A/N: YEEEAAAAH AND THE SHIT GOES DOWN. Man, I like making Conrad's childhood subtly miserable.
I, for one, hope you enjoy this. Like, really enjoy it. Rae and I have probably spent a collective 10 hours freaking out about how well this concept works, and it is a freaky-sexy one indeed. Also baby, thank you for your inestimable wealth of vampire lore! This, just, fft.
You know how Mont said Worth spends a lot of time rolling in the trash for a reason? WELL.
Warnings: language, hyper-violence, medical gore, gratuitous amounts of Conrad wumping, HALLOWEEEEEN oh god watch out for that Halloween (hey look, you guys finally know what date it is!)
Wanted
Wednesday night under a nearly full moon, Conrad spent his walk home glancing in every alley on the way, hands balled in his coat pockets.
For once it wasn't due to paranoia – or, rather, it was a more palatable and functional form of paranoia. After a month of being periodically harassed by Luce, Conrad realized the harassment was just that: periodical. Now capable of accepting that it was happening (anyone who had as many fang-marks as he did would be downright insane not to), he was beginning to get a sense of Luce's schedule. A brief inspection of an updated Red Cross blood-loss-to-regeneration-time website set it in stone, and though part of him preferred not to think that the vampire was waiting a week for his blood to fill back up, the other part of him was pervertedly touched by the undead dick's consideration.
Or maybe anemia just tasted bad. There were always two ways to think about everything Luce did. That said, the asshole was also a few days overdue and Conrad had made the executive decision that he wasn't going to be surprised when he showed up … if he did show up. The preternatural quiet of both Monday and Tuesday night seemed to vote against the very idea, leaving Conrad more alone than usual simply because he was expecting someone.
Conrad didn't like the sensation of facing up to the growing mental tidal-wave of just an informant, so he did some truly impressive work that night and moved at least eight bodies out of the morgue just to focus on something simple. He left tired at three a.m. and was navigating his way through the silent black streets of the city, wincing against the occasional piercing gust of frigid air. It was uncommonly frigid, even for a stereotypical, claustrophobic east-coast town such as his where the narrow alleyways funneled bursts of cold wind into gut-wrenching temperature projectiles.
Conrad shivered and bundled his scarf higher around his neck, grimacing; anyone might have thought it was the depth of December if the stark concrete niches of the old city hadn't been pockmarked with fronds of hay and pumpkins and the occasional kitschy paper skeleton twisting drunkenly in the wind.
It was four days till Halloween, and those that got into it, got into it. Ghost-shaped lights winked in windows 'til all hours of the morning and orangey fall wreathes adorned all shapes and sized of doors. Conrad's own condo was neat and bare as ever, thank you. He had never really liked Halloween, which was a little unfortunate considering how it seemed hell-bent on happening every day that year.
It wasn't just the overwhelming amount of clunky orange and black kitsch that insulted his gay sensibilities. The holiday never seemed to apply to him. He remembered being led out under a sheet a few times as a very young child; remembered two roughly-cut eyeholes jerking with each tiny tennis-shoe step, the tear-drop windows of a spooky world catching on his eyelashes and sliding down his face until everything was white and scratchy, only allowing the sound of his parents arguing in.
He was bad at getting candy, the neighborhood he lived in was even worse at giving it, and the next year's relocation to a 'safe trick-or-treating' event found him shuffling between hokey booths in the middle-school gym. He had held his plastic pumpkin out as a prisoner displays cuffed wrists, head down. After they returned home, his mother's fearful requisition of anything containing chocolate (there had been a rumor of a recall, only for Mars candy but who could be sure?) cemented his mumbled no thanks when it came up the next year. That was it.
The holiday soon turned into a cool phlegmy lump of discontent in his young life, something to wince and turn away from. He was jealous of the kids with their cool costumes – the kids with their cool parents and cool brothers and sisters who all seemed to like being together no matter how cold it was outside – with a simplicity of emotion that never quite left him. He hated to think his creepy profession was the cause of repressed Halloween trauma, but it also seemed like one of the least crazy things anyone had said all year. If he were to go out trick-or-treating now, he would probably get arrested for assault and battery if anybody's costume was too convincing.
The coroner frowned at some jack-o-lanterns lining the concrete stairway to an apartment complex, eyes catching on the obvious gaps in the spooky-faced line-up. Their unlucky brethren had been smashed to slices of glossy orange shell and hairy guts and smeared down the steps, damp pale meat glistening in the porch lamp. The product of a baseball bat and hormones and a dash of social unrest. Kids. Punks.
Conrad hitched his coat higher around his neck and walked a little faster. He wished he had someone to walk with him. He also wished that his first thought wasn't about how quickly Luce would just eat someone if they tried to come after him with a baseball bat. He smirked a little. Or maybe he would just stalk them for the rest of their life and become their best friend once they came of age.
Any way he looked at it, the man – vampire – was unimaginably fucked up.
Perhaps because of how empty the streets were, Conrad caught himself chuckling and shaking his head. Whatever worked for them, assuming it did work. At least Luce hadn't picked a punk or a psychopath to foist his thorny affections on, and those same affections hadn't permanently compromised Lamont's sanity. Wondering over the dynamic and the years between the two men, Conrad's smirk drifted into a frown. He was in the middle of a sudden and uncomfortable thought train (which culminated in the unexpectedly relieving fact that if Lamont Toucey didn't want Luce near his neck, he was almost certainly barred from his belt-line) when he turned a corner and something pale caught his eye.
Conrad stopped in the middle of the silent sidewalk and squinted through the rising steam of his breath, pushing his glasses up his nose.
Twenty paces away, a bit of early-morning fog had settled under a tall streetlamp's decorative base. It wouldn't have been so strange had the rest of the street and the rest of his walk been completely devoid of fog. The visible length of the street was bare and dark, scraped clean of anything except the glitter of concrete. Skin prickling, Conrad glanced around nervously, suddenly reminded of the pitch-black sky above him and the sallow moon at his back.
There was a complex translucency to the fog that tricked his eyes, made him reluctant to walk into it or past it or near it. The lamps farther down the street shone through it, or so he thought, until he realized that two orangey lights were shifting with the fog with a disturbing viscosity, like yolks bobbing in a pool of egg-white. He stared blankly, trying to figure out the twists of milky layers as thoughts of crossing the street and sprinting home slowly drained from his mind.
Before he could, the fog unwound itself from the spool of the lamp and drifted off to the left, into the blackened mouth of an alley. The hidden chill rose under Conrad's skin, flash-freezing him down to his bones, then abruptly misted into the cold night. As if a white tendril had snuck around his ankle and tugged, he stepped forward just enough to watch it leave. Then it winked at him.
The winking light in the fog, drifting around the corner, made him feel curious. So very curious. His skin prickled and, abruptly, he couldn't feel his skin at all.
Before he knew it, Conrad was walking along after it, trailing his hands over the brick walls to keep himself on the ground, taking each step as if he were on stilts. It felt as though he were feeding the white wisps of his breath to the presence sliding ahead of him, or that it was gently teasing them out of him like a spinning wheel. Something hooked into his deflating lungs and dragged him along, away from the street and its row of yellow lights, soft and interesting and completely devoid of fear or anything at all.
He went into an alley. Far into an alley, into the catacombs he had never dared venture, each time lured around a corner by an almost playful ringlet of fog.
A year later, Conrad turned a corner, gloved hand sliding high on the brick, and the whole city seemed to freeze around him in an icy wood-print of shadows. At the end of a dead-end alley stood a tall shape. A man.
The figure stood just far enough from a security bulb to be reduced to a column of heavy, damaged fabric and just close enough that, when he raised his head from the depths of his voluminous hood, two round blue lenses caught a glaring flash of yellow.
"Doctor Achenleck." His voice carried clearly through the freezing air between them, despite the clean white strips of fabric cocooning the bottom half of his face. He raised his hand, producing a loud leathery creak. "I mean you no harm."
Clutched in a glove, half-hidden by a fold of his tattered jacket, was a thick, antique pistol.
Conrad's brain saw it, registered the crescent complexity of the safety and the trigger. He took a step backwards, eyes dry and wide, but it was too small. It was only when a white wisp — the fog — snaked behind the man's broad leathery shoulders and reared what was suddenly a peaked, rat-like face with two glinting orange eyes that the rest of Conrad's breath melted from the crystals in his chest and he gasped it out, turned and ran.
The old brick hallways around him had become a catacomb of dumpsters and drainage pipes, and he couldn't remember how he had gotten there. That fact made his chest crunch up like a soda-can, made him stumble and crack his shoulders on the walls as he turned one corner, then two, panting. He couldn't hear anything through the rasp of his own breath or see anything past the visual scrape of black brick walls, but he could feel the silence behind him like a void sucking at his ankles, broken only by the lightest of scrapes. Conrad could almost feel the cold blue air flowing around the billowing weight of heavy leather, twisting and snapping soundlessly, movements too quick to be human.
He made it halfway down the widest of corridors before the silence ended with a shocking bang.
Conrad's body went limp as his leg was blown away, except that the flesh and the bone was still there: everything was still there, save for a precise hole that burned white-hot. The pain paralyzed him so completely that he couldn't scream as he hit the ground, face slamming into cold prickling concrete. Sensation shockwaved through him, streaking from his jaw and his leg and crashing in his gut, fraying his nervous system. His consciousness flickered and failed to blow out and then left him torn and exposed, a stiff bones-and-skin weight on the ground.
Throat too tight to breathe, he lashed out with his arms as he heard footsteps approaching from impossibly far away. Then a hand fastened around his ankle and lifted him sideways. His vision jerked; the jolt brought his bleeding leg twisting against the ground and agony lanced up his knee and side and brainstem and he arched violently, gasping.
His blunt gloved fingertips scrabbled at the concrete as he was dragged over the ground for minutes and minutes, shoe skittering from side to side, leaving red fishtails quickly absorbed into a coating of sewage water. By the time the man threw his leg down, he was already shaking in anguish, bringing his hands in front of his stinging face to protect himself or curl into the ground and disappear.
He moaned brokenly when the man shoved them down and a sudden pressure across his chest (a knee) forced a pained grunt from his throat, overloading his constricted brain. The man's wrapped face was inches from his own, bringing his panic raging into the base of his skull. A chemical smell rushed his senses, familiar and toxically strong.
"Doctor Conrad Dillon Achenleck."
The man's voice was deep and sharp, yet inexplicably distant. Cold and packaged into dangerously even syllables. A bolt of new terror ripped through Conrad's liquidy gut as his hunter took a raspy breath, sending the chemical smell into the air again.
"Twenty-seven. Homosexual. Employed as assistant coroner at a local police station. Hobbies include sketching and cooking. Born and raised in the city. Strained relationship with separated parents."
Conrad's face was too numb to feel the leather finger that forced itself under his lip and against his gums but his eyes strained upwards in fear, breath puffing furiously through his reddened nose. The man with the heavy brass goggles looked into his face, head cocking to the side in an oddly mechanical, quizzical gesture.
"Human."
About the time he tasted leather and blood and bleach, Conrad realized he was whimpering around the finger in his mouth. Stupid things, brainless things that were true but didn't relate to the situation in any way. Absolving shit like please don't know I haven't done anything wrong please get off of me please please stop I don't know you I'm innocent. Panic overcoming fear, Conrad tried to twist away and the man pinned him calmly, grip firm even as it was suffocated by the layers and layers of fabric.
"You ran," the man said in the same even tone. "It was unnecessary. However, I will release you as soon as you give me the information I require. You will note that, considering the severity of your wound, it would be wisest to comply quickly to minimize risk of infection."
The big technical rat-tat-tatting words dissolved into nonsense syllables in Conrad's head, making him swallow hard and fast as he tried to find his own.
"What — what do you —" he croaked out, disbelieving of the very ground under his aching head, but the man pressed him into it curtly.
"You will tell me the location of the vampire known as Luce Darnall Worth."
"Wh-what? Luce?"
The name almost made no sense to him. Then: pale skin, fangs, puffs of fur. Luce Worth. He fought to hold onto the concept of the vampire, mind reeling too violently to cope.
"I … I don't know where Luce is. I don't. I don't. I-I've never known, he's never told me," he chanted with weak breaths, voice winding higher as the pain in him rose then spiked to unbearable as a hand came down on his leg and forced it straight. He cried out hoarsely, head snapping back. "Please don't hurt me, fuck, please don't kill me—"
"Your unnatural involvement with his kind—"
Conrad gagged and twisted away as much as he could when two hard leather fingers jabbed into his neck, where two starry scars sat under his jaw.
"—may be only the beginning of why you will burn, Doctor Achenleck. You are a sodomist and a heretic. But I hold no ill will towards you. This is a professional calling. I am giving you the closest to deliverance you may ever receive. If you answer me and fulfill this purpose, mercy may be taken on your soul."
The man waited above him and Conrad could do no more than try to take the pain clawing its way up his spine and the sweat trickling down his neck, head twisting from side to side.
"If you answer me, God will not be the only one to spare you further agony," the hunter finished in an awful monotone, blank goggles shining in Conrad's face.
When Conrad could do nothing more than gasp and pant, ground down to a knot of pain, the man moved off of his chest and reached down. Conrad shrieked as a splitting sensation lanced up his leg, the product of the man's fat gloved thumb jabbing into the bullet-hole and twisting. He felt the fragile bow of his fibula slither to the side, felt the ball-and-socket pull in his red knee. He felt the grate of seams on flapping grizzled tissue and the pulse of the red-slicked tear, and his stomach heaved violently, pulling away from the unimaginable pain.
His cry petered off then jerked back into a wretched scream, so hard and loud he could feel the blood fill his face and clog his veined neck, prickling. The man's hand slammed his chest flat to the ground, keeping him still.
"No, no, god! Please stop, please!"
He was screaming now, keening, and saliva was pooling around his numb tongue and edging towards his cinched throat. His jaw shook, locked open. His fingers were clawed around the man's arm so hard they hurt even as the agony in his leg sucked all sensation towards it, leaving his hands dumb and cold. He couldn't breathe, with the noise pushing out of him like vomit and the sickening bleach smell pushing in. Couldn't see why this was happening, couldn't see anything.
"You will tell me the location of the vampire known as Luce Darnall Worth," the man repeated above him, voice terrifyingly close, now with a faint edge of urgency or anger. The hand on his chest dug in, pushing him flat to the concrete and making his ribs creak. "You have allowed him to violate you six times. He has entered your home. You know where he is, or where he is likely to be. Answer me and this will end."
The finger jabbed deeper and Conrad was suddenly screaming for Luce, yelling his name shrilly to the band of night sky above him. Begging him to come and save him, he was always there, why wasn't he there now? Conrad couldn't think about the police and why no one was running towards such primal sounds: he was not in their world anymore, nor they in his. He was alone.
Voice cracking, he should have called for the Detective or Hanna but he screamed for Luce, desperate for a white coat and skinny-strong limbs to tear the weight off of him. Conrad called until his breath ran out and then sensation began to retreat from his brittle limbs, bringing the cold in harder and faster than before. His vision had begun to dim when, dislocated, he heard something slam into the body above him and stinging air and bruises replaced the hands.
"Piss off, ya fuckin' sop!"
Something struck the closest wall, followed by a brief struggle. Under the low roar, Conrad heard the shuff of a coat flaring, the thump of two shoes hitting the top of a dumpster. Eyes flickering open, he turned weakly towards the sounds. His heart jumped haltingly to hear a dangerous growl, guttural and familiar.
"Nothin you'd want with him, Abby. He ain't yer type. Not near enough bite to 'im."
To his left, almost too high to see, the hem of a scummy white coat hung off of the side of a closed dumpster. Conrad breathed out hard and fast, quickly overcome by the convulsion of relief and the blurry burn in his eyes. It forced him flat to the ground.
He was afraid to say the name, even in his head.
"Worth. I was certain I smelled you."
The man's voice came from somewhere to his left and Conrad curled instinctively, dragging his bleeding leg closer to his chest.
"Le's skip the hygiene cracks, Hellsing. We known each other too long fer that. Where d'you get off packin' lead into pedestrians?"
"Incorrect. Pedestrian implies a lack of involvement. This man is a most calculated product of circumstance and favor and a curious divergence from your habits. You alone should know what a rare opportunity he presented to me."
A scrape of shoes, the sound of leather falling straight.
"Fortunately, you are sloppy and indiscriminate in all things."
"Aw, you still talk so sweet. Thought you'd lost it, love." Luce chuckled high above him, the spiteful sound of a car back-firing. "What brings ya ta this armpit of a city? I had ya pinned fer a California boy."
"Many things called me here, most of which a degenerate could not hope to understand. Too fortunate, that I should be able to secure your filthy skin after dispelling the situation here."
"Ah, Abby, ta get that ye'd hafta touch me," Luce nearly sing-songed, smug. Far below on the ground, Conrad heard the tinny sound of something tapping idly against a brick wall. "But I gotta say, m'hurt. When'd I get knocked down ta second place in yer kill-list? I thought I had a special place in yer chest-hole, bein' yer personal fuck-up and all. Er was it just lust?"
"When the fate of the world hangs in the balance, sacrifices must be made. My calling here only delayed your death, never replaced it."
"Ooh, is the apocalypse finally here? Fer real this time? You been waitin' on that fer a good long while. You must feel like a kid at Christmas."
"Your heresy will not be tolerated," the man hissed, tone sharpened by a cagey flap of leather.
"Won't it, now?" Luce's voice came wanderingly from above, impossibly confident. "I gotcher toy, Abby. You come any closer er mess with that blood-bag at yer feet and I'll give you a big wet kiss. Yer delicately fucked, as the sayin' goes, an' I wanna know somethin', now that we're stoppin' ta talk fer the first time. How come you've been trackin' me like a dog when all the good sires're out there skippin' round in the moonlight, suckin' down humans like juice-boxes an' makin' babies? This is a regular vamp metropolis fer the big guys and yannoe I've always been a roach compared ta those blokes. Can't even lift a car – ya do know what a car is, right?"
The alleyway was silent again, dense air hanging like pressurized gas: the curt snap of a safety created a spark that nearly set it on fire.
"This won' kill ya, but me spittin' in the wound just might. I'd speak up."
"You are a different kind of difficulty. A rare disease I must address personally before battling the source of all illness."
The man's voice radiated an immeasurable coldness, a fervency made somehow more potent by the restrictive calm of his tone. A low grunt from Luce prompted him further.
"I would say you underestimate your own importance, but yours is a wretched kind of harbinger. A perversion of a perversion, a break in the structure of evil. I will stop at nothing to eliminate you before you can spread your contaminant."
"Oh, that what all'a this is about? I could tell ya I ain't plannin' on havin kids anytime soon … ain't exactly the parent type, kin barely take care'a myself. Then 'gain, don't think that'd change your mind. After all, there's so much more standin' between us. Like how I don' clean behind my ears, fer instance."
"On your feet, abomination. Weapons are secondary to faith."
Conrad heard the click of a pistol and the creak of wood and struggled to make a noise, but his throat was sealed, his limbs too heavy to lift. The roar rose in his ears, where it had been lurking since he stopped being able to scream. He felt himself being dragged under by the emptiness in his leg, and fought against it, because Luce was so close.
"Didn't think so," the vampire grit out above him, then made what sounded like a sigh. "Alright, you've been waitin on it long enough. One more thing, though. How 'bout a toast, 'fore we get after it?"
There was a thick slicing noise and it could have been Conrad's battered imagination, but the alleyway was suddenly the quietest place on earth. In the dark of his own lids, it felt like the depths of a cave so far away from light and sound that insanity wasn't far behind. Something dripped onto metal, echoing, and Luce chuckled in a way that could only be described as sly.
"Aw. Ya don' look excited, puppy. Thought maybe ye'd wanna drink me dry like everyone else. Here I was bein' generous … but this scares ya, doesn't it?"
"Death robbed me of fear," the man grit out, low and harsh.
"Nope. I kin see it. This scares ya shitless," Luce drawled, chuckling again. Several more slicing noises wettened the frigid air. Conrad heard the man draw back with a scrape of his boot, heard him breathe in sharply. "But I guess death robbed ya 'a that, too."
"You are flouting God."
"An you fucked with the wrong guy from the very beginnin'," Luce answered in a growl so ripe with rage that Conrad's chest froze up. He turned his head to the side just in time to be bombarded with a rush of noises that ended in the cold slap of thrown liquid, a snarl and the sound of a body being dashed against a wall.
"Catch!"
The last thing Conrad heard was the sound of thousands of tiny hard things crashing to the floor, scattering and bouncing underneath a monstrous roar so furious it shook the floor and blotted out every other sound. He recoiled inside his cold mind, reaching for the lurking blackness. He felt what he hoped was two stick-thin arms shoving underneath his limp legs, then agony shorted out his every molecule and he bled out in the darkness, that roar still rumbling on beneath his skin.
Waking up was a slow process of crawling onto a grey plane without arms or legs.
It was hours or minutes before he remembered his body. The first thing Conrad did when he got control of his face was frown into his condensing senses and, after a moment, try to turn to the side. The second thing he did was shout in pain, even if it came out as little more than a wretched moan because he couldn't open his mouth fast enough.
All at once, he felt the fabric underneath his hands and the warm air, compounded by the heaviness of his body, and all of it together sent him into a silent panic until something slapped him loosely on the arm.
"Aw, quit yer belly-achin. If y'got enough blood ta whine, you'll live."
Conrad opened his dry eyes and looked down his chest, which was shaking with his unsteady breaths. He was in his bedroom. His dry, warm, closed bedroom. A yellowish, skinny form was hunched above his feet, glowing in the light of his bedside table.
After fumbling to his right, the coroner's hand fell on the cool plastic rims of his glasses and, with the addition of a thick layer of glass, Luce's naked torso condensed into sharp lines, thousands of scars still hatching his sallow skin.
His collarbone looked like a wound, it was so deeply dug into the clay of his chest. He was covered in blood. He looked distinctly unhappy.
"Luce," Conrad whispered, relief too intense to feel rolling through his aching body.
"Mornin', peaches," Luce mumbled dully around a pair of scissors, red eyes fixed on something near Conrad's feet. Conrad followed his gaze and his face fell, mind refusing to believe there was so much blood on his bed. His denial was encouraged by the glossy crinkle of his comforter, which he followed until it ended in a chain of busted rings to his right. His shower-guard. He was on his back, bleeding onto his shower-guard, which Luce had ripped off and put under him.
'Nausea' wasn't even close to the rotten sensation that bloomed in his gut at the sight of so much wet, fresh blood.
At Luce's elbow was what could only be described as a kit. A kit composed of kitchen knives and a knife-sharpener, the peroxide Conrad always kept in the cabinet, and was that a pair of tweezers? His vision weaved to see red smeared down the silvery, perfectly maintained blade of his curved fish-knife.
Don't be sick, don't be sick.
"What was — what was that?" he choked out, turning away from the gore. His bedroom was suddenly an alien landscape, a haunting cave as unrecognizable as the fish-knife with blood suspended above his precious comforter in droplets and dribbles and perfect plastic shower-splash beads. "Oh god, what was all that?"
"That was Abner Vanslyk. Congrats fer survivin' a date with the craziest vamp on earth."
Conrad stared blankly at the sharp shadows of Worth's wiry shoulders as the dead man abruptly ripped out a length of ace tape (the sound made Conrad's heart punch his lungs and all three organs made a mad scramble for his throat) and snipped it with his teeth. He watched uncomprehendingly as Luce wrapped it around the handle of his delicate trimming scissors and pressed it flat, then heard.
"He was? A vampire? But he was hunting you! And said —"
"He's a fang who hunts other fangs," Luce cut him off, inspecting the scissors. "Or a psycho hunter who just so happened ta get turned and didn' see any reason why that should mess with his night-job."
Conrad struggled to understand, but was overwhelmed by the separate struggle to remember. His memory was contaminated with pain, a disruptive virus in his normally expert code of memories. Even then, the things he recalled most clearly were the hardness of the concrete beneath his back and the nauseating scent of bleach, not things he wanted to flash back to at that moment.
"How?" he asked weakly, not knowing what he expected. Luce looked up at him with a vaguely annoyed expression before bending forward and digging the small scissors into the blackened fabric of his blood-soaked pants, snipping brusquely up the side.
"All I got's hearsay, but he was the best around. Legend. The real Van Hellsing doin' God's work, figger. Then some sadistic fucker — eh, can't say sadistic. Abner offed his whole clan and he wanted revenge. He went nuts, turned Abner himself. Figured it was all he deserved and that he'd go insane himself and 'probly jump on a stake 'cos he hated vamps so fuckin' bad."
Conrad hissed and recoiled when the vampire lifted his knee up enough to cut under it, peeling the sticky fabric away from his suddenly cold leg. The scissors, red with blood, clanked back into his kit. The vampire took a moment to sniff around the injury and yet another to poke at the shreds of Conrad's pant-leg, making the coroner grimace and catch his breath.
"Thing is, he went insane. Then he came back to the surface and figured he'd keep doing what he'd always done. Drains a good portion of the vamps he kills, too, when he's not experimentin' on 'em, which is a big fuck-all no-no. So now he's a super-strong immortal fucker out fer the rest of our skins."
With no warning, Luce reached in and ripped off the fabric around the clotted wound in one great snap: Conrad cursed sharply, but Luce didn't seem to hear or react. He just stared at the black-red mess on the other side of the soaked fabric, scruffy face almost pensive.
"Great plannin, that."
It took a minute for the sting to fade, and another for Conrad to look hesitantly at the gelatinous pock-mark in the taut white skin of his calf, cold blood beading all around, before he realized he didn't want to. It was, in fact, the last thing he wanted to do at that moment. It required realizing that he had been shot.
"He eats other vampires?" he asked hoarsely, trying not to shiver or think too clearly.
"Yeah. Makes 'im stronger. An he thinks he's there ta protect humans, not eat 'em. Word says he's been alive for the good part ovva millennia and never once bit a human. That alone'd drive you insane. Think hate and habit're the only things keepin' him alive."
"What was that smell? Was that – "
"Bleach."
"Bleach?"
"An' before that it was lye."
Luce was starting to get cross. Conrad could tell from the grate of his voice, which had descended into a terse growl, but he could also hear anger in it. Anger that possibly wasn't directed at him or the bullet-wound he was staring at so intently. Tension was crawling up the skinny vampire's spine, lip slowly curling back from his teeth.
"Fucker bathes in it, practically gargles with it. That mummy-job on his face is cos he's a wacko germaphobe but he does it to keep from smellin' blood, too."
"How long has he been … hunting you?"
"Since he realized I wadn't dead. Not in the way he wanted, anyways," the vampire muttered, holding the fragments of the pant-leg up to the light. He poked a finger through the bullet hole and pressed the scraps back together; the gore sealed the seams, presenting an intact length of cloth. He snorted softly, satisfied, and threw it aside onto the shower-guard. "Good thing he's his own worst enemy. Regular superstitious nut-job, has all kinds'a hang-ups. All ya gotta do is know where his buttons are. He'll be pickin' up that rice fer a few hours yet."
Elbows numb from propping himself up, Conrad tried to process everything. The hunter was a vampire himself. Vampires could eat other vampires but weren't supposed to. Luce had managed to avoid being killed by an overqualified psycho for god only knew how long, and only by parlor tricks. Then, most amazing, he realized the absolute unrealism of being rescued from said hunter by Luce, who could have been anywhere at three a.m.
"Oh god. Oh fuck," Conrad gasped, shivering in the chill wind of the near-miss. It was worsened by the flat tone with which Luce spoke of avoiding the demon, like he was a mall-cop instead of a killer. He stared down at the undead man at his feet as if doubting his very presence. "How did you f-find me?"
"Wacko an' me have the same hobbies, 'parently," Luce answered. "I was followin' you too."
That was the last straw. Conrad made a weak, hopeless noise and fell back on the bed. He was three steps away from hyperventilating, if just to make himself pass out and spare his cramping mind the next few minutes or hours.
"It was a clean shot, but the bullet's still in ya," Luce grunted suddenly below him, the annoyance in his voice accompanied by the tinny, terrifying scrape of metal against metal. "Thass gonna be a bitch."
Conrad looked down in time to completely flip his shit at what he saw.
Before he could scream oh god are you even qualified, the long knife-sharpener from his Jacob Mantolo kitchen set was already two inches deep into his destroyed leg and he snapped the wrong way, arching hard against the bed. Could feel his voice clogging in his throat again, prickles rising up his neck as he hissed silently. He was banging his fist on the bed, saved by Luce's cold, monstrously strong hand holding his leg down. Even through the deafening nerve-scream of pain, he felt the clink of metal and metal and then the sharpener was out of his leg.
He dragged in a ragged, whining breath and pushed it back out again with a violent curse as the tweezers went in right after, prodding for the blunt end of the bullet. He could feel it shifting in the tight clench of his flesh, pushing up against the oily inflamed swelling: his body's desperate attempt to make the ragged edges of the hole touch again and heal. He gagged and bit his fist, whimpering sharply and then roaring as he felt the cold nugget move too clearly to stay sane, and then articulacy devolved into pure pain and then, finally, greyness.
"Oy, faggot."
Conrad didn't know when he fell back on the bed, didn't know how long he'd been there, but the slapping at his face was light and sharp, different from deep and burning. His eyes fluttered open. Luce was above him, deep lines under his eyes and between his brows.
"Don' pass out. Hard part's done. Yer a half-ounce lighter."
Conrad mumbled weakly, but his exit into oblivion had already closed: he was in for the count. He breathed and tried to steady himself, then nearly kicked out with his good leg when another burst of pain hit him. With white hands clamped around his ankle and knee, Luce was licking his leg, brusquely working into the wound and sucking.
Conrad's stomach prickled half from the idea and half from the slippery, painful sensation and he tried to yank it away, but the attempt hurt like hell and came as little more than a nudge to the vampire. He huffed, neck red.
"Do you, uh, mind?"
"Yer leg's beggin' ta be a ball'a pus after takin' a bath in that puddle, and I was comin' fer a bite anyways," Luce snapped, looking twice as fierce with a ring of cold blood layered over his sneering mouth. "Least you can do is lemme take the edge off."
"Great. Go ahead. Have fun. My body is … your buffet," Conrad said hopelessly, because it was all he could say, then fell back and moaned silently again, clammy hands to his face.
But in that darkness, abiding the shifting contact at his leg, he thought. He thought about what was happening below him and what had been happening since he had woken up and probably before. Luce with tools. Luce with blood on his hands.
The business with the scissors and knife sharpener – a makeshift protrusion rod, like the type he used at the morgue to track bullet trajectories – wasn't any clumsy skill forced through Luce's porous yellow skin by sheer number of years alive. The way the vampire worked was skilled, ordered. He knew exactly what he was doing inside and out. Knew what tendons to avoid.
The way he was licking, he was cleaning, and Conrad remembered that whatever Luce licked healed faster. He was taking care of him, or at least his body. And it was a natural process. A practiced response.
Conrad's hands fell from his eyes.
"You used to be a doctor."
"Still a doctor," Luce Worth responded after a long minute, eyes still sharp with his work. Conrad propped himself up again and stared at him in something like awe, realizing he knew nothing about the once-man at his feet. The way Luce wasn't looking at him, intricate veiny hands wrapping the gauze up his leg with a watchmaker's precision, made him seem even more like something to watch, but never touch or know.
"How did … you become a vampire?" Conrad asked before he could stop himself. Luce's skinny fingers froze on his knee, jaw locking. Conrad swallowed, not awake enough to feel the drop of his stomach or wonder if he'd made a mistake. "I heard some things. Before I passed out."
Luce looked up at him and kept his gaze for a long time, then pulled away from his leg, fully wrapped in snowy white.
"Make do with what ya heard," he said shortly, voice rough. He got to his feet, head still bowed as he wiped at a splotch of dried blood on his skeletal chest then reached for his tools. "Ain't yer business. Yer good fer now. Go ta sleep."
"Was it bad?"
"What part'a shut up and sleep is yer ear fuckin' up? You got a bullet in that, too?" Luce snarled, threat obvious in the clench of his bloody fingers over the knife sharpener.
"I just, I can't — you want me to sleep?" Conrad demanded, trying to communicate where the comprehension gap lay: it wasn't the idea that his body could stop working (oh, that was very possible) but the idea of letting it happen like there was nothing wrong and remaining helpless in the dark for seven subsequent hours. "You're insane. He's still out there and – for fuck's sake, y-you ripped out my alarm system."
"Yer alarm system was shit. And yer best defense against Abner is yer front door," Luce told him as he gathered his kit and then dragged the shower-guard off the bed, crumpling it. The caving planes of his chest as he worked made him look bare and fierce and almost barbaric, as hard as his glare. The sharp yellow light of the lamp hit him like desert sun, making Conrad think of scraggly trees and red earth.
"He's a real vamp, all rules apply. Old blood. You don't invite him in, he can't get ta you. Can't get inta anyplace you think of as yours. Just keep your dumb yuppie mouth shut, try an' work durin' the day and you'll be safe here. He doesn't want you dead anyways."
With that, Luce walked the plastic tangle to the bathroom and threw it into the tub, following it with all the tools, which hit the bottom with earsplitting clangs that made Conrad almost bite his tongue in half. He stepped back, too thin to comprehend, and wiped the rest of the wet blood off on his black pants. Reaching for his coat, which was hanging limply from the counter, the vampire walked back into Conrad's bedroom proper and stopped to sling the furry red-stained thing over his bare shoulders.
"Last time I checked, he doesn't kill humans. That was 'bout a decade or so ago, though. He might'a updated ta get more with the times."
Luce turned and started for the door, a simple and final motion that made all manner of alarm-bells go off in Conrad's head.
"Where the fuck are you going?" Conrad demanded. Luce stopped, looked over his shoulder. That little turn wasn't near enough: the majority of his stick-thin body was still facing the door. Conrad's heart did not cease its sudden pounding, but actually sped up. "You are not leaving. There is no way in hell you are leaving."
Luce looked genuinely perturbed. Conrad would have felt proud of eliciting such an honest emotion if he hadn't been completely out of his mind and burning with an inexplicable urgency to keep the vampire in the dark room.
"Figured I'd skip the self-righteous bullshit and get the hell out," Luce muttered. When Conrad stared at him with wild eyes, he turned around with a dry expression, brow arched. He crossed his stick-thin arms. "Dunno if you got the memo, but when shit like this happens, normal people usually take righ' abou' now ta start bitchin at the freak that got 'em dragged into all'a this. Recoilin' in uncomprehendin' fear and all that."
"You think I don't know that?" Conrad nearly shrieked, voice cracking with his own disbelief. He struggled to form coherent words around the knot of his stomach, teeth grit so hard it made his jaw ache. "I should hate you. I should have hated you way before this, if just because of the windows and the stalking and my door and my fucking keys, don't think I've forgotten about my fucking keys. But I am more afraid than I have ever been in my entire life, and I've spent – god, I've spent years being pointlessly terrified of every little fucking thing so that's saying something. I am anything but normal. I don't care what I'm supposed to be feeling, and I really don't give a rat's ass how much you want to vanish into the night and not deal with me."
Luce's mouth opened, lips already hiked over his fangs, but Conrad's voice burst out of his tight throat like a geyser breaking through rock, his finger pinned on the vampire's bony chest.
"You got me shot. There is a freak out there who smells like bleach and wants both of us in an unimaginable amount of pain and I don't see how throwing you out is going to make me any safer and no your vampire invitation bullshit doesn't make it all better. He already knows we're together or whatever we are, so we are, so you deal with my ass. I say you stay, you stay."
It all came out in a rising shout and, when he stopped, Conrad realized he was shaking. His trembling fingers knotted into the fabric of his sweater-vest, still clotted with the last of the grime from the alley. The charcoal fabric looked like rough concrete, moisture beading atop it. Conrad swallowed heavily.
"I just … can't be alone right now," he whispered to the sheets and his wrapped leg. "I think I'll go insane, if I'm alone."
He felt Luce staring intently at the bow of his neck and just waited. It wasn't long.
"An I'm starved. If I stay, I'll bite into you."
And your level of blood-loss says that's not an option, the doctor hiding under the stubble and scars seemed to say, red gaze unflinching. Conrad felt all the strength drain from his chest, a hopeless chill settling in like lead and weighing him towards the bed. His leg ached. His head hurt almost worse.
He couldn't even breathe right, but that swirling anaerobia gave him the fierceness to just return Luce's stare until the vampire snorted and shook his head.
"Yer fucked up, peaches," he said, voice gravelly, and turned for the door again.
Conrad jerked towards the door, mixture of anger and almost piteous disbelief spiking sharp in his throat, but a sharp and excruciatingly exhausted just wait a fuckin' second, Jesus Christ ya whingin' ninny left him with an order he could follow. Bolt upright in bed, Conrad sat and waited, head ringing and empty. His entire self was poised on the motionless door, waiting for the inward swing. Like he promised.
A few minutes later, Luce slouched back into his bedroom with a dark plastic bag in his spidery hand, which he chewed into and began to drag down like it was the most disgusting fruit punch in the world. The package had a slightly yellowed label with a large B and a plus on it. A blood-bag.
"Where did you get that?" Conrad nearly whispered, then, louder, as something dawned so quickly and violently it wasn't like dawning but rather exploding (and he knew he was looking for something to get pissed off about so he didn't get really, really scared), "Where the fuck did you get that? You didn't have time to – my fridge. You've been keeping human blood in my fridge!"
"Don' lookit me like that, puppy," Luce snickered, and the sound was infinitely reassuring no matter how weak and hoarse it was. "Y'never use the bottom drawer."
Conrad tensed up, riling, then found his body had too many holes to hold so much outrage. The coroner swallowed and found himself empty again, light-headedness returning with a vengeance. Watching Luce sit down on the edge of the bed and choke the blood down with a truly nauseated, crunched expression, Conrad figured hazily that if he never noticed, he truly had no room to complain.
The fridge was too big for one person, anyhow. Always had been.
After Worth drained the bag and crumpled it like a juice-pouch (its oily swirls of leftover blood stuck to the plastic, Conrad tried not to look at the plastic sheet in the tub) and tossed it aside, he shucked his jacket and climbed into the bed with a distinctly annoyed air. If Conrad hadn't been staring with something bordering desperation, he might have missed the exhaustion radiating from Luce Worth's bony body, the faint shake of his stick-thin arms, but just the dip of the mattress was like a hand on the coroner's shoulder or lower back. There was a weight next to him, meaning he wasn't alone.
Letting out a shuddering breath, he laid down, knowing he would be protected for now, and that was all that mattered. But, cruelly, laying down with Luce and facing his silent bedroom was the first acknowledgment that life would go on … or that he was expected to continue after this.
He reached out. His hand clamped around Luce's side and at the first touch of solid, safe skin he was muttering something, something that sounded suspiciously like Jesus Jesus Christ oh fuck but all he could hear and feel was the rising pitch of it and the knobby hardness of his knuckles in his bloodless shaking hands. His chest jerked as he didn't cry but just breathed like he had wanted to in the alley, sucking in lungful after lungful until the clench of shortage eased from his chest — until he was too numb with oxygen to remember what the vampire's knee felt like across his ribs, poised to snap him in half.
Luce's chest was cool against his forehead and the vampire didn't move away but let him shiver and cling to him, hand on his shoulder, until existing came naturally again. The pain and the early hour caught up to him and he breathed himself into slow, deep rhythm. Soon, Conrad was asleep. In the half-dark, Luce tensed as if to roll away from the coroner's loosening hands, then stopped and glanced at the curtains and the broken windows behind them. He looked at the wintery glow shining through, then at the warm light of the bedside lamp.
At last, he put a hand over Conrad's leg and tucked his blood-speckled face into his warm neck, counting himself into a matching oblivion with the soft jump of his patient's steadying pulse.