All the King's Horses Pt. 01

Sunnyvale, California

Earth

1998

Tiffany Winters, ordinary girl in an ordinary town, was about to do the ordinary thing for a girl her age -- slack off and read magazines to kill time until her boyfriend showed up -- when her pager buzzed. The pager was the one thing in her room that didn't quite fit. It was a room of boy band posters, old Easy bake ovens that she had never had the heart to throw away, a cheap boombox that still had the half rewound cassette tape for Alanna's First Adventure by Tamora Pierce crammed into the second tape slot, and three VHS rewinder boxes, which contained, in order, her recorded Simpsons marathon, her recorded X-Files marathon, and her recorded hour of CSPAN for her stupid civics class.

It was, in other words, the room of an ordinary, well to do teen girl.

Teen girls didn't have pagers.

Pagers were things parents had -- doctors and lawyers and stuff.

Tiff's pager was hidden, tucked away under a drawer, in a non-descript binder, and with its beeper set so softly that only a highly advanced listening device, the kind used by the FBI to snoop out drug king-pins, might have heard it. And only then by pressing it against the top of the drawer. Tiff heard it, though. Tiff closed her magazine, closed her eyes, rolled her head back and groaned. "Christamungus," she whispered, then remained there, hoping that maybe, just maybe, her pager had bleeped at her by accident.

Maybe, if she ignored it, it would go away.

The pager bleeped again.

"Blargh!" Tiff stood, tossed her magazine onto the bed, then grabbed her drawer. She fished out the binder, popped it open, wriggled it around and got out the pager.

C: A-Dee @ Parker and 5^th! Rit ETA 11:12 AM. Bring HW, S-, bandages

Tiff scowled. "Oh, no, Tiffany, everything should be relaxed this evening!" She said, cocking her head to the side. "Oh, no, Tiffany, you can hang out with your biffer once he's off works." She looked at the alarm clock by her bed. Riley would be off work at eleven -- one of the downsides of working the late shift at 7/11. Well, the middle late shift, before the late late shift started. Tiff had had a whole plan. She'd lay around, maybe get into something really cute, and then Riley could climb up the window like...like...

Tiff shook her head, her cheeks burning as she realized she hadn't been imagining Riley at all.

She put her hands over her face. "It's okay. Mr. X doesn't do it on purpose. H-"

"Hey," a soft voice spoke from behind her.

Tiffany Winters responded in a way very unlike an ordinary girl. Her body blurred into motion, snapping out her leg and kicking it into the air at exactly the height of a human throat, pinning the figure that had seemingly materialized in her room out of thin air. Tiff spent a few seconds blinking at the face above her foot, even as her hand had jerked one of her concealed stakes out from under the half-dozen hiding places she had stashed the things. The stake fell from her nerveless fingers, clattering to the ground.

"Vicky!?" Tiff whispered.

"Hey Tiff," Victor Enache said, his voice squeaking slightly around the pressure of Tiff's heel. She jerked her leg back, staggering.

"Vicky, what are you doing here?" Tiff asked, her eyes wide. "And how did you get in?"

"You invited me," Victor said, rubbing his throat and wincing. "Still hurts when you do that. I was worried you'd lost your touch." His voice had a sardonic edge to it, even as his deep, brown-black eyes looked into hers. They were filled with that same soul-deep hurt that Tiff remembered seeing. She bristled. How dare he. How absolute dare he just...show up again in his rumpled coat and his tattered jeans, all broad shouldered and muscular and pale and brooding with his stupid mop of silky black hair and that ever so slight Romanian accent -- not thick and goofy, but sexy and exotic, and with those tiny little fangs of his, peeking over his lips, just begging for her to kiss them.

What an absolute bastard.

"I repeatify my query," Tiff said, scowling harder to try and banish the urge to lick his abs. "Where. I mean. Why. The...what are you doing here?" She put her hands on her hips, glaring. Glaring as hard as she could.

The glare bounced off Victor like bullets might have. "I came to warn you," he said. "Someone's trying to kill you."

"Someone? Try to kill me? What a freaking shockalot!" Tiff snapped. She almost immediately regretted saying it. But Victor's face was already hardening into his most deep frown. The kind of frown where he knew she was being childish, and wanted to scold her, but wouldn't because he respected her so much. Which just made Tiff want to lick his abdominal muscles more. Which made Tiff feel angrier about him showing up.

Because they couldn't. They never could again.

"Yes, people in specific are trying to kill you. The Camerilla-"

"Oh those bozeones," Tiff muttered. "You know, has anyone told them it's the 20^th century? Queen went outta style, like, ten years ago." She grinned. "See, it's...it's a joke, cause that old band."

"I saw them live," Victor said, frowning. "And no, the Camerilla is not to be trifled with. They may have called a truce with you ever since the...incident." He looked aside and Tiff bit down on her tongue. The first reaction she had, the one driven by anger and frustration and no tiny amount of lingering hurt, was: Oh, the time you turned my friends into dog monsters? Yeah, that was sooooome incident

Victor's lips pursed, as if she had said it out loud anyway. Tiff's eyebrow twitched and she scowled. "So?"

"But just because the local Prince won't come after you, if you maintain your current focus on killing his enemies," Victor said, frowning. "Doesn't mean he won't turn a blind eye if those said enemies decide to remove Tiffany Winters, Vampire Hunter from the equation entirely."

"Oh noooo!" Tiff said, her hands going to her cheeks in slow, mock shock.

"It's serious, Tiffany," Victor stepped closer.

"Yeah, and so is every other problem on my plate," Tiff said, not stepping backwards. "I don't see why this, in specific, dragged you back here. When, oh, right, the werewolf didn't. Or those demons that turned people into maggots? Or the cyborg-zombie. Did you hear about the cyborg-zombie? I remember the cyborg-zombie. I remember thinking, wow, wouldn't it be nice if my four hundred year old vampire ex with superpowers was around to maybe help me, while he was trying to push my head into the school cafeteria's meat grinder." She glared up at Victor -- all five foot nothing of her, and tried to ignore how close they were standing.

Victor looked away. "I was...busy."

"You were hiding," Tiff hissed.

"Yeah, well, an ancient blood curse triggered by feelings of joy does that to a vampire," Victor muttered.

"What the fuck kind of dumbass curse is that, anyway!?" Tiff hissed.

And that was when the window began to rattle.

Tiff's eyes almost bugged out of her head. "Hide!" She whispered.

"Why?" Victor asked.

"Just do it, you stupid sexy fangbastard!" Tiff hissed, shoving Victor towards the closet.

Victor frowned, but allowed his tall, broad body to be folded and crammed into the closet, tucked up against the dresses, the frilly skirts, the jeans, the slacks, and the other paraphernalia of a teen girl that filled the closet. The door slid shut, just as the window opened and Riley peeked out. The comparison between him and Victor was not one that served Riley in the long or short term. When Victor was far away, off in Los Angeles doing whatever the fuck he did there, Tiff could focus on Riley's artistic side. His goofy poetry. His, admittedly, rather mediocre tongue skills. But, hey, he was nineteen, having tongue skills at all was impressive, right?

But with Victor thrumming inside of her closet with all the brooding, sexual energy of a vampire of the clan Tzamarkias -- the clan of blood sculpting and dark powers and darker temptation, the same clan that had birthed the infamous Dracula Tepet himself...Riley didn't come off looking so hot. Like, did he have to have so many pimples.

"Hey, Tiff, I got off work early!" Riley said.

"Greatzilla!" Tiff said, giving him two thumbs up.

"...are...you okay?" Riley asked.

Tiff glanced at the clock. It was ticking closer and closer towards ten thirty. She did the mental math. If she needed to be at the corner of Parker and 5^th on time to do her job, then she'd have to leave in, like, ten minutes.

"Uhhh..." Tiff said. "N...No, I...think I might be coming down with something."

"You? Coming down with something?" Riley asked, arching an eyebrow as he looked at Tiff. "You never get sick."

Tiff hacked and coughed as hard as she could. "So, you obviously!" She said, drawing in a deep breath and coughing again. "Should..." She coughed a third time. "Not get close."

Riley bit his lip. "All right..." He said, hesitantly, then started to slowly creep down. Tiff coughed a few more times, then hurried to the window. Riley looked quite small at the bottom of the trellis he had used to clamber up to her window. He glanced up at her, then started to turn and walk away, his hands in his pockets. Tiff slowly let her head bonk down into the sill, the muffled thunk of it filling her ears.

Welp.

She was pretty sure she could scratch, what, four boyfriends now since Victor?

"Riley, huh?" Victor asked, the closet door rasping open behind her.

"Yeah," Tiff said.

"Last I heard, you were dating Tom," Victor said, his voice studiously neutral. Tiff felt a tiny crawling spider of anger going down her back. She started to stand, looking out at the night, her brow furrowing.

"Oh no you didn't," she said. She turned around. "Did you imply something, Vicky?"

Victor coughed. "N-No, I...just...noted something."

Tiff scowled at him. "Yeah, I dated Tom and- I dated Tom and Riley."

Victor frowned, slightly. "And what about George?"

"What about George!?" Tiff hissed.

Victor put his hand over his face. "No, you're right. Sorry. I'm being an ass."

"Yeah, a judge-ass-mental hole!" Tiff snapped. "And, you know what? I have to go and save the world again tonight. So, you can just...I don't know, stand around broodingly like a broody brat." She turned to the window, then ducked down and fished her emergency backpack out from under her bed. It clanked and clunked loudly as she swung it over her shoulders, then came to the window sill, moving up with a sleek grace.

"Tiffany, I should come with you," Victor said.

"No, you really shouldn't," Tiff snapped, glaring back over her shoulder. "You've done enough freakin' damage for one night."

She leaped down and off the sill -- landing into the night.

Victor didn't follow.

Tiffany sprinted down the sidewalk at her max speed, not even breathing hard as she rounded the corner, darting around the pools of light cast by streetlights. But she wasn't worried about being spotted. People in Sunnyvale had a habit, learned from a history of odd things going bump in the night, to not glance out their windows. Often, glancing out a window at night was a good way to never wake up in the morning. To become another one of the quietly ignored statistics in this happy little town. Tiff slowed only once she started to get close to 5^th and Parker, her breathing only hitching a tiny bit. She was walking past the storefronts and the alleyways of this part of downtown with a determined stride and an angry scowl.

"Stupid Victor," she muttered under her breath. "Stupid blood curse. Stupid fucking vampire baroque revenge bulls-"

And that was when the sack went over her head. Tiff started to struggle.

Then the needle plunged into her neck.

And that was it.

***

The first thing that she felt, after so long, was pain. It was an achy, crawling pain, radiating slowly out of her bones and creeping through her muscles like the fingers of a creeper at a dance. After the pain came awareness -- her leg was here. Her arms were there. Her head was there. And after awareness came sight and sound. The sound was distant, muted, and warped. Like her head was underwater. And her eyes saw only murky blue luminescence. Then the luminescence began to slide away, flowing past her face, and she realized that her head had been under water. The fluid flowed past her eyes, her nose, her mouth, and a sudden blast of cold air seemed to strike her face, her breasts, her belly, her whole body as the liquid drained away.

Tiffany Winters tried to speak, but her throat was jammed with-

She gagged. The feeling of it was so horrible that she wracked forward, gagging more and more as something slurped out of her throat. The trailing end of it was barbed and covered in wriggling wires, which tugged themselves free of something deep inside of her. She grabbed onto the thing that had come out of her throat and looked at it, squinting to try and get an idea of what it was.

It was a plastic tube. Ribbed for not her pleasure, and tipped with a long collection of threaded cables. The idea of it being jammed down her throat made Tiff want to throw up all over again, even as she coughed the last bits of slime from her lungs and spat it to the side of the small metal coffin she was lounging in.

"Talk about a...what...the...even..." She croaked, looking left, then right. She was in a metal coffin in what looked like a basement somewhere: Large steam tubes and hissing machines clanked and clattered. It all said 'boiler room' to her, though it didn't look a thing like the Sunnyvale High boiler room. Tiffany felt her strength beginning to return. The cold and the pain was fading away, leaving the burning power she felt at pretty much every hour of the day. Tiffany stepped away from the coffin, swinging her legs free and hissing every time her skin touched the cold metal. "Cold, cold, cold, cooooooooooold!"

She danced across the grated floor and away from the coffin, her arms crossed over her chest, and took some stock.

She was buckass naked, freezing her tits off, and covered in the gloppy slime that had been in the metal tube.

"Yup," she said, slowly. "This is, officialicated and proper, the worst way to wake up ever."

Tiff scanned the room, her brow furrowing, as she looked for a door. And, to her delight, she found one. It was a large, hatched door, with stenciled set letter H above it. Tiff bit her lip and pranced over to the door, trying to remain in contact with as little of the grated floor as she could, her toes beginning to go numb with the contact against the cold metal. She gripped the bright red hatch, then started to strain, shoving and twisting and pushing. The hatch might have defeated a normal human. But Tiff felt the latches and the catches inside give, creak, groan, and finally come free with a whirring hiss of metal on metal.

She showed teeth. "You have been defeated, door!"

The door swung open and she peeked out, looking up and down the narrow, metal corridor. She was beginning to think that maybe...just maybe...she was not, in fact, in Sunnyvale anymore. The ceiling was metal and lined with hard white lights, which shone down on the mostly dark metal surfaces, making them gleam like mirrors. The whole place was full of mechanical noises -- clicking and hissing sounds, groans and creaks. The air smelled dead and still and stale. Her nose crinkled slightly at the taste of it. There were no windows so...was she underground?

Then she heard voices.

"We need to figure out what this thing was doing so..." Muffled by the room's groaning. "...maybe a..." More groaning, creaking. Footsteps. "...honestly, Xao?"

Laughter. More fotosteps.

Tiff licked her lips, then padded gently out of the hatch. She swung it shut, as quietly as she could, then found a small nook in the corridor. By pressing her back flush to the cold metal, she was able to hide herself in some of the shadows and watch the corner, to see who exactly was coming around the corner. She had this pegged on the Cam. This was exactly the kind of bullshit the Cam would do. Failing that, maybe the same guys who had made the cyber-zombies.

Actually, scratch that. She was betting it all on the cyber-zombie guys. Those people had been weird.

Tiff tensed.

And the people came around the corner.

And she had not been ready for skintight spandex.

Not that she minded skintight spandex, considering the two men leading the way. The first was lithe and tall, with short cropped black hair and...Tiff wasn't sure what the PC way was to describe Asian eyes, because she had met, like, one Asian person in her whole life. They were pretty, though. She liked pretty eyes, and this guy had dark brown-black ones, which looked perpetually amused. He was also toned enough that the skintight clothing he wore had absolutely zero downsides. He had a belt, but he didn't have any guns or anything. Instead, he had what looked like a huge sized pager, sleek and white, hung off his hip. The man next to him was taller and thinner, more gaunt and brooding looking, with bright red hair that contrasted with his dour attitude and his narrow face. But he was still handsome. And ripped too. He was holding his pager in his hand, and it was making a soft purring noise. Like a cat.

"That's the radiation source, Captain," the redhead said, holding the pager up to the door. "This ship's incredibly primitive -- that's a fission reactor."

Tiff's brow furrowed. Ship?

"An old nuclear vessel..." The Asian guy said, rubbing his chin. He was the captain? Tiff cocked her head as the redhead hung his pager-thing off his hip. "The rocket was nuclear powered, the systems were nuclear powered -- just like the old Heinlein and Niven novels..." He grinned. "It's like walking through history."

"There's one problem, sir," the redhead said, his voice dry. "We never launched one."

The captain blinked. "Huh?"

The redhead, then, frowned. And Tiff felt the same thing. Her Hunter's instinct, dormant and sleeping, was rousing and growling at her. Snarling. Snapping. It was the same hissing voice that she had managed to convince to ignore Victor, through sheer dogged determination and gritted teeth. It was the snapping, purring sound of the first Hunter, the Hunter that had started the entire long linage of her people. It was furious. It was savage. It was dark. And it knew prey when it saw it. It knew an enemy when it saw it.

And it growled...

Vampire.

"Captain!" The redhead said -- and Tiff saw his fangs.

The Captain swung around and then snapped up his hand, aiming his finger in her direction. "Hands up!"

Tiff ran.

She had no chance against a vampire and one of his ghouls or servants or cultists or whatever -- the only shot she had was to get away and get away fast. Something hot and bright flared to her left, metal spurting into the air, a glowing, cherry red line slashed along the wall. She rolled away from it with a yelp and skirted around the corner. She was in more corridors, but there were no doors -- just more pipes and tubes along the walls and the ceiling. She rushed forward. More clattering sounds, footsteps. Around the bend came the last thing she expected or, honestly, wanted.

A werewolf.

It was in its warform -- huge, maybe nine feet tall, rippling with muscles and covered in fur. Its claws were out, and it -- no, he -- looked down his snout at her. "Listen, lady!" He said, holding up his paw, like he was a cop trying to get her to not ride her bike across the crosswalk. Tiff threw herself forward, skidding between his legs and ducking as he tried to reach after her. "She's making a break for -" He shouted. Tiff, acting on instinct, grabbed one of the tubes that ran along the ceiling, hissing as she felt the shocking chill of it. She yanked it down, using every bit of strength she had. Metal squealed and the pipe section she held came down, spraying thick gouts of hissing steam at the werewolf, who jerked away with a yip.