Divine Wine (excerpt)

This is pulled out of Divine Wine. The vampire's got her eye on the killer and stalks him in the streets:


As I watched him over the next few weeks, I got to know the little fucker better. His given name was Steve, though he preferred the nom de guerre, “Johnny Slash.” He has a broken front tooth and a jagged scar above his eyebrow. His nose is smashed. He's gangly and favors loose-fitting t-shirts that hide his scrawny frame. He wears baggy pants and carries a large, serrated hunting knife. He has beady eyes the color of dark chocolate and greasy, lank, lemon-yellow hair that hangs in strands that nearly brush his shoulders.

In a city that's nearly half black, and whites are outnumbered three to one, the little fucker belongs to a gang of thugs who called themselves the “White Aryans of 18th Street.” Arrogant and puerile little shits, each one strangely violent in his own way. Rape and murder isn't uncommon to any of them, but the little fucker outshone his entire gang. He enjoys killing, and he prefers his sex partners dead and on the ground.

In the two weeks that I shadowed the boy, he killed and raped three women, as well as murdering a child. All four of them were dark-skinned and pretty. The women had big asses and tits to match. He took the women near the screamo bar and dragged them into the same alley where he had fucked the first corpse. The child was playing after dark in a schoolyard, when he pulled her into a nearby stand of bushes and beat her to death. She was the only one that he didn't touch after she was dead.

I understood why the ghoul followed him so closely. The little fucker is like a walking morgue, leaving corpses in his wake: a banquet for ghouls. But that kind of murder won't go unnoticed for long by the police. And even though none of the women were the cute, blond, cheerleader-types, the media slavers over, reporters will come howling if any of them think there’s a serial killer in the city.

He's perfect. Exactly what I was looking for in the concrete, steel and neon glare that makes up Atlantic City. The little fucker is a brutal and confident killer. Five times I'd seen him kill, and four times I'd seen him rape corpses within screaming distance of large crowds. The boy feels invulnerable, and he is incautious in his murders and the aftermath.

Perfect.