TITLE: It's All Coming Back To Me Now
RATING: M for angst, violence, angst and language
PAIRING: Pam/Tara
SYNOPSIS: Part 3 of The Rift Trilogy. Follows 'I Fall Without You' and 'When You're More Than A Memory.' Shaken by Eric's ominous warnings about Pam, Tara takes off for London. But what will she find when she gets there?
DISCLAIMER: True Blood and it's wacky characters do not belong to me so don't sue; I'm pretty poor and I have nothing of value.
A/N – This is Part 3 of The Rift trilogy. Newcomers to this story verse might want to acquaint themselves with Parts 1 and 2 before they delve into this stew of angst. You can find them on my profile page; I'd put the hyperlinks here but this site disallows them. Sorry.
So, I tried to make this a one-shot as I desperately did not want to commit to yet another multi-chapter story due to work obligations. However, every time I tried to pen out a one-shot everything read like it was rushed and jumbled. In the end, I gave up and decided to flesh things out. Let me know what you thought if you have half a moment. Happy reading.
Chapter 1
London was an experiment in misery and poverty. The fall of the Pound, the way it shattered onto the foreign exchange market's floor like so much glass, had resulted in England's capital caving in on itself.
The once thriving and powerful city crumbled under inflation and unemployment. Crime rates skyrocketed and violence swept across the city like a disease out of control. Monarchs were the first to go, their power and prestige stripped from their delicate fingers as the people revolted. Buckingham Palace was set aflame, burning like a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night.
Corporate kingpins were next, the city's financial and central business district all but literally going up in smoke as businesses liquidated, from either excessive takeovers, monetary stress or plain carelessness.
The city turned on itself, its people too busy ransacking and spreading chaos to notice the damage until it was too late.
Now, London was a former shadow of itself; a ruined urban jungle of cracked roads and dilapidated infrastructure. Streets were littered with the homeless, the gang members, the addicts and the whores. People walked around armed for the police were as corrupt as they were helpful.
Life in London was a constant game of Russian Roulette.
One thing that hadn't changed? The weather.
Tara was made known of this fact as she skulked down an uneven cobblestone street, a marker of the city's previous Victorian influence. Rain poured down in near transparent sheets, soaking the ground below and obscuring visibility that was already aggravated by wisps of silver-gray fog that hung in the air like unwanted decorations. Thunder rumbled in the sky, its monotonous gargling shattered intermittently by the hard pounding of the rain.
A white-hot streak of lightning cut through the oil-black sky, momentarily igniting the city before the dark of night reclaimed its territory and clapped a heavy shadow over the bric-a-brac of decrepit buildings and streets.
Tara cursed under her breath as the front of her boot caught the lip of a jutting cobblestone, upsetting her equilibrium. She righted herself, adjusted the collar of her waterproof trench coat more snuggly over her neck then continued down the pathetically lit street, the tail of her coat flapping out behind her like an ominous pair of midnight wings.
The vampire rounded the corner and proceeded up a small incline, her boots sloshing and slipping against the flow of rainwater and sludge that retched from a blocked storm sewer. The smell of shit and piss grew heavy in the air, a sickening aroma of human waste, as Tara neared the top of the small hill. She paused at the corner of the junction, squinted up at the graffiti-ed and abused street sign before she impatiently shoved a wet clump of hair off her forehead.
"Fuck." She had taken a wrong turn.
Tara stood preternaturally still as she tuned out her surroundings. She dug into her recent memories, unearthed the image of London's street map and brought it to her mind's eye. Mental fingers located her current location then drew a path to her destination.
A sound to her left snapped the vampire out of her internal wanderings and she barely managed to sidestep the lunge of a V addict, so concentrated she was on her mental findings.
The addict, his lank hair matted to the sides of his head, his eyes wild and feral from withdrawal crashed into a nearby broken lamppost. The impact of his head hitting the unforgiving metal post didn't deter him as he righted himself and pulled out a wicked looking hunting knife.
"I want yer fuckin' blood," he snarled, his voice pitched with desperation and need. He sprang forward, slashing blindly with his knife, his movements clumsy and unstable.
Tara simply contorted her body out of his path of attack, kicked out with a heavily booted foot and sent the knife the addict was holding out of his hand and skittering down the road.
"Ya can't have it," Tara sneered, her eyes steely as she regarded him in manner that a child regards an unwanted toy. She darted forward, gave him a patronizing slap across the face then leapt back.
He shrieked, more from frustration than pain and turned around to throw himself at Tara, his need for V overwhelming his survivor's instincts.
Tara used his momentum to send him careening into the brick wall of an uninhabited building. His head smacked against the side of the building with a sickening crack and he crumpled to the ground in an unceremonious heap, leaving a slick trail of blood down the brick walls. He didn't move.
"Fuckin' amateur," Tara hissed at the prone body. That was all the attention she provided for the addict before she turned on her heel and retraced her steps.
Ambling back down the hill, she turned into a dark alleyway where even the relentless wash of rain couldn't mask the stench of piss and sweat. The pungent smells seemed to have soaked into the pores of the dirt-streaked brick walls and Tara was infinitely glad she didn't need to breathe as she trudged down the alleyway and onto a main street teeming with activity. Nighttime activity.
It was whore central.
People were fucking left and right, some out in the open, others hunkered in the shadows of darkened street corners. There were clients sitting in their cars, moaning and grunting as whores worked at them with their mouths. One man had a boy who looked no more than fifteen pressed up against a dumpster, pounding into him from behind. The boy's eyes were screwed shut, his face pinched with pain as his client plowed repeatedly into him.
Tara turned her head away in disgust, fighting the urge to blur over to the man and twist his head clean off his shoulders.
A hand on her shoulder made her snarl and instinct had her grabbing the hand and twisting. Bones snapped and a scream of pain followed but Tara paid the whore who had managed to sneak up on her no mind as she slammed her up against the alley wall.
"Never sneak up on a vampire," Tara hissed, locking eyes of obsidian onto a pair of frightened hazel. "Ya hear?" She pressed the whore into the brick wall, uncaring of the fact that it made the whore whimper in pain as the rough texture scraped at her near naked back.
The whore nodded and Tara let her go, watching with unsympathetic eyes as she ran off, clutching her ruined wrist.
The vampire looked up at the street sign tacked a quarter way up the wall. Nodding satisfactorily, she turned right and continued down the street, bypassing rutting couples and whores that called out to her, their voices equally cocky and seductive. Tara suppressed a shiver of revulsion as her eyes were unwilling witnesses to sexual acts that bordered on depraved. She couldn't help the sigh of relief that escaped past parted lips when she reached the end of the street, leaving behind the reek of arousal and body fluids along with the grunts, moans and pained whimpers.
The skies were finally clearing when Tara made her way down the blissfully quiet street. The vampire noted that this street was composed of boarding houses, some more elegant than the other but still overall shabby and in need of a new coating of paint.
She came to a stop across the road from a looming apartment building that was Victorian in style. It was an eyesore as it towered over all the boarding houses; its outer shell decaying, graffiti-ed and plastered with posters, pictures and ads. The main entrance, two pathetic looking double doors bore a cracked window, a dangling doorknob and the word "cunt" spray-painted across the other window.
"You have got to be fuckin' kidding me," Tara swore, her voice tinged with disbelief. She couldn't believe that Pam would willingly live in s shithole such as this. A shithole just off whore central in what Tara had come to conclude was probably London's dirtiest, lowest, most dangerous part of town.
She whipped out the slip of paper Eric had given her, matched the address to that of the street sign stenciled above the entrance doors then let loose a litany of cusses when the words unfortunately matched.
"What the actual fuck, Pam?" Worry and panic, two emotions that had been hounding her since Eric had hunted her down in that piss-poor excuse for a bar, were now gnawing its irritating teeth at nerves that were already frayed. She took a deliberate step forward, intending to cross the street and into the building to demand an explanation from her ex-lover when an all too familiar smell drifted from across the street to caress her senses.
Lavender and honeysuckle. A hint of vanilla.
Pam.
Tara hastily backed into a shadowy corner, unwilling to reveal herself for reasons unknown. Her breath hitched in her throat when Pam emerged from those falling apart doors. When she stepped into the weak spotlight courtesy of the lamppost in front of the apartment building, Tara's knees threatened to buckle.
Starved. That was the first word that came to Tara's mind as disbelieving eyes ran a visual sweep down the length of Pam's body…or what was left of it. The blonde's normally form fitting clothes all but hung off her emaciated frame, her body having thinned to the point of skeletal. Her maker's face was gaunt, her cheeks hollowed out and her eyes sunken into her skull. The color of her skin was pallid, bordering on a grayish tinge and her thick blonde hair lay mused and tangled around her too thin face.
Pam was shaking slightly as she glanced down both sides of the street. Then she seemed to go rigid as her nose picked up something.
Tara pressed her back further into the building she was currently hiding against. She watched as Pam's eyes, so blank and lifeless, tracked a path across the other side of the street. They momentarily stopped right where Tara was hiding and Tara had to bite down hard on her lip to contain her cry of shock; Pam's eyes, normally a vibrant Prussian blue was now so alarmingly devoid of life. So much so that the blue of her eyes were now rendered to a dull slate gray.
Tara observed Pam with pain-laden eyes and a heart pumped full of so much sadness that she thought it might burst in the confines of her chest. She watched as Pam's shoulders slump and her lower lip tremble. She turned away, exposing her back to Tara and proceeded to walk down the dimly lit street.
Tara counted to twenty, girded her mental loins and then proceeded to follow, purposely using her nose to track Pam so that she could keep a sizeable distance between them to avoid detection.
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There was someone following her, that she knew for a fact. Pam paused as she pretended to read a street sign but then cast an inconspicuous glance over her shoulder.
Nothing. She sighed and continued on, needing to get to the blood mart before the nighttime crowd rush kicked in. Pam didn't do so well in crowds anymore; it made her feel boxed in, claustrophobic, suffocated.
As Pam walked, she couldn't help but acknowledge that whatever or whoever was following her was not a threat. Every instinct, active or otherwise was completely unperturbed by her mysterious follower, which made Pam wary. She turned the corner and tossed another look behind her but the London fog that crept in from the Thames conveniently obscured the street she left behind with twisty fingers of gray-white.
"Of course," she murmured as she made her way down the narrow street that would spit her out into the main square. She paused again when she felt the presence of her follower and this time, it registered to her as familiar. The presence felt familiar. Tears pricked her eyes, the realization causing her to come to the conclusion that she was indeed in the throes of heavy blood withdrawal. Delusions, overactive imaginations, these were all symptoms vampires were subjected to when they didn't feed for long periods of time.
Shaking her head, both in disgust with herself and to clear the smog in her head, she ambled down the narrow street and was halfway past a dark alleyway when two Drainers jumped out at her.
Pam immediately hissed, her fangs protracting over lips that were pulled back into a snarl.
"Well looky here, we got ourselves a wild alley cat," the taller one of the two announced. He swung the heavy silver chain in front of him in a circular motion and Pam, knowing that whilst she may be able to take down one Drainer, was already too weak to attempt to tussle with two. She backed up, snarling at the two advancing men.
"Here, kitty, kitty," the bulkier man cooed in a manner that was decidedly patronizing. He moved away from his silver carrying partner and beckoned Pam mockingly with a "come hither" gesture.
As he was seemingly devoid of any present silver, Pam lunged for him first. The realization that he was bait came a fraction too late as she exposed her unprotected back to the man with the silver chain.
Pam hissed in pain as the silver chain was immediately wrapped around her neck from behind, halting her movements. The effect was instantaneous as the silver bit deeply into vulnerable flesh, leeching her of her remaining strength and burning a path through skin and muscle.
"There, now," the bulky man soothed. He walked up to stand in front of Pam, smiled a decidedly unfriendly smile, then backhanded her. Blood sprayed out from torn lips as the blonde's head snapped sideways.
"Hey, don't waste the V," the tall man complained. Using the chain, he dragged her into the cover of darkness provided by the alleyway. "Where's the kit? I'll hold her while you drain."
The bulky man appraised Pam with a glint in his eye that send a lick of fear down the length of her spine. Her fears were confirmed when he began stroking himself through the material of his pants.
"Lemme have some fun with the slag, first," the bulky man proclaimed, leering at Pam. "You want a go?"
"I don't fuck things without a pulse," the tall man behind Pam replied, disgust evident in his tone. He stepped out from behind Pam, coiled the chain around her right wrist and tied it to a rung jutting out from the wall she was pressed up against. Grabbing the remaining chain, he did the same with her other wrist until Pam was securely pinned to the wall by silver.
"Well stand guard then," the bulky man said. His voice was interspersed with pants as he continued to fondle himself.
"Make it quick," the taller man retorted as he took his position by the mouth of the alleyway.
"Don't worry, love," the man leered as he unzipped his pants. "I'm a good shag." He fished out his semi-erect cock and began fisting himself in earnest with one hand. His other hand reached out for the button of Pam's jeans and the blonde whimpered and tried to twist out of his grasp but the combination of the silver against her skin and the lack of blood consumption over the past few weeks resulted in her being weaker than a newborn kitten.
Pam was about to succumb to her fate when an ear piercing scream sounded from the end of mouth of the alleyway. It was followed by the sickening crunch of bones and a wet plop as a decapitated head rolled down the alleyway only to stop at the bulky man's feet.
"Jesus Christ!" The shocked exclamation was punctuated by the sound of a heavy body dropping to the ground. Before the man could make another sound, he found himself pressed up against the wall opposite Pam by a dark-skinned vampire with the look of death in pitch-black eyes.
Tara held the man effortlessly by the throat with one hand. Her eyes roamed down the length Pam's attacker and almost rapist until she caught sight of his exposed dick. A cruel smile painted her lips and without so much as a warning, she grabbed the exposed appendage and snapped it viciously sideways.
The man howled in agony as Tara effectively ruined rigid muscles that once made up his erection.
"Shut. Up," Tara snarled, so incensed that her words were barely coherent through a voice that was more of a sub-vocal growl. She tightened her fingers around his throat, one squeeze shy of causing permanent damage, though the iron-clad grip she had around his neck had rendered the man unable to speak let alone scream. Her gargled and gasped, his stubby hands clawing at Tara's fingers to no avail.
Tara stared hard into his eyes, her own blazing with a seething fury that was almost palpable. Her hand still around his broken penis, she gave it a none too gentle squeeze, watching with absolutely no mercy as tears sprang into his eyes and his mouth formed an "O" of silent screams.
"You will die for trying to touch her like that," Tara promised, her voice dark with rage, her eyes glinting with murderous intent. She gave the now pitifully flaccid cock another squeeze, her fingernails digging into the sensitive flesh and drawing blood. The man twitched against her and choked out something that resembled a yowl.
"How would like to die?" Tara's voice was frighteningly conversational as she regarded the man with a bland look. "Would you like me to rip off that pathetic stump you call a dick and shove it down your throat?" The man's eyes grew wide as dinner plates when Tara fanned out her hand to encase both his testicles and his penis in her palm. She made a twisting motion with her wrist and the man managed a garbled scream.
"Maybe I'll just kick it up to your throat," Tara mused. She smiled a twisted smile before she brought her knee up to his exposed junk.
Something snapped and tore and blood spurted from split skin to drip out from between the man's legs. Tara's eyes were arctic, her expression completely emotionless as the man thrashed within her grip, screaming silently between chokes and gags. Then, his animated body of flailing limbs suddenly went slack as his eyes rolled to the back of head.
Tara sneered in disdain as the man passed out, slumping forward as his body succumbed to the cocktail of pain, fear and panic. Tara let go of his nether regions, clapped both hands to either side of his face and snapped his neck.
The man was dead before he hit the ground. Tara looked down at the unmoving body with stone cold eyes then kicked out with her foot; her boot came into contact with the side of his head, shattering his skull to pieces and leaving a noticeable dent.
The enraged vampire was about to do more damage when a whimper brought her out of her red haze of anger. She turned and realized that Pam was still silvered to the wall.
"Shit." She vamp sped to her maker and made quick work of unchaining Pam, uncaring of the fact that the silver bit and blistered her exposed palms.
When the chain slithered off Pam's neck and wrists onto the grime-slicked floor, Tara kicked it down the alleyway. She gripped at Pam's shoulders when the blonde's legs gave out from under her.
"Hey," Tara began, her voice laced with panic as she watched Pam's gaze swim in and out of focus. "Look at me, Pam." She reached out and to grip the blonde's chin, worry etched across her face when Pam didn't even acknowledge her. "Look at me!"When Pam's eyes rolled to the back of her head, Tara bit off a curse and swept her into her arms. Panic gave way to a very real fear when she felt just how light and bony Pam was.
"Fuck, what have you done?" Tara cried out as Pam's head lolled onto her shoulder and her body went slack in her arms.
Cradling a barely conscious Pam, Tara vamp sped them out of the alley.
TBC