Part One
There was a macabre rightness to how red the light was here, Blade thought as he stepped into the lab, when he could smell that so much blood had been spilt. He was still breathing hard and could feel adrenaline humming through his veins, making them sing. It was a good thing that Frost was not currently standing in front of him. Had he been, Blade was sure that he would have struck him to the floor. With the old rage and exhilaration from the chase still claiming dominance over him, and with such a powerful new reason to hate presented before him, Blade thought that he might even cross that line that he and Frost had until that point danced around so ably and finally kill the son of a bitch.
"Old man," Blade breathed as he pulled off his sunglasses and held up a small flashlight so that he could instead better view the reddish liquid, too translucent to be pure blood, in which his mentor was suspended. His voice was low and slightly hoarse, only because he was alone; had anyone else been there, he would have sounded entirely unaffected. "Look at what they've done to you."
The vat sprang open at a few touches of Blade's hand at the controls, releasing the reddish fluid across the floor of the lab and Blade's own shoes. His nostrils twitched as the faint, coppery scent told him that his guess had been correct. Blood diluted with a liberal amount of saline. Oh, certainly, they were brave enough to turn him, brave enough to bet that the thirst would take him down before he managed to kill more than a handful of them, but not so brave as to keep him on full blood and let him get strong enough to become a threat.
Whistler was connected to a series of syringes and tubes that ran into his back and shoulders in addition to being submerged, and he was jerked up short while the blood ran out. He dangled and twitched, unconscious, at the ends of his lines like a marionette; it hurt to look at him. Blade's sword was a live thing that leapt into his hand independently of his control. The tubing made a sound almost like that of wet spaghetti breaking as the steel slid through it, allowing Whistler to tumble down and into Blade's arms. His skin was slick and tepid, scarcely warmer than room temperature.
Staying out of Blade's way and keeping a low profile for the past several days as the net had closed had been the smartest decision that Frost had ever made.
Whistler was breathing in slow, sickly gasps as Blade lowered him down to the cement. There was a wet sound to each exhalation, making Blade think of all of the blood that had likely been inhaled while Whistler had been dangling without needing to use his lungs. His hand curled around the stake at his waist before he had time to halt himself. It was cold, and the metal bit at his fingers.
There were a thousand reasons that their cure might not work, and a thousand more for why it could. Karen had invented it on the fly based upon guesswork and hypothesis and nothing in the way of clinical trials. Frost had been brought crashing back down from godhood and into tumultuous, messy humanity again by virtue of a massive dosage and conditions that they had no hope of duplicating. Whistler was obviously sick, having been underfed for so long, and very well might not survive the night.
What Blade was toying with in his mind, after these two years of searching and fighting, was certainly the easier of all of their options. He guessed that it might even be the kinder.
On a terrible, rattling wheeze, the thing that had been Whistler once upon a time and maybe on some level even still was opened his eyes. They blinked slowly at Blade. He was not sure that there was anything there that resembled recognition, or that he would have been able to see it if there was.
Fuck. Wasn't as if he was known for taking the easy way out.
Blade pulled his hand away from the stake and hoisted Whistler over his shoulder in one smooth movement. Another testament to the fact that Whistler had not been living off of pure blood: he hardly weighed anything at all.
---
Even though the night was only beginning and sunlight was still several hours away, Blade already knew that he was done hunting for the evening. Any action that he took would be sloppy and careless, as he could not stop his mind from returning again and again to the thing in his trunk, and apt in the end to do more harm than good. It occurred to Blade as he pulled the car into the converted warehouse that was serving as their base of operations for now that the list of breaks he was cutting to the bloodsuckers was getting longer and longer.
The smell of marijuana and the sound of hip-hop were pervasive as Blade cut the engine and the lights before stepping out of the vehicle. The locks on the door had not had time to engage before he was sweeping his gaze around the space, making sure that the only figures within sight were the ones who had permission to be there. Scud Blade could hear without even needing to glance up, working in his harness on the security system. Frost seemed to be adhering to the less was more policy that had carried him through the past few days and was somewhere else deep within the warehouse. Every once in a great while, he would still shock the hell out of Blade by proving that he had a sense of discretion.
"Lock up your daughters, boys and girls, the Dark Knight returns," Scud announced as he noticed Blade's presence and flipped down from the rafters where the UV lights were mounted. Blade thought that his tone was guarded and nearly nervous, as if he did not know what to expect from Blade tonight was still willing to lay good money on the worst. He must have been talking to Frost. There was even a certain pleading in his voice as he held out the remains of the joint that he had been working on and said, "Little tokage of the smokage there, B?"
If anything would have put Blade on the path towards cracking a smile-or his version of it-the sight of his own mechanic on the verge of spinning himself into an outright panic because Blade was in a mood would have done the trick. He said, "Later. Cut the lights." Blade waited until Scud had disentangled himself from the harness and obeyed, killing the UV lights that served as their best security system, before he opened up the car's trunk.
Scud's voice was nearly awed as he crept up to Blade's shoulder in the resulting semidarkness, as if he was seeing a holy relic for the first time. They had been hunting Whistler for as long as Scud had been a part of the operation. "You found him?" Blade thought that Scud was on the verge of reaching out and touching the corpse when it, scenting so much fresh blood in such close proximity to itself, opened its eyes again. The look there was cold, insectile; Blade wondered if he had really seen anything else in it at all.
"And you didn't kill him?" Scud went on. He sounded incredulous.
Blade did not give voice to the heavy sigh that wanted to rise up from his chest. From the corner of his eye, he noticed a figure moving silently and with a level of grace that a normal human still had no hope of claiming, heading for the stairs. For a second, Blade was sure that the sound of his teeth grinding against one another was loud enough for Scud to hear. It was a struggle to force the muscles in his jaw to unlock again, and when they did he could only manage, "Give me a hand."
The room had been designed with just this purpose in mind, holding a vampire as they made the shift back to human again, conceived of when Blade had first learned that Whistler's death had been greatly exaggerated. Frost claimed that he remembered nothing about his own transformation until several hours after it began, and on this much, at least, Blade believed him. Frost's frustration as he was forced to admit it was too sharp to be faked. That did not mean that Frost had not raged for all of those hours that he did not remember and had been prevented by doing damage only by virtue of being isolated from all of the people who had once been his prey. The walls in this room were cement and more than a foot thick, and the door was four inches of steel. Even a vampire at his fullest strength would have been unable to batter his way free. It did not take more than a glance to know that Whistler was not a vampire at his fullest strength.
Blade could have easily handled Whistler's weight on his own, but he was glad to have Scud there even though the freezing of hell could not have induced him to admit it. Blade needed a witness. His hands were clenching and unclenching themselves into spasmodic fists as he was caught between two warring impulses, equally strong. Uncertainty was nearly alien to Blade, and he detested those rare moments when it came to visit him. He could only remember being uncertain to his extent one other time, when Frost had come onto him mere hours after being slapped back into the human race. Blade did not think that his response then would be the correct one now.
Scud helped Blade settle Whistler down in the room's only chair before he stepped back. They listed for a moment to Whistler's breathing, which sounded as if he had a child's rattle lodged in his throat. Scud's tone was rightly nervous as he ventured forth, "I don't feel so good about this, B. Listen to his breathing, he's already dying." As if he was conscious in there somewhere and meant to punctuate Scud's point, Whistler gave forth a particularly rasping gasp, sounding like a man who believed this breath to be his last and wanted to make sure that it was a memorable one. Blade kept his face blank. "He's in pain," Scud continued. A touch of the nervousness bled out of his voice, though certainly not all. He probably thought that pushing the euthanasia angle was the only path that would not get him slammed against the wall. He was probably right. "Why don't we put him out of his misery right now?"
Blade had brought a hypodermic needle and a pneumatic injector into the room with him, and he busied himself by filling it with Karen's miracle now. Though Whistler's eyes followed every move that Blade made, there was no comprehension there. Several days after Frost had presented himself in all of his seemingly impossible human glory, Blade had taken him to Karen. After she had picked herself up from the floor and after she had realized that the sunlight falling through the window and onto Frost's face was not a trick, she had become very excited and had proceeded to draw syringe after syringe of blood from Frost's arm until he had been rendered so snarling and irritable that Blade had half-expected him to go after Karen's throat with his new, blunt human teeth. When Frost had finally settled down, Karen had excitedly run several hours worth of tests on the blood samples, chattering all the while about case studies and unprecedented levels of new information. It was a level of animation that Blade had never seen from her before. She had administered the cure upon herself, she had said, but it hardly mattered, because she had only begun to show the symptoms of turning. It was like wrapping a Band-Aid around her thumb after cutting herself with a kitchen knife. If the cure was working on a vampire who had fully turned, she told Blade as she slid another slide of Frost's blood beneath her microscope, and working on a vampire who had turned decades previously, then that was like putting a Band-Aid over a bullet wound and having it, miracle of miracles, actually work.
Frost, slumped onto Karen's couch beneath her living room window, had not been impressed. He still had an ugly green and purple bruise running across his cheek where Blade had struck him, and the marks of Blade's teeth on the side of his neck. Staring at him, Blade was still not sure that he was all that impressed, either, but he had paid very close attention when Karen had showed him how to administer the cure and had promised that she would make more of it and an improved version of the serum as fast as she could and send them to him wherever in the world he happened to be.
He had been silent for too long. Even if Scud had grown used to Blade's peculiar pauses, his eyebrows would lift soon. Another man would have shivered as he came out of his reverie. Blade only said, "They had him in stasis at a halfway house. I'm going to give him an accelerated retroviral detox. Make him go cold turkey in one night." He tilted Whistler's head to the side and injected the cure into the side of his neck. Whistler complied with Blade moving his head and winced slightly when he felt the needle biting into his flesh, but there was still no one standing behind his eyes.
As if Scud had been eavesdropping on Blade's thoughts, he said, "That shit ain't gonna work, man. He ain't Deac-listen to him. He's on his way out right now. We'd be doing the motherfucker a favor by taking him out."
Blade's lip hardly curled into the beginnings of a snarl. It was enough; Scud was already cutting himself off and beginning to slink back when Blade slammed the empty hypodermic against his chest, hard. "Get out," Blade said, biting off each word as if it was a bullet. Scud's famous mouth failed him for once, and he could not remove himself from the room fast enough. Blade stared down at Whistler, who remained on the chair and was lost to the world of the thirst. He leaned subtly towards Blade's wrist every time that Blade shifted and brought it closer to his mouth. "If there's anything left of you in there, Whistler, listen up," he said, and thought that Whistler's head tilted to the side very slightly, like a dog's. "In the morning those blinds are going to open, whether you're cured or not." He exited the room.
Scud had not slunk off to hide himself within his machinery for a few hours, and was standing beside the enhanced steel door when Blade emerged and locked it carefully behind him. Blade did not know if he should call this bravery on Scud's part or merely an unparalleled act of stupidity. Scud was nearly addressing his feet as he said in a low, subdued voice, "Hey, man, I didn't mean to call him that-"
Blade cut him off by pointing silently back towards the lights that Scud had been tinkering with upon his arrival. Scud took the opportunity to escape at face value and fled. Blade stared at the stairs that led up to his quarters for a long, taut moment before he started up them. If Frost was even half as wise as Scud was showing himself to be, then he would have found an even more remote part of the warehouse to hide himself until the sun rose.
For all of the moments in which Frost could prove himself to be staggeringly intelligent, though, common sense was never going to be his strong point. He was seated on the edge of the bed when Blade entered, his laptop seated across his knees. Blade glanced at the computer's screen and realized that Frost was double-checking all of Scud's security protocols. So there actually were some things that Blade said to him that did not enter his mind and then fly out again as soon as Frost saw something shiny. Blade was not sure if that was supposed to soothe him, or only infuriate him further.
Frost did not look up immediately as he heard the door open to admit Blade, continuing to work on his computer as if he was the only one in the room. His shoulder's betrayed him, as they knotted themselves up into one solid line of tension with the snicking of the door. Blade leaned back against the closed door and watched silently for several moments with his arms folded over his chest. If Frost was concerned that this was going to be the moment when Blade finally snapped and twisted his neck like a jelly jar, then he did not show it. Granted, once they had put the first two months behind them those chances had dwindled so as to become nearly infinitesimal, but they were still there and present on both minds, a burr that could not quite be found and removed.
Frost finally satisfied himself that the perimeters were unmolested for now and set the computer to the side so that he could meet Blade's eyes finally. The look there was guarded; Blade's stillness seemed to be unsettling him more than any amount of movement could have done. Blade remained as still as a pond on a windless day.
"So," Frost said, leaning further back onto the bed and lacing his hands behind his head. Blade could have told him that, after two years, he was finally beginning to lose his touch. The movements were a shade too calculated for the relaxation to be fully believable, and the look in his eyes was flinty. "The quest has come to an end. How goes it, mighty hero?"
Blade growled, low in his throat, and so softly that it barely carried across the room. Frost actually relaxed to hear it. "He'll live," Blade said, even though he was not yet sure of that fact at all. He would make it so through sheer, bloody-minded determination. Frost's lips turned up into a faint smirk, as if he was privy to the direction of Blade's thoughts and could not stop himself from being horribly amused by them, and that was enough to propel Blade forward and across the room at last. Frost made a soft sound when Blade's mouth met and mauled his own, sprawling further back into the bed and parting his lips to allow Blade greater access. It could have been surprise, or pleasure, or even pure relief; Blade did not know and was not at the moment interested in questions of interpretation. He lay his body down over Frost's and pressed him down deeper against the mattress, pushing his knee negligently between Frost's thighs. Frost was already half-hard, and he grew more so at Blade's first touch. When Frost raised his hands to grip at Blade's back, Blade grabbed his wrists quickly and pinned them above his head, never raising his mouth from where he had moved it to begin leaving deep, blossoming bruises against the side of Frost's neck.
Frost hissed when he felt the first scrape of Blade's teeth over his skin and pushed half-heartedly at the weight that was keeping his hands pinned over his head. "You're a control freak, you know that?" he gasped into Blade's ear.
Blade raised his head only so that he could take Frost's mouth again. By the time that he was done, Frost was panting and pliant, all but squirming beneath him. "Shut up," was all that Blade muttered before he took Frost's mouth again. Frost's mouth-everything that Frost could do with his mouth, which had turned out to be a long and varied list-was an acquired taste. Blade was not in the mood for it tonight.
"Yes, massa," Frost muttered in a sarcastic, disgruntled voice before he arched up against Blade's thigh again.
Blade growled and pushed his weight down hard against Frost's trapped wrists, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to cause a surprised wince to move across Frost's face. "Whatever happens when Whistler walks out of that room tomorrow," he said to Frost, watching as an annoyed look flashed across Frost's face. "I'm not going to intervene."
Frost's scowl deepened, and he ceased arching upwards against Blade's obliging thigh. He pushed much harder and more sincerely against the hand that Blade was using to keep him pinned down than he had been moments before. Frost made a disgusted noise when the action proved to be futile and he was left trapped. "I don't live on your forbearance," he snapped, even though they both knew that to be at least a partial lie. The thought of killing Frost and ridding himself of the possibility that he would rise to his old level of power had remained a constant rhythm in the back of his mind for months; it was a whisper even now. Likewise, Blade had no doubt that Frost would be long gone if he could be sure that the new wolves which ruled his old den would not make short work of him. It was a part of their balance.
"I won't intervene," Blade repeated again before he retook Frost's mouth. Frost parted for him, both his lips and then his legs so that Blade could slide his knee more fully between Frost's thighs, and was soon boneless beneath him.
"I'm not going to be what you're trying to make me into," Frost whispered once when they had to part so that they could breathe. He did not speak again, only uttering a few wordless gasps and grunts as Blade scraped his teeth across the scar and fucked him into the mattress, his body written into one long line of tension. They were face to face, and though Blade watched Frost's face as carefully as he was able while he was being distracted by Frost's other considerable talents, he could see no hint of what Frost was really thinking. Neither could he sort out his own thoughts, and this was what troubled him as much as anything else. When they were both spent, he rolled away from Frost and listened as Frost's breathing evened out and eventually became deep and regular with sleep. It took a long time for Frost to drop off, and longer than that for Blade. When the first rays of the pink dawn began to touch at the outside of the warehouse, Blade was still awake and staring at the gleaming sword that he had put to such use earlier.
End Part One