Chapter Text
There is a pang in your stomach that reminds you how long it’s been since the last time you have eaten. Winter in New York, when you are a vampire that only feeds off animals, is never easy, but you refuse to compromise your morals in the name of a quick meal. You stagger through the woods, following a faint scent of blood. You realise too late that it isn't fresh. The blood has already soaked into the snow, turning into red ice around the three dead bodies that lie on the edge of your property. You lean down to inspect them for a moment before there is a loud rustling behind you.
For a second, you panic, your hand sliding in the bloody ice before you are on your feet and hiding behind a large oak tree further in the forest. The winter has made the trees bare, but humans are loud, and you have spent centuries learning how to avoid them.
You realise a second too late that blood is still on your hand as it tightens the knot already in your stomach. You bring your hand up, watching as the red liquid drips down into the snow. You feel your fangs fight for dominance, and your tongue skims your upper lip. It would be so easy just to flick it out for a taste, something that you haven’t allowed yourself in centuries, but you refuse to give in. You chose to stop feeding off humans for a reason.
You remind yourself of this as you scrape the blood away on the bark of the tree, using the rough texture to calm you down. Once you feel like you can think again, you turn to watch them. A group of humans dressed in puffy winter coats gather around the bodies, and you internally groan at the unwanted attention that has plopped into your front yard. You think about turning away to go to another spot to find food when you smell her.
It’s vanilla mixed with something bitter, like coffee that was brewed a little too long. Despite the bitterness muffling how truly sweet she is underneath, you know that one taste would be like pure sugar to your veins.
The woman the scent belongs to enters the fray, her brown hair blowing in the wind, and that scent you’re attracted to — the vanilla mixed with bitterness — hits your nose again, followed by the floral body wash and shampoo she often uses. She dominates the scene before her, with a confidence that makes others move out of her way. Yet even from this distance, you can tell that it is all a mask for the much softer woman who hides underneath.
It takes all of your control not to step into the clearing and scoop her in your arms. You can't remember the last time you have smelled a human who could make your memories melt into nothing but desire, and right now you are too weak to keep fighting, so you turn and run as fast as you can.
Just as you turn your back, Olivia looks in your direction like a magnet trying to find its match. She blinks once, and you are already gone, but she keeps staring.
“World to Liv!” Fin calls out, clapping his hand by her ear.
“There’s someone here,” Olivia says, turning to face the other detectives. “Someone’s watching.”
“What?” Amanda frowns, her tone showing enough panic for Olivia to know who she’s not taking along with her to further investigate.
“How do you know someone’s here?” Amaro asks.
“I just get the feeling we’re being watched. Fin, with me. Amanda, Amaro, stay with the bodies and investigate the area.”
Olivia leads the way in the direction you ran off in. The urgency in her step makes the crunch of snow beneath her feet that much louder to your sensitive ears. Still, you make a clean escape, but you watch from your new hiding place as the officers continue their determined search for you, making it all the way to a small abandoned shed on the property before Olivia finally lets out a frustrated huff.
“There’s no sign of your mystery man from this point, Liv,” Fin says, holstering his weapon.
“I see that Fin,” she replies, a little frustrated. “But you saw the shoe prints. Someone was there.”
“Well, whoever it was, they’re gone now,” Fin says.
Despite the evidence that suggests you’re supposedly long gone, Olivia isn’t convinced. That eerie feeling that she’s being watched is still heavy on her shoulders, but she isn’t sure where else to look and frankly, there’s no time. She and Fin are needed back at the scene.
The idea of coming back tomorrow with more officers and even a couple of K-9 units comes to mind, but she keeps the thought to herself. A much more tempting thought suddenly pushes its way to the front of her mind: coming back later, alone, to further investigate. She isn’t sure what it’ll accomplish, since it’s possible whoever she saw has long been scared off. But this serial killer and rapist has claimed eight people already. She needs to close this case.
Although you haven’t needed to breathe for centuries, your breath still hitches as she turns around, and her gaze unknowingly lingers in your direction. Her big brown eyes immediately draw you in, as does the pain that sets so heavily in her gaze. It’s clear there’s a lot on her mind and arguably more on her soul. It’s more baggage on a single human than you’ve sensed in a long time, and as you watch her and the man, Fin, walk away, you find a small part of yourself hoping that maybe you’ll cross paths with her again.
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As the cloudy day turns into night, the moon occasionally peaking out from behind the lingering clouds, you find your thoughts keep drifting back to the brown-haired woman. To ‘Liv,’ as you overheard Fin call her. The way he said it suggests it’s a nickname, likely for the name ‘Olivia’ but you can’t be certain. You don’t get around many people anymore — and haven’t for many, many decades. Your friends are few and far between — so you’re a little outdated on names.
While your mind stays busy with the thoughts of this woman, your other senses focus on the quiet night you’ve decided to sit out and enjoy from the comforts of a sturdy tree branch roughly twenty feet off the ground. Being in such a secluded area means the only noises you often hear are those of animals. Rabbits, deer, owls, squirrels. It’s all peaceful sounds to you, and sometimes you like to imagine what the different animals are doing — or even what they’re thinking — if you can’t see them. Tonight is no different. You can hear a few deer nearby, their feet crunching softly and slowly in the snow. They’re not hurried, knowing they can take their time to move to wherever they want to settle down for the night.
But then you hear a sound that’s out of place. A sound you recognise from earlier: human feet. Except this time, they seem a little slower than earlier, almost as if they know they shouldn’t be out here alone. When you smell the scent of the human, it feels like everything stops.
Vanilla and something bitter.
She came back.
But she’s come back more nervous than before. You can sense the fear she carries, hear it in the way her blood is pumping faster in her veins. It’s intoxicating and forces you to do something you haven't done in years—you speak to her.
“You’re either really brave, really curious, or really stupid.”
She doesn't jump; her years of detective work have carved away the normal alarm responses, but her dominant hand goes to pull out her gun, her flashlight pointing in the general direction of your voice. She aims it at the tree ten feet off from where you are. You giggle, and she moves too far in the opposite direction.
“Show yourself!” She calls out. Her voice is level, but the fear is written in the thrumming of her blood in her veins.
Olivia hears a soft thump of feet coming in contact with the ground, merely feet from where her gun and light are pointed and she moves them both to aim at you. You hiss as the light hits your eyes and you squint, holding your hand up to block the light.
“Turn it off,” you snap, blinking quickly in a poor attempt to get your eyes to stop burning from the difference in light.
“Who are you? What are you doing out here?”
“My name is Y/N, and you happen to be on my property.”
Even with your hand blocking most of her flashlight, you see her gun lower a little.
“Now, can you put your weapon away, please? I have no intentions of harming you as long as you don’t try to harm me.”
‘Not that you could,’ you think to yourself. Neither the gun in her hand nor her raw strength could ever do any deadly harm to you. But you don’t want to have to be forced to hurt her in any way.
“Not until you tell me your involvement with the three victims my team and I found today.”
“I had nothing to do with those bodies,” you reply sincerely. “I was doing a perimeter walk of my property when I heard you and your team and saw the bodies.”
“If you had nothing to do with them, then did you maybe hear or see who did?” Olivia asks, slowly holstering her weapon.
She lowers the flashlight so you can lower your hand, and she steps closer to you. You step back in response, intent on keeping distance between you and her. You may be full now, but there is something about her smell that wants to override any rational thought.
This distance gives you more room to think, and you take a moment to reflect on the past day, looking for anything out of the ordinary. There’s a period of time you can recall when you heard some noises you couldn’t immediately identify as what made them.
“There was a time early this morning that I heard some unusual noise, but there’s a lot of animals around here.”
“Did you see anything?”
You shake your head. “No. Didn’t get to the area fast enough to see who or what it was.”
Olivia scoffs, and suddenly, that vanilla scent that made everything stop earlier is almost completely consumed by the bitter smell. It’s clear she doesn’t believe you, and you feel the sudden urge to try and change her mind. You are distracted, however, as your nose crinkles, and she moves closer again, quicker than before.
“I find that hard to believe,” she replies. “You out-ran my partner and me pretty easily earlier.”
You shrug. “I know the area. Now, do you maybe want to come inside? It’s awfully cold out tonight.”
“Says the one poorly dressed for the weather.”
Olivia isn’t entirely sure why, but she reaches out to touch you. Her hands get within millimetres of making contact when you quickly pull away, but the closeness was all she needed to feel how cold you are. It radiates off of you like the air from a freezer when someone first opens its door. You hear her breath hitch from this new information, her gaze looking you over from head to toe.
The whole time she’s been here, she hasn’t gotten a good look at your features. She’s curious, sure, but she suddenly feels an urgency to get away from here. She’s not afraid — at least, not any more afraid than she had been when she first arrived — but her brain is thinking of all the things she needs to research, the comparisons to crime scene photos she needs to make.
You can sense her mind is buzzing with activity. You can hear it in your own ears and feel the way your mind seems to rattle a little. You shake your head briefly to try to get rid of the feeling.
“Can you be quiet?” You ask, reaching behind you to touch the tree you bumped into when you moved away from her.
Olivia blinks, visibly confused. “I didn’t say anything.”
She suddenly reaches for her pocket and pulls out her phone. You don’t have any technology but you recognize the modern technology when you see it from your occasional trip into the city.
“I gotta go,” she says. “It’s late, and I have work to do.”
“Can I walk you to your car?” You ask. “There’s an active wolf pack nearby. I heard them a couple of hours ago.”
“I think I can manage, but thanks.” She says, turning to walk away.
Despite her decline for an escort, you secretly follow her back to her car and stay out of range of its headlights, watching as she drives away into the night.
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Olivia’s kitchen counter looks like a crime scene.
Photos from today’s crime scene in the woods and all of the other scenes are scattered across the entire surface, her laptop sitting in the middle of the chaos with several tabs worth of research opened on it. She’s been at this for hours, closely studying the bruise patterns and bite marks found on the victims. Whenever she needs a break from that, she reads the research about vampires pulled up on her computer.
Olivia has never been one who was particularly interested in the concept of vampires and werewolves. She always thought they were complete fiction, simply the product of someone’s imagination. But after reading all of this research and various articles, she has no choice but to admit that vampires are real.
And there’s one in New York.
But you’re not the killer she’s looking for, she concludes after comparing the hand bruises and bite marks on all of the victims.
“She really was telling the truth,” she sighs to herself as she puts away the photos and shuts off her laptop.
She decides at that moment that she’s going to go back to see you. She’s certain you know more than what you initially told her, but you are refusing to cooperate because of how she treated you. You’re one of the best leads she has, the only one who could potentially describe the person who dumped the bodies there. And she’ll try to learn more about you. Maybe showing an interest in you and what you are will help her build a rapport. It certainly has nothing to do with the fact that she’s incredibly interested in you in a way that she hasn’t been interested in anyone else since Elliot left without a word.
As she climbs into bed a little later that night, her eyes heavy with exhaustion, it’s the dim image of you in her mind that helps her drift off to sleep.