______________________________________everglades - by adire___

Florida smelled of dead things.

Florida smelled of dead things, and he opened his mouth to let that heavy, ripe smell roll across his red, red tongue.

Florida smelled of dead things, and he tasted home.

Ash dreamed of milk and viscera and blackened things as he drove, dreamed as always with his eyes open, as he had since the day of his "birth". Around him everything was the rich, musty green of rot, and he had the sensation of a giant, wet maw opening to swallow him. The entire cedar swamp of the Florida Everglades was alive, as opposed to the dry, dead land of the arid deserts that had been his habitat for the past half-century or so.

Alive--and where there was life, there was always the fresh scent of blossoming, decomposing death.

"I'm on a bullet and I'm headed straight into God; even he'd like to end it, too.... "

That jackass isn't the only one who'd like to end it. He turned up the volume on the ancient radio with its CD car kit, making the speakers of the flaking rust-red Chevrolet throb. He was really too old for Marilyn Manson; hell, he was older than Marilyn Manson. But Ash never had really cared; he tended to do things as he wished, and dared others to question something as inconsequential as his musical tastes.

3:53 A.M., and sunrise soon. He should find a town and a hotel, or at least a nice dark hole, before long; there was no way he was making Disneyworld or whatever happy shiny place he might end up in before that nice big golden ball of death broke the horizon. Not tonight, Mister.

Five minutes later, halfway into the slowly rollicking and grinding "Lamb of God", he passed a sign that read "Curran Falls--26 miles". He tipped the brim of his black Stetson to it, his usual slow, minimal smile just barely gracing bloodless lips. If he hurried, he might even have time for a snack.

He almost missed the exit, and had to slam the heel of one pointy-toed cowboy boot against the brake, wrenching the wheel to the side and skidding the pickup truck across the deserted I-95 interstate. Its dry-rotting tires bounced across the median, and then he was on his way south into Curran Falls.

What little of it there was, anyway. As far as he could tell, the border of the town was marked by the dilapidated shack of an abandoned gas station, its long-dry pumps standing like silent sentinels keeping watch over the town--wherever the rest of it was--their disembodied eyes plucked out and set to rest in the empty sockets of the station's broken and half-boarded windows. The scent of rot emanated from the husk of the building as well, moist and comforting, laced with the flavor of ancient, decaying wood and the dustiness of trailing tresses of Spanish moss. The miasma of cedar filled Ash's lungs, tangy and sharp, and he smiled.

Neat little squares of houses rolled slowly by, typical Southern countryside, cars as old as his Chevy up on cinder blocks in neatly cut front yards, the occasional grain silo, coon dogs in chicken wire pens just beginning to stir and snuffle in the predawn hours. He imagined heavyset middle-aged men with slow drawls sleeping next to their plump and plain wives, smelled the hot, untamed pulses of their restless, dusty-haired children. Peaceful, sleepy town.....innocent as a newborn babe covered in his mother's pain-bright blood, his tangled Spanish moss hair caked in gore and its toothless mouth gaping pink and hungry.

Ash drove through that bland, repetitive landscape of settled swamp for at least ten minutes before he came to what he supposed he could call the town proper. "Welcome to Curran Falls" a tottering, decrepit sign read, its legs buried in climbing weeds that were probably the only things holding it up, their parasitic vines fastened to crumbling wood and struggling to suck some remaining life from a corpse dead since some long antiquity. The scent of decay was weaker here, overpowered by the faint smells of gasoline and road tar, of humans and animals, of the first vestiges of morning coffee drifting from the old-fashioned diner that was the first building that he passed that even looked recently used. No doubt a bustling vintage-seventies redhead in a checkered jumper and crisp white apron would open the doors come the rising of the sun, letting in the stolid bulk of the town's flannel-and-denim-clad working men. Those type never missed their breakfast coffee.

Ash didn't plan on being around to see it.

He almost missed the motel, just as he had almost missed the exit; it was tucked away at the back of its lot, its sign too dull to see well with Ash's night vision suffering in the slow grey light and his attention diverted by a mild curiosity as to whether the natures of the inhabitants of the squat, featureless buildings would reflect their abodes. The motel was long and low and yellow and looked deserted, but its "vacancy" sign still flashed and buzzed as faintly as trapped and dying flies against the Motel 6 logo, and so he turned the grinding, groaning Chevy into the gravel-and-glass-littered parking lot.

It was better than nothing, and the smell of death was stronger here. Soothing.

Axles squealed as he parked the pickup, and then the entire vehicle settled with a world-weary groan; Ash patted its frame affectionately as he swung his long, lean, Wrangler-clad legs out of the seat. "We've been together for a long time, old friend, " he chuckled in his low, gravelly voice. "Don't give out on me now." The Chevy, however, was not likely to answer, and Ash only drew his dusty black trench closer about his long, rangy frame and swung his small bag from the bed of the truck. He was tempted to put on his sunglasses just to freak the small-town folk, but settled for simply drawing the brim of his hat down and letting the lank strands of his glossy black hair--at the moment in need of a wash--fall across his too-pale, too-sharp, too-young features, shadowing the hot yellow gleam of his too-bright, too-old eyes.

Spurs jingled softly as he strode towards the door.

The small, grizzled man behind the counter looked as though he had been waiting for Ash. His rummy blue eyes, watered-out and faded, were fixed unwaveringly upon the door, his gnarled, trembling hands clutching at the stained cup of his morning coffee. He had the furtive air of muted anger of someone who knew, but Ash doubted that it was anything more than age, drink, and bitterness.

"We ain't got no rooms, " he spat before Ash could even speak, snarling in a hoarse, rolling accent straight out of a country-western song.

Ash smiled his cold, humorless smile, letting his bag thump with ominous finality upon the desk separating them. "Funny, " he drawled softly, deliberately mimicking the other's distortion of speech. "Sign outside says you do, "pardner"." He thought about baring his teeth, but the smile and his close-hovering presence were enough, his tall, wraithly raven-body making the other draw back, scowl, glare defensively.

"Ain't got no use for you city cowboy types 'round here; get lost an' haul yer fancy-talkin' ass to Orlando or somewhere where yer welcome!"

City cowboy types.... Ash almost laughed, but it wasn't worth the effort. "But I want to stay here. " Pale lips peeled back from even white teeth in a smile that could have been a snarl, and his voice hissed like that of a striking rattler's as he pinned the flinching man with an acrid gaze like smoking yellow acid. "I'll bet you've got plenty of use for my money, old man. Now get me a room. "

His feral stare had the same effect as a threat--and indeed it was; Ash was running out of patience even more swiftly than he was running out of time, and his fingers itched for the feeling of the man's wet, rubbery entrails, his hot red blood pouring from his veins like milk from Mother's teat, his heart bared within the white cradle of his ribs, a meaty, purple-veined lump of throbbing flesh.

But such measures, no matter how desired, were unnecessary; the man blanched, his skin bleaching to nearly white before turning purple with the flush of old, sour, diseased blood. "R-right, " he rattled hoarsely, never taking his terrified eyes from Ash even as he fumbled about beneath the counter. "If....if you'll just sign here....." Nearly gibbering, he dropped a heavy book on the counter that hadn't been opened in so long that a cloud of dust erupted from its cover as it was peeled back to a yellowed page.

Lofting a brow, the amber-eyed man smirked, reaching out to delicately pluck the proffered pen from a shivering hand, regarding his terrified opposition with catlike calm and leaning closer, closer, closer still, lover-close, his cold breath whispering over wrinkled and liver-spotted skin. "Thanks, "friend"," he breathed softly, and then lowered his gaze to the page and the list of scrawled names upon it, amusedly ignoring the whimpering sound of choked fear that trailed upon the air.

Ash Moire, he wrote on the next available line, and wrinkled his nose at the name. It meant nothing, just another name that he had picked up over the centuries, though it had been so long since he had used his true name that he had nearly forgotten it. Ash served well enough, and this was not the time of his youth, the time when names like Running Wolf and Girl Who Talks With Stars meant something, the time when he wore warriors' feathers in his hair and spoke with dead Elders over the smoke of peace pipes and hunted bison on the plains, the time when his eyes were still brown and his skin still tawny rather than this wild, feral gold and bleached corpse-whiteness.

When he looked up once more, the man was a mute and frozen statue with one hand stiffly extended, holding a jangling set of keys; he looked as though he expected to be eviscerated simply for blinking--and in the mood that Ash was in, he might well be. The lanky man hadn't eaten for days; pickings were slim along the Southern interstates at night, when even the hitchhikers found somewhere else to be.

But he preferred his meals a bit younger, a bit softer, a bit sweeter--and so he only drew the keys from the other's grasp, favoring him with another smile that was more teeth than anything else. "Thanks again, " he murmured, his voice like rough sandpaper scraped over velvet, and then winked one molten-yellow eye, tipping his Stetson to the man in a mockery of friendly appreciation. His strides were slow and measured as he departed the lobby for the outbuildings; he may have been worried by the approaching sunrise, but he would not let a mere human see him scrambling for the dark like a lowly insect.

He nearly laughed as the low, shuddering sigh of the proprietor's relief trailed after him.

The tag on the key read 131, and he slung his bag over his shoulder, casting an eye towards the greying sky as he strode lazily down the outdoor walkway. He was cutting it close, but it wouldn't be the first time; the light to the east was just beginning to take on a pink tinge when he closed the door to the room behind him and slung his bag onto the bed. The curtains were already drawn, but he rearranged them a bit, making sure that nothing more than the merest hint of dim illumination would be able to reach the dark room--and then, as a safety measure, propped a chair underneath the handle of the door in case room service decided to pop in and accidentally serve up a hearty helping of deep-fried Ash.

That was not funny.

He parted his lips to exhale a sigh without breath, and then simply fell across the bed, as limp as the corpse that he should be. His cigarette was dry between his lips, the ember on the tip of it like the red eye of a brother or lover in the darkness--and he stared at the ceiling with his eyes open, dreaming his waking dreams long into the day, dreams of bleached white bone against even whiter sand bathed in moonlight like melting snow. White...always white. Death was always white there....

....but here, it was green. Green and thick.

The CD was playing in his ears now, echoing from the earphones to bounce and rattle in amplifying waves around his skull.

"We have no future; Heaven wasn't made for me....Burn ourselves to Hell, as fast as it can be.... "

Sometimes Ash really had to wonder about Marilyn Manson. If someone that famous was one of them, most would know, but you could never be sure. The bitterness of his words stapled itself to Ash's lungs, made vaporous clouds of green dance before his vision, winding with the trails of smoke that he occasionally remembered to exhale. He understood it all only too well.

An anarchist AntiChrist Native American vampire cowboy. He couldn't find the humanity left to laugh at the irony of that. Make the righteous stray. Make the Christians pray. Make the white man pay.

Make the living bleed.

Immortality as a stereotype was such a blast. No, really.

Smoke wound about his fingers, turned into floating streams of milky whiteness, pulsed in time with the burns of black light upon his vision. A serpent formed itself from a coiling tendril, a bone-white serpent whose cartilaginous vertebrae protruded against its shell-flake skin like infant fingers struggling to break through a caudal membrane. The serpent hissed, flicked the pale meat-strip of its tongue at him, blinked with his own yellow eyes. Ash would have reached up to crush it, but he could never touch his dreamings, never truly wanted to.

The serpent flowed into the ember of his cigarette, vanished, and he imagined it as a biblical representation of Satan's temptations, returning to the orange glow of Hell, swathed in the damask of guttural growls and coyotes' bayings. He closed his eyes and followed it, burrowed down a warm, slimy tunnel of oozing maroon pulsation, chased the flickering white tail of that serpent, felt its trailing offal splash against his face in its wake. It burst into Hell, and Hell was a black place, a warm black place of rising emerald vapors and strange, sick light filtered through heavy leaves, wet and musty. Serpents rose from water thick as oil and lashed at him, bodies flicking like whips to coil about his limbs, holding him prisoned and dragging him down, down, down into the living muck. Mud and feces and rotting animal and vegetable matter filled his mouth, clogged his throat, poured into his lungs, and as it oozed into his brain he heard it hissing....

CRACK!!!

A sharp bellow of thunder opened a razor-welt in the sky, and Ash started awake, eyes flying open. His cigarette was nothing more than a dead butt on the pillow next to him, lying in the crumbled puddle of its own ashy corpse, and he brushed it away, lifting his head. Hissing sounded from outside, and he realized that it was raining, raining the sounds that had triggered his sleeping dreams. He sighed, running his fingers through his hair, sharp gaze flicking over the dark room; the red eyes of the digital clock on the nightstand accused the numbers 9:14, and he blinked a hate-yellow stare back at it. It was rare that he slept an entire day and early evening away like that, so obliviously--but then it was rare that he ever slept at all, and he supposed he was long overdue for a true rest.

But he didn't feel rested. He felt hungry.

Manson was still crackling in his ears, and he reached for the Sony Discman, muttering words silently in time. "And we don't want to live forever, and we know that suffering is so much better... "

You know it, buddy. He turned the CD off and tossed the earphones onto the bed; even he could only listen for so long, and he couldn't imagine how many times the disc had cycled during his dormant torpor, feeding the strangeness of his not-quite-sleeping dreams.

The Stetson came to his hand from the corner that he had carelessly tossed it to, and fit like the receptive body of a familiar lover; Ash adjusted the collar of his blouse, smoothed his clothing, straightened his coat, and then ventured out into the rain. The Chevy could rest tonight; he preferred to do his hunting on foot.

Each drop that struck his skin was like a kiss, and he threw his head back, letting it soak his skin as he walked, mouth opening to let its coolness pour down his throat, shuddering as it touched his teeth and slid over them like tasting tongues. Cars splashed by, golden headlights like putrid, rotten lemons. Pickup trucks, old Buicks, and occasionally a car that had been made some time after the eighties. Ash guessed that if he followed them, he would find the town's local watering hole, some dim-lit bar/truck stop where angry men lingered over bottles of Bud and lonely women looked for a quick fix to ease their aching, betrayed hearts. Travelers like him were rarely noticed there--or if they were, they were given wide berth, and left to themselves.

Just the way he liked it.

His boots splashed water onto the cuffs of his black Wranglers as he walked, and he bowed his head, closing his eyes and letting his senses guide him rather than his almost too-clear vision. Meandering, wandering, in no hurry.....the streets would not move beneath him and depart because of his lack of haste, although in a moment of vision he imagined that they did, the sidewalk and pavement buckling and humping like the back of a giant rolling worm, its fat, soft grey body striped in yellow. Ash almost lost his balance, nearly fell into a crack opening in the cement--and then he banished the dreaming, righted himself.

Sometimes they were too real.

Beer drifted through the sodden air, stinging his nostrils--beer and human sweat, and the subtle flavor of sex and desperation. He was close...probably closer than he thought, considering the way that the moldy rain was damping the scents of the night. Hot yellow eyes opened, searched for muted neon glow and a sign that would read something like "Big Ed's All-Night Truck Stop and Bar"--and instead found a long, low hut of a building, a log-cabin affair with a porch, neon beer signs in the window, and several of the pickup trucks that had passed earlier parked in its gravel lot.

Dry Hole, the sign said.

Frankly, it was more sophisticated than what he had been expecting.

Ash stepped into the dry overhang of a building across the street, hands pushing into his pockets as he propped his shoulder against a soaped-over window. Watching. A red Dodge Ram ground into the parking lot, pulled into an empty space; two crew-cut, pasty-faced men got out, barely more than boys, probably in their last wild, beer-drinking summer before journeying off to their first wild, beer-drinking semester at college. Their letter jackets were green and gold as they pulled them over their heads and darted for the safe dryness of the porch, and then vanished past the swinging door into a world of lights and bawdy laughter and old Tom Petty songs.

Thank you, small-town America, for creating people that probably deserve to die.

Probably. But probably had always been good enough for him.

Spurs jingled as he ventured into the street once more, his lean, lanky body swaying like a scarecrow draped in tattered black rags, fingers touching to the edge of the Stetson to tip its brim downwards into its usual place. His hair was plastered to his cheeks, but he hardly paid it any notice; neither that nor the rain and its cessation as he stepped onto the porch were worth his attention. Not when he was so close....so close, dozens of pulses pounding like an orchestral timpani of drums in his ears, crimson rushing like rivers laced with the subtly flavoring tang of alcohol. One night here, perhaps two, and he would be sated and on his way to the scent of an unknown home that drew him further and further down the highway--and if he was lucky, he might be able to bring along something for the road that he could keep to snack on until it began to rot and bloat and the blood turned sour and the skin began to crack and peel like roadkill beneath a desert sun.

The light assaulted him as he stepped inside, dim as it was, and he had to pause for a moment to let his eyes adjust, pupils dilating to the merest pinpoints of black floating in a sea of chemicals. The noise was louder now, disgruntled grumbling and unrestrained, healthy laughter and low taunts of invitation mixing with the clinking of glasses; Ash had to focus to pick one conversation out from another, one whisper from the hiss of exhaled air, but he wasn't particularly interested. His hot eyes roved over the room, over the humped backs of healthy, muscular men of gnarled breed, draped in plaid and cotton and denim and leather, over the plain forms of voluptuous women with gaping teeth and tawdry sluts' makeup. He would have preferred a Vegas night club, but this would have to do.

Those at the bar made room grudgingly for the stranger in their midst, eyeing him distastefully until they realized that his unblinking gaze was turned straight ahead not out of fear, but out of utter confidence and lack of interest. Then they leaned closer, muttering to one another, secretively pointing, scowling, frowning. Ash was used to it, and ignored them in favor of a reedy stripling of a bartender who approached him only reluctantly. His gums were raw and swollen with hunger, but he forced himself to move calmly, slowly, utterly relaxed as he regarded the man with eyes that could turn a strong and fearless man to frozen stone.

"You serve scotch here, " he stated more than asked, softly, evenly, and yet unworried that he might not be heard over the din. "Don't you."

The bartender sniffed as though offended that he should even ask, and nodded, staring at him icily, sweat beading on his greasy forehead; Ash only met his gaze, a slow smile curving his lips as a single brow lofted, waiting. After a moment of frozen silence, the man swallowed slowly and nodded, turning away with the air of one reluctant to turn his back on a striking snake--and Ash smiled even wider, humorless and cruel, as he watched the shaken little thing prepare his drink with trembling hands. Those around him watched in hateful silence, watched him lean his elbows on the bar, watched him accept the drink in exchange for a bill, watched him relax as casually as though a funereal hush were not spreading over the room. It was obvious that strangers were not welcome here, but Ash could care less.

Don't fuck with me. The clink of feral teeth on glass said it all, and he waited.

Minutes passed....minutes upon minutes, blending into first one hour, and then another. Ash sat alone, listening as conversations began again, halting and stiff, whispers about the strange, lean man at the bar, the man in the black with the freakish eyes, the man who walked into their bar like he owned the place--the man who did nothing to hold their interest, and therefore was forgotten in favor of normal business. The level of laughter rose and fell, flowed and ebbed, and he honed in on first one conversation, then the other, listening for the sounds of misery, the clink of a glass set on an empty table, the hoarse breathing of someone trying to drown their sorrows in solitary drink.

Nothing. Everyone was so sickeningly settled, so caught in their routine; there were no jilted lovers, no lonely outcasts, no easy prey. Complacency. Contentment. Swampwater stagnation.

Ash thought he would be sick.

The bar began to clear out around 4:00, and still he had not seen a single suitable lamb to lead from the flock; the two potential fraternity boys had left over an hour before, and they had been his most promising opportunities. Pathetic.

Disgusted, Ash stood and kicked his barstool in, casting the irritated tender a sour-eyed glance that sent him shrinking against the row of beer taps. For a moment he considered leaping the bar like a wildcat and slashing his throat with his nails, sending blood spraying over the bar like spilled paint in rancid crimson--but the bartender was too conspicuous, too likely to get him in trouble if he disappeared. When strangers rolled into town, no one took notice--but when they left, suddenly everyone remembered their plates and descriptions, and even Ash could only kill so many cops.

Seething, his jaw locked, he stalked out of the door, only a monumental effort of trembling restraint stopping him from slamming it straight out of its hinges. The hunger was driving him mad, crawling over his skin like a thousand slimy leeches, sucking at his rationality and making him want to scream his rage and frustration in sharp cracks like the lightning sizzling across the sky. Fury-visions danced across his eyes, blurring pictures of bodies exploding in great scarlet starbursts, snapping tendons flailing about like whips, muscle fiber unraveling itself in runnels of meaty yarn, and he hissed as he paused on the porch, digging his fingers into his palms. His lazy, relaxed mood was swiftly evaporating, and the heady smell of that green vapor of death was not helping.

"You're going about it the wrong way."

Snarling, animalistic, Ash whirled towards the sound of the presence that he should have sensed through the red haze of his need, turned golden-blazing eyes upon the whelp that dared to speak to him....

....and drew up short, blinking in surprise.

For a moment he could not tell if the small, thin shadow was male or female, and the voice, cool and soft and dry as the desiccated fuzz on the undersides of magnolia leaves, offered no aid in determination, with its quiet intonations of unspoken secrets. Then the willowy figure shifted, and he looked closer, let his sharp hawks'-eyes rove over a narrow, flat chest covered in skin like pale wisps of dandelion fluff criss-crossed by the pattern of tattered net, noted the sharp angularity of bony hips draped in ragged denim, too straight and slender to belong to any girl, and the large, pretty boys' hands in fingerless lace gloves.

Pale fingers tipped in long, sharp nails coated in chipped green paint shifted, one plucking at the flimsy black scarf wound haphazardly around that slim torso and the other lifting to remove the cigarette held between thin white lips, and Ash lifted his gaze to the boy's face. White-blond hair, cut raggedly, bluntly, unevenly, stuck up in short strands of baby-fine platinum all over his head, aesthetic disarray colored in streaks of violet and powder-blue, seeming to melt into the pallor of milky, ashen skin, a few threads kissing the saber edges of high, sharp cheekbones; thin black brows hinted at true hair color. Hollow pits of eyes stared at him calmly, ageless and strange and solemn, so deep a black that in an instant Ash re-experienced his dream of falling forever into the blinding, dark muck of the swamp.

I'll show you the things mothers don't want good little boys to know, those young, dark eyes said, with their lazy lids and heavy lashes and linings of thick, dark kohl. For a moment Ash stared at the bruise-blue hollows beneath them, followed the delicate tracery of veins beneath paper-fragile skin--and then snapped away as the boy spoke once more, regarding him enigmatically over the pencil-thin barrier of his cigarette, each word carrying a soft thread of knot-winding smoke with it.

"This isn't like any city you've ever been in, " the boy said softly. "Hunting is different here."

So out of place....this freakish beauty seemed so out of place in this solid lump of a town, and Ash wondered how he ever managed to find his way here, why his scent seemed so strange and yet so familiar, like something he should know from a dreaming. "Didn't your mother ever tell you not to talk to strangers, kid?" he whispered, as though speaking were somehow sacrilegious in the presence of this waif and his strange, softly numb eyes, eyes as strange as Ash's.

The boy became a smile, for a moment--as though that minimal curving of lips eclipsed his slender form in a wash of echoes, and he existed as nothing more--and then, in a flicker of white teeth and a cat-pink tongue, the smile was gone, and the boy remained, moving in a lazy series of motions so languid that they disguised their swiftness. A fragile stalk of a body pressed against him, and Ash shuddered as he felt the warmth that still lingered in icy veins, the warmth of fresh killing, the warmth that just barely graced cold lips as they brushed against his throat.

"You're so....so hungry.....feed from me tonight...." the boy whispered roughly against his skin, nosing aside the collar of his blouse to taste him. "Hunt with me tomorrow...." A cold tongue touched his throat, then his jaw, and Ash closed his eyes, frozen into near-helplessness, his hands twitching in agitation as he struggled not to seize him, jerk him closer still, and drain that small, sweet, obscenely warm body of its pulsating unlife. He felt the heat in the tiny veins of white lips as they pressed to his, in the moistness of the tongue that caressed his teeth, slithering serpentine and insidious into his mouth for the merest moment before it was suddenly at his ear, tickling at his skin as softly as the breath of, "....and then get me the hell out of here."

He twitched and trembled as the boy drew away, and bloodlust made him ache and throb in a way that sexual desire had not accomplished since his change--and then he started as that wispy form suddenly bounded away like a fleeing faun, graceful and trailed by the flutters of gauzy black wound about him. Follow me, a flash of black vision said, and then long, lithe steps flitted into the rain.

The night was electric around Ash, and green, so very green, like bright moss clinging to damp stones. The scent of death was suddenly fresh again, fresh and steaming like a newly opened corpse, and the thrill of the hunt was acid on his tongue; he vaulted from the porch in pursuit, but the boy was already gone, swift, so swift--no, there, a flash of white and fluttering black, doves and ravens writhing about each other, the scent of ancient, ancient blood and cedar, and Ash was on the chase.

Wildness took him, and if he could have flown as his predecessors had, then he would have; buildings sped past, mere inkblots of color out of the corner of his eye, his feet striking the cement too swiftly to even make a sound. His ancestors sang in his blood, and he remembered sunlight, remembered the hard heaviness of the smooth shaft of a spear in his hand, remembered howling to the sky as he thundered after a fleeing herd, the scent of fear and sweat and leather floating into his mouth on clouds of dust. His coat flared behind him like tattered wings, whipping and snapping like lolling black tongues, and as his Stetson flew off in the cyclonic wind of his passage, he caught it in one skeletal hand and held it close to his chest. The boy was ever-ahead of him, weaving through the street, seeming to float so slowly, so gracefully, and yet as fleet as a fleeing gazelle as he dashed from the town and into the surrounding trees, sure feet finding the solid places amidst treacherous mud.

Ash was forced to slow his pace lest he slip and fall into that black, black mud, and those deep lagoons of endless night where the water was as warm and unrelenting as the embrace of a black-widow lover. But those flickering hints of white were always just on the edge of his vision, taunting him, teasing him, drawing him ever-onwards and feeding his exhilaration into a rising, surging, unbearable flood of blood-hunger and anticipation. The giant gullet of the Florida swamp swallowed him, and he flew like a yellow-eyed vulture down its throat.

"Stop."

Yellow-gold eyes widened, and Ash froze in his tracks, nearly falling as he struggled not to collide with the bird-thin frame that imposed itself in his path--and instead ended up standing, hands dangling uselessly at his sides, his tall crane's body pressed intimately against the other's and his startled eyes staring down into oh-so-serious ebon depths; the boy was forced to tilt his head back upon the slim reed of his neck in order to even meet Ash's gaze.

"Here, " he whispered in that softly thrumming ghost-voice, and then turned away, and Ash was surprised to feel a small hand of corpse's coolness creeping into his own to draw him after as the boy picked his way into the underbrush, along a slight irregularity in the brush that no human eye would have been able to call a path. Ash followed slowly, his ears pricking to the sounds of a million frogs singing the nearness of the dawn.

Swamp brush opened into a tiny clearing--more of a pocket in the everglade forest, enclosed on all sides by rotting green boughs and dank with the sweet smell of decay. A small cabin occupied that space, worn and ancient, its single window blacked over; it looked deserted, but Ash's sharp eyes noted minor things, the deliberate care taken with the building's upkeep and the even more deliberate attempt to make it look decrepit and on the edge of tottering to sink into the mire of the swamp with the other dead things that resided there.

"I bring them here, " the boy breathed, and Ash did not have to ask who; the scent of blood here was layered, peeled away level by level, from last kill to first, as though the miasma had piled upon itself with each death and grown long after the deceased had been disposed of. He touched a fingertip to an azure streak in ash-blond hair, and then was led inside.

The room was spare, sparse, but their kind had little in the name of material needs; they required no food, no means by which to prepare it, no place in which to eat it, and so Ash was not surprised to see nothing more in the cabin than a desk piled with a small stack of books, a closed cedar chest, and an ancient wire-frame bed, too small to be a queen and too large to be a twin and draped with sheets and blankets of thin, dusty black chenille.

Black...of course black.

The stains never showed on black.

"It is safe here, " the boy murmured to his silent companion, and then turned to Ash, sliding his arms about his waist as though he were a familiar lover, pressing against him--and for a moment, the merest instant, gravely liquid eyes flashed with a hint of desperation and loneliness, a loneliness that Ash knew only too well, the loneliness of one whose own kind are scattered few and far between....and then the strange, pretty boy's lips were at Ash's throat, and the wildness and the bloodlust were upon him again, blinding him to anything else.

The boy's eyes were red in his vision, his hair soft beneath his touch as he tangled his fingers in it, drawing the boy's head gently back, exposing the gentle, milky blue pulsation of his throat. He gasped, clutching at the heavy blackness of his coat, trembling in Ash's hold as the older vampire dragged his lips across his jugular. Green, yes, the scent of blood was green now, not black or red or any of those death-colors but the green of rotting life, and Ash reveled in it, nearly drowned in it as he pressed so tightly against him, nearly crushing him with a strength that could have snapped those fragile bird-bones.

"Do it, " the boy hissed, fingernails gouging at the sleeves of his coat as Ash licked softly at his skin, and then "Do it! " he repeated urgently, sliding against him and tossing his head back further, straining towards him.

Breathing hoarsely, trembling with hunger and burning-sick desire, Ash stared at the whiteness of the beautiful corpse-boy's throat, sharp eyes tracking every ticking and beating of the flow of blood through cold, cold veins, wondering what unsuspecting soul had died for this harvest--and then the pain came, the delicious pain of bone piercing flesh as his teeth extruded themselves, clawed their way free from their roots and their hidden deeper setting in his gums to extend like flashing white hypodermic needles, expectant, deadly. Ash shivered, closing his eyes in sweet anticipation--and then his canines found flesh, and still-hot blood coursed upon his tongue in a flood of deep, loamy sin.

He did not normally bite his victims, hated the feeling of their pasty, rubbery flesh in his mouth, squealing against his teeth like that of greasy pigs--but this boy, this boy was like cream and sugar confection, his skin soft and cool against Ash's lips, his flesh tender and pliant and sweet, and the golden-eyed man bit down harder, and harder still, only vaguely aware of the other's high, whimpering gasps and moans, the pain of fingers tangling in his hair only heightening his desire to taste the slender being. Life poured down his throat, a maddening rush of so many flavors, the base iron-sharp tang of human blood mingled with the slightest hint of beer-sweetness and laced with an edge of something darker, older, as dry and musty as the lightless spaces of a basement cellar, warm as the depths of a tightly-packed grave--the essence of the boy.

The bed was behind Ash, almost beneath his knees in the close confines of the tiny space--and he drove his fangs deeper into the boy's throat as he fell back onto it, clutching him close even as he tore at his clothes, his animal nature needing the naked flesh of their bodies together, needing to feel that delicate white skin beneath his touch, so easy to rend, to destroy, and the boy cried out hotly, dragging his fingers through Ash's hair and then ripping at his coat. The flavor was driving him out of his mind, bringing visions such as those that he had never seen, visions of a sea of blood and madness, visions of the ending of all things in a great shuddering of black bone ripping over the world like a giant, swift-growing creature of countless deadly scythes, sluicing away flesh and blood and hair from fragile human bone, scattering the landscape of the earth with thick black gore. The taste of the boy's blood brought Ash to the borders of the macabre gate of a twisted and scorched Heaven, and as they ripped each others' clothes away and twined upon the bed in sinful ecstasy of pale limbs and corpse-cold flesh, a font of blood splashed from those gates to bath him in the blissful benediction of ascension.

He fell into a place of dark, cradling greenness, the boy clutched to him, and together they were lost.

My name is Luche he said in the quiet moments afterwards, when they held each other in a cooling sweat like sex. His name was Luche, and he was only forty-two years old, changed at the age of fifteen--so young, and yet so strangely old. He had been changed in Brooklyn, and had come to Florida nine years ago, hidden from the sun in the back of an eighteen-wheeler and spending days in torpor as he waited. Curran Falls had been the driver's home and last stop, and so Luche had settled here.

He had been lonely in this place where it was nearly impossible to find one's own kind--so lonely, barely more than a boy still in his arrested development, and in the secret hours of the night had tried to befriend some of the children of the small town. They had laughed at him, called him Leech.

"And you let them?" Ash whispered, pressing his cheek to the boy's frail chest like a rice-paper lantern and listening to a heart that beat as faintly as a bird's.

"No, " Luche answered, and Ash felt more than heard him smile, felt the cold pleasure of a child cutthroat. "I killed them."

"Mm." Ash felt sated, so deliciously satisfied, the craving in his veins soothed and drawing him towards the somnolence afterwards. Thin black sheets swathed his rake-thin body; his arms wound about the boy's waist, his face buried in his chest, inhaling the smell of him, and he felt him smile again as the boy cradled his head close, stroking lovers' fingers through his hair--but after all, weren't all vampires lovers of a sort? Dawn had come and gone, but all was sweet, thick darkness here, the blacking on the window keeping at bay whatever light may have filtered through the swamp's green canopy. "So you want to leave?" he murmured, blinking lazy cat-eyes. "Where do you want me to take you?"

"First we hunt, " Luche whispered, and then breathed in his hair. "You smell like bones and sun. How can you smell like sun? Are you that old?"

Ash could not help but laugh. "I'm only two hundred and sixty-seven, kid; a morning walk would fry me just as easily as you." He sighed, closing his eyes and burying his face in that sweet skin once more, fighting the urge to drag his tongue along the stark curvature of a rib. "But where I come from....everything smells like the sun. It bakes itself into the very earth, and even at night the smell never goes away."

"I want to go there." He spoke the words with a child's demanding, and it made Ash smile, kiss his neck. "I want to be able to move as freely as you do; I've never been anywhere but Brooklyn and here."

Ash could understand the boy's dilemma; it was hard for younger vampires on their own, and often it was considered foolish to make one so young. No cop in his right mind would be able to see someone like Luche driving past and not pull him over and ask to see his license and registration, and so without transportation to get him from one shelter to another, Luche was day-locked in whatever locale he happened to be in. Hiding in the back of that eighteen-wheeler to get here had been an admirable stroke of innovation--but pulling off the same trick in a town this small was bound to be nearly impossible.

"I'm not quite ready to go back there yet, Luche." He was doing some running of his own, in a way, like a child running away from home; decades in the same place had instilled a deep wander-lust in him, and he was not ready to hunt those Arizona desert sands again so soon. "Maybe in a few years....a few decades, maybe...."

"You'll be gone by then." There was a deep sadness in his kinsman's voice, and Ash held him closer, wondering at the strangeness of his evolution, that such sadness could make him want to comfort another of his kind and yet would only mark a human as dinner. "You'll have left me somewhere and gone on."

Ash lifted his gaze, fighting the urge to bite his lip; that mistake had resulted in punctured skin far too many times. "Luche, " he whispered, and then fell silent as he stared into wide, liquid eyes, bottomless pools of night.

"I've never been anywhere, Ash, " the boy whispered softly, almost desperately, his delicate lips trembling. "I'm not even a kid anymore, not really, and I've never been all the places that children should go....I've never been to Disney, never seen the Grand Canyon, never even been on a family vacation....even though my family is still alive somewhere, I think." He sighed, wistful. "I'll never see them again, either."

"That's the way things are, kid. That's the way things go when you change." He pulled away from him, turned over onto his back and stared at the ceiling. "Do you think they'd even want to see you? You're still a child, and they're old and grizzled...and when they find out what you are...."

"You're cruel." Petulant, the boy pushed away from him, slid his nude form out of the bed, glared down at him with his hands planted on his skinny white hips, fierce and wild, and Ash thought he was beautiful.

"We are cruel, " Ash said softly, lifting himself and turning onto his side, extending a long hand to touch his fingertips to Luche's stomach, making the boy shudder and close his eyes. "It is what we are, Luche. Beautiful cruelty." He trailed his fingertips over that paper-skin, followed the tracery of delicate veins laid out on a milky canvas, and felt the hunger welling once more, too much, too soon, but this boy was too delectable to resist. "Come to bed....if we're going to hunt tonight, we should rest today. We're going to have to kill very early if you want to leave in time to make another town by nightfall."

"Are you going to leave me there?" Those flashing black eyes accused, and Ash smiled once more; he wondered if he had been like this in the beginning of his first century, so wild and still pulsing with some hint of hungry life, bewitching and as sweet as the damp earth of a fresh-turned grave.

"I'll leave you where ever you want me to leave you, Luche."

And so the boy crept into the bed once more, slid beneath the sheets and pressed into Ash's embrace, and they fell silently still, listened to the slow, wormlike creeping of the blood in each others' veins, and were comforted by the nearness of another of their kind.

They made love in the manner of humans some time during the hours before sunset, and then draped across each other like drowsy panthers, each licking the cooling blood from the other's fresh scratches and bite-wounds. Sleepy words passed between them, and their bodies fitted together like two halves of a whole, and Ash wondered if he ever would truly leave the boy anywhere; he was already addicted to the heady white powder of his drug, to the sweet flavor that his body added to the richness of the blood. The scent that he had been following was the strongest here, now, and he buried his face in Luche's throat and inhaled his musty-sweet odor once more.

"It's time, " Luche whispered into the green-black thickness of the air.

Ash watched in grave silence as the boy gathered his things, what few of them there were; after they hunted, they would not have time to return here if they were going to retrieve the Chevy from the hotel. A few small garments, a book, a pack of cigarettes, several bottles of nail polish and other make-up articles fell into the cavernous military knapsack, and then those large, earnest eyes were staring up at him. "I'm ready, " he breathed in that cloudy voice of disintegrating cotton candy, and Ash could see his well-contained excitement pulsing in the vein beneath his temple.

"Then show me how to hunt."

It was barely past sundown, and the faintest hint of pink still colored what little they could see of the sky as they slipped like stealthy shadows from the cabin. Ash blinked, and then the boy was gone, flitting like a bird taking wing into the boughs overhead, nothing more than a black-trailing shadow that led him onward like the elusive scent of fresh blood. Feral-gold eyes sharpened, bloodless lips curved into a smile, and Ash leaped into the trees in wild, almost joyous pursuit, the blood singing in his veins, making him hum with his own personal power.

Beautiful cruelty, he thought, echoing his words of only hours before, and the grinning emerald worms of the swamp rose up and bared their teeth at him; he tore through their phantom bodies in a savage joy of bloodlust that he had not felt in over a century, and exploded into the town like a tornado, howling his bestiality to the blue-dark sky.

"You are happy." The boy's presence was at his side, descending from the trees like an angel falling from heaven, and Ash only turned to him, restless, waiting, his hands curling and uncurling at his sides like flexing claws. Boy became echo-smile again, strange and mysterious, and then he beckoned to him with a single sharp talon. "This way."

Curran Falls was not much for dark side streets and back alleys, but Luche somehow managed to find them all, skulking through them like a scruffy white cat with his long, exaggerated black shadow trailing behind. They passed an elementary school, and the phantom odors of small, ripe children teased at Ash's senses and then vanished into the heaviness hanging over the town as they passed on, further into the ill-lit darkness. The night was dry tonight, or as dry as nights here ever got with the thickly-scented, musky moisture permeating the air; a million tastes and smells assaulted Ash, drowned him in thousands of ghosts of life, making his vision swim with a fluxing red sea.

"Ash, " Luche whispered, and he slowed. "Listen...."

Listen, he said, and Ash fell utterly still, lifting his head, nostrils flaring to scent the night, ears pricking like those of a wolf. Listen he said, and Ash strained towards the faint sounds coming from behind the run-down old building before them....soft sounds, heavy breathing, tiny cries and grunts and moans just barely echoing within the confines of a small space. Apparently high school kids were the same everywhere; Ash wondered, if he had been born in this time, if he would have lost his virginity in the back of a car as well.

"Up here." Luche was perched atop a closed garbage dumpster, and Ash took his proffered hand, allowed himself to be pulled up to his side. From there they floated to the rooftop, creeping across it like slithering snakes to pull themselves into lithe crouches upon the edge, peering down at the minutely rocking powder-blue Honda below.

They struck the roof of the small car like hailstones, hovered, waited, drove themselves to giddy drunkenness inhaling the wild, acrid flavor of fear spiraling from within the vehicle. Glass sliced their hands, brought lovely blossoms of aching pain as they shattered the back window, and the tinny, terrified screams of the young couple within were the sweetest wine of all.

They clawed them free from the vehicle, hissing and snarling like slavering, red-eyed wolves, prising them loose like some strange delicacy from its neatly packed can. The sharp-edged glass cut them with their struggles, and the vapid-eyed girl in Ash's grasp managed to scratch at him before he was upon her, pinning her violently against the roof of the car and savaging her with his teeth. He carved rivulets in her face, shallow gouges, licked the tears and runnels of blood from her skin in an obscene parody of a lover's kiss and rejoicing in her soft, mindless whimpers. This was what it felt like to kill, oh yes....

Nearby, Luche was quiet, so quiet.....he killed as he existed, in muted, muffled sound. The crew-cut boy lay beneath him on the gravel-strewn cement, passive and unresisting, glassy eyes staring and his breathing rapid, almost impassioned, as the waif-creature kissed and nuzzled and sucked at his throat. Luche brought death like a blanket of blinding, swamping emerald thickness, slow and mind-numbing and inexorable, and Ash almost admired him even as he brought his nails to the girl's throat and slashed it swiftly and viciously open. Bright red exploded onto his pale-cold face like a gunshot piercing the air in shrieking sound, and he shuddered in orgiastic bliss as he licked this hellish blessing from his lips, feeling it burning down his throat to riot in his stomach like a churning host of demons. Electric, seething, he pressed his mouth to the wound, licking at its steaming edges and drinking hungrily of its pumping life--and then he felt a soft tongue upon his face, licking at his cheeks and brows and closed eyes, and he turned to kiss Luche, sharing the flavor of the girl between them.

"Ash...." the boy moaned into his lips, and they shared in benediction together, witnessed by the glazed blue eyes of the pretty corpse beneath them.

They disposed of the bodies in the swamp, letting them sink into the warm embrace of thick water and sluggish mud, where the pair could be lovers forever; pale, fresh-flushed skin was licked clean and then washed in a tiny pool of clear water that had collected in a small depression in the earth. The entire feeding had taken less than half an hour, and ten minutes later found them at the motel; Luche stood crouched in the bed of the pickup like some wary, tensed cat as Ash ventured in to retrieve his bag and CD player.

"Is that it?" the boy whispered, and then tilted his head back to stare at the sky, exposing his throat to the moon.

"Not yet, " Ash said, and could not suppress a grin. "Still have to pay the innkeeper for his gracious service."

They killed the motel's proprietor as well, Luche binding his mouth and silencing his screams with a bloody, painful kiss as Ash sliced open his stomach with delicate precision. This one did not deserve the eternal green peace of the swamp, and so they simply left him there, wrapped like a pretty present in the ribbons of his own viscera. Ash was no longer worried about stealth, nor subtlety; mortal law could do nothing against them, and he would enjoy killing them if they tried to touch Luche.

The Chevy grumbled as he started it--and then settled into a low, contented rumble as they pulled out onto the street, purring and soft, almost as though welcoming Luche into its belly as Ash handed the boy a battered CD case and told him to pick whatever he wanted to get them through the hours ahead.

Dark, solemn eyes regarded him over a beige-banded cigarette, bright beneath the shadow of Ash's well-worn black Stetson. "Where are we going?"

"I dunno, kid." Ash chuckled, fingers tapping lightly on the steering wheel as Luche finally settled on a CD and pushed play--Sacred Spirits, an overmarketed collection of Native American melodies, and Ash wondered if there was any irony to be found in that. He inhaled softly, letting the boy's dry scent rest on his tongue, a scent already familiar, a scent of home. "I thought we might start with Disneyworld."

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