Part Two
Being in the thirst was like being in a wasp's nest, Whistler would think even after years had passed since he had felt it last, an experience that he would never forget. Every movement brought pain, every sound that he heard was the rush of a beating heart. He felt equally hot and cold by turns, and as if there were ants crawling over his skin. Whistler prowled around the perimeters of his cage, raging, as he felt his breath rattling with increasing intensity in his chest. He could smell the sunlight creeping closer and closer to the eastern horizon through the many feet of concrete; he could hear the unfamiliar person working on machinery outside and the two others, the one that was familiar and the one that felt as if he ought to be, rutting above his head.
When the rattling in his chest grew too loud and the need for oxygen too great, and shocking after he had spent so many months hardly needing air at all, Whistler abandoned his pacing and sank down heavily against the wall. The cement was freezing cold through the thin material of his pants and against the bare skin of his back. The three heartbeats moving about above and around him were filling up his entire world. The eventual fading of his sense, when it came, was nearly a relief.
Whistler was still sitting against the wall when he heard footsteps outside of his room and a whirring of machinery as the heavy metal blinds over the windows pulled up. Eastern exposure sent bright golden lights spilling through the room. Whistler flinched back before he could stop himself, and raised his arm quickly to shield his eyes. He could hardly imagine what the pain would have been like if he had still been a vampire.
'No,' Whistler amended only a second later, thinking of the things that he had been put through by the various factions of the vampire nation, so many that the nights were blurred together. He could imagine a hell of a lot at this point.
Blade moved as silently as the air itself in spite of his size as he crossed the room. His boots made a faint sound against the concrete when he drew close that Whistler had to lean forward in order to hear. It would have been as loud as a gunshot if he had still possessed vampire sense. Whistler opened his eyes as Blade loomed over him.
"How do you feel?" Blade asked.
Whistler paused for a long moment as considered waking up in the morgue a few days after he had attempted to kill himself, of feeding on the coroner who happened to draw too close, of ripping through three other people on his way to the surface, and of running afoul of a group of vampires who recognized him immediately. Of the days and nights of blood-mostly his-that had followed afterwards.
"Like hammered shit," Whistler finally answered. His voice sounded rough, and scraped at his throat as it emerged. He guessed that it had been a while since he had used it for anything so complicated as actually forming words. Whistler extended his hand upwards, and Blade used it to pull him up to his feet. His legs wobbled on him for a second, as steady as any still-wet colt's, and obliged him to put his hand against the wall so that he would not topple over. "Motherfucker," Whistler groused. From the corner of his eye, he thought that he saw Blade's mouth twitch upwards. The kid seemed to have gone and grown himself a sense of humor in Whistler's absence. For the first time, Whistler began to entertain the possibility that the blurs in his memories constituted a much larger span of time than he had originally guessed.
Blade gripped briefly at Whistler's shoulder once he had righted himself again, pulled away before Whistler could do much more than register the contact. "Come on," was all that Blade said, and left the containment room before Whistler could respond. Whistler cast a quick glance over the rest of the room before he followed. He and Blade had never invested in any kind of secured space to contain living vampires in all of the years that they had worked together. If Blade needed information, he used his own creative means to find it in the field. He had never brought one home with him before. Whistler's brows drew together as he realized that quite a few things must have changed during his absence, and few of them good.
Whistler stumbled twice as Blade led him to a bathroom. Each time Blade caught him, righted him, and released him again without saying a word. Whistler squinted against the dim interior lights, trying to pick out the fuzzy outlines of objects that should have been sharp and distinct. There were a few aspects of being a vampire that were still attractive, after all.
That was not a thought that Whistler enjoyed in the slightest.
There was a stack of clothes setting out on the edge of the bathroom sink where Blade ultimately left him. Blade disappeared before Whistler could thank him for getting him that far. He knew Blade, and he knew how to read the cards no matter how closely Blade held them to his chest. He knew that he was being kept in the dark on something big. The most convincing lies were the ones that were told by omission.
Whistler glanced once over his shoulder, to the place where Blade had been standing only seconds before and had then disappeared like a ghost, before he reached out and touched the folded clothes. The nights as a vampire might remain one long blur, but he remembered these clothes as his own. His leg brace was sitting beside them, still smelling of the oil that he used to keep the leather supple.
Whistler slid into the clothes and felt immediately more like himself, more like a human again. He pressed his tongue against each of his canines in turn, tasting salty blood each time. The feeling, however comfortable, was swift in fleeing. He was struggling back into the leg brace when Blade reappeared in the doorway. Blade watched, arms folded over his chest, and did not offer to help. Neither did Whistler ask for it.
Whistler pressed his tongue against each of his canines again before he spoke. They felt duller than they had a few moments before, maybe. He could not be sure. The beads of blood that welled up on his tongue did not know whether they were sickening or sweet. To distract himself, Whistler examined the shave kit perched on the edge of the sink before he decided that he had been grizzled for too long to change his ways now, not looking up until the taste of the blood had faded away altogether.
"How did you find me?" Whistler asked finally.
Blade had his sunglasses on, rendering even the few hints as to what was going through his mind that could usually be garnered through his eyes into sleek, insectile plastic. The rest of his face was smooth Grecian marble, and about as personable. That only counted among people who had not known Blade for longer than twenty years, though. Whistler knew all of the minute cracks and fissures in the marble that another person would allow to slide right on by. He could see that Blade was going to lie to him before Blade even opened his mouth, and wondered why.
"We started out in Russia," Blade said. Whistler made note of the 'we' and thought of the two unfamiliar heartbeats that he had heard the night before. It was a difficult operation to keep going alone. "They kept moving you around."
Whistler only remembered one blood-spattered dungeon being exchanged for another. So far as he had known, he had never left New York. The location was not the most important question that he had to ask, anyway. "How long was I gone? Months?" His voice still had a raspy, cracked quality.
Blade turned and left the doorway abruptly, saying only as he went, "Too long."
Whistler stared after him as he realized, "Years."
Human senses were only one step up from being outright worthless, Whistler thought, and was slightly appalled that he would think this even as he could not quite banish it away again. Scarcely twelve hours before he had been filled with knowledge brought from every corner of the warehouse and about every person within in. In the absence of such, he was as stumbling and blind as a day-old puppy.
This did not mean that he could not feel Blade's eyes on him, watching every move that he made. He had never known Blade to administer such an unspoken test to him before. Whistler knew damned well that he did not like it. He knelt beside a scale to mask his quick burst of anger and pulled his wedding ring off from where he had taped it there to keep it safe. Whistler licked the ring and slid it back onto his finger again before he stood.
"They tortured me almost to death, then let me heal in a vat of blood so that they could go at it again," Whistler grunted after he had risen and looked around the warehouse. Save for the scale, none of the rest of the equipment was familiar to him. Frost's people had had a fun old time rampaging through the warehouse after leaving Whistler to bleed and die, destroying all that they had put their goddamned bloodless hands on. He was lucky that even the scale was left. Whistler rubbed for a moment at his bad leg and muttered, "Sorry sons of bitches could have at least fixed my goddamned leg while they were at it." His lungs were clearer than they had been in years, though, and the weight of the cancer that he had felt eating away at him was gone.
Blade made a soft, noncommittal noise. His eyes remained on Whistler, weighing and judging each move that he made. It was like having ants crawling continually over his skin. Whistler grit his teeth and was on the verge of telling Blade to knock it the fuck off, things had not changed that much, when he heard the sounds of someone working deeper within the warehouse. Frowning, Whistler thought of the two foreign heartbeats that he had heard and demanded, "Where's my arc welder?"
Almost as if the mysterious person had an intercom that he was consulting for clues, the sounds of machinery were joined by the raucous cacophony of that damned street music that every kid had played while he and Blade had still been in New York. Creedence Clearwater Revival it was not, and Whistler could already feel his lip curling up. The quirk of Blade's eyebrows seemed amused, so much as Blade ever showed such things.
Whistler cast a single disbelieving glance in Blade's direction, swallowed back the incredulous question that wanted to be asked, and stormed off in the direction of the music. It was not as if the idiot was giving him a slim trail to follow, as the music was playing so loudly that the cement walls were all but shaking and shimmying along to the beat. Whistler's mouth twisted farther as he followed the noise. He hoped like hell that Blade's security did not depend upon secrecy, then.
Blade trailed after Whistler without sound, quiet as shadow. He seemed more waiting than anything else. Whistler wondered for what.
If it was the damned kid that Whistler came across in the main part of the warehouse, using Whistler's arc welder as carelessly as if it was a supermarket toy chosen to keep him quiet and smoking a cigarette that Whistler could tell even at ten paces was not rolled with tobacco, then Blade did not think much of him. Whistler paused for a moment, his lip curling, as he waited for the kid to notice him. Looked like he was working on some kind of light. Good, Whistler thought, at least he had two brain cells to rub together. He and Blade should have installed ultraviolet lights while they were back in New York. Probably would have killed a lot of suckheads and saved them all a lot of trouble.
The kid noticed Whistler at last and turned the welder off, flipped up his mask, and tossed the welder down onto the table beside him. Whistler's hackles rose even higher. If he had been a dog, then they would have been standing in a solid line all the way down his spine.
"Whistler," the kid said. "Nice to meet you, man. I've heard a lot about you." He gestures briefly, first to Blade and then to some place off within the shadows that Whistler could not see. "I'm Josh. You can call me Scud, though. Everyone does." He shrugged and turned back to his work.
Kid couldn't be more than twenty-three. He and Blade had been hunting bloodsuckers since this kid was learning about vampires in the black and white movies. Whistler curled his lip and was aware that it made him look like a dog, when he ought to be striving to be as human as possible. "Tell me something, Skid," he said, gesturing to where a perfectly innocent car was up on blocks and in the middle of having terrible things done to it.
The kid looked up, his brow wrinkling in confusion. Whistler had a feeling that he wore that expression a lot. "No, no, man," he said. "Scud. Like Stud? Scud."
It was all that Whistler could do not to roll his eyes. "Whatever." He pointed to the car. Hell, he could almost hear it crying for someone to rescue it. "What are you doing here?"
Scud even looked proud as he saw what Whistler was indicating. "Oh, you mean the Pimpmobile?" A glow entered his voice. "Just a little after-market modification. Nitrous oxide, shit like that." He took another drag from his joint and turned back towards the small television where a trio of brightly colored cartoon girls were dancing.
"Oh, yeah," Whistler said, continuing the watch the kid sideways. Idiot had no idea what was coming. "You gave it a more expansive exhaust profile."
Scud turned away from his cartoons. Upon realizing that Whistler really did know something of what he was talking about, his entire face lit up and became more animated. "The whole package will crack that Betty up to, I don't know, three hundred horsepower." He reached out and rubbed his hand along the car's fender the way that he would caress a lover. If that was the case, then God only knew what kind of ointments and antibiotics his girlfriends had to use afterwards.
Whistler snorted. "And you'll burn the damned thing out before your next oil change." He spun around to face Blade, who had his arms folded over his chest and was watching with a faintly amused expression. "Where'd you dig up this shitbird?"
For the first time, the kid shook off all of that smoke that he was inhaling and came out of his chemical Zen. "What the fuck's your problem, Poppy?"
"My problem? My problem?" Whistler lunged around the car at Scud, who scurried back into an open place where none of the tools would be in danger. It was the first smart decision that the kid had made yet. "My problem is that I've spent two years sucking down blood clots, and came back to find some jerkoff fucking with my life's work."
"Hey-" Scud began, and started to level his finger at Whistler. If he completed that gesture, then Whistler swore that he was going to snap it off.
Three heartbeats. Two accounted for, and Whistler cursed himself for a fool when he heard the boots on the cement. The third person was not nearly as quiet as Blade. A sarcastic voice rang out, "And here I was looking for a better time to make an entrance." Whistler deeply wished that he was mistaking all of the alarms that that voice set off within him, especially when Blade answered in a rumbling voice, "Like ripping off a Band-Aid."
Whistler turned. Human ears might not be able to do their job for shit in comparison to vampiric ones, but that was still not a voice that he was likely to forget at any point in his life. He remembered his laugh, he remembered the way that he had growled out orders to his men while his boot had plowed into Whistler's side, the way that his voice had become distorted and strange when his fangs had descended. Deacon Frost's hair was slightly longer, and while his skin was still startlingly pale, had lost his luminescent glow and looked remarkably close to human. There was even a flush in his cheeks that could have been the rushing of fresh blood. Whistler saw that Frost had a long white scar running up from his Adam's apple, curving up the side of his neck, and ending at a place just beneath his jaw. It flexed whenever he swallowed.
What mark had not been on Frost's neck the last time that Whistler had seen him, and vampires did not scar. It was very easy to forget that fact when Whistler looked at Frost's eyes, which were still cold and sharp. Whatever else might have changed about Frost, those had remained exactly the same.
Chief among the changes that Whistler was sure that someone was just waiting to give him a damned good explanation for why Frost was standing beside Blade as easily as if he was a pet rather than a mortal enemy. Blade's arms were still folded over his chest. They were not reaching for the stake that they ought to have been.
Frost flicked Blade an annoyed glare and made a huffing noise when Blade looked to be completely impervious to it. Rolling his eyes very slightly, the son of a bitch looked back towards Whistler. If he was in any way nervous, then he was a good enough actor not to show it. Whistler's eyes were drawn over and over again to the flush of moving blood in Frost's cheeks, as he could feel it rushing hale and hearty through his own veins after so long in which his heart had scarcely beat at all. He did not want to believe it, though, and so he would not.
Still giving Blade a sideways look from beneath his lashes, as if Blade was the sun and he the satellite that had no choice but to revolve around it and reflect it, the son of a bitch said to Whistler, "Well, Gramps, this is only as unpleasant as you want it to be-"
Whistler had had fever dreams of what it would be like to finally give Deacon Frost what he deserved. The reality of it might not be able to touch them, but, oh, it was damned sweet all the same. Whistler felt the skin across his knuckles split, his fist slammed into Frost's jaw with such force, and Frost's head rocked back against the blow. These fucking icy eyes of his went cloudy for only a moment before they refocused, sharp and cold. Frost twisted partway around so that he could glare at Blade, though Blade only lifted his shoulders into a minute shrug in response.
"Told you," Blade said. The amused look was still on his face, technically. It was fixed, rigid, ready to crack the second that anyone tapped it too hard. Whistler wondered how much violence was swirling beneath Blade's surface now, barely held in check. He wondered why none of it was being directed towards its proper source, the enemy standing in their midst.
Fueled by this, Whistler struck Frost again, driving him backwards and towards the car that he and Scud had only moments before stepped away from. "Whoa!" Whistler heard the kid yell from behind them. There was a faint growling noise rending the air. Whistler did not know if it came from him, Frost, or even from Blade. That there was a such a large pool within the room who knew how to growl like an animal was hardly doing anything to calm Whistler down. Neither was the fact that Frost, while retreating back under each of Whistler's blows, had still not delivered one himself and kept flashing Blade those impatient, aggravated looks. Every time that a new detail was added to the picture being painted within Whistler's mind, he found himself becoming more sickened.
The third punch drove Frost right up against the body of the car, causing the bloodsucker to grunt and Scud to make the low noise of an animal in pain. Something in Frost's eyes flashed, sharp and predatory. He braced his hands against the car at his back and launched himself forward before the third could become a fourth. Whistler noted that, while Frost was moving quickly, he was doing so at a speed that was impressive for a human, nothing comparable to what he had been capable of before. Pale or not, the blood rising in Frost's cheeks was making him look pink and healthy. For every new detail, Whistler grew angrier.
Frost twisted out from beneath Whistler before another punch could be thrown, grabbed Whistler by the shoulders, and hurled him back against the car himself. In the background, Scud sounded as if he was going to need sedation. Whistler felt air being driven from his lungs and mourned the loss, a sensation that he had not had time to grow accustomed to again after such a long stretch of time in which breathing had been more a matter of habit than of necessity.
Frost leaned forward and filled Whistler's vision. The startling iceberg blue of his eyes was still as pure and inhuman as it had been the last time that Whistler had seen him, though the teeth that he revealed were at the moment blunt. "Listen, Gramps," Frost began in a low voice that hardly sounded human, and struck Whistler hard enough to make his ears ring when Whistler only tried to punch him again. "Things have changed a little bit-"
A shadow crossed the air behind Frost. If Blade finished the job and took the fucking bloodsucker out now, then Whistler swore that he would never aloud mention those seconds of insanity that had had Blade and Frost standing side by side. Lady Luck was not interested in accepting bargains, however, and Blade only grabbed Frost by the back of his neck and wrenched him back hard before he could strike Whistler again. Frost dangled like a kitten for a second before he wrenched free, only to have Blade put his hand into the center of his chest and force him to keep his distance.
"What the fuck," Frost began angrily, only to pause so that he could lap at his lower lip and spit blood to the side. He glared at Blade. "You said that you weren't going to interfere."
"I lied," Blade replied. His eyes roamed briefly across Frost's lower lip before he added, "You had it coming."
There was no way of interpreting those words that did not involve letting a lot of information that Whistler would rather not have had sliding through his brain. He noted that Blade's hand remained against Frost's chest in warning, and there was no more violence in the gesture than there was in everything that Blade did. "Someone want to explain to me what in the fuck is going on here?" Whistler demanded as he pushed himself away from the car. His head ached in equal part from the blow that Frost had delivered to him and in mourning all of the missing sensory data that was no longer pouring in. In the background, Scud looked torn between slinking off before the real violence got started and knowing that if he did that he was going to miss the best part of the show. Whistler ignored him, expecting no better. It was Blade that he was concerned about. Whistler leveled his finger at Frost and watched the bloodsucker narrow his eyes. "And why is this motherfucker still alive?"
Frost rolled his eyes and began to stroll off for parts of the warehouse unknown, saying only, "Meet your Patient Zero." There was a bitter note to his voice that no one missed.
Blade tightened his fingers through the front of Frost's shirt before he could go more than a step, effectively leashing him in place. Off of Frost's annoyed, incredulous look, Blade said, "You have a lot coming. Get used to it."
Frost's mouth settled into an angry line. "Aren't you Old Testament today." He shoved at Blade's hand. "I'm not going anywhere." When Blade still refused to release him, Frost held up his hands. "Fine."
Whistler could not believe what he was seeing, and it grew worse every minute. "You want to explain to me why he's not a pile of ash?"
"Karen came up with a cure for transmitted vampirism," Blade said, nodding towards Frost. "Same cure that I used on you. She wasn't able to crack the code until you were dead, though-until I thought that you were dead," Blade amended. His fingers tightened further through the front of Frost's shirt, cutting off Frost's air supply for a moment and causing him to wince and watch Blade warily. It was the first smart thing that Whistler had seen Blade do since Frost had shown his face, and if it was not such a drop in the bucket he would probably be much more pleased.
"I thought that he was dead, too, stud," Frost said. Whistler did not know what he ought to find more troubling, the fact that Frost was relaxed around Blade in the first place, or the fact that it had the feeling of an old argument that had been mused over many times by both parties. Frost looked back towards him. Whistler forget why he needed to have a reason for his rage at all, only that it was hot and red and there. "You weren't supposed to happen." Back to Blade, he said, "If I had not been…incapacitated, it would not have happened." Blade's soft growl said that this was not a wise avenue for him to keep pushing. Frost fell silent, but his eyes were not cowed.
Whistler realized that in pushing Frost back, Blade had also blocked Whistler from having an easy avenue to his enemy, in effect serving as a warning to the both of them. "That doesn't tell me why you're not dust in the wind, suckhead," he snapped.
Frost's lips curved up into a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. Whistler would not have been surprised to find that he was incapable of one even if he tried. "Blade tells the tale better than I do," he said. "It's a hell of a bedtime story, too, needs to be done right."
Blade's mouth twisted into a small, grim smile of his very own. With his sunglasses on, Whistler could not tell if Blade's seeming amusement was genuine. Didn't matter; he did not need to see Blade's eyes to know that he did not like the way that Frost was staring at Blade without flinching and nearly without blinking, a strange and unreadable expression fixed upon his face, or the way that Blade was staring back without taking his hand away from Frost's chest.
"Karen developed the cure with an eye towards halting the transformation midway through," Blade went on. "She never thought about using it to turn back a vampire that had been turned five decades ago." Frost's pink-skinned, lightly tanned face and the new way that he was moving drew Whistler's eye again. As much as he hated to believe, it seemed as if in another few seconds he would be given no choice.
Frost made an impatient noise and lifted his hand to tug himself free from Blade's grasp. This time, Blade allowed it. His teeth glittered in the light. "I'm the one that made you possible," Frost said. He did not sound nearly so smug as that smile would have suggested. Had Whistler been feeling more charitable, he would have said that Frost's voice was filled with broken glass, and Frost on the verge of shattering with it. "Guess you owe me."
"I owe you a hell of a lot, suckhead," Whistler answered automatically. He flexed his wrist, where two years before Frost's boot had broken it. When a person was turned into a vampire, any unhealed illnesses or injuries were gobbled up by the greedy, grabbing virus. It was the reason that Whistler could now draw a full breath of air into his lungs, while his leg was just as fucked as ever-it had been healed as well as it was going to be decades before he had ever felt a vampire's fangs. Moving his wrist around, though, Whistler swore that he could still feel the bones working against one another. He wondered what Blade would do if Whistler were to lunge between the two of them so that he could deliver the same message right back to Frost, if that warning that he was issuing really did count for him as well as Frost.
And while he was there, he could ask Blade when in the hell divided loyalties had ever become an issue between them.
"Doesn't explain why you haven't served your purpose like any other lab rat," Whistler continued, no longer speaking to Frost in the strictest sense. Blade's eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses, but Whistler had known him ever since Blade was a teenager and since Whistler had still had some brown in his air. He knew every minute twitch and tic and the meanings behind them perhaps better than Blade himself did.
He could not read Blade now, and that was a blow that knocked him back more firmly than all of the aches and pains that accompanied sliding from vampire back into human.
"He pulls his weight," was all that Blade said.
Frost twitched, and for a second his mouth became a thin, hard line. "That I do," he said quietly.
Blade glanced back at him. Even though the moment lasted for only a second, it still spoke of familiarity that had nearly become a private language. Whistler would have preferred being sick to witnessing any of this. "Work it out," Blade said, stepping out from between the two of them. Whistler had a clear path to Frost. Frost looked at Blade as if he had just performed an act so stupid that words could not even hope to express his displeasure, while Scud added in a nervous voice, "Yo, B, don't you think that that's a little like throwing chum into the water?" Blade silenced him with a glare.
Frost was not so easy to cow. He flicked Blade another annoyed look and said, "You should be on the U.N-"
Frost was cut off before he could go any further by the wailing of alarms and the abrupt shutting off of all of the lights. They were replaced by an eerie blue glow that took the planes and shadows of everyone's faces and made them alien and strange. Frost's teeth made a clicking noise, so abruptly did he shut his mouth again. He threw a wild look towards Scud as the kid dove towards his computer and began typing.
"Motion sensors," Scud said with the giddy excitement that only the young could manage, still thinking on some level that war was a game. "Zone Three, gentlemen."
"Human?" Blade asked. He sounded as if he already knew the answer and was walking towards a set of stairs even as he said it.
Scud shook his head. On the screen in front of him, pale purple figures ghosted to and fro. Though he did not for a second forget Frost standing there, so tantalizingly close and now with no barrier between them, Whistler could not help but draw a few steps closer in fascination. He and Blade had not employed a security system anywhere near this sophisticated. How things might have been different if they had.
Still typing as he stared at the figures, Scud said, "Only if they got a body temperature of fifty. Looks like suckheads to me." Blade sprinted up the stairs with a speed and silence that would have defied any regular man. Scud did not seem to notice that he was gone. He continued to type, only to pull back and yelp as his thermal camera threw out sparks and then went black.
Whistler made a sound of deep disgust even as he was oddly comforted to know that this new world that Blade had constructed in his absence still had flaws. "Fried," he said. "They're using magnesium flares, kid. Got your entire security system scoped out." Scud began to make a face. Whistler did not stick around to see how to played out. There was a cabinet full of guns close at hand, proof that even if Blade had lost his mind he had at the very least not lost it entirely. Hopefully, if Whistler had any influence over it, not irreversibly, either.
Whistler could feel Frost directly behind him as he reached the cabinet and withdrew a rifle, but it was the kid who made the most noise. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't trust you-" Whistler did not even break stride as he swung about and brought the butt of the rifle into Scud's mouth. Only the fact that he was a kid, and as such had some kind of marginal excuse for his stupidity, kept Whistler from doing it hard enough to break teeth. Scud fell back to the floor and flashed Whistler a look of poison that belied the rest of his demeanor. Spinning away, Whistler missed most of it.
Frost had been only a pace or two behind Whistler, reaching for a weapon himself. Finding the barrel of a rifle thrust into his face without warning tended to make a man back up quickly. Frost held up his hands to show that he had nothing in them and seethed, "I know how to fight, you old idiot."
Whistler cocked the rifle and said calmly, "I know. Give me one good reason." As if Frost had not already given him dozens if not hundreds, as if the fact that he was supposed to be human and tightly leashed now made a damned bit of difference.
Frost's eyes narrowed into icy slits. If the universe was kind, then the next thing that he said would have been enough to give Whistler his reason. Frost's expression changed and he said only, "Maybe you ought to be using those bullets on someone with bigger teeth, then."
Whistler snuck a glance over his shoulder and saw two dark-clad figures gracefully flipping among the rafters as if they were children cavorting on the world's largest playground. Whistler remembered what it was like to be able to move like that. If the faintly wistful look that crossed Frost's face was anything to go by, then so did he. Making a disgusted sound from deep in his throat and not even knowing which one of them he was directing it towards, Whistler raised the rifle against his shoulder and began to fire as the vampires dropped, nearly silently, to the floor. He and Blade had kept all of their guns loaded with silver-tipped hollow points at all times. Whistler could only hope that Blade had kept up the practice, even if he had allowed everything else to go wrong. Bullets pinged off of machinery without hitting their targets, and Scud made an outraged sound that Whistler ignored altogether.
Both vampires were clad from head to foot in a skintight, dark gray material that left nothing to the imagination at the same time that it let Whistler know that these were not a couple of random suckheads that had been turned a week before and wanted to build their reputations by trying their luck against the Daywalker. The form of one was female, and athletic. That was all that Whistler got before she clocked him with a roundhouse that left him dazed and reeling with a force that a human could not hope to touch. Whistler got off a single shot on reflex, knowing even as he pulled the trigger that it was going to go wild, before the rifle was wrenched violently from his hands. The vampire swung it around to bear on Frost, who back up abruptly with his hands held up in a placating gesture.
"Easy there, princess," Frost said. He met eyes with Whistler briefly over her shoulder. "Apparently I'm not welcome in this fight."
Whistler pulled his lips back from his teeth and had a moment in which he could worry about how animalistic the gesture was, how familiar, before the woman spun away again. Over her shoulder, Whistler saw Blade grip the railing that ran along the stairs and, sword in hand, flip gracefully over the edge. Even though her eyes were covered by goggles that made her look more like a particularly svelte frog than anything else, the female vampire turned her head to follow Blade like a dog finding a scent.
"Guard lights!" Blade barked as his feet touched the cement again.
Frost started in spite of his statement that he was going to stay out of it, a computer coming back to life. He nodded and began to dart around Whistler. Whistler halted him by grabbing quickly for his bicep. "Where do you think that you're going, suckhead?" he growled, eyeing the weapons cabinet that was still only a few yards away.
Frost shook himself free and stared at Whistler in disbelief. "Old man, you have got to be kidding me," he snapped.
"I got it, Deac," Scud said as he scrambled back up to his feet. He was still rubbing his hands against his mouth where Whistler had struck him, and his palm came away streaked with blood. Yeah, Whistler was sure that he was going to lose sleep over that. The kid threw himself down into the computer chair, his shoulders hunched up around his ears as if he expected to find a bullet between them at any moment, and typed rapidly into the keyboard. The lights that Scud had been tinkering with when Whistler had stormed out of the bathroom flared into life in a circle all around the warehouse, nearly blinding to human eyes. Whistler saw Frost step backwards and put his arm to protect himself until his eyes adjusted, but he wasn't screaming and dropping to the floor with bubbling skin as he should have been. Whistler could see his day getting better by the moment.
Even as Frost was not collapsing down to the cement and screaming, neither were the ones that Whistler knew for a fact were vampires. With a snicking sound, opaque protective plates fell down over their goggles to protect their eyes from the UV glare. The female lunged after Blade, drawing her sword and throwing the gun to the side as she did so. Whistler dove to retrieve it, only to have the male vampire reach it a second faster. Whistler seethed as he found himself standing down the barrel of the gun. The male kept his weapon on a regular rotation between Scud, Whistler, and Frost, so that none of them had more than a second at a time in which to try something heroic and fatal. Of the three of them, he had Scud's undivided attention, roughly half of Whistler's, and none at all of Frost's. His attention was fixed entirely upon the place where Blade was engaged in a furious fight with the female vampire, who was proving that all of her sleek athleticism was not maintained purely so that she would look good in a cocktail gown. Frost's body had been wound into one long, unbroken line of tension and he was rocked forward onto the balls of his feet, as if he was about to lunge forward and did not care about the hail of bullets that would surely follow. Whistler wondered if he realized, in that moment, that he would not be able to heal those wounds within the hour this time. The moment of trying to take a peek into Frost's head both disoriented and horrified him.
Sparks fell down to the cement as Blade and the female vampire sparred, the female using her slighter stature so that she could dart around Blade's bulk. Blade moved faster than she had anticipated and drove in a strike that would have killed her if she had not noticed it at the last possible second, and then twisted like a cat in midair so that she caught the flat of the sword across the meaty part of her thigh rather than losing a limb. Frost released the air in his lungs on an audible sigh as Blade, inch by inch, began to gain the upper hand, though sweat was gleaming in diamond-dust droplets across his arms and shoulders. He took a lucky elbow to the face as he tried to get in beneath the woman's defenses and shook it off, spitting a mouthful of blood to the side. For the first time, Whistler saw the expression of tight, emotionless focus that had dominated his face drop away and for a second came to be dominated by a low-burning rage. He and Frost let out their breaths again, this time in tandem. If this kept up, Whistler was going to ask the damned bloodsucker to put a bullet in him.
The fight ended abruptly, with Blade seeing and opening and, using reflexes that even with his large size put hers to shame, arced the point of the sword around, drove it forward, and brought it to a halt only millimeters away from the female vampire's throat. Even a bloodsucker was going to have some trouble throwing off the loss of her head. Whistler could have cheered, had he not realized that Blade was not pushing the advantage while he had it and ending one bloodsucker then and there. If Whistler had come back only to realize that Frost was the beginning of a disturbing trend involving Blade losing his taste for the war altogether, the he might have to eat his gun. He saw Blade glance downwards.
Okay. Maybe not.
Displaying a faster intelligence than most of the vampires that Whistler had dealt with over the course of his long and colorful career, and perhaps even a hint of unusual humor, she had turned her own sword around and had it angled directly at Blade's groin. He could still kill her, but it would probably not be pretty. Whistler jerked forward, only to find the gun pointed squarely at his head. Scud had not moved at all during the entire episode, and Frost had gone rigid, his eyes glittering with fury and his face so drained of blood that he almost looked a vampire again.
"Nyssa!" the male vampire barked, and then a sentence spoken in vampire so quickly that Whistler could not hope to follow it. He had learned to read it, though not perfectly, but occasions when he and Blade had been around a vampire long enough to pick up the spoken lingo with any degree of fluency had been scarce in coming. They did not need to know the language in order to kill them. Frost, he noticed, looked as if every screw that was holding his body together was loosened at once. A second later, the female vampire-Whistler was going to cautiously begin calling her Nyssa within his head and call it a bonus if Nyssa was shorthand for 'enormous bitch'-put her sword away. Of course.
The male vampire said something else, causing Frost to reply testily, "You've never shot a burglar?" Noting Scud's confused expression, he added, "He says we shot first." Frost seemed content to pretend that Whistler was not standing there at all. For the moment, until they had a little more time to settle the scores between them, Whistler was willing to do the same.
Scud's expression went from confused to comprehending to outraged in the span of an eye blink. "Is he fucking serious?" he exploded, stepping forward. It was probably lucky for Scud that Whistler deftly reclaimed his rifle at that moment, even though the male vampire's face only expressed mild annoyance, and Frost hardly even quirked an eyebrow. He was, Whistler noted, still intently watching Blade. "Does he know how long it's going to take me to rewire those fucking cameras?"
They never did learn if the male vampire was, in fact, fucking serious or if he really did know how long that it was going to take Scud to repair all of the damage that had been done, as the male was not more interested in Blade. "We are here to deliver a message. We represent the ruling body of the vampire clan. They're offering you a truce." He knelt, still breathing hard, so that he could offer Blade some kind of long metallic tube. There were markings etched into it that appeared to be vampire, but they were too small and far away for Whistler to actually read what they said. "They want to meet with you."
One vampire was kneeling at Blade's feet, all but baring the back of his neck in submission, while his companion was damned good but nevertheless outnumbered. Blade instead called out, "Scud." The kid went back to his computer and typed in a series of codes into the keyboard. The UV lights cut out to leave them in relative gloom. To the vampires, Blade said, "Take off your masks." His tone left no room for them to assume that it had been a request.
The male vampire was the first to obey, revealing himself to be black and handsome. Had he been human, Whistler would have put his age at being slightly older than Blade himself. As it was, he guessed that one stab in the dark was as good as any other. "My name is Asad." He gestured towards the female. "And this is Nyssa."
Nyssa pulled off her mask, revealing a pretty woman with olive skin, flashing eyes, and lustrous dark curls. In the dim light created by the absence of the UVs, it was easy to overlook how her skin nearly seemed to glow, a clear indicator that she had not seen the sun in a very long time. If she was intimidated by being in such proximity to the Daywalker, then it did not show in her face. "You have been our most feared enemy," she said in a strange, methodical voice, "but now there is something loose on the streets. Something worse than you."
Blade regarded her for a long, solemn moment before he nodded once and flipped the metallic tube through the air towards Frost, who was drawing close. Frost caught it deftly from the air and gave it a cursory glance before he handed it back to Blade. "It's legit," he said, and noticed that both Whistler and Nyssa were looking at him with frank astonishment. "I pull my weight," he said flatly to Whistler, a note of annoyance coloring his voice. To Nyssa, he even curled his lip slightly before he spoke. "What's wrong, princess?" She started. Blade, Frost, and Whistler all made careful note of the gesture. "It's not exactly holy writ."
"Vampire was not meant to be read by creatures such as you," Nyssa said stiffly. She looked pointedly between Frost and Blade before she sniffed and added, "Even before you came to your…arrangement."
Frost went rigid for a moment before he flashed Nyssa a tight-lipped smile. It looked more as if he was struggling not to bare his teeth. "Pureblood politics," he said, though Whistler had a feeling that that had not been what Nyssa was referring to at all. "You broke a record, honey. I was going to give you a good five minutes more before you went to the Jim Crow place. I just happen to be a man of the people."
"You are a disease-" Nyssa began, bristling and causing Frost to bristle in return.
"Enough." Blade did not raise his voice; he did not have to. Frost fell silent immediately, looking at Blade moodily. Nyssa trailed off a second later. She looked shocked to have discovered that she was even doing so, as Whistler was to see her. Asad watched it all with a steady and thoughtful look. "Later," Blade said to Frost, though Frost had not said another word. He handed Frost the tube that Asad had brought with him, the one whose purpose Whistler still did not know. Frost looked briefly surprised and even gratified before he regained control of his face; Nyssa looked as if she was on the verge of cracking off and then spitting out her own fangs.
Whistler had no doubt that Blade saw both of these reactions, and that he had planned for both: putting Nyssa in her place with barely hidden fangs, and doing the same to Frost with a gentler hand. Whistler had no idea what had gone on over the past two years to warrant Frost that kind of care, or why Blade was holding his sword in check while surrounded by his enemies, but he was already sure that he would enjoy being told about none of it.
As Frost continued to flip the cylinder over and over in his hand and examine it with seemingly intense interest, even though it had looked as if he had seen everything that he needed to see a few minutes before, and Nyssa continued to look aghast that he was even touching it, Blade said, "What threat?"
Nyssa pulled her eyes away from Frost, finally. It looked as if it hurt her. She did not seem to process what Blade had said at first and then froze for a moment, her mouth opening and closing before she regained her composure. Nyssa did not look like a person who was accustomed to being driven from her set path. Whistler guessed that that made two of them. "I am not permitted to tell you," she said. "It is not for me to tell this story."
Whistler had been silent for about long enough, he figured. It was about time that he grabbed the train and wrenched it back onto the tracks before it got too far. "So you're gonna have to explain this one to me, darlin'," he said. "Where I'm standing, it looks like you want us to follow you into the lion's den with blood smeared all over us."
Nyssa threw him a stormy look. She was made for it. "It's the only way," she gritted.
As long as it was the only way, damn, Whistler guessed that made everything just fine. He was about to say so when Blade took the metallic tube back from Frost and said, "This as ironclad as it's supposed to be?"
Nyssa threw another look at Frost over Blade's shoulder before she answered. This was clearly more insight into the vampire world than Blade was supposed to have. "Yes," she finally said, tightly.
Blade nodded and went still for a moment, so still that he seemed more like a statue than a man. Seeing Blade in a moment of uncertainty, however well he was masking it, hurt Whistler on a level that he had not anticipated, and unsettled him, too. Doubt was not something that their world was particularly forgiving of. He could not stop his eyes from cutting towards Frost.
Blade ended his fugue state by handing the tube back to Nyssa and saying, "We'll leave at dusk. You and Asad are to keep your masks off at all times and stay within the range of the UV lights." Blade held up a finger and flashed a tight, glittering smile. For the first time since he had woken up, Whistler recognized the man. "One wrong move, and your asses fry."
Though Nyssa looked taken aback, she bowed her head in assent. Asad continued to watch everyone with a cool and critical eye.
Whistler had been wrong. The train was much too far off the tracks to be pulled back now.
End Part Two