I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) by Tony Monchinski Page B

held his stuff together today. One thing Gossitch
couldn’t figure, was why the kid seemed to have it in for the guy.
He’d have to talk to Boone about that too.
    Gossitch decided he’d turn in, get some
sleep. He ground the butt of the cigarette out in the ash tray and
stood, slinging the holster over his arm again, picking up two of
the briefcases. He’d have to come back for the third. He would
sleep with them in the same room he was in.
    “…nothing could be sadder,” Burke sang, “than
a glass of wine, all alone…”

 
17.
11:59 A.M.
     
    She was attuned to her Master’s needs and
therefore this morning found herself gripped by the same
melancholia that had taken hold of him.
    When she had entered his service, she had
ceased thinking of herself as a unique individual. She had had a
name once, but no more. She was his . Kreshnik’s victories
were hers. His vexations as well. She lived to serve. His needs
were sated in and upon her person.
    Kreshnik sat in the dark of the warehouse,
bathed in the glow of the television screen. She knelt before him,
attending to his hands. Cruel, vicious instruments they were,
stained with blood from the morning’s kill. She had worked the
dried blood from under the nails and now filed each to a sharpened
point. He largely ignored her, intent on the screen.
    When he had come into her life, she had
renounced her husband, her child, her family. She had turned her
back on her species. Her childhood, adolescence, and young
womanhood were lost to her as though none had ever been hers. Her
being was caught up in its entirety in the moment, in serving, in
being his. She was a part of her Master.
    She was his nuse , his bride.
    On CNN, the KLA was fighting to establish an
independent Kosovo. She knew her Master wished to be there, to
exult in the butchery of the Serbs, to participate in the rout of
his people’s age old enemies. The Serbs. Slavs, like Rainford. She
hated the Dark Lord, and she hated him because her Master did. The
day would come when Kreshnik would rise up against the Dark Lord,
when this next generation of the children of the night would assume
their rightful position in the order of things, banishing their
weak and antiquated forebears.
    But that time was not now.
    Her Master wore his hat even indoors. His
gaze burned out from under it, fixed on the television. He longed
to be home in the Balkans, running amuck. For the time being he was
stuck here, in a warehouse in a city ripe with vermin. She had felt
his frustration before and had cried for him, because Kreshnik
would not weep. He could not cry. He could not bleed. He had been
raised and perfected in the secret places of eastern Europe. Unlike
others of his kind, he did not fear the sun. He despised it.
    As his body evolved, each day he could
withstand it that much more. Soon, she knew, her Master would be
able to walk openly in the day.
    The humans didn’t know what they were in for
then.
    In the meantime, he sat watching the news,
brooding.
    She was his bride. One of three. Kreshnik’s
appetites were enormous. Her two counterparts were nearby in the
dark, recuperating. The sodomy had been especially brutal this
morning.
    There had been a fourth. They had abandoned
her corpse when they’d uprooted and come here. An anal fissure had
become infected and given way to septic shock. Kreshnik had
pleasured himself in her and on her and drank from her until her
last day, and when that had arrived he had drained her. She met her
end in delirium, semi-conscious, a wan smile on her face.
    There would be another, this bride knew. She
would be used up in his service. The thought, as she filed
Kreshnik’s nails, caused her no concern. Her fate, one she accepted
willingly, was to serve him as all others who had come before her
had. When she was finished, ruined, she would be cast aside. As had
been the fourth, as had been others she did not know.
    She refused to cling to any false hopes that
the Master would deign to