Kyle laughed as one of the young men, Frank, asked him where his motorcycle was.  "Parked somewhere safer than in front of this place!" he jibed, and slapped Frank's hand as he extended it.  The vampire then caught that sweet scent which wafted to his senses on the faint breeze stirring the air.  "Damn, something smells good," his tones expressing how delicious that fragrance was to him.  The vampire raised a brow as Frank gestured behind him, and swiveling around, Kyle laid his pale blue-grey eyes on the sexy piece of work standing behind him.  His eyes slid across her form for a few moments before a boyish smile curled his invitingly fleshy lips, and cocking one leg to his side, he propped his hands on his hips turned under at the knuckles.  His dark brown hair was long, and pulled back in a pony tail, ringlets of loose hair framing his very youthful face.  He was handsome in a unique way.  His brows were thick and arched, his cheek-bones high, his nose broad, and his lips full, while his face was thin in its callow age.  He did not look old enough to be hanging out in bars to be sure, but looks and the appearance of age were deceiving in a world where immortals lived along-side humans.  "Well good evening.  Your first time to Rocky's?" he asked, figuring she was headed to the bar the way she was dressed.  "I'm Kyle.  If there is anything you wanna know about Rocky's bar, I am the kid to ask," he conveyed light heartedly, his pale eyes glittering on her.  "I might start by telling you what a dive it is," he snickered, but it was the truth.  "They have the best rock gut drinks around though, and their cheap," he grinned.  "So don't tell me a classy lady like you is goin' in there?  Seems like Club Elysium, Paddy O'Brian's, or the Bourban Street Blues bar would be more your style.  Or are you just slumming it for a night?" he laughed.  He was crass, but charming in his own way.  One would never know how wicked the New Orleans native was.  He had an accent, but it was not thick, just a slight southern draw.  He then began introducing his friends to her, who all looked older than him, when it was the other way around.  He had sixty years on the oldest fellow, who he introduced her to first.  "This is Shane, and that is Frank.  Don't mind them if they hit on you, can't blame a lonely guy for tryin'," he teased, and got shoved by Frank, who he ribbed brisky back in the gut with an elbow, making him grunt.  "And this pretty thing is Brenda, James' girl, and that is James.  And that is Melissa, who don't take any kinda shiit off'a any guy.  You wanna join us?  Maybe one of us'll get lucky, and if not?  Well, yaw company will be enjoyed anyway."  He was definately the most charismatic and outspoken in the group, although all of them said their hellos in their own way, if only with a saucy waggle of their fingers.  Not all of them were vampires, just Kyle, Melissa, and Frank, and they certainly did not act like a human might expect vampires to act.  The other two were blood thralls.  James and his girlfriend Brenda were both Frank's thralls.  Kyle did not want the hassle of giving up his blood to anyone.  His sire was the only one who had ever tasted his blood.  "So you gotta name?" he then asked her, as his friends made their way over to the line to get into the bar, Kyle sidling along after them, while all his attention was still fixed on Mia.  IDs were checked at the door.  Kyle had a fake ID, had to, or he would never get into bars and clubs.      

"Mia," Kyle muttered her name as she introduced herself.  The corner of his mouth then pulled into a tug as she agreed to join.  "Peachy," he said.  The name rang familiar, and as he flashed the bouncer at the door his ID, not that he needed to, he was a regular there, the memory came flooding back like it had happened yesterday.  Frank opened the door for the group, and Kyle brushed by him to enter the place, not even to seem to look where he was going, and yet he wove through the crowd without bumping into a soul.  Their favorite was open, but still had dishes on it.  Kyle plopped himself down anyway, and shoved the glasses and snack baskets aside, and towards the edge of the table as he slid towards the center of the seat.  It was a large, horse-shoe shaped booth.  While the were getting seated, a bus boy ran out and gathered the dishes into a dish pan, and wiped down the maple table top.  Frank slid in next to Kyle, and once everyone was seated, the bar tender, a thin young woman, walked over to take their orders.  Frank ordered a bottle of JD, while Kyle ordered a bottle of cheap vodka, and James and Brenda were drinking beer.  Melissa ordered wine, the best they had, which was mediocre.  Kyle tapped his fingers on the table, still remembering how that woman had begged him to let her go...talking about how her daughter and husband needed her.  He remembered what he told her..."Life will go on for them..."  without you, is what he said, but he only muttered part of it.  He noticed Frank staring at him.  "What?" Frank shook his head at his dumbfounded look and question.  It was not like Kyle to be quiet, or distracted.  "Yeh aiight?" Frank's accent bordered on Creole.  He was clearly a native of New Orleans.  "Yeah, fine, man." Kyle grinned and pinned Mia with his eyes.  "I met a woman who had a daughter named Mia not too long ago.  Her name was Caroline," he mentioned.  A faint smile curled his lips.  Time was relative, and 15 years might be 'not too long ago' to some people.  Not that, that was the case with him.  He was only 85 years old as a vampire.  He simply could not pass up a chance at mischief, and chances were, she was a different Mia anyway.   He was just fishing, and if he got lucky, he would get a bite.  The vampire broke the seal on his vodka and tipped the bottle to take a sip.  Frank in the meantime, smiled to Mia as his dark brown eyes settled on her.  "Yeh lived long in Nawlins?" he asked her, his voice very soft spoken.  He had an easy going way about him, but was the quiet type for the most part.  Kyle meanwhile was just hoping, just hoping that Mia ignored Frank and was floored by what he said.  He needed something to get his blood pumping tonight.  Frank was too nice of a guy, which was why he didn't know much about Kyle.  He knew he was a vampire, and had been hanging out with him for about five years, and he knew where he lived and that he had a nice place.  He had been there a few times.  He also knew, that Kyle had a very dark side.  He had seen it for himself, but most vampires did.   

-- Edited by JD at 21:30, 2006-03-23

Frank had noticed Mia's rather startled expression and his eyes softened on her warmly as she replied to his inquirey.  He had not missed Kyle's comments, nor his distraction, and wondered about that too.  "I was bawn and raised heuh," he told her, and the lifted his drink to quaff a swallow, appreciating the brief warmth which soaked his throat and stomach.  The vampire propped a leg up on the seat, his knee brushing Kyle as he did so, who slid over a little.  There was still plenty of room at the large booth. Melissa smiled him to a little as his arm draped the back of the seat behind her.  She liked Frank, and the two were rather good friends.  Melissa lit a cigarette and offered Frank and Mia one, and then slipped the pack back into her purse to swap it for a zippo.  Frank declined the smoke with a, "Thanks, but I am trying to quit," and Melissa laughed as she wondered why on earth he bothered?  The rogue Anubian vampire then fixed his gaze on Mia.  "Yeh aiight, girl?" he asked her, his concern genuine, or at least seemed to be.  He was not a talker really, did not talk just for the sake of hearing of his voice like so many people did.  "Would yeh like another drink?"  He had told the waiter to put her drinks on his tab.  He was a gentleman that way.  The vampire would order her another drink if she gave any indication of wanting another one.  When Mia asked Kyle where he was from, he met her gaze and smiled a little.  "I was born in Bryson North Carolina, and moved here when I was fifteen.  My daddy was born on the rezz, was a marine, so we moved around a lot," he told her, and he told the truth, just not all of it.  "Some might say I was a military brat, but they did not know my father, or what an ashhole he was," he scoffed, smirking as he did, and polished off another drink, to spill more of the rot gut liquor into his glass.  His gaze then wandered off a bit.  "I think he resented knocking up my mother and having a half breed son.  He was proud you see, cuzz he was a pure blood, and there was this cherokee girl he wanted to marry.  I didn' even get his jet black hair.  I still go back there sometimes...to the reservation, the smokey mountains.  It wasn' all bad," he shrugged a little.  "It was really pretty there," the last spoken quietly.  The mountains, the beauty of that place, had been his escape as a battered child, who could never please his father, who he had loved and respected despite his temper and drunken rages.  The very youthful vampire then drained his glass again and grimaced.  "This shiit could take grease off an ol' engine," he remarked distastefully, then swilled down some more.

Mia's scent was locked into Kyle's olfactory memory.  He had a plan...A plan he had made the moment her eyes, her voice, and her breath had given her away.  Oh it was nothing obvious, she had covered herself well, but Kyle had a sense for subtlies.  The slightest shiver in her breath, the glean which had lept in her eyes, the faintest waver in her voice.  She was the daughter of Caroline.  Would her daughter's terror be as exhilerating? he wondered.  Would murdering her be as blissful?  Would her blood warm him with her raging pulse of horror?  He smiled warmly as she said her goodbyes, and waved to her.  "It was nice gettin' to know yeh, Mia.  Take it easy, girl," his farewell to her as pleasant as you please, the softness in his eyes, the sincere friendliness in his voice, all a paradox to the cold heart which lie within.  He parted with his friends ten minutes after her, and hit the streets to pick up her scent, which lingered and stirred in the air, on the sidewalk, on any lamp post or object she had brushed against, then it vanished at the curb where a cab had stopped to pick her up.  He ducked into an alley for awhile, and their called on his shadow gifts to reform his appearance into a guise he used from time to time...He had named him Jack, after Jack the Ripper.  Ten minutes later he stepped out of that alley, as Jack...Tall, lanky, black haired, brown eyed, Jack.  For the next two hours he stood on the corner hailing cabs.  He had five dollars in his hand, but a pocket full of cash readily available.  When each cab met the curb, and the window was rolled down, he breathed in the scents within, seeking one scent, Mia's.  When her aroma was not identified, he flashed the five dollar bill, and asked if he could get a ride to the Convention Center.  He was only about twenty dollars short, heh, and he knew it.  When the cab he was seeking finally pulled up to the curb, and Mia's scent hit him, he swapped the five for a fifty.  "I need a ride to the River Walk," he said, and the cab driver unlocked the back doors.  Kyle climbed into the cab, his eyes sliding over the cage between himself and the driver briefly, before he slid a 40.caliber Heckler and Kotch from the holster inside of his leather jacket.  Before he threatened the cab driver with the loaded pistol, which he had released the safety on, before very quietly sliding back the action, his left hand balled into a fist, and using excelerated motion while tapping his vampiric strength, he punched a hole in the cage to wrap his left arm around the taxi-driver's throat, and as swiftly snapped his right arm through to angle his wrist with the muzzle of the pistol pressed against his temple.  "You can either tell me what I want to know, or find out what it feels like to have one side of your head blown off, and your brains spilled all over the window and door, by a fourty caliber hollow point bullet."  Kyle then described what Mia looked like in detail to the man, and defined exactly where he had picked her up, then demanded the driver to take him where he had dropped her off.  "Oh, and if you try to pull a fast one on me?  You, and everyone you love, will die horrible deaths.  Take me to where she is, forget you ever saw me, and you will live to know, that I forgot all about you," he promised the man, with a flash of his fangs to put the scare deep inside of the man.  Needless to say, the taxi-driver caved to his threats, and drove him to Mia's place, even showing him the door she had gone through.  Kyle smiled, patted the man all friendly like on the shoulder, and climbed out of the cab.  He had smelled her on the walk and in the air even before he climbed out of the cab.  It would not have gone well for the driver if he had NOT picked up his scent.

In the guise of Jack, Kyle stalked the beauty by her scent, his eyes looking ahead of him by using oracle of shadows, an ability which allowed him to close distance with sight, through the plane of shadows, and he did not bother with walls and doors, he phased right through them until he was standing right behind her.  "Welcome to Hell," he whispered to her, even as the ground opened up beneath her to swallow her up into a gateway of shadows.  She would feel like the ground came out from under her, and like she was falling rapidly, only quite suddenly the sensation would end as her feet were met again by solid ground.  Kyle looked like himself again when he arrived with her, was still standing right behind her when they emerged, in the exact same position they had been in before.  They were at the foot of a mountain's sheer rock face, on the ruins of an ancient temple, in the Lonely Mountains of An Morendor, the Shadowlands.  The pale grey cliff wall had once been one of temple's walls.  Some of the walls which had domed outward from the mountain's marble face, still stood partially intact, while at the very center of the ruin's cracked floor, as a stepped circle, where a table of stone which was broken in half stood, one half standing, the other half crumbled into rubble.  "Welcome to the last place your mother ever saw," he conveted, his fingers brushing her hair away from her throat in that instant she overcame the affects of the plunging descent through shadows.  He laughed when she spun around and distanced herself from him.  "You cannot escape me," he assured her.  "I can move like lightning...I can vanish into shadows...I can make your will my own.  But what I truly want to see, is if your screams are as delightful as your mother's were," his eyes burning on her with a feral hunger for murder and blood lust.