Hunter/Hunted - Sierra Aguirre-Stoker

Sierra settles the rifle more securely against her shoulder, takes a measured breath, and waits.   She's not one of the undead, but she's learned to control her breathing to make herself nearly unmoving, to calm her heartbeat and fire in the still pauses. She's nearly as deadly as one of them.
Her target is inside the building in front of her. He’s taken up squatter's quarters in the crumbling Spanish colonial that used to belong to an investment banker, until he and his family lost the business and most of their money in '08. Since then, a steady trail of residents have tried to move in, but the house has bled them dry in upkeep, and they've all moved on. It's been vacant for three years now.
It's the perfect base for a vampire. Already rumored to be cursed, and avoided by most.
The door opens, and a figure in a long black leather coat steps out.
Sierra waits for him to nearly round the corner in her direction before firing a single shot, center mass, that tips him over into the alley.
A good shot, but she needs to follow it up. With the right load, the right equipment, and the right person on the trigger, a vampire can be killed with a shot to the heart. But creating hollow aspen-powder loaded silver bullets (which warp enough on their own, accuracy is much better with silver-plated) is a tedious job, and guaranteeing a shot clear through the heart without a precision scope, on a moving target, are things most vigilantes simply aren't at the caliber to achieve.
She has a limited window before she has to assume someone has called in the shots fired, even if in actuality that might not have happened. She slings the rifle strap across her chest, pulls her sidearm, bolts into the alley, and places another bullet into the vamp's forehead. There’s no sense getting herself bitten if the vamp is still semi-mobile. That will keep him down long enough for her to finish the job.
In one fluid motion, she draws her stake and drives it home.
Gross.
This guy’s only been undead less than a year, so the corpse doesn’t crumble into dust. It just goes through nine months’ worth of decay in about four seconds, skin shriveling, features sinking, dark blood dripping out onto the dirt.
She hears doors and shutters slamming, and a strange sibilant hissing. He wasn’t alone in that house. She’d been told he didn’t have a coven of his own, but clearly, he had someone. She’s no longer the hunter. She’s become the hunted.
By someone far more likely to actually find her than whatever police unit might be responding to the scene.
She leaves the stake in the body (it’s already obviously a vigilante kill, and she was wearing gloves the whole time) and runs.
The hiss becomes a screech of rage as Sierra bursts out of the alley into the street where she’d parked her car. She’s already unslung her rifle and tosses it through the open back window. A perk of being a vigilante hunter in Texas is that having visible weapons on your person or in your vehicle is just a cultural thing. Most likely, no one who happened to glimpse her will actually remember seeing her with the rifle, any more than they would remember seeing someone wearing cowboy boots.
She turns the engine over just as a faint siren sounds in the distance. She’s had plenty of practice eluding the cops on these streets, and with far less lead time, so she’s none too concerned about doing it again, even if that is a response to the shots fired.
What she is worried about is the dark shape that explodes from the alley in a terrifyingly swift leap, locking onto the bumper of the car as she floors the accelerator and kicks up a shower of gravel and sand. The car squats and jolts, struggling with the extra and badly distributed weight on the rear end, and Sierra whips it sideways, hoping to dislodge her unwanted passenger.
There’s a teeth-aching screech of claws on metal, as the vamp attempts to get purchase on the trunk, but Sierra keeps the battered Gran Fury fishtailing until she reaches the first corner.
When she swings the turn, there’s another terrible screech, part tearing metal, part angry vampire, as the creature loses its grip and is flung free, taking a chunk of the bumper with it. Sierra can hear the rest of the loosened metal rattling on the street behind her.
She’ll ditch the car in a couple blocks; the vigilantes work hand in hand with a chop shop she knows well, given her mom’s racer buddies used to be part of both its supply and demand. This car will be nothing but parts by morning, so even if the vamp or any passersby could ID it, they’ll have no trail to follow.
She shakes off the eerie memory of the gleaming red eyes focused on her, and the far more terrifying one of watching the back of her car torn apart in the rearview mirror without any glimpse of what was doing it, and pushes the pedal to the floor.