Savage Wings: Book Three of The Whitechapel Chronicles

Chapter 28

London was a morgue.

The frost had descended and had left nothing unscathed. Roads and pathways sparkled with a crisp white coverlet of ice. The streets we'd travelled had been graveyard-quiet and although we were in a part of town where I didn't exactly expect to see much in the way of life, winter's touch had rendered the city as still and as cold as the dead.

Not quite dead, however, was the man currently pinned beneath me and I was becoming increasingly irritated by his struggles and refusal to give up. Still, I couldn't really blame him. Even though he was nothing but a low-level scumbag pimp who liked to try out all his girls on a regular basis, whether they wanted him to or not, he'd clearly been enjoying life before he'd stumbled across three vampires who'd decided that it was time for that life to come to an end. Skinny, with a rat-like face and very little in the way of visible muscle-tone, I never expected much of a fight to be honest, but sometimes it's the ones you least expect who almost catch you off guard. Almost. 

Earlier that evening, it was the hunger that had caught me off guard, hitting me harder in the gut than it had in a long time, maybe even since I'd been a fledgling when I'd thought the hunger would rip me apart if I didn't satiate it. And this time when it woke me from a sleep more blissful than I'd experienced in ages, tearing across my stomach like I hadn't fed in months, I knew immediately that I had to go hunting or things were going to become very unpleasant indeed. The events of the past few days had left me feeling ravenous, the release of my latent powers, the battle to keep them under wraps afterwards, it was using up my energy far quicker than normal and I need to replenish.

I needed to feed.

A darkened, graffiti-ravaged underpass not far from Clapham Junction Station probably wasn't most people's idea of a top London restaurant but the vintage was good, even if the vessel in which it was served left a lot to be desired.

We'd found him, Harper, Fenton and myself, teaching one of his girls – and I say girls, because she looked dangerously close to the legal age limit – that he could take whatever he wanted from her, whenever he wanted and that didn't just mean his generous cut of her measly earnings. Stumbling passed us, still doing up the zipper on her jeans and her eyes half-dazed from whatever shit the pimp was pumping through her veins, the girl barely gave us a second glance but her boss did. In fact, his eyes almost popped out of his head when he saw the three of us standing just inside the entrance of the underpass, the dim light in the tunnel barely penetrating the gloom.

"Who the fuck are you?" he spat, his thin, rodent features contorting into an indignant sneer. There was a snap of a flick-knife and a glint of steel in his hand. "And how the fuck did you get past Roach?"

Roach had been everything but roach-size, but the description had fit him perfectly considering he really was nothing but vermin. I'm quite sure to some he was not a guy to be messed with, his sheer bulk deterring anyone from stepping out of line, but his bulk also happened to be made up of close to three hundred pounds of soft puffy flesh as opposed to muscle and his bladder had given out just the same as any man half his size when Harper had slit his throat and drank voraciously from the wound.

"Surprisingly easily." Harper shrugged, wiping the corner of his mouth. "You should think about employing more capable staff. Roach really wasn't up to the job." He flashed him a brash grin.

The pimp's mouth opened and closed a couple of times as he stared at Harper, his brain clearly working overtime to try and process the elongated incisors and the very real threat that emanated from the three people in front of him. Humans don't want to believe it, you see. No matter what their eyes show them, their minds try to seek out the logical, their minds try to convince them that none of it is real. But this was real and he was about to find out just how real it was.