First Impressions

Disclaimer: I own nothing in this story.

Chapter One: The Prey in Sight

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Josef sighed and turned down the canapé offered to him by a hovering waiter. "Got anything along the lines of hard liquor? Something to make the evening pass by a bit quicker?" he asked, allowing his bad mood and boredom to slip into his voice. The waiter, who appeared to be a few years older than him, replied automatically and politely, "No, sir" and moved away, but not before Josef detected the slightest contemptuous flare of his nostrils. "Hey, I'll take anything, paint-stripper even – being knocked out cold would actually be ideal," he called out to the waiter's back.

"Manners, Josef!" breathed someone silkily just behind him.

He didn't turn around. "Why, Coraline, so good to see you. I thought you'd abandoned me" he complained with half-real sincerity.

She put a hand on his arm and stepped smoothly around him, maintaining her touch, until she was facing him. Wearing her appropriately vampish red dress and vicious high-heels with her thick dark hair spilling over her shoulders, Coraline with that one gesture made Josef the most envied man at the party. "Ah, Josef, you can take care of yourself, surely?" she said, peering up at him mischievously with her deep brown, wicked eyes.

Watching the couple, male on-lookers wondered at Josef's unresponsiveness to the woman standing closely in front of him, her hand still seductively resting on his arm. He looked totally nonchalant, with his hands casually in his pockets, avoiding her gaze as if briefly distracted by something else in the room. Of course, they didn't know that after about a century of knowing Coraline, it was hard to still be sucked in by her routine. "Why are we even here?" Josef complained. "We're the only ones here, I'm hungry and there's no one to drink. And, this is a dull party." He wondered briefly how she had swung entry to this event. It wasn't the kind of society Coraline was usually to be found in, but then Coraline was pretty good at getting anything she wanted, and what she wanted at the moment was at this staid, mind-numbingly slow party.

"I know," she pouted, "But this was his next appearance and I had to show him off."

"And this would be your latest obsession, the musician? Dick, is it?"

She poked him in the chest, hard enough to have done some real damage to a human. The precise application of pressure with that tapered finger even managed to sharply get Josef's full attention, and yet she made the movement look so innocent and playful. Josef looked at her, thinking that she was an interesting person to be around, that he liked her, but that she had a different attitude to the lines they kept to in order to make their existence safe. She was dangerous, but that made her exciting. "It's Mick. He's beautiful. I will be with him forever."

Josef considered her carefully. "You've never actually met him." They were now walking slowly towards the band, where Coraline's "Mick" was playing a guitar and singing through some interminable song. Josef looked at him critically. The guy was wearing a horrible loud shirt that almost hurt Josef's fashion-conscious eyes, and his short hair was slicked back in a conventional style. He looked older than Josef, who still appeared fully youthful – he could even almost pass as one of these newly-invented teenagers, but they didn't go in so much for sharp suits. Mick seemed to be at the time of life that mirrors an arrow shot into the air: at the pinnacle of its flight it seems to hover, stationary, for a brief moment before falling swiftly back to earth. Mick had reached the pinnacle of his youth, to the extent that all too soon it would be over and time would take away from him what it had previously given. At the moment though, Mick was everything he could ever humanly be, and ill-chosen shirts and a cheap haircut didn't disguise that. But that moment was common to all humans, what did Coraline see in this man she had never talked to?

"That doesn't matter. I don't need to meet him. I know. And he's not my new obsession. It's different. He's different."

"From what you've already told me about him, it certainly appears to be obsession. You know, following his band around to dives, following him home…"

"No! Just wait until you meet him, you'll see." They stopped to one side of the stage, towards the back of the small crowd that was watching or dancing. The band finished the song, and started another one that was horribly similar – slow and pedestrian, middle-of-the-road, dull to be short.

"Just how much of "forever" are you planning on sleeping though?" Josef remarked sideways to Coraline, although focusing on Mick he could hear his heartbeat had almost slowed to the rhythm of the music: he was as bored as Josef was. Coraline just made an impatient hissing noise to silence him, and gazed, enraptured, at the singer until the end of the song, when once again she slinked away from Josef's side, weaving her way through the crowd and past the stage, making sure that she was seen by Mick. She turned over her shoulder and threw him a sultry look for good measure. Josef grinned to himself at her display. It was a triumphant success. He heard Mick's heartbeat leap has he commented appreciatively to his bandmates, "I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers."

"Yeah, well, good luck to you, buddy," thought Josef, "It won't be crackers she'll be eating."

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Later at Coraline's place, Josef sat thankfully in a cool leather chair, having finally got hold of some liquor. It had gained a pink glow from something else Coraline kept in the chiller cabinet. Coraline was pacing around the room like a young, excited debutant that had just returned from the ball. "He came after me after he'd finished the set… I asked him to play something more interesting, and he said he couldn't at this party – wrong crowd of course – but he told me to come to one of his real gigs. O course I've been but I never let him see me before… then I got him to take off my dress…"

"Stop, please. I was a witness to everything anyway. I don't need a post-game commentary."

"You were watching?"

"I was bored."

She didn't seem bothered. She was already thinking about going to his next gig with him, and the one after that, and after that… "I want to be with him forever" she repeated, with an almost manic gleam in her eyes.

"Coraline, you need to clear your head about this," Josef told her seriously. "Have you thought about what that means? How many vampires do you know that are still with their sire after even ten years?"

She stopped her pacing and looked at him, searching for an answer to defend herself. She settled on "You don't understand."

"I'm just being realistic. You want to tie yourself down to one person forever? Forever is a very real concept for us, remember?"

"It's not like I have a choice! We're meant to be together."

Josef didn't immediately reply to her outburst. It had surprised him. Coraline was always an impulsive, let's say passionate person, but this was unexpected. "You are a bit crazy, you know that?"

She smiled at him, showing a hint of her fangs. "Ah, but that's why you love me!" she whispered, sliding towards him.

"Careful, you don't want to make Mick jealous. The thought of him coming over in a rage and smashing his guitar over my head does not appeal."

Coraline was looking past his shoulder and smiling. "Too late."

Josef became aware of clumsy human footprints outside, quickly followed by drunken shouting. Mick had come after Coraline. Josef could sense her delight, but she let none of it show to the human who was banging on the glass behind him.

"Who you got in there?" Mick shouted, seeing Josef in the chair. "Come on out! Come out here, I'm ready."

"Talking to Coraline or me, you're not ready" Josef muttered inside his head. Coraline had walked over to Mick, expertly feigning indifference to him. She even told him to go away, but he persisted. Josef would have been able to slip away unnoticed by Mick, vampire or not, due to the human's intoxication, and he took the opportunity to disappear. But it was harder, as a vampire, to get himself out of hearing range, especially once Mick threw a chair threw the glass, stepping over it to reach Coraline… After that, he got out of there as soon as he could.

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Josef, after approximately three hundred and fifty years of being, barring the occasional leap, essentially earthbound, was still not used to flying, and squirmed uncomfortably in his seat on the flight back to New York. He was anxious to get off and be home – on top of his dislike of flight, he had some business to catch up on he had put on hold for his brief visit to Los Angeles to see Coraline. And he'd been practically ignored the whole time as well. He wasn't used to not being the center of attention. And he couldn't really see why Coraline was so caught up with Mick, seeing as she could get any human, and almost any vampire, she wanted. Though if she was serious in her insane plan for the guy, Josef guessed he'd have plenty of time to get to know him. He better be more interesting than he seemed.

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Author's note: So I always wondered who Coraline had in her house that night, and Josef just made sense, since they knew each other previously. I figured Coraline must be fairly stalkerish given her behaviour with Beth, so I've given her a pre-existing fascination with Mick. I liked the idea that Josef at one point had to choose between them. He evidently chose Mick, so I wanted to explore the foundations of their relationship. Plus, the idea was sparked off by the first Moonlight fic I wrote, which mentions Josef's first meeting with Mick (to be covered next chapter). What do you think? Hearing your opinions makes my day!