Chapter Text
The first few days following Laszlo's death had been trying, as his body learned to adapt to its new needs and limitations. Not being an idiot, he had the very obvious down quickly, and knew about his new sanguinary diet and that he would perish in sunlight. But he still struggled with the way his blood caught fire whenever he called to the Lord (the Cravensworth family was famously irreligious, but when one had been beseeching God and His angels during climax since one was thirteen, it was a difficult habit to break) and the tedious hours spent waiting for darkness to fall. Lovemaking, while incredibly exhilarating with his new vampire mistress, could only occupy a man for so long before he yearned for the coffee house and the theater.
Crouched on the floor, Laszlo drew the last thin trickle of blood from the victim's neck through his teeth and looked up. The beautiful creature responsible for his death was stark naked, perched on the edge of the bed and watching him, her chin in her hand and a small, inscrutable smile on her face.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I feel like your prey when you do that."
Nadja's smile widened, the candlelight casting weird and flickering shadows across her face. "No longer. Blood of my blood; kin of my kin; all that rubbish."
"This poor fellow can't say the same." Laszlo hefted the carcass over his shoulder, grunting in surprise at the relative lightness, and nearly losing his balance. Being a man of education and means, he had never been particularly bothered with accumulating physical strength, and he still was getting used to the newfound power thrumming in his undead body. She had killed this man somewhere out in the streets in the early hours of the night, seemingly unwilling to wait for Laszlo to join her on the hunt. It was fine by him, frankly; he'd hesitated to strike the last time she'd led him to a victim, and he worried he'd do it again.
Nadja chuckled, then squinted at him with penetrating and unblinking eyes. Her dark hair spilled over her shoulder and he glanced at the pale flesh of her throat. "You are just going to toss him out the window?"
Laszlo paused. "That's an option?" he said, but the look on Nadja's face told him that was a test and he'd just failed. He grabbed his hat and quickly added, "'course not, my darling. I shall deposit him in the river, as you sensibly taught me."
Nadja only nodded, but a muscle in his breast still spasmed in a feeble attempt to stir his dead heart. If he were human, that simple nod of assent would bring him to his knees in joy. Instead, he smiled and leapt out the window, bounding across the rooftops toward the Thames with the corpse over his shoulder.
Thankfully, his flat was situated not too far from the river. Not that a longer journey would tire him out, of course, but he was still wary of traveling too far from the protection of his maker. 'Just a baby,' Nadja had called him, and though this rankled him, Laszlo had to admit he was still unsure if he could handle himself alone should something go awry. He would never say this out loud, obviously, but he recognized it all the same.
The pale orange moon was only a sliver of light against the muddy, dark blue sky; instead, the night was primarily illuminated by the unctuous halos of the street lamps, struggling to be seen through the haze. Laszlo could taste the grime and smoke on the air, made worse by his heightened vampire senses, and was not looking forward to the exciting additional smells he would find at street level.
Finding a place to dump the body required some thought. When he'd watched Nadja do it, she had simply tossed the corpses in the river with seemingly little attention to who had been around. He wasn't sure if it was some kind of mass hypnosis or pure dumb luck, but they'd never been stopped and he never read anything about bodies being fished from the river around their hunting grounds. But Laszlo was being cautious; he very much wanted to feel that pleasant twitch in his heart muscle again, which required this to go as smoothly as possible. He needed to avoid the soldiers at the Savoy, but if he went further upriver, he would surely be recognized by the coveys and their patrons. Although, he thought, perching on a parapet, perhaps he could make this poor sod into a convincing victim of excessive drink.
Adjusting the corpse into a more amiable position with their arms interlocking at the shoulders, Laszlo alighted to the cobblestone and pretended—quite well, he thought—to be merely helping a friend who'd gotten too far into his cups as he strode down crowded street. He was right on all counts: no one thought anything of the limp figure he was assisting, even when the ladies waved and the gentlemen winked, and he proceeded unmolested through the crowd.
These few blocks of the West End had once been his entire world, day and night blurring into an endless saturnalia of sex and drink, all paid from his father's loathsome coffers. He had very infrequently been sober in these streets, so he was surprised when he had no real difficulty finding the stairs leading down to the river.
He gently lowered the body, watching as the man's pale face disappeared under the blackness of the water. If he'd been asked a week hence about disposing of a corpse, he wouldn't have been able to fathom it. He'd had fascinating conversations with resurrectionists and had even been allowed to dissect a corpse or two by friends at the surgeon's college, but the disposal bit had been, in his mind, the work of someone else. A person more suited to working with his hands. Now, though, he supposed that kind of person would have to be him. It was one thing to neatly incinerate a medical cadaver at the college. Finding a way to dispose of a bloodless murder victim was something else entirely.
To avoid being recognized, now decidedly without an inebriated friend under his arm, Laszlo launched himself into the air as a bat and wheeled back over the depraved streets of his former life, back towards his flat and back towards Nadja.
When he flew through the window and resumed human form, Nadja was fully clothed and lacing up her boots. Her dress was a deep claret, so unlike the fashionable pastels of the day that Laszlo briefly wondered where she'd even gotten the fabric. He looked at her oddly and paused, unsure if he should remove his hat. "We could have gone out together if you'd have liked, my delectable dulcinea," he said slowly. "I would have liked to helped you to dress."
Nadja shook her head, smoothing out her skirts. "Do not worry so, chryso mou. I wished for you to do this on your own."
Laszlo remained with his hand stupidly on the brim of his hat, a small part of his brain working in the background to decipher the Greek epithet. "And now...?"
"And now, I must away on business. I will return overmorrow."
Laszlo balked. "You—by yourself, you mean?"
"Yes, by myself," she said, her wrinkled brow telling him that he once again misspoke. Shit, but this woman wore contempt like others slathered their faces in lead. He must have looked distressed, because her expression soon softened and she drifted closer. "It's very boring business. You would kill yourself to escape the boringness."
"Tedium," Laszlo supplied, taking her pale hand and planting a kiss on the palm. He wondered if he looked as wan as she; he hadn't seen himself in the mirror since he'd died, and only had a vague idea of how he now looked. In fact, he thought grimly, he would never see himself again. It was another thing he'd known awaited him in undeath, but he hadn't really considered the reality at the time. (Not that there had been much consideration involved at all. He was still unclear on how the decision-making process had actually gone, but he also wasn't very bothered.)
Nadja made a derisive sound, taking his hat and placing it atop her dark head. "Always with your fancy words. You know what I meant."
Laszlo didn't answer, just parted his lips to kiss the heel of her hand, letting his teeth graze the thin skin of her wrist.
"Laszlo," Nadja warned gently, but didn't take her hand back. "You have just fed, and he was a rather large chap. You will survive."
"Never," he mumbled around his fangs, into her flesh. "Just to consider the separation is to ache."
She laughed. "The ache in your breeches."
"Yes. The prick in my breeches and the prick in my heart. Both beg for your tender mercy."
"You are quite silly," she said, easily slipping her wrist from his grasp and patting him on the cheek. "I promise you'll be fine, louloúdi mou. You have to learn to take care of yourself. Hunt by yourself, feed yourself..."
"Perhaps I'll never learn," he said, leaning into her touch and gazing into her eyes, which were the most beautiful green he'd ever seen; the ivy climbing the walls at Eton, the rolling moors of his father's estate, the sludge in the Thames where he'd watched his supper slip beneath the waves: none could compare to the color of Nadja's eyes. He could gaze into them forever, and if he had his way, he would. "I'll only starve without you."
"If you never learn to feed yourself," Nadja said with a sneer, "I'll kill you before you starve. Such a pathetic vampire should not live, especially not the blood of my fucking blood."
Despite the cold dread creeping up his spine, Laszlo laughed. He'd been only half joking, but quickly decided to fully commit.
Nadja withdrew, sending the hat spinning onto the bed with a flick of her wrist. "This is how things will be: you'll grow into a big, strong, independent vampire. You will go on to fuck and kill so many people, and some of them will become your own little baby vampires. That's what our kind does. How we survive."
"So it's a test. The boy's first time alone without a minder."
Nadja shrugged. "If you like. I really just have something rather boring to do."
He reached for her hand again. "Less boring than wasting away in your absence—"
"Enough!" Nadja snapped, shoving him in the chest with such force that he went sprawling backwards onto the bed. "I'm not arguing about this, Laszlo. It's only two bloody days. You'll be a good boy and wait, I'll come back and teach you to kill properly, and we'll make crazy love to celebrate. Yes?"
"Yes. I'll be with you in spirit only, my darling," Laszlo wheezed, wrenching his now-crushed hat out from under his back. He didn't try to sit up, only reached toward the ceiling dramatically and recited, "'From thee I will never part, ancient person of my heart.'"
"You're calling me old?" she said, and he didn't need to see her to know her lips were drawn back over her fangs.
"Ah, it's a compliment. Well, I meant it as a compliment. An ancient, powerful vampire, as venerable as she is dangerous..."
This seemed to soothe her; she entered his field of vision from above, her demeanor relaxed. "I am powerful and dangerous and that other word. Which is why you ought to listen to my wisdom, my love." She bent to kiss him, and though Laszlo yearned to pull her down with him, he let her draw away. "Now stay put 'til overmorrow."
Without waiting for an answer, possibly to keep him from protesting yet again, Nadja transformed into a bat and, with a farewell screech, swooped out the window.
Laszlo remained on his back, looking at the canopy stretching over the bed and listening to the wall clock ticking down the seconds in the otherwise silent room. After thirty seconds exactly, he decided he was going to have to follow her.