Bad Blood
A Teen Titans fanfic by Keiko13 & Lomesir
Summary
They say, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." When Jump City's nightly streets suddenly become more dangerous than ever before, Robin and the other Titans in the West and East must investigate to find the source of the demonic happenings plaguing the people of their city. After surviving the near-completed apocalypse brought about by Raven's prophetic life, can the Teen Titans survive another dark, contemptuous battle in the demon's mafia underworld seeping into Jump City? (OC Pair, R/S)
Authors' Notes - This is a joint fic, everyone! Hope you guys enjoy! We're both working hard to write up this fanfic without having any mess-ups. Lomesir covers the Titans, and I often cover the OCs. Have a fun time! And don't worry, Raven/Beast Boy fans and Robin/Starfire shippers will be happily catered to. I'm sure this won't be as big a hit as These Black Eyes (which I admire for its long-standing run and massive amount of chapters!), but I hope it's still sufficient. Thanks a bunch, and drop a review on your way out! No flames, please.
Keiko
Chapter 1
"Meat Fork"
Robin looked up at the glowing moon, its light becoming fuzzy every few seconds. "The End" had taken its toll on him and his friends; he lacked at least four days of sleep. His vision was always the first to go.
Beast Boy poked his shoulder none too lightly when he began to slump forward on his feet. The jet-haired teen superhero rubbed at his eyes through the trademark mask he always wore and grumbled sleepily.
"Dude, you won't be able to track the baddies if you're sleeping on them."
Robin responded with a potent, angry glare. Beast Boy looked in the other direction and whistled to himself. Raven sighed heavily.
"Robin, I know we're all really tired, but if we hurry up and try to get at least a slight lead, maybe we can go home early and catch some rest." Starfire was now the one yawning and stretching her arms. It became the first time anyone ever heard her cracking her shoulders and neck, which turned some heads. Cyborg checked the watch built into one of his arms and snorted.
"God! Two-frickin'-thirty AM. I don't care if I charged up or not, I'm feelin' for y'all." Not a moment sooner after he spoke, a bell was heard confirming he was right, chiming on the half-hour mark. That only made everyone more sleepy. The only thing to wake them up were the blinding headlights from a police car, which turned off after it parked silently near them. Raven looked down at the body of a scandalously dressed young woman seemingly thrown against the alley wall. There were no marks of a struggle and no signs of rape, and little clues to a motive, but what caught her was the mark on the prostitute's neck.
One of Jump City's many police officers on the force came out with a gun strapped to her hip. She had her curly black hair held back in a ponytail, and her cop hat was cocked to one side. Her badge, which she assumed she had to show to the Titans, read Janet MacLean. Janet didn't appear to be surprised that the Teen Titans were on the scene, nor did she seem to take it to a negative reproach. They saw this as a good sign.
"What's the play-by-play?" she questioned. Remembering some things he'd picked up from his previous training as a sidekick, Robin checked over the scene, bending down and inspecting the body. Raven leaned against the wall and drew up her hood slowly, indicating she needed to think. While she wasn't as anal with her friends now, they knew well enough to let her alone.
"The carnage is way too clean. There's not a drop of blood anywhere." reported Robin, standing up on his feet again. Beast Boy was chewing on his bottom lip.
"It's like lookin' at a horror movie!" he said. Janet whistled.
"Somebody doesn't like the ho stroll around here." she mumbled to herself. "That is unusually clean. No way an amateur pulled this off...if it was human at all." Janet wasn't entirely unaware of the strange happenings in Jump City, since most of the Titans' showdowns were always broadcasted through Internet news (they had requested very early for there not to be video camera interference from the news networks).
However, the sentence "If it was human at all" made Beast Boy's eyes light up—though not in a happy, bubbly, "Let's go to the newest amusement park" kind of way.
"It was a vampire!" he gasped, smacking his fist into an open palm. "Dudes, I know it was! I mean, look at the neck mark! It's like someone stuck a meat fork in her jugular!" He paused and revised the sentence, and then shuddered. Janet blinked and raised an eyebrow, while the Teen Titans all gave him strange glances. Raven said nothing, but Starfire scratched at her bright red hair.
"I don't think a vampire did this, B." Cyborg said calmly.
"Perhaps the lack of sleep has clouded your judgment, Beast Boy," Starfire suggested. "Is it not correct that these 'vampire' creatures are only fictional things of your world's books?" Beast Boy held up a correctional finger.
"And movies!" he added.
"Of which you watch too many." retorted Raven, which earned her a pair of narrowed eyes and a pout from the shapeshifter.
"How can you deny it? The proof's right there! The suckhead probably came along and drained her dry!" He raised his arms as if in the middle of a revolutionizing speech. "I mean, how do you think all the color stayed inside the lines?" He pointed at the dead body while Janet and Robin crossed their arms simultaneously.
"Look at it! Just look at it!" He raked his fingers through the air. "This is classic Bram Stoker, guys! This would be the gold of Hollywood! The dude was probably some big organization guy who's like, got it in for humans!"
Cyborg shook his head. "B, you should've stopped five sentences ago."
"Vampires aren't real, honey." Janet said. Beast Boy jumped at the term of endearment and stiffened. "You been stayin' up watching too much Blade?"
"Knowing Beast Boy, he's just been watching too much, period." Robin said in a grunt. He ran his fingers through his hair. "We have no idea who did this. Sorry, Janet. We'll try to work on it tomorrow."
"Well, no, no!" Janet held up her hands in a calming gesture. "Y'all look like you should get some shut-eye. I'll pull out the precinct, and we'll take over the case, okay? You guys just worry about catching up on that sleep you missed."
Robin knitted his brow together and wore a classic look of worry on his face, always being the one to think about his line of duty. Janet gave him a friendly touch on the shoulder, smiling.
"The world can do without superheroes for a few days. The police can still handle ourselves, you know," she pointed out, teasing with the last line. Starfire came up and hugged Robin's arm.
"Please, Robin? You need rest most of all."
Raven let her eyes slide half-shut in personal sarcasm. Where's my parade? she wondered. There was a silence among the group until Cyborg stretched.
"Let's go home, y'all." He smirked, flashing his teeth, "I'll make my famous waffles in the morning!" The joke invoked not even a single chuckle, so the oldest of the Titans let it drop like a rock without question. "All right, all right. Maybe it's still a lil' early to be talkin' about waffles."
"Evil beware." Raven said, taking a rimshot at a line she recalled saying a while back. It made Cyborg cheer up a little bit.
"Okay, okay. Thanks, Janet." Robin said, giving a nod to the police woman. Janet patted the teenager's shoulder.
"Rest up good, Robin. Have a nice night."
"Morning," echoed most of the Titans, making Janet chuckle as she called in for a body bag.
The Titans all began to depart. However, just before Robin mounted on his motorcycle, he looked over his shoulder and saw that Beast Boy was still staring at the long-dead victim, head bowed, mouth moving incoherently. He strained his ears to listen, and found he was still too tired.
"Beast Boy!" he shouted. The green-skinned teen looked up, spaced out in the moment. "Let's get going!"
"Um...right." Beast Boy immediately shifted to the form of a red-tailed hawk and joined his comrades in the flight back to Titan's Tower. As they went off into the distant twilight dawn that would rise in a few hours, Janet reviewed the crime scene and puckered her lips. There was definitely something bothering her about the attack. It looked almost willing, due to no signs of an argument, but the method of death escaped her. The victim was completely white, her skin robbed of pigmentation. Something was wrong with that.
His sight was blind, but his ears heard clearly the roar of a motorcycle passing him by, followed by the screech of a bird-like creature and several other, larger flying creatures. He opened his mouth and screeched as this happened, and the echoes bounced back to him to give him a clear picture of the mobile bodies of the Teen Titans. The little vampire bat flapped his wings and fluttered rapidly into the nearest alley, then dropped as if dead.
A shadow appeared to grow larger; the wings magnified and billowed down to the dirty ground, connected to the fingerless arms of a trenchcoat stained all black. With a button just above the young man's exposed, flat stomach, he stood up and revealed a white cross on the midriff zip-up top he wore underneath to match his black, loose jeans and leather boots. Crimson-red eyes peered out into the night with vision humans would die to obtain.
"The famed Teen Titans." he said to himself. His black-painted nails suddenly shot out to four times their normal length, and he stabbed a spider crawling on the alley wall beside his head. Opening his mouth, he bared a pair of thick, long fangs behind his canine teeth.
"This is going to make my hunts a lot harder..."
At noon the next day, Beast Boy was reviewing the latest publishing of Interview With A Vampire when he heard a knock on his room's door at the Tower. He lifted his head.
"Who'zat?"
"It's me." a dead-pan voice said quietly. Beast Boy paused before he flipped the book upside-down on his bed to mark his place and hopped down from the top bunk, welcoming Raven into his not-so-clean dwelling. Raven only tried to step over the cheesy pizza at the entrance.
"You should clean up." she said blatantly. Beast Boy blinked.
"That's it?" he wondered. Raven gave him an "isn't it obvious?" expression, and the shapeshifter nodded silently. To what, he had not a clue, but he shut the door behind Raven.
"What's on your mind?"
Raven cleared a relatively clean spot for her to sit on the bottom bed and settled there. "I've been thinking about that murder scene from the other night." she admitted, which caught Beast Boy's immediate attention. Raven gazed at her lap as she looked over her words. "I checked the background of the mark. The bite, the unusually clean bloodshed...or, the lack thereof..." Beast Boy put his hands on his hips.
"And?" he pressed, more serious than he normally was. Raven peered at him, hoping he wouldn't suddenly shout and try to randomly hug her for her answer.
"...I think you may be right."
Beast Boy was uncharacteristically quiet now, but his eyes suddenly lit up and began to sparkle, and a grin played around his mouth. She tried to ignore it, but the warning signs kept coming back.
"It's possible that a vampire had attacked that girl the other night."
"I knew it!" he cried, borderlining a squeal as he tore through his room looking for something as he talked. Raven watched him with a stony expression. "The bite, the lack of blood, the pale skin, I knew it, I just knew it! I mean, it had to be a vampire! And I'll bet you anything she's not dead, too! You know that if a vampire bites you you'll get turned?"
Raven's face didn't change. "Don't be so sure." she growled. "That girl was most definitely dead." Beast Boy shot her a wide-eyed look.
"Are you kidding? How can you know more than this?" He whipped out a thick, hand-held notebook filled with chicken-scratch pen notes on vampires, dhampirs, and anything associated with all things Dracula. Raven didn't even leaf through it before her eyes lifted over the edge of the binding, and she croaked,
"You can't be serious."
"It's all true!" Beast Boy insisted. Raven plucked the tiny book out of the young one's hands and pulled out the first page, reading over the front and back. She glared at him.
"Vampires exchange blood with their victims. It's not an instant turning."
Beast Boy opened his mouth to protest how Raven could possibly know, stopped, and closed his trap before he could snap it on his own hand. Raven gave him the page back.
"Most of what was at the crime scene was a classic nightly hunting. Vampires don't have to feed on humans, but they consider them the main food source. Whoever attacked the prostitute must be a very greedy vampire."
"Why, because he sucked her dry?" asked Beast Boy, who was, again, surprisingly serious. Raven nodded.
"Traditionally, it's a gluttony to take more than what's needed to quench a vampire's thirst. It's like the 300-pound humans you see gorging on pancakes at the local IHOP."
Beast Boy groaned. "How many times do they hunt, exactly?" he questioned, not trusting his own knowledge now. Raven sighed.
"Statistically, those who have recently reached puberty hunt every night, since they are Newborn. The more experienced can go for days without a serious hunt for food—four to five at maximum." Beast Boy poked his fingers together.
"What would you consider a 'more experienced hunter', do you think? Like, eighteen?"
Raven paused, frowning. "...I'm not entirely sure. The books I have on the subject are vague at best."
"Reason why I was asking is 'cause I think I know the age of the attacker." Beast Boy said. Raven now raised her head curiously.
"Speak," she invited.
Beast Boy grinned, proud of his recent achievement. "According to my oh-so-extensive intelligence," he bragged, whereby Raven groaned as he went on, "I'd say our perpetrator is at least nineteen or twenty years old."
"How do you know that?" Raven questioned. "There's no definite way to tell a vampire's age. They're immortal beings."
Beast Boy snapped his fingers, still smirking. "That's where you're wrong!" he stated matter-of-factly. "See, I did some research on the Internet, too. And a really positive source I came across said how you can tell the general age group, human-ish scale."
"What's the source? Do I want to know?"
Beast Boy shook his head "no". Raven dropped the question as her friend took up a seat beside her.
"See, they said all vampires got fangs, which is obvious. And you can tell how good a hunter they are by the appearance of the bite. Like, a 'Newborn' kid, like you mentioned, would have thicker fangs that are a little closer together and are pretty blunt. A really good vampire would have a set of fangs that were super sharp and super thin. They could be further apart, too."
Raven crossed her arms, still paying attention. Beast Boy tilted his neck and tapped at the spot where the victim had been bitten as a hint.
"The mark had really wide placing of the fangs, and it was a clean hit. No tearing or digging in like a Newborn might have to."
"At least that narrows down the appearance of the age," Raven mused. "That's not bad, Beast Boy. You actually caught something." Beast Boy grinned again.
"Now you just have to tell Robin."
Beast Boy stopped. "...Can I mention the vampires?"
Raven smiled slightly. "Why don't you let me take care of that." she said. "It might be a little better that way."
"Cool! Vampire hunting! It'll be just like Van Hellsing!"
Raven gave Beast Boy a quiet stare. "I liked you better when you were serious."
Beast Boy pouted. "I am serious!" he insisted. "What, a guy can't joke once in a while?"