[color=gray][h3][sup][sup]The last shards of daylight retreated behind the curtains, replaced by the lights of man. Little manicured fingers crept past the duvet. When no sizzle came, they grasped the edge and pulled the duvet down. Her hands dragged her body upright. Her hand darted for her phone. The screen flashed alive from the movement of the device.

[i]7:55 pm[/i]

She pulled the plug from the phone and crawled from the bed. She stumbled to the bathroom, only to stand idly in front of the mirror for a time. She looked to the toilet expectantly, then back to her mirror. Leaning over the sink, her fingers pulled and prodded at the corners of her eyes, searching for dried sleep. There still wasn’t any. Her hand darted for the faucet. Her other found its way to a bottle of facial scrub. 

The halting, hesitant movements accelerated as they settled into motions of stiff automation. Then, they ground to a halt once more. Concealer could find no targets. She squinted as she applied her foundation, and scowled at the growing gap between its color and hers. A newly soiled makeup wipe joined the others in the trash, bringing with it foundation soaked in lotion the skin had failed to absorb.

Her hands hovered around her toiletries bag in search of a target. She plucked mascara and lip gloss from their resting places. Both were applied. Both were approved. Both found stations in her purse. Hair rollers took their place in the toiletries bag. She stared at her face, inspecting its gloss as her knuckles tensed from their grip on the counter. Her eyes scanned every detail. One hand moved, to prod hair into place. 

She broke from the sink. 

She returned to her phone. She flicked her wrist several times, until her touch could provoke a response from the screen. After a look at the weather, she went for her suitcase. The outfit fell together. A navy blue wrap dress. Pulled-up socks and black ankle boots with heels to conceal her feet-turned-hooves as well as she could. It wasn’t perfect, but it had to do.

She tottered from her room across the hall and delivered three firm raps to the door. “Sham?” she lisped, “I’m ready to go. Are we shtill doing breakpasht your way?” 

Sam opened the door. His hair was a mess, pushing against his cap like it was in revolt. His mouth followed the motion of a yawn, though no air or sound accompanied it. “I would prefer it that way. Look-” He peeked out from his room. Like a meerkat, he scanned the hallway for any potential listeners. Satisfied by the emptiness, he beckoned Caroline in.   

His dirty clothes speckled the room, joined by a variety of tech paraphernalia only he could have known the purpose of. His laptop lay open, its screen shining like a beacon. The webcam was covered with a piece of tape. Its fans filled the room with a dull hum as it strained against the many tabs inflicted on it. No sooner had Caroline closed the door behind her than Sam continued, anxiously pacing as he spoke.

“Look I did some more reading and I-, I think I already mentioned this in the past but do you know how much information we knew that the government has on us? The Patriot act, Snowden—this [i]shit[/i] never disappeared…” He closed the gap between them, glancing from wall to wall in search of anything confirming his suspicions. “And that’s only the stuff we know about! These last nights, I’ve seen some weird stuff in the city, figures that seem hidden to most, beings and traces that should not exist.” He began to speak faster right in front of her, his own words whipping him up. 

“So surely if we have our ‘special diets,’ there might be others like us out there trying to keep this grand fucking conspiracy silent, and I mean if this is real what more is real? Imagine it: witches, warlocks, the illuminati, stonemasons, all of [i]that[/i] might actually exist.” Caroline reeled as his gesticulation reached a crescendo. Then he paused. Sam let out a sigh. His arms drifted down. “All I ask for is that we go for breakfast secretly: in an alley, garage, maybe we go for a homeless person, some moronic gambler or an addict, you know, scum. The type of people that the cops won't report missing.”

He paused again. The calm set in.

“That is if we need to ‘leave leftovers’, I am pretty sure I can make people forget things, so maybe we can dine and dash?”

His consolation was an offer of preserved conscience. An offer that seemed to fall on indifferent ears. Caroline rubbed the bridge of her nose and drew a breath. Her lips tensed. “I...get your point.” Her hands formed fists as she began her frustrated concession. “We don’t know who’sh watching. Or lishtening. I jusht—. Do we habe to—? Can we at leasht—?”

She forced out a frustrated sigh.  “I jusht...I jusht...I can’t...I worry it ishn’t...” She growled and shook her hands. Her speech grew halting and strained. “It ishn’t enoup. I can’t rishk changing again. I can’t. I jusht can’t. Who knowsh what could come neksht? It might not eben matter how carepul we are. Sho ip we do it your way, can I at leasht...eat a whole meal? People go misshing all’a time. And ip we...you know...nobody will care ip it’sh...” She spun her wrist, beckoning the right word. Her mouth tensed into an awkward, tight-lipped smile. “Ip you really want to go for shome’in’a copsh won’t care about? We could...try and get all’a dat...in shomeone who ishn’t...you know...[i]white[/i]?”

She said it like it was a dirty word. Like she was afraid of it. As if she were worried that God would draw the line at the mere suggestion of using systemic racism to one’s advantage, after looking clean past murder and a half-dozen other things. Sam stared back at her for a moment. Confusion turned to realization. A hesitant laugh escaped him as it did. 

“Well that might be best I guess...”[/sup]

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[sup]It had not taken long to find a better place to hunt. The taxi ride there was even shorter. Caroline made polite small talk with the driver. They got out at the corner of South Casino Center Boulevard and East Carson Avenue. It was a short walk to the grounds of the night; it was the wait that took forever.

Sam stood watch along the wall. Caroline sat in the stairwell. Nobody ever took the stairs if they could help it. 

Sam was meticulous. Caroline, less so. For him, the phone was a prop. For her, a distraction. Still, she didn’t regret badgering him into accepting their use for coordination. How else could they have gotten the scheme to work? Perhaps it was a disguised blessing for him, too. His impatient partner could be sated by idle scrolling. She wouldn’t have been much help anyway. Her way was finding [i]good enough[/i] and slamming it into the pavement. Being a predator who survived needed more work than that. More care. More attention to detail. 

Most potential targets bristled with risk. Of course, “tough guys” knew how they looked—they were insisting upon it by their very choice to dress as such. And anyone with a purse could clutch it tightly to signal alertness. But others had converged on different techniques without even knowing it. The laughing groups of friends and the smiling couples were protected by numbers, as prey—however wrong it still felt to call them that—found safety in herds the world over. Anyone with a dog had a little mutualistic creature on guard, ready to alert them and everyone else of a threat, real or imagined, well before it could close in. Well-dressed folks advertised a social toxin. Their plumage—their clothes and hair—said they had money, importance, and that to trouble them was to invite the attention of something more dangerous, be it their next of kin or the police at their beck and call. Addicts had actual poison coursing through their veins, and some were looking rough enough to make it obvious. Sketchy figures in drawn hoodies despite the heat suggested a fellow predator of some kind, be they mugger or monster. 

Ambush tactics didn’t make for a glorious hunt. It wasn’t exciting. It was mostly shaping up to be boring, really. But it was still dangerous. Still stressful. Just hopefully less so than Caroline’s cavalier go-to-them-and-jump approach.

The crowds thinned out as the night went on. A thousand faces passed, and Sam still hadn’t found just what he was looking for. Caroline had already interrupted his search twice, each time on the hour, wondering when they’d “be done.”

It had to be foolproof. Something she wouldn’t screw up. She had her instructions. She knew what her part was. Hopefully she was paying more attention than the one time he’d checked in on her. All she needed to do was feign a collision with the target, and he’d take care of the rest. He checked his phone. The time read 23:12. He texted the agreed-upon message. Something that could be a part of an excuse, rather than something needing to be explained. [i]‘Coming?’[/i]

Their chosen target? An African-American guy who looked about their age, maybe thirty-something at most. He didn’t seem to be a tourist; what tourist would be using one of those rent-a-scooters to go seemingly nowhere in particular at night? And neither his clothes nor the fact that he was riding a scooter suggested wealth, at least as far as Sam knew.

Their target started picking up speed again as he passed Sam, now that the sidewalk seemed clear up ahead. Sam started walking. The moment of truth came as the target neared the Golden Nugget arch. 

Caroline darted out and feigned trying to stop. He tried to stop and swerve—really, it was more of a surprised flinch. He stumbled forward. His legs couldn’t keep up. He made contact with the pavement. His knees scraped and his hands tore. Caroline ate her part up. She groaned, whimpered, and hissed on the ground. She kept her eyes on him as she made a show. He stopped sputtering out confused curses when he saw that she seemed more hurt than him. He stumbled to his feet, surprise and anger melting into genuine concern. Was she really that hurt?

Sam closed in. The man gave him one look before returning his attention to Caroline. She brought her hand to her mouth, rubbed her face, then brought it back again to broadcast she’d hurt her face. He barely had a chance to ask her what was wrong. 

The click of Sam’s gun told the target the only one with a problem was him. But what sent him into stunned silence was the fact that the little white girl he’d just crashed into stood up, dusted herself off, and flipped like a switch. Like she wasn’t even hurt. 

Caroline helped him up, one hand on his mouth, while Sam hid his weapon again. Then, they walked. Caroline led, while Sam followed behind their guy, gun still pressed to his back through his jacket pocket. Caroline positioned herself to obscure the security guard’s line of sight and their bruised target as they entered the parking garage. Not that it mattered. He didn’t even bother looking up from his crossword. 

They found a nice, quiet space Sam insisted was out of any camera’s lines of sight on the second floor from the top, avoiding the roof lest any cameras or eyes from above look down and catch them in the act instead. Caroline was far past arguing. Her excited, impatient bouncing had nearly gotten a comment out of the target, until an insistent nudge from Sam shut him up again.

Sam drew first blood. The very second their target slumped into his arms, Caroline darted to the ground. He got the carotid; she held her nose and made do with the femoral, as far down the thigh as she could manage. It was his plan, after all. The only sound for several minutes was of gulping. Of Sam’s careful sips, and of Caroline’s breathless chugging. Sam broke first. He handed her a knife, told her to cover up the wounds when she was done. 

There was no use trying to stop her; he’d probably already lost too much blood. Not that she cared either way. Nonlethal feedings were something she’d only tried a few times. She was convinced there was no other way to feed but to kill. So it seemed, she was more concerned with what happened if she didn’t feed enough than what happened if she fed too much.

Sam took the stairs and headed to their meeting place: the nearby bus stop on South Main Street. A few tense minutes later, Caroline followed, bearing a contented little smile that suggested everything else had gone smoothly.

With food handled, it was time to start hitting up ATMs.[/sup][/sup][/h3][/color]