Make Bright and Loud the Terror of the Night
By Insomniac Owl
A/N: Title from Algernon Swinburne's 'Prologue to the Revenger's Tragedy'
He has walked away from a massacre, but the coroner's report will say the bodies found at the scene were already dead, and everyone will believe it. It was a funeral home. But his clothes smell like smoke. There is ash in his hair and smeared across his skin, sticking to him like blood, and the soles of his boots are soft against the concrete.
Halfway back from the train station, Mitchell stops and vomits into somebody's rosebushes.
Fuck, he thinks. Jesus Christ. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. His legs give way beneath him, and he collapses backward onto the sidewalk, the cold leeching through jeans and skin into bone. But the feeling is distant, removed and ineffable as though through smoke. He shivers because it is cold, but the motions of his body have nothing to do with him. He is remembering. The sudden heat of the explosion, the roar of sound, how Ivan's weight crushed him to the floor.
Fuck, he thinks. Ivan.
"Daisy," he whispers, fumbling in his pockets for his phone. Like everything else it reeks of smoke, but it works, and he finds her number. She will want to know, he thinks, as the ringing starts up steady and serene in his ear. He clutches the phone in his right hand, his left fisted against his temple, and lets the ringing anchor him, lets it run through him until he is full of it saying heeeeeere, heeeeere, heeeeeere. He is still alive.
"Mitchell," Daisy's voice says in his ear, surprised.
"Daisy." His voice sticks in his throat. "Have you - it's probably on the news by now, have you seen it?"
"Seen what?"
"Something's happened. At the meeting tonight, someone attacked us. A bomb. There was - an explosion."
Daisy says nothing, but he can hear the hitch in her breath, the careful steadiness as she reins it back in. "What are you saying?"
"You know."
Silence.
"Where are you?" he asks. The words lurch from his mouth before he can think them through. She is the only vampire left that he knows, and they are bound together by this. They have both lost something. And he's kissed her once before, in Prague, in a men's restroom, while Herrick and Ivan sipped tumblers of scotch at the bar and talked about the old days. She'd smelled of steel and dark floral perfume, and she'd bitten his lips till they bled.
"The Grand," she says, "in the City Center. Don't come."
"Daisy."
"Don't come. I'll see you tomorrow."
His cigarettes are useless when he pulls the box from his pocket, crumpled and smelling thickly of smoke and ash. He drops them into the gutter, then empties his pockets of everything else, too, throwing things from him with shaking hands. He will have to get rid of his jacket, maybe his shoes. He won't ever get the smoke out. But for now there are two five pence pieces, half a ticket stub for Monsters, a receipt from Sainsbury's for beer and tea and one raw chicken. He pauses at the receipt, drawing a raw thumbnail down the edge.
He is only two blocks away from where the pink house stands like salvation at the end of the street, a slash of warmth in the chill and darkness. He could be there in minutes. It seems a safe haven now, when all other places are closed to him, and his heart aches at the thought of it. There will be a light on in the living room, and food for him in the fridge, if he wants it. Annie will be making tea and George, whatever he is doing, will be breathing in and out, alive.
It is dark out and fog lingers between the rooftops as he stares down the street, past houses, alleys, the garage. Everything is quiet.
Mitchell rises and, somehow, walks.