A heavy rain flooded the cobblestone streets of the ancient city. People about their business wrapped shawls tighter and adjusted hats to keep out the damp, even knowing that it was ultimately a futile effort.

A rather young couple entered a sidestreet, the man gallantly shielding his companion with an arm about the shoulders as they hurried along.

They stopped short, frozen, as the unmistakable tinkling crash of a broken window echoed through the sidestreet. The woman acted first, dragging her male companion through the haze of astonishment and down the street.

The glass struck the cobblestones behind them as they ran. The crystal waterfall sound of the falling shards against the street was broken by a light sound of shoes on stone.

The man glanced over his shoulder, eyes widening in the ageless look of human surprise as he saw a scar-covered man straighten from a crouch amid the shards of glass.

The scarred man rose slowly, as if his muscles ached at even this minor a strain. He was stripped to the waist, revealing a network of deep etched lines in his torso, some of which pulsed with an eerie bluish-white glow. The man raised his head last, opening his eyes with the lazyness of a lizard on a hot rock.

They glowed red.

The man running with the woman yelped and froze, tripping up the woman and sending her sprawling on the soaked street.

PIERCING

He was frozen, staring at those eyes, unable to even think clearly.

SKEWERING

He began to realise that a low moan was coming from deep in his throat, like a trapped animal.

PREYING

Suddenly the scarred man moved. He did not move, he moved and somehow was there.

STRIKING

With the suddenness of panic, the scarred man's hand was clamped on his victim's face. He lifted him by the jaw, never breaking eye contact.

FEEDING

His mouth opened, long wickedly curved fangs were revealed. A heartbeat later, those fangs sunk deep into the flesh of the suspended man's throat.

The whole process took merely the space of time the woman used to regain her feet. As she began to turn around to see what had happened, she heard a single, long sucking sound.

She completed her turn, now completely in the grip of terror, just in time to see her male companion's dessicated corpse strike the cobblestones. The vampire, for that was what he was, didn't even try to hold her in his gaze as he had done to the now dead man.

Irrationally, the thought angered the woman. She eyed the corpse, more specifically the sword the dead man had always carried in life.

The thought to try and pick it up was but half formed when the scarred man was suddenly there in front of her and she felt pain in her neck and there was the long sucking sound again but this time she could feel her life going with it like water down a drain and she didn't want to die but the darkness was creeping up on her...

THUD/CRUNCH

Suddenly there was another man standing amid the broken glass where the scarred man had landed. Rain ran down the angles of his immaculate teal armor in tiny rivers and waterfalls, and the wet plastered his long lavender hair against the sides of his face. His eyes were pale and intense as lighthouse fires.

The vampire let the woman go, although he was only half done draining her. He faced the newcomer with something akin to fear powering his undead muscles as his vicim fell to her knees, fighting to remain concious. There was a muffled explosion and the vampire was gone, in his place were tiny fluttering things.

Bats! the woman realised as thousands of fluttering, red-eyed bats scattered in all directions.

The half-dead woman gained her feet, swaying slightly from side to side, she felt the deathly cold associated with extreme paleness of the skin on her face. Through the swimming vision of near-unconciousness she saw the armored man approaching her. She opened her mouth to thank him but all that came out was the dark blood of the inner arteries that came with severe internal hemorraging.

The armored man retracted his sword from the dying woman's abdomen and allowed her to slump to the ground. He raised a gauntleted hand and sketched a cross above her.

"Ashes to ashes; and Dust to dust."

Holy light engulfed the woman's body, leaving nothing as it faded.

The teal-armored man with the lavender hair was gone.