Disclaimer: I don't own IPS or any of the characters, regrettably.

Rating/Warning: M; contains sex and blood. If either of these squick you out, don't read!

Author's Note: Just some fun, vampiric Valentine's Day smut for you to enjoy. It came out a little more plotty than I'd intended, but one can't really go wrong with both plot and smut, right? Enjoy! =)

In Darkness, We Reign

Operation: Falcon. Those were two words he dreaded hearing together. It meant days of dangerous raids and grueling prep for said raids. He didn't mind the danger or the work, really; he wasn't given to laziness and he had no shortage of courage. But sane people didn't sent themselves crashing into basement meth labs without reservations, and he had always considered himself a sane person.

Blood.

That perception had come into question when the meth cook had launched himself across the fucking room with a strength that was bizarre even for a tweeker loaded on crank. It was easily in the realm of superhuman, unless Marshall was just high as a kite off of the fumes that had accumulated down here. Yeah, that was probably it; whomever had decided to put the meth lab in the basement had obviously never heard of proper ventilation.

Thirst.

He had reached that conclusion long after the fact, once the medics had cleared him after wiping the blood from his throat and finding no wound there. Must not be his blood, they had concluded. Except at the time, as the meth junkie had launched across the room at him so fast he'd had no time to think anything except what the fuck, he had been sure he'd felt razor-sharp teeth pierce the skin of his neck. He had lost consciousness as he lay on the floor (something he had conveniently not mentioned to the EMS workers), saved by Mary's rather violent intervention with the perp… though in his last seconds of consciousness, he had seen things that made no sense at all.

Must have been the fumes.

Mary, of course, had been watching him like a hawk ever since. Doubtless, when he didn't show up for work today, she would be pounding on his door in short order. He had already called Stan, but she would show up anyway.

Fear.

The light outside was giving him a headache beyond all imagining, and as he'd shut his blinds and drawn curtains that were usually only decorative, his heart had raced with a kind of paranoid fear of the blinding sun. Had to be the meth… when the drywall in the basement had broken open, the loose meth that had collected there over time, particle by particle, had undoubtedly been released…

Was it drywall, though? He could have sworn the walls had been brick…

Sweat.

He shook his head. He'd been high, obviously. Yes, that was it. He'd hallucinated being bitten, and everything that followed, which was why there was no bite on his neck. Right?

Right.

His fingers rubbed idly where the bite had been, if only as a figment of his meth-addled imagination. The drugs, too, surely explained his sensitivity to light and paranoia, an itchy feeling that made him want to crawl out of his own skin and hide in the closet until nightfall.

He heard a car screech to a halt out front, a '67 Mustang by the sound of things. 3... 2... 1... Right on cue, his front door flew open with a bang after the brief rattling of a key in the lock. Of course, Mary wouldn't knock or anything. In a way, he was glad; his bedroom was now the darkest room in the house, and he wasn't inclined to leave it to let her in.

Prey.

He could hear the heels of her boots clicking down the hall - he was hearing everything, probably because of the fucking meth… He froze. Dear God, he could hear her breathing, and she was only at the other end of the hall. And… what the hell…

He could smell her.

She smelled like sweat and woman and Mary.

She smelled like the blood that coursed through her veins.

He swallowed roughly as his heart started pounding in his chest again, not out of fear as it had when he'd pulled the drapes closed, but rather… in excitement. This, he suspected was how Mary felt when they went on an Operation Falcon. His own breathing was suddenly harsh in his ears. He was sweating. It was like… intense desire…

No.

Oh, God.

It was hunger.

Mary took the hall at a brisk walk, knowing she would find him in the bedroom. He always reclused when he was sick, and she couldn't imagine the rampant paranoia of meth exposure was going to help anything.

The first step would be to get his gun away from him.

She pushed the door open slowly, cautiously; Mary was rarely cautious, but in some cases, it was necessary. She didn't see him anywhere in the darkened room… in the bathroom, maybe? She stepped in, pushing the door closed behind her…

A hand reached out to fist in her hair, pulling her back against his shaking body. He'd hidden himself behind the door - what was he, a five-year-old? - but his ragged breaths in her ear told her something was definitely wrong.

"Mare…" he groaned softly, his voice filled with regret. "Why'd you have to come?"

Mary sucked in a breath as she felt teeth, impossibly sharp, graze her neck just above the point of her pulse. He trembled with the effort of holding himself back, a whimper rising from his throat as he tried to quash the desperate need to… feed… Oh God, no… not Mary… this can't be happening…

Her eyes had widened in surprise when he'd grabbed her, pounced, one could even say, but now, they narrowed, sliding sideways as she looked at him. Then… she smirked. Marshall was startled, by that sudden and wholly inappropriate change of expression and by what happened a half-second later.

She gripped the arm that held her by the throat and jerked it free, twisting her body hardly at all as she threw him across the room like a rag doll, sending him slamming into the drywall above his bed. As he hit, in his mind's eye, he saw the basement again; he was lying on the floor, bleeding, and she was standing above him…

She picked the meth cook up by the throat, actually holding him in the air, before slamming him into the brick wall hard enough to crack the mortar and send bricks clattering down. Then, a dark red spray of blood…

Marshall gasped as he slipped down the wall to land on the bed below, cracked bits of drywall scattered around him. She had killed the meth cook, had ripped his throat out with her bare hands! How was that even possible? He had thought it was nothing more than a drug-induced hallucination! He looked up at her from the bed and saw that she was watching him with eyes that were all pupil with only the thinnest ring of iris, a feral grin spreading across her face, her teeth gleaming in the darkness, pointed and razor-sharp.

He was not the fiercest predator in this room.

He had just become prey.

"I thought that tweeker might have turned you," she murmured quietly, yet her voice rang in his ears like thunder. "Fucking bastard. It shouldn't happen that way."

She came toward him, her knees landing on the bed, and she crawled to him on all fours until she held herself over his body, her eyes shifting from his to flick an assessing, perhaps hungry glance over him, and back again.

"It can be better," she spoke again, and that grin was back, the one that marked him as her meal.

"Mare… what's happening to me?" he whispered shakily, words finally coming back to him.

"You're becoming something more than human… and something less," she replied cryptically. "Your strength will multiply. You'll see in the dark as though it was daylight. You will lose all fear of death, for it can no longer touch you."

"But… in the basement… that thing that bit me… you killed it."

"Oh, we can be killed, but we cannot simply die, not of sickness or age. We can't even be killed by average means."

"But when you were shot…"

"A show put on by my family, to maintain our cover," Mary replied casually. "I'm sorry for your suffering, but we've hidden what we are for a long time, and that couldn't stop just to spare your tears."

"Mary…"

Denial welled up in him, this couldn't be real… but that hunger was back… and with her so close… oh God, he wanted her, all of her…

"Do you thirst for my blood, Marshall?" she asked seductively. "Or is it my body you crave?"

She ran a hand over the growing bulge in his pajama bottoms and he shuddered under her touch. She leaned back, unbuttoning her shirt. She stripped before him until she wore nothing. She brought a finger to her throat, and he saw that her fingernail was no longer bitten to the quick - an illusion? - as she drew it along her skin, a thick trickle of blood rolling after it. His pupils dilated at the sight of it, and he groaned with need.

"Drink, Marshall," she commanded, and in a heartbeat he'd sat up and taken her in his arms, his grip like iron as he lapped the blood from her neck… yet, he did not quite dare to bite her, for he was hers to command, and she had yet to grant him permission.

He flipped her over so she was under him and quickly shed his own clothes; still, there was not even the illusion that he was in control. She smirked at him, her eyes suffused with lust and a hunger of her own as she ran her hand over his hardness. He brought his lips to her throat again, still refraining from that much-longed-for bite.

"Do it, Marshall," she demanded of him at last. "You can't hurt me."

Finally, he sank his teeth into her flesh as his cock sank into her body, his groan stifled by the flow of her blood down his throat. He moaned between gulps, his hips thrusting in time as he drank of her, and she thrust back against him with a fervent zeal that was purely Mary.

His release was building quickly, far faster than usual, but her blood… he could taste her desire, her pleasure, and it was driving him to the edge. He could sense that she was close, as well, for his feeding was not without its effects on her. She groaned, gasped, and writhed beneath him, arching her back as he plunged into her, a moving, breathing portrait of her own pleasure.

Suddenly, she howled in ecstasy and sank her own teeth into him just above his collarbone. He gasped as she shuddered beneath him, finding her own release in the moment she drank of his blood. He followed almost immediately, his orgasm ripping through him with an intensity he had never felt in his life.

Shaking, he held himself up above her for only a moment before he gave in and collapsed. Her arms slipped around his shoulders and she smiled at him, her face gentle in a way he'd never seen. He felt like he was floating in a haze of red, and he realized he was high in some way, mesmerized by what she'd done to him. She was right; it was better this way.

"Is this what you were keeping from me?" he asked after a long silence. "Is this what was always in the way?"

"I couldn't corrupt someone I cared for so much," she admitted. "I would have watched you grow old, aged with you though there would be no truth in it, and grieved your death for eternity. In this, we are less than human, for we will watch as the world falls to ruin, the bones of every human we've ever loved long since turned to dust."

"How old are you?"

"I was born in 1671, in New Jersey, but it was still a colony then."

Marshall's eyes widened; she was well over three-hundred years old… he opened his mouth, but she forestalled the myriad of questions that were threatening to spring from him.

"This is why I find your fascination with history so boring, Marshall. I've already lived through it once," she said, rolling her eyes at his disappointed look. "I'll tell you anything you want to know, just not right now. For right now, I'll just tell you the parts that matter."

"How many people have you been?" he asked, realizing that Mary Shannon couldn't be who she really was, that there was a reason she was so good at this job.

"I have been many people, none of them important. I stay under the radar. Obviously I'm older than radar, by the way. My real father died when I was seven, killed by the same vampire that turned Jinx, Brandi, and me. He was a hunter; he was killed and we were turned as retaliation. Brandi and I still grew up, but then… we just stopped aging after a point. Jinx was the same way."

"What about James Wiley Shannon?"

"The man you know as my father was no one, a criminal we killed to establish our new lives," she replied, scrutinizing his face carefully for a reaction. "Does that bother you? That's just how it's done."

"I suppose I don't really know anything about it," he answered finally. "It goes against my personal sense of justice, but… on the other hand, I didn't believe in vampires until today, so I guess things are going to change."

"That's what a vampire's life is all about, adapting to change," she agreed. "The light sensitivity will fade, and you won't burst into flames like in the movies, but a good pair of sunglasses wouldn't hurt, and garlic will give you horrible indigestion every time. And of course, you'll need to drink blood, but you have me for that."

"You know, Mary Shannon hates change. Mary Shannon doesn't believe in vampires, either," he remarked, smirking at her.

"It's always the one you least suspect," she replied, smirking in return.

"Who are you, really?" he asked, studying her face as he stared at her.

"The details may vary, but who I am is more or less who you know me to be. My mother and my sister delight in choosing new names for themselves, the stranger, the better," she answered, her smirk becoming a real smile. "I, however, have always been Mary."

xxxxx

Stan looked up as his two marshals entered the office together on Monday morning. He was put on edge almost immediately, because Mary looked unequivocally happy, and Marshall looked pretty weird, too. He was wearing a long, black duster that nearly reached the floor, over an outfit that could have been his usual except that it, too, was all black, right down to the cowboy boots. He had topped it off with very dark sunglasses, and he looked unusually pale, though Stan couldn't tell whether or not that was just an optical illusion caused by all the black.

"What's with you, Marshall? You look like a cowboy that got sucked into The Matrix," Stan asked, his brow furrowed with concern. "And should I be worried that Mary looks so happy?"

"Definitely, Stan," he replied, grinning, and for a second, Stan thought he'd caught a glimpse of fangs.

No, he thought, shaking his head. Couldn't be…

"Be afraid, Stan," Mary added with a similar grin. "Be very afraid."

A/N: Does Marshall need to dress the part? Of course not, but he does it anyway. A good alternate title to this could have been, "In Darkness, We Reign... But We're Pretty Great in the Daytime, Too!" =P

If you liked, please review, and show your blood lust- I mean... show your love! =D