Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
Also do not own references to Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I am crediting Wikipedia for the information about The Ramones and pheromones.
Author's Note: It's almost Halloween again, so I wanted to get an update out there before then. :) Have a Happy Halloween and hope you enjoy the latest installment! :D Thanks for reading!
Reviews, feedback, comments and constructive criticism are welcomed and appreciated. :D
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Chapter Ten: I Want To Find You, Tear Out All Your Tenderness
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"Gus, help me up," Shawn whispered as soon as Lassiter left.
"Uh uh, Shawn."
"Gus, we have to go after Lassie. He has no idea what he's getting into." Shawn shifted, feeling the napkins getting wet under his palm.
"Shawn, we can't."
"Yes we can."
"We shouldn't."
"We should! Just get me some cookies and juice and one of those stickers that says 'I donated blood today' and we'll be good to go." He cracked a smile but it still looked weak. So did he, in fact, and pale.
"What really happened?" Gus repeated earlier question.
Shawn shrugged weakly, wincing as it pulled at the skin on his neck. "It's hard to believe, and will sound crazy."
"You said . . . you said Juliet was kissing you . . . and then she bit you?" Gus helped.
"Yeah. That's what happened." He shook his head carefully at Gus' skeptical look. "I know, I know how it sounds."
"I don't know what's more unbelievable—the kissing part or the biting part," Gus threw in.
Shawn rolled his eyes. "Ha ha," he muttered humorously. "You know Juliet has always thought of me as a sexy beast." He used his free hand to smooth out the front of his costume, which had rumpled up a little during their passionate exchange. "And this costume just sent her over the edge. Vampires are sexy, Gus."
"Right," Gus said, unconvinced.
"Listen, we were just . . . dancing, and talking, and then Jules ran away and I chased her back here. And then we started making out. She made the first move."
"That doesn't sound like Juliet at all," Gus frowned. "But then, she's been acting weird all day."
"She has, right?" Shawn agreed. "She did want me to call her Carmine, and she kept saying kinda strange things and acting like I might hurt her. And then she just . . . jumped me. Like, right on me."
"Shawn!" Gus made a motion to cover both ears.
Shawn couldn't help but grin, but he felt some color returning to his cheeks—a faint blush. "That's what happened, Gus. What really happened." He chuckled softly. "It was going good for a while but then she just pulled back and she . . . attacked. Like a wild animal. It's really not as sexy as it sounds."
Shawn's body stiffened at the memory of Juliet's teeth piercing his neck. What had been fun role play turned instantly dangerous and terrifying, and didn't stop even after she drew blood.
He could have—should have, in fact—thrown her off him; at the very least, pushed her back enough to be held at arm's length. But the fact remained, he hadn't done one thing to stop her.
"But she was so hot," Shawn whined aloud, and Gus quirked an eyebrow at him. He couldn't help it, he had enjoyed the way she'd pressed herself against him and kissed him as if she had saved up a lifetime's supply of passion just for him. His actual fear of the game turning scary had not been enough of a red alert for him to physically stop her.
Still . . . she'd tasted his blood, and she'd (apparently) liked it.
Using the floor as leverage, Shawn pushed himself to his knees. He heard a rush of blood in his ears and almost sank back to the floor. Funny thoughts popped into his mind.
"I didn't actually see her fangs, so maybe that means I won't turn into a real vampire," Shawn stated, watching Gus's face scrunch up with disgust. "And she didn't feed me her blood. That's what has to happen now, isn't that the way it goes?"
"The way what goes? Vampires aren't really real, Shawn."
A corner of Shawn's mouth turned up in a smirk. "Don't think I didn't hear the quaking in your voice, buddy. I know where you keep your chain of garlic, your silver and your crossbow."
"Those are . . . they're just for safety's sake," Gus sputtered. "Precautions."
Shawn put his unbloodied hand on Gus's shoulder. "Bet you wish you had that stuff with you tonight." Without thinking, Gus grabbed Shawn under the armpit and pulled him to his feet, faltering only when he saw how close he was to the wound on Shawn's neck. His stomach twisted, but he steadied Shawn, who was either faking it or was actually unstable on his feet. "You're not going to pass out on me, are you?" he asked, trying to force down his gag reflex. The smell of Shawn's blood was making him dizzy.
Shawn raised an eyebrow. "Maybe I should be asking you that." He pulled back from Gus to give him some clearer air, but his head was spinning. Though he'd lost consciousness earlier, he couldn't imagine that Juliet had taken that much blood for it to be the cause. She hadn't had more than a few good licks, like a cat lapping up cream. Shawn sighed. The comparison was in bad taste, even for his dark sense of humor. Could he have passed out because of the pain of the broken skin?
"It doesn't seem right," he muttered aloud, pressing his palm flat to the wall.
"What?" Gus asked. To him, none of this had any ring of rightness.
"How she did it."
"Did what?"
Shawn shook his head. "We need to get moving. She's still out there."
# # # # #
Weaving her way through the Halloween Gala, she noticed how time bent and blurred the shapes, the colors together, how her mind moved quickly and slowly at once, as if her eyes were just catching up with her steps as she stalked through the crowd. She noticed—black ravens on a man's hands, no, long black feathers encircling the cuffs of his sleeves, stretching out towards his long, pale fingers. It made her laugh, her voice like copper in the back of her throat. She tasted the blood.
She wanted the soft lips of a man's to press her lips against; ninety years without one single kiss. And now she'd kissed . . . he'd tasted of sugar, of cakes and punch, of delicacies much too sweet. She could have kept him; he had fallen very quickly under her spell.
His blood . . . the blood was just how she remembered it, warm and pulsing a life all its own.
Now she had become the feral one with the teeth; now she had stained her own face and her white dress unattractively with a man's blood. She had taken it this time, with as much force as when it had been taken from her. One kiss was not enough; there had been another one in her sights that she—not she, but the other woman, the sweet one with the blue eyes—had run from. She had to make her way back to him and make him share her lips.
Don't, don't— The same imploring within her brain. The same desperate plea. STOP! Leave him!
Maybe she—the other woman—had been a teensy present then, while she had kissed the vampire and then drank him with abandon. Present, watching it unfold with horror, begging her, Carmine, not to do it, to stop.
Present enough to cause her to stop enjoying the vampire, but not present enough to hinder her hunger or halt her pursuit of the man who would be next.
# # # # #
Carlton fought the urge to use his authoritative Head Detective voice to clear a path, or better yet, clear out the party. He was still on assignment, even if his partner had hurled herself off the deep end, and was forcing himself to prove that he could handle a few solid hours of undercover work—even if the Velcro on his tearaway pants did keep getting snagged on, every now and then, random women's long skirts or dresses. He continued to swallow his embarrassment, push his pants back together, and follow what he hoped was O'Hara's trail. Her skimpy costume barely covered her thigh holster, and though she had clipped her cell phone to her ankle, she was not answering it.
Lassiter kept his gun at his side in order not to spook any of the guests—or the mark, whomever she might be. His top priority was locating O'Hara, making certain she was physically okay, and taking care of her if she was not, all things he loathed to admit, because the cop in him wanted to stay on task of locating the perp, catching her in the act and arresting her red-handed. But that would have to wait.
He was on his third circuit of the room, rechecking the places they had walked when the worked the room together, and the table where they had sat sipping punch when he had first lost her, when he spotted a glimmer of blond hair. Pushing through a small knot of people to get a closer look, he recognized the back of her dress. Relief hovered in his breath.
He holstered his gun when he had her in his sights, though a little voice in his head was screaming at him not to. What if O'Hara had become dangerous somehow? She had been out of her mind all day as it was. Plus, she may also still be armed. . . . Lassiter wanted to believe in his gut that she would never shoot him, even if some unbeknownst ingesting of drugs made her think she might want to, or need to, in order to survive.
Juliet had her back to him, but had frozen, catching her reflection in one of the many mirrors hung around the room. Seeing the woman in the mirrors with the blood on her hands, mouth and dress, seeing that the woman was her, made her pause, made her breath catch. The moments of her daze were coming to an end; she wondered, from the tunnel inside her skull, just where her victim was, if he was still alive.
Then she heard her name. Carmine O'Hara.
Juliet turned sharply, flinging her arm out when his footsteps were upon her, reaching for her shoulders, she was sure. She registered the crack of flesh on flesh, that the back of her hand burned where she'd caught him—now caught his shocked expression—on the cheek. His hand went towards the reversed hand print she had left, the hurt in his eyes more than just pain. He touched his skin, then winced. He reached for her.
Without thinking it through, she clutched his wrist and pulled his hand to her, kissing and tasting it, being sweet—and then she bit down on two of his fingers.
Carlton's mind reeled, uncertain how his partner had the strength to rock him on his feet, pull him towards her—then clamp his fingers with her teeth. He had gotten a look at her eyes after she'd hit him; her pupils were dilated to the point of nearly swallowing her blue irises, and she had something red on her mouth. He howled. It couldn't be possible, but the pain teased that she had bit him to the bone. "O'Hara!" he yelled, trying to jerk his arm from her, set himself free. Like a rabid animal, she held on. Her tongue moved seductively down his palm, licking his lifelines, his heartlines, sensing the rhythm of his blood beating next to hers. Her teeth released his fingers only long enough to clamp hard around his wrist. She was as close to him as she had been to the vampire, their bodies touching in all the right places. She inhaled his musky scent, feeling pleasantly lightheaded. She ground her teeth into his arm and broke the skin on his wrist.
Carlton yelled. She was emotionless as he shoved her backwards, the palm of his unbitten hand rough on her forehead, her teeth dragging across his skin, leaving a raised red line on his palm. Confused and guilty, starting to stammer that he didn't mean, he didn't mean, especially when he saw a small red mark jump to her forehead from his push. But Juliet had not reacted; she stood where he'd pushed her, where her feet had stopped, her arms half frozen away from her sides.
He stared with growing horror as he realized she'd broken his skin, that she'd bitten hard enough to draw blood. It seemed . . . incomprehensible. Unreal. "O'Hara," he whispered, his head feeling light, then heavy, as it spun with pain. There was something else in the mix: he was getting dizzy as he studied his fingers, both cut open, both oozing his own sticky blood. He recalled the wound on Spencer's neck then, the story Spencer was trying to spin to himself or to Guster about O'Hara being responsible . . . his vision slanted and he had to take a few steps back to right it. He saw O'Hara standing before him, her body in splinters, as if she was only a reflected image in a broken mirror. She wasn't looking at him but at the floor off to his left, behind him.
Was there . . . something in her saliva, like a spider, a toxin that could paralyze? Mount sensations of wooziness, make her victim collapse? Lassiter tried hard to work through the variables as his vision blurred. None of it made a lick of sense to him, because in the real world, people got shot, got into knife fights in bars after too much Scotch or did terrible things like strangling others for a couple of bucks. Maybe, just maybe, in stories, your partner became frightened as if she were living in some Gothic revival novel and then maybe, just maybe, she got bold like a femme fatal in some espionage thriller. But never, never, did she turn on you, hiss like a feral creature of the night and attack you. Never, never, did she attack the one she found deliciously flirtatious (what he found stupendously irritating) and bite him on the neck until he passed out.
It couldn't have basis in reality that Juliet O'Hara was now some kind of vamp—ire.
# # # # #
Lassiter was on the floor in a heap by the time Shawn and Gus made it into the room, his face against the floor and covered by his arms. Shawn had forced Gus to stop several times because he needed rest; he was so lightheaded he considered thieving from a hospital's blood bank supply—a tangled thought that was not quite right. One time, he had actually fallen, and had almost been too weak to stand up, his legs not quite stable, but Gus had been right there to throw his arm around Shawn's shoulders.
"Shawn!" Gus yelled out, now they had followed Lassiter's red-eyed trail, his fury woven into the braids of Juliet's blood lust. He sniffed, backing away from what may have been Lassiter's blood drained corpse, his eyes alighting on a painful looking wound on the detective's hand.
"Crap! We're too late!" Shawn said, ignoring Lassiter's ireful groan when Shawn toed his leg.
Gus sighed in relief, tempered only by the fact that Juliet had apparently left another body behind, moving on like ghost or a shadow. "Are you—sure it was Juliet?"
Shawn's hand went to the wound on his neck; he recalled suddenly Juliet's tongue in his mouth, aggressive, forcing his teeth to part. He remembered he had only been teasing; he had on, in his opinion, his most alluring Axe cologne, and had hoped to flirt with his victim until she succumbed to the treacherous boundaries of hand holding, of a peck on the cheek. If he was lucky, a half hug, quick and warm but sweet as freely given Halloween chocolates.
But she had kept him silent with her kissing, pinned him to the wall with her body, her palms pressed against his thighs with the lightest feather touch. He had been a hostage to her desire, never guessing something might be wrong with her.
"She's one of the Five People You Meet in Hell, Gus," Shawn said. He huffed. "That was not Juliet. Not our Juliet."
Gus' forehead wrinkled with confusion. "Then . . . who was it?"
As he glanced down at Juliet's partner, he stomach twisted, knowing that Lassiter must have done something to placate her and still, he had been no match. Shawn squatted down to take Lassiter's pulse; a single groan did not mean the man was all right. There was a half moon of teeth marks his wrist and an angry red line on his palm, but no blood. It seemed their beautiful attacker didn't know how to go straight for an artery or a vein, a fact that had worked in their favor. Shawn noticed then that Lassiter's skin was a shade paler than usual, and wondered if his own complexion was just as white, as thin as paper or moth wings.
The shock of the bite rushed back as he glanced at the teeth marks she had left on Lassiter's hand, deep, in the shape of her mouth, the impossibility of broken skin.
He'd opened his mouth to scream but she'd managed to simultaneously caress his face as she took and took; he was easy, and she knew it.
Or, the thing within her knew. He was dizzy with odd thoughts, some truly Gothic in nature, wondering quickly if poor, innocent Juliet had mingled her blood with that of a killer, or a werewolf, or a man-pire. Did she cut her finger on a sliver of mirror, did he or it swoop in to kiss, to lick, to join his own plasma with hers? Shawn shook his head, his equilibrium still not squared away. He teetered. This had to be logical: it was a poison of a kind, a drug she was forcibly or mistakenly slipped; they had stumbled upon a crime at this Halloween party after all. But the intended victim must be safe then? He felt himself slipping.
"Shawn, we've got to find Juliet," Gus said, gulping with nausea as he glanced at Lassiter again. "Or whomever—um, whatever?—she is. Should we just leave him here?"
"There's no time. I think . . . I think he'll be okay. I hate to admit it, but I guess we're going have to need that ambulance after all." They both stared at Lassie. Shawn toed one of his arms, and it slid off his face. His eyes were closed, but the "sleep" hardly looked peaceful—it seemed as if the detective's organs had constricted in pain. The wound on his hand was practically glowing.
They paused to regroup, deciding to move Lassiter out of the way. It wouldn't do if the Head Detective was trampled, no matter how funny it might be at some other time. Shawn grabbed Lassiter's shoulders and Gus took his feet, moving his dead weight behind a large planter near a wall. Gus gave Lassiter's costume a once-over. "Officer Bad Sexy?" he read off the plastic badge, looking up at Shawn. "What did you do?"
Shawn shrugged. "He didn't have to wear it. Jules didn't have to either—" Shawn stopped, gasping. The costumes. Could it be . . . ? He looked down at what he wore, recalling the strange sensations he'd experienced after he put it on.
"Gus, do you think it's possible we're in that episode of Buffy where the gang buys costumes from the evil costume shop and then they all turn into their costumes?" Shawn said all in a rush.
"What?" Gus asked, unable to comprehend the jumble of words.
"I have a theory, it might be bunnies." Even though Buffy episodes might explain why Juliet was acting like a temptress, they didn't explain the crazy part, the biting part. Shawn considered another few seconds, trying to ignore the renewal of weirdness as his clothes hugged his body. "Could Jules be demonically possessed? Erm . . . mnemonically possessed? Phonetically?"
"Demonically possessed?" Gus repeated, sounding worried. He was glad he had Father Westley on speed dial for just such occasions. As Shawn continued to sound out words with "noms" or "mons" in them, Gus worked to put the important one into context. Pheromones.
"Pharaoh-whatsies?" Shawn repeated cluelessly. "Gus, I thought you were still deathly afraid of mummies."
"Not pharaoh," Gus spat with a frown. "Pheromones."
"The Ramones? Really, Gus? Is this the best time to be discussing the first American punk rock group formed in the idyllic Queens of 1974, very big here and in the UK, touring relentlessly for the better part of 22 years?"
Gus glanced at his best friend suspiciously, wondering from just what girl—fling—recently had fed Shawn this kind of information. He had to wonder, though he'd rather not, if Shawn managed to take this girl home or if her gushing for what must be her favorite group was too much for him to stand.
"What?" Shawn shrugged. "I can be open minded."
"How many albums did you have to listen to?" Gus asked with a wicked gleam in his eye. "Before she'd—"
"Hey, hey now!" Shawn protested, drawing his hands up to his chest as if to protect himself from Gus's impure suggestions.
"You're not fooling me, Shawn," Gus retorted. He sighed. "And it was pheromones." He carefully sounded out the word, then launched into the definition before his best friend could muster another 'what?'. "Don't you remember anything from tenth grade science class? Pheromones are chemicals capable of acting outside the body of the secreting individual to impact the behavior of the receiving individual."
At first, noticing Shawn cover his ears and drone on "Lalalalalalala" only made Gus speak louder. But it was getting them nowhere even faster than before—and Juliet was still a blur of a wavelength, having a decent head start.
Gus considered what Shawn had said: that Juliet was not Juliet. In spite of the case involving Father Westley, and the proof in that instance that there was no evidence of demonic possession, Gus still was keen that demonic possession could still happen to anyone at large. He licked his lips, thinking it was unfair for Shawn to bring up not only demonic possession but mummies and their violent, century old death curses—as if this night wasn't filled with enough lunacy.
His eyes strayed to the ungainly bite marks on Shawn's neck. If there was going to be a reasonable, rational explanation for what got into Juliet to make her seem not like herself at all, Gus believed that pheromones were at the root. He wasn't yet ruling out some kind of poison or toxin either, as she'd managed to—though he hadn't witnessed either attack—knock both Shawn and Lassiter out cold. With her mouth.
Gus thought about it; Juliet was a beautiful woman—knocking out a man with her mouth really wouldn't be that difficult.
# # # # #
She bent down to kiss him on the lips, softly and sweetly, a goodbye kiss, just as she had done with the vampire. Unlike the vampire, the tall man was not charmed and did not fall under her spell. "I craved you," she murmured, turning away with pangs of the past. The night was still young, and she wanted to find other men and blood to taste.
The vampire had risen; she could smell his blood in the air as he made his way toward her. He would soon be upon her, and if she was not careful, he might drink her in this time around.
If he could catch her.