Thunder crashed and, for a moment, the buildings were thrown into stark relief. The darkness lay thick and close, the fierce electrical storm knocking out street lights and blocking the gentle light of the moon. Wind screamed through the city, and loitered outside foals’ windows, moaning as ghoulishly as it could. It should have been raining. It wasn’t raining, but it was one of those nights when it really should have been raining.

In the darkness, a ghost-white shadow, arrogantly defying gravity (and optics), scaled the sheer side of the Canterlot apartment block. Hoof over hoof, she dragged herself up. A warm, lethargic satiety had replaced the predatory hunger of an hour before, and the climb was taxing both her muscles and her agility. In all honesty, Vinyl was starting to regret not taking the stairs. An ache was building in her shoulders, and she could feel a wobble starting to build in her legs. Her front was starting to rub raw in patches, where it was being dragged harshly over the rough concrete facade. Were she not supremely confident in her awesome power, she might even have despaired of completing her ascent before her strength gave out. As it was, she knew that she would collapse gratefully into her bed the moment she had slipped silently in through her window. By this point, however, the climb down would be worse than the remaining climb up. On top of that, her original reason for the choice still stood; she couldn’t possibly let her poor, innocent roommate see her come slinking home after feeding, a blood-soaked monster of the night. The respectable, proper, and innocently naive mare would probably die of fright. No, she had to keep on with this route. With a moaning grunt, she reached out for the next window-ledge. The predatory silhouette dragged on up through the night.

Eventually, finally, she reached her room. Pulling herself up to sit on the ledge, she lent against her window for a while, enjoying the cool press of the glass on her side, and gulping down frigid air. As a chill so cold that it almost burned scoured her nose and lungs, her scrapes and muscles bloomed with a bruised heat. It was far from an ideal end to the night, but her hunt had gone flawlessly, her secret was undiscovered, and she was home safe. She allowed herself a slight wolfish grin of satisfaction. Once her breathing had returned to normal, she sat up and wrapped the window’s handle in her magic, then twisted it open. Or, rather, she tried to twist it open. Then she tried again. Then she pressed her face back against the glass and gazed, unfocused, through her closed blinds. Finally, she began to mumble.

“You idiot. You bucking idiot. It’s locked, and you can’t see the key, and you can’t get in. And you’re going to have to climb all the way back down and use the bucking stairs, like you should have done in the first bucking place. Buck.”

Vinyl craned her head back to plot her route of descent. The moment her weight shifted, however, she felt her guts drop and the empty air start to tug at her back, shrieking in anticipation. She slammed herself back against the window, hammering and scraping against it with her hooves. “Buck! Oh, buck, Tavi, help! It’s so bucking high up!”

After hardly a minute of desperate screaming, the blind drew back to reveal a thoroughly unimpressed earth pony.

Author's Note

I started trying to write an OctaScratch sadfic (that ship being what brought me to Fimfiction in the first place, and why deliver long-overdue promised updates when you can just start yet another story, amirite?), but decided that I have nowhere near the talent to do it justice, and that I'd do a bog-standard OctaScratch vampire thang instead. That was four months ago to the day as of when I'm writing this.

But, hey, 170~ish words a month. Looks like I've finally broken out of my laziness.