Chapter 2: The Price of a Head - Part 2

Ellis strolled through the filth that made up the western side of the city, the alleys seeming to grow narrower with each corner he rounded. However, the closer the walls got to each other, the louder the noises that came from the inevitable exit to the pathway. It was as if these back alleys and passageways were leading him to a new place altogether, outside of the great walls of Bristol. He exited the stretch into a full blown street, a long time ago it probably had a designated name, like most others, but everyone just called it ‘Dead End Way’ now. It earned the name when the people of the slums had created a makeshift gate out of old trash and debris from broken homes and carriages to separate themselves from the ‘well off’ side of town. The gate would still function, sure, if you managed to clear a whole lot of crap out of the way first, but the city authorities and the people who lived in the Piss Paths were happy to keep it as it was. There weren’t many people from the east side of the city that wanted to see this side of things anyways.

The smell of urine was thick in the air as Ellis crossed the street to a few nods and shouts of acknowledgement from the people who he knew or who had heard stories about his demon hunts. None of them really believed that it was true, but everyone here needed something to gossip about while they watched their tankards empty and the room begin to spin. He made his way through the Piss Paths, following the gutters as far as they would take him before the lights went out and the pitch black streets became a maze to anyone who didn’t know where they were going. The first red light was located on the roof of an old broken down mill, long since put out of service for a better, more efficient company’s outpost across the harbor on the other side of the River Avon.

Ellis took a deep breath as he hopped onto a rusted out garbage bin and jumped to a low-hanging ladder, using his teeth to hold the burlap sack as he climbed. His ribs issued pins and needles up his side with each wrung passed. When he reached the roof of the old mill, the bright red light was flashing down on him as he took the sack out of his mouth and spat at the red-brown metal sheeting.

“I’m going to need to get checked out after that,” he muttered to himself as he walked along the precariously sloped roof until the next red light appeared in the distance. The beacon shined from the other side of a sealed alleyway that you could only reach by scaling the rooftops until you could bypass it.

He made it to the other side of the alley, and after almost an hour, and another solid thirteen red, flashing, indicators, he arrived at the part of town that not even most people from the Piss Paths knew about. This was the third face that Bristol donned. The face that few could see but many dreamed about, not knowing their fantasies were only a few blocks away. It was one of the few places for miles around that you could find such a diverse grouping of the stinking rich and even fouler poor. Here, you could see a man with a top hat and golden watch losing his money in a game of dice to a man with a four foot beard coated in things so questionable people stopped asking. You could see a child with more money than a retiree, and you could satisfy any desire that ever crossed your perverse mind.

However, in the midst of all the chaos and glorious gluttony, Ellis had only a single location that he wished to visit. The Cock’s Caper. It was—perhaps—the most well-known location in the red light district, and it brought people from every city around Bristol, as long as they knew someone on the inside that would let them in. The women were three things: sexy, shameless, and insatiable; they would do anything you wanted if you had the coin for it. As the haggard doors swung open they seemed to tilt and bang against each other as if they were threatening to fall off, but somehow never did. He strolled into the thick smoke from hundreds of lit cigars, and the clamor of countless flesh-hungry men drowned out the outside world.

A buxom woman strode toward him, lust glimmering in her eyes, though Ellis knew far before she reached him that her lust was for coin, not cock. She slid an arm around his neck, pressing her breasts against him and cooing into his ear.

“You’re looking a little lonely, there, stud. I got a room with a king size bed and a queen size cunt if you want to get out of this racket.” Her lips traced along his ear, and her hand began to dive below his belt when Ellis grabbed her wrist with very little restraint, his other hand still dangling the sack of skulls beside him.

“Sorry sweetheart, but this jack doesn’t pay for his women,” he stated, his voice gruff, but playful all in the same time. He had never seen her before—that meant she was new. He could tell by the way the other girls glanced at them and chuckled behind their backs. They knew what the girl was in for.

Her cheeks flushed as she pulled away from him, snapping her arm back and holding her wrist, glaring at him in offense. “Probably some kinda queer,” she spat as she went to turn away.

Ellis whistled to get her attention as she walked away and she turned to glare at him one last time, though her flushed cheeks showed more interest than just money, now. As she turned to look his hand flashed forward and a golden light darted up into the air, spinning through the bright lit room. As any woman of her trade, she recognized the color of gold, but when she caught the piece with a coy smile, her hands tightened harder around it. The sharp edges of the ornate design that embellished the golden coin was something that every girl that worked at the Caper was forced to commit to memory, and it was obviously this woman’s first time actually seeing one.

“I didn’t mean to scare you off before, just having a bit of fun, love. Now, if you wouldn’t mind taking a rascal like me upstairs, I would truly love a round or two between the sheets with such a beautiful woman,” he stated, winking at her.

Even though she knew that it was just him playing his part, her cheeks remained a deep pink and she nodded shyly to him. Be it the glint in his green eyes or the flare of his bright red hair, she couldn’t tell what it was that stirred her so. “Of course, sir. I’ve a few tricks I’d love to show you,” she stated, being sure to say it loud enough for anyone around them to hear before grabbing his hand and walking him up the stairs.

“Great job training the new girl, ladies. I’ll be sure to let Raimey know you’ve done such an exemplary job on detailing your regular clientele,” Ellis whispered as he passed a group of the gossiping brothel workers.

“Fuck you, Carter,” came the overwhelming response, and Ellis laughed as he followed his partner in crime up and into her bedroom.

When she closed the door behind them, Ellis smiled as he tossed her real gold this time. It was not a must, but he always felt better about himself, giving the women a little something. After all, they covered his ass, and had to spend as long as it took him and Raimey to have their sit down pretending to fuck someone who wasn’t even there.

“What’s your name?” Ellis asked.

“It’s Rosalita, but everyone here just calls me Rose,” her voice shook with nervousness as she eyed the coins that he had thrown on the bed.

“Well, Rose. Thank you for your service, and keep up the good work. Tell your co-workers that they’re a bunch of bitches and if they don’t tip you off when a Crusader comes in, next time, I’ll have their asses,” he stated with another wink.

She nodded meekly and smiled, her cheeks seemingly stuck in their bright red pigment as she picked up the pieces of gold from the bed and pocketed them. She thanked him as she lay down on the bed and began to issue soft moans, allowing the outsiders to hear well what ‘they’ were up to. Hell, if she had been any other kind of girl, Ellis might have been persuaded by those noises to grab a hold of her shoulder length brown hair and show her a good time after all. But, he had business to attend to, and he knew Raimey was a busy man. He walked over to the wall and he knocked on a panel of the wood, then another, waiting to hear the hollow thud as he got the right one. With one last heavy shove, the half-foot wide panel slid forward and to the side, revealing a switch that caused an entire section of the wall to slide out of the way, opening up into a spiral staircase leading down into the belly of the whorehouse.

The staircase was only wide enough to walk two people abreast, and it was so dimly lit that it would be no surprise if a few people had fallen to their early demise. At the end of the staircase there was a thick, oaken door with a massive crucifix that was bolted into it, reaching all four sides of the entrance. The center of the crucifix had a small hanging miniature cross as a knocker and Ellis grabbed hold of it and slammed it against the iron cross behind it. The bang was almost deafening in the closed quarters of the stairwell, and Ellis winced as he held one of his ears with his empty hand before a grumbling issued from behind the door.

“What the hell do you wan—” Raimey began to bellow as he swung the door open to see Ellis standing there. “Oh! It’s you! Well, I certainly didn’t expect you back so soon! Did your search in Bath yield anything interesting?”

“As a matter of fact, it did. They’ve begun tearing down Bath Abbey, and all sorts of unsavory types have begun to move in on it. It’s going to take a whole lot more than just me to crack that case open.”

“Tearing it down?” Raimey exclaimed, sitting down in his leather chair with a loud whump. “They’ve known that building has been a shit-hole for years. Why tear it down now? It’s been there since Christ hisself was walking on water.”

“I’d ease down the blasphemy before he comes and walks all over your dead body instead.”

“Right. Well, if that’s a bust, what do you have for me?”

Ellis slammed the burlap sack onto Raimey’s desk and one of the vampire’s skulls came tumbling out onto it, while the others seemed to hide in the darkness of the sack—afraid of the candlelight. Raimey grabbed the skull that had fallen out and he palmed it in his grizzled, old hands. His bushy moustache quivered as he looked at it and he looked back to Ellis. “It’s still warm.”

“Astute observation, my dear old man. Because I just found this pack of wolves hiding in our streets, feeding off of our people not a hundred yards away from Main Street.”

Raimey breathed a sigh as he sat back in his chair and his hand stroked across his bald scalp, entering the thick gray hair that lined the sides and back of his head. “Well, I’ll be damned. I haven’t heard of them getting this far into the city as of late.”

“And that’s not the worst of it either, Raimey. Two of the bastards had complete control over their muscular and bone structures. One of them got to the point where he was another foot taller and built like a brick shithouse. These weren’t just hungry vamps, they were scouts on a mission. They said that something was coming. A force that we’ve never seen that is going to drink our planet dry.”

“Oh bollox. You know how they are. Always the prophecy of doom and destruction with those types,” Raimey stated with a dismissive wave.

Ellis eyed the man with scrutiny for a moment, but he let the comment pass. “Aye, and I would side with you on that one any other day, but I think something is going on. It might not be here and now, but it is close, and it is coming. I can feel it as sure as my father felt it before they came for his head. Have you heard of anything at all?”

Raimey seemed to stroke his chin pensively for a good, long, while before he heaved a sigh and he looked at Ellis in the eye. “Damnit, alright. I heard that there’s bad business in Whitehall. A group of radicals out there been talking about demons and the like, but nobody knows exactly where they are. You’d spend weeks scouring the area if you really wanted to find anything.”

“Great. Sounds really promising.” Sarcasm dripped from each word that came out of his mouth. “Well, if you can afford to pay me, I’ll stick around a while and deal with the problems around Bristol, but I’m not taking less than fifty gold pieces a head.”

“Fifty!? Are you mad? I’ll give you twenty five.”

“Forty.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Forty-five. I can keep playing this game if you like.”

“Thirty.”

“Forty.”

Raimey scrunched up his face in frustration as he slammed the skull back into the bag with the other two and he hurled the sack of them at the back of the room. “Fine, you miserly little shit. Put me out of business why don’t you. If you weren’t a damn Crusader I wouldn’t give you a quarter of that.”

“Well, then, I suppose it’s a good thing that you’ve hired reliable help, then isn’t it.” The grin on his face would evoke most men to just punch him in the nose, but Raimey knew that Ellis was just a go get ’em type. He came on strong, but in the end he always meant well.

“Alright, kid. If you want info on where to find the fangs in Whitehall, there’s only one person I’ve heard of that has details on where they are. But, there’s a catch. He’s on the other side of the river, and he’s been prisoned in an old asylum. It’d be easy enough if that was all there was to it, but apparently this place has been out of business for decades. The only people who know the damn thing exists have been dead for years, or have long since forgotten where it is, save for ‘in the woods’. ‘Parently the vamps have locked up one of their own for not cooperating with their plans in Whitehall. They thought that he’d rot there for the rest of his miserable days, but if you can get to him, you might just be able to get some more concrete facts on where his friends are hiding out.”

“Okay…but even if you know he’s there, how exactly do we find out how to get there?”

“Hold yer damn horses, I was just getting’ to that part. There was a scholar of some kind that frequented the asylum during its last years in business. His journal has been kept here in Bristol’s library, and it is the only way you’re going to find your way to that building. It’s not much, but it’s something.”

“Well, it’s definitely more than we had before, so I’ll take it.”

“Good. Now get the hell out of my office, and don’t come back unless you’re dying…or have something worth my while.”

Ellis quirked a brow at the man as he stood there, folding his arms across his chest.

“What?” Raimey asked, furrowing his brows as he looked at the young hunter.

Ellis motioned to the bag of skulls with his eyes and Raimey rolled his own and sighed.

“Fine, fine. You win. Here’s your money, now get the hell out of here,” he growled, slamming a bag of coins on the table.

Ellis smiled as he palmed the coins and then he looked around the room really quickly as he remembered the equipment he had used. “Before I go,” he started as he looked about. “I could use a few more of those garlic mist grenades if you have any.”

Raimey smirked as he looked at him and nodded. “Well, now you’re talking my language, boy. For thirty gold coins a piece I can get you a couple, if you like.”

“I’ll take two.” Ellis dumped the coins out on the table and he divvied half of them off to the side, keeping the sixty left over and stuffing them back into the bag as Raimey put down two more of the silver vials for Ellis to grab. Ellis nodded and he took his rewards as he walked toward the exit.

“And, Ellis,” Raimey called, causing Ellis to turn and look over his shoulder. “Be careful, out there, alright?”

Ellis wanted nothing more than to chide the older man for his sentimentality, but something in Raimey’s eyes made him bite his tongue. He nodded as he turned around, and he gnawed on his lip, trying to figure out what the man was so worried about as he climbed the stairs. Rose was still going about her business when he came back up through the wall, and he smiled kindly at her as he slid the secret door closed behind him. He began to groan alongside her, and as he raised his voice, she followed suit until they were crying out in false orgasm together. He undid his pants and he splashed some water on his face and hers before they left, her hair a mess and him doing up his belt and zipping his pants as he walked down the stairs to the sound of people cheering for them.

He was almost sad to see the doors close behind him as he made his way back out into the streets. It was time for him to put his weapons down and hit some books for a change.

Oh joy.