Chapter Text
The forest was unnervingly quiet that night. No owls singing, no rodent scavenging for food, no predator roaming the wood. Just pure, raw silence. The kind that you could hear right before a catastrophe. The kind that makes you feel watched, as if the whole forest was looking at you through the foliage, observing your every move.
The shadow always hated that kind of atmosphere. It didn’t have a long life compared to others, but it was still experienced enough to know: bad things was going to happen. It was running as fast as it could, jumping from tree to ground to tree again, just a blur of fabric barely visible through the night. It was on a mission tonight, and sadly, it had heard the call later than usual, meaning its enemy was one step ahead, probably already committing unspeakable horror to undeserving innocent.
A break through the tree let in moonlight, illuminating its terrifying appearance. The entity, because it could only be described as an entity, a demon from the deepest pit of hell, looked to be made of shadow and fog. Each movement seemed to shimmer, leaving in its trail something that looked like star powder. At its hip, the black and white sheath of a katana. But the real monstrosity was its face. The skin looked stony, as black as the rest of its body, and with two small, curved, black horn on its forehead, circled with gold skin on its base. Its mouth was stuck in a permanent sneer, showing of pure white teeth and two sets of 5 cm long fangs on its upper and lower gums.
Finally, it saw the road ahead of them. But the sight it was greeted with made them sick. A car was flipped over in the middle of the road, two lifeless bodies around. As it feared, the entity was too late. It stopped in front of the first body, a twenty something woman, lying on her back, her eyes staring blankly at the sky. Her neck was bent at an awkward angle, blood oozing from her carotid. The thing didn’t need to check to know. That woman was dead. Her body temperature was already dropping, just like the second body. This time it was a man, probably in the same age range, and more than likely her companion. He, too, had lost a lot of blood from the carotid. This could only mean one thing. The creature was chasing after a vampire. A careless one, who probably did not respect its food. It hated those ones, it brought back to many memories of much darker times, where the night brought forth walking nightmares which left bloodshed and misery in its wake. The being took a deep breath, letting the light wind carry the surrounding smells to them. It put aside the sweet aroma of wet forest, the tang of blood, the odor of burnt rubber on asphalt, and concentrate on the strange sent that lingered slightly. With the humidity in the air, it was harder to recognize and locate it, but the thing still managed to quickly find a lead. The vampire was a male, as indicated by the slight smell of after shave it could feel. It was mostly covered by that distinctive smell vampire had, that was quite complicated to describe. It felt a weird blend of rotten tomatoes and iron, with an undertone of decomposing corpse. He was going toward the west, probably to go to the nearest town, if it had to guess. The creature took of once again, at a leisure pace this time, to make sure to not lose the trail. It wasn’t in a rush anymore, as the vampire had just finished hunting. He would probably go back to a hotel or something like that to digest a bit before going somewhere else.
After twenty minute of a light jog, the entity finally stopped in front a motel a few miles from the town. That’s when its biggest problem arose. How was it going to find him in such a place? The motel stunk, and that fool smell was masking its target like the thickest fog. It jumped on the roof, and paced along the building, trying to find the irregular heartbeat of a vampire but, as if the universe was mocking them, someone down there decided to turn up the sound of its music, the bass vibrating through the walls.
With a sigh of despair, the thing retreated back to the shadow, abandoning its hunt for the night.