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It's interesting, being a romanticized monster. You'd think that after learning vampires weren't like the stories, they wouldn't be as cool.
The clamoring ants at the edges of his city said otherwise.
*
Gavriel did not plan to be a Maker. He was not involved in Elisabet’s turning, not to a stage that could be considered making. Oh, he helped break her from prison, watched her first kills, but it was Lucien who was in charge of turning her, in charge of feedings and sharing power. Who had power worth sharing.
Then it was the three of them, monsters of the night, drinking their fill, killing as they pleased, exploring the world under the cover of night.
And then there was Italy, and the Spider, and Gavriel traded his life for Lucien’s.
There was not a word for what Lucien meant to Gavriel, but Maker was, perhaps, the closest. Death did not fear Gavriel, nor did he fear it, but living without anyone to call his, anyone to call him theirs, that was worthy of fear.
“No, wait. I will take his place. Get up, Lucien.”
“What a waste to cut down such a rare creature.”
Gavriel lived, then, as Thorn, for years. Hunting down and killing by-blows, murdering mistakes, killing and drinking the blood of those who often didn’t even understand why they were to die.
It wasn’t an experience that lent itself towards finding and creating progeny.
And then Casper. An act of mercy by a worn down killer.
A mistake.
The cemetery. Constant pain, constant starvation. Dreams of revenge.
Taunts from the monster who tried to win Gavriel’s loyalty by force.
Freedom. Blood, old and thick and singing with centuries worth of power.
Locating Lucien. Crossing the ocean, letting Elisabet capture him and make his life easy, taking him to the very person he wanted to kill.
And then-
The party. The farmhouse. The boy.
The girl.
Gavriel saved her the first time to make them even.
She had rescued him from Elisabet and her churls, gotten the three of them out. Gavriel did not need rescuing, but the offer… well, the offer was too sweet to resist.
“I don’t want to be a monster,” he heard her say, bluffing against her friend who was Cold and would soon be wild with hunger.
And her friend moved, and Gavriel moved, and there was blood in his mouth, fresh and warm, weak but oh-so-delicious.
“Gavriel! Gavriel let him go. Please let Aidan go. He’s going to die!”
Listening was a conscious choice. She looked at him like a person, mostly, and he’s doubtful that would stay true if he killed her friend.
Blood drunk and still starved, despite draining the Spider and his immediate Corps, her heartbeat flickered in his gaze, in his ears. For a moment, it was worth it, leaving this body, slowly going cold, to instead feast on hers, still entirely warm, fully alive.
Blood didn’t taste different depending on morals, he knew, not truly, but sometimes it felt as though it could. Would her blood be as sweet as her actions, brave despite the flaring heartbeat?
“Please, don’t.”
But then she wouldn’t be, not if she were drained and cold and dead.
“Come, Tana. The night is young and your friend is very tired. We should make him a bed—a cap of flowers and a kirtle, embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.” Being lucid is hard. The pain isn’t everpresent anymore, the torturers long gone, but being in charge of his own body is odd. Wrong. Unusual, anymore.
Gavriel watched Tana bend, checking her friend’s life by his chest. “Is he going to—will he live?”
“No, no chance of that.” Gavriel had been aware enough to hear their conversations. Much of his understanding left as soon as it entered, but this was familiar. This was what Gavriel was good at. “He wants to die, so he will. But not tonight and not because of me.”
“Oh,” Tana said, as though he said more than he had. Maybe that was true. “So he’s okay?”
She glanced up at him through dark eyelashes, awaiting an answer. Answers he could give, as the vampire she was around. The white dress that had to have been pretty once was splattered in blood, not all her own. There were nicks and scratches across her arms, her knees skinned.
She looked pathetic, in a way, and in another she reminded him of his grandmother.
Gavriel reached out, wishing to draw her up. “Yes, but you’re hurt.”
“I haven’t had a very good day,” Tana admitted, as though Gavriel truly was another child from that party, an equal and not a monster. “I think I might still be hung over and everyone’s dead and my root beer’s gone.” Her breath hitched, and she scrubbed at her eyes with a filthy hand.
“We’ll get you another day,” Gavriel promised, picking up Aidan.
And they would, because he liked them, and he liked driving, and he had no responsibilities except those he owed himself.
*
Gavriel slipped the car keys from Aidan’s pocket as he left the boy in the backseat, taking the driver’s seat for himself. Tana joined him not long after, food in her arms and hands still shaking minutely.
He rolled the windows down and let the wind speak for them, driving perhaps faster than was legal.
Tana curled into her own seat, her window halfway up and still catching some of her hair. It was late for someone who lived by the sunrise, rather than the sunset. Or perhaps just late for someone who started their day surrounded by the corpses of those they’d loved.
Gavriel had been responsible for those corpses in his own life. Let it be ruinous, praying for penitence that he would never earn.
“What was going on back at the house?” Tana asked, something not quite drowsy in her tone. “Those chains—why didn’t you get out of them before, if you always could?”
“I killed someone—a vampire—and I was exhausted and—” Gavriel stopped, trying to align the words into something she might understand. Words hadn’t been important in the cemetery, they weren’t important when he was tearing out throats and cutting off heads. The road stretched ahead of them, long and empty. “My mind is—not as it was.” His history stretched behind, long and bloody. “There is a madness that comes over us when we’re starved and carved, a madness that can be cured only by feeding—but such things they have done to me that it would take a river of blood to wash away all my wounds. I struggle for my most rational moments. I could have gotten out of the chains, yes, but it would have cost me.”
It had cost him, still, but less, perhaps, with a few pints of blood in his belly and Tana’s eyes on him.
“You don’t seem crazy,” she said, proving again his point. “Well, you don’t seem that crazy.” As though he was any other teenager, crazy with normal things.
He smiled helplessly. “Some of the time, I’m not.” Once, some of the time would have been most of the time. But pain warps the mind in ways humans cannot understand, cannot wish to understand. “But the rest of the time is most of the time. And when I am, unfortunately, I am all appetite.
“They left me there with the tied-up boy, saved for the following night, like a sweet on the pillow. I was still waiting for it to get closer to dark when you came in.”
Tana’s inhale wasn’t sharp, just perhaps a bit heavier than the last one. Gavriel glanced away from the road, the streetlights illuminating her in flashes. Dark hair, dark scabs, a light dress.
He let the wind carry instead, relaxing momentarily into the act of driving. It didn’t matter if his sentences were in the right order for the language here, it only mattered that the wheels stayed within the right lines, that the lights stayed on properly.
A moment later, Tana spoke again. “Why were they after you—those men and the Thorn? Was it bad, what you did?”
“Very bad,” he agreed. How to say- “An act of mercy that I regret—endlessly, I regret it. I had a tutor once who wanted me to believe that mercy is a kind of sorrow and that since evil is the motive of sorrow, evil is also the motive of mercy. I thought that my tutor was old and cruel, and maybe he was—” He had certainly been something monstrous, but to call him evil would be to call himself evil and- well. Perhaps they both were. “-but now I think he was also right.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Tana said, plaintively. “Mercy can’t be evil. It’s a virtue—like kindness or courage or…”
Gavriel glanced away from the road as she trailed off. The moonlight lit her face softly, the haze of heat and life mixing to make her look as ethereal as the angels his victims would pray to when lucid enough.
“This is the world I remade with my terrible mercy,” he murmured, the closest he could give to an apology - an apology for the horrors she faced so bravely tonight, an apology for the sort of horrors she must not have been spared for years, in a world where they could spare no one.
“That doesn’t make sense either,” Tana said, shaking her head.
Gavriel waited for the rest of her thoughts, interested in hearing where they went but was given a yawn instead. He laughed, helplessly fond of this creature who’d looked at him and offered aid. “Go to sleep, Tana.” He murmured, as comforting as he knew how. “Lean back your seat. If you let me borrow your car for tonight, I promise I will repay you.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked challengingly, blue eyes looking him up and down. “With what?”
He was half willing to promise whatever she’d like. “Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of things long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.”
She took it in stride, again as though most boys her age offered the currencies of a hundred civilizations for repayment. “Okay. So where are we going?” She laid her head against the hlaf-raised glass of the window.
Gavriel glanced through the mirror at the boy passed out in the back seat, then at the creature halfway to dozing beside him. “Coldtown.”
“Oh,” she said, surprise shaking her awake.
“I must,” Gavriel said, not sure if he was apologizing or explaining. “But if Aidan comes through the gates with me, he’ll be safer, and you’ll be safer without him. They’ll hunt for him out in the world. And he’s likely to start hunting, too.”
“But what if he doesn’t want to be a vampire?” Tana asked, almost sharp, almost desperate. She was more hopeful than Gavriel had been in a long, long time. He remembered when he was Cold, believing he could beat it. How terribly that had ended.
“The fever is in his blood. He looks for no cure but one. I think he is decided in his heart, but who can confess to such a decision?” Aidan had certainly not lasted as long as many by-blows Gavriel had killed.
“It’s hard to fight the infection,” Tana said sharply. It softened, turned desperate in a way that spoke of horrors. “They can’t. You don’t understand. It takes them over and they can’t think straight.”
Gavriel watched the road, wondering if she had truly forgotten that you could not become a vampire without first being Cold.
When she did speak again, it was a little softer. She shifted uncomfortably, translucent fabric shifting over her arms and shoulders. “If you go to Coldtown, you won’t be able to get out. Are you sure whatever you’re going there for is worth it?”
It had kept him sane for years of torture, the fairytale of his revenge. It would be. He reached out instead of answering, fingers brushing across mangled skin near Tana’s elbow. “What’s that?”
“What?” Tana looked down, watching as he traced the outline of it.
“These are old marks,” he said softly, feeling the smoothness of the edges. “You were just a child.”
“Should it matter?”
“Why should death discriminate between age and youth, you mean?” he kept his tone level. “Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die.”
Something in her face changed just barely, like his answer was anything but what she expected. He hoped it was a good change.
“Seems like Death came back for me.”
And that- he couldn’t help but grin. Death always came back, wearing the faces of friends and enemies, even the guise of human girls who wanted to be alive, even if that meant leaving death in their wake. “You drove him off again. Sleep, Tana. I will guard you from Death, for I have no fear of him. We have been adversaries for so long that we are closer than friends.”
“I’ll just close my eyes for a minute,” she said. “It’s not even really that late.”
But it was the end of a day so soaked in horror that Gavriel expected to see her spine curve under the weight of it. The humans at that party had known each other. Been friends.
Waking up in a sea of one’s friends’ corpses was never going to be a soft experience. Gavriel hummed, and let his gaze drag back to the endless road as Tana laid her head across the window.
The design of the states had changed in the time he was captive. America wasn’t Gavriel’s favored hunting ground, but he knew his way around, knew all the houses that were kept by vampires that preyed on hikers and which nightclubs would slice up patrons’ arms to lick the blood off.
Had known. There were human hunters now, Thorns who were stuck doing damage control or taking out vampires who left too many by-blows, too many weak, false vampires to keep killing.
They told stories about Gavriel, now. The Spider had read them outside his cage, inbetween flashes of killings, people Gavriel remembered draining but not why they were in range. The Thorn of Istra, gone mad from the futility of correcting his own mistakes. Truly, you make monsters out of mercy.
The road continued, headlights illuminating the helpful signs that not even the rise of GPS could render inert.
Tana’s car lacked a center console, so when she shifted drowsily, pulling her knees up to chest, it wasn’t a surprise that an hour later her boots were digging into Gavriel’s leg, head lolled back against the seatbelt. It was two hours and another exit past when Aidan began to stir. Gavriel kept half his focus on the empty road, the other half on the rear view mirror.
“What hit me- oh.” Aidan stilled, looked around balefully and tugged his seatbelt away from his neck. “Thought the craziest things were supposed to be dreams.”
“You flirt with death, and yet you are surprised when it kisses you.”
The boy startled. “You’re still here.”
“Where else would I be?”
He shrugged. Gavriel heard his swallow, the pulsing of weak blood, unturned, barely fed. A by-blow with potential to be more, potential to be nothing. “Where are we going? We need to find a hotel-”
Gavriel’s laugh was unintentional, a light thing, but Aidan froze as though it were a gunshot.
“What?”
“You’re not going to a hotel, little mistake.”
Another swallow. Aidan’s heartbeat was so loud, faster than Tana’s and burning with infection. “Yeah, I am. I’ll wait out the infection and-”
“Do you think you will last?”
“I- yeah. I can totally-”
“You’ve tried to kill Tana twice, and it’s only been a day.”
Aidan shook his head. “No, no, it’s- I’ll be fine. I’m not even thirsty anymore.”
“And you think that you will stay sated?”
Gavriel was sure he wouldn’t. The Spider talked about ‘surviving’ the Cold sometimes. He spoke of it as torture, pumping a human full of venom and letting them live like that, bloodless and starving, until they tore out their own throats.
The Cold wasn’t meant to be fought.
“What else can I do?”
“You thought being a vampire would be fun earlier.”
“I- that was the hunger talking.”
“Was it?”
Aidan didn’t answer, bluster dried up like his sanity soon would be.
“We’re going to Coldtown. You can come infected, or you can come turned, but you are coming.”
Gavriel missed hunting by heartbeats. They were so loud when prey was scared, thundering like hoofbeats, like screaming, like Aleksander when he was on a bender.
The boy watched out the window for nearly another hour, pulse slowing and rocketing in turns.
“Can we stop? There was a sign for a rest stop a mile back.”
Gavriel hummed. Aidan was shaking. Some people weren’t made to survive the hunger. He clicked on a blinker, flashing on the empty road, signalling to those who weren’t even here.
The Dead Last Rest Stop was brightly lit, floodlights and neon signs turning the night into something like day. Gavriel hadn’t seen a day in so long. He parked away from the main crowd, where he could lure someone and leave a proper corpse, not a by-blow capable of haunting his steps.
He let Aidan unbuckle first, climb out of the car. Only then did Gavriel move, carefully letting Tana stretch her feet across the front seat, quiet so as not to wake her.
She would need her strength for the drive back.
Aidan wandered across the parking lot. If he were smart, he’d come back turned. There were crowds, and so much blood to drink. Newborns were all hunger, and where better to leave him than a buffet?
Gavriel stretched dead muscles, and prepared to wander himself. Gavriel didn’t have time to feast, but he should snack if he wanted to arrive as anything more than hunger and hate.
*
There was money in the pockets of his snack. Clothes, too, and a wallet that made Gavriel feel like he was playing dress up. The issue with killing someone who looked like himself was that Gavriel never saw himself in his features - his eyes were Katya’s, his mouth Aleksander’s. His hair belonged to his mother and his cheekbones were a gift from his grandmother. He killed himself and he killed all of them, but it was that thinking that put him in a cage the first time and Gavriel was not going to be captive again.
He took the money and bought snacks, and a cup of coffee that he flavored with cream and sugar. The caffeine and sugar would aid the fight against sleep. Not for him, that was the benefit of his snack, his little not-by-blow who wouldn’t have the chance to become wild like Aidan and bite someone else, but for Tana, who would need clarity when she drove back from Coldtown. Who would appreciate a snack after her unplanned rescues, and would need the water when her adrenaline caught up and she began to cry.