Chapter Text
June 2020
Somewhere Outside Olympic National Park
"I told you, Sam, California's a bust these days." Michael ran his hand back through his hair, then rubbed his face to wipe away the sensation of the mask he'd removed to strap on his helmet. "There's nothing there."
Apparently they were on speaker, though, because Allan's deep, congested voice saw fit to argue:
"A bust for you, maybe. We had intel from several operatives deep in LA last year, and they haven't reported back since August."
Michael rolled his eyes, picturing Edgar vigorously nodding with beefy arms crossed over his chest.
"Uh-huh." He knew the skepticism in his voice was as good as a red flag to a bull, but couldn't help it nonetheless. "Your 'operatives' went missing last summer, and you're just bothering me about it now? You already wasted my time with this Washington State bullshit--"
Some rustling and a series of beeps seemed to indicate that Sam had wrestled the phone back, and when he spoke his voice was discreetly hushed. Must've left the Three Stooges behind, with Charley as Moe.
"They getting stir-crazy?" he asked.
"You know it," Sam said fondly. "Edgar's trying to convince me vampires are faking the panini, fer Chrissakes."
"So I can come home?"
Sigh, crackling down the line.
"It's not total bullshit--the L.A. thing, not corona. I never liked those guys, but total radio silence is weird."
"Maybe they found Xenu," Michael cracked. It wouldn't be the first time their little operation (not so little anymore, with occasional connections from one coast to the other) had been a stepping stone that ended in a compound. Edgar and Allan had been worn down to tolerability by years of Sam's inexplicably patient influence, but the type willing to listen to their pitch for more than 30 seconds wasn't often that refined. "Seriously, Sammy, do you really need me on this one?"
"LA's a great place for your career options. You've been dealing with beautiful assholes who only come out at night for 30 years.”
"Ha." They'd stepped around the subject of David and his boys for a few years, at first out of some pretense that Michael and Star's relationship was going anywhere once they'd crawled out of their mutual foxhole. Then Sam had gone away to the fancy liberal arts school he'd gotten himself into, and come home with a stranger tagging along behind him.
There are other vampires!
Of course there were. Michael had just thought they would all agree not to know it, to pretend Sam's weird little prepper friends were the product of one nightmare summer they'd all just as soon forget, even if his mom hadn't given up on coaxing in feral strays. Star and Laddie were still part of the family, and Michael thought they had all agreed to give the gravestones, literal and metaphorical, a wide berth.
Charley Brewster ("closet case extraordinaire," as Sam had referred to him privately at first) had not made this agreement. He was a twitchy kid five years Sam's senior but a year behind him in studies--apparently his ex-girlfriend writing a term paper about him for her abnormal psych class had made his last school “a bad fit.” Michael had spent his life being described with uncomfortable euphemisms, so he couldn't say he didn't sympathize.
The fact that Charley was crazy (Michael knew things were serious when he said as much and, instead of laughing, Sam suddenly gave him an earful) didn't help with the vampire thing. Mostly because he'd refused to admit that he'd apparently lived next door to one.
“There's no way this guy was just a serial killer, Mike. I've gotta convince him.” Sam had said over the phone in his second semester.
“Isn't that why he has a shrink?” Michael had still been in Santa Carla then, sitting on the porch with a chunky cordless under his chin and a joint in his hand, chilling out after his shift at the local garage.
“No, that's because before the meds he thought a TV host was an actual vampire hunter.” Contacting B-movie star Peter Vincent, who swore up and down that the vampirism had been extremely real, had been Sam's first port of call. Unfortunately, Sam was proving to have a nose like a bloodhound. “Something's not right. I need the guys to have a look at him.”
Sam and Charley had barely been on speaking terms at the time, most of their interactions confined to sniping while Sam worked the library job required for one of his many scholarships (which he'd lost and had to start from scratch when he switched schools and majors halfway through; another thing Charley owed him for, even if Sam didn't keep score). And yet, he'd come back to Santa Carla over the summer with Charley in tow.
While Michael did make a token attempt to hide it in person, he resented Charley for dragging his brother back into the stake-slinging muck. All the barbs they'd started out throwing had gotten Charley stuck in Sam's side and he'd stayed, because Sam was a collector just like Mom. And Sam had paid the price for that, too.
They bullshitted a while longer, Sam sharing what little new gossip existed when the whole world was locked up inside and Michael half-heartedly protesting that 51 was too damn old to ride down the coast all by his lonesome. Sam, as always, struck an obnoxious balance between kindly not acknowledging that the problem wasn't the distance but the memories, and campaigning yet again for Michael to spend time in the Golden State.
(He used to think he couldn't hate anywhere more than Arizona.)
"C'mon, Sam--"
"Mike." He sounded serious now, like when one of his students was in trouble. "You know I'd be there if I could. Hell, the crutches might even be easier to travel with right now since nobody’s in the airports, but--"
"It's fine," Michael interrupted to avoid hearing the rest of that low blow. Just because Sam had decided to forgive how bad Michael and Charley fucked up between the two of them, it didn't mean Michael had to agree, and Sam knew it. "I'll call you when I find a hotel. Tell Mom I love her."
The beep of his Bluetooth wasn't anywhere near as satisfying as slamming down the receiver of a phone, but it worked in a pinch.
It was his own fault. There was some fundamental lack in him that kept him circling and waiting for a guiding hand. He'd never joined the team, because it might give his dad time to look for a new target. Never applied to college, because Mom needed help and would never have asked for it. Never had a dream, because maybe deep down he was a dumb jock with nothing to offer but a half-decent lay. James Dean, eat your heart out.
He pulled his visor down, eyes stinging from the bright sunlight, and drowned his thoughts in the roar of the Triumph's engine. It was worthy of Theseus at this point--new wheels, new engine, new carburetor, more storage and a reupholstered seat. He worked on it whenever he wasn't riding, and it had lasted longer than every girlfriend he'd had since Star (half a dozen in almost 30 years, not including one-night stands. Lila had lasted as long as six months). The shine tended to come off his "damaged goods" appeal when his brooding aura turned into unreturned phone calls and a disinterest in meeting the folks. That was fine.
He had people who needed him, and that was (had to be) enough. Look at what had happened when he'd tried to walk away--no matter how much Sammy sticker-bombed those crutches or asked Michael to trick out the chair he kept around for bad days, there was still a missing fucking chunk from his brother's leg that would never heal, skin twisted and muscles atrophied out of all possibility of weight-bearing. Michael hated remembering Sam’s dipshit friend-turned-brothers, the “fearless vampire killers,” crying their eyes out in the ER while he tried to spin an explanation to the nurses, because someone had to be the adult. Not that Michael had looked it.
They all carried scars.
***
Santa Carla never changed--at least, it hadn't any other time Michael had been forced to pass through and check on their AirBnB.
Same boardwalk. Same tourists. Fewer MISSING posters, but same struggle to climb out of the socioeconomic hole it fell into back in 1906. Same salty decay smell, dead fish and seaweed mixing with ocean breeze.
This time, though...
He tugged his mask (blue sky with glittery clouds, leftover scraps from a quilt Mom made ages ago) higher over his nose. He liked the feeling of anonymity, even in this eerily sparse version of a summer night. Locals milled carefully six feet apart, taking advantage of the excuse of "open air" to get out of their houses.
Pretzel; corndog; plastic cup of beer; hit off his weed pen (how times did change, there); with that, he was almost able to ignore the weirdness of it all. Resorts were supposed to be timeless.
And finally, just like he'd known would happen, he glimpsed a blonde head making its way through the crowd over a battered black moto jacket. The man--the real one setting off this slide into hallucination--had a manbun-undercut combo and skinny jeans, and the way he stood all alone in his six-foot bubble made Michael's chest hurt. God knew, being back here, he wasn't surprised. He pretended to tap his Bluetooth earpiece and waited.
Hello, Michael. The apparition (maskless) grinned with fewer pointed teeth than he'd gotten used to. They walked apace, separated but linked, along the boardwalk to the pier. It'd be quiet there. Fewer stares.
"The hair's new." Michael leaned on the railing, pulled his mask off, and took a long hit from his vape. Euphoric strain, his ass. He'd never changed David's hair before--that peroxide mullet had greeted him sitting on top of t-shirts, mesh, and funeral suits, always untouched. Maybe this counted as growth.
He chanced a longer look and choked. David was shaped like the stuff of his old nightmares, in the early nights when he and Star still thought holding each other together was the same as happily ever after. The holes in his chest were gone, but Michael could see thick scar tissue peeking over the collar of a battered tank top. One eye was permanently hellish, bruise-toned and crusted and bloody-broken around the iris.
"You look like shit," Michael said when his cough subsided.
His inner David seemed pleased at the reaction; he'd looked almost petulant before, waiting to be acknowledged. "You look old."
Michael laughed. “No, I don't.”
The hallucination gave Michael the once-over: the curls that had only a small handful of silver classing up the temples, the body that should have started to soften even with Michael's almost religious devotion to the weight bench at gyms in every city nationwide. The hint of a beleaguered smile line. Touché.
If this little regression was heading toward a full breakdown, he might as well ride it out. "At least Sam isn't bugging me about settling down anymore. Can't exactly do that with you following me around."
“Poor baby,” David said, dripping sarcasm. “Is it hard knowing you’re gonna be alone forever? There's still an easy way out for a coward like you.”
(He’d always known how to twist the knife, even before he was just a manifestation of Michael’s misplaced guilt.)
Michael toasted the horizon with his clear plastic cup, watching the waves come in black-and-white under the moon.
“Nah. I have you, don’t I?”
David didn’t answer for long enough that Michael turned to see whether he’d vanished, but he was still there, staring like the creep he always had been.
“You’re the one who left, Michael.”
Mi-chael. Those two syllables were his most persistent haunting; no one had ever used his name like David, with a casual familiarity bordering on possession, and at his worst moments he’d been forced to admit he didn’t really want to forget that. Didn’t want to lose this scrap of a version of a memory.
"Let's skip past this part," he said. "I've got too much coming up in L.A. to beat myself up about you again."
"L.A.?" David repeated.
"You'd think if my brain were going to show me shit, it'd bother to keep up." Michael snorted and scrubbed his face with his hand. "Guess I'm more tired than I thought."
When Michael looked back at David, the shade of a vampire was leaning against the railing and staring intently like a video put on pause.
"I'm still waiting," David said; Michael thought he saw a grin pass over his face.
Michael put his palms over his eyes and tipped his head back.
"Fuckin’ Sam. Made me cut through here and set off the curse again just to go see some dumbass prepper who probably shot himself in the nuts."
"We keep in pretty good touch, huh? Through the ‘curse’?" The gloves David was borrowing for this fantasy didn't suit him like his old ones had, but there was an undeniable pleasure to watching the tendons beneath flex.
"Except that time with the shrink," Michael admitted. "Felt kinda lonely."
“I’ll bet.” The one good eye was clear-blue and solemn, and the pull of scarring made the hint of cruelty in David’s upper lip more pronounced. The tip of his pink tongue flicked out, seeming to taste the air like a lizard’s. “Nice knowing I’m wanted.”
Wanting you was never the problem, Michael didn’t say aloud; it didn’t actually matter.
When he looked up again David was gone, because he’d never been there at all.
*
The hallucination arriving nice and early was almost comforting. If Santa Carla was only home to Michael’s own threadbare ghosts, he could handle that.
The AirBnB reminded him of taxidermy, a pretty skin stretched over the bones of Grandpa’s house to make it look real and alive. The management company was shitting bricks over the sudden income loss caused by the pandemic, but Michael was honestly more disappointed at the vacancy because it meant he had no excuse to camp out on the beach or hit up the Motel 6.
The walls were plaster and shiplap now, with just enough of Grandpa’s trophies scattered around to suggest that a hunting lodge had somehow rolled down a mountain onto the coast. The sheets were hotel-white under crisp comforters, and the wifi password on the chalkboard was “L1fes-A-B3ach”.
Even the air conditioning was better than it had been when the Emersons had lived there.
He did all the normal grown-up shit: checked the locks and upkeep, tossed his laundry in the wash, set up his personal hotspot and VPN. Probable scam or no, he'd learned the cost of underestimating Sam's tips beforehand rather than ragging on them after.
There were vampires everywhere; of course there were. He just hated the idea that the Emersons had actually managed, yet again, to find their trail. His family’s reasonable, selfless determination to protect the world wasn’t something Michael had the energy to share, but the desire to at least protect them after all his failures was enough to keep him looped in for now.
He wondered, when he was lying to himself, where his own passion and conviction had gone; when he was drunk enough for clarity, he knew. It wasn’t complicated.
And when he finally accessed the files Sam had sent his way (two days ago, before he’d even agreed to come here--asshole), he was forced reluctantly to admit that the pattern the presumably-late “Jacob” and his posse had found wasn’t complicated, either. Downright crystal clear, actually: a bunch of cocky dipshits stumbled on the real thing and got their asses handed to them. But the data since their disappearances was... Weird. Still pointing to vampires, but a different impact, and it started well before March.
It made him itchy, seeing the rate of killings drop and rise. Made him wonder what was happening there, whether there was some kind of struggle happening between or inside the targets, and it made him want to move. When pacing from the kitchen to the den didn’t help, he went outside to the carport. He’d planned to stay tomorrow night, too, to recover from the fatigue he could feel building, but the smoothed-over veneer was prickling against his skin. He just needed to look at his bike, remind himself he could leave if it all got too much.
The Triumph, when he arrived, was already occupied. David still had his new haircut, but his outfit was an eerie shade of what he'd worn when they met, like a thrifted approximation. Santa Carla never could keep the dead quiet.
"The hell have you been doing to my bike?" This time David sounded more offended than he ever had about Michael and Star.
"Thirty years of free maintenance. I'll be sure to send the bill." Shit. He definitely shouldn't be driving if they were this vivid. (It usually wasn’t a problem. He could go months without more than the occasional whisper in his ears or tickle at the back of his neck from the dregs of vampire blood that somehow still circulated in his veins. Had to be the isolation or the proximity, but it was his responsibility regardless.)
“You don’t look happy to see me.” David shifted, one boot rising onto the handlebars while he leaned back to brace both hands behind him. It was a weird pose, like something out of Whitesnake, and Michael wondered what wires were getting crossed besides the obvious.
“Not my decision, is it?”
“I think we both know that’s not true, Michael.” Had his smile always been so lopsided? It felt too human, somehow. He’d kept the scars. “I wouldn’t be here if not for you.”
Goddammit. He should ignore it, but the night was already ruined; nobody else needed to get wiped out if he crashed his bike on the highway. “Fine. Then you tell me, Id-Master: What’s it about this time?”
“Why don’t you invite me inside, where we can talk more comfortably?” ‘David’ said with a wolfish grin, and Michael couldn’t help but burst into the deepest laughter he’d felt in ages. Christ.
David’s remaining eyebrow wiggled a bit. “Can’t blame a girl for trying,” he said as Michael rubbed his eyes.
How many times had he imagined it going differently, only to remind himself that the cost of placating his sad teenage boner would have been eating his entire family as an appetizer? Well, he was alone now.
“Alright, fever dream. C’mon in.”
Michael had even surprised himself, if the look on David's face was anything to go by.
Back inside, he moved onto the couch and tried to keep on with business even if this night was looking increasingly like a loss. He owed it to Sam to at least try and stick with it, no matter how weird he was feeling or what stupid shit Santa Carla stirred up in him personally.
The hell did they do? he wondered, feeling a knot form in his gut. If Jacob hadn’t actually died, it wouldn’t be the first time somebody had gone Dark Side and set up shop for themselves. Vampires were persuasive.
“You got anything to offer?” Michael asked the apparition, who had been hovering over his shoulder in uncharacteristic silence.
“Power vacuum,” David mused, and Michael nodded. Convenient that he could be his own sounding board.
“That usually means more deaths, not less.” He flicked through to the folder labeled DISAPP-LA-20192020
They always started with the missing persons, gathered from databases rather than milk cartons and bulletin boards now. Sorting out the signal from the noise took time, especially in a massive city like LA--not every vanished teen could be chalked up to vamps. But Sam had found something stranger this time: reappearances, people turning up miles from where they last remembered being. It looked more like alien abductions to Michael, the kind of X-Files shit where he drew the line. But then the Frogs had brought up their missing "contacts," and Sam had latched on with the eerie eye he'd developed.
("The Watcher always knows," Allan would say solemnly, with the stupid but earnest respect for Sam that was the only reason Michael kept putting up with them and their obsession with that fucking TV show.)
So fine. Vampire kidnappings. They had to be young, because it was damn easy to link several victims to their delivery apps, and from there to the common address they'd visited in the warehouse district. Probably not the actual place, but definitely within a few miles. Wouldn't want the food to get cold.
The right thing to do would be to leave now. Six hours to L.A. would mean getting into town right around sunrise, which would give him the most time to snoop around under the cover of day. Get the lay of the land, and then...he wasn't exactly new to picking up a few delivery gigs when he rolled into town. The money was decent, and nobody noticed a few fries going missing across 20 bags.
Oddly, David wasn't looking at him but at the tablet. Not using it of course, but staring, raking his eye over the addresses. "How's that death wish treating you, Michael?"
"Like an old friend." Michael didn't miss a beat. David looked real enough to touch, but it was over if he did that. He still thought about the soft-eyed boy with his own name he'd found on the side of the road in Idaho ages ago; they'd been solid enough to hold each other and insubstantial enough to pour each other's regrets into. He wished he knew what had happened to that guy.
"Fancy a drink?" David was up off the couch now, prowling the den.
"I don't drink alone." Not that there would be anything here if he did. They'd put that up top in the listing rules.
"What am I, chopped liver?" David touched his hand to his own chest, mock-hurt.
"Shish kebab," Michael corrected. He could always walk down to a local dive, take his tagalong and deal with the brawl that usually ended the night when he did, but he was so damn tired. If he squinted, he could pretend right now that the distance was because of the disease, not because David was dead, dead-dead, at Michael’s hand. If he drank that would be so much easier.
If he drank, he might get other ideas, too, like the ones already creeping in if the way David’s fingers were curling into the neck of his tank top and stretching it downwards were any indication. Michael watched, because he’d imagine it one way or the other and he wanted to see where his brain was taking him.
Unlike early on, the chest wasn’t bloody or bruised, had no cracks opening into portals of fire or blackness. There were just a series of thick, circular scars, like some unimaginably strong fingers had punched through flesh which had time to heal instead of evaporating in the sunlight. He wondered what the back would look like, under the dark coat.
(He shouldn’t have gotten high earlier, probably; it set a bad pattern. And sure enough, David smirked and pulled out a joint. Michael knew he was slipping when he almost told the apparition to knock it off because the rules said No Smoking.)
“C’mon, Michael. We both know you’re not going anywhere tonight.” David’s voice sounded like it always had that long-ago summer--twice as long as he’d ever been alive, probably--husky, fond, and full of permission to do everything Michael shouldn’t.
Kill the enabler inside your head, he thought.
Seems like you can't make it stick. David's voice was back where he'd started, at least, even if the hand he was reaching out seemed more real than anything ever had. Might as well give in.
"Got started without you." The world was soft at the edges, and all he wanted was to slip out of the present he'd made for himself. He imagined David so strongly he could smell the burn of rolling paper, dirty and harsh compared to the thin white stream put out by the gadget in his pocket. Of course David wouldn't vape. It was strange enough watching him prowl by the flat-screen TV.
"Classic," Michael mumbled, high enough to enjoy watching the joint as it rolled from David's fingers to the crooked bow of his lips and back. Loose enough to slide his hand under the waistband of his jeans and stroke himself idly, still waiting for the promised middle-aged ebb in libido to hit him.
"Like what you see?"
(Michael had tried for years to tell himself David hadn’t actually looked like that, until a deep-clean of the bike’s saddle bags had yielded up a crumpled strip of photobooth shots from the old boardwalk. They’d proved his memory was devastatingly accurate.)
“Alexa, play The Doors,” he said, and enjoyed the look of contemptuous incredulity his brain conjured at his own old-ass bourgeois bullshit bringing Jim Morrison’s music into this. “Yeah, David. I do.”
“You’re pathetic.” David’s lip curled and smoke spilled from his nostrils like a dragon. Wasting that precious humanity jerking off to the memory of a dead guy.
“Better than inflicting myself on a real person, right?” Michael let his head roll back and wrapped the couch’s faux-fur throw around his waist, vaguely aware that even if the security cameras were only supposed to cover entrances it still probably wasn’t that private.
He needed a shower anyway. David didn't follow him into the bathroom--maybe Michael was still uneasy about the plumbing deep down, even after it had been replaced down to the groundwater--but he was waiting in the bedroom when Michael got out, wrapped in a towel coarse and small enough to feel like his high school days. He'd let the water run from boiling to freezing over his skin; the bedside clock read 3:30 AM.
David looked wrong sprawled on the overstuffed chair in the corner. "What are you gonna do when I get tired of waiting?"
"Maybe you'll finish what you started." Michael fell back onto the bed, let the towel pool at his feet, and took up where he'd left off.
"Saving you from mediocrity?" David leaned forward, chin propped on the heel of his hand and arm braced on his knee.
"Putting me out of my misery." It was the height of self-indulgence to show off to himself, but the memory of David's hungry attention was almost as addictive as the real thing. A smile that could make you jump off a bridge.
Michael had done almost every odd job that yielded quick money, so long as it was technically above-board. Deliveries, landscaping, day labor of all stripes. Stripping too, if he was going to be a few days and there was a club big enough to employ men and hard up enough to shove a sufficiently muscled drifter onto the stage. He was no dancer, but he'd learned a few tricks about taking his time, rolling his hips and arching his back to show off the goods. He was a long way from the two seconds he should have lasted during that endless welcome party, strung along by drugs and vampiric suggestion.
It was gratifying to see that attention so firmly fixed, almost entranced if his imagination could be that generous. He felt the edge coming with David's name on his lips, and as he spilled over into the aftermath he admired his brain's handiwork.
“Lousy pillow talk.” David's voice was calm, but the fist tucked at his side told a different story.
“Still miss you, asshole.” He closed his eyes, letting himself indulge in his own powerlessness.
When he opened them, David was gone.
*
He smelled LA before he saw it, the scent of diesel and bodies and trash overwhelming until he pulled his scarf up around his nose.
The sun was setting, billboards coming on so bright and chaotic it was like daylight. He felt energized in spite of himself by the moonrise, and selfishly enjoyed the ease of rumbling down the mostly-clear streets of a city notorious for 24/7/365 gridlock.
Who says a worldwide plague doesn’t have its advantages?
He chanced a quick trip to the convenience store for necessities (beef jerky, fresh socks, energy drinks--Sam said he still ate like a college student) and checked into an anonymous motel a few blocks from where the supposed “lost hunters” had last communicated from.
It was too old to have cameras, the proprietors clearly only kept from retirement by crushing necessity. But it was clean--he'd learned the importance of that distinction after he'd dragged bed bugs back with him from an early stakeout. Sam had taken years to stop bringing up the furniture they had to sacrifice clearing out the infestation.
("It was vintage, Mike!" he'd snapped; Michael was sure he just missed having a literal fainting couch that also happened to be the perfect size for stretching out on to read comics.)
He'd started paying the extra 30 bucks a night for rooms that had cigarette burns and doors that faced the parking lot, but no surprise stains waiting under the pillow. Those in-between spaces felt more like home than the sparsely furnished apartment he kept in bastard-cold New York. It felt better to keep moving, and nobody was there to scold him when he pulled a crushed pack of smokes out of his pocket.
He'd spent a few minutes chatting with the desk, fishing for local scandals; the best he got was complaints about constantly waylaid DoorDashers and how the little touch of plague had ruined business. Vampires might not have caused COVID, but they're sure as hell doing well.
He braced himself for a night of searching empty buildings, in the pre-dawn hours when he worked best, and was once again thankful that his joints were so robust.
("Look, I just think we should consider--"
He'd shut that conversation down. Hard.)
And if, out of the corner of his eye, he kept getting glimpses of his personal bête noire, that was nothing new. He’d seen him at half the rest stops on the PCH, comfortingly fake as hell in broad daylight.
*
“You know that’s not what I mean, Laurel.” Frog’s burgundy lips curved angrily downward in the desaturated pallor of the Zoom window. Behind her, walls of flash and photos of finished work crowded the frame; she hadn’t even bothered leaving the tattoo shop her family owned and lived above. “It’s not about convenience. Dad’s liver is a preexisting condition--”
“Really? You don’t mean that you’re skipping… meal prep… for the third time this month, but you want us to deliver your share?” Laurel tried to keep her voice calm. Turned out she wasn't magically cut out to run a not-really-coven of 20-something vampires just because she'd stumbled her way into ousting the previous leader. And nobody else seemed interested in the position.
“I don’t mind,” Roya said from behind Laurel, voice echoing through the warehouse that had stopped doubling as a nightclub with the quarantine order. Which was part of why they were dealing with backup plans. Laurel scowled and shook her head, but Roya continued unperturbed, checking the security of the restraints.
“Thaaaaank you, Roya! Love ya, babe!” Frog didn’t wait for an answer, just disappeared into the blackness of a closed window.
Laurel turned and threw her hands up. “The hell was that?”
Roya tilted her shaved head, eyes and mouth as frustratingly flat as ever. One bare shoulder shrugged before her attention returned to the task at hand.
“Roya! Talk to me!” Laurel half-shouted, standing up too fast and sending her flimsy folding chair skidding a few inches across the floor.
“Why? She said she had to dip. You didn’t want to deliver. I’m handling it.”
Laurel wished she’d figured out earlier how bad Roya’s ‘playing dumb’ act could get if she didn’t cut to the chase. The hours she’d wasted.
“It’s not about the delivery, Roya! It’s--we’re all supposed to be in this together. That’s what we agreed.”
"I am. Providing community aid and shit." Roya treated the seriousness of their survival like a third-string gig she could ignore until it was convenient. And it had become abundantly clear over the past six months that whatever else the-not-exactly-late but deposed Duke's glamour had done to them, it was also curbing some serious hunger pangs.
Bottling enough blood for five vampires without killing the host was turning out to be a bigger ordeal than Laurel had bargained for, and temperature-safe storage was easier said than found in the warehouse district. Laurel had been fighting a low hum of 'hangry' for the past few nights, there was a ramshackle Saw trap in their hang space, and if she had to do this again without help she was gonna snap.
"It's about making sure we don't forget what this costs, or..." she trailed off with a half-hearted shrug. She knew killing people was wrong, morally, but she was already catching herself making justifications for the convenience of it. Her brother Mark was holding strong, and he hadn’t even asked for any of this. Maybe she just wanted to be a good sister for a change.
"Look, we'll get it next time. Don't overthink." Roya held up her phone. "I sent the order in before we hopped on the call."
"Roya! Do we even have enough supplies here?"
"Yup. Izzy stocked up last week. Rip the bandaid off." Roya pushed away from the bar counter where they'd placed the laptop, leaving an uneasy silence. Laurel was always braced to hear Duke and her tell-tale heart down in the covered pit the second someone stopped talking, and the other girls had definitely let her know that they'd noticed. But there had been no screaming, even from the first. Just breathing, thick and wet at first, then struggling, then...quiet. Even. It scared the shit out of her, but she knew Duke wasn’t dead, because she still drank her share.
Twenty-five minutes later someone was knocking on the door.
"Tall." Roya nodded at the silhouette. "Good sign."
"Just get ready," Laurel hissed. She pulled her hair back, trying to look less disheveled than literally everyone on earth had been feeling for three months.
"Hey, sorry, I need to take a photo--" The guy she opened the door to looked a little like Mark. That was all it was. She hesitated instead of knocking him out with a hit, and he looked over her shoulder at their serial killer setup… and he laughed.
"You guys are just kids, aren't you?"
“We’re filming a movie,” Roya stepped in and said; the guy’s dark-eyed gaze went up to her lack of hair, down to her lack of bra, and snapped on back to Laurel.
“Riiiight. Okay, well, I’ll just, uh,” (He made a sort of shrugging motion from well back, swinging the bag gently towards the threshold and taking a snapshot with his phone.) “There we go!”
Laurel licked her lips and blurted, “You could join.” She batted her eyelashes, realizing that in her chunky boots they were about the same height. “You look pretty ripped.”
(Roya snorted, and was probably in danger of spraining something trying not to laugh outright.)
The guy’s eyes went wide, and he jerked back and away.
Fuck.
“Ha. Uh, I’m. I let my SAG card lapse. Here.” The In-n-Out bag went down on the floor, and he nudged it closer with his motorcycle boot, like he was scared they’d grab him and tear him into pieces.
“Oh, it’s not a SAG project. I really think you’d be good,” she tried again, laying the porno voice on thick and shaking off the hand Roya suddenly put on her wrist. “You’d fit right in, if you know--”
“I think I’d better go. Don’t want to invade your bubble, and anyway, like I said--you look a little young for me. You girls--kids--have fun.”
“Wait--” Laurel tried to step forward, but found herself yanked back into the warehouse as the door swung shut. At least she was pissed enough to put aside the vestigial fear that she’d been clocked. “What the hell, dude?”
The hunger was burning, twisting her insides and making it feel like the only thing left in her was the flaming ember of a master vampire’s heart.
“Not that one.”
“He’s not your type?” she gestured at Roya, as though anyone on the planet could miss the categorical impossibility there. Killing might taste better if you were attracted to the subject, but that concern went far down the list when making their own juice bags.
“He. Had. Your. Picture.” Roya sat down on a crate, clutching her own belly, and Laurel remembered that she wasn’t the only one going without. They were all doing what they could, within their limits.
“Sorry. I think I’m just hangry.”
“You and me both.” Roya’s mouth twisted a little into a half-smile, and she wordlessly held out a fist Laurel stared at.
C’mon, dude. Don’t leave me hangin’.
...yeah, okay. She finished the bump. It was fine. They'd wait another day, finish the dregs of cow blood that acted like an appetite suppressant and not much else, and call somewhere else tomorrow night. Frog could make her own setup if she wanted to stay across town.
They were trying to be careful, but two days later they saw the man again.
"How's the movie going, folks?" He waved and kept well clear of their door, kicking his massive motorcycle into gear before she could even think of an answer.
"He's stalking us," Laurel’s girlfriend Izzy had said the second time. Laurel had dug her heels in, wanting to believe in coincidence and the high cost of rent. They were still snagging a few unsuspecting new faces here and there. They could hang in there.
After the fourth visit she finally admitted it. DoorDash, UberEats, Instacart--he was everywhere.
"You girls squatting here?" He was on his bike again, like a nervous cat ready to bolt. "Not to be a narc; I had some friends with a similar setup when I was your age. They got hurt, in the end. I wouldn't want to see that happen to you."
"Okay, he's a fuckin’ creep." Laurel burst out when he was done. "What do we do?"
"What to you mean 'what do we do?'" Roya asked. "We eat him."
“He has my picture, remember?”
“You know you can complain about Dashers, right?” Izzy said, rolling her pale green eyes. “Or kill him for being creepy. Whatever.”
“We can’t. We said we wouldn’t.” Mark would never forgive Laurel if she dragged him into that, too.
“Yeah, ‘we’ did. So get rid of him like a normal human. It’s not that deep.” Izzy wiggled further down on the couch and put her headphones on, vanishing into the mental landscape of her work, editing music videos.
They were hangry, Laurel reminded herself. Hangry and bored and she was going to bite the next person who pissed her off, so she went down where the only person was safely behind bars where she couldn’t reach.
“Duke!” she called out, because she didn’t want to startle the woman who’d turned her after Izzy took a chomp. Imprisonment didn’t need to mean cruelty, she figured. “Duke, dinner.”
(It had been a good few days, but no longer than the rest of them, and Duke was still giving the silent treatment.)
She was halfway through pouring the cow’s blood down a chute before she noticed that the door to the neighboring vault was ajar, blue light spilling out, and--
FUCK.
"EVERYBODY IN HERE!" She could feel herself starting to panic and shoved it down. She'd decided she was done being Laurel, the nutjob burden. She could think about how quickly their fresh start was falling apart later.
"It's gone." She said when Izzy and Roya arrived. The box containing the heart of L.A.'s ex-master vampire and professional dickbag, Vlad Manfred Castaneda--too old to burn, and a potent double-edged power source if threats ever came to their door--had vanished.
"Shit." Izzy swallowed. "Okay. We need to act quick."
The silence from Duke's pit suddenly seemed a lot more ominous, and when they tried the door--yep. They had a vacancy in their oubliette.
"She wouldn't take it," Laurel argued. "Not when she just got a reminder of what a creepy prick he is. She'd definitely rather die than let him back into her head. I wouldn't be able to do it even if it did let me learn kung-fu."
"We don't know what she'd do after all that," Izzy said. "She probably doesn't either. We have to keep ourselves safe first."
"So we find out how she got out." Frog's voice sounded steely on speakerphone, Roya holding her up like it was a concert. "And who might want to help her."
It was sort of tough imagining who would want to help Duke, since she was pretty deep in the proverbial (not so much literal anymore) hole with the room's current occupants. But they all came around to the same suspect.
"What dude would help Duke?" Laurel asked. "Is he stupid?"
Roya clapped her hands together. "That's what we'll find out. We nab him, find out what he knows--"
"I'm sorry, 'nab'?" Izzy snorted.
"Let me have it, Iz, I always wanted to be a ‘30s gangster." The plan Roya laid out was simple by necessity--they could restrain a normal human without much problem, but they had no way of knowing what that might bring down on their heads. More hunters? Other vampires? Sexy werewolves?
At least they basically had a call button for the source of their problem. Frog hung up with an ETA of two hours, and the other girls made emergency trips to the corner stores for supplies. Laurel remembered after her third dirty look that she hadn't brought a mask. It was a hard habit to get into when she knew she was undead and wouldn't be transmitting anything to anyone, but she couldn't exactly explain that. It was easier just to tie the scarf in her pocket around her neck and face, avoid eye contact and retreat back home. She'd never felt less human than this year, watching people die by the thousands without a single fear that it could happen to her.
They all watched Roya place the order, clustered around her phone and breathing in accidental sync.
"It's gonna be okay," Laurel tried to reassure them.
"Hearing it from the baby isn't reassuring," Frog deadpanned. "You're so young you could trip and go up in flames."
"We’ve got this." Izzy put her hand on top of Laurel's. Even almost a year in, that simple touch still made Laurel's stomach do flips. But it was icing on the cake compared to the gift of Izzy's trust.
"We're gonna be careful." Laurel looked at each of them one by one. "Of us and him. Maybe we can talk this out."
They placed the order. Chinese food--felt like the guy deserved a decent meal if he ended up playing along.
The ambush, unfortunately, did not go exactly as planned, even with two of them in position outside and Laurel and Izzy watching through their door camera.
“Hey. Hey, are you okay?” ‘Your Dasher--Mike’ said when he rolled up, quarantine mullet flying in the wind below his helmet.
Frog banged at the alleyside door, hair in cotton-candy pink space buns and dress slipping down off one shoulder. She’d snapped off the heel of one of her shoes and smeared her mascara down her face as Laurel watched; the thought she put into the whole thing was impressive, just like when Laurel had seen her hunt.
“Let me IN, you CUNTS!” Frog screamed drunkenly and launched into a string of profanity in at least two languages. “Give me my money!”
‘Mike’s’ eyes flicked from side to side over his mask (kittens and ribbons, this time), and his leg swung over the bike. He tapped at his ear and then crept closer, red insulated bag slung under one arm and his other hand tucked in his jacket like he was reaching for a phone.
“Miss?” he asked, brows knitting in confusion.
“You’re gonna see them, right?” Frog slurred and wandered unevenly his way. “You need to let me in.”
“I don’t think I’d better do that, but if you want I can drop you off somewhere.” (Close. Closer. Laurel’s mouth watered with the tension, even in black and white, and she almost envied Frog right then. “Do you have a phone?”
“Whatcha got?” Frog asked, face lighting up with a version of delight that wouldn’t reach her eyes. “‘M hungry.”
The shreds of thought and emotion rising off him were weird--tense and nervous, but pretty genuinely concerned. Seemed solid, for a cis guy, but…
As soon as he took the last step into arm’s reach, Frog pounced, while Roya dropped down from the fire escape. The plan had been to drop him with their combined weight, but Mike was heartier than they'd anticipated. He bent under Roya's weight but didn't go down, and he managed to get an arm between his neck and Frog's teeth.
"Shit," Roya swore, and bit down on his shoulder, trying to shock him in place. The pressure was enough to make Mike's knees buckle, but he'd gotten enough of a start swinging that he managed to shred his jacket against their claws and wriggle free, aiming kicks of his heavy boots at the girls’ hands and joints. It would have been embarrassing, a total impossibility when Duke was in charge, but it turned out that a vampire running on fumes was about equivalent to one panicked gym queen.
"What kind of Matrix shit was that?" Izzy asked.
A limited-use ult, apparently, because it was all ‘Mike’ could do to stagger his way to his bike and rev the engine, peeling out as Roya and Frog recovered enough to leap for him. The bike wavered but didn't fall, almost hitting a car as it turned onto the main road and vanished into the night.
So much for delivery.
*
It had been a while since Michael's leathers had come in clutch, but he was definitely grateful for his battered jacket as he staggered off his bike and into his shitty motel room. The bite in his shoulder was still deep, bleeding sluggishly down his front, but it could've been worse. Michael had seen worse.
It figured that he would die from his own complacency. He knew those girls (kids? He wasn’t sure about the bald one) were vampires, knew that made them inherently unpredictable and dangerous, but he'd be lying if he said he hadn't begun to feel a minor fondness for them. They were almost certainly behind the kidnappings, but they were just as clearly holding themselves back. They were trying, probably harder than he or Star had ever had to. Looking at them, frightened and angry about it, was like stepping back into 1987.
And the more they'd watched him watching them, the more it seemed like he could inch his way toward something like a truce. Mom would be over the moon to meet some vampires with non-lethal aspirations, and maybe the kids would be glad of some bizarre Vampires Anonymous. That idea was currently going up in smoke, since he'd failed to account for a hungry vampire jumping for his neck at the first smell of blood.
His phone jangled in his pocket, somehow untouched by the chaos of his mistake. He tapped his earpiece, not wanting to spare his hand when he was busy stripping down to reveal the damage.
"What the hell, Mike?"
"Not a good time, Sam." He scooped water out of the bathroom sink, having decided the smaller trickle beat out trying to strip completely and get in the shower. There were emergency medical supplies in his bag, at least, but the clock was ticking.
"And what made it a good time to bring a rentboy home on your vampire hunting mission?" Sam sounded exhausted under his usual waspishness.
Michael didn't have the energy for his acid quips. So he'd jerked off, sue him. "Forgot the camera was there. Tell them sorry about the free show."
"I'm serious, Mike. I've got the AirBnB guys breathing down my neck about you smoking inside, and apparently it's actually some baby-face stoner you brought over? Does the gay curse on your dick only activate within Santa Carla city limits?"
Are you okay he knew his baby brother was asking, in their fucked up Gen X way. But he didn't have time. "Sam, I swear I was alone all night."
"They sent me the clip, Mike. How long did it take you to find a doppelganger for your first crush?"
He dropped the phone while wrestling out of his jacket, hoped the industrial case he’d bought last year would protect it from bouncing off the tile as he tried to control his breathing. His hands continued through the motions of crumpling up his ruined t-shirt and applying pressure, but fuck. Fuck.
“Dude, if Mom doesn't want me staying in her precious investment property after all she can tell me herself. Don’t fuck with me like this,” he said flatly, a seed of panic growing in his gut. He was running low on 90% isopropyl alcohol; it had been a pain in the ass to get lately.
“I know you don’t like to talk about it, but the terms are--”
“Sam, I was alone, as far as I know. I didn’t. I didn’t even vape inside. So just stop fucking with me.” You wouldn’t do this to Charley, he didn’t add, biting his tongue against the sting of the alcohol deep inside his meat and blinking away tears of pain.
“Jesus, Mike, are you off your meds?”
“That’s none of your business, Sam. Just assume I’m lying and move on.” Like always.
“This is not the time for a pity party! You’re on the other side of the country, stoned out of your gourd as usual, and you still have to make everything more complicated--”
“Go fuck yourself. I’ll send you my hospital bill.”
There was a certain amount of gratification in hearing the shift in tone of Sam’s tinny “wait, what?” before the earbud hit the wall and bounced into the shower stall.
Fuck. He braced himself against the sink and breathed for a few minutes before continuing with what wouldn’t just be first aid for most people. The lingering traces of corruption in his blood had kept him safe over the years from more than one injury that would have taken other hunters out of the game--god knew he knew what that looked like--and as long as the bleeding slowed soon, he wouldn’t actually need to hit an ER about it.
The hallucinations, on the other hand…
He didn’t usually get in so deep. It had been years since he accidentally spoke to David inside another person’s skin.
As far as you know, doubt whispered in his gut.
He waited until he'd done a half-assed wrap on his shoulder to pick his phone back up and start scrolling its cracked screen shakily through Santa Carla's missing persons reports and John Does. Plenty of young men, hungry and lost, but no ghosts in manbuns. Whoever Michael had roped into his little jaunt down memory lane might be fucked up, but he wasn't dead.
Or nobody noticed yet.
It had been a long time since he regretted going off the meds; they'd been a last-ditch attempt to begin with, a medical intervention in a magical issue, but he'd swallowed his pride and asked Sam's irritating boyfriend for a referral to get the damn things. The talking that led to the prescription getting forked over happened through gritted teeth, but he’d done it based on the example. Charley's very real, non-vampire-related antipsychotic prescriptions went back further than his driver's license, and they'd been on tentatively better terms at the time. Before.
Seroquel and Sertraline had been one hell of a combination, Michael tipped his hat to the docs on that one. It sucked, but there had been a missing boy in Idaho and gaps in his memory. He'd never be sure what happened there, but took unearned comfort from the sun not yet striking him down.
As it turned out, mental health had been pretty damn lonely without the voice in his head. Since he didn't actually have the shit he'd asked them to fix when he filled out the paperwork, all the drugs he'd fought so hard for did was make him feel heavy and tired. Too tired to dream, or to do much else that someone didn't hold his hand through. He started to miss catching sight of David in the crowd, the way his brain excelled at picturing the sun striking that bleached hair. He was withdrawing from his family more than he had before the drugs, being a drag at weddings, grunting his way through requisite sessions that made him feel raw and irritated and not much else. Eventually, he'd let the refill lapse and ignored the check-in calls until they stopped. It was still two years before David came back, an echo of an echo out of the corner of his eye, and it had been a much greater comfort than sanity.
He gripped the sides of the sink until the bathroom stopped threatening to slide out from underneath him. He could handle this. He'd sleep off the injury, load up on iron and protein tomorrow, and try to work up to calling Sam back. He'd be the big brother, like he was supposed to be.
It figured David would be standing there waiting for him, right in front of the empty mirror just to make a point. Michael took him in, really stared like he hadn't since he'd figured out nobody else could see his personal escort. The fucked-up eye aside, his expression was pinched, and there were familiar dark-but-glinting stains on his jacket. He looked like he'd seen a ghost.
"You idiot." David's eyes were locked to his poorly-applied bandages, not even trying for the nonchalance he'd always coveted so closely.
Michael called up every remaining ounce of strength he had left, closed the four steps between them, and slugged David in the face.
It had been 33 years, but David still laughed the same way when you hit him. Fucker.
The pain in Michael's knuckles that radiated up into his torn-up shoulder should have brought him back to his senses; he should have grabbed a stake and ended his personal nightmare for good right then and there. Or he should have grabbed David and trussed him up in silver to question and then dispose of.
Instead, he had David's tongue down his throat and that long leather-clad body pressed against him in an instant, and it was like eating a rare steak after months with his jaw wired shut.
I'm losing it, he thought distantly when David snarled and shoved him back onto the bed, fangs bared.
“The hair looks stupid,” he managed instead, trying for the ponytail holder and finding his good hand pinned to the comforter.
“Sorry to disappoint,” David replied, straddling him and getting his dirty boots all over the bedlinens. “Somebody stabbed my stylist in the heart.”
And then the bandage was gone and there was a vampire tongue jammed deep into those ragged bite marks, playing over every raw bloody exposed part of Michael.
If this wasn't real, it was almost worth it.
"Fuck." His voice sounded too strung-out and cracked for his age, like his body was trying and failing to return to the shape David had found it in. David, who was licking him out well above the waistband and still managing to melt him into a writhing mess. And because he had smashed through the looking glass long ago, had maybe been peeling himself raw to David for decades unaware, he said, "Don't stop."
There was no sense that David needed the encouragement but he seemed eager to take it, grinding their hips together and working Michael's nipple with an intensity that was closer to bullying than seduction. Not much difference for them, Michael supposed.
You're mine, Michael. David growled low inside him, cleaning every trace of spilled blood from his skin, from the patch of chest hair that was only just beginning to grey.
"David..." It would be worth the torn muscles just to put hands on the body that had haunted him, but Michael's injured hand refused to do more than twitch reflexively every time David dipped into him. It was starting to piss him off--a guy ought to get to be a participant in his last meal.
Without warning, David released his good arm. The freedom was short-lived, David's hold returning to his throat as though there had been any danger of him looking away.
You don't walk out of here... David didn't blink, didn't waver as he bit into the palm of his hand--not close to a vein, but deep enough that scattered droplets fell over Michael's wounds. They burned the same way the alcohol had. ...without my permission.
God. Oh god oh god ohgodohgodohgod--
His eyes were streaming again from the pain, but he finally had a hand on that stupid fucking hair. It was softer than he remembered, still blond but with no peroxide crispiness left anymore, and the undercut felt pleasantly bristly under his thumb. The dark circle under David’s (whole, blue) eye did nothing to disguise how young he still looked, and that should make Michael feel worse than it actually did but fuck it, David hadn’t cared when Michael was barely legal, either.
Vampires were supposed to have bad breath, but not David. He tasted gamey and smokey, meat laced with cigarettes and bourbon. Real in a way that wasn’t clean, but wasn’t unpleasant, either. At least not to Michael.
He’d never really lost his libido the way most guys apparently did, but he’d definitely backed off on getting up close and personal with people over the years outside of very controlled hookups. He’d thought he’d gotten pretty good at taking care of his own needs before feeling David’s rough hand squeezing his package through his jeans just shy of too hard.
Maybe he was dead. Maybe those girls had killed him in the alley, and Sam was going to have to help Mom execute the sparse funeral plan Michael had drawn up a decade ago, and maybe he was going to get to spend his afterlife getting fucked stupid by a shit-hot vampire who hated him.
(Not that he deserved Heaven.)
Pay attention, he heard inside his head while David’s mouth was still so completely occupied. It was simply the most David demand possible, and he obliged by rocking up into that grip.
Why now? Words were slipping out of Michael's head with each hard, steady pull of David's hand on his cock.
Mmm. David stopped, letting go of Michael's now-painful and blood-smeared arousal to trace a feather-light touch up his shaft. The hand on Michael's throat squeezed, while the other rubbed slow circles over his chest. It looked like he was spreading sparkly iodine. My dog was misbehaving.
You're the one smearing your blood all over me, you freak. It made Michael's skin feel like it was on fire, like every nerve ending had been hooked up to an amplifier. Would the flecks of blood in his wound be enough to drag him back under into real half-vampirism? Michael was too adrift in this dream to care.
Could always piss on you if you prefer. Long as you get the message. David ran his tongue over his teeth.
If you stop doing that I'm going to fucking bite you.
Part of him put these things on himself, he thought, as David removed his previously attentive hand, leaving only the one on Michael's throat. He was all hungry eye and sharp teeth. Come on, Michael. Come and take it back.
I can’t beat you, Michael thought. Even if he weren’t, as David had noted, old, the gulf between them was nearly as vast at it had been the night they met, with only a few tiny aftershocks of vampiric blood left. While that might give Michael an edge over the average human, it wasn’t going to cut it with a vampire who already had him pinned.
Then keep up. David’s lip curled, and when he came in again for a kiss Michael headbutted, rolled, and smashed the table lamp hard onto that stupid, stupid, sexy haircut.