Leroy slammed the glass down on his desk, not caring if it broke or not.  He still couldn't walk right and the scrapes on his face had a lot of people asking if he'd walked into a door and laughing.  Yes, Leroy was pissed!   He stood and looked into the full length mirror on his wall.  At six foot six and still active in the gym, he had no idea what that little bitch had done to him.  He touched the jagged scar on his right cheek and vowed that he'd make her pay.  She would pay!  He gingerly put a piece of raw steak on his eye.  Ok, maybe it was silly, but it couldn't hurt.  Well, it wouldn't hurt nearly as much as his eye, anyway.

Eliza picked up the piece of raw steak and sucked the blood from it.  Forty five seconds in the microwave oven and it was delightfully warm without being cooked.  The stars were just becoming visible out of her window.  She licked her fingers and flipped the page on the news paper.  Her eyes widened and she spat out a short curse.  There, there in front of her was the man that had accosted her that night with Mark.  Even in the grainy newspaper photo, it was clear that his face was messed up.  The girl in the other panel looked even worse than he did. She daintily took another piece of raw meat and raptly read the newspaper article.

The article described how, once again, Leroy had avoided any guilty finding on the assault and battery charges brought against him.  The witnesses had refused to testify or changed their testimony and even the plaintiff had refused to take the stand.  Eliza shook her head.  "Even here," she thought.  "Even here."

Thursday night was a slow night.  Eliza put the paper on the bar and waved to Victor.  "Vick, what can you tell me about this guy?"  Victor sauntered over and looked at the paper.  He casually dropped the bar rag over the picture and nervously looked around the room.  He picked up the rag, picked up the paper and folded it.  He handed it to her.

"That is Leroy," he said in a low voice.  "Leroy is bad news.  Leroy is death warmed over on an good day, and on a bad day he can be your own personal nightmare!"  He took a deep breath.  "My advice to you is don't even say the name."  He took the newspaper from her, turned, threw the newspaper into thrash and walked to the other end of the bar.

Sitting in the dark booth, fiddling with her drink, she knew she was going to get involved.  He'd already approached her once, and she doubted if he'd let it drop after what she'd done to him.  She could let it slide and he could choose the time and place for their next meeting or she could bring the fight to him.  She grinned, feeling a little fang start to extrude.  It wasn't her style to let anything sit and the more she thought about him, the more angry she got.

Leroy smiled and wondered about her.  She frequented three different clubs and it seemed she was likely to leave with a man or a woman.  She'd only left with a regular John a few times, but she had left with the same one three times, the same day each week.  She was definitely a working girl, but she sure had strange habits.  His people had talked to the bartenders in each club and they all denied that she was working there.  One of the bartenders had gone as far as to tell them to leave her alone.  He hadn't know who he was talking to, but his affection for her had been obvious.  Leroy looked at the picture that had been taken of her.  The light was poor and the shot was out of focus, or so it seemed. 

They'd tried to find where she lived but no one had been able to follow her.  With her dark clothing and proclivity for the night, she'd leave the bar and almost vanish.  They didn't want to alert her to the fact she was being watched, and staying back out of sight, made her almost impossible to shadow.  She was a shadow, is how one operative had described her.  He'd been concerned she was a professional spook of some sort.  Leroy had laughed and told him she was a professional, all right, but not a spook!

He looked at the picture and wondered.  She'd really messed him up and no one in his entire life had ever taken him down that easily.  If fact, since grade school, no one had taken him down at all.  He'd reached six foot in the sixth grade and grew another six inches before he quit school in the tenth grade.  There was no doubt about it: Leroy had a mean streak and he'd learned to use it to instill fear and compliance in those around him.  He was a bad, bad man.

A small protection racket had grown into various profit making enterprises with Leroy directing and raking in the money.  The trail of broken bodies and death spread around him like slime, but he was clever and through layers of organization, sheer intimidation and bribery, managed to stay out of jail and have his business continue to thrive.

Now there was Eliza.  Was she a threat or a thorn?  He turned the picture in his hands and remembered the pain in his groin and remembered crawling out of the alley with blood streaming down his face.  He'd finally called for help on his cell phone.  The only thing he could think to say was that he'd been the victim of a hit and run.  Him!  A victim.  The thought galled him but what she'd done to him galled him even more. 

He threw the picture on his desk and stabbing it with his forefinger hissed, "You're going to wish you'd never been born, bitch!"

How easy it was with the computer.  She'd searched local newspaper articles for the past five years and probably knew as much about Leroy and his operation as anyone alive.  She grinned a fang filled grin.  Now she'd get information first hand.  She could get street buzz that no cop would ever get near.  With her abilities, sensitivity, sex and booze, she'd know if that bastard was going to scratch his butt!  She was going to make his life a living hell before she finished him. 

Two sharp slaps sounded in the dark alley followed by a low muffled whimpering.  Eliza glided forward to see what was happening.  The man put his left hand on the woman's throat, inserted a stiletto into the neck of her blouse, cut and ripped the blouse and her bra from her body.  The man smiled as her large breasts spilled out.

"Marsha," he said, "Leroy told you that you wanna play, you gotta pay.  He told you that you need protection."  He flicked her left breast with the tip of the knife, opening a small bleeding wound.  "See?  Leroy was right.  You could get hurt." 

The smell of blood and fear hit Eliza like a wall.  She stopped in her tracks to regain control of herself.  She was wearing skin tight black jeans, a form fitting black t-shirt and short black boots.  To obscure her pale arms, she was wearing a light cape, more decorative than functional, but it did the intended job.  She gotten her long hair bobbed into a page boy.  With the new hair cut and her petite figure, a casual glance wouldn't reveal is she was male or female. She liked the androgynous look.  Somehow it made her feel really sexy, although sex was not on her mind a the moment.

Marsha's pale blue eyes were wide and scared, her mascara had smeared from her tears. She grasped the wrist of the hand at her throat with both hands, trying to keep him from choking her any more, but her eyes were focused on the knife he was running over her breasts.  "Please don't cut me," she whined.  "I'll give you anything you want.  You can do anything you want.  We can have a real good time."  She tried to sound believable and she tried to smile.

"You have got to be kidding me," he snarled.  "I hate holding your sweaty throat!"  He deftly reversed the knife, drew his hand back and began a downward strike to her neck.  Eliza moved at full speed.  She learned to use her strength and speed, not depending on anything that would pit her weight against a larger opponent's strength.  She had positioned herself to grab his wrist with her left hand and brace herself against the brick wall with her right hand.  Using her strength, she stopped the blade in mid air.  He was totally surprised but he'd survived by accommodating to surprises. 

He hit her with a clubbing blow with his left hand, injuring her shoulder and knocking her to her knees.  Freeing his knife hand from her grasp, he struck a backhand blow that drove the knife into her body just below her right breast, a little to the right.  She grunted with pain but grabbed the offending hand with her left hand and rotated it backwards.  She heard bones crack and he landed on his back with a satisfying thud, moaning in pain. 

They struggled to their feet and faced each other.  Eliza's fangs had fully deployed and the grimace of pain was on her face.  She felt a choking sensation, a tickling at the back of her throat and she violently coughed.  A spray of blood blew from her and covered her assailant.  She looked at the pain in her side and saw the stiletto protruding from her rib cage.  She grasped it with her left hand and pulled the bloody blade from her body.  Holding it at arms length in front of her, almost using the blade like a gunsight to focus on the man facing her, she spat, "Bastard!" as blood pumped from the wound in her chest.

His right arm hung limply and he was cradling it with his left hand.  Eliza took a step towards him, but he panicked, turned and ran from the alley.  He'd covered a half a block when he realized that he was running towards a bloody apparition that was snarling at him.  Turning in the opposite direction, he attempted to increase his speed.  The last thing he remembered seeing, was an open mouth filled with fangs descending towards his throat.

"What do you mean that you don't know if it was a boy or a girl?  A girl has tits, you dumb shit!" Leroy screamed.  The large man slumped in the chair.  His right arm was in a cast and his neck was covered with a heavy bandage.  He was pale and obviously weak and confused. 

"It might have been a kid," he muttered.  "It looked like a 12 year old kid!"

Leroy walked over and bent so they were nose to nose.  "You're going to tell me a 12 year old kid did this to you at one a.m. in the morning?"  He paused.  "GET REAL!"

"I dunno!  I dunno!  Maybe he's a karate expert or something!"  The man started making sniffing sounds and his shoulders were shaking. 

Leroy sat heavily behind his desk.  "I've got three men dead, two missing and you're too beat to crap to be any good.  What the hell is going on here?  Some 12 year old Kung Fu kid is taking my organization apart!"  He looked at the ceiling trying to calm himself.  In a very quiet voice he said, "Please go."  There was no response.  "Please go!" Leroy screamed, standing so quickly that his desk chair was slammed into the wall.  The man rolled out of the chair and stumbled to his knees.  Semi crawling and running he left the room.

She sat on her couch nude.  It was warm but she didn't feel like turning on the air conditioner yet.  She licked the blood from her fingers. 

YES!  She'd done it.  She'd made the front page.  "Funny," she thought.  "That slime bucket can mutilate and kill women and that's buried on page 23.  One of his lackeys stubs his toe and it makes the front page."  The front page had a picture of a heavily bandaged man with a cast on his arm.  The caption stated: Assault victim recovers.  "Bastard," she muttered.  A three quarter column bemoaned the state of crime in the city and questioned why the police weren't providing more protection for "honest" citizens.

There, she finally found it and it was on page 23.  "Ironic," she thought.  There was no picture, no write up, just a short item under "The Police Blotter" of name, age and a note, "assault victim."  A column on the same page featured a article about an interview with "Leroy," a prominent business man, philanthropist, and patron of the arts.  Eliza suppressed the urge to gag and violently threw the paper in the trash can.  "Tonight," she thought.  "Tonight!"  She felt a sexual rush.  She ran her hand up her thigh, lightly brushing herself and cupped a breast, squeezing lightly.  "I am so bad," she thought.

"I am going to make tonight special," she mused, fumbling through her closet.  Ah, she loved that skirt.  It was a slightly flared leather skirt that only went to mid thigh.  It allowed freedom of movement while showing off her shape and her legs to maximum advantage.  She selected a narrow tie belt for it.  She knew she could be needing to move freely.  She found a translucent black blouse.  She had a matching black bra but she was not going to wear that.  She giggled.  Tonight, there would be no doubt as to whether she was a boy or girl.  She'd heard the buzz on the street and the speculation.  Of course, she doubted that anyone would be telling, but he would know.  He would know!

Leroy slapped at the sharp stinging sensation.  He tried to slap, that is.  His hand had move a few inches and then stopped sharply with a metallic clank that coincided with another pain in his wrist.  "Ugh," he grunted as he tried to sit up.  He fell heavily back on the bed and blinked, trying to wake up enough to figure out what was wrong.  It was pitch dark and he couldn't see a thing.  His arms were stretched over his head at a forty-five degree angle and his legs were stretched out at a similar angle and he quickly realized that he was unable to move. 

Panic was not part of his nature.  He could feel the pillow beneath his head and could recognize the feel of his silk sheets.  His eyes were adjusting to the darkness and he could make out the dim outline of his window.  The curtains were drawn and only the faintest light leaked in around the edges of them.  The curtains were slowly drawn open and a slight figure was silhouetted against the open window.  She was standing profile to him and the bright moon revealed her breasts as if she was naked but, her face turned towards him was in impenetrable shadow. "Who the hell are you" he asked, "and what is going on here."  He twisted around and could see that he was fastened, hand and foot, by handcuffs to the bed.  "Shit!' he hissed.  "Someone it going to get their ass kicked.  Get these damn things off of me, now!"  The final word was screamed, but Eliza knew that his penthouse apartment was sound proofed. 

She drew the curtain shut again and turned on dim light in the room.  He blinked at the sudden relative brightness and squinted.  He glared at her.  She smiled and flipped the long dagger she was carrying and carefully looked as his powerful nude body.  For the first time, she could see fear on his face.  She walked over and stood next to him.  "How many women have you cut or had cut," she asked, smiling at him.  She lowered the dagger to his left nipple.  "You like having their breasts cut, don't you?"  She slashed a three inch wound, opening his nipple.  He grunted but said nothing.  Eliza smiled at him and removed her boots.  She straddled him on the bed, and leaning forward licked the blood flowing from the wound. 

She straightened and licked her lips.  "I love the taste of fear, don't you?  Of course you do," she continued without allowing him opportunity to speak.  "You know, there shouldn’t be any secrets between us.  Nothing should be between us."  She smiled and removed her blouse.  She arched her back, displaying her figure to maximum advantage.  She giggled as he stared at her and licked his lips.  "You men are all alike.  Show you a little tit and you get all horny and hard.  She slid down to his thighs and touched him. "See!" she said.  "I told you so!" 

He jerked his body trying to buck her off of him, but the handcuffs were too tight to allow that much movement.  She leaned forward and put the knife at his heart.  "You want to play," she asked grinning.  When he felt the touch of steel on his flesh he froze.  Smiling at him she opened her mouth and allowed her fangs to grow and be seen.  His eyes widened and he clenched his jaw; she could see his jaw muscles twitch. 

"We could take a lot of time with this but I'm getting bored and want to get to the good stuff."  She rolled off of the bed and stood next to him, on his right.  His eyes followed her every movement.  She bent and straightened holding a wicked, slightly inward curved knife that had a serrated edge.  She flicked her wrist, opening the knife, which locked in the open position with a solid, "snick."  Smiling at him, holding the knife up, with her left hand, she trailed her fingers down his chest, softly caressing his manhood.  She snickered as she felt his involuntary reaction.  "Enjoy it," she hissed.  "Your time is almost out.  You see, I'm going to cut it off an watch you lie there, soaking in your own blood, as you bleed to death."

He began to crack.  He strained with his full strength, trying to free his arms and legs.  She could hear the bed creak, and his face contorted into a grimace of fear and panic.  She could smell the fresh blood from his wrists and ankles.  She released her hold on his genitalia and bent to lick the blood from his left wrist.  As her hot tongue touched the jagged wounds on his wrist, he sagged, making whimpering sounds.  She straightened and smiled.  Flipping the knife to her left hand, she cupped his scrotum and fondled him.  "Aw, it's all soft and limp.  Don't you want it to get hard one last time?" she asked sweetly.  He snarled and spat at her.  Laughing, she squeezed until he arched his back and screamed in agony.  Releasing most of the pressure, she said, "Oh, I bet that hurt! I wonder if it hurts as bad having your breasts slashed?  Or as bad as having your face beat to a bloody pulp?" 

He lay gasping.  She shifted her grip and put the knife at the base of his penis.  "I'll do this nice and slow so you can enjoy it.  A man should enjoy his last moments, don't you think?."  She paused.  "I've researched this.  If shock doesn't kill you, blood loss will.  So don't you worry.  It'll be over real soon!"  He began screaming as the razor sharp serrations bit into his tender flesh.  Eliza was true to her words.  She made it last a very long time.

Mark rolled over, opened one eye and stared clock on the bed stand.  Four-thirty AM.  The low tap, tap, tap, that had awakened him continued.  Sitting up and trying to focus, he realized that someone was tapping on his door.  He groaned, and staggering to the door in his shorts, peered out of the security hole.  Opening the door,  he was face to face with Eliza.  She smiled and held up a small bottle of brandy.  Realizing she was ok, his second thought was, "Damn, she is cute with her hair cut that way!" 

She put her hands around his neck and jumped up on him, wrapping her legs around his waist.  She quickly kissed him and then leaned back.  He easily supported her weight and even half asleep, the translucent black blouse caused him to focus on her delicious breasts.  He put his arms around her, and as his hand encountered the bare flesh of her buttocks, he realized the nature of the  moist heat that was  pressing on his stomach.  He backed up, kicked the door shut and walked into the bed room.  He knelt, sitting her on the bed.  Pushing her backwards onto the bed, he lifted her dress and gave her what she wanted.  Some time later all sounds from the room ceased and they slept.