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Rumors carried fast through the Guard of Priwen. Had to, when the monsters they fought stuck to shadows and dark filthy places, when the smallest hint of information could mean the difference between killing a beast and being killed by it. Foot soldiers on patrol heard talk in bars or hospitals or whispered in snatches on the street and carried it to their superior officers, whispers going up and up the chain of command until they ended in Geoffrey's ears.
It meant he got news before anyone else in London. He could pinpoint the trail left by a hungry leech days before anyone even realized there was a killer on the loose. It also, unfortunately, meant he had to sort through a river's worth of utter garbage just to know what was worth keeping.
People, at their core, were creatures of panicked instinct, and Priwen's work made its people braver than most but it also made them more paranoid. A cat's hiss in the late night fog became a horrifying beast's snarl, a drunkard stumbling home late became a shambling monstrosity patrolling the dimly-lit streets. Sometimes it felt like Geoffrey spent as much of his waking hours chasing shadows as he did leeches, sending his people after this lead and that, always hoping that this one would have some small hint of truth to it.
It was exhausting work. Sometimes he dreamed of torching the whole length of London's sewers, consequences be damned, just to cut down on the places those beasts might be able to hide. But for as long as the city stood, its shadows and dark, hidden places stayed part of it, and that meant the rumors stayed too.
At first, he'd thought this was just another one of them, less believable than most. It seemed almost comical: one of their soldiers, found carved open from collar to hip and just barely clinging to life, had started babbling out the story almost the moment Priwen's doctors finally managed to revive her: a strange doctor appearing from the gloom the moment she thought all hope was lost, guiding her through a quiet prayer as he staunched the worst of the bleeding, then disappearing in the moments before the rest of her patrol arrived.
A good Samaritan, she'd said, her words slow and slurred through the morphine, in a tone of voice that meant an angel.
Priwen's quest might be a holy one, but if God was on their side he'd never done much to show it. Illness and grief and long, sleepless nights were the only rewards his soldiers ever reaped in return for their service. Geoffrey still prayed, on Sundays or over the body of an injured soldier, but he also knew full well that this woman's angel hadn't been sent to her by anything more holy than a mind gone delirious with pain.
But it was harmless enough, in the end. Let her believe in her angel if she wanted. Geoffrey had no desire to crush what few dreams the members of Priwen, privy to the true monstrousness of the world in a way few others were, had left.
...That was, until the rumor caught on, picked up and repeated through the ranks of the Guard of Priwen until the only thing spreading faster than it was the plague.
One of his people, a half-grown boy who Priwen had taken in after both his parents were turned, claimed a man in a dark coat had chased away a skal that was about to bite him in two. Another, a woman who'd lost her son and most of her face in a leech attack, said he'd kept her guts from falling out after a beast of a leech had tried to eviscerate her. A third, a fourth, a fifth—until it had stopped being a rumor and started becoming a pattern.
All of them agreed on a description: tall, dark-haired, soft-spoken with a thick beard and a heavy coat. And some of them had proof: small, even battlefield stitches closing up deadly wounds that no hand at Priwen could have done, bandages expertly tied around bites that would have otherwise bled out, leeches found dead with marks on their body left by no weapon Geoffrey was familiar with.
It was good for his people's health. It was good for morale. And it was driving Goeffrey mad. Because if this stranger was real, he knew full well that there were two things it could be: a true angel, or a monster playing with them for his own amusement.
Geoffrey wasn't a fool. He knew full well which was more likely. And that meant it was his job to hunt this good Samaritan down, before the other shoe could have a chance to drop.
—
It took Geoffrey a month and a half to put together enough sightings to start finding patterns. Each of them he marked with pins pushed through a map of London he'd hung on his bedroom wall, a decoration he'd fully admit made him look like more than a bit of a madman. In the end, though, he was glad he'd done it.
There was a pattern here, all right. And it was an interesting one.
The sightings ranged all across London, but they were most common in a few particular areas: Pembroke, near the old hospital; Whitechapel, close to a run-down church; the center of the West End, where the mansions loomed high over the streets.
Geoffrey had never heard of an angel with a patrol route. But he'd sure as hell met his fair share of leeches who preferred a particular hunting grounds.
Leeches who kept their minds justified themselves in all sorts of strange ways. They targeted the old or the infirm and told themselves they were barely stealing anything at all, they hunted their own families and claimed it was their right, they invented crimes to punish humanity for and called their murders justice. Staring at his map, lost in thought, Geoffrey couldn't help but imagine he might understand this leech.
More of Priwen's soldiers were coming home alive these days. More, but not all of them. Might not a leech—a doctor or a nurse, maybe, someone obsessed with thinking themselves a healer—be able to justify that? If they saved three and killed one, then, well, a person could hardly call that a murder at all.
Geoffrey scowled. His hands felt restless. He picked up a stake from where it had fallen beside his bed, knocked from its hiding place under the frame in the middle of the night, and then—snarling under his breath, furious—slammed it into the corner of the map, pushing it through until it hit the wall beyond. Imagining it was the monster's neck.
"Fuck!" he snarled, furious with himself and the leech's conjured image both.
He was getting ahead of himself. He knew he was getting ahead of himself. His theory was nothing more than a hunch, stitched together by threads of conspiracy and tied off nicely with a paranoid bow worthy of an asylum patient. Maybe the leech was hunting elsewhere entirely, and only protecting Geoffrey's people out of some twisted sense of amusement. Maybe there was no leech at all, just a half-mad doctor with a bizarre hobby.
But if he was right... if this monster was hunting his people, and Geoffrey had failed to stop it because he'd dismissed this whole thing as some strange delusion...
He wouldn't forgive the beast. And he wouldn't forgive himself either.
Enough. He'd planned and theorized and stewed enough. It was time for him to act.
From his wardrobe, Goeffrey pulled his favorite coat for the Guard's more... subtle work. It lacked the armoring of his usual uniform, but the fabric was thick and solid and filled with over a dozen pockets to hide stakes and blades and matches in. A scarf wrapped tightly around his neck, a few vials of holy water slipped into his pockets...
Let any leech try him now. He could use a chance to work off some steam.
—
Normally, Geoffrey preferred to track his prey at night. As every recruit learned sooner or later, an awake, angry vampire was still less of a threat than one holed up in its lair with traps and escape routes at hand.
Today, though, was a different sort of hunt, and so the sky when he headed out was the brightest he'd seen in weeks. Not that that meant much, for London—it was a gloomy, overcast sort of day, threatening a freezing rain but never quite delivering it—but after months of nights even the pale grey sky seemed strange overhead.
It wasn't the only uncomfortable thing. The pandemic had thinned the street's crowds, and the ones who did still go out kept their distance from strangers now, but even so Geoffrey with his scars and his callouses and his hunter's eyes earned him a number of wide-eyed, quickly averted looks from strangers. The poor people he passed probably thought him a member of some street gang or another; the rich people probably just saw him and thought brute.
It was half the reason he'd decided to save the West End for second. If he could find the information he needed about this vampire in Whitechapel and save himself the hassle of trying to pry information out of a bunch of insufferable posh arseholes, all the better.
(Pembroke belonged to the Bastards of the Stole, and so it was last-resort-only as an investigation route; as much as he'd relish an excuse to drop the veneer of a truce and go for all-out-war on those brainless leech-worshippers, there was no justifying the casualties his people would suffer. Geoffrey didn't need to go snooping around to guess why a vampire might be hanging around Edgar Swansea's hospital, and he equally didn't need to guess that Edgar probably didn't have too much in the way of useful information to offer him about the vampire. If the two were actually close, instead of just monster and monster's pathetic admirer, Swansea would've warned the leech away from touching Priwen's people to begin with.
...And if it turned out they were and he hadn't, well. They'd be having that all-out-war after all.)
As Geoffrey approached Whitechapel and the church he'd marked off on his map, his heart sunk. St. Mary's was the name of the place, as it turned out: a massive, ornate brick building with solid stone doors, facing a block of buildings that had clearly seen better days. A worn-down funeral parlor with a lamp still lit in the window, a dilapidated cobbler's, half a dozen shops with names so faded and peeling he could only guess at what they once might have been. Vampires couldn't enter places of worship but they often made themselves lairs not far away, in graveyards or garden houses or dark alley corners. Geoffrey had hoped to mark out any potential entrances and check for disturbances later. This, though... this was a leech's paradise. Even with a full team it would take a two nights' work just to scout out the buildings here. More, if they found any traps laid for them while worked.
Scowling, he eyed the heavy wooden door of the church. The pandemic meant there were no services, but he couldn't imagine the building would be left entirely unoccupied. And priests were the nosy sort.
He didn't like the idea. He just didn't have any better ones.
The first knock echoed through the space beyond the door, fading off into nothing without a sound from inside. The second went similarly unanswered. Geoffrey raised his hand again to try for a third—and very nearly hit empty air as the door swung inwards.
"Hello, my... child." The man's brow furrowed as he caught sight of Geoffrey, but he kept resolutely on. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't recognize your face. We haven't met before, have we?"
"We haven't," Geoffrey said shortly, still sizing him up.
"Ah, I see." He blinked a moment, a dozen questions clearly on the tip of his tongue before he swallowed them all down. "Well, then. I'm Father Joseph Larrabee. I suppose you could say I'm the caretaker of this church for the time being. Circumstances being what they are, I can't invite you in, but perhaps there's something I could help you with? Are you new to Whitechapel, perhaps?"
The vicar was a plain-looking man, grey hair receding at the temples and his eyes marked by crow's feet. His garments were worn but almost self-consciously clean, without a wrinkle in sight, and the wire-rimmed glasses he wore made his face take on an almost owlish look.
Even holy men could be tempted by vampires, or controlled by them. But Geoffrey had a good instinct for that sort of thing, and he didn't thing Larrabee was an ally or a pawn of whatever leech he was searching for. There was no slackness to his expression or fogginess to his gaze, and he wasn't looking at Geoffrey with the fear of a man who knew he was facing down an enemy—just the wary look of someone who'd found an ominous-looking stranger at their door. Couldn't fault a person that.
"I'm not from around this part of town," Geoffrey said. "It's just that, ah"—he paused a moment, trying to guess what might best tug on this man's sympathies—"it's my sister. Brown hair, tall. I haven't seen her in days, and the last person who saw her said she'd been walking up a street near here. Said she'd been talking to a pale-looking man with a beard. I was wondering if you'd happened to see anything. I was hoping to find whatever man it was who talked to her last, at least."
The look Larrabee gave him then was so full of sorrow that for a second Geoffrey felt he ought to start mourning his poor, imaginary sister.
"I see..." He sighed. "I'm afraid I haven't seen anyone matching either of those descriptions."
"That's a shame. You sure you haven't seen anything at all? Even the smallest hint might help."
Larrabee shook his head. "You're not the first to come here asking, I'm afraid—too many have vanished as of late. Even with the plague, it's... strange. I can put the word out around our community, though. Perhaps someone else nearby has seen her. And I'll pray for her safety, of course."
Geoffrey didn't need this vicar to pray for an invented victim, but he did want to hear more about the scrap of information Larrabee had let slip. He pounced on the words with all the single-minded focus of a hunting dog following a trail.
"Someone else, you say? Who might that be? Perhaps the two of us could swap names. We'd cover more ground if we both looked for two people at once."
People went missing for all sort of reasons. For all Geoffrey knew, this second person could be a drunkard who'd slipped and cracked their head open in a gutter. But his hunter's instincts were buzzing, telling him to pay attention, and he'd never once in his life regretted listening to them.
"It's no one around here, I'm afraid, so I don't know how helpful it would be. The missing man's mother was a long-time member of our flock here, is all, and she seeks my guidance sometimes even now."
"Still," Geoffrey said, trying and failing to keep the urgency out of his voice, "if there's a chance—"
Larrabee looked him up and down, a hint of suspicion on his face, but after a few moments he slumped back against the church door, obviously angry with himself for daring to doubt a grieving man.
(For shame, Geoffrey thought wryly.)
"The Reid family. On the West End. Their son, Jonathan, was a doctor withthe war effort. He was supposed to arrive home several weeks ago, and there's records of his return to London, but... since the night he came back, no one's heard from him. The family hasn't given up hope yet, of course, but..." Larrabee's gaze dropped to the ground. "There's no reason an upstanding man like himself would seek to abandon his family so suddenly."
Oh, Geoffrey could think of a reason. His heart leapt with a furious sort of triumph.
He nodded, doing everything in his power to keep his expression morose. "That's... thank you. I'll keep looking around myself, but—maybe they'll know something. I can at least ask."
A doctor. Family on the West End. Ties to this Whitechapel Church. The trail couldn't have been more obvious if it had been marked in blood-red letters a hundred yards high.
He worked his way through the rest of the rote pleasantries with Larrabee—thanking him for praying for his sister, thanking him for the information, wrapping every sentence in the shroud of a god-fearing innocent full of blind hope for a missing family member's safe return—and it wasn't until that massive wooden door finally shut that he allowed himself to smile.
Found you, Jonathan Reid.
Geoffrey adjusted the stakes strapped to his arms before setting off down the street. It was time to pay a poor, grieving family a visit.
—
It was nearing sunset by the time Geoffrey made it to the West End. The weak evening sun filtered through wherever the massive, looming mansions didn't block it out, giving the streets a starkly contrasting look. He was cutting it close, he knew—but it would be another kind of risk to leave this hunt until tomorrow. The monster was familiar with Priwen and well aware of his people's patrol routes; if it caught Geoffrey's scent around St. Mary's and realized he was on its trail, there was no telling how the beast might retaliate.
The Guard had spent long enough at the mercy of this beast. That ended tonight.
No one here was too happy to talk to a man who looked like Geoffrey, but with a sharp-edged smile and a bit of persistence he managed to pester a few of the answers he was looking for out of a shopkeeper nearby. The Reid mansion, it turned out, was one of the largest of the absurdly huge houses here: a brief walk from the carefully-trimmed park, ornate and gleaming, near big enough to be a city until itself with the way it rose like a cliff over the streets below.
Poor Reid, Geoffrey thought, with no small amount of venom. From the highest highs to the lowest lows. If the leech's family wasn't aware it was still lingering in this world, then it certainly hadn't been invited in. Perhaps it had some hovel dug out in a sewer nearby, or maybe even a nest in the park.
Did it look on its old residence with resentment, hating what it had become? Or was the freedom to control, to ruin, to kill, so intoxicating that it had no regrets at all? Geoffrey had met both types of leech before. Each was as pathetic as the other. And, whichever sort it was, the outcome was always the same—young vampires always went for their families eventually. Just like...
He shook himself out of his thoughts with a scowl. Now wasn't the time to get morose about it all. Not when he was on a deadline.
Geoffrey'd considered various options for information, everything from hiding in the shadow of the building until nighttime right up to breaking in, but in the end he did what hat already worked for him once today: he walked up and knocked on the door.
The echo from his knock was, if anything, more impressive than the church's had been. He could hear the sound bounce around inside for what seemed like ages, reflected again and again through the house's cavernous space.
It wasn't long before he heard footsteps. The approached at a slow, tentative pace, long enough that Geoffrey began wishing he could just throw the damn door open himself, and when finally the door opened it was too the tired, lined face of a balding man wearing a jet black suit and cravat that probably cost more than anything Geoffrey had ever owned in his life.
Reid's father, was his immediate first thought, and then he caught himself, remembered what sort of people he was dealing with here, and corrected himself: Reid's butler.
"Ah, hello," Geoffrey started, "I was wondering, are you—"
The butler arched one deeply unimpressed eyebrow. "Whatever you're selling, we aren't interested."
Now here was a man who had a talent for making pleasantries unpleasant. Geoffrey was almost impressed.
"It's not anything like that. I'm with a... well, a neighborhood watch group of sorts. Keep the streets clean, keep an eye out for each other, that sort of thing. I heard you had a family member go missing, and I think I might have some information that might help."
The butler straightened, curiosity and suspicion warring for control on his face. That, at least, Geoffrey couldn't blame him for—he'd worked the aftermath of enough leech attacks to know that missing people always brought out the vultures. Family as rich as this, he probably wasn't the first one to come here sniffing around for an easy mark. Loons offering seances, con artists spinning wild tales to poor grieving parents, folks ready to spin lies to anyone desperate enough to lend an ear... the possibilities were endless.
"Well," the man said hesitantly, "that's..."
Before he could finish his sentence, though, another set of footsteps echoed down the hall inside the house. Two, this time, overlapping and close. The butler winced, turning away from Geoffrey and motioning as if to shut the door, but before he could a new pair appeared in the doorway.
The first was a young, dark-haired woman with sunken and tired eyes, wearing a black dress and a scowl. There was a cold sort of beauty to her that Geoffrey couldn't help but admire—she somehow reminded him of one of his own soldiers more than any idle rich heiress he'd ever seen before. Reid's widow, perhaps? Or a family member? The second, clutching tightly to the first's arm, was an elderly woman with a desperate, piercing gaze, her eyes fixed on Geoffrey and filled with a terrible weariness. He didn't even have to guess at who this might be; he'd seen mothers grieving their dead children too many times to mistake a look like that for anything else.
Fuck, he thought tiredly. He'd been hoping to avoid Reid's parents'. This was the part he didn't like: meeting the people left behind, knowing the monster he was about to kill had once been someone's loved one.
"Mother," the younger woman said unhappily, trying to pull the older away—which, all right, at least answered one question. Sister, then. "It would better if you stayed..."
"I heard him," she said, a terrible hope in her voice. "My son, you said—"
Perhaps he deserved the twin looks of venom daughter and butler shot him. No matter what hope his words fed her, it wasn't as if he could bring her child back.
Still, there was nothing for it. Leech-hunting was never pretty work. One way or another, he need whatever information he could glean from them, and he'd done more unpleasant than this before.
"Look," he said, "I can help. I just need you to hear me out—"
The daughter's eyes flashed angrily. "Mother, you need to rest. I'll talk to this man. Avery, if you would—"
She offered her mother's arm to the butler—Avery, apparently. For a moment mother and daughter stared at each other, and then finally the elder Reid sighed and took hold of Avery's arm instead. Already her eyes seemed less sharp, more clouded over; lucidity came and went for her, perhaps.
Poor woman. Losing a family member was hard.
Avery frowned at Geoffrey a moment, clearly unhappy about leaving the Reid daughter alone in Geoffrey's presence, but finally his gaze fell back onto the woman on his arm, and he began to lead her slowly away down the opulent hall, out of Geoffrey's sight.
Damn. The daughter was his only hope left, then.
"Miss Reid," he started, still trying to keep this whole thing civil.
"Missus Mary Reid, thank you. Though Reid alone would be fine, coming from you."
Scowl fixed firmly on her face, Mary stepped out onto the front walk, slamming the door shut behind her. She was a head shorter than him, at least, but she glared up at him with a look that almost made him forget that. The scorn in her eyes could've shrunk anyone down.
"All I want is to help," Geoffrey said, aiming for a conciliatory tone. "Whatever you've been dealing with so far, this isn't that—"
She scoffed. "All right, then, let me ask you—if you've seen my brother, tell me, how tall is he? How does he keep his hair? What color are his eyes?"
Fuck. Geoffrey couldn't hide his wince. He knew the answers to her questions, in his own way: tall enough to rip a man's throat out. Falling out in clumps, unless he's turned into one of the well-preserved sorts. Red. But those would be nothing more than mockery to someone unaware of what her dear brother had become.
He'd gotten overconfident. Desperate. Too focused on the leech, instead of the humans he needed to consider for an operation like this.
Whatever Mary saw in Geoffrey's face, it was enough. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth thinned into a grim, scornful line. She was past anger now and into cold, bitter contempt.
"I don't know what you think you're coming here for—upsetting my mother, disturbing our family—but you'd better not think we're an easy target for..." She looked him up and down. "Whatever scheme it is you're trying. We've had opportunists around here enough already. If you so much as show yourself in my mother's presence again, I'll have the police here in an instant."
The vultures had really been circling, then. Mary was bristling with what had to be days, if not weeks, of pent-up rage. Geoffrey took a step back, hands raised in a gesture of innocence even as his mind raced. This had gone as badly as it possibly could have; what could he do now, to try and save this? To try and warn a family unaware of their own impending demise.
Mary looked away from him then, her gaze distant. Her voice dropped to something barely above a whisper as she added, "And anyway, there's nothing I need from you. My brother is alive."
There was something in the way she said it, confusion and hope and fear all in one—
Geoffrey stopped. Blinked. And then, for the first time today, let the carefully-crafted innocent civilian persona he'd been trying so hard to keep up unravel. "You saw it, didn't you? What your brother became. You've got some idea, at least."
Her eyes darted back to him then, something other than hatred on her face for the first time in this conversation.
"I know what's happened," Geoffrey said, desperation making him honest. "This the thing he is now—whatever you think is left of him there, it isn't. I can help you. I just need you to let me explain."
He had done this before: brought grieving family members into the fold, helped them see behind the curtain and understand what had really taken their loved ones. Geoffrey watched curiosity and mistrust war across her face, watched her hand hesitate on the door—
And then saw, with crushing disappointment, the moment mistrust won out.
"I don't need anything from you," she spat, "except for you to leave," and before he could get another word out she was through the door and slamming it heavy behind her.
Geoffrey stood there. Alone, shut out, his best lead destroyed, with the last traces of daylight quickly fading.
"Goddamnit," he snarled, and slammed the side of his fist against the heavy door before finally turning to leave.
His fault, in the end, no matter how much he wanted to blame someone else. His cockiness, his hesitance, his refusal to slow down, his reluctance to get anyone else involved. He'd thought he was better than this. He needed to be better than this.
So far the leech had been playing, toying with the Guard like a cat with a mouse—but Geoffrey had just escalated, and he knew full well how a leech would react to that. There wasn't the slightest chance a vampire like Reid wouldn't realize someone was after it now, and there wasn't the slightest chance Reid would do anything other than retaliate, brutally and swiftly.
It was Geoffrey's fault. And the Guard would be the ones to pay.
Geoffrey ran through his options as he walked the West End streets. He could go back, regroup, try to warn his people before the first patrols went out—but a quick glance at the sky above told him he was already far too late for that. There was Swansea's hospital still, but chasing that lead now would be tantamount to giving the leech a head start in hunting the Guard down.
There was only one option he could think of that might actually keep Reid away from the rest of the Guard. One stupid, self-endangering, completely idiotic option. He made his way to the neighborhood's far west side, forced open a gate that was half rusted shut, and slipped into the West End sewers.
If Reid had a nest here—and Geoffrey suspected it did—then it would smell him first. And it wouldn't have time to go after anyone else if it was focused on hunting down an intruder to its territory.
As a rule, members of the Guard of Priwen didn't go down into the sewers alone. Cramped corners, dangerous traps, and too many leeches for a single person to handle, no matter how skilled that person might be. And Geoffrey was still in his civilian clothes: missing his sword, missing his crossbow, the furthest thing he had from being suitable for a fight like this.
But he had already broken every other rule tonight. What was one more?
Geoffrey slipped a stake into one hand and a makeshift torch into the other as he crept down the stone tunnels, eyes open, ears perked up for the slightest hint of sound. Waiting for the fight he knew had to come.
—
This was the embarrassing thing: in the end, it wasn't Reid who got him.
West End was supposed to be relatively safe, less-touched as it was by the plague and the death that came with it, but the neighborhood's sewers were far more invested with skals than he'd expected. Mangy, half-rotted packs of them roamed in horrifying numbers, an overgrown rat infestation, so numerous he was half-surprised the West End was still standing at all. He fought his way through them with little care for the noise he was making, actively hoping it might draw Reid near—and, thanks to that, ended up completely unprepared for the half-ton of solid grey mass that slammed into him while he was halfway through driving a stake through a skal's half-shattered skull.
Vulkod, came the panicked thought, courtesy of the small portion of his mind that wasn't busy trying to process the sheer, overwhelming pain that had just ripped its way through every single bone in his body at once.
He didn't even have time to cry out. The air left his lungs in a stunned wheeze as he hit the sewer's sloped wall and bounced off. He hit the floor a crumpled heap, the stake dropping from his limp grip, the torch extinguishing itself in the tepid water coating the tunnel's floor, the taste of iron in his mouth.
No one had reported a vulkod in this area, no one had even suspected—but no, of course they hadn't. The Guard was focused on the hardest-hit areas first: the slums, the docks, the workers' quarters. A monster hoping to hide couldn't hope to do better than this stretch of dank, filthy underground.
And now Geoffrey was going to die here, the final capstone to every error he'd made today. He would've laughed if he had breath to do it.
It was too dark now for the vulkod to cast a shadow, but Geoffrey could feel its looming presence as the monster crouched beside his prone form. One massive hand, cold and waxy and big enough to crush his head between finger and thumb, wrapped around the back of his neck, pulling away the scarf he'd tied there.
"Poor hunter," growled a voice like gravel, amusement plain in its tone. "Thought he was the biggest thing down he—ahh!"
The words turned to a howl of shock as the vulkod let go of Geoffrey, falling backwards heavily enough to make the sewer tunnel shake. There was another sound now, joining the vulkod's howling, pained noises: a chilling snarl, higher than the vulkod's voice but still monstrously deep, filled with an unrelenting fury.
Another skal? Or something else? Not that it mattered when either one would have him for a meal as soon as the other was dead.
Geoffrey focused on getting his hands and knees under himself, willing his body to work again, as a battle to the death played out only a scant few feet from his face. This was the first real stroke of luck he'd had today. He knew vulkods well enough to know that whatever was attacking the vulkod couldn't hope to win, but if it could just weaken the beast a little, enough for Geoffrey to get a chance at one good strike—
One of the voices cut off in a final, pained yelp, giving way to the sound of ripping flesh. The vulkod's flesh.
That... no. That shouldn't be possible. Geoffrey eased himself up, trying to stand on a leg that refused to hold his weight—and froze as yet another new sound echoed out from the dark.
"I wouldn't recommend that."
It wasn't a monster's voice. It was human-sounding. Posh-sounding, even, more at home in some absurd palace of a home than a place like this. And the tone... somehow, the voice almost sounded concerned for him.
Geoffrey swallowed. Apparently he'd found his target after all.
"Jonathan Reid, I take it?" He smiled, well aware he could be seen even if he couldn't see right now.
A soft, considering noise. "Ah. Geoffrey McCullum, I presume? So that was you asking about me. I wondered how long it would take. May I ask what exactly you found, or would you prefer to keep that yourself?"
It seemed Geoffrey's reputation preceded him. He'd be prouder of that if he hadn't made such a pathetic showing tonight.
Knowing it was useless but unable to stop himself from trying, Geoffrey made another attempt at getting back onto his feet. He made it halfway up before his left leg exploded in pain again—and then, without warning, he felt cold fingers tipped with daggerlike nails at his shoulders.
Geoffrey thrashed, trying desperately to fight, wanting to at least die on his feet, in battle, instead of with a leech's teeth in his throat. If he couldn't win he could at least force Reid to kill him quickly, to offer him some dignity in death—
Strong hands forced him to the ground. He shuddered, prepared for the worst, sick with revulsion at the knowledge of what came next... and then froze, confused, as Reid's hands pulled away once more. There was a sound vaguely like someone rummaging through a bag, a noise like something tearing, and then when Reid's hand touched him once again it was with a scrap of cloth between them. His claws touched Geoffrey's leg a moment, making him flinch, only to avoid the skin and instead start carefully cutting away the fabric of Geoffrey's trousers near the wound.
"Please," said Reid, sounding aggrieved, "if you intend to insist on trying to stand, at least let me bandage this first. You'll bleed out otherwise."
"What?" Geoffrey managed. His heart was still beating so fast it felt like it might drum its way right out of his ribcage. "What are you talking about?"
This didn't make sense. None of this made sense. This was what Reid had done for the others of the Guard, before—but the ruse was up now, and Reid knew that Geoffrey knew what he truly was. What possible reason could he have not to devour Geoffrey now, when he was alone and soaked with blood and all but being presented on a gilt platter for him?
(He, not it, because no matter how badly Geoffrey tried to force himself it was impossible to think of this strange, overly-polite stranger as a mere beast to be hunted. Already he was losing his edge; maybe the blood loss was to blame.)
Reid paused. The silence seemed to take a long, long time in the darkness. "...I refuse to believe you don't understand what bloodloss is."
"No, I mean—is this your idea of a joke? Patching me up before you eat me?"
Reid's hands faltered. "Is that what you think I intend?"
"I'm not a child or an idiot, so."
"Hm. Hold still. This might be unpleasant." The sound of a bottle uncorking echoed through the tunnel, a moment before Reid smeared some stinging liquid over the wound. "And I didn't think you were either of those—is it so hard to believe I might not bear you any ill will?"
Geoffrey didn't even have to think about that question. "Yes."
Reid sighed. It sounded terribly, frighteningly human. Geoffrey knew full well what he'd see if he re-lit his torch: a gaunt, monstrous face, smeared with vulkod blood and maybe others', eyes a deep crimson and skin blistered bloody. A leech's face. But here, in the dark, he could almost imagine a human instead. He could understand now why so many of Priwen's soldiers had been willing to believe this man was a guardian angel.
"You hate our kind that much?" Reid asked quietly.
"It isn't about hatred." Not only about hatred, at least. "When you were a doctor, did you hate illness? Or did you just realize that a disease is a disease, and you needed to eradicate it for your patient's sake?"
Reid's silence was even longer this time. When he finally spoke, all he said was, "I do still consider myself a doctor, for what it's worth."
"And yet you're a leech. So why are you here, then, doctor? Patching up the ones who want to destroy you?"
"I don't disagree with the work you do. Those who kill need to be stopped. And for all the time I've been watching, you're the only ones out there protecting people."
Those who kill, not leeches. A distinction without a difference—and yet, Reid clearly saw one there. Was Reid implying he'd truly never killed anyone? Or did he think his murders didn't count somehow?
It had to be the latter. The former was unthinkable, impossible for a leech. But there was something in the earnest tone of Reid's voice that made it hard to tell.
It was the height of stupidity to point it out, but Geoffrey couldn't help himself: "You know how this ends, right? You let me go tonight, I'll be back tomorrow night to burn you to ash. There's no world where I pardon you your vampirism, or keep you around as some blood-sucking pet, or whatever it is you're hoping for with this."
"Not tomorrow night, I hope," Reid said, a touch of amusement in his voice. "I strongly recommend against walking on this for at least a week. But..." His voice dropped quieter, contemplative.
Geoffrey could've laughed. An idealist vampire! a sentimental vampire! He'd met more than his fair share of bizarre, deranged leeches before, but this might just win them all. Even the most pathetic, brainless skal knew better than to tend to the ones trying to hunt it down.
It would fall apart before long, Geoffrey knew. Reid's mask would slip, or his control would shatter, and in no time at all he'd be the same bloodthirsty animal that Geoffrey had faced a hundred times before. Geoffrey's responsibility was to put a stake through him before it could happen. No amount of cheap philosophy or pretty ideals changed that.
And yet. And yet. Sitting here in the dark, helpless, at the mercy of a monster, there was some part of Geoffrey that wanted to believe Reid's convictions.
Maybe it was the blood loss. Maybe Geoffrey was just a fool. But for just a moment he leaned his head back against the grimy tunnel, stared off into the dark, and let himself imagine the world that Reid claimed could exist: one where the hands working carefully on his wounded thigh, bandaging him up with a gentle precision, didn't belong to an enemy.