sane as a vampire hunter can be." Kenzie admitted.
"She home schooled me so that we could spend all our time together. I am grateful for that. I learned more from her than any public school kid I know learned by the time they were out of post secondary.
"One night we were walking home from a nice dinner out. I still remember what she was wearing, a green silk dinner gown with matching shoes and handbag. Her hair pulled up in a loose bun. Her smile pulling at the corners of her dark blue eyes. We were celebrating. I had just passed an exam for an early scholarship to Trinity. She wanted to treat her little prodigy." By this time, the one tear had turned to a flood, streaming down her face in a relentless waterfall of grief. "She wanted to take a shortcut down an ally, when we got deep into the shadows, she saw something that made her stop in her tracks. A pair of glowing red eye stared back at us with an intensity that could set a forest ablaze." Blair paused to wipe her eyes and noticed that the day was turning to dark.
"It is getting dark, Argyle will be out soon." Blair changed the subject as she finished drying her eyes. Indeed, twilight was approaching and the dark belonged to the vampires and demons. "We should get ready. We only have one shot at this. If we screw up, innocent people and we could die. He is powerful, we need to be prepared."
Not more than five minutes later, they say the vampire called Argyle in his swift, yet eerily silent approach on the city of Edinburgh. Quickly, he passed the hiding place of Blair and Kenzie in the bushes. He continues toward town. In an unlucky twist of events, the wind changed without warning. The scent of human flesh and blood was wafted along the rolling hills to the incubus strolling toward the city with a lustful hunger eating away at his dead belly.
As the scent reached the vampire, the girls realized that they were no longer a secret to the vampire that had so long eluded them. He turned and swept quickly back the way he had come, heading straight for the panic stricken girls. Fear was building inside of them, they had never wound up starting on the defensive. They had always had the element of surprise. Scrambling to their feet they picked up their weapons.
Kenzie used a semi auto 9mm glock with an extended clip. Blair favored a more medieval weapon. She carried an array of swords and bows with an occasional pike. They had learned that the only way to kill a vampire was to incapacitate it by wounding it in a way that would kill a human, and then they would cleave the head off. Whoever said that you needed a wooden steak of a cross to kill a vampire was wrong, that is mere folk lore and was soon proved false by Blair and Kenzie. Now as the vampire named Argyle strode quickly toward them with a glare of rage burning in his ruby eyes, the girls has only seconds to think.
Before they could respond, he was upon them. Kenzie fired a hollow point bullet straight at his heart. It would have been a perfect shot. Argyle wasn't called a vampire for nothing though, he moved at the speed of sound when in danger, a speed that required the girls to be two steps ahead at all times in order to keep their lives and bring his to a long over due end. He moved out of the way of the high velocity rounds and ran at the girls. One of his rock hard finger nails clipped Kenzie on the arm and he tried to knock the gun out of her hand.
As blood flowed from Kenzie's arm as Argyle ran past and turned around, Blair noticed that the look in his eye had changed. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage. His eyes now burned with a blinding hunger. In hunger he would be blinded and distracted by the smell of blood, but at the same time he was more determined to kill them and have his dinner. Running back Blair and Kenzie, he let out a primitive, guttural grunt that underlined his hunger and urge to kill. Blair hurriedly knocked an arrow and took aim. With a twang, the arrow went flying toward the vampire, who moved out of the way just in time.