Beginnings Read online

  Allowing a final prayer also set the Bangers apart from other thugs. From what the newspapers had said, the Bangers always allowed their victims one last prayer before they ripped them apart. They then wrote the prayer in blood on the ground so all could see.

  Quivering now, a feeling of hopelessness along with loose bowels struck, and Paul clenched up downstairs, desperately trying to hold everything in. He only hoped that his end would be quick. Bending to one knee, he made his voice sound as quiet and humble as possible. “Guys, I didn’t do anything to you. I just wanted a place to—”

  His stopped speaking when he saw their implacable expressions. They weren’t going to listen to him anymore than the wind would. He stayed down, but spotted a crowbar out of the corner of his eye. Oh yeah… Say hello to my little friend!

  When the leader asked him again if he wanted to pray, Paul seized the crowbar and in a shocking burst of desperation, smashed the big man on the kneecap. Louis fell to the ground and howled, “You freakin’ hit me!”

  As the other two men stood by, shocked that a victim would actually hit back, Paul got to his feet, set his stance, took batting practice and knocked out Number Two. The other two men ran at him, but he menaced them back until he reached the door.

  “Come and get some,” he challenged.

  Bad idea, as the other men came at him. Stunned, he dropped the crowbar and tore out of the door, the howls of the men following him into the night.

  “You’re dead!” they screamed. “You’re freakin’ dead!”

  No, he wasn’t—not yet. The cold air revived him, and he ran out of the building and down the alleyway. Strength wasn’t his forte, but he could run, and fear and desperation fueled his flight. A metal fence at the end of the alley separated him from the safety of the street. Salvation lay ten feet away, straight up and over.

  With a lunge, he jumped halfway up the fence and started to scale it, but a knife sang out of the darkness and buried itself in the back of his right leg. He screamed and fell to the ground. Closing his hands around the haft, he yanked the blade out. Blood spurted from the wound as agony lanced through his body. Try as he might to get up, he couldn’t. The enemy closed in on his position, the leader limping noticeably, and Paul cowered against the fence.

  “You little turd,” growled Louis. “We usually get rid of the scum quickly, but in your case, we’ll make an exception.”

  “I’m only seventeen,” Paul protested. Why they were doing this to him was wrong and didn’t they care? He wanted to shout it, but then realized, just like everyone else, they didn’t care. The pack surrounded him and the assault began. Kicks to his ribs, punches to his face and body…

  Covering up didn’t help much. In that period known as the-moment-before-it-all-ended, he silently asked the wind to take him away. All he heard, though, was a whisper.

  Abruptly, the men stopped the beating. “Did you hear that?” one of them asked nervously. “It sounded like…wings.”

  “Maybe it’s that bat they’re talkin’ about on the news,” another punk said with a note of fear in his voice.

  “Shut your mouth,” snarled Louis. “There ain’t no such thing.”

  The whisper of the wind grew stronger, and a gale force sprang up, pushing the attackers back. It wasn’t random. It was as if someone or something had thrown up an invisible column of air, hard and impenetrable. “What’s goin’ on here?” Louis asked with a note of fear in his voice.

  His friends didn’t say anything, just pointed to the sky. Following their lead, Louis looked up and screamed. The other three men screamed as well when someone wearing a black cape dropped out of nowhere to land noiselessly in front of them. Black leather pants and boots completed the picture.

  This was no bat. It was a person. It was dressed much the same as the Bangers, but it looked sleeker and totally otherworldly.

  “What in the hell are you?” Louis shouted. “What are you?”

  The individual didn’t answer. It stood stock still at first, and from his vantage point, Paul estimated the person to be around five-six. Not overly large at all, but whatever this person was, they had some veil of power capable of keeping the scum at bay.

  As for this person’s gender, it was impossible to tell, even though they wore their hair long. It streamed behind their head like a black waterfall, glossy and full, and shone clearly in the dim light of the streetlamps.

  Quickly the Bangers forgot about their terror and went on the offensive. Using their weapons as well as their fists, they beat on the newcomer, but the person in black simply allowed them to wail away. Their chains and pipes bounced off its hide.

  Finally, in what had to be the last, desperate move of an equally desperate person, Louis pulled a pistol from his coat pocket and emptied the clip into the figure in black. He shot at point-blank range, no less than two feet away. No way could he miss…and he didn’t. The person jerked around from the impact of the bullets but didn’t go down. The ejected cartridges hit the concrete, each of them making a faint pinging sound.

  Abruptly the gun clicked empty and it fell from Louis’ suddenly-nerveless hand. “What’s going on?” he screamed in fear as well as frustration. “Why won’t you die?”

  “Because I can’t,” the person answered in a very feminine voice.

  A woman— It was a woman! Paul shrank back against the fence and watched as she went into action. In a series of moves almost too fast for his eyes to follow, she seized the enemy one by one in an iron grip around their throats and tossed them at the wall in rapid succession. They hurtled through the air, hit the bricks with a sickening thud and fell to the ground.

  Seconds later, she strode over in a casual manner to where Louis was. Bending over him, she addressed him in a tone colder than ice. “Now, you shouldn’t be picking on people. You know better.” She waggled her finger as if to underscore her statement.

  “Don’t kill me,” he babbled in a voice thick with fear. “Don’t kill me…please.”

  A second later, he began mewling out of sheer stark raving terror. Through a blur of pain, Paul observed the ownage going on, and it was sweet. Call this a moment to cherish…if he lived that long.

  “I’m not going to kill you,” the woman said.

  Louis shrank back against the brick and his rant shut off like a faucet being twisted. “You’re…not? What are you, lady?”

  Her voice softened only a shade, but the iron remained as she replied, “I’m your nightmare come true. The one you don’t talk about. And I’ll come back if you don’t stop what you’re doing.”

  In a lightning fast move, she punched him, just once, but very hard. His head snapped around, connected with the brick, and he slithered to the ground, unconscious.

  She pirouetted, and Paul got his first clear view of her. The face wasn’t an adult’s. She looked to be around his age and had angular, pretty features, but with very white skin, so white it resembled porcelain. Her eyes were ice blue, the color of the Arctic Ocean.

  Pretty though she was, his attention wasn’t on her face or body. He zeroed in on her teeth. No, not teeth… She had fangs.

  Fangs…it wasn’t possible. This was the twenty-first century. People like this didn’t exist. His mind screamed one word—vampire.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Paul…Paul Wiseman,” he blurted out.

  She cocked her head to one side and her eyes traveled up and down his body. “You’re bleeding,” she said in a very pleasant voice. “You should get that looked at.”

  She stooped down and dabbed at the blood on the ground with a long, tapered finger. In a slow, careful move, she put a spot of the blood on her small pink tongue and swished it around in her mouth. A moment later, she gave a nod of what seemed like approval. “This is AB-negative, just like mine. That’s rare. I think I might like you.”

  “Like me?” he asked, fearful for his life. First, the Bangers had almost beaten him to death and now it looked as though he’d suffer the s
ame fate, although it would come in a different form. “Like me as what, your dinner?”

  “No, I don’t work that way,” she replied. The hardness in her face disappeared and a smile emerged. Her fangs retracted, and she showed small, white and even teeth. In total, she looked pretty hot, even with her bone-white skin.

  How did she work, then? He wanted to ask her, but a second later the sound of a dog barking distracted him. A mutt, small, scrawny and half-starved, entered the alley. It ran up to the girl and started to growl. In turn, she hissed, a sharp and totally mean sound that sent the dog away howling.

  “Dogs don’t like me,” she offered as an excuse.

  Paul could only stare at the scene. This wasn’t happening. It wasn’t real.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” she said, interrupting his thoughts of the weird and fantastic. “We need to talk.”

  In a quick move, she grabbed the collar of his hoodie and hauled him up into the sky. One second ago he’d almost been Banger meat, and now he was soaring with some vampire chick over the city.

  A riot of questions ran through his half-conscious mind. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know his blood type—he did. But how could she possibly know what his Rh factor was without using some kind of machine for it?

  Oh wait, she’s a vampire, and now she’s probably taking me to a quiet place so she can drink up and be on her way.

  During their flight, Paul tried to talk, but only a series of choking sounds emerged from his throat. After a magnificent effort to get his vocal chords working, he managed to stammer out, “Thanks.”

  “If you mean thanks for saving your butt from those punks, don’t worry about it,” she said over the sound of the wind rushing by. “Just doing my job is all.”

  “Doing your job…”

  He fell silent then, looking at the buildings below him. They had to be at least two hundred feet off the ground, if not more, and she could fly. Where were they going? What was happening?

  It had to be a dream, but a second later reality intruded. She went into a dive and his ribs whined in pain. “Oh crap!” gasped Paul. This was it. This was the end.

  However, they landed with a gentle bump in what looked to be someone’s backyard, and she released him. He fell to the ground, trying to get his breath back. Sitting up, he found that they’d landed in a small residential area. Quaint-looking wooden structures lined the road, but fortunately there was no one around at this time of night. It was biting cold and the ground was hard as rock.

  This being winter, a crust of frost and snow covered everything. In addition, a sharp wind had begun to blow and he shivered. Rational thought was difficult, but the one thing he managed to get out was, “What’s your name?”

  “Angela,” she said in a cottony voice that somehow took away the cold. “Do you like it?”

  How to answer her? “Yes.”

  “I don’t have a last name,” she continued, kicking dirt off her boots and brushing a few stray specks of mud from her cape. “None of us do.”

  Us… Who is us? And what was up with the no-last-name business? This didn’t make sense…and his mind felt as if it was taking a trip outside his body. He looked down at the ground. Blood dripped in a steady pattern from his wound, yet he felt no pain.

  She cocked her head to one side as if judging him and bent down to examine his leg. “The bleeding’s started again,” she said. “You’re going into shock. Anyway, this is our home.” With a delicately-pointed finger she indicated a white wooden two-story house. “We’ll fix you up. Don’t worry.”

  “Fix me up?” Paul wondered if they were going to simply dress his wounds or carve him up like a turkey. “Am I, like…next on your hit list?”

  The person called Angela offered what he took to be a kind smile. “I’m not the one you should be worried about.”

  Her answer wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting. He wanted to tell her something else, but the pain and shock had really started to set in, and heaviness settled over his eyes, forcing them to close. Through a dim curtain, he heard her say, “Stay with me. Stay with me.”

  No way he could fight it, but her words rang in his ears—Stay with me.

  If this was how he had to go out, so be it. In the last moments of consciousness, he heard her voice, soft and low, urging him to hang in there and stay with her. Then the world faded into nothingness.

  Chapter Two

  Meet the Crew—Part I

  Remembrances, Paul had a few. He didn’t dream very often, but somewhere in the dimmest recesses of his mind thoughts of his parents surfaced. Who were they? What were their jobs? Did they somehow lose their lives in an accident? Maybe they’d been called away, but for what purpose, he did not know.

  When he was very small, he had the idea his parents were superheroes. It seemed like the dream of every little kid. They were working for the government, spies sent on secret assignments to save the world. It was hard to let go of this concept. In his reveries, Kodachrome-colored deeds of derring-do, battles against super-villains and fights for justice flashed in front of his eyes. Those images comforted him.

  Above all, the concept of his father being more than human stood out. He may have been on the short side, but to a young child, all adults were giants. He remembered the pitch of his father’s voice, high and somewhat nervous. Did superheroes get nervous? Maybe, as saving the world was a tough job.

  Then there was the smell of his aftershave. It smelled like freshly fallen rain, washing away the grime and unpleasant things of the day. The sound of his feet padding along the floor, his quick movements and the timbre of his voice—these qualities indicated someone close and special, and how could his father be anything but special?

  His mother, though… He struggled to recall her face and couldn’t. Somewhere in his subconscious, the vision of a small room sprang up. He played with his toys there. The walls were a bright yellow, the carpet felt soft and soothing to his skin, and he remembered his father lifting him up…

  Shifting now to his later years, the images became sharper, intensified and grew more unpleasant. He recalled his first days in a foster home. He was maybe five at the time. Mrs. Swanson was his first foster mother, a short and scrawny woman who constantly beat him for the slightest perceived infraction. She also hit two other foster children she was raising. “You’re not grateful for my care!” she’d screamed.

  If this was care, he’d wondered what punishment was but suffered in silence. A visit from Social Services revealed the truth. They’d taken him away when they’d seen the bruises and lacerations on his face and body. He hadn’t known what had happened to the two other kids.

  Seven now, and he had been on his fourth house. This family hadn’t fed him anything but canned soup and stale bread. “We don’t have enough food for you,” his foster father had said.

  Billings had been the man’s name. They’d sat at a loaded dinner table, full of decent food, and he and his wife and two children had tucked into their steaks. Paul and Mr. Campbell’s Soup became friends…for a while.

  The years jumped forward. On perhaps his seventh or eighth foster home—maybe—he recalled a small apartment somewhere in New Rochelle. His foster parents had been alcoholics. They’d smacked him around frequently because he liked to read and they didn’t. It had interfered with their bottle time.

  When they’d hit, they had used a strap. Made of thick leather, it’d had holes drilled into it, and it had left thick and deep welts on his back and shoulders. It hadn’t taken long for him to learn how to run and run fast. He’d struck back whenever possible, but there had been two of them. They had been bigger and meaner, and he hadn’t been able to understand why this was happening to him. A broken arm had alerted the authorities once more. They’d come and yelled at the drunks then had taken him away.

  “You’ll like it,” the woman from Social Services had said. She had been in charge of his case and had known of the difficulties he’d been facing. A middle-aged and kindly sort, she’d
brought him to St. Joseph’s Orphanage, located in the Bronx. She’d had a word with the people in charge and had left him there. “You’ll be taken care of here,” she’d said.

  Little Paul, almost ten, had looked up at the grim gray walls and a sense of foreboding had run through him. The place looked like a prison. This wasn’t going to be good…but he’d had nowhere else to go. Still, he had tried one last time and hadn’t been able to keep the pleading tone from showing. “Can’t I stay with a nice family for once?”

  The woman’s face had softened and she’d dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “We’ll keep trying to find your real family, Paul. Do your best.”

  A moment later she had been gone and there he’d stayed. He’d walked inside the doors with Brother Max, a large and kindly man who’d spoken softly and had seemed decent enough. Max had shown him to his room. “You’ll be staying here for now,” he’d said. “Dinner is at six.”

  Apparently the orphanage had believed in providing the bare minimum of creature comforts. Three unsteady-looking study desks and three cots had filled most of the space. A large closet had sat in one corner near a grimy window. A broom and dustpan had been in the opposite corner.

  Peeking outside, Paul had seen a single maple tree in front of the window, the lone piece of nature in this area. Shifting his view to one side, he’d seen the driveway that the would-be adoptive parents used along with the delivery trucks. That had been all.

  Emitting a sigh of frustration as well as loss, he’d turned away to stare at the room once more. It had been a room for three…but no one had entered for the longest time, so Paul had sat on the edge of one hard bed, had tried to stop the tears from coming and couldn’t. He’d cried for no one wanted to listen to him and no one cared.

  “We’re all equal here,” Max had told the kids one night. It had been their usual bull session where everyone sat around with their friends and aired their grievances. “You get equal time from us because this is what we do. We help others.”