CHAPTER SIX:
Do Keep Up.
Godric's P.O.V
The strike came five days after the phone call, just as Godric was becoming impatient and restless. Certainly, the trickster was already here, she had to be, he could sense her lurking around the bend, skulking the peripheral corner, skirting in the shadows. Only she was teasing. Drawing out the suspense. Or trying to unsettle him, Godric was less sure of her motive but he did discover she preferred the long game.
Godric, however, was more patient than a recently arisen Dhampir, and she attacked on the fifth night, bored of her own games and, perhaps, Godric's nonchalance.
Godric found their bodies in the kitchens. Four of his five nest-mates, motionless on the linoleum, silver knives dug between the third and fourth vertebrae of the neck. Not enough to kill a vampire, but the silver halted their recovery leaving them paralyzed on the floor. They would heal as soon as the knives were taken out.
Blood was sprayed on the floor in drops like stars on a constellation atlas, speckled with comets. They were huddled and lumped by the kitchen cabinets at the far right, a heap of bodies, and, there, by the third's foot was a different mark, a spread, a drag.
They had been moved there, Godric knew. Hauled and placed meticulously to look as if they had all fallen in the same spot, perhaps fighting the same assailant, but nonetheless had decidedly not. The Dhampir must have forgotten to clean that particular mark up before they sprayed the room to look like a battlefield.
Godric strolled into the dimly lit kitchen, stayed close to the left, and crossed his arms over his chest, cocking a brow as he glanced to the highest cupboards lining the wall, right above the pile that was, in truth, a lure.
"I know you are in there, little one. I told you this won't be so easy."
The creak of hinges echoed in the dark, as the cupboard door right above the heap arched open. Astonishingly green eyes glowed from the depths, the Dhampir having bent and screwed themselves tightly into the small space, only capable due to its astounding plasticity.
It was the perfect spot to pounce on him if he had, as she likely planned, gone to release his nest-mates from the silver daggers in their necks.
Honestly, he almost had if he had not spotted that mark by the boot.
She unfurled from the cupboard, one pale hand, a softer calf, sliding to the floor barefoot, bloodstained, with the grace of a spider descending from their web, listless opulence of a marauding predator. She grinned beneath a tangle of onyx curls.
"Hello, love."
Her bare feet didn't thud on the linoleum as she landed, barely a squeak of skin on plastic, crouching on the ground before straightening up, staring at him through the dark. She was dressed in an over-sized shirt Godric noted, dotted with blood, just red enough to be fresh.
She'd fed recently.
She regarded him from across the way, head tilted to the side inquisitively.
"You're shorter than I expected."
Godric blinked, and then slanted his own brow high. The Dhampir smiled and nodded.
"Point taken."
Then the dance began.
And it was a dance, languid, smooth, she began to edge to the side, near the far wall, front keeping face to him, lurking just out of reach, and Godric matched her steps, orbiting.
"Did you truly believe that ruse would have worked on me? I'm a little insulted, Dhampir."
Momentarily, she paused by the wall across the way, where Godric had originally entered by the closed shuttered window. She grinned toothily, double fangs glinting beneath a tarnished stretch of red.
Yes, she had fed very recently.
It would be an awful shame if she had ruined her appetite already. Godric himself was famished.
"Not really, no. However, do you know you and Eric move the same way?"
She shrugged delicate shoulders, a hand from her side coming up to flick at the tail of a slated blind.
"I suspected as much. After all, you are his Maker, aren't you? As a Maker, you taught him how to feed, how to fight. You two may have different music, but you dance the same foxtrot. You keep your fronts to me and like to circle around. It worked for Eric because I had never seen it before."
Fast, then. Fast, and keen, and intelligent.
Her hand dipped beneath the blind.
"Which makes it terribly easy for me to lead you exactly where I want you to be, and with a little mess on the floor for good measure, you look down when you should have been looking up."
Her hand pulled away from behind the curtain, holding a rope of some kind concealed by the blinds. Godric glanced up to the ceiling just as she pulled the knot in the slender cord free.
The silver chainmesh came sailing down, right over Godric's head, burning upon contact. He rumbled viciously as the links burrowed into his skin, sinking to his knees in sudden off-guard disbelief.
A week ago, this, perhaps, could have crippled him.
Yet, as the Dhampir had, he too had fed recently.
Fresh blood made a world of difference.
With a lingering growl, and a heave, Godric ripped the silver mesh off, shirking it away to the blood-speckled floor where it landed with a resounding thunk.
The Dhampir gave a disappointed sigh.
"Do you know how long that took me to make? You can't just pop into Costco and buy pure silver chainmail. You have to thread and weave that shit yourself."
Coming to a stand, still steaming in places from the swiftly-healing burns, Godric regarded the small being before him.
Fast, keen, intelligent, and resourceful.
What a delightful bundle.
"Now I'm impressed. You had enough foresight to plan ahead and prepare for your enemies' vulnerabilities. Not many newborns have the fortitude to do so."
Godric poked a sandal sole at the chainmail beside him, careful not to catch skin.
"It does make me question where you managed to scavenge so much silver from in such a short amount of time."
Neither dared move, not a step or stage, but the Dhampir did grin.
"A few poor Texan jewellers are going to wake up with their stocks empty. You know what they say, don't fight harder, fight smarter."
Godric smirked in response.
"At the very least, only smart enough not to realize, at my considerable age, silver would only anger me and not restrain."
She thumbed the curtain once more.
Another surprise?
Just how many cards up the sleeve did she have?
"Or, say, clever enough to distract you with that so I can do this."
Another diversion.
It was not the hand at the blinds that produced the next dance, but the one she had hidden behind her back, the one she had kept out of sight since the very beginning. A charming sleight of hand, not a card, no, but a remote.
The remote that controlled the shutters of his nest.
She flashed it at him before she flicked the main switch.
The automatic blinds began lifting, and Godric frowned, disappointed.
It was early into the night but well into moonlight hours. Whatever the Dhampir-
Sunlight began to pour in through the opening cracks.
Godric hissed and stumbled back, hitting wall with shoulder blades, just as a beam of sunlight, swelling, began to split the kitchen asunder. The light cleaved the room in two, practically imprisoning him in the far corner, and, luckily, the motionless bodies of his nestmates in the only other darkened nook.
The Dhampir stood beside the light, haloed in gold that sparked those ungodly green eyes to an inferno.
The bends of the kitchen offered little shade and protection, but the chamber was not overly large…
Gaining his bearings, Godric edged towards the light, lifted his hand, and singed his fingers.
It was real sunlight then, and not an illusion.
Remarkable.
Maddening.
"I thought we agreed no magic, little witch."
She span the remote deftly through her fingers, like one would roll a coin over knuckles.
"No, we agreed I would not use magic in the fight itself. No one mentioned anything about beforehand. You know, the witch ward is outrageously rude of you."
Godric slunk as close as the ajar door shadow let him, a tiny triangle of moving space.
"And yet, seemingly pointless."
She hummed low and long.
"It works, alright. Whoever you called in to do it did an infuriatingly good job. only, wards only protect the area they encompass. A foot outside, and I can still spell this or that."
She waved a hand through the light, fingers teasing sunshine.
"Do you like it? It's a spell of my own making. A little night-time disillusionment charm I set up just outside of that nasty ward you have up over your home. Makes you vampires think its nice and safe and dark and, just when you come flooding out of your nests, bam. Good morning Vietnam. Trying to get it to bypass your call for sleep was a little more difficult, but I won't bore you with the details."
The blood on her fangs.
The flush to her cheeks.
… A streak of ash on her calf.
She must have seen him looking.
"What? It was one little nest. I had to see if it would work before I tried it on you, now, didn't I? Call it being sensible. A rarity for me. See, you've already taught me so much."
Godric… Well, Godric laughed.
"A magistrate would call it murder."
The Dhampir folded her arms over her chest but her smile never waned.
"Murder, you say? Then should we both pretend you have not fed recently? Oh, in the last..."
Her nostrils flared, a leisurely intake of breath, a savouring hold in her chest.
"Two days, at least, from what I can sniff out. Quite a lot, by that delightful scent you have going on. You smelled a little like cardboard in the beginning. Fragile and dull, but now… Well, It seems we've both been prepping to get the upper hand. Were you hoping I'd have a nibble? Naughty."
She's trying to redirect him.
It very nearly works, if not for Godric knowing the real good stuff was yet to come.
"I said a magistrate, not myself. Here raindrop, lesson one free of charge."
Bracing himself, Godric flashed through the sunlight, snatched the startled Dhampir by the arm, and threw her over to the darkened side of the kitchen. Before she could so much as get her footing, Godric was beside her, in the shadows, hand wrapped around a pale, thin neck, and slamming her into the wall, pinned.
"Sunlight only works with exposure longer than six seconds. If a vampire can cross that distance before then we only get a little singed around the edges. This is not an overly large kitchen. You would have had better chances in the living room."
She had just enough room from the hand around her neck to nod, excited.
"You should have thrown me towards your nest mates."
Her arm shot out, elbow crooked, and smashes backwards, into the wall-
Into the fire alarm system by her head.
The sprinklers above burble to life, raining cold water down upon them.
The Dhampir glances to him, up to the raining water, down to him glistening, up, down, and huffed.
"How bloody embarrassing."
Godric wanted to laugh, but instead catches a drop on his finger of his spare hand, presses it to his lips, takes a sip. Just as he thought.
"Holy water is a myth, I am afraid. But where on earth did you get so much of it?"
He saw the ripple of her own lip, a tongue being ran over teeth.
"Seventeen priests, and a mega church. They just let me walk right on in. One even offered to baptise me."
She then lunges for his wrist, supple enough to reach, and Godric has no other option but to drop her lest he wanted her notable fangs lodged into his palm.
She darted away a step before he could get a hold of her again, but she made no other move.
"You've been here longer than I thought."
She had managed to spell outside his wards, find and steal his blind system remote, refill the water tanks in the basement with holy water, and, given her already extraordinary track record, Lilith knew what else.
"Four days, give or take an hour or two. You lot slumbered away as I tinkered about. Do you know your nose curls when you dream? It's quite adorable, really."
How did he not smell her from a mile off, as he could now?
The Dhampir chuckled, almost as if she could read his thoughts.
Worse still, or most electrifying, anew, Godric could not determine which, she had gotten close enough to him, right over him as he slept, watched him slumber, crept into his own territory to play plumber, and he had not felt a damned thing.
Nothing.
How disconcerting.
How thrilling.
"Now, now, I'm not going to give all my secrets away. A girl has to keep some mystery about herself."
She paused, as did Godric.
"Traditional fight, then?"
Godric nodded and gestured over to the window.
She laughed at him.
"I said traditional, not fair. You're a few thousand years old, aren't you? I can smell it, like aged wine, the good stuff with the gold label on the top shelf… Gotta give a girl a fighting chance."
She grinned, all teeth and fang, and then swung.
Godric ducked, tutting.
"Never be so obvi-"
He was cut off by the unnatural bend of her leg sweeping backwards, curving over herself like a scorpion tale, around, as she kicked him, almost impossibly, in the chest.
Godric went sailing backwards, clipped the door, cracking wood and brick and plaster.
Not just flexible then, but unbelievably elastic.
Nevertheless, Godric ducked himself, missing the next swing of a closed fist, and heard the shutters coming back down, delving the home into sweet, sweet darkness.
She had not, Godric thought, changed her mind for him. No.
Darkness was a Dhampir's favourite hunting ground. Sunlight may not hurt them, but they were a nocturnal breed, and biology was a hard thing to fight. Especially when said Dhampir was, by Godric's instincts, only a few weeks old at the maximum.
Unfortunately for her, it was a vampires' favourite place too.
She kicked again, but Godric was faster this time around, managing to grasp her leg before she could shift it back, and with a good grip on her hip and toss, she was airborne, sailing into the granite countertops, breaking stone and marble.
She bounced back onto her feet as if he had merely thrown her down on a soft mattress.
And she was gone.
Vanished.
The speed of which she had to have moved for someone like Godric, a vampire his age, not to see, not even a flash, must have been astronomically rapid.
He listened to the house.
Silence.
"So this is the game you wish to play? Alright, little one, I will bite."
Godric sidled out of the kitchen, keeping vigil, listening, waiting, into the unexpectedly dark hallways.
She'd blown all the lights somehow, at least on the ground floor.
"You do realise darkness not only enhances your vision, but mine also?"
Godric, however, had one thing the Dhampir did not.
Patience.
There was no need for him to search.
She would come to him.
And she did, halfway down the hallway, she leapt from the ceiling corner from upon high, laughing.
"Peek-a-boo!"
She amazingly managed to get an arm partially draped around his shoulders before Godric could react, the scrape of something sharp and keen catching up his throat, a fang by the waft of something warm against his skin.
She used her curved arm to swing around him, pole vaulting to the side where she could get a good bite, but the extra movement gave Godric extra time, time between her legs wrapping around his hip to attach, to really be able to sink her fangs in, lock him into her deathly grip, and time for him to wrangle a hand into her t-shirt, into her shoulder, tearing her off, flinging her down the lobby to clatter into the stairs.
The wooden bannister snaps beneath her body, shattering.
"You will have to do better than that."
However, she was already up, crouching, snarling, and then-
Then a fragment of broken bannister, a plank of jagged wood, was in her hand, and then it's sailing through the air right at him.
Godric had no time to duck or dodge.
He barely had enough time to register the wood skewering him through his bottom left ribs, with enough force to send him back into the hallway wall, piercing him to mortar and grout.
Hot pain bloomed in his chest, dragging a seething hiss from tight pressed lips, and-
Godric had not felt so alive in nearly a millennium.
No one had been able to make him hurt, make him bleed, for five hundred more years above that.
There was no chance, however, to think much more of this, of things perhaps best not thought of at all, before the Dhampir was speeding towards him.
Godric had endured much graver pain than a little splinter in the rib, and he managed to wrench himself free just in time to crouch and lunge as the Dhampir got close, to hook a shoulder at her waist and send them both crashing through the opposite wall.
She too must have lived through her own fair share of hurts by the way she took the blow so readily, so easily, with barely a flinch.
They tumbled in the dark and dirt and debris, grappling to get the upper hand.
"What kind of vampire has wood in their home?"
A punch to his throat is met with a knee to the abdomen.
Her green eyes almost glow in the dusk.
"A risk taker? Apathetic? No... Truly? Suicidal?"
Godric swept her feet out from under her, got her down on the ground in a tangle, twists a forearm against her throat, and surges down cruelly as he growled.
She only laughs.
"Hit a sore spot, did I?"
He knows what she is doing, for he does it himself.
Half the fight can be won by getting into someone's head. As soon as you're in, you've won.
He almost feels sorry the young Dhampir already knows this.
She went to twist, to wiggle out, but his knee plants itself at home at her sternum.
She goes to twist, to wiggle out, but his knee planted itself at her stomach, keeping her planted like a butterfly to parchment.
"What Dhampir comes running headfirst to spar a vampire more than ten times her age? Not suicidal, you enjoy life too much for that... But one who is running away, perhaps?"
Oh, she does not like that.
Not a bit.
The reaction was instantaneous.
Her pupils blow so wide there was barely a slither of green left, fangs peeled back to show, a deadly roar, low and dangerous, singing in the air.
Her leg swung up from his side, bends, hooks around his neck with that astonishing tractability, choking as thigh and calf squeeze into a noose.
It knocked the air right out of him.
Possibly a good thing, then, that he did not need it.
She squeezed harder.
His neck nearly broke, almost snapped cleanly into a right angle.
Godric had to dislocate his own jaw to get his head out of the hold before she could pop his head off.
Thankfully, for a vampire of his age, their healing was virtually instant, and his jaw bursts back into place as soon as his head is free. His next words, however, are a little garbled as the muscle around the joints knotted back together.
"Hit a sore spot, did I?"
Evidently, the Dhampir did not like having her own words mirrored back, as she slipped from beneath and scampered off into the dark, disappearing.
Godric got up, spinning, never staying with his back to one particular place for very long.
She was still in this room, he thought.
He could feel her there.
A tickle to the back of his neck, the rising of long-thought-dead hairs.
She was watching.
Waiting.
"The same reason you believe you are here to give me as a gift to Eric, I suppose?"
He scanned the room, all the dark little nooks and crannies she could bend and twist herself into, searching for a hint or glimmer of a Dhampir ready to dive.
He found nothing.
"You want a feeding ground. Now why is that? Your Sire isn't denying you food, now, is he? No, I don't think so. Neither is Eric. Perhaps it is not in the way you wish you had food, but you are not so selfish as to care for the means or methods. So... What is it you truly want? Control? Power? Status?"
They were the only rational reasons Godric could currently think of that would warrant so much effort on a young Dhampir's part. That would see a Dhampir risk life and limb to fight a vampire immeasurably more experienced. That would see her come so far, do so much, right here, right now.
She was fast, she was resourceful, she was intelligent.
This was not just a game to her.
It meant… Something.
A voice spoke up from right behind him.
"For the silence."
Godric whirled around, blinked at the sight of a nimble hand inches from his neck, so close to victory-
Falling.
The hand fell, and the Dhampir was left standing there, hushed, still, almost…
Almost mournful.
"I want silence."
Godric does not understand, not right away, and she appears to know this, seems to understand what a strange turn of phrase it is, as she met his eye. Nevertheless, he does understand one thing.
The desperation in which she speaks with.
"Do you know what a Horcrux is, Godric?"
Godric does not grimace, but he is close to doing so.
He had never had the unfortunate luck of running into one of the foulest pieces of magic, but he had heard of it, had been in Greece when that ghastly little magician Herpo was active.
Godric's only regret was he had not ate that contemptuous man sooner.
The Dhampir appeared to expect this reaction. Of course, she had. She was, despite her quite mad plan, rather sane.
"You do, don't you? I can see it on your face. The... Disgust. It's always disgust."
She smiled, but it did not reach her gaze, not as it had before.
"I was a Horcrux."
It was a statement, as quite as could be, but equally as assured.
There was no lie there. No invention, or tall tale, or falsehood.
Her voice was achingly honest, and terrible, and agonizing.
Possibly, this was the first time she had ever admitted this.
Godric's gaze drifted to the prominent scar upon her forehead. He had thought, when he saw her descend from the cupboard, that it appeared cursed, that it must have been more than what it appeared to be.
Dhampir's, even in their human phase, did not scar easily.
He had never thought it could be remnants of such dark magic, such… Pain.
Godric's master had been one to dabble in the dark arts-
He cut that thought loose and left it to drown somewhere dark.
"There was a man called Tom. A wizard. I was barely a year old when he… When I became what I was. When he… When he made me. I grew up with him in my head. Always there. Always listening. Always… Talking. I didn't notice at first. I didn't notice for a long while. I thought that was just how the story went, you know? When you've always had a voice in your head, you don't think it's strange, you don't stop to question if anybody else has it."
She swallows, Godric sees. A grieved bob in her throat, trying to swallow laments.
"Like a house, I suppose, I didn't realize my foundations were rotten from the inside out."
She took a step away from him, as if she could walk away from what she was speaking.
As if it were ever that easy, Godric thought.
"It doesn't matter in the end. Whether I was conscious of it or not, Tom was there. Pulling my strings, whispering, always chip, chip, chipping away at me. By the end, I didn't know where he began, and I ended. That's what happens when you're possessed by someone else, be it in love, or magic, or law. They steal everything from you. They take it all. You have… You have nothing left that isn't marked by them. They… they stain you. They entangle themselves so far deep into you, into your life, that without them you're not sure of what's left… What scraps of yourself you could maybe stitch back together to look a bit more fuckin' human."
Godric couldn't help thinking of his own dreary beginnings then.
The smell of piss and shit in the crates of the Roman slave markets.
The friction burns of a too-tight collar.
The hissing of flesh branded with a master's mark.
A mark he still bore to that day, as this Dhampir bore her scar.
A slave is a slave, no matter the cage.
"And then I died. There was a war, and Tom… I died, and so did he… But I came back. I came back. Do you know what surprised me most?"
Godric slowly shook his head.
"It wasn't resurrecting. It wasn't that I had somehow, against the odds, survived what no one else ever had. It wasn't even the dead bodies piled around me, friends, enemies, children… It was the silence. Tom was gone, and it was… It was just me in my own head, and it was so fuckin' quiet."
Godric remembered the day he killed his owner, his Maker, the man that had took, and took, and took. He remembered sitting there, in the Villa, next to the pile of ashes. He had not ran. He had not hid. He had simply sat there, from dawn to dusk, in the shadows, wondering what he was supposed to do when there was no one there to order him to do it.
He had struggled with that for a long, long, long while.
"After the war, I just… Drifted. I locked myself away in my Godfather's home. I sat staring at a mirror for hours, wondering who the fuck was staring back and… And no voice in my head answered back. For the first time in my life, there was only silence. There was only me."
Godric realized his fingers were trembling.
He too knew that time, he too had wandered, from country to country, aimless, goalless, but free.
No one ever told you that you sometimes had to learn what freedom meant. What knowing yourself takes. How hard it is to take that collar off your neck.
This Dhampir knew.
And Godric wished she never had to learn those lessons.
"For those raised in coops, the outside world can seem scary, but I… I took that step out, and I saw the sky, and, Merlin, I was free. I didn't need to worry anymore. Every thought, every feeling, every mistake and misstep… They were mine. Mine alone. And then the hunger came, and I died again, and… Here I am, and-"
She met his gaze, teardrops cresting on lashes, but never falling.
"I fought, bled, and died for that silence. My silence. It's my silence, Godric. Mine. I will make it rain blood before I ever let anyone else take that away from me again."
And it all tragically fell into place.
Influence, status, power? None of the above. She was not here as a Dhampir… She was here as a girl fighting the chains and cuffs being locked down around her. Another brand being heated over the coals.
Godric knew that fight all too well.
"You were brought to your Sire for him to control you."
Her nod was stiff, rigid, unforgiving.
"They want to swap Tom out for another. This Bill fuckin' Compton might be a better man, he might be kind, and caring, and nice, that's what Sanguine says... But a leash is still a leash, be they studded in diamonds or spikes. I won't go back that. I can't go back to that."
She chomps down tight, the muscle in her jaw jumping. Godric picked up where she left off.
"You thought if you got Eric on your side, if you managed to find your own feeding ground, there would be no use for a Sire, and they would leave you be."
She laughed, and there was no humour to be found in the sorrowful sound.
"Leave me to my silence? Yes. They're not going to, are they? You don't get to walk away from being a Horcrux."
You don't get to walk away from being a slave, either.
Yet, Godric had.
It had been a brutal, treacherous, lonely road to walk.
Perhaps the hardest road to ever be travelled down.
Godric had escaped. Godric had survived. Godric had lived. He, of course, still had lingering thoughts, dark thoughts, about that point in his life occasionally. Sometimes, rarely, he still had nightmares. He could not stand the taste of grapes, and the smell of olive oil, and the certain crack a whip makes in the air still made him startle, but… But he had lived.
He carried those memories with him, but they were not him.
He was more than what his Maker had made him.
As this Dhampir was more than what her Tom made her.
Godric had walked that road by himself… But this Dhampir did not need to.
He stole a step close, braced his hand upon her warm shoulder, surprising him momentarily, the heat, and the Dhampir flinched, teeth flashing, possibly believing a hit was coming, of course she did, but the blow never came.
And she froze.
Unsure of the kindness.
Unsure of the compassion.
Unsure.
"Yes you do, and you do not ever let anyone tell you otherwise. You are more than the mark upon your brow. You always have been."
His hand slipped from her shoulder.
Small steps.
The Dhampir shook her head as if she scented something offensive.
"As soon as I go back, they'll get Bill to order me to stay. To... Not be me. To be good. They'll think it's for the best, they won't see what-"
Godric's chin lifted.
"Then you do not go back alone."
She frowned at him between the inky curls that had fallen over her face.
"Who the fuck would I take back? The priest that wanted to baptise me? Your nest mates I have stacked all in a pretty pile? I don't know if you've noticed, Godric, but I'm not really doing well in the ol' friends arena."
Godric inclines his head, catching her gaze and holding.
"You have a friend in me."
Her eyebrows shot up.
"The vampire I came to abduct?"
He grinned.
"The vampire you were honest with."
She searched his face long and hard, and she must have found something there, in the shadow of his own haunted gaze, between brow and bone, because, suddenly, she knew too.
"Does it ever get easier?"
Sometimes, truth is not pretty, and it is not easy, but it is what she deserves.
"No… But you learn to live with it, and in time you see it is not all there is to you."
She ran a hand through her tangled hair, snagging at curls, looking disgruntled.
"You know, I didn't mean to say any of this right? I really did plan on hogtying you and carting you back to Eric with a bow on your head. This impulsivity thing is... Unsettling. I talk before I ever think to."
Godric shrugged.
"You could still try. The option is still there. I cannot promise you will win, I will not play at being a weak, but it would be your choice."
Between them, through the short stretch of distance, from two very different lives that had walked analogous paths, Godric held his hand up, palm open.
"Or you could choose a different course. It is up to you."
That was the heart of the matter.
Godric had, by the widening of her eye, for the first time in this Dhampir's life, given her a choice. And it would be hers. If she wanted to fight, they would. If she wanted to leave, she could. This was hers alone to decide.
The Dhampir eyed his hand as if he were offering her some strange, foreign, creature.
"You could be saying all this to lure me into a false sense of security. Buying time until you could get Bill or Eric here to wrestle me down…"
Godric kept his hand out, open, soft, and nodded.
"I could be, yes. Do you think I am."
It was important she thought about this herself, that she made her own mind, her own first choice unhindered by goading or coaxing or persuading. It was also a mark to her intelligence to question his motives.
She stares at his hand for a long while.
And then she slipped her own into his. Small, warm, scarred, a little fragile, but holding a strength not many would ever understand.
"No I don't. I could be wrong, it wouldn't be the first time I trusted the wrong person, but... You know. You understand."
He nodded and flexed his fingers gently.
"I do."
He leads her to the door, next to the ruined wall they had come crashing through.
"Now let's go wake up my nest mates, and let Eric know where you are so he is not left scouring Louisiana another day. I'm sure he is ready to erupt in frustration."
She goes back to smiling toothily, a little lopsided, a little too wild, a little too much, and it soothes something inside Godric.
"Oh, that reminds me. Careful in your back garden. I buried a lot of gas tanks out there ready to blow if they're stepped on. I'd get someone to dig those up if I were you."
Godric laughed in the dark.
"Have you booby-trapped my entire nest?"
Her laughter joins his own.
They make a pleasant ring together.
"Not all of it, no. You didn't expect me to come fight an ancient vampire, with no magic might I add, and not try and at least level the playing field? But I'd warn visitors of the spike pit I dug at the end of your driveway."
How did she have time to-
How had he not noticed a-
Never mind.
It was better left uninvited, Godric thought.
Eric's P.O.V
The door to the rental car slammed shut behind him. The rental car Eric had to take out because someone had stolen his Corvette, the cool air of night-time Dallas crisp.
Eric sped towards Godric's nest up the winding driveway, minding the strange square whole down the bottom of the road.
A night ago, after hours of experiencing the strangest emotions, poignant, hot emotions, from Godric through the, finally, open Maker Bond, Eric had received a phone call from his Maker as Godric had said he would do.
Only, it was not Godric on the other end of the line from Pam's cell.
It had been that minx.
Harriet fucking Potter.
The reason for his stolen car. His lost phone. His missing Corvette. His damned high-speed rush to Dallas.
The conversation had been short, swift, and troubling.
"Is Godric dead?"
A laugh.
"Of course Godric's dead, Eric… But yeah, he can't come to the phone right now. He's in the spike pit. Come to Dallas. See you soon blonde and blue!"
A dead line.
She had hung up on him, and had not picked up from Godric, or Eric's, phone since.
Nothing.
Silence.
Stan had not answered.
Isabelle had not answered.
Nothing was coming out of Dallas.
It was a fuckin' Bermuda triangle.
The rest of the night had been a blur of movement, getting a car, driving like the wind, telling Compton and that Sanguine fellow some flimsy excuse of being needed in Court, leaving Pam to distract them, unsure of what Eric would be walking into, what retribution he would give if she had hurt-
Godric had not been the same… Vampire he had once been.
All it would have took was one right move at just the right time and-
He knew how fucking slippery that Dhampir could be when she really wanted to move.
if she had hurt Godric, Eric would rip her head off her shoulders and-
He made it through the door, shouldering through the pliant wood, and found Isabella in the hallway, ashen but relatively untouched.
If she had stood by as-
"Eric?"
"Where's Godric?"
She blinked at him.
"In the living room, the private out in the back, if you would just-"
But Eric would not just, he was off, away, bursting into the room, ready for blood and ash and-
Godric was sitting on the sofa, perfectly, fine, fresh faced-
Flushed… He was flushed, with a mug of blood, real blood, in hand and…
Smiling.
Not just smiling.
Laughing.
Harriet was sitting beside him on the sofa, bare, mud-streaked feet up on the table, clothed in a fluffy dressing gown of all things, looking right at home between the cushions and velvet, her own mug of blood between her fingers.
Godric spotted Eric's looming figure first, but it was Harriet who reacted.
"Oh, hello. It only took me five hours to get to Dallas. What took you so long?"
For the first time in an age, Eric found himself spluttering, lost for words, pointedly ignoring the smirk on Godric's face.
"Long? Long? You said Godric was dead."
Harriet frowned and glanced to the man in question.
"Of course he's dead… He's a vampire."
Eric thundered into the room.
"You said he was in a spike pit!"
Realisation washed over her pretty little face.
"Oh, that, yeah. He was digging up the stakes I had buried down there. He didn't want one of you lot tripping in and meeting the true death. I thought I said that over the phone?"
Eric spat like a cornered cat.
"No! No you didn't! You simply said of course Godric is dead. He's in the spike pit! How else was I supposed to take that?"
Harriet shrugged indifferently.
"Not my problem you obviously have a hearing problem-"
"Hearing problem? What-… And when and why did you bury stakes in a pit?!"
Godric smiled and chimed in to Eric's mounting confusion, seemingly enjoying this far too much.
"She was trying to kidnap me."
Spike pits, stolen cars, kidnapped vampires…
Harriet had been gone a total of ninety-six hours.
How-
Eric staggered over to the open chair and sagged in, rolling his neck.
"Kidnap? You came all this way to kidnap... Godric? Why would you... Where did you... How?"
Harriet actually rolled her eyes at him, sipping at her mug.
"Your phone had him listed. The only one with a real name and not a… Bodily feature, by the way, which was a giant red flag. You might want to hide your ties better. Honestly, Eric. Keep up."
Godric smirked wider, fangs showing a little.
"Yes, Eric. Do keep up."
There was a sudden bang from somewhere in the house, and a shriek followed by a stream of muffled southern tinged curses.
Stan.
Harriet's smile glinted.
"That would be the silver nail bomb I hid in the bottom floor bathroom shower."
A.N: THANK YOU all for the followers, favourites and the lovely reviews! I can't say how many times I've read every single one, and I just wanted to thank you all for all your kind words. I hope you all liked this chapter, and if you have a spare moment or two, please drop a review, and I will hopefully see you all soon!