Chapter 1: An Unsettled Stomach
Chapter Text
”All children except one grow up.” - J.M. Barrie
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Michael spits another mouthful of food into his napkin as discreetly as he can.
He stares down at the plate set in front of him. Mashed potatoes like drying glue smeared with brown gravy that tastes like salt and something slightly burnt. The single meatloaf slice he’s taken for himself is maybe only a third gone. Michael can still feel the bits of minced onion and husks of dried parsley flakes under his tongue and between his teeth.
His mother and Sam are finished already. Plates clean, and starting to pack up supper. Michael’s is less than half finished.
For the third time this week.
“Hey, Mom, did you put something different in the meatloaf?” Michael asks, resigning himself to not finishing the food.
Lucy, stacking plates near the sink, shakes her head. “Mm, no, just the usual suspects. Why? Did it not taste good?”
Michael swallows again, feeling those bits go down like grains of sand against his throat. “No, tasted fine. Just a little different.”
He picks his plate up, deciding that if he tries to get any more down, what he managed would just come right back up, and that would be a new problem. His mother takes his dishes from him and he can see her eyes linger on the uneaten portions. Her face draws into a little frown, worry ignited in her eyes.
“Mike?” Sam asks from his other side, at the fridge, stashing away the leftovers. “You okay?”
Sam’s question is coloured with the same concern that shadows their mother’s face. He stops in the middle of putting the container of mashed potatoes in their spot, turning to give all his attention to Michael.
He supposes they’d all learned better than to ignore the subtle signs. To not, at least, ask for certain.
Michael sighs. “Yes, I’m fine. Just-”
The rest of the sentence stalls in his mouth. For a long moment, his brother and mother look at him, waiting.
“I’m not really hungry right now,” Michael finishes.
His mother clucks her tongue at him, and Sam goes back to helping clean up. Michael lets go of a breath that he didn’t realize he’d been holding. Like he’s gotten away with something.
“Sam, will you go get your grandfather’s plates, please? I don’t want him forgetting again,” Lucy says. Sam makes a little huffing noise as he closes the fridge.
“Sure Mom.”
Sam walks off, leaving Michael with his mother in the kitchen. He turns away from the door, and starts filling the sink with soapy water. The warmth of the dishwater against his hands feels nice, enough that he doesn’t mind the chore. His mother comes to stand beside him, taking the clean dishes as he finishes them to wipe them dry.
“You know, it’s okay to not feel okay, Michael,” she says softly.
He looks over at her. Then back down to the dirtying water.
“I know,” he says, in an equally soft tone.
They haven’t talked about it. Not after the initial screaming meltdown, which will stick in Michael’s mind as possibly the worst moments he’d ever seen of his mother. Not even the fight before the divorce could top it. Michael can still recall the sound of her voice as she’d screamed, shrill to the point of cracking, too full of smoke and terror to manage anything more gentle.
Michael still winces a little at the memory when he thinks about it.
They haven’t talked about anything but the most mundane things, really. The upcoming school year, Grandpa making some vague noises about introducing Michael to some of his friends for work he could pick up on the weekends, his mother searching every classified column in the newspaper.
School. Work.
Life.
His mother’s hand grasps his, and Michael jerks, realizing too late just how quiet he’d gone, scrubbing the same clean bowl over and over while he’d gotten lost in his own head.
Lucy gasps as he startles, drawing her hand back. Michael’s hands tighten on the bowl, the sponge.
“Michael-”
The phone rings, loud and nagging in the quiet kitchen.
“I got it!” Sam shouts from across the house. Footsteps pound across the floor as he races to the receiver in the hallway outside of the kitchen, and while he greets the other side with the customary and rushed “Hello, Emerson residence, who may I ask is calling,” it takes no time at all for everyone to know who’s on the other side.
Lucy and Michael share a look, though Michael’s not sure it’s for the same reasons.
The Frog brothers have been calling every single night since the attack. Lucy has yet to actually let Sam stay overnight with them, like they’ve all been begging her for. From the sounds of Sam’s excited conversation, it seems like it will be another round of attempted bargaining tonight.
Michael huffs a breath and shakes his head, setting the bowl aside. “I can finish up, Mom.”
“Honey-”
“I got it. I’m okay.” Michael smiles at her, trying to appear more relaxed than he is. “You should go make sure they’re not planning on hunting werewolves at City Hall or something.”
Lucy’s eyebrows knit together and her mouth goes thin and tense. “Don’t joke about that, Michael,” she says flatly, but she drapes her dish towel over the counter and goes to probably do just that.
He watches her go, before turning back to the sink. He braces himself over it.
For a moment, Michael lets himself stand there, watching the suds in the water swirl around. God, he needs to get out of his own head. He looks out the windows above the sink, to the fading light of the summer evening outside. The sky is purples and blues, the stars lost under the glow of the town further down the slope of the hills, behind the trees. Despite it being mid August, the weather is cool in the gathering dark. A perfect night to be out, and not stuck in his room, reading books he’s already read, the air circulating under the too-slow ceiling fan while laying on a sleeping bag because Laddie had destroyed his bed when he’d gone feral. The thought of that night creeps back into his mind, memories sweeping him up without him saying so.
The dead weight of Dwayne’s body slid off of Michael’s shoulders and hit the ground with a heavy thud. Michael tried not to breathe in the stench of smoke and burning hair - he tried not to look at the body much to begin with.
At least the yard was mostly hidden by the trees surrounding the property. The nearest neighbors were almost half a mile away, so no prying eyes would even accidentally spy the awful production being carried out. So far, it was just the one body. Soon there would be two.
And when the sun came up in a couple hours, there would be none. Just ash and ruined clothing.
Dwayne lay on the grass at an odd angle. If he were - well, if he were here, it would be an uncomfortable position. His head was tilted back, crooked against his shoulders which were frozen in place, holding his arms out like a movie zombie. His legs were askew in the grass, and it all gave the impression of something deeply wrong.
It was a dead body. A real one. One Michael had been (however barely) responsible for making that way.
The bloody arrow had been tugged out, but the hole remained. The flesh around it was cooked, sickly yellow in places and scorched black in others. The electricity had streaked across the body in burning lines, leaving behind torn and blistered skin, angry red and still faintly sizzling.
Michael had to look away. He couldn’t see him like that.
If he didn’t, something was going to come screaming out of him, and he couldn’t let that happen.
Grandpa had told him that this needed to get done. To be sure. To finish it. The old man was still inside, making sure that, in his words, the ‘most dangerous’ element was well and truly taken care of. Michael’s not sure what could possibly come back from being burned alive, but he’s not taking much on chance or assumption anymore. And neither was Grandpa.
Despite the inability to look at the scene before him, Michael still turned away and started walking back towards the house.
Dwayne was on the lawn. Max was caustic soot in the chimney. The Frogs had…described exactly what had happened to Paul.
There was one left. And Michael had to go get him.
David was exactly where Michael left him. If it weren’t for the massive horns sticking out of his chest, it would be easy to assume he was just asleep. But he wasn’t.
Michael’s fingers hovered a hair's breadth from the other man’s face. He looked so young, like this, splayed out on the table, his face turned away, pressed against the furs underneath him. Michael almost wanted to rouse him, to shake his shoulders and wake him up. And then his hands brushed over the horns in his chest and Michael’s stomach swooped with renewed nausea.
He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t-
This couldn’t possibly be it. It felt like reality was coming towards him like a truck on the highway and Michael was standing in the middle of the road, watching it race closer and closer. It was inevitable.
David wasn’t sleeping, he was dead. Dark, thick blood pooled on the table under him, leaving a long, tacky smear on the wood and antlers and floor. It’s seeped up around the twin horns, soaking into the dark fabric of David’s shirt and coat, staining it darker. Michael’s eyes trailed upwards from the wound. His chest, his neck. His face.
There was red at the corners of David’s mouth, a rivulet which ran from his nose down his cheek. Blood in his lungs coming up from screaming. Thrashing and trying to free himself.
Michael only realized he's not breathing himself when he ducked his head, hands on his knees and gasped.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
The word tore itself wetly from his throat, as if it was him choking on blood instead. He wanted to scream, a little. Wanted to wail and rage and curse until his voice gave out.
He doesn’t get that luxury right now.
Or maybe, he’s just been given the luxury of not needing to.
The sound of removing two horns from a body was something Michael would never forget, to the day he died. The wetness spattered onto his hands as they tried to find a good hold on David’s back, sticking his fingers together. The blood wasn’t warm - but it wasn’t cold, either. Somewhere between. David was surprisingly light as Michael pulled him into his arms. Like all his gravity went out of him with his lifeblood. He was cold and limp, and his head rested against Michael’s collarbone as he carried him out of the workroom, gelled hair tickling the bottom of his jaw. He was so close. The closest he’s been since throwing that punch. Since Michael could feel his breath on his face as he smiled, and asked him how far he was willing to go to belong.
Michael’s hands tightened and he wanted to toss the body aside. Because that’s all that this was; a dead body, a corpse, an imitation of closeness and of trust that he threw away the minute he let those fucking kids-
Michael tried to take a breath. It felt too tight in his chest to fill his lungs completely, so he let them ache.
Every step through the house felt like a mile, and every step outside was like a league. The cool air of the night did little to soothe any pains, finding the bare skin of his hands and neck and icing over his sweat. It left Michael feeling weak as he finally came to where Dwayne was still laying.
He almost put a hand on David’s head as he slipped off his shoulder, to rest him on the grass of the yard. But he didn’t.
The night was very quiet, save for the rustle of grass as Michael slumped onto his knees. He couldn’t stop looking at them, sprawled out on the front lawn like so many spare parts. Heat pricked at the corners of his eyes and he scrubbed at them, angry at his body for falling apart. He couldn’t fall apart. He needed to be there for Sam, for his mom. They’re who mattered right now, not his-
Not the vampires.
Gravel crunched behind him. A soft footfall, coming closer.
“I’ll be back inside in a minute, Mom-” He said, but as he turned his voice died in his throat. Star was standing there, her dark hair windswept and barely out of her face. Michael’s heart twisted in his chest.
“Star, hey, I’m sorry I thought...”
“I know what you thought,” she said. Her voice was even. Cold, almost. It felt wrong, compared to how relieved she was just hours ago.
Michael tried to clear his throat, gather himself. “You kinda disappeared on us, is everything okay? Laddie’s alright, right?”
The corners of her lips went tight.
“No. He’s not, but that isn’t your problem to deal with. You’ve done more than enough for us already.”
The more she spoke, the less Michael felt like he understood what was happening. Suddenly, he felt like she was distant, standing in the driveway and him kneeling in the grass of the yard. His hands twitched, and he needed to hold her. Hold onto something.
Michael staggered up, and moved to walk to her. So he could wrap his arms around her and feel her warm body against his, to know she was there-
But the moment he took a step, she took one backwards.
“Star?” He said her name like a lifeline.
“I’m leaving Santa Carla.”
It was like someone upended a bucket of ice-water on Michael’s head. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing, that couldn’t be right, there must be-
“Why?”
Star finally smiled, the expression breaking the stoniness of her face, but it was sad, wounded. “I don’t belong here. Neither does Laddie, and…I’m the only one who can look after him now. So we’re leaving.”
“But where are you going?” Michael almost croaked the question.
“Home.”
It answered nothing. Frustration welled up through the cracks in Michael’s heart, not so different than when she appeared at the window when he was on the last legs of his sanity, and she offered him a way out. A plea, a bargain. And yet, no answers. Nothing that helped him understand.
“Is home here?” He asked.
She didn’t answer.
With eyes that saw through him, Star turned and started to walk away.
He moved without thinking, his legs carrying him forward while something of himself stayed behind. She wasn’t far, she was right there. Michael reached out, his hand, covered in dried blood, aiming for hers. To take it and beg or bargain, just like she had, for something that he knew would slip away forever if he didn’t.
His foot caught on nothing. Missed a step in time, and as though the distance between them was a chasm a thousand feet wide, Michael fell.
His knees hit the hard stones of the driveway, pain ricocheting up his legs. His hand that had been held out came down on nothing, empty on the ground. The little rocks dug into his palm, ground in with the weight of his shoulders.
Star paused. Turned slightly to look back at him. For a moment, there was the softness that he knew. Worry. Her smile had gone soft. Pitying.
But not regretful.
“I did like you, you know,” she murmured.
“But not enough to stay,” Michael finished.
“No,” Star whispered. “Not enough for that.”
Michael takes a deep, shaking breath as he comes back to himself. Something small and fast darts across the sky, little flitting bats that pull him away from the painful memory. They wheel over the blackening outline of the treetops, turning on a dime to capture mosquitoes and moths before disappearing into the darkness of the woods again. Michael watches them, feeling something hollow in his chest.
If he was outside, he thinks, he could get a better view of them. Wander out to the horse pastures in the hills and watch them all night. Maybe go star-gazing if he felt like it. Out here, the stars were so bright at night, unlike the urban sprawl of Phoenix.
His mother got anxious even letting him go out during the day, though. If he so much as asked to run down to the store for something she’d hesitate and say she’d go with him, or to wait until Grandpa was free for the trip. She’d throw a fit if he went out on his own at night, especially without mentioning it.
He’s not angry at his mother. He knows he’s not. She had been scared, which is a perfectly logical response to everything that had happened, and he shouldn’t scare her more by wandering off again just because he’s feeling a little housebound.
He turns away from the window, thrusting his hands back into the water to start scrubbing again, placing the clean dishes on the drying rack in neat rows. His mother is talking to Sam, who’s trying to have two conversations at once now that he’s trying to listen to her and whatever wild story is being spun to him down the phone line. He can’t help but smile a little, listening to them. The sound of a domestic squabble feels familiar, comfortable. Michael dredges the mixing bowl for the meatloaf out of the water and starts rinsing it out.
The raw meat smell, diluted but still potent enough to carry some of its metallic sharpness, invades his nose.
It fills every bit of air that he breathes in, and he almost gags on it as his mind yanks up the images of the last time he smelled blood mixed with water. Pouring from burst pipes, pooling on the floor of the kitchen in thick waves, ankle-deep and pungent. Raw and bloody, iron and salt and that terrible, beckoning something that sat in the back of Michael’s throat like a snake, making him want to swallow-
The bowl makes a loud splash as Michael drops it back into the sink. He takes a staggering step back, raising a hand up to his face like he can physically block the scent. He can taste the bright tang of blood in his mouth, even though nothing is there. He scrubs at his mouth and nose, trying without success to make the lingering smell disappear.
Tension closes in a vice grip around his head, working into his brow, tightening with every breath. Every time he inhales, he can still taste it. It’s like it’s infused into the stale, warm air of the kitchen.
He stumbles forward, leaning over the sink to get at the windows. Unlocking them and throwing them open to let the cooler air in. It doesn’t do much, the temperature difference isn’t quite enough to feel, but even being able to feel the slight draft over his skin helps. It feels like a seal breaking, letting out pressure. He takes a deep, shaking breath, filling his lungs to capacity with the clean smells of dust and trees from outside, banishing the spectre of blood back to the furthest corner of his mind, where it belongs.
Through the sloshing of the water, the scrape of his fingers against the dishes and the mess of the inside of his own head, Michael doesn’t hear footsteps getting closer until a hand is landing on his shoulder.
The tension which has been winding in Michael’s body snaps all at once, like a bowstring pulled too taut. He wheels towards the unexpected touch, arm jerking up to knock away the hand with an arcing spatter of dishwater.
Sam is standing there, shirt wet with the scattered droplets and staring wide-eyed at Michael who had just slapped him away like he'd tried to put a knife in his ribs in a dark alley.
“Jesus Christ, Mike!” he exclaims, arms held out in shock. He’s stumbled back a few steps from where he’d been when Michael had lashed out.
Michael gasps, the surprise making his throat tighten and his heart jackrabbit in his chest. It takes a few moments for the sudden too-fast beating of his heart to be calm enough to find some words.
“Don’t do that,” he spits.
Sam looks incredulously at him. “What, walk up to you?”
Michael shakes his head, already turning away to dab his hands on the dish towel so he wouldn’t get any more of the kitchen damp. “That - that sneak shit you do. Just hanging around people until they notice you out of the corner of their eye and you fucking jump-scare them.”
Sam drops his arms, giving Michael a sidelong glance.
“I literally didn’t. Not like I thought you would be grocking the soap so hard you almost decked me about it. So sorry for interrupting your special you-time.”
Michael can feel the lingering annoyance sitting somewhere in his gums like a second set of teeth. It wants him to snap at Sam and tell him to piss off, that Sam should have known not to surprise him like that. (He really hadn’t. Sam just walked up to him, and Michael had been so deep in his thoughts that he wasn’t paying attention.)
He lets all the air in his chest out at once, bringing a hand up to the back of his neck to pinch and rub where it met the back of his head.
“Whatever. What do you want? I thought you had a pressing phone call.”
Sam takes the out from the impending verbal slap fight, embarrassment flashing across his face. He crosses his arms, sighing. “Mom kinda called it quits. Edgar and Alan found a lead-”
Just like smelling the raw meat, Michael’s gut drops. He cuts Sam off before he can even finish.
“The hell they did, and like hell you’re going.”
“Mike, it would literally just be us messing around in the library doing like, research and stuff. Trust me, I wouldn’t let them run in completely unknowing this time-”
“There’s not gonna be a ‘this time’,” Michael says, voice rising, “because you’re not going chasing after shit that can kill you because those two little morons wanna play Rambo with real fucking monsters!”
Michael doesn’t mean to shout. Really, he doesn’t even mean to get as upset as he’s getting. The words bubble up anyway, booming through his chest and bouncing off the walls of the kitchen. He can’t stop the images from flashing through his head, Sam laying bloody and broken. Something dark hunched over his body while it feasts and those two little idiots responsible for it long gone-
The room and Sam are very quiet in the aftermath of Michael’s shouting.
Michael only realizes his hands, closed into hard fists where he’d curled them by his side, are shaking when Sam looks down at them. And the look on Sam’s face is familiar. Too familiar, and like a slap in retaliation to his own words, it drives Michael back. An actual step back, which he takes towards the sink, leaning against it. Sam stays where he is.
Eventually, Sam speaks back up.
“...Mom just told me to help you with the dishes. That’s all,” he mumbles.
He’s still standing a few paces away, though. Far enough that if Michael were to make a move towards him, he’d have enough room to jump away, out of arm’s reach. Michael makes a snap decision, and in a swift movement, he grabs up the dish towel and throws it at Sam. He makes a muffled snort as it hits him exactly where Michael intended - right in the face - and snatches it up. Michael tosses in a half-smile as well.
“Then come help.”
Sam sticks his tongue out. “Gross, I think it got in my mouth.”
“You should learn how to close it, then.”
Sam gives him a raised eyebrow for that, and makes the first move to come closer again. He joins Michael at the sink, drying cups and silverware as he hands them over.
“Alan is going to be in my class,” Sam says out of nowhere.
“What?”
“At school. We’re in the same grade. Edgar is a year younger than us.”
Huh. Michael hadn’t known that. It felt odd, in a way. Edgar had made it very clear he was the driving force in their merry little band of Van Helsing wanna-bes, the head hunter, and though he was shorter than his brother, now that Michael was thinking about it, he had the air of authority. Or at least a head hard enough to not care about anyone else’s opinions on the matter of leadership.
“Okay?” Michael shrugs “Are they suggesting that some of the teachers are monsters?” It sounds like something those knuckleheads would come up with. Michael can’t honestly imagine them paying much attention in class.
Sam rolls his eyes. “No, it’s just. I’m going to be hanging out with them anyway, so don't get your panties in a knot about it. That’s all. They’re pretty okay, when they’re not in their zone.”
Michael looks over at Sam, seeing how he’s staring out the window, the way he toying with the utensils in his hands. There’s a furrow in his brow that Michael knows as well as he knows his own face. Sam is under the same restrictions as Michael has been for the past few weeks. A quick glance to his neck and - yeah.
There had been a ring of round bruises there, that had finally started to fade into yellow. An imprint of the place where Max had grabbed Sam, held him in a crushing grip as bait and insurance against their mother. Sam said he was fine. In the moment, he’d barely felt a thing, he’d said, just anger at Max and fear for their mom.
But she hasn’t wanted him to leave the house much because of it. Even Grandpa had agreed with that assessment.
Michael suppresses a sigh.
“Look, just…be careful, alright? Don’t go around harassing people because Edgar gets a wild hair up his ass, or thinks the mailman is actually an alien or something.” Michael says.
“Oh, Edgar doesn’t believe in aliens.”
God, they just get weirder and weirder.
The kitchen returns to companionable silence, and they finish with little fanfare. The conversation has distracted Michael enough to focus his wandering mind a little. Having Sam beside him feels nice. It’s like a little piece of normality that hasn’t turned unrecognizable.
Until he turns away from the sink.
He lets his eyes roam as he considers what to actually do with the rest of his night, now that he is feeling grounded enough to do anything. Read, probably. Maybe he’d ply his mother for a walk outside after all. He still feels a little of the itch under his skin, just for a breath of fresh air. She could time him if she liked.
Michael’s eyes are drawn to the wall as he mulls over his nonexistent evening plans, painted in its muted green and faded cream paneling. It’ll probably be the next thing to be fixed, after they manage to wrestle the plumbing back into something usable. It’s a wonder that Grandpa hasn’t had to take any of it down, actually. It must have been soaked through by the flood-
And then he freezes.
The wall is clean. Old, sure, but the paint and panelling is remarkably intact. The bottom near the baseboard is warped and bubbling from water damage, but the color is still cream, not that awful, thick, pink colour that the flood had been. It was like the kitchen had never been touched by a deluge of vampire blood.
He stares, seconds ticking by with his breath caught in his throat. He remembers the heavy, metallic scent and the sound of the torrent beating against the kitchen doors. He remembers the blood on the walls. It was all there. Perfect in his memory.
So where’s the damage?
“Mike?”
The call of his name rips his attention away from the wall. At least this time Sam hadn’t touched him. Michael jerks his gaze to the side, looking at his brother. Sam is staring at him again, a familiar hesitation on his face that Michael knows immediately.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Sam asks. “You look tired.”
Michael’s mouth twists. “Thanks.”
“Why don’t you go upstairs and lay down, huh? Take some aspirin too.”
Irritation blooms in Michael’s chest at the suggestion, not because it’s wrong, or even unwarranted but the tone of Sam’s voice sounds so much like their mother’s. He’s so sick of people attempting to tell him what will help him most. It always feels wrong, like a coat that’s a size too small, or putting a shoe on the wrong foot - strangling. Like he knows the advice won’t help him the way they want it to and it’s unsettling.
It makes his hair prickle and his palms sweat. Familiar and discomforting in its familiarity.
Sam is still looking at him and all at once, Michael can’t be here anymore. He turns away, and starts to move with purpose towards the door.
“I’m gonna go for a smoke. Don’t tell Mom.”
He moves quickly, thanking whatever lucky stars he still has that his mother isn’t in the hallway to question where he’s going. The summer air is almost blessedly cool on his skin as he closes the front door behind him and sits down on the porch steps.
To one side of the wicker chair, a wooden sculpture of a moose stares back at him with flat eyes. Apparently, it had been a gift from one of Grandpa’s friends, trading some poor, stuffed animal forever posed in an undignified way for this small, rough impression of Canadian wildlife. The center of its back had been carved hollow, filled with dirt and the corpses of whatever plants Grandpa had attempted to grow in it. For all his skills, the old man wasn’t much of a gardener.
Luckily, it doesn’t seem like he goes back over his projects when he’s abandoned them. Michael digs his fingers into the dry dirt, scraping it back. A few inches down, and they rub against plastic wrap.
Michael pulls the box of cigarettes out, tapping the dust off of them, and unwinding the rubber band holding the carton together. It’s crumpled, crushed really. The lid’s almost ripped off, and the paper is stained brownish red from sand and blood.
He’d gotten them off of Paul, after all.
The lighter he pulls from his pocket, and he glances to the door, just to be sure there wasn’t anyone in the living room. His mother would crawl up one side of him and down the other if she knew. When he’d confirmed he was alone, Michael flicks the steel and lights up.
Harsh smoke scrapes down his throat. As the box proclaims, the Camels are unfiltered, and he tastes it with every pull. But it was also good. The nicotine smoothes over his nerves, coating them in a thick blanket of artificial calm. Better than the still, stagnant air of the house.
Better than trying to think.
-
He ends up finishing the mostly empty pack. Each tastes worse than the last, but he can’t help but keep reaching for another when the previous cigarette has been stubbed out on the dry dirt of the driveway.
The tar and ash sit in the back of his mouth better than other flavors.
It passes the time. An hour, and then two. The night gets darker, and the day dies in a splash of orange-pink light on the horizon. Michael watches the lights of passing cars on the main road down the hill, listens for the conversation of his family inside, and sucks down the last of his secret vice. He doesn’t know what he’ll do with the box after he’s done - bury it again, maybe. If he threw it away, his mother might see it in the trash. He certainly wasn’t going to keep it. Just holding it in his hand, idly running his thumb over the dried, brown blotches made his stomach turn. Michael clicks the lighter under his thumb. Maybe he should burn this too.
He looks away from the empty carton, back out to the yard. Letting himself get distracted. Grandpa’s truck is sitting in the driveway. Its load of wooden fence posts have been taken off and stored away to make room for a still-wrapped toilet. The boxes of electrical lines to refit the living room from where the ceiling lamps had been torn down were already inside. This weekend, Grandpa’s friends were coming back out to see how much damage had been done.
Michael thinks that an exploded stereo might have done pretty significant damage. It was likely going to cost a pretty penny to fix, if it ever got fixed at all.
He can still smell the electrical fire, the frying wires and burning ozone, if he thinks about it. The whole wall behind the stereo must be black.
Something gnaws at the back of his mind.
The memory of the stained wall comes back, but this time it doesn’t settle as well. In his mind’s eye, there are two images, competing with each other: kitchen walls dripping with pink and red, bloodstained bathwater, leaving long streaks on white panelling, a visceral final revenge,
And the image of the water-damaged, but otherwise untouched paint that Michael saw tonight. That nobody had seemed to pay any mind except for him.
The nagging thought burrows deeper, biting its way into his center.
Michael considers burning the cigarette carton. Watching the mangled paper be reduced to feathery ash on the ground, smelling like a different kind of smoke than the one its contents had provided him. It would satisfy some part of him that feels compelled to see something burn and be reduced to nothing.
He can hear the conversation of his mother and brother and grandfather inside. Voices muffled, but still audible. He thinks about going inside and into the kitchen again, to run his hands over the wall, and to get a look at the stereo set. All while they would be watching him.
Even through the walls, he thinks he can already feel their eyes on him. Like earlier at dinner, when they’d been almost waiting for him to say something was wrong. What had they been expecting; for Michael to snap and suddenly descend into a screaming breakdown? Was that what they wanted?
He grits his teeth, hard enough that his jaw aches, and lets the anger fizzle. In his clenching hand, the flimsy paper of the pack crumples into an unsalvageable little ball. Oops.
Michael looks back at the house when he feels like he’s able. He doesn’t see movement in the living room, but he isn’t going to investigate now. His mother is already wary thanks to Sam trying to promise nothing would happen if he just spent one night out with his friends. Michael didn’t want to be caught looking for-
Looking for what? Signs? That his memory wasn’t failing, that the house really had flooded with bloody water and the stereo had gone up in smoke, and Michael’s sudden weird gut feeling was just some lingering paranoia?
Because it most likely is. Not every bad feeling meant something. It’s over. Done. Now, he’s just living in the aftermath. If he wanted to entertain some stupid thought he’d had in a moment of anxiousness, then that was his business.
Still, he’d rather not actually do it in front of his family. They are watching him closely enough these days as it was, and Michael knows he wouldn’t be able to explain what he was doing in a way that wouldn’t set off their alarm bells. The last thing he needs is them deciding to keep him under even more lock and key.
Tonight, then. Later, when it’s really late and no one, not even his grandfather, who’d always kept odd hours, would be awake.
Michael opens his hand, and the little cube of paper rolls pathetically in his palm. He plucks it up with two fingers, and flicks the lighter. The heat of the flame is bright and sudden, licking against his hand a fraction of a second before he drops the crumpled box to the ground, where it starts to smoulder. He watches as the flames consume the paper and wax, the old red stains, feeling a determination settle somewhere near the base of his ribs.
He's been having trouble sleeping anyway.
Chapter 2: Strange Taxidermy
Summary:
Michael has a strange dream, and a chat with an expert.
Notes:
Welcome baaaaack. The month felt like it took forever. Also, warning you now, that while we're not planning on going far over the expected schedule time, chapter 3 is going to give us (and has been giving us) some grief, so bear with us. Not much more to say, see you on the other side and enjoy! :>
Chapter Text
Michael wakes up to a silent house.
It's a bleary sort of half awake, the kind where his vision remains stubbornly cloudy and his head still swims with half remembered recollections. The dreams leave only the vaguest impression, more feelings than images or sensations he could hold onto. But he thinks it was something sad. There’s an empty feeling in his chest.
He doesn’t remember falling asleep after he’d come upstairs. Go figure, the one night he’d been planning on trying to put his insomnia towards something useful, he ended up nodding off. He remembers turning off the lights and laying down, listening to the settling of the house and his own slow heartbeat in his ears. Then he must have shut his eyes and drifted off. He blinks, trying to clear his vision a little, but every movement feels sluggish. When he does manage to force them open for longer than a second or two, he just stares up.
The room is almost pitch black, and the square of light on the ceiling from his window is shifting. He follows it with his eyes, tracking the mottled bunch of shadows that move in time with the trees outside. Those are clear enough, but the room’s corners, the walls, the door leading to his side of the bathroom, are yawning black pits of nothingness.
Air brushes over his skin from the blades of the fan spinning above him. He watches it move, just this side of too slow, again and again, almost hypnotized by the movement.
As he looks at it, something changes. He thinks he can distinguish the edges of the blades, but a sort of after-image leaves a trail in their wake as they pass. Smearing behind it, silvery and dim, before disappearing again. The distortion of the light and movement makes the hairs on the back of Michael's neck stand up. He hates looking at it, moves to look away.
He can’t move his head.
His muscles are loose, tingling like a limb that’s had the blood crushed out of it. Like trying to curl his fingers but being unable to feel the movement at all. Numb.
He’s laid out, his lower half covered by the sheet he’d haphazardly thrown over his sleeping bag. He can feel all the places where his arms and legs are splayed out. He wants to pull them in, shift, but he can’t.
As if he is a puppet with no strings, Michael can’t move his body. Only his eyes.
He flicks his gaze around the room, up, down, left and right, into the corners and the places where the shadows hang heaviest. His eyelids are heavy, and each blink is a struggle as he barely manages to force his eyes open again. He feels the rise and fall of his chest moving as steadily as though he were still asleep, mismatching the intensity of his growing anxiety.
Maybe it’s how the moonlight and sharp security light cuts through the blackness, maybe it’s that he’s panicking. But the shadows are not just shadows. One moment, Michael is alone in the room. The next, he is not.
As though cut from the dark and the moonlight himself, David stands in the corner of his room.
His hair and face catch white and gleaming in the hard light from the window, but his body is swallowed up by the shadow around him, a mass of black on black. He shifts his head, just a little, and the light catches in his eyes like a cat’s. Green-yellow, opaque and shiny, startlingly bright as he takes a single step towards where Michael is pinned on the floor.
Michael wants to fling himself upright, to question this phantom that’s stepped out of his nightmares, but his body stays just as stubbornly still as before. The vision of David strides out of the dark, the silver spurs on his boots pinging with every step. Boots tapping against the hardwood. Despite the utter silence of the room, and the clarity of the dream, everything feels muffled. Like Michael is the only person in the world experiencing this.
Finally he’s standing over Michael, looking at him with those eerie lantern eyes. Michael has never had this detailed of a dream before - not one that felt so vividly real at any rate. He can make out the shine of David’s patchy beard, the gentle swing of the leather strip in his earring. Another tilt of his head, and David’s burning blue eyes lose the light, the animal-green reflection in their pupils disappearing. They look human again. Almost.
He’s just standing over Michael. His expression is, as it ever was, unreadable. Funny - even in his dreams, David remains an enigma.
After a long moment, David crouches. The movement is fast, uncannily graceful and silent. He’s by Michael’s head, though he’s not looking at his face. His gaze trails along the length of his body, as if he’s trying to take in every inch of him. Michael’s breath comes in shallow, slow pants, still out of his control.
David reaches out. His hand - bare, Michael realizes - settles on his chest, just above his heart.
Hard, claw tipped fingers press into the grooves between his ribs. David is cold and the chill seeps through the thin fabric of Michael’s shirt and into his skin. He feels the pressure of David pressing down as he breathes in, feeling the push of his muscles, the beating of his heart.
His heartbeat never changes its slow, steady tempo, even as the seconds tick on and David’s hand remains on his chest. He’s just watching Michael, watching him breathe. The room seems drawn back behind him, making David seem all the closer. He waits for something to happen, for David to dig those claws into his skin and sink even deeper - to break bone and pull his heart from under his ribs and show it to Michael before he dies.
But he doesn’t do that. Instead, in measured movements, he shifts out of his crouch, stretching out his legs and dropping his shoulders. His free hand comes down on the floor, claws clicking against the wood as he adjusts, and he-
Lays down. Next to Michael on the floor.
His coat settles along his body like a blanket, free arm pillowing his head as he lays on his side. The dim glow of his eyes washes over his face like a candle burned to the last bit of wick, fire with no warmth. It casts soft shadows on his face.
He doesn’t look angry. He doesn’t look happy, or condescending or calculating.
He looks…distant. Like he’s recalling something he hasn’t thought about in a long time.
Michael’s heartbeat continues its gentle pulse, and his breath still comes and goes, completely calm. His eyes are like a hundred pound weights, almost impossible to keep open now. Especially now, it seems.
David’s hand stays on Michael's chest as he moves again. This time, to lean forward. To come closer.
Michael feels the wash of cold breath over his skin. Over his neck. It rattles in a way that reminds him of an old water pipe, rusty and gurgling. This close, he can smell the vampire - cigarette ash, the worn fabric of his duster, something old. Like wet stones. There’s a moment of hesitation, a breath where something vibrates in the air like a plucked string.
It manages to change something in the dizzying laxness of Michael’s body. Some tension pulls through his spine as David’s nose finds the shell of his ear, trailing down his jaw, following a scent. Michael thinks he knows what scent it is. David’s mouth finds Michael’s pulse, and he huffs, cold against Michael’s skin which suddenly feels blazing.
As soon as his lips meet Michael’s neck, his head is filled with a wash of sensation. Like his heart is a cold block of ice in his chest, like there are invisible eyes watching him from unseen corners of the room. A pit of want has opened inside of him, so deep it threatens to swallow him whole, and it just sits there, gaping.
It all slams into him, forced through his mind and his body like rain in a dry creek bed, a flood from somewhere outside of him, and just as devastating.
The overwhelm must finally break something inside of him, and Michael’s shoulders twitch.
Whatever David had been planning - whatever nightmare Michael’s mind had conjured up - he pauses. His hand lingering over Michael’s heart jerks, the edge of his nails catching on the shirt. The two cold brands of fangs withdraw from Michael’s throat, leaving behind damp skin and a memory of their imprint.
The sensations that swept over Michael suddenly stop as though they’d never been there at all.
David is upright almost too fast for Michael’s eyes to track, but he doesn’t take his gaze off him for an instant. He’s staring down at Michael, and those icy eyes lock with his own. Awake and watching.
They widen, a fraction of a movement that changes David’s whole face.
He’s surprised.
The hand on Michael’s chest tightens. The slight pressure of his claws shifts into something much sharper, true talons pricking through the fabric of his shirt and scratching threateningly at Michael’s skin.
His breath stutters, finally, drawing in under his own power, enough to scream-
He blinks.
And David is gone.
The room is empty, save for Michael himself, alone on the sleeping bag.
With breath heaving through his chest Michael finally jerks himself upright. Control comes back in fits, his arms and legs moving without coordination as he throws himself to the side, rolling onto the floor. He lays there, face pressed against the floorboards, panting. The cool wood feels better against his overheated skin, sending little shocks through him where he’s touching it. He’s trembling, but manages to maneuver onto his hands and knees while he tries to slow his breathing.
His eyes dart around the room, checking every corner. Leaving no possible space unobserved.
A nightmare. A vivid one, at that.
Michael squeezes his eyes shut, ducking his head down so it hangs limp against his chest. He twists his fingers into his hair, and tries his best to breathe. Slowly, gradually his throat loosens and his breaths stop heaving quite so much. He carefully lowers himself back down to a sitting position, and tries to focus on something other than the pounding of his own heart. He can hear the fan circling above him, the crickets outside. If he listens hard enough, he could even hear Sam’s quiet breathing in the next room, through the open bathroom.
He brings his hand down from his hair to his neck, without his say-so. To just below his jaw where a phantom sensation lingers-
He rips his fingers away before they can touch the spot.
That wall of…emotion that had come over him, when David had touched him had disappeared, but he feels oddly empty. Hollowed in its wake as though it had physically carved a space inside of him, and now there’s a collapsing hole left over. What was that? His own panic? A part of the paralysis?
Michael rubs at his stinging eyes. Whatever that had been - night terror, sleep paralysis vision, guilt-riddled hallucination of some lingering effects of coming so close to that hellish edge that were still working through him, it was over.
It’s over, now.
Michael blearily looks up, to the side table above him, and sees the red numbers of the digital clock glaring out of the darkness. Two forty two in the morning.
Any other night these past three weeks, he’d have still been awake. He’d been planning on being awake tonight, right?
Michael rises from the floor, on legs that are only just steady enough.
Time to prove a theory.
-
His socks muffled his steps on the wood flooring, but the boards squeaked with even the most careful movements. The sounds are even louder in the dark and when Michael opens his bedroom door to the hallway, the catch of the latch and the creaking hinges sound deafening to his ears.
He peers out of his doorway, as if someone would actually be up in the middle of the night. Michael is going to have to be quiet as he looks around downstairs. Grandpa sleeps in a bedroom on the ground floor, just down the hall from his workroom.
Some part of him is whispering that all of this is moronic. He's literally sneaking around his own home like it’s a crime, and if someone sees him, that would be evidence enough that something is wrong. They’d ask questions.
Maybe it’s just the memory of what happened the last time he snuck out of the house in the middle of the night.
He bites his lip, and before he can change his mind he slips out of the hallway, leaving the door ajar behind him.
He has to check.
Michael slipped past Sam’s room and down the stairs. The living room is an uncanny reflection of itself during the day, silent without the sounds of birdsong or the radio, still without the doors open to let in a draft during the warm summer day. Michael descends into the shadows of the main floor, one step at a time.
The security light from the shed shines through the slats of the blinds, thin white lines thrown into warped shapes on the walls and floor. The nearest streetlight is at the bottom of the hill where the dirt road meets the main paved one, far enough away that it’s only a tiny orange glow through the trees. The house is dark, but not altogether impossible to navigate. Still, he’ll need more light if he’s going to find what he came down here to look for. He skirts around the taxidermy lion in the corner, keeping his eyes averted from its sharp teeth and smoke stained fur. Even before being blown halfway to hell the thing gave Michael the creeps. His objective is behind it, near the couch. The one remaining lamp in the room that was still in working order after the attack. His hand lands on it, and without thinking about it he turns it on.
Light floods into his eyes, painful and sudden. For a moment it’s like he’s looked right into the noonday sun. Michael grunts and slams his eyes shut, but the lightbulb leaves a smeared, muted glow behind his eyelids. It takes a few seconds of rubbing and blinking to get them clear enough to see again.
“Fuck me, Jesus Christ-” he mutters to himself, before turning away from the lamp and opening his eyes, carefully this time.
The living room is just as it was only hours ago. The chandelier is still shoved into a corner for rewiring, and the lamp is the only light that works. The glow from the lamp’s bulb is very strong, abnormally so - his mother must have changed it recently. It casts the room into more shadows than it illuminates, making the redwood walls look darker and richer. With the late hour, and the lack of other people in the space, it feels alien. Like he is a new fixture in the space that doesn’t quite fit, or shouldn’t be there at all.
Michael shoves the feeling aside, chalking it up to shot nerves and a tired, sleep deprived mind. And blinding himself, because he’s an idiot.
Now he has the light, he moves around the couch and makes for the abandoned stereo system. The various devices sit in their cabinet, which ended up shoved further back against the wall.
It’s still in pretty good condition. The tape deck and record player are smashed and the casing had cracked from the force of a body being flung into them, but everything else looks fine. There’s a clean, neat little hole in one of the devices where Sam’s arrow had lodged itself. No one had tried to use them since the attack, but Michael didn’t have to be a tech geek to know they’re probably busted beyond repair.
As he gets closer, he inspects the cabinet for damage. He knows there are things that are broken, but now he’s looking for what he knows should be there - what he’s sure is there: Scorch marks. Burned, melted plastic and blackened metal. The faint, lingering scent of electrical fire and blood.
But the closer he gets, the less he sees. Michael stands over the stereo, looking down at it. Broken. A little singed here and there.
But still in one piece.
The edges of the plastic casing are melted near the plugs at the back, shot from the electricity. But, there should be stains. There should be smears of blood, bits of innards or something clinging to the devices.
Dwayne had essentially exploded from the shock and there was nothing to suggest he’d been there at all.
He grabs the edges of the speaker cabinet, nails digging into the wood as he tugs it away from the wall. It’s heavy, the legs scrape against the floor with a teeth-gritting screech. In the back of his head, he recalls distantly that he’s trying to be quiet, but he doesn’t care at the moment. The cabinet groans, old wood complaining at being disturbed, and the gap between it and the wall widens. Michael’s eyes land on the space behind, on the plug set into the plaster.
It’s clean.
The wall behind the stereo is fine - no burn marks in the wood paneling, the white wall socket in perfect condition, if a little scuffed from the cabinet being shoved into it.
It doesn’t make any sense.
Michael shuts his eyes and takes a breath, steadying himself as he tries to come to terms with what he’s seeing, and what that might mean. He pushes, and the cabinet screeches back into place, as though it had never been moved. He can feel his breath rasping in his throat, harder than it should be.
What was that term? He’d heard Sam throw it around in the days after everything had happened. Post trauma response or something. The brain making you act weird when something really bad has happened, because it’s trying to protect you.
Well, maybe Michael is misremembering. Or it hadn’t been that bad. Maybe he’s been making up theories about what he’d thought was happening, like blood leaving stains or outlets blowing out, when really, it didn’t happen.
But he’d seen it.
He’d felt it. It had been real as anything he’s experiencing right now, like the shift of his clothing against his skin, or the sound of the fans running upstairs -
It had been real.
In the back of his mind, a memory flickers, ignited by the familiar swirling feeling of confusion.
Maggots.
Worms.
Real and squirming against their boxes and in his mouth. As real as the beating of his heart in his chest. Memories as clear as day.
And yet.
Three weeks of things Michael didn’t want to think about came trickling in - doubts, bad dreams, restlessness, tasteless food and the heaviness in his chest that, for all the world, he thought should have died with the vampires.
The panic he’s been forcing down claws up through his chest all at once, let loose by the sinking realization as to just what has been happening. It sears through his head and down into his throat. He can’t breathe. His brain is running a million miles an hour and his heartbeat sounds like a kick-drum in his ears. Even now, his rational mind is rejecting what’s right in front of him, all but begging him to accept it.
Claws prick at his chest. Teeth set against his neck. A supposed dead man visiting him in the night.
Maybe not so dead, after all.
Michael takes an unsteady step away from the cabinet, then more, faster. He stumbles back until his knee hits the couch and he almost trips and falls, biting down on his tongue in the shock of trying to regain his balance.
The sharp, metallic tang of blood slicks the inside of his mouth, coating his teeth. Just like the panic had hit him, the taste sweeps over his senses as it lingers on his tongue. Like focusing a camera, the colours in the room are sharper, vivid, and the shadows are less black, their depths revealed by - what Michael can only assume now - are lingering vampire powers.
Three weeks of hunger he hadn’t even realized he was feeling, sharpened with every meal his body didn’t want, snakes up his throat. He wants more.
He spits a mouthful of bloody saliva on the floor and leans over, one hand braced on his knee while the other grips the arm of the couch. The new stain on the ground stares accusingly up at him. Almost teasing, like he’s being stupid for not sating the hunger snarling behind his ribs. He rips his eyes away from it before they can linger for too long, but his mouth is still watering. He’s going to be sick.
“What the hell are you doin’, boy?”
“Jesus fuck-!” Michael gasps, his head snapping up to see the old man where he’d snuck up on him. “Grandpa!”
The old man harrumphs. “Gettin’ blood on my floor, really Michael?”
Grandpa is standing on the threshold where the hallway meets the living room. He’s in his red bathrobe and an undershirt, neon green boxers and his soft, deerskin moccasin slippers. His hair is as wild as ever, pulled back loosely. He’d clearly just rolled out of bed and is looking at him with an expression Michael can’t parse. He can’t really read the man on a good day to begin with, and given the last few weeks, he’s begun to suspect parts of his grandfather’s wackier side is a mask in and of itself. A funky old coot, a weird hermit.
And also, an ex-vampire hunter.
Michael straightens and wipes at his mouth. The blood is gone, but the twisting in his stomach, now that he’s feeling it, stubbornly remains. If anything, it’s gotten worse now that the flavor is gone. He tries to relax his shoulders, looking away from Grandpa’s stare. “Yeah. Right. I’m sorry. Just bit my tongue, that’s all. I’ll clean it up.”
He starts to take a step towards the kitchen, to get a towel and wipe away the spit, when he’s stopped by Grandpa reaching towards him and grabbing his arm.
“Michael.”
He knows that tone. The same from his mother, the same from Sam. Except, they didn’t have decades of knowledge and experience under their belts. Not like Grandpa, who’d pieced things together likely the first time his mother had brought Max into the house, and just had to wait for the right moment to strike.
He knows something’s wrong.
Michael can’t look at him. He can’t move, despite how it feels like his grandfather’s hand is burning on his skin. A sudden desire to twist away and lash out threads through his muscles, the urge so abrupt and all-encompassing that Michael twitches with it, barely contained.
Instead, he keeps his gaze averted. He keeps silent. He lets Grandpa look at him, and know.
“Why don’t we go sit down.” Grandpa says.
-
Michael sits on a backless swivel stool in the corner of the workroom, where he’d been put by Grandpa, watching the old man work at the table full of taxidermy.
The current project is a coyote, and he can’t seem to take his eyes off it. The body is bare, a hollow, plastic sculpture to fit inside the pelt. It doesn’t look like a skinned animal, or even a model of one. A white impression of a canine body that smells of chemicals and clay, the mouth pulled wide but all the teeth missing from it - those sat to the side, yet to be inserted in the mold. The eye sockets however were filled with the glass inserts that looked almost too-real. Tawney yellow, surrounded by dark sclera. Focused.
A shiver creeps up Michael’s spine every time his eyes meet the coyote’s glass ones. He feels, ridiculous as it is, the need to avert his gaze. It’s as if the thing is watching him. Wailing silently.
Grandpa hasn’t said anything more after asking Michael to sit. Instead he had put on his stained leather smock, pulled out his tools and went to the work of making the stuffed figure.
As if the crisis sitting on the stool behind him wasn’t even big enough to pause from trimming the edges of the pelt for the mount.
Grandpa peels the raw edges of the hide off with a sharp knife, tossing the ragged pieces into a bucket near his feet. The skin is dry and cleaned on the inside already, and the man slips it over the mount a few times to make sure it’s sitting correctly. It looks worse like that - the skin of the coyote hanging loose on its body like its insides were falling out. Or maybe tearing their way through from underneath.
The quiet stretches out between them, tight and uncomfortable in Michael’s chest. The urge to speak sits heavy on his tongue, to ask something. Anything to break the silence in the air. He draws in a breath, not certain of what’s going to come out-
“Why don’t ya close th’ door, Michael,” Grandpa hums before he can say anything. “Figure you don’t want anyone hearing.”
Michael knows that he doesn’t even if he’s not sure what exactly they’re talking about. He stands and slides the double doors closed, gently, so the wood doesn’t bang as it meets, but he leaves the doors unlatched. Just in case, something in his mind whispers.
He shakes his head, dispelling the worry that doesn’t make any sense. His grandfather won’t hurt him. He wants to talk.
He returns to his seat, and Grandpa sets down his tools. Michael rubs his own arms, nails scratching harshly at his skin.
“How’re you feeling?” Grandpa asks.
Michael huffs. “I’m fine-”
“Cut the shit boy,” Grandpa interrupts, sitting back from the table, “for all our sake’s.”
Michael’s mouth snaps shut. Grandpa has never spoken to him like that, not even after the fight, when the house had been basically unlivable. It’s clipped. Cold.
It makes Michael feel like one of the projects on the table. Peeled open and scraped raw. Nowhere to hide.
“I’m-” he tries again, but instead of the words he wants, his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth and his throat goes painfully tight.
He isn’t okay? Obviously.
He doesn’t know what was going on? That’s a lie. Kinda.
He’s…
“I’m confused, I think.” Michael settles on. It’s not enough, not quite the right word, but it’s all he has to offer at the moment. He’s not sure what he would say about the stereo or the walls. Or the dream. If that’s what it all was.
Grandpa nods.
“I imagine that you are.”
There is another word that springs to mind, though, even though he would never admit it to the old man. He’s hungry. But he knows how that would come off, and he really, really doesn’t want to end up on the wrong end of a garden stake.
His grandfather turns around and must catch something in Michael’s face because he reaches out and places two warm, steady hands on Michael’s shoulders. Grandpa squeezes gently, a comforting hum on his lips.
“Now don’t panic. That doesn’t help anyone. I bet that’s part of how you got into this whole mess.”
Michael just shakes his head.
“It’s supposed to be over,” he says. The words fall out of him in a rush, like he can’t get them out fast enough. “They’re supposed to be dead, we killed them. I saw David-”
He stops. The name catches behind his teeth, stumbling out of his mouth without his say so. He scrambles for something else.
“I saw the head vampire die.”
Grandpa just looks tired. “This kinda thing ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
The laugh that bubbles out of Michael is too sudden and too loud, and it goes on for too long. It sounds like a bark from a frightened dog. Hysterical. Grandpa gives him a long look as he trails off, his face falling again within seconds. He drops his hands from Michael’s shoulders and leans back against the work table.
“So. We didn’t get ‘em all, did we,” he says.
Michael swallows, the uneasiness settling deeper into his stomach. “I guess not.”
“One in particular, I would assume.”
“Yeah.”
Grandpa sighs.
“You didn’t mention any specifics when you were tellin’ us all about it after the fight. You think this, uh, ‘David’ fella’s the one who turned you?”
David’s mouth finds Michael’s pulse, and he huffs, cold against his skin. The press of teeth against Michael’s throat-
He tears his gaze away from Grandpa, his face blazing with sudden heat.
“Yeah. Pretty sure.” he says, quieter.
“Well shit.” Grandpa replies.
Well shit indeed.
At least Grandpa seems to be taking it in stride, offering his own wry half-smirk at his grandson.
“All this before your senior year of highschool. You know, most fellas your age would be messin’ with the cops or finding a job, or trying to keep from getting a girl pregnant-”
Michael shoots his grandfather a flat scowl at the last suggestion, but the man continues.
“-But not this family, huh? Nah, we gotta go and poke a vampire nest with a flaming baseball bat, because that’s a good way to spend summer vacation.”
Maybe a little frustration creeps into the end of that statement, but Michael finds he can’t blame him. He knows that most of this mess was his fault, and that he made it worse by keeping it to himself.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he says. “It just felt like it kept happening to me without me even being involved.”
“Sometimes, that’s exactly how it happens.”
Michael gives Grandpa an exasperated look. It’s too late for this kind of thing.
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is these things have a tendency to pull you in like a riptide. Y’don’t notice until you can’t see the shore anymore. And at that point, there’s only two options.”
“Sink or swim?” Michael asks, though he knows the answer.
Grandpa nods.
Michael rubs a hand over his own face as Grandpa watches him carefully. It feels like his skin is too tight over his body and vibrating with the desire for... something. He’s wired, electrified in his bones, restless in his own skin. A feeling he’s come to know too well in the weeks past, and he’s starting to loathe it. If he could chase the sensation off with his teeth that are so on edge, he would.
Sitting straight on the stool, he tries to gather himself as much as he can.
“Okay, so I made things worse by making assumptions-”
“They do make an ass out of you and me-”
“So what the fuck do I do to fix it,” Michael practically growls.
No. Not practically.
Michael snarls, lips pulling back to show the tips of his teeth, nails too sharp to be human digging into the fabric of his sweatpants. He jerks forward in his seat, ready to throw himself upright-
Grandpa stands frozen against the table. Watching him with a wary expression. At his side, his left hand has drawn back, hovering over the table top. Fingers inches from the wooden handle of one of the hide scrapers, the blade short and curved.
Michael’s insides plummet into an icy darkness and he snaps his hands up to his mouth.
“...I’m sorry,” he whispers in a trembling voice which is still far too harsh to be totally human.
His grandfather’s face is hard. It’s the same expression he’d had when he was looking over the devastation of his home, the near-brutalization of his daughter and grandchildren, and the dead bodies littering the floor that was painted with blood.
“Yeah. I’m sure you are.”
Michael’s hands hesitate by his mouth, trailing over his lips. He knows what he will feel if he slips them inside. The harsh points of his teeth are already digging into the soft flesh of his tongue.
It’s like that snake of hunger that has been sitting idle at the back of his throat has suddenly struck out, fitting itself into his skull. Whatever has been lying silent and patient these three weeks is done being toyed with, denied, ignored. It’s in his blood, and it will have what it wants. Now.
It’s all Michael can do to clamp his mouth shut against his own teeth, and wait.
Waiting for what his grandfather will say now. Waiting for a plan of action, for some explanation.
“Go get your shoes,” the old man says instead.
Michael blinks. “What?”
Grandpa grumbles as he pushes himself away from the workbench, brushing non-existent dust from his apron. “We’re taking a drive and then a walk. Go get your shoes.”
“Grandpa, it’s like three a.m.-”
The man doesn’t turn around. “Then you’d better get a move on, boy. A minute lost is a minute wasted. Don’cha agree?”
He supposes he has no choice but to agree. Michael slowly lowers his hands from his mouth, tentatively feeling his teeth as he goes. They’re normal again, but the transformation doesn’t make him feel much better. In fact, if he lets himself think about it for too long, he can feel that knife's edge of panic just waiting to surge up again. It sits, sullen in his gut now.
Instead of letting himself dwell on it, he gets up to follow his grandfather. On the way out, he looks up the stairs, to the still-dark second floor.
He should-
“If there’s anything to tell,” Grandpa says, “We can tell them in the morning.”
Michael doesn’t want to. He wants to go upstairs and wake Sam up, to explain the best he can that he hasn’t been lying. He’d thought things were fine. He wants to wake his mother and tell her that he’s so, so sorry. For everything.
But he doesn't want to scare anyone. He doesn’t want to make things worse just as they’re starting to get better.
He doesn’t want to put this on them. He never did.
Michael silently passes their rooms to his own, and grabs his shoes.
Grandpa is already by the door, waiting for him. He’s dressed like he’s going out, exchanging his moccasins for boots, his bathrobe for a coat. His shoulders are loose, even as he stares with that unreadable expression, one hand at his side and the other holding the keys to the truck. He quietly opens the door, and Michael follows him out.
The difference between being in the house and being outside hits Michael like a physical blow. Inside is stuffy, a wooden box kept dark by blocking out the world outside - security in exchange for being confined. This is nothing like that. Above, the moon shines in a half disk, waxing if Michael remembers the right term. In the coolness of the deep night, the air feels clear. Clean and fresh, water after a year in the desert. The trees around them are alive with a million little sounds, night birds and bats calling to each other, frogs and crickets singing in a low hum that makes Michael’s ears tingle. Further away in the distance, there’s the faintest sound of semi trucks echoing along the highway. The only people awake this time of night.
Aside from them, of course.
Grandpa climbs into the old flatbed, and Michael hesitates for only a moment before he clambers in as well. Dust rises from the passenger seat as he shoves some newspapers and a box of rusted metal pipes into the footwell. It tickles in his nose, and Michael struggles not to sneeze.
The truck rattles and sputters to life, headlights cutting holes in the darkness. Tires crunch into the gravel of the driveway as they jerk and pull forward, and as they pass under the archway of the fence, Michael looks back at the cabin. Watching for lights upstairs to click on and notice something is happening.
He watches until they pass through the trees and around the curve of the dirt road leading down the hill, hiding the house from view.
The lights never turn on.
Chapter 3: The Widow of Santa Carla
Summary:
Grandpa takes Michael to meet someone.
Notes:
This chapter has been fighting us tooth and claw since it was drafted ALL THE WAY BACK IN AUGUST. We only just finished editing it...the night before we're posting it.
Enjoy :>
Chapter Text
The light and noise of the beach and its boardwalk fade to nothing quickly. It doesn’t take long before Michael and Grandpa are driving through dark, rolling hills, spotted with the twisted shape of the occasional tree. There aren’t many houses away from the town proper, and the suburbs have passed away behind them minutes ago. For long stretches, the only signs that people live out here are the fences that occasionally line the road, pastures for livestock and the indication of property lines. They cast strange shadows in the moonlight, barbed wire and rough-hewn poles whose shapes seem to sway and chase after the truck as it trundles over cracked pavement, and then dirt roads. Sometimes, Michael mistakes a particularly warped pole for a person, standing just off the side of the road. It isn’t, but he still feels as though the empty shape watches them even after it’s out of his sight.
The hills get steeper and the open ground is swallowed in the dark shapes of trees, taller than any you’d find outside of the state. They rise up out of nowhere, and as the truck turns they’re surrounded by the trunks, straight and tall and dense. It makes the road a tunnel, like the bottom of a canyon, sheer sides closing in around them.
It’s not until a break in the hills, driving along the edge of a particularly winding part of the road that Michael looks down, and realizes that Grandpa is driving them up into the mountains.
From up here, the lights of Santa Carla - the town, the Boardwalk, and even further away the wharf and docks - shine like a glittering reflection of the stars above in the night sky. Distant and small, nestled into the curve of the coast. Swallowed by the dark.
Michael almost forgets, watching the world roll past, that they’re driving out here for a reason.
The view disappears behind another stand of trees, gone as quick as it emerged. It's a few minutes longer before Grandpa starts to slow the truck to a stop and parks it. Neither of them speak as the old man turns off the ignition, but Michael knows in his gut that they’ve arrived at their destination. The only break in their surroundings is an unmarked turn-off in the woods beside them, shrouded by scrub brush and long, dried grass, meandering through the looming trees. It looks like it had been made naturally by people - or more probably animals - walking through the scrub.
Grandpa turns off the headlights and for a moment, darkness swamps them both. Then there’s a click, and he swings a big, heavy-looking flashlight in an arc into the pitch black of the trees. He gets out of the driver’s side and hops to the ground.
Michael doesn’t immediately follow.
Grandpa looks back when he doesn’t hear Michael behind him right away and turns the flashlight around. The beam hits his face and Michael jerks back, eyes slamming shut as he’s assaulted with light for a second time that night.
“C’mon, Michael. Didn’t drive out here for nothin’.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming. You didn’t have to blind me over it.”
Granted, Grandpa never told Michael what the ‘something’ they’d come out here for was, but he's here now. Just like the start of this mess, he can only take a breath and follow where someone else leads. He slides out of the truck, and meets his grandfather in the woods.
The path isn’t easy. In the dead of night as it is, even with the moon bright overhead and Grandpa’s flashlight showing the trail, it’s still difficult to navigate the underbrush. His sneakers, which serve him well enough on wooden boardwalks and sandy beaches, scrape and slide on the path. The ground is dusty and dry, disrupted by the dark shapes of tree roots. They catch on Michael’s jeans and grab at his ankles. There’s rocks he doesn’t see until he’s almost tripping on them.
It’s not immediately apparent, but the longer they walk, the more something nags at Michael’s senses. The crunch of his shoes on the ground, his grandfather’s huffing breath, but-
The forest has gone eerily quiet. The wind in the trees is still, and there are no crickets, or frogs, or night birds. Above, in the branches of the trees though, come little rattling sounds. Like dry wood clacking against itself. Something white sways on twine between the limbs, but before Michael has a chance to focus on it, he almost runs into Grandpa’s back.
His grandfather has stopped, looking back at Michael with a raised eyebrow. Ahead is a clearing, crowded by the silhouettes of pines on all sides. The scrub is still dense around them, and some of the brambles catch at Michael’s pants as he moves around his grandfather to get a better look. The trail widens out into a level path, but the gravel is gone, replaced by hard-packed dirt. It looks almost black in the moonlight, the soil rich and dark. At first, Michael doesn’t actually see what Grandpa is looking at, hidden as it is in the dip of the earth and the shrouding foliage. Then, with a decisive click, the flashlight turns off, and the world slides back into focus.
A cabin is nestled in the middle of the clearing, almost hidden by a dip in the ground. It’s old. Rustic, if Michael was going to be charitable, with broad logs making up its walls and a low, sloped shingle roof. A small chimney puffs smoke into the midnight air, and a porch stands out front, decorated with windchimes that clatter in the soft breeze. The entire place looks plucked from an earlier age, set down in the middle of the woods with no regard for the modernity of the rest of the world. Except-
As they draw closer Michael sees the chimes more clearly. Instead of driftwood or shells, the normal kitschy crap that you’d expect to be on a grandma’s porch, the decorations are made of bone. All along the roof of the porch the moonlight glints on the pale, bleached shapes. Curved jaws full of teeth both flat and sharp, long femurs and tibias, antlers like branches and horns that make low, hollow noises as the air moves through them.
In the macabre tidbits, Michael very nearly misses the woman sitting on the porch until she laughs.
“I was wondering when you’d finally bring the sprout out here. You’d gone on about them coming for weeks, I was beginning to worry something had happened, Jonathan.”
The voice is like dead leaves rattling in the wind, creaky and old. The woman it comes from is hunched over on a rocking chair, just as rough-hewn as the wood of the cabin, idly rocking herself backwards and forwards. Her face is in shadow, but Michael can see the rest of her well enough. Her clothing is plain, a white blouse with a downturned collar and a long dark-green skirt in a heavy fabric. Simple, but well cared for. A dark woven shawl, a thick thing covered in geometric patterns, is draped over the chair behind her and a pipe dangles from her fingers, the bowl smoking softly with something that smells like herbs and tobacco. She’s tiny, dwarfed by even the small cabin - Michael suspects she’d barely come up to his chin if she stood next with him. Though he doesn’t mean to, his mind conjures up the image of a gnarled old tree stump, bent and broken and ancient.
Grandpa walks up to the porch, a hand on Michael’s back so he moves too. Even with that though, Michael is struggling to make himself walk towards the house and the old woman. It seems like every step he takes closer, the less his body wants to move - and the deeper the shadows under the porch get.
Once they’re about ten feet away, they stop. From here, Michael can only make out the moonlight catching on two braids of silver hair, draped over the woman’s shoulders. She lifts the pipe to her lips and takes a long, slow puff. The coal glows, and for a moment, it reflects red in her eyes, two black pits set deep into the shadows of her face. She lets the smoke out with a chuckle at whatever expression he must be making.
“No need to be edgy, boy. I won’t hurt you, unless I have a reason.”
That’s less than comforting. Michael glances at Grandpa. Who is smiling.
“She don’t bite. Often. Mrs. Johnson, I’d like you to meet Michael, my grandson. Michael, this is Mrs. Johnson. The Widow of Santa Carla.”
Michael blinks, taken aback.
“You’re the Widow Johnson? The one Grandpa’s been...” He trails off, unsure if he should actually ask about this woman and his grandfather’s semi-regular activities. Mrs. Johnson laughs again.
“I am, in the flesh. But please, Michael, no need to be formal. Call me the Widow.”
Michael nods at her, but doesn’t press the odd statement. He’s lost for words. Maybe, if they’d met during the daytime, it would be different, but with the night he’s been having, driving out into the middle of nowhere, the bones clacking around him, it all muddles together into a familiar feeling of missing something that’s right in front of his face. Something he should be paying much closer attention to.
“Well,” Grandpa starts, “I’d have loved to make this less of a formal call, but uh. We got some trouble, see.”
“I am aware of the events that befell your grandson.” The Widow says, almost before Grandpa had finished speaking. “I make a point to keep tabs on anyone in my town who may be experiencing... unusual happenings. By the by, my boy, I do apologize for not stepping in but the thief tended to make himself scarce when I’d try to corral him.”
One hand curls, long fingernails like claws trying to grip something that keeps slipping away. The other hand lifts the pipe to her lips again, taking a long draw and letting the bluish smoke wisp out into the moonlight. Michael wonders how exactly this tiny old woman would have been able to help. She’s hardly an imposing figure, weird vibes aside.
“It’s fine, ma’am,” Michael stutters. “I, uh. I had it handled, in the end.”
The Widow scoffs, scratchy and amused. “In that I am inclined to disagree. If you’d ‘handled’ it, you wouldn’t be here.”
He supposes she’s right. She doesn’t sound upset, per se. Exasperated more than anything.
With a final puff of the pipe, the Widow taps the ashes out over the edge of the porch to land in the dry dirt. She stands from the chair, and finally, the shadows part from her face.
It’s as old as the rest of her, brown skin pulling in deep corners around her eyes and mouth, years of laugh-lines accentuating high cheekbones and a long, straight nose. Her eyes aren’t just dark in the night, they’re black. She looks at Michael, and that old, elegant face splits into a smile.
Two long fangs glint like white opals behind her lips.
“Let’s see what can be done about you.”
His heart kicks in his chest with the stark realization. He tenses to respond, to run and take his Grandfather with him - but before Michael can even attempt to do any of that, the Widow turns, plucks the shawl off the back of her chair and with a flick of her wrist, pulls it over her shoulders. She moves to the door, knocking twice on the wooden frame with bony knuckles. As if by magic, it swings open, and a soft amber light blooms from somewhere inside, even though there had been no sign of it through the door before. She walks past him, into the little cabin, and when Michael doesn’t immediately follow she looks at him over her shoulder.
“Well? Come inside, the night nor I is getting any younger while you dawdle on my porch.”
Grandpa’s hand on his back leaves him little other option. With a single sharp shove, Michael is stumbling up the steps and into the warm light of the cabin’s interior.
The first thing that catches his eye is a familiar taxidermied dog, sitting proudly in a fake dog bed by the biggest fireplace Michael thinks he’s ever seen. Its black plastic eyes glint in the firelight, and the Widow walks past it towards the hearth.
“Lets see here. There’s a few ways we can go about this...”
She plucks a bottle off the crowded top of the mantel, peers into its brown, cloudy glass and shakes her head. As she puts it back she motions with a free hand towards a squashed armchair crammed between two bookshelves.
“Sit down, it'll be a few minutes.”
The Widow skirts past him, and Grandpa comes to take up sentry duty at his side, his arms crossed as he leans against the wall. Michael finds himself grateful for a place to sit and catch his breath. He settles against the chair’s thick cushions, and his eyes begin to wander.
He can’t see any of the windows, which makes sense if the Widow is less than human. Instead, the walls are covered in hanging blankets - thick, warm sarape, in bright colors similar to the one the Widow is wearing as a shawl, but much bigger. It’s hard to see many of the full designs on them, since the walls are almost totally covered by shelves. Some are carved in beautiful dark wood, shaped into figures that twist like hands and stretched bodies and wings. But there are also plain hardware shelves of tarnished metal and little boxes made of plywood. Every single available space is stuffed full, near to bursting.
Most of the shelves are taken up by books. There are collections of paperbacks so worn some of them are missing their covers entirely, massive tomes bound in leather that’s sewn shut with thick stitches, and Michael thinks he sees some of the wide, thin shapes of children’s books. Some of the piles aren’t even bound, just loose pages, crumpled and haphazardly stacked. The writing that he can see is scribbly, full of scratched out sections and tears - and more than a few suspicious, faded red stains.
The Widow moves around the room silently, flitting between shelves and mumbling under her breath. Her long fingers take up little boxes and jars, turning them this way and that until she opens them and observes their contents, before scowling and setting them back down. They don’t always make it back to the place she’d gotten them from.
She reaches between shelves containing teapots and cups that don’t match, some intact while others are cracked to the point of uselessness, pawing through little glass terrariums where there’s a veritable garden of moss and dead plants. And then, with no warning, she spins around and plucks a disembodied grizzly bear paw out of a pile of yarn balls, appraises it for a moment, then huffs and tosses it over her shoulder. Before it lands on the floor, the claws clatter into a mobile of bottles hanging from the ceiling, of all shapes and sizes imaginable and stuffed with herbs, seashells and glittering stones. There’s also one that’s just teeth, animal in shape, little and sharp. Among them are three human molars and an incisor.
Michael tries to ignore that as soon as he notices, keeping his eyes trained on the old woman instead. She’s moved back over to the fireplace now, and is fussing with a heavy iron kettle suspended over the coals with an equally heavy looking iron hook, steaming away.
“Do you take tea?” She asks over her shoulder.
Grandpa looks down at Michael with an expectant raised eyebrow. Michael shrugs, shaking his head.
“Not usually?” he answers.
“Well then, you probably won’t enjoy this overmuch.” She smiles, and her fangs catch the light again, glittering. A shot glass, stamped with the coat of arms of some pub or bar appears in her other hand - Michael isn’t sure where it came from, only that one moment her hand is empty, and the next it is not. She then reaches into the jumble of items littering the mantel, and produces a small, twisting vial of something sludgy and dark. She uncorks it with her teeth, and adds a few drops to the glass. She completes the concoction with water from the kettle. The cup is thrust into Michael’s hands, the contents smearing like watered-down pitch on the sides. Michael gives it an uncertain sniff.
“This isn’t blood, is it?”
The Widow cackles as she turns to choose a teacup from one of the bookshelves.
“No, it’s not, though you might wish it was. Drink it, quickly now, before it gets cold. Chamomile, Jonathan?”
Grandpa chuckles. “Only if you want me sleepin’ over.”
The Widow hums, her eyes glancing deliberately up and down the man, clearly in consideration.
Michael wrinkles his nose at the exchange, before turning his attention back to the glass burning away in his hands. He eyes the liquid in the cup for an uneasy moment, then knocks it back in one go.
Acrid bitterness, something sharp and stringent and herby explodes across his tongue, so strong it nearly makes him gag. It seems to dry his mouth to sand paper and somehow make him drool at the same time, if only to try and banish the awful taste. It’s already slid down his throat, so he grits his teeth against the worst of it, the grounds from whatever was in the vial crunching between his teeth like granules of sand. He has to take a breath afterwards, the pungent flavor lingering on his tongue.
“Oh, Jesus Christ- What is this stuff?” He manages. The Widow takes the cup from his outstretched hand and peers into it, holding it up to her eye like a spyglass.
“Wolfsbane. It was unlikely but I had to make sure you weren’t one of those changing types.”
Michael coughs against the last bit of potion, looking up at her with wide eyes for an entirely new reason, now.
“Werewolves are real?”
The Widow chuckles as she hands Grandpa a steaming tin mug, meeting his gaze with that same sharp, sarcastic amusement as before on the porch. “Am I real, boy?”
In the light from the fire, her teeth glint behind thin lips.
She is very much real.
“What would have happened if I was a werewolf?” Michael asks.
“You would have keeled over and started vomiting up the torn-apart remains of your internal organs while your body tried to shift between forms to save you, ultimately resulting in your painful, twisted death.”
“She’s a poet when she wants to be,” Grandpa remarks softly to Michael.
Whatever rapidly spiraling thoughts he’s having are interrupted by another cup being shoved into his hands, just as warm, but this time the liquid inside smells floral and green. Actual tea. Michael takes a sip from the chipped china, washing away the lingering horror on his tongue. He should probably be much more wary of accepting random drinks from weirdos in isolated places in coastal California by now, but the tea is just water and leaves - none of the sticky, heady warmth of-
Well. Vampire blood.
Besides, Grandpa is still leaning against the wall next to him, blowing away the steam on his own drink, very much a human and not a half-vampire. If the Widow had any interest in turning anyone, she’d probably have already done it to him.
The Widow, Michael notes, does not take any tea of her own. She places the kettle on a wide hearthstone in front of the fire, and returns to her keen-eyed search in the mess of her collection of oddities.
“I don’t think I’m a werewolf,” Michael mumbles, watching her. She unscrews the lids to a few rusted old tins, and grumbles when she doesn’t find whatever she’s looking for.
The Widow scoffs at his statement as she turns away from the shelves and starts fishing around in the pocket of her skirt. “Clearly not.”
“So why did you try that?”
“It never hurts to be sure. And it's a good thing I was right, because otherwise I would have had to kill you.”
Michael gapes at her.
“It’s nothing personal, you understand,” the Widow shrugs. “Some things just cannot be allowed to continue to live.”
Baffled, Michael wheels around to face his grandfather, who’s busy draining his cup next to him. “Grandpa, what the fuck is she talking about?”
The old man looks at him with a pinched, troubled expression. He sucks in air through his teeth. “Well. She has a good point. A mix’a the two, vampire ‘n werewolf, that would be real dangerous, even if they’re a rarity among the rare.” He turns to the Widow. “Good damn thing that he ain’t, but I fail to see how this helps with the question.”
“I’m getting there, Jonathan, be patient.” The Widow stops rummaging in her pockets and produces something. It's hidden in her hand, but Michael sees a pearly glint between her gnarled fingers. “Michael, may I see your arm? Whichever is your non-dominant hand.”
She holds out her other hand, expectant. Michael stands, setting down his cup as he does, and offers her his left hand. She takes it in cold, startlingly strong fingers and pulls him closer.
“This may sting a bit.”
That’s all the warning he gets before she drives the object she’s holding into the soft skin of his forearm.
‘Sting’ is a fucking understatement - a line of pain lances up his arm, down into his hand and up into his shoulder. Michael’s heard descriptions of what a rattlesnake bite felt like, and he thinks he'd take the rattler over this. He tries to jerk back, but the Widow’s grip is iron hard on his wrist. Her thin fingers hide an unexpected strength, and all his squirming gets him is a disparaging look from her as she grips him tighter. Michael bites back a yelp as he feels the bones of his arm grind together under her palm.
“Fuck! Hey-!”
She twists the fingers of her other hand, and the object she’s been holding is revealed, held like a needle between her index and thumb. It's a tooth, a wickedly sharp fang, curved and shining the same rainbow opal as hers do. The Widow wields it with the precision of an artist’s pen as she pushes it through the skin on the inside of his arm, leaving a deep, inch long gash. And then, all at once, she removes it and the burning pain is gone. The crystalline fang is coated in his blood, thick and black-red in the dim light. It’s a lot of blood, but none drips off, pulled deeper into the tooth by a small channel on the back that he hadn’t seen.
The Widow lets go of his arm and Michael flings himself back, tripping over his own feet and landing hard on his ass. His head is spinning, both with the pain and the whiplash of this long, weird night piling on top of itself. He wants to ask what the fuck that was for-
But the words die in his throat.
The old woman is holding the fang close to her face. She sniffs at it, peers through dark eyes at its color and shine, like a jeweler determining the worth of the stone in their tweezers.
Then she swipes the tooth across her tongue and the red of Michael’s blood seeps into her mouth. She closes her eyes.
“Hm.”
Michael grips the weeping wound with his opposite hand and holds his arm close to his chest. Blood slicks between his fingers and smears across his palm, the smell of iron invading his nose and making the back of his throat clench. His breath comes out in short, panting huffs, trying to ignore the taste in the air.
“Hm?” Michael repeats, incredulous. “What’s that supposed to mean?” What little patience he’d had for this supernatural bullshit has long since started to fade, and the familiar feeling of being kept in the dark is not helping.
“Michael,” his Grandfather scolds at his tone, but the Widow doesn’t seem to mind. She simply lowers the fang from her mouth, her jaw flexing a few more times and the skin of her throat bobbing in a swallow, before opening her eyes to fix back on his face.
“It means, little fledgling, that I am thinking. And I’m afraid this may be a more dire situation than even my skills can solve.”
The silence in the room is deafening. But it only lasts a moment.
Grandpa sets down his cup and steps away from the chair, coming towards the Widow. She blinks calmly at him as he holds his hands out.
“Look, what exactly are we dealin’ with, here? It’s been three weeks, and it seem like he’s startin’ to show the traits again. Why the delay?”
“Michael,” she asks, looking past his grandfather, “what happened to the girl and her child?”
Michael blinks, not sure why she’s asked the question. “You mean Star and Laddie?”
“Yes.”
The memory of the last time he saw them tugs in his chest. “They turned human,” he answers.
At least. He thought so.
“Their bond was broken,” she says, by way of confirmation. She’s watching Michael curiously, even more intensely than before, like if she looked hard enough she could pick apart the threads of his being.
Michael looks between her and his grandfather.
“Bond?” He echos.
The Widow’s shoulders lose a bit of the tension that had been holding them up. Her nimble old fingers turn the glittering fang over and over, finger nails tracing along its cutting edge like a worry stone.
“When a vampire makes a fledgeling, a bond is forged, mental and physical. It’s the power that connects them, until the new vampire is born in full. The power comes from the sire.”
“It’s why killin’ the creator will turn the fledge human,” Grandpa adds. “Like cuttin’ a generator. No more source...no more vampire-to-be.”
“Wait, hold on, what's a- a fledgeling?” Michael asks, the word awkward in his mouth.
Both of them look confused at the question.
“You are, m’boy.” Grandpa says.
“I thought I was a half-vampire.”
There’s a beat. And then the Widow starts to cackle, long guffaws as though he’d told the world’s best joke. Even Grandpa has to hide his smile behind a suspicious cough.
“Is that what the little idiots from the boardwalk told you? My goodness, it’s a wonder you’re still in one piece. I almost feel tempted to ask what else they got wrong.”
She composes herself, and her expression goes sober again.
“No, you are not a half-vampire. Those are a very different kettle of fish. You’re still bonded to your sire, as the troublesome little whelp managed to live.” She tilts her head tapping the fang she’s still holding against her lips. “I suppose the thief would’ve had to impart some survival skills to him…”
The confirmation of his suspicions does little to help ease Michael’s growing worry, which is beginning to crystalize into something sharp in his chest.
“So Star and Laddie- they turned back because their sire... died?” He asks. Grandpa nods, but the Widow shakes her head against it.
“It’s not always so cut and dry,” she says. Her eyes wander, over Michael and over Grandpa, who is now looking at her with interest, to the single room of the cabin as though following a thought through the air. “Sometimes there are anomalies. Special scenarios. Hiccups.”
Michael doesn’t like the sound of that.
“Like what?” Grandpa asks.
The Widow’s index finger taps at the tip of the fang. “Johnathan, have you been honest with me?”
Grandpa seems to search for words for a moment, looking confused. “Honest?”
The Widow nods. “About the thief-” She stops, sighs. “About Max’s death. You said you killed him?”
Grandpa pauses, clearly running the memory back in his head. Wondering, like Michael, what she’s getting at. Finally, he shrugs.
“As far as I can tell, yes, I did. Drove through the front wall, rammed a fence post right through the old thing - ah, no offense,” he says. “Dead as a doornail. Hell, we’re still cleaning soot from the upholstery.”
He chuckles. The Widow doesn’t.
Michael finds himself recalling the memories of that night as well. Those few nightmare-like moments where his head was spinning sickly from being thrown into a rafter beam, and Max was raving about something with Sam’s neck in his fist and his mother pressed to his side with victorious, bruising force. Where all Michael had was his blinding rage, his soul-crushing fear, and his two hands.
He’d acted. He’d seen the headlights racing towards the wall with no intention of stopping and he’d moved without real thought. Only instinct.
The Widow’s gaze has stopped roving. It’s landed squarely on him.
“You may not have tasted human blood, Michael Emerson, but you have killed,” she murmurs. “And that, unfortunately, changes things.”
The silence that rings in the little cabin is deafening.
Michael’s hand tightens on his arm and pain lances through his flesh, radiating into his fingers. It feels distant, compared to this.
When he tries to let go, it comes off with an awful sticking sound, the dried blood tacky and itchy on his skin. The wound is still fresh though - even when Nanook had bitten him, he’d known, in the back of his head, that it was healing. Had healed even before the night was through. This was staying, though, raw and open and blood starting to bead.
It glints, dark and shining against the red of the firelight. He’s tempted to lick it away, and only barely tamps down on the sensation. His teeth ache.
Michael covers it up again.
“So I can’t change this,” he mumbles. Even saying that feels final, a nail in his proverbial coffin.
“It is unlikely that you could,” the Widow says, though her tone is not unkind. “Even if you did manage to kill the vampire which sired you, there is next to no chance that it would change anything.”
“But you just said-”
“There is an exception to every rule, my dear, and this is one of them. Your blood is... stubborn. I tasted it when I took my sample. It wouldn’t let go of our curse even with nothing tethering it.”
Michael can’t believe what he’s hearing.
“So that’s it? I’m just a monster, forever?”
“Bein’ undead don’t make you a monster, son,” Grandpa says. He takes Michael’s arm, mindful to not grab near the wound, and helps him get back to his shaky feet. “It’s not pretty, but there’s ways to live with it.”
“Something must have happened when the bond was created,” The Widow muses, mostly to herself. “A closeness, or perhaps a sense of belonging. In some way, you want to stay like this.”
“Stay like- I would rather die than become a vampire!” Michael exclaims.
“Then die,” the Widow says, nonchalantly. “It’s not hard. You could find a dozen methods in this room alone.”
Grandpa interrupts. “Now, just hold on, the both of you. Michael, don’t shout, it ain’t polite, she’s helping as best she can and denying reality got no one nowhere. And uh…”
He looks to the Widow. “...Let’s not get crazy with suggestions. I’ve still got to get him back to his mother, you know.”
She holds his gaze for a long moment, then looks back at Michael.
“So, you cannot die, and you cannot return to being human. What does that leave you?”
Michael’s throat feels tight, his tongue heavy. He doesn’t want to say it. He doesn’t want to admit to the truth that she’s laid out for him.
“I don’t want to be a monster,” he says. His voice feels weak, small. Like it did when he was a little kid. Grandpa’s hand squeezes his shoulder gently, but it’s the Widow who speaks softly to him.
“Michael,” she says, “There are many monsters in this world, and it has been my experience that most of them don’t need any sort of paranatural help to get there. Many are just as human as you were only weeks ago. It is up to you, not the curse clinging to your blood, to determine what you’ll become.”
Michael shakes his head again. “I don’t want to kill people just to live. I can’t-”
The Widow’s expression remains gentle. Her eyes drift up and away from him, up to the rafters above their heads. Her gaze traces the carvings in the wood, the circles and arcs.
“Nothing in this world is immortal. Not you, not me, not even the stars in the sky. Everything ends, either by your teeth, or by time. You can either accept it, or keep running from it.”
The words sit heavy and unsettled in Michael’s stomach, but a small part of him knows the old vampire is right. Probably that same part that wouldn’t let go of David’s blood...
“What if I wanted to confront him? For real this time?” He asks, a wild idea, but his spinning head offers it up as something, anything to grab. “David’s still alive, maybe if I try-”
“I have no doubt the boy would kill you, should it come to that. He’s still young, but he’s strong, even injured.” The Widow almost sounds like she’s complimenting him, though her face suggests otherwise. She looks annoyed, suddenly, like something irritating has occurred to her.
With more force than necessary, she rams the fang back into her pocket, grumbling something under her breath. Michael thinks he hears something about ‘a fine mess’ and another string of words that, though it isn’t in English, is most definitely a curse. Grandpa shoots her a worried look.
“Everythin’ alright there?” he asks and the Widow sighs.
“No, not particularly Jonathan. I just realized your grandson’s condition will make things... very complicated.”
“There’s something else?” Michael says, despair and disbelief creeping into his words.
“It’s not to do with you specifically, Michael.” The Widow pushes a hand through her thick silver hair, displacing it from its neat braids. “But I’m afraid if there’s truly nothing to be done, then you cannot remain in Santa Carla.”
It should hit him a lot harder than it does, but the words feel numb after so many world-shaking revelations. Why shouldn’t this happen as well? It only seems right that he wouldn’t be able to stay.
Actually, he’s reminded, a little, of the night his mother came into his room and told him she and their father were getting divorced, and that they’d probably have to leave Phoenix. She’d tried to break it to him gently, but after the years of animosity, culminating in that one, hideous breakdown when they’d all learned just what his father had been doing for three years now…
At some point, it’s not so much a realization as accepting what’s right in front of you.
“...Okay,” is all he manages to muster in response. The Widow must see something in his face or hear something in his voice, because she steps closer and places a hand on Michael’s other shoulder.
“I want you to understand, Michael, I would let you stay if I could - you’re my Jonathan’s family, and it’s nice to see him less lonely. But I physically cannot. I’m compelled to protect my territory from others of our kind, and I cannot allow undead on my living ground. That is my curse to bear.”
“You managed with them here. David and the others,” Michael mumbles.
“They kept well away from here. Their sire had at least enough brain in his skull to not let them wander too close. For his own gain, of course, but-”
She suddenly waves her hand, as though swatting the words out of the air. Refusing to continue the thread of conversation.
“You live close, and are not protected by moving water. I could not allow you to stay in good conscience.”
She lets go of his shoulder. The Widow turns to Grandpa, who looks defeated. Small. Even as an older man, Michael realizes belatedly, he never thought of his grandfather as someone insignificant. He was a constant presence around the house, with the house itself like an extension of him with every knickknack and oddity. He was a weird old coot, and, well. Grandpa.
But now his shoulders are slumped, and his unshaven face is thin in the meager red light of the fire. There’s a sunken quality to his tired eyes. The old man looks... shaken. Whatever they had come here for initially, this clearly isn’t what he’d wanted.
“Jonathan,” the Widow says, “I think it’s time to go home.”
She says it with finality. Grandpa opens his mouth, breathes like he’s about to say something to her, and maybe it’s simply the reluctant acceptance that’s settled in Michael’s body, he’s got no idea what more could possibly be gained here, but the man stops. Instead he just nods, and starts nudging him towards the door of the cabin.
“Alright. Alright, we can figure this out in the morning, I guess. Michael, c’mon-”
“I can’t.”
He says it quietly. It's all too easy to imagine what would happen now if he were to turn around and go home. Waiting, staring at the wall until morning. Until Sam and his mom wake up, and then he’d have to tell them. All of it. Prove it to them, if they had any doubts. He can already see the look on Sam’s face, the way his mother’s expression would fall and she’d start to panic, all because of him-
His hand clenches, sending a sting of pain up his wounded arm. There is someone to blame for this, but it’s not him.
His grandfather tries to speak. “Michael-”
“Is he at the cave?” Michael asks the Widow, ignoring Grandpa.
“Is that where you want to go?” She asks in return. She knows he means David.
He takes a bracing breath that doesn’t seem to fill his lungs all the way. “I think I have to go there,” he says.
“Michael,” Grandpa says, stepping around to his front, “it’s the middle of the night. If this sire of yours is out there, he’ll be up. Prob’ly fed, prob’ly spittin’ mad, too. You agreed, rushin’ into things is what got you in this mess at all, so let’s not rush this. Let’s go home, get your mother and Sam caught up, and then make a real plan.”
Michael sets his jaw, and with it, his resolve. One way or the other, he’s not letting this go on past tonight.
“No. I’m not rushing into this, I know what I have to do.”
The Widow’s dark eyes shine brighter, interested. “You plan to confront him.”
Michael laughs but there is no humor in the sound. He feels cold, a certainty settling into his bones that he can’t shake out.
“It's either that or stick my head in the sand, right? I don’t exactly have a choice.”
“You will always have a choice,” the Widow says, humor in her tone. “You just may not enjoy the options.”
“...Then I guess this is mine,” Michael mutters.
The Widow nods. Michael’s not sure what he expects to happen now, but it’s not for the Widow to move past them towards the door, and make an inviting motion to the pair of them.
“Come on then, the sun will be rising soon and you have places to be.”
He follows the Widow out into the night. After being in the still, stuffy air of the cabin, the breeze is a welcome change. He starts towards the path in the woods that will lead back to the Jeep, but the Widow’s fingers catch the collar of his shirt, stopping him.
“I have a quicker way, if you’ll allow me. And it will save your grandfather some money on gasoline.”
“Do you have a plane I don’t know about?” Michael asks, dryly. The Widow snorts, an undignified sound that makes her seem more human than just a moment before.
“Jonathan did say you were funny. No, I do not have an aeroplane, but the earth listens to me, and I can send you where you need to go.”
Michael raises an eyebrow. “So what do you want me to do, exactly?”
“Walk.”
The urge to question her bubbles up in his throat, but he ignores it. There are some things he doesn’t need to understand right now, or maybe ever. Not if they work.
“Fine. Show me where to go.”
Wordlessly, she begins walking around the side of the cabin, into the brush that surrounds it. Michael follows after her, trying to avoid the prickle bushes, or ignore how some of his steps crunch suspiciously under his shoes. If he looks down, he doesn’t want to see what little skulls he’s grinding into the dirt.
They make their way around the back. There’s not much there, a couple of poles with a laundry line between them and another set of bone chimes.
There’s also a set of doors.
Set into the ground, surrounded by large flat stones, probably the entrance to an old root cellar. The Widow walks to them, picking her way silently through the overgrown grass. Her fingers hook into a smallest crack between the two, and with the hidden strength she’s shown before, hauls them open. The doors swing to either side on their creaking, rusted hinges, landing with a clatter against the stone.
Just as with the shadows hiding her face when he’d met her, the doors open into an impenetrably black pit. Beyond them is perhaps a few feet of visible earth, in a steep downwards slope, but after that, it’s as if the world just disappears.
The Widow extends her hand to the hole. “This will take you to the caves. You only have to follow the path.”
Michael steps towards the open cellar doors, each inch feeling like the clicking of a key in a lock. The winding of a screw - or maybe a noose.
He’s doing this. He’s actually going to do this.
The tips of his shoes brush the edge of the stones surrounding the hole.
Yet again, he has nothing. No weapon, no plan, not even words in his mind. His anger is burnt out, his panic is thin. It’s an odd kind of clarity, now, as he comes closer and closer to the darkness that lays low in the pit like an open grave. Waiting for him to come to it.
Of his own volition, Michael looks away. He looks behind him, where the Widow is waiting with her hands clasped, watching him, to his grandfather.
He’s watching Michael as well, no further away than the Widow, but the distance suddenly feels insurmountable. Like he’s on one side of the Grand Canyon, Grandpa is on the other, and all Michael can do is stare across the vast distance, wondering if he shouted loud enough, he’d be heard. There’s an emotion in the old man’s eyes which is hard to place, but they’re shining in the moonlight with unshed tears.
Michael almost stumbles as he takes a step back towards him, and his grandfather closes the distance, wrapping his arms tight around his grandson. It’s like being young and small again, and the warmth and strength of his old limbs are a comfort Michael wants to soak up and never let go. Grandpa’s voice finds his ear, in a rough whisper that carries a lifetime of sorrow.
“If y’need us, Michael, we’ll be right here.”
Something wet slides down Michael’s cheek, dripping off it and soaking into the fabric of the man’s shirt. Michael pretends he doesn’t feel it.
He nods, and he pulls away. The cool of the night slides between them once again, as the arms fall away, as Michael retreats to himself. He turns back to the cellar.
Again, he comes to the edge. Looking down.
“Just…jump?” He asks the Widow, quietly, but knowing she can hear him anyway.
“It’s easier than you think,” she answers. Then, after a pause, her voice comes to his ear, as though she’s standing right beside him, even though he hadn’t heard her move. “Your road will be hard little fledge, try not to fall before you learn to fly.”
Michael doesn’t have anything to say to that. He’s used to falling by now - what’s one more trip?
He crouches, and slips into the darkness of the pit.
Chapter 4: The Boys are Back (in town)
Summary:
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Right?
Notes:
Helloooo. It's been a little bit. Seems like the ao3 curse got us, and life came at us a little harder than expected in March. Thankfully, chapter 5 is like 80% written, so it should be uploaded on time! FINALLY, THE BOYS IS COME TO US! Took a while, but they're finally here! And none to pleased with Michael!
As always, thank you for reading, and enjoy!
Chapter Text
Black.
It engulfs him entirely as he falls, and for a dizzying second, Michael’s not sure if he’s falling, or if the blackness is rushing up to meet him.
He hits the bottom unexpectedly, falling to his knees from the force of his body hitting the ground. His hands scrape on the same hard-packed earth as above. When he looks up, looks back behind him, he expects to see the square of sky and trees above.
But instead...nothing.
The Widow hadn’t shut the doors, he hadn’t fallen at a weird angle and misplaced it. The space where he had dropped into the tunnel is just gone, replaced by dark earth and the pale tips of tree roots. But even those were barely visible in the shadows. It’s not just the absence of light, as Michael falls into the pit. It's a physical presence, pressing in on all sides. Heavy and soft, like hiding in thick, dark curtains. Or being blindfolded.
Not even vampires can see in complete darkness, apparently.
He scrapes himself together, standing from aching knees on ground that feels solid enough. Blindly, he holds out both hands and finds that the walls are actually closer than he thought. There’s only a small gap of space when he leans side to side, gauging the space he has to work with. Reaching up doesn’t give him a ceiling though, so he leaves it be. It’s enough room to move.
Just walk, the Widow had said. So he does.
The way forward turns out to be as straightforward as it is unseen. As far as Michael can tell, there are no deviations in the path, though he keeps one hand to the right side wall, just in case. He feels dirt and little stones, the occasional root twisting from one place to another. It’s all incredibly silent. The only sounds he can hear is his own clothing rubbing against itself and his skin, the soft puffs of his breathing. Sometimes, if he pauses, he thinks he hears the skittering of little feet, somewhere deep in the ground. And under that, though that might really be his imagination, the pump of tiny, frantic little heartbeats.
He tries to ignore why he might be so sensitive to it now.
The air is getting close, and Michael wonders for a moment if he could die of suffocation, like the old miners did. That’s what the canaries were for, right? It’s a silly thought, the Widow probably wouldn’t have sent him down here to die.
...Probably.
It occurs to him, as his feet crunch over small stones and his breath muffled in the close walls, that he should have maybe come up with a better plan than “show up and confront David.” Or any plan, for that matter. He is approaching the most dangerous person he’s ever known, and the only backup plan he has is...what? Hoping he won’t kill him on sight, at best? He’s not sure he could even imagine what a worst case scenario would be.
Michael sighs, and the sound bounces back, like a version of himself is out of sight, judging his piss-poor planning capabilities. Gradually, he slows down. Then stops.
What would happen if he were to turn back? Would he come to the cellar doors again, and be able to climb out? He hadn’t seen them when he’d fallen into the tunnel, but surely they were still there at all. Could he run back home and they could do as Grandpa suggested, and find a solution some other way?
He turns-
Only to find a stone wall inches from his back.
He smacks his face into it, it’s so close. His nose stings, banging not into the dirt of the walls, but against even harder, cooler stone. “Shit-” he curses, reaching up to dab at his nose, making sure it wasn’t busted. He stretches out his arm, feeling along, and no, there is no opening. Not just that he’d lost it - it was as though there never was one to begin with.
The way back is shut.
Distantly, suddenly, as though it started on a cue, Michael hears the faintest roar of waves.
For a second, he thinks he might be actually hallucinating. The ocean should be miles away, Michael hadn’t nearly walked that long, had he?
He slowly draws his hand back from the stone. It was some kind of vampire magic. It had to be, like the maggots and worms and the blood. Not illusions this time, but teleportation, somehow? Was that even possible?
His head hurts.
He pushes himself away from the inexplicable wall, trying his damnedest not to think about the implications of magic or portals or anything like that. He has slightly more important things to focus on. The tiny tunnel opens up more, the stone under his feet turning gritty with a layer of sand and little pebbles, accumulated from the tides outside. Wider and wider, until it’s not a tunnel. It’s the jagged, asymmetrical little rooms and pits and side-chambers of the cave. The distant sounds of the waves become louder, more clear. A heartbeat of their own.
And soon, there’s light. It filters in from above in tiny silver beams from the moon. Glowing dimmer, rough and ruddy underneath it, is firelight.
He picks his way through the natural roughness of the back caves, passing piles of rubble, old bricks and flagstones. Some dusty, rotting couches, precariously stacked in a corner. Empty wooden crates, piles of old, mouse-eaten clothing. Unlike the odd but curated cabin in the woods, this collection would look more at home in a hoarder's house. Michael finds it difficult to move without disturbing anything and alerting anyone who might be around to his presence - if he hasn’t been discovered already.
Unexpectedly, he comes to a corner he knows. There’s a halfway decent loveseat here, only a few springs sticking up through the cushions. He remembers getting poked in the ass by one of them.
When David had brought him back here.
The memory is hazy, just like everything about that night. The weed made things slow, too in and too out of focus at the same time. And then there was the wine. He could still taste it sometimes, sour and metallic.
The colors so bright, every touch and motion sending sensation skittering over his skin. It had been warm. A little too warm, but good. Then David had led him away from the impromptu party, to here. This little nook.
Michael squints at the loveseat. They’d talked. He remembers that. David had asked him…something, but he can’t remember what, or how he’d answered. He’d probably been close to blacking out at that point, but he doesn’t remember feeling bad.
Just a little confused, and vaguely warm. Something more than the wine feeding it.
Michael tears his eyes away, clenching his teeth against the softness of the memory. David wasn’t his friend, he never had been. Max had said it himself, it was on his orders that the pack had even approached him in the first place.
That night tastes bitter when he remembers it, now.
Michael pulls away and keeps going.
The light grows brighter. There are sounds echoing through the passages, bouncing off the rocks in odd patterns. It sounds like voices, but Michael can’t be sure. It’s too distorted. For a horrible second, he has to entertain the possibility that David might have people down here. Humans, that he intended to-
He can’t make himself imagine it. They’re too quiet anyway, no blood-curdling screams of horror or pain, so he just keeps moving forward, trying to mind his footing. Trying to be quiet.
He rounds the corner that leads into the main antechamber of the sunken hotel. Fire crackles in the burn barrels, and the ocean breeze rattles the bones and garlands of junk strung from the ceiling. The sound of voices is abruptly gone, though, and Michael quickly looks around to find where it had been coming from.
He doesn’t realize someone is coming at him until hands grab his collar and slam him into the wall. Michael’s head spins with the force of the hit, his breath rushing out of his chest with the crushing blow. His vision goes blurry for a few seconds as they snarl into his face.
“Give me one good fucking reason that I shouldn’t pull your guts out and make you eat them.”
Michael blinks in shock at the voice.
Paul’s face is inches from his, a mask of anger, spattered with fading pock marks and scars that spray across his skin like freckles, still red and raw but almost closed. His eyes are ringed in black circles Michael doesn’t think is makeup, and his hair is tangled, falling into his face in dusty colored sheets.
“You’re alive-?” he wheezes, but Paul shoves him harder against the wall, pushing what little air he has out of his chest.
“Where are the little punks, huh? They coming behind you?”
His eyes - blue at the edges, but bleeding that unnatural tawny yellow out from the pupil - dart around Michael to the nook he’d been deposited out of, like the aforementioned kids would dash in, stakes blazing. Michael chokes as he tries to get something, anything to come out of his mouth. Fuck, Paul is going to kill him if he doesn’t-
“Paul.”
The name is almost too quiet to hear, but Paul flinches like he’s been shot.
They both look over. Michael bites back a yell with the air he doesn’t have, because there’s Marko.
He's sitting on the fountain’s edge, hunched into himself with a big, white dog's head in his lap - the same dog Michael remembers from the video store, which perks its head up at the commotion. He’s not wearing his eye-searing jigsaw of a jacket, or even a shirt. Aside from being a little pale and tired, he mostly looks okay. Until he straightens up and Michael sees his chest, bound with layers of bandage and a thick pad of gauze that's been taped over his sternum. It’s hard to tell from this distance, and the spotty lighting, but Michael thinks he sees a dark stain in the center of the gauze and can only imagine what injury it’s hiding. The explanation that he’d been given from the Frogs and Sam had made his mouth go dry and his stomach flip in the moment, and he hadn’t even seen the carnage. This made their descriptions of blood and screaming all too viscerally real.
Marko is very much not impaled anymore, though, and is watching Michael and Paul with that sidelong stare. Like he’s just waiting for the action to start.
“Let him go. If nothing else we can let David get the first shot.”
Paul’s face had slipped as he had focused on Marko, but at the mere suggestion that he let go, he growls. It's a low, animalistic sound that makes the back of Michael’s teeth ache.
“But he-”
“-Isn’t the one who put a hole in me. Put him down. We can be adults here. Right?”
Michael looks at Paul.
Paul looks back at Michael.
Slowly, he backs off, hands thrown up in surrender. His eyes never leave Michael though, watching, anticipating a strike he doesn’t intend on making.
Michael slumps against the wall as Paul steps away, just a few feet. He brings a hand up to his head, wincing at the ache of it hitting the stone.
“You’re all alive?” He breathes, trying to regain some semblance of balance.
“No thanks to you,” Paul grumbles at him, rubbing at his nose with a thumb. “What the fuck was that about? There’s easier ways to say y’got cold feet.”
“Cold f- cold feet???” Michael stares up at Paul in disbelief. “You fucking tricked me and then killed a bunch of people like I’d just be cool with it!”
“Oh c’mon, Michael, those dickwads had it coming, and it’s not like you knew them or anything. You didn’t care until you got your panties in a twist about ‘being a monster.’ Gimme a break.”
Paul pats his pockets, like he’s looking for something, then scowls when he doesn’t find it.
“Marko, you got any more smokes?”
Marko rolls his eyes. “Check David’s pockets, if he hasn’t finished them off.”
“Fuck.”
“Also,” Marko continues just as lightly, “to be fair, we’re not all alive. I guess we could thank you for that?”
The more he speaks, the rougher he sounds, a phlegmy bubbliness behind his breaths that suggests just how much further he has yet to heal. Marko’s hand in a fist pressing against his stomach as he does. It looks like speaking is still difficult.
Paul scoffs. “He had nothing to do with that. The old man deserves a medal for getting rid of Max.”
Michael’s jaw clenches, and he pushes himself off of the wall, hands balling into fists. They’re still laughing. They ruined his life, have the blood of countless people on their hands, revel in it, and they’re laughing about it? They jump from the subject of murder like it’s a passing conversation topic they’ve discussed so much it’s mundane.
And Michael is standing in the middle of it all, wondering what joke he’s missing.
“You guys really are something, you know that? Real pieces of work.”
Paul raises an eyebrow at him.
“Pot and kettle much? You’re no saint.”
“I don’t kill people for fun.”
A wide, nasty sneer slides across Paul’s face, and he leans in closer to Michael.
“No, of course you don’t. You just get yourself into sticky situations and then let your own little brother put his life on the line cleaning it up for you, because Michael Emerson doesn’t kill people. Michael Emerson lets others kill for him.”
Michael’s fist collides with Paul’s jaw before he’s even aware he’s moved. The impact reverberates up his arm, into his shoulder with a satisfying thud and the sickening click of teeth clamping together as he makes contact. Paul’s head snaps back, his arms wheeling, thrown off balance.
Michael only has a second to feel good about that - where the evidence of what he’d done plays out and a rush of something like vindication flows like liquid fire in his veins - because just as fast, Paul is crouching like some kind of creature. His leg sweeps out and catches behind Michael’s knees, hooking it, and the world spins as Michael collapses backwards. The air rushes out of his lungs a second time as he hits the floor hard.
“You really wanna play like that, Mike?” Paul says, his voice a parody of itself, rattling hollowly in his chest and oh too-casual. “Because I can play.”
He’s on Michael again, pouncing from all-fours and straddling his chest. Michael tries to hit him again, but his clumsy flail gets caught, Paul pinning both of his wrists to the dirt in one cold hand. Under his palm, the Widow’s wound burns, aches and stings, weakening his attempts to pull away. Paul leans in, until their faces are only a handful of inches apart. This close, the pockmarks look worse. Skin pulling together where it had torn and ripped apart with the application of holy water. Paul’s eyes are so bright, his scleras are almost black.
“I promise you, man, if you fight me, you’ll lose. And I will enjoy killing you.”
Micheal bucks his hips, shoes scraping on the grit of the cave floor for purchase and finding none against the steel of the immortal monster above him. Paul barely moves. His lips part, a smile that wasn’t one showing off his fangs, ready to treat Michael exactly like they’d treated those poor punks at the bonfire. Willing to show that unlike Michael, he’s game to get more than his hands dirty.
Marko makes a cut-off noise somewhere to their right, and suddenly, Paul is no longer on top of Michael.
In a daze, he watches as Paul is flung bodily to the side, the face that had been grinning in a rictus now open and almost comically surprised. He’s hauled up by the back of his coat collar, long arms reaching back to try and dislodge-
“Dwayne, you fucker! Let me-”
“Stop being a little bitch and I’ll consider it.” Dwayne rumbles, holding him like a scruffed puppy.
Silent as ever, Dwayne had slid out of nowhere, leaving Michael breathless at his presence. He too doesn’t look very well, the dark circles under his eyes darker with his tan skin and curtain of black hair. Rather than the angry red pockmarks Paul is sporting, a blooming line of electrical scars is healing pink and shiny across his neck and face. Paul whines and wiggles in his grip, his legs kicking out into open space as Dwayne holds him above the floor. He’s using some of that freaky levitation power the pack had just to be more dramatic in his antics. It would be a comical sight, in any other context.
Any humor the situation might have dissipates instantly, however, as Dwayne turns from Paul to Michael. The look on his face makes Paul’s previous real murderous intent look positively jolly by comparison.
“You should go,” Dwayne says plainly.
Michael manages to get up from his sprawl on the ground, gritting his teeth against aches that are sure to be bruising nice and dark by the morning. If he makes it out of this alive, he’s going to have one hell of a time explaining himself.
“I need to talk to David.”
Dwayne somehow manages to scowl even darker, and tosses Paul off to the side without even looking where he lands. The other boy yelps as he tumbles into the dirt, bouncing to his feet fast as anything and scrambles to Marko’s side, clearly looking for some kind of fussing. He gets a wry smirk for his efforts instead.
“No,” Dwayne says. “Leave.”
Leave and go where? Back to the cabin? Back to the Widow and her ultimatum? Michael knows he’s testing his luck, but he’s made his choice. He straightens, squaring his shoulders.
“I won’t leave until I talk to him.”
Dwayne’s eye twitches, and he takes a step towards Michael. For a moment, Michael thinks this might actually be it. Paul is crazy and erratic and plenty willing to make good on his threats, but Dwayne won’t even give Michael the benefit of being good sport.
But then he freezes, hand raised to reach out and grab Michael suspended.
“If you wanna talk to him, then go ahead and talk.”
Michael had come here knowing it would come to this, but hearing his voice behind him still turns the blood in his veins to ice.
He turns, and there he is. Standing on one of the boulders near the entrance, just as whole and alive as he was in Michael’s dream, is David.
Now though, under the light of the fires, his skin looks ashen. In the darkness of his room, he hadn’t seen the deep, dark hollows under his eyes, or the gauntness of his cheeks. His mouth is set in a tight, thin line, and he’s hunched into himself like the long coat around him is keeping the form of his body hidden from view. He pins Michael down with a steady glare from his perch. A big black bird of prey. Waiting.
“You look like shit.” Michael says before he can stop himself.
“Yeah, that happens when someone impales you on a taxidermy antelope.”
It’s not guilt that bubbles in Michael’s gut at the accusation, as correct as it may be. It’s not. He shouldn’t feel bad for doing what he did - both because it was right at the time, and because, well. Clearly it hadn’t even stuck.
David sighs, and his shoulders drop from their hunch. The glare in his eyes lessens, and suddenly he just sounds…annoyed. He looks past Michael when he speaks.
“What the fuck do you want? Besides ruining a perfectly good night with your presence.”
The flat boredom in David’s voice is like a slap in the face, full force and leaving just as much of a sting. It’s unlike any other way David had ever spoken to Michael - dismissive, empty, like Michael didn’t matter. Even when he had been angry, when he’d been taunting and threatening, David had still sounded like he’d cared. Like Michael was worth his attention at all.
He almost wants to be angry about it, but the spark doesn’t come.
Michael hadn’t come here with a plan, but part of him had been expecting a fight. A confrontation, like Paul and Dwayne had given him. In the heat of the battle in the house, David had been more than willing to come to blows - started it, in fact.
Michel didn’t know what to do with this flat disinterest. He had wanted to confront David, but it sounds like David has just…stopped caring.
So, he says the first thing that comes into his head.
“I need your help.”
David’s eyes narrow, that flatness leaving his face as something darker sparks across it, but before he’s even able to respond, Paul jumps in.
“Uh, fuck no!” He scoffs from where he’s standing by Marko, hands on his hips. “You don’t get to nearly get us fucking murdered and then waltz back in here like nothing happened!”
“That’s not-”
“It absolutely is, you fucking asshole. Why would you need our help anyway?” Paul’s voice goes mean, mocking. “Is Mommy threatening to ground you? Does your baby brother keep stealing your shit? That’s sooooo sad for you Mike, really suffering under the weight of suburbia there. I’m not sure what gives you the balls-”
”I’m still a fucking vampire!” Michael shouts.
It explodes from his chest, the tension that had been growing there popped like so many balloons with each of Paul’s barbs. His voice ricochets off the stone, disappearing into the cave along with his ability to remain calm.
He reaches up to grab at his own hair, fingers digging into his scalp. The dried blood at his wrist cracks and itches.
“Ever since I met you people, my life has been a fucking nightmare! And even when you’re supposedly dead, you’re still messing things up! I thought it was all over! You were gone, Star left, I was supposed to be normal again and then-”
He chokes on the words, too heavy and crowded on his tongue to get them all out. He grits his teeth instead, his eyes feeling traitorously wet.
David is staring at him.
“That... isn’t possible,” he says lowly.
Michael is almost grateful for the dismissal this time, letting him come down from spilling his guts. This is normal. This is familiar. He rolls his eyes against the denial.
“Tell that to the Widow Johnson, she’s the one who sent me here because of it.”
“Hold it, hold it!” Paul interrupts, again. This time, he doesn’t stay in his cozy spot next to Marko - he jumps his way over the scattered junk on the floor, getting right into Michael’s space. At least this time, he’s not angry. Curious, maybe? Like he can’t quite believe what Michael’s saying. “The Widow? You met the Witch Bitch of Santa Carla and you didn’t get eaten alive?”
That…was a name, certainly. The crassness as well as the sudden change in demeanor at the very mention of her name - title? - shakes Michael from his own anger for a moment.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he gestures at himself, in one piece and not eaten. Paul looks him up and down like he’s confirming that Michael is, in fact, physically here.
“No worse for wear either. Christ, Mike, is that the worst she did?”
He flicks a finger out, to Michael’s hand. Oh, the cut.
“I mean. She also made me drink wolfsbane.”
Marko snorts loudly. “Oh that's a good one, I gotta remember that for the next time we hang out with an asshole cell.”
Michael doesn’t have time to ask what that means before Marko collapses forward, basically as soon as he’d finished speaking, to start hacking. The coughs are deep and wheezing, and it sounds like with every inhale he’s not quite getting enough air.
Paul hisses between his teeth, a human sound this time, and steps away from Michael to come back to his friend’s side. “Don’t try to laugh, dude. He’s not worth it.”
Michael is so caught up in watching the two of them he jumps when he feels a hand on his elbow. It's Dwayne, tugging on his arm with surprising gentleness so he can look at the cut. Michael’s first instinct is to pull away but just like all the other times he’s been grabbed, the vampire doesn’t let him.
“What did she do?”
Dwayne’s a quiet guy, Michael isn’t sure he’s heard more than a dozen words from him in the time he’s known him, but even then he can tell that he’s concerned. It’s a little uncanny, what with how he’d been fully prepared to drag him out of the cave by his hair just minutes ago.
“Cut me. With a fang,” he says. “I…think she was trying to figure out what was happening?”
Dwayne grunts in some kind of affirmation that he’d heard Michael speak, but still eyes the wound. Like he’s trying to puzzle something out himself, but can’t make the pieces fit. He lets Michael take back his arm, at least, the troubled look still on his face.
“How did you get all the way out here from the mountains? We didn’t see you pull up.”
Michael turns to look at David, who’s also appraising him now. Or maybe he just wants Michael gone, and is trying to find the fastest way to make that happen. Probably that.
“That was her, too,” Michael explains with a hapless shrug. “She told me to walk down some dark-ass tunnel in her basement, and I ended up here.”
Paul makes a muffled noise of frustration and possibly complete disbelief, and Marko holds his middle again, clearly trying not to laugh and upset his own injury.
“Well, she must really like you, then,” David says, dry as a desert.
“Not enough to let me stay in Santa Carla.”
That certainly sours the air of the cavern. Michael doesn’t have to see them all to know that it’s not the response any of them wanted to hear. Definitely not David, who takes in those words, slowly shuts his eyes, and pinches the bridge of his nose as though Michael was the embodiment of a headache that refused to leave.
It’s incongruous, a tiny thing, but when he lifts his hand, Michael notices for the first time that they’re…bare. David isn’t wearing his gloves. There’s dirt caked under his fingernails, which are short and bitten down. Not the claws he’d drawn over Michael’s skin earlier. Almost human.
“That. Isn’t. Possible,” he repeats, much more pointedly. “You aren’t still a vampire.”
“Um. Yes I am.”
”No, you’re not,” David growls, and his eyes flash yellow for an instant before settling back into their normal blue. “You can’t be, because I let you go.”
As inconsequential as the bare hands, the statement is bare and small.
But it hurts. He’s not even sure why, just that from one heartbeat to another, it aches.
He doesn’t get time to respond though, because it’s Dwayne who, of all the people in the room, abruptly rounds on David. Whatever little problem he’d been puzzling out in his head, a key piece must have clicked into place.
“What is he talking about.”
It’s not a question, and Dwayne doesn’t sound confused.
David’s face goes that icy placid that Michael is coming to know now as a refusal - a lie of omission, rather than an outright untruth. And honestly, Michael might commend David for his endurance under Dwayne’s unblinking stare.
David sticks his hands in his pockets, meeting Dwayne head on.
“Max told us to do a lot of shit. We didn’t. You know that.”
Dwayne’s lips twitch. “Not this, David.” He makes a motion in Michael’s direction, “We said we would talk about other fledges after what happened with Marko.”
Well. That’s a concerning statement, the idea that Marko might be responsible for another undead flying around in the world. Michael glances over at him, but the little vampire looks completely baffled, and Paul still at his side doesn’t look like he understands much more. Is... that not what Dwayne meant?
“We had a plan-” Dwayne tries to continue, but is cut off.
“I thought it wouldn’t be a problem!” David says, his voice raising a little. “He’s supposed to be human. I made sure of it.”
“Apparently not well enough, since he’s standing right there.” Dwayne gestures in Michael’s direction.
“He can also hear you,” Michael adds dryly. It earns him two dirty looks from Dwayne and David.
“He was supposed to be Max’s,” Dwayne growls.
“Plans change,” David answers simply. Almost defiantly.
Dwayne’s jaw flexes. A couple of times, he breathes in like he’s about to speak, but either thinks better of it, or can’t find the right words for it. He leans back, hand coming up to swipe over his face in exhaustion. Michael can’t say he doesn’t feel the same.
For long, heated minutes, they just…stare intently at each other intently. Faces shifting back and forth, as if having a conversation Michael can’t hear, somehow communicating entirely through eyebrow movement and frowns. When Michael pulls his eyes away from the bizarre sight, he notices that Marko and Paul are also still, watching this silent exchange as though they too were part of the conversation, or at least listening to every unspoken word. The dog in Marko’s lap looks up at the vampire and whines, prompting Marko to distractedly pat behind his ears.
On some unknown cue, David’s face pulls into a snarl.
“We’re not doing that.”
“Oh no, David. You’re eating this one,” Dwayne rumbles, crossing his arms. “Like it or not, he is our responsibility. Your responsibility.”
Paul takes the moment to pipe up yet again. “Can we vote on the other option? I mean, it would give the old Witch something fun to sink her teeth into, huh?”
”No,” Dwayne and David say in unison, and Paul slumps, muttering to himself. David’s eyes meet Michael’s again. He looks like he’s chewing on something nasty, and about to spit it out with Michael’s face as his bullseye.
“Fine. You get your way.”
Michael blinks. “What?”
“You’re coming with us.”
Michael looks from him, to Dwayne, and then to Paul and Marko. Looking for any clarification for the sudden proclamation.
“You’re leaving?” He asks.
David shrugs. He gestures around him to the large room, and Michael follows it. Finally having a chance to take in the space for the first time since tumbling into it.
The place hadn’t exactly been the picture of cleanliness. Michael remembers seeing it for the very first time, what felt like a lifetime ago, and wondering how anyone could make a home out of a junkyard, but being impressed that the pack had managed anyway. Now, it looked more in disarray than even then. What uncanny chaotic order there had been was now just…chaos.
The old sunken couches had been shoved far to the sides, and the available floor space is now taken up with just. Stuff. Piles of clothing and random assortments of knicknacks, a whole three boxes dedicated to just books, and another two to records and cassettes. There’s a tackle box for fishing, but sticking out from it is a collection of wrenches, screwdrivers, a tube of tire sealant, and all manner of hardware for fixing whatever mechanical issues might come up in a motor. Leaning against the fountain are two guitars, one acoustic of warm red wood, and the other an electric bass covered in scratches and stickers, both without strings. Sitting on David’s wheelchair, in an old, stained, glass coffee pot with a big crack running down the side, there’s a huge bundle of cash and coins. From just a glance, Michael’s sure it has to be in the hundreds of dollars.
The whole place has been turned upside down. Just like Michael remembers his own house back in Phoenix, during the last few days.
“With Max gone and the neighbors getting a little territorial,” David says, “yes. We’re leaving. And since you begged so nicely, you’re gonna come with us, or take your chances on your own.”
And Michael isn’t naive enough to think he could actually handle that.
…He hadn’t wanted this. Michael can feel it in the pit of his stomach, how he can’t seem to find any words anymore.
This hadn’t been how it was supposed to go.
David steps down from his little perch on the rocks. Each step is slow, deliberate, carefully placing each boot firmly so there’s no worry of slipping, but there’s a gingerness about it that Michael realizes with a start is David’s own injury. Like Marko, it must still be hurting him. Even after weeks. He finds less satisfaction in that knowledge than he would have had a month ago.
David finally comes to a stop in front of him. He looks as tired as Michael feels. “Tomorrow night, up at the top of the cliff. You get a backpack to fill. We leave at midnight,” he says, utterly glacial.
Michael doesn’t think that they would wait for him if he was late.
“Got it?”
Michael nods.
“Good. Now get the fuck out.”
Under the gaze of four vampires which watch his every movement, Michael starts walking on legs that feel like they’re liable to collapse underneath him at any moment. He skirts around David, who does not move, towards the entrance, gripping the rough stone with scraped palms to pull himself up and out of the hole. His body feels like one massive bruise, and he can’t imagine what he looks like.
What they’re all seeing.
Wind whips his face as he makes it outside. Fresh, for once, salty but clean, cold in the very early morning. Each step on the old, rickety staircase warns of shattering under every footfall, as they always do. Michael grips the railing harder with each one. Willing his body upwards even as it feels heavier every inch.
As he makes it to the top of the cliff, he looks back out over the water. The sky is purpling, clouds high above catching the first red rays of sunlight.
Dawn breaks bloody over Santa Carla, and Michael starts for home.
Chapter 5: Put your Life in a Bag
Summary:
You never know what you have until it's gone. Or until you have to fit your whole life into one little bag, to take with you into forever.
Notes:
Notes for the chapter: one, don't ever put soap directly into an open wound (Michael is a dumbass) and two, it's the 80s! Do YOU think 18 year old boys from deep suburbia know to be kind to sexualities other than straight? (Michael is a DUMB. ASS.)
He gon' learn. Don't worry. You can't have growth if there's nothing to grow from. Also, welcome to hiatus land. For the next few months, we will be working on some Stranger Things stories. We hope you like those as much as you like this one! We'll likely be returning sometime in winter.
Thank you all for reading, and we hope you like this installment! :>
Chapter Text
Michael barely remembers the trip back to the house. He only vaguely recalls managing to trek back across the windy bluffs, the sky growing light above him. He’s not sure what a sight he must have made to the early morning folks who passed him in cars - some bedraggled, meandering homeless kid following the white lines on the shoulder of the streets, probably.
Santa Carla had a surplus of those. At least they might be safer now, with the vampires leaving.
The sun is climbing into the sky by the time Michael gets out of town and back into the woods. The morning mist is still clinging quietly in the hollows between the hills, slowly being burned away by the warm light. Whenever Michael comes out of the shade of a tree the light hits him on the back of his neck and the sensation feels too warm. It makes something in the back of his mind squirm in discomfort.
He wonders how he could have been so blind to it this past month.
The cabin’s yard is quiet when he arrives. All the sculptures are standing like sentinels, their wooden eyes following Michael as he makes his way to the porch. The air is still and starting to warm, loud with echoing birdsong. The only thing amiss is the fact that Grandpa’s Jeep is not in its usual spot. Michael blinks at the space where it should be, wondering what happened after he’d jumped down the hole, if the old man hadn’t come right home.
As quietly as he can he tries to get inside, feeling like a criminal the entire time he does. He grips the handle of the front door and turns it with delicate slowness. The latch clicks - Grandpa doesn’t bother locking it, no one ever comes out this far - and it swings inwards. Michael keeps hold of it so the shutters inside don’t bang as it moves. He slips into the house. Closing the door with as much grace as he’d opened it.
There’s no one downstairs. The lamp is still on, its light less effective now that the sun is up. The doors to the workroom are still open, the room itself dim and unoccupied.
He’s home.
For a moment, Michael just stands there. Stupefied in his own exhaustion.
He’s here, but he’s a stranger looking in.
No one is up to witness him, at least. No smells of coffee or breakfast, or sounds of people moving around. With any luck, he’ll be able to slip back into his own room and no one will be the wiser that he’d ever left it.
It feels too easy.
His room is dark still, even with the morning light outside. His window doesn’t face east. Michael trips inside, leaning heavily against the wall as he toes off his shoes, more on autopilot than consciously thinking about it. Everything is exactly the same, nothing is the same. The sleeping bag is bunched up on the floor, sheet and blanket in a heap beside it where he’d flung them off in the night.
When David had slipped in, and decided to keep playing weird mind games right to the end.
Or whatever the fuck he’d been doing. Apparently David kept things even from his own packmates - that was news to Michael, but somehow not surprising. Michael wasn’t going to decipher what that all meant right now.
He slumps to the ground, patting out the sleeping bag. Lining up his pillow. It’s cool against his cheek when he lays down, smelling like shampoo and clean linen. It’s getting lighter outside, and Michael watches the shadows around the room slowly disappear as the seconds, minutes tick past. The exhaustion hits him like a wave, and he shuts his eyes. His body pulls him under before he can think of anything else.
-
This time, he doesn’t dream, and he doesn’t wake to a dead man standing over him. When Michael’s eyes slip closed, they almost refuse to open again. Regardless of - or maybe because of - the chaos of the hours before, Michael sleeps like the dead himself, heavy and deep and completely unaware.
It’s almost exhausting in its own right, and even when wakefulness does come back to Michael his body resists it, groggy and over-tired.
When he does manage to wrench his eyes open again, his mind is blissfully blank for a few seconds.
His room is much brighter now. The leaves from the trees outside reflect the light in, warm and gold and green just past the height of summer. His fan is still spinning above his head, slow as it was the night before and doing even less now against the encroaching heat of coastal Californian midday. He slept in quite a bit. He’d been doing that a lot, lately. Michael brings a hand up to try and rub away the sleep-warm heaviness sitting on his eyes, and in doing so, his wrist pinches and throbs.
It all slams back into him.
The shock pins him to the sleeping bag. For a long, horrible moment, all he can do is sit there and watch the last night stumble through his head in a horrific, dizzying montage. He brings his arm down, seeing in the light of day the long gouge in his flesh, angry and red, the edges barely pulled together. And as he gets to the end, crawling back home, clawing his way back to bed, and right now, this very moment, another sickening realization hits him.
Michael flings himself upright, scrambling to his knees to reach for his bedside clock.
Noon. Sixteen minutes past twelve, to be exact.
One day. One more day, and Michael had just fucking slept through half of it.
Even as he watches with wide eyes and a brain that seems to barely comprehend, the minute ticks to seventeen-past.
Slowly, Michael sets the clock back down. He slumps forward, one hand gripping the edge of the bedside table and the other on his knee. His head leans forward, thumping against the little drawer of the table.
He braces for the wave of panic, but it doesn’t come. Instead of a rising tide of dread and fear, he feels kind of... numb. There’s nothing he can do to change this now.
It’s noon. He has twelve hours. Hell, this is actually earlier than he’d been waking up the past couple weeks. And if he hadn’t gotten the sleep, as little as it really was, he’d have been worse.
At least this way, he might not be a total basket case for…the last day his family might ever see him.
That does draw something painful and sharp up, right from his gut to behind his eyes. Michael slams them shut against the feeling.
He couldn’t think about that right now. As much as it was sitting on his shoulders as the cause of all this, if Michael stared right at it he’d crumble. He’d tell them everything. And he couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t. He gets to his feet, breathing slowly until the stabbing pain goes away.
A shower is the first order of business. Michael had only just remembered to take off his shoes before collapsing onto the sleeping bag, which hadn’t saved it from the not inconsiderate amount of dirt on his clothes and in his hair. This isn’t the first time he’d woken up on his bed dirty and disoriented. At least he had landed right side up.
Michael hauls himself to the bathroom, shutting his door to it. Sam’s is closed already.
Good. Michael didn’t want him to see any of this. No questions.
He makes sure the third door to the hallway is locked as well before turning on the tap.
The old pipes rattle and shudder and the water spits and hisses the first few moments, but they still work well enough. Michael wonders, bitingly, if Paul had meant to leave them intact when he’d destroyed the rest of the plumbing, or if he’d just missed a spot.
The room starts to fill with steam and Michael shucks off his grimy clothing. Even removing that feels good, and the first wash of hot water over his skin as he steps under the spray feels even better. He stands for a few moments just feeling the heat, soothing over his scalp and working its way into his bones that he hadn’t even realized were stiff.
Did vampires bathe? The question floats through his head like the mist around him, idle and inconsequential, until it permeates his brain like hot water through his skin.
They surely must - the rest of them might be wild and spend every night cavorting about like nothing in the world mattered but what was right in front of them, but they weren’t…messy. David had scruff, but it was neat at the edges. Dwayne and Marko were both relatively clean-shaven, all four of them had hair that was curated - even more than Michael, who just ran a comb through it and called it good.
When David had laid down next to Michael, he’d only smelled like earth and cigarette smoke and faintly of dust. Not rot, just. Old.
Michael watches the water drain into the tub basin, gradually getting clearer as he washes the night off himself. The hot water is harsh against his skin, but it feels good to be clean. He turns the warm water knob down a little, and brings his wound into the spray, rubbing soap into the cut. Maybe vampires couldn’t get sick, but a half- er. Fledgeling, like himself, might be able to. Best to be safe.
The soap stings as much as the hot water. Michael winces as he tries to be quick, clearing away sand or dirt sticking to the wound. It still aches, the water working its way in, his skin reddening quickly even under the reduced heat. Michael draws back his arm, grimacing as the stinging heat refuses to go away. Each drop landing in a searing little spatter and not stopping as it drips down his skin. Burning more.
And it’s not just his arm; as Michael stands under the flow of water longer, having turned the tap almost to pure cold, it keeps feeling hotter. Burning him, it was burning him-
With a shout, Michael wrenches the handle to turn off the water entirely, stumbling to get out of the tub.
He stands, dripping a puddle on the floor his mother would tisk at while he scratches at his raw skin. There are burns, small welts forming on his arms and shoulders where the water had flowed over them. He watches as they appear, and then slowly sink back into his skin. Healed by some vampire power.
Gradually the pain recedes, but he’s still shaken.
He sighs, letting his shoulders relax. As much as it feels like he’s seeing ghosts everywhere, wondering what else unexpected and horrifying would trip some unknown trigger, there is some measure of comfort in knowing he wasn’t being paranoid. Running water, right? Hah, Michael wondered what Sam would make of not even being able to shower comfortably.
Speaking of Sam. He couldn’t hide in his room forever. He would have to figure out what he’s going to tell them. If he was going to tell them at all.
Michael grabs the first aid box from under the sink, popping the tabs and opening it to retrieve a roll of gauze bandage and some medical tape. He wraps the gauze around his forearm, the still open cut immediately tinting the white material red. He keeps wrapping until it stops, then tapes the whole mess in place. It’s completely obvious that something is wrong, his whole forearm is covered in bandage and tape. That would lead to questions he doesn’t want to answer. The solution he comes up with is less than elegant, but the long sleeved shirt he tugs on hides it from view at least. Even if he already feels stuffy in it the moment he puts it on.
He attempts to tame his hair for a couple minutes in the mirror above the bureau before giving it up as a loss. The humidity of the sunny coast wasn’t kind to him. He looks like a poodle. But it’s normal enough.
He refuses to look at the clock on his nightstand again as he passes it, walking into the hallway and stopping briefly at the top of the stairs.
The fan in the living room is already running, the windows open and blinds drawn up to let in the sun, falling on the warm redwood floor. The colors of all the nicknacks and taxidermy pop in the light, and Michael pauses to just…look at it all for a moment. He’d never actually realized how much his grandfather had collected in here - or his grandmother.
There were bits and pieces of her touch, her presence, scattered throughout the old place. In lace doilies draped over the backs of the couch and chairs, pressed flower arrangements in frames hanging on the walls between old road signs and farm equipment. A cutout in black paper of a woman’s bust, hung above the mantle, below which rested a small, black and white photograph of a man, his wife, and their little girl between them.
The last time Michael had seen Grandma Mina had been at her funeral, when he was eleven. Eight years ago. It had been a long, sad day where nothing felt right, and his father and Grandpa had nearly gotten into a fistfight over his grandmother’s grave. His mother had pulled him and Sam away before they’d seen too much, but the awkward, awful feeling of seeing that still left a bad taste in his mouth.
Michael wonders what Grandma Mina would make of all this. If she had known about monsters in the dark like Grandpa did. If he’d told her.
He hadn’t thought to warn his daughter - and what sane person would? It’s not like vampires were something anyone believed in, and with good reason. If they’d never left Arizona, Michael likely would have gone through the rest of his life none the wiser to the reality of blood sucking freaks hiding in the darkest corners of the world.
There’s a sound from downstairs, and unconsciously, Michael flinches at it. Footsteps tap on the wooden floor, and his mother rounds the corner from Grandpa’s workroom and ducks into the kitchen. In her hands are a few of the little blue bottles Michael recognizes from the window sills on the back sunroom. A whole collection of them out there, some clear, but most some color of blue. They look like they’d been filled with something pale and gritty - sand or salt, maybe.
He stays still. He’d been meaning to go downstairs to try and face the day, whatever it might bring but watching his mother disappear into the kitchen, it suddenly feels impossible to move his feet. He stands there, frozen.
He can’t face her. It would be better if she didn’t ask questions he has no answers to. That he wouldn’t crack just by seeing her concerned face, watching as he tries to hide from her again.
So he turns, and makes for the next door down. Sam’s room.
The door is, thankfully, open. Now that they weren’t being accosted on all sides by supernatural bullshit, the room had changed. Or, more accurately, Sam had gotten the chance to change it from a stuffy guest bedroom to something more his style. Posters papered the wall above and beside his bed, comic panels and singers that Michael only knew because Sam would fantasize about somehow scrounging up the money to go see them now that they were only a couple hours away from L.A. The clothing hamper near the end of the bed was already overflowing, and a backpack is sitting on the desk chair, half packed with all his new school supplies for the coming school year.
Sam is laying on the bed, perfectly relaxed, paging through a comic book. For a second, Michael hestates, just watching him. Taking in the sight.
Then, Sam’s eyebrows furrow.
“Can I fucking help you?” He drawls, not looking up from his reading.
Michael snorts, letting himself smirk a little. He comes around the doorway properly, sticking his hands in his pockets and shrugs. “Where’d you get that mouth, huh? Better not let Mom hear you talking like that.”
It’s Sam’s turn to smirk now. “I have beloved youngest child's immunity,” he says. “She’ll blame you.”
Michael places a hand on his chest scandalized. “Betrayal of the highest order. I’ve taught you words that Mom would beat us both black and blue for ever saying and this is how you repay me.”
Sam looks up from his comic now, and Michael can see the slight quirk of his eyebrows as he looks his brother up and down. Michael keeps his shoulders relaxed, face open. Easy.
“What’s with the shirt?” Sam asks.
Michael looks down, as if he’s seeing what he’s wearing for the first time.
“Chilly,” he answers.
Sam glances to the window of his room, open to the air. The sun is high, and even with the ceiling fan going, it’s still this side of too warm in the bedroom. Sam is in shorts and a single layer button up. He looks back to Michael in the knit sweater and jeans, and pinches his lips, dubious.
Michael cuts him off, before he can question it further.
“What are you reading?” He asks. Just getting Sam to talk. Keep talking, about anything.
“Like you care,” Sam says, rolling his eyes as he looks back at the book. Michael approaches the bed, still trying to act natural.
“No, really, humor me Sammy, I wanna know what nerd shit you’re into.”
Sam shoots him a baffled look.
“You’re being weird, Mike.”
“Can’t a guy bother his kid brother?”
Admittedly, this…is a little odd for Michael. Not that he doesn’t bother Sam - he does. A lot. But it had been different over the past few weeks, after everything. And it was true, Michael didn’t usually ask about Sam’s nerdy interests, but something was sneering in his head that now he had no time, and whatever his brother had to say was something precious. Something to hold onto.
Sam sighs, and folds down the cover to show him, as though that explains everything. It’s a Batman comic.
“Which one is that one again?”
“It’s in the name, Mike. He’s a man dressed as a bat.”
“Really? I thought he was bitten by a radioactive Chihuahua.”
Sam smiles, just a little. “You’re such an asshole.”
“Your favourite asshole, though.” Michael teases.
“That’s Alan, actually.”
Damn. Snubbed. He knows that Sam is joking, just as much as Michael is, but that same sneering voice whispers that Sam may actually mean it. After all, the person who’s there for you is who really cares about you, right? And the Frogs had been calling every night when Michael rarely says five words to Sam some days. The defensiveness doesn’t mean to spill out, but it does, coloring his words with an edge.
“If you like him so much, why don’t you marry him?” Michael scoffs.
Sam goes very still suddenly. His fingertips turn white where he’s gripping the comic, and he seems to find whatever is happening on the pages very interesting. He won’t meet Michael’s eyes.
“That’s not funny, Mike.”
Not the reaction Michael was anticipating.
“C’mon Sam, it was just a joke,” he tries, but Sam is pulling away, his face going red.
“It’s a shitty joke then, since it’s not funny.”
Sam tosses the comic down on the bed, getting up and making for the bathroom, clearly intending to end the conversation. To be away from his brother.
Michael can’t help it. The red numbers on his bedside clock tick in his head.
“I mean, it’s not like you’re some kinda queer, Sammy. Chill out.”
Sam whirls around, eyes wide and face a deep red, going up to his ears. His hand not gripping the door is balled into a fist at his side. He looks like he’s about ready to throw something.
“Shut the fuck up, Mike! God, you really are an asshole!”
He slams the bathroom door hard enough the sound shudders through him, leaving Michael alone in the room.
Michael stands up from the bed, knocking on the door. “Sammy, come on. I’m sorry, okay? You’re right, it’s not funny, I’m a dick with a big mouth.”
Sam doesn’t respond, and he doesn’t open the door. There’s only silence on the other side.
“Sam,” Michael says again, quieter.
His hand lingers on the door, waiting. The seconds become a minute. The door stays closed, Sam silent behind it.
Eventually, Michael pulls away, and leaves the room.
-
A bag. That’s what David had said. Micheal was allowed one bag to take with him, wherever they were going.
His backpack lays where it had been unceremoniously thrown the day they’d moved in - to the side, along with a bunch of other boxes of random things. Michael scoops it up, a dust bunny floating to the floor where it had collected in the weeks without use. Inside are folders and binders of school work from the previous year that Michael hadn’t bothered to get rid of yet, along with a couple books, and his collection of cassettes.
The first two, the books and papers, he scoops out. Places the former on the chest of drawers, and the latter in the trash. The cassettes, he starts to sort through.
Bon Jovi, REM, Bruce Springsteen, all find themselves laid out and considered. Three Duran Duran, and even an AC/DC, which even the pack might appreciate. And more, a couple from local artists in Phoenix. Michael hadn’t realized just how much he’d collected over the course of years. He remembers buying his first one himself in middle school, after having worked all weekend helping his mother pull weeds for the back garden and getting five dollars out of it. Seeing them spread out across his bed, it occurs to him that…he can’t take all of them with him. He doesn’t even know if he can take some of them, or- or what David and the rest would say about it.
Hmph. It’s not like they didn’t have their music, a lot of which was certainly not to Michael’s own taste, and he never said a word about it-
…He’s stalling. Michael looks away from the cassettes and to the backpack, lying empty beside them. Normally it felt like a hundred pounds against his back during the school year, somehow able to squeeze in an impossible amount of textbooks and other random crap necessary for class, and always with room for more. Now, Michael wasn’t sure he’d be able to get more than a couple day’s worth of clothes inside of it. Let alone anything else, like cassettes.
One bag? Was David serious? Just how serious? And what would he do if Michael didn’t comply?
He sets his jaw.
Spinning around, Michael makes for his closet. He yanks open the door and grabs up his sports bag. It was the only thing left from the precisely two years of baseball he’d played in Freshman and Sophomore year of highschool, and had just acted as a second hamper for laundry ever since.
Michael would follow David’s orders. Just not in the way David clearly wanted.
He spreads open the duffle bag on the floor and grabs up the cassettes that he wants. Not all, but the ones that he really likes. Then, he goes to the bureau. Underwear first, and then socks. He packs them down as much as he can. Shirts are next, rolled tightly to save space, and most of his jeans follow them. Michael doesn’t know where the pack got their clothes - stolen, most likely. He hopes from just charity bins or off the racks of shops or stalls when the owners weren’t looking. And not. Bodies. In either case, Michael is going to avoid that for as long as possible. ‘Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without’, his mother would say.
The duffle is about three fourths full now. Space for other things, but not much. He’s going to have to actually pick and choose now.
Michael tosses in a spare belt. His hiking boots, after having shook off the red Sonoran dust from their treds. Hairbrush and comb, some extra soap - again, God only knows where they were bathing, or how often. As he turns around, he catches sight of the leather jacket hanging from the edge of the mirror above the dresser.
He reaches for it, and holds it in his hands, fingers running over the squeaky, new hide.
It’s not, in reality, but it does feel like the thing that started it all. If he hadn’t seen Star that night, if she’d lost him in the crowd and he hadn’t caught sight of who she was hanging out with. If he hadn’t given in to that childish, desperate urge to impress her somehow - to look like something she’d spare a glance for, no matter how shallow…
Michael flings it down at the bag with the rest, the thing flopping to the side. Whatever. It was money spent, and who knows when he’d want for a coat of some kind.
What else could go in? Michael looks around his room, eyeing anything that he had that he could feasibly take. That he could justify bringing. They’d already culled so much before the move, and now he was paring it down to just a single duffle bag. His whole life, packed away. Everything seemed important suddenly, and yet nothing so monumental that he could justify choosing it over anything else. And what would he need it for, anyhow? It’s not like vampires had sentimentality, right? Just look at the junk filling the cave - they kept whatever shiny thing caught their eye, and then completely forgot about it the moment it stopped being interesting.
He feels tired. Michael still doesn’t want to look at the clock on his bedside table, but he can guess it’s early afternoon. The sun is blazing outside, too bright and too warm. It would be easy to sink back down into sleep again, and it would feel better than fighting the weight in his head and limbs while trying to accomplish this.
With his head bowed, Michael spots another box that had been shoved into the closet, something he hadn’t remembered to unpack because, well, he’d been a little busy in the days following the move. He can’t even remember what was in that one.
Out of curiosity, Michael walks over to the box, turning it around. In simple, black marker the label reads ‘books’. Huh. It might be more of Sam’s stuff, or his mother’s, that got mixed up in the fray. Michael draws back the top flaps.
It is books. But it’s not what he expects.
The first on top is a three ring binder, yellow with daisy print. The title card, in his mother’s handwriting, is ‘Sam Emerson.’
Michael blinks and looks down into the box. Sure enough, it’s albums and a few paper sleeves of loose photos. There’s even a couple undeveloped rolls of film, rattling in their little plastic canisters.
Right under Sam’s album is a brown, leather covered binder, labeled ‘Michael Emerson.’
The first page is a card from the hospital, detailing his weight and height, and welcoming him into the world with a tiny blue footprint at the bottom. The next pages are…him. A baby, in various relative’s arms. Michael pauses on one, where he’s sitting in Grandma Mina’s lap on the couch downstairs, though the cabin was a little tidier in the photo. Her light hair had already gone golden-white, but her smile was like his mother’s.
A few more pages, a couple birthdays - three to be exact - and there’s Michael sitting on a hospital bed with his mother, pointing at a bundle in her arms. Sam.
He hadn’t remembered much of that. Just the nebulous, little kid excitement that bled over from the adults around him, and then suddenly having a sibling. A little brother who yelled, got a lot of his mother’s attention, and slowly grew up and started following Michael wherever he went. Someone to argue with, someone to boss around, or blame a broken flower pot on when they’d both been tearing through the house. Someone who would always be there with him.
Michael’s throat feels tight when he tries to swallow.
He turns more pages. More years go by, in instances Michael lets his eyes pass over. School days, candid photos taken when he wasn’t looking, relatives and friends they wouldn’t ever be seeing again. It all goes by in a wash.
Not all of the pages are full, though there aren’t many blank ones left in the book. His mother had done a decent job of keeping up with things. Near the end, there’s a page with only one picture pressed between the backing and the clear plastic film keeping it held to the weak adhesive.
A photo from two summers ago, on a trip to the Grand Canyon.
Michael is sixteen, and he can tell. He’d gotten his height, but hadn’t filled out just yet, limbs a little gangly still. His hair had been shorter, though just as thick, and it fell into his eyes in the photo. He was dressed in a varsity shirt and shorts. Beside him, Sam stood, dressed similarly, only his shirt was a wild affair of printed paint-splatter colors and showed a few inches of his midriff - something their mother only allowed seeing as the temperature that day had been over a hundred degrees. And she herself was there on the opposite side of Michael, holding him close, sunhat casting shadows that still couldn’t hide her brilliant smile.
And to the other side of Sam, stood their father.
Lance Emerson was always the tallest man Michael knew. Even now, he loomed from the side of the photograph, staring down the barrel of the camera like it owed him something. Mouth pressed in a line while he’d waited for the timer to count down and take the picture. His hair, though shorter than Michael’s, had the same wave. His eyes, though set under a hard brow, were the same dark brown.
A drawn reflection of his own face.
Michael peels back the protective film and gently pries up the photo. His thumb sweeps over the faces of his mother and brother.
The photo squeaks and buckles, but rips apart easily under his fingers, torn in an uneven line down one side. That face so like his own is crushed in his hand, and flung into the trash can. The remaining third, Michael tucks into a pocket on the inside of the duffle bag. Protected.
With luck, the others won’t see it. They cannot make him give up everything - and he won’t, anyhow.
There’s nothing else that Michael can conceivably think he’d want or need. He stands there a moment, looking around as though something else would give him some inspiration. Or maybe convince him to upend the bag, run downstairs and spill his guts.
Nothing is forthcoming, for either reason.
-
The waiting is the worst part, he thinks as he watches the sun slowly creep down the horizon. Failing to find anything else to do with himself, he’d sat at the kitchen table and had been there for hours. It's like the moment he thinks about standing up to actually make something of his last day with his family, an invisible weight slams into his chest and pins him down. He can’t leave yet, it's far too early. But he feels like he can’t stay now, either. Every moment he doesn’t tell his mom and Sam what he’s planning on doing, the dread in his chest gets heavier. It feels awful, he hates it. But there’s just nothing he can do. He’s stuck until the sun goes down.
Lucy’s been avoiding him, giving him “space”, as she would say. It’s almost a blessing. But the fact he’ll be gone by tomorrow, creeping in with every inch of shadow that grows longer as the sun sets-
Footsteps behind him. He doesn’t have to turn to know it’s Sam, but he does anyway. The boy freezes in place, hand halfway to the fridge handle. His face is closed off from Michael, and his eyes are rimmed red. Like he’s been rubbing them or something.
“Hey, Mike,” he says neutrally.
“Hey, Sam.” Michael sits up properly, taking a steadying breath. “Think we could talk for a second?”
The cagey look on Sam’s face gets even stonier, and Michael feels the guilt, once again, for making him feel so unsure. Like he has to hide from his own family.
“I wanted to apologize, for earlier.”
Sam’s frown deepens. “Okay... then do it.”
“What?”
“Say you’re sorry.”
Michael almost laughs, then shakes his head instead.
“God, when’d you become a jackass, huh? I’m sorry I upset you. It wasn’t cool.”
The frown flickers as Sam fights not to smile. “Yeah, glad you know that at least. Just. Don’t call me a- that again, okay?”
Michael gives a jerky nod. “No problem.”
There won’t be a chance for it to happen again. The frown on Sam’s face finally falls away, and he smiles as he grabs a rootbeer (one of grandpa’s no doubt, he’s gonna get shit for it when the old man sees) out of the fridge. He pops it open with a hiss and takes a few sips.
“You still thinking about dropping out to get a job?” Sam asks.
Oh. That. Even the notion of school or work seems so alien, now. Utterly inconsequential. Michael shrugs. “Maybe. It's not like the school system and I got along much. And I’m not going to be picking up trash all summer.”
Or ever again.
Sam hums in acknowledgement and takes another contemplative sip. “Mom’ll be mad.”
“Mom-” Michael stumbles over his words, trying to keep them steady but the longer this conversation goes on, the less confident he’s feeling. He tries again. “Mom doesn’t get to tell me how to fuck up my life.”
He doesn’t mean for it to come out so…mean. But the image of his mother’s face, the confusion, how lost she’d looked when he’d been falling apart in front of her, trying to keep the hideous things happening from her knowledge - all of this in part because of her and what she’d chosen a long time ago-
If they hadn’t come here. If that bastard had given up more in the divorce, and they’d kept the house. If his mother hadn’t-
Sam’s brows lower, the tip of the bottle leaving his lips. “Jesus, Mike, don’t say that to her face or something. She did her best.”
“Trust me, I won’t.” He probably wouldn’t see his mother again. The thought makes his chest ache. He presses a palm into his forehead, hanging it low.
“Sorry,” Michael says again, lamely.
A moment of silence passes between them. This close, he can hear the fizz in the soda, the way Sam swallows awkwardly. The setting sun is coming in, red and gold through the front room windows and it’s hitting him right in the face like a little arrow of hot pain. He can’t take this anymore.
Michael gets up. He walks over to Sam and puts a hand on his thin, narrow shoulder. Only then does he realize that Sam really doesn’t have to look up to meet his gaze anymore. He’d gotten taller. So much taller in the last year.
“I’m gonna go to bed, Sammy. I love you, okay?”
Sam raises an eyebrow, but nods slowly.
“You’re being weird Mike. I love you too.”
Michael turns to go. “Night, Sam.”
“Yeah, g’night.”
-
Michael lays on his sleeping bag, with all the lights off in his room. He let down the blinds but kept them turned open, so he can watch the light turn from sunset, to twilight, to fully dark.
He faces away from the door, so when there’s a knock and it creaks open, casting a single line of hallway light over him and he can see the shape of his mother silhouetted in the doorway, she can’t see that he’s awake. She doesn’t bother him. He knows she figures he’ll eat dinner when he gets up. Quietly, the door closes again.
Above him on the bedside table, the numbers of the clock tick up.
He’d stashed the sports bag in the closet, so no one would see that either. He wonders if he should dress at all - other than his jeans and shirt and the shoes by the door. Would they be expecting him to? Fully leathered up? He probably should, given that he didn’t know how long or how far they would be riding.
Downstairs, there’s the sound of talking. A door opening and closing - a third voice joining the conversation.
Grandpa’s finally home.
Michael grips his pillow tighter, hearing the minute pops of seams in the fabric. The talking is mostly his mother’s worried, admonishing tone for being gone all day, and his grandfather’s gruff answer. Then in a quieter way, she asks a question. Michael knows the sound. Asking-
Asking things. Michael stares unblinking at the far wall under his window. Trying not to move, to hear it all. Apparently even supernatural hearing wasn’t good enough to get individual words through wood.
Minutes pass. There’s footsteps, the kitchen doors opening but no one comes up the stairs, yelling. No one comes to ‘wake’ him up and demand answers.
Eventually, it goes quiet again. The clock informs him in neat, red digits that it’s half-past eleven.
Time’s up.
-
Michael’s not sure how he manages to get out of the house and back out of town without getting caught or stopped. Honesty, whenever he looks back on it, the whole thing feels like it was happening to someone else, faraway and disconnected.
He lets it be. The numbness while watching the dark, homey cabin in the wooded hills fade away is better than anything else he could let himself feel.
By contrast, the cliffs are bright and windy and cold, smelling like salt and sea spray. It seems to wake him from the daze, and root him in the moment. Michael is glad for his coat now that he’s out here. In the divot of one of the many open pits in the earth, there’s a slap-shod lean-to of scrap metal, and usually, the bikes are parked under it to keep them out of the worst of the weather - but it’s empty when Michael pulls up next to it. For a dreadful moment, Michael wonders if somehow his bedside clock was wrong, and he’d missed them.
He hastily parks his bike near the edge, leaving it right out in the open, and starts heading for the stairs. He almost gets to the wooden landing before something in the atmosphere above him changes in that shivery, inexplicable way. With the telltale hush of displaced air, Michael turns to see the descent and the graceful, almost ballerina-like landing.
“Heading the wrong way there, Mikey.” Paul says by way of greeting. He waves a little with two fingers like a half-assed salute.
It’s a testament to how much they stand out while wearing it, because the first thing Michael notices is Paul’s clothing. Instead of the gaudy, grungy tailcoat and random belts, Paul’s only wearing a single shirt - and not the mesh one. It’s black with short, cut sleeves, some metal band emblazoned on the front, and light-wash jeans with the knees fully worn out. The bangles and bracelets and trinkets decorating his arms remain, though they all seem to have been transferred to one side - and why is evident as soon as Paul waves with it. On the bare wrist a big, dark bite is slowly healing over, punctures over the pulse point red and raw. It looks new.
Michael’s not sure what to make of it. It looks painful, the punctures deep even if it wasn’t actively bleeding. He can only guess why it’s there. With a shake of his head, he refocuses.
“I thought-”
“Not very good at that, are you? Our ride’s near the road, grab your gear and c’mon.”
Paul turns on his heel and starts walking back towards the road, hands shoved in his pockets. Michael looks between him and the old staircase for a second or two before hastily snatching his bag from the back of his bike, scrambling after him when he realizes that Paul really isn’t going to wait. They move quickly, Paul’s long strides not allowing for Michael to slow down even over the rough, uneven terrain of the bluff. Michael is confused, glancing back to his bike, still parked.
“What do you mean ‘ride’, I thought you’d be taking the bikes? Where are they?”
Paul snorts at the suggestion. “Where’d you think we got all that cash? Sold ‘em. And I dunno about you, but Portland’s a little far out to make in a single night, ‘specially on your little pony. Shame we couldn’t hock that, too.”
It almost stops him in his tracks. “We’re going to Portland?” Michael asks incredulously.
Paul nods.
“To start, anyway. David mentioned we might move further east, get away from the coast. It’s like, three days or somethin’ from here to there, so you can ask him in the car.”
Michael’s head spins a little with all the new information. The image of the pack without their precious motorcycles was odd enough. Trying to get his head around a move that big, jumping not just cities, but whole states-
“Where did you get a car?” Michael mumbles instead of questioning that.
Paul looks at him over his shoulder and flashes a fanged grin.
“What is this, Twenty Questions? We got it from some poor fuck that wound up being very generous.”
A tongue lashes over those teeth, before Paul turns back around. Michael feels the claws of horror sink into his belly, at what Paul’s implying, but the vampire is already walking away again. Michael has no choice but to keep up.
The aforementioned ‘car’ is actually a mid-sized van, a big white one with no windows in the long back, for utility work. It’s seen better days, the edges of the wheel wells speckled with red rust and it’s missing a hubcap on the left front tire. There’s a sizable dent in the back bumper, and it’s covered in various scrapes the previous owner either hadn’t had the money to get smoothed out, or were added for ‘effect’. Michael wouldn’t put it past the pack.
It’s parked by the side of the main road that leads to all the nature trails along the bluff, the same that Michael had walked back to town on this morning. Up front, standing at the open engine block, is Dwayne. He too is dressed differently, Michael notices. A red flannel with sleeves rolled up past his elbows, still mostly unbuttoned, and bluejeans that look slightly too big for him. His hair’s up too, slung over his shoulder in a thick braid. He’s messing with something in the motor, screwing a cap back on a reservoir, his hands dirty with the black grease.
From this angle, the backdoors of the van are open, and Michael can peer inside.
It seems he hadn’t been the only one to struggle with paring down his worldly possessions. Inside is, for lack of a better term, stuffed. Whatever seats other than the driver’s and the front passenger’s had been completely torn out, leaving as much room as possible. That had been filled with at least four duffle bags not so different from Michael’s, lining the sides, and a couple of the boxes he’d seen last night of books, records, and cassettes. Leaning by the passenger seat is the unstrung electric bass, padded with a collection of the blankets and pillows from Star’s old nest bed.
Sitting among all of that is Marko.
He looks like he’s asleep, his head leaned back against the vans wall, the big, white dog on his lap. It lifts its head to look at Michael, snuffling at the air, before huffing and setting it back down again. Its nose brushes against Marko’s hand, limp against the blankets, and the vampire’s fingers twitch but no more.
“Hey Dwayne,” Paul calls, strolling forward. “You owe me a ten.”
Dwayne barely glances over. “David’s got the cash.”
Michael raises an eyebrow. “You were taking bets on me?”
Paul snickers, and Dwayne stands up straight, rolling his eyes.
“‘Course we did. Paul and I bet on most things, actually. Marko too when he’s awake.”
Was this just going to be how things were, now? Michael readjusts the strap of his bag on his shoulder, the old, familiar irritation battling with the ambient unease. He’s not sure he’s going to be able to take another night of this, let alone…however long after.
“Thanks for the warning, I guess. I’ll try not to do anything stupid.”
“Too late,” Dwayne says. He reaches up and pulls down the hood of the van. The latch rattles as it slams back into place, and in the back, the white dog startles. It yips, and for a moment, Marko’s eyes open. Only a moment though, because they’re slipping closed a second later. He…must still be recovering, Michael assumes.
Dwayne comes around to the driver’s side, and thumbs towards the back. “Stash your shit. We gotta go.”
Michael regards the open truck a little like an open grave. Well. He’d come this far.
He steps inside.
Between Marko, the dog, the stuff in boxes and bags, and then Paul who slips in behind Michael, there’s really not much room. Enough that he can set his bag behind him and lean against it like a cushion, with a couple feet of space between him and his two…packmates? Is that what they are to him now? Even in his head, the word is too new and strange to think about it for long.
Paul pulls the back doors closed as Michael settles in the space behind the passenger seat, Dwayne doing the same to his own door. The overhead light dims and goes out, making the inside of the van close and dark. There’s the jingle of keys, and the engine starts up, loud but steady enough. The headlights flicker on, showing the road ahead of them.
“Last call, people,” David’s voice makes Michael jump, breath catching in his throat.
David is already seated it seems, Michael hadn’t even noticed him in the dark. His coat and pants blend him into the seats, his face in shadow. When he turns it, the light from the illuminated dashboard clock shines green in his eyes.
“If you let me back down there, I’m just going to take more music,” Paul shrugs, scootching closer to Marko. He then- he puts an arm around the sleeping vampire’s shoulders, pulling him close, tenderly by the shoulder. Michael feels a squirm of discomfort in his stomach as some things suddenly click into place. The realization isn’t monumental, but. He looks away from the pair as fast as he can, anyway.
In doing so, he meets David’s eye. Michael swears he sees David’s lips twitch.
“I think we have enough Iron Maiden.”
“I disagree, but hey, I’m not the one driving.” Paul chirps, then presses his face to the side of Marko’s head, nose in his blond curls. Dwayne makes a noise that seems to be in agreement with that, and puts the car into drive.
With a jerk, the van rumbles onto the road, leaving Santa Carla behind it.
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