Part 6-9: Julian and Charles Darwin

Part Six of Nine: Julian and Charles Darwin.

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As Julian had guessed, he was not a gentleman. He turned his back and was striding away before the poor girl had shuffled her taffeta skirts down over her hips and veiled the glimpse of milk-white thighs, decorated with the red blotches of his clawed fingers.

Julian raised his chin and scented the air. Despite the heavy lavender scent that she drizzled over her body, it stank of sex...and fear. He licked his lips. This was it, the part where he could swoop in, finish what the young man had started, and disguise his bite as part of a frenzied attack by mutilating her corpse afterward. But that had never been the plan.
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The brush of shoe leather on wet cobblestones captured Julian’s attention and a warm glow filled his chest. They are so predictable, and vampires are not the only ones preying on the weak. He had not been able to save Eva from the scum of the earth, but this girl would be luckier, even though she would never know it.

The man came into view, his oily, lank hair clung to the dirt on his neck, and the stains on the knees of his pants had a coal-dust aroma that proclaimed him to work at the docks.

There had never been a better time to be a vampire. The early 1800’s had seen a remarkable population explosion in London, and even though the death rate had risen due to typhoid and cholera in the drinking water, there were always plenty of scavengers and the unskilled laboring poor to pick up off the streets. No one misses them, or looks for too long, even if they do.

Julian preferred his victims to merit their fate. For a moment, leaning as an indolent statue with his arms folded across his chest, Julian flirted with the possibility that this angular faced, yellow toothed individual would defy his expectation and offer a helping hand to the whimpering young girl.

Her breathing had stopped at the grating scuffs of the stranger’s footsteps. Her constricted features frozen as she scanned the darkness, and hope that she was mistaken still lurking in her widened eyes.

A derisive sneer pulled at Julian’s lips. So...here’s your chance to come good. Be a man.

And as the greasy haired man pulled his collar higher and a blade glinted in his hand, Julian knew he had found someone deserving of his attention.

Julian enjoyed the moment to the full, dragging the intoxicating scent of the girl’s fear over his palette, watching her face jerk around as the scuffing of urgent footsteps bearing down penetrated her consciousness, and as her heart began to race, Julian swooped.

The unkempt rancid young man found himself sucked into a time warp tunnel that whisked him through the air. The cold wind biting into his chest like a bed of nails took his open-mouthed scream and forced it back down into his throat.

He came to an abrupt halt, and was spun around on his heel so quickly that the world kept turning. When the giddy sensation vertigo subsided, he was in the depths of Hyde Park pinned against a tree, and the rough bark of an English oak dug into his spine.

“You’re in my territory now,” snarled Julian.

Scraping hanks of hair back from his cold sweaty forehead, the man stared into a chalk-white mask of fury, and choked on his own terror.

“Well, well, what have we here?” Julian’s low tone vibrated inside the young man’s skull, stroking enticingly over his brain.

Julian’s cold fingers eased away from his throat as he released the tattered lapels of his jacket enough to allow his victim to gulp down air. Staring down, his eyes glittering as green ice, Julian cocked his head, closed his fingers carefully around the wrist of the man’s knife hand and brought the blade up into view between them. “What were you planning hmm?”

Inhaling a deep breath, as the reek of sweat and semen staining the fabric of the man’s pants penetrated, Julian’s lip curled. “Not just a robbery...oh no. What then? Rape? Murder?”

Menace thickened the air as Julian dragged the sharp blade edge down his own palm, scoring a line that glittered as a vein in a piece of quartz, and the man opened his mouth to scream.

Julian waited as the heart beating beneath the threadbare jacket moved from a canter to a gallop and the wet chambers clattered as they pumped adrenalin around the man’s body. Julian smiled as he closed a fist on the rogue’s coat front again, and the smell of blood wafted into the air as the capillaries in his neck ruptured beneath Julian’s pressing knuckles. As the flight reflex kicked in and his limbs began to jerk Julian lifted him until his toes barely brushed the grass, and just as his heart chambers lost their rhythm, fibrillating in a delightful echo of terror, Julian tore his throat out.

Grabbing a handful of greasy hair and jerking the man’s head back, Julian bit down, flooding his mouth with heat as a gush of blood hit the back of his throat. Swallowing greedily in time with the fading heartbeat, he filled his stomach, and as Julian finally drew back, a purring growl splattered blood over the dead man’s face.

The blown pupils in the glazed eyes staring towards the moon reflected Julian’s harsh white features as he searched the man’s face. It was not Eva’s killer, but Julian was ever hopeful that one day, it would be.

Guiding the slack body to sit at the base of the tree trunk, Julian tugged a cloth cap from the man’s pocket, and tossed it over his face, creating an illusion of the drunken stupor of sleep. Although a closer inspection would discover the black grease on the front of his stained jacket was claret red, Julian would be miles away by then.

Julian used a white lawn handkerchief to wipe the blood from his face, embracing the elusive warmth that filled his chest, filtered through his limbs, and vibrated along his nerve endings.

“Now that, Charles, is what I call unnatural selection,” he said quietly. There is a place for the beastly, if only to redress the balance of Mother Nature. Even she gets it wrong, sometimes, it seems.

To be continued...