For three days, the bullets stopped. The knives remained sheathed.
Elara did not attack. She watched.
She followed Valerius like a shadow stitched to his heels. When he walked through the ruins of the Financial District, she was three stories up, vaulting across the rusted girders of collapsed banks. When he sat in the park reading a book that was falling apart with age, she was in the tree canopy, observing through high-powered binoculars.
She told herself it was reconnaissance. Krixis had taught her: To kill the beast, you must know where it sleeps, how it eats, and what it fears.
But Valerius didn't seem to fear anything.
On the second night, she watched him walk into a Scrapper ambush.
The Scrappers were humans who had rejected both the Resistance and the Monsters. They modified their bodies with junk tech—hydraulic arms, saw-blade legs. They surrounded Valerius in an alleyway, five of them, drooling for his coat and boots.
"Give it up, pretty boy," the leader grunted, revving a chainsaw attached to his elbow.
Elara, perched on a fire escape, reached for her sniper rifle. She didn't want them to kill him. He was her bounty. He was her contract.
But she didn't need to shoot.
Valerius didn't even drop his book.
As the leader lunged, Valerius stepped to the side—a movement so slight it looked like a glitch in the video feed. With his free hand, he reached out and grabbed the spinning chainsaw blade.
He didn't grab the handle. He grabbed the blade.
Sparks flew. The metal screeched. But Valerius's grip was stronger than the motor. He stopped the chain with his bare palm.
"Rude," Valerius noted.
He twisted his wrist. The chainsaw snapped. The leader stumbled forward, off-balance. Valerius simply tapped him on the forehead. The force of the tap sent the man's skull backward into the brick wall with the force of a cannonball. Crunch.
The other four attacked.
It wasn't a fight. It was a slaughter. Valerius moved like smoke. He tore the hydraulic arm off one man and used it to bludgeon the next. He dodged bullets by simply not being there when the trigger was pulled.
In thirty seconds, five men were piles of scrap metal and broken bone. Valerius hadn't even gotten a speck of blood on his white shirt.
He looked up at the fire escape, straight at Elara.
"Six out of ten for form," he called out, critiquing his own massacre. "But I deducted points for the mess."
He climbed the fire escape, defying gravity, jumping twenty feet at a time until he landed on the roof beside her.
Elara didn't flinch. She was busy writing in her notebook.
"Stalking suits you," Valerius said, leaning against a chimney. "It's very... devoted."
"I'm gathering data," Elara said coldly, not looking up. "Analyzing your combat patterns. You favor your right side. You play with your food."
"And you," Valerius grinned, stepping closer, "are hopelessly in love with me."
Elara finally looked up. She scoffed so hard she nearly choked.
"I would rather lick a radioactive waste barrel," she stated flatly. "I don't love you, Valerius. I love the idea of your corpse. I love the mountain of gold you promised me when you hired me to end your miserable existence."
She stood up, closing her notebook with a snap. "Zorgath's bounty is pocket change compared to what you offered. I'm just protecting my investment."
"Mmm," Valerius hummed, unbothered. "Hatred is just love without the flowers. You follow me. You watch me. You think about me constantly. Be careful, Elara. If you keep this up, I might fall for you."
Elara rolled her eyes, packing her binoculars. "Don't bother. You're not my type."
Valerius raised an eyebrow. "And what is your type? The spider-monsters? The mindless drones?"
"Humans," Elara said, slinging her rifle over her shoulder. "Mortal. Fragile. Normal. Someone who lives, ages, and dies. Someone who doesn't treat dismemberment like a hobby."
Valerius laughed, a sharp bark of amusement. "Boring. But... biologically compatible."
Elara paused. "What?"
"Vampires and humans," Valerius said, examining his fingernails. "We are not different species, Elara. Not really. We are an evolution. A mutation. We can... mingle."
"Mingle?" Elara frowned, her scientific curiosity piqued despite herself. "You mean... reproduce?"
"Of course," Valerius smirked. "How do you think the Dhampirs were born in the 14th century? A vampire father, a human mother... nature finds a way. The child is usually stronger than the mother, faster than the father. A perfect hybrid."
Elara stared at him. She tried to imagine it. A creature with Valerius's immortality but human empathy. Or human fragility with a vampire's hunger.
"That's... theoretically impossible," she murmured, tapping her pen against her chin. "The cellular regeneration of a vampire would consume the human DNA. Unless the gestation period was accelerated..."
Valerius stepped into her personal space. He smelled of old paper and rain.
"You're doing it again," he whispered. "You're looking at the biology, not the soul. It's fascinating."
"I'm looking for a weakness," Elara lied. "If you can reproduce, you have biological functions. If you have biological functions, you can be disrupted."
"Well," Valerius whispered, his voice dropping to a velvet purr. "Feel free to disrupt me whenever you like."
The next night, Elara stopped observing. She was ready to test a theory.
She lured him to the Substation Alpha—the main power grid for the monster's hives. It hummed with lethal amounts of electricity.
She stood in the center of the main transformer room. The floor was a metal grate. Above them, massive copper coils crackled with blue energy.
Valerius walked in, hands in his pockets.
"Electricity," he noted, looking at the coils. "You kept your promise."
"I always deliver," Elara said.
She was wearing a rubber-insulated suit. She held a remote detonator.
"I've rerouted the entire eastern grid to this room," Elara explained, her voice echoing. "Fifty thousand volts. Three thousand amps. Enough to jumpstart a dead city. Or... cook a vampire."
Valerius stepped onto the metal grate. "Shall we dance?"
Elara pressed the button.
ZZAAPP.
It wasn't a spark. It was a lightning bolt.
Thick, blue arcs of pure energy slammed down from the coils, striking the metal grate. Valerius was the conduit.
The sound was deafening—a constant, tearing screech of air being ionization.
Valerius went rigid.
His back arched. His mouth opened in a silent scream as the electricity coursed through him.
Elara watched through her tinted goggles. It was gruesome.
The heat was instantaneous. Valerius's clothes caught fire and disintegrated in seconds. His skin began to bubble. The electricity was cooking him from the inside out.
His eyes popped. Literally. They exploded in bursts of boiling fluid.
His skin turned black, then cracked, revealing the muscle beneath. Then the muscle turned to charcoal.
Smoke poured from his ears and mouth. The smell of ozone mixed with the sickly-sweet scent of roasting meat.
Elara kept the power on. She watched his skeleton glow orange, the bones acting like the filament of a lightbulb. He was a glowing, screaming skeleton wrapped in charred meat.
Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty.
Finally, the transformer blew. BOOM.
The blue light vanished. Darkness fell, save for the orange glow of Valerius's superheated bones.
His body—what was left of it—collapsed onto the grate. It was a pile of smoking, blackened cinder. A literal charcoal briquette in the shape of a man.
Elara walked forward, her boots clanking on the metal. She poked the body with a rubber baton.
The body crumbled. Ash flaked away.
"Fried," she whispered. "Crispy."
She waited.
A minute passed. The smoke cleared. The charcoal didn't move.
Then... a heartbeat.
Thump-thump.
It was loud. It echoed in the silent room.
Thump-thump.
The blackened crust of his chest cracked open. Beneath the charcoal, fresh, pink skin pushed through like a flower blooming in ash.
Valerius sat up. As he moved, the burnt layer of his body sloughed off in heavy flakes, revealing a brand new, pristine body underneath. He shook his head, and a cloud of soot flew from his hair, which was rapidly growing back from baldness to its usual silver length.
He coughed, spitting out a mouthful of smoke.
"The tingling," he rasped, his voice vibrating. "Oh, the tingling!"
He stood up. He was glowing again, his body radiating the stored energy. Small sparks of static electricity jumped from his fingertips.
He looked at Elara. His eyes, newly formed and bright red, were wide with adrenaline.
"That..." He pointed a finger at her, a spark jumping from it. "...was electric. Literally."
Elara dropped her baton. She looked defeated. "I cooked you. You were ash. You were a briquette."
Valerius walked over to her. He didn't attack. He didn't mock her this time.
He stopped inches away. The static on his skin made the hair on Elara's arms stand up. He reached out and took her hand.
His skin was hot. Burning hot.
He lifted her hand to his lips. He didn't bite. He pressed a soft, lingering kiss to her knuckles.
"You have a gift for chaos, my little storm," he whispered against her skin. "My heart... it hasn't beaten that fast in eight hundred years."
He looked into her eyes. There was no irony. No sarcasm. Just a terrifying, intense admiration.
"You make me feel alive," he said softly.
Then, he dropped her hand.
"Same time next week," he said, his voice returning to its usual playful lilt. "Try acid. I've always wondered what it feels like to melt."
He turned and walked out of the ruined substation, naked and covered in soot, whistling a cheerful tune.
Elara stood there in the dark, clutching her hand where he had kissed it. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, a frantic rhythm that had nothing to do with the fight.
She looked at the door, then at her hand.
"What the hell," she whispered to the empty room. "Was that?"