This is an M/A Halloween tale written as a patr eon request for Eleeka. If you would like your own tale, you can follow me on Patr eon, the link is in my bio.
Ships will include Jelrayza, and Graylu. There will be blood and violence and sexual content, we're delving into the world of vampires, and they do not sparkle.
Part I: Secrets in your tea
The halls are cavernous and cold, white floors, white walls, white ceilings. The only contrast is the huge windows bracketed by thick black drapes—velvet, to keep out the daylight. They're thrown wide now, and nighttime bleeds in. It feels like every star in the sky can be seen through this single bay window.
Gray tries not to touch anything. Erza notices. She notices everything. Her mouth crescents. Her lips are painted the same shade as dried blood and Gray knows it's for his benefit. She never wants him to forget what she is. She always wants him to think about how dangerous she can be.
If only she knew she stalks his nightmares. Telling her such a thing is giving her too much of an advantage, however, so this is a secret Gray will take to his grave.
"This way." She beckons him over the threshold and into another great and empty room. There is but two loveseats, made of more velvet with swooping backs that reminds him of shapely women. It feels wrong to sit in ones embrace when they've been so informally introduced, but when Erza Scarlet suggests you sit, you do not ignore her.
"A refreshment?" she asks as soon as he's settled.
"Uh—" He hesitates, unsure of the proper protocols when visiting the home of your nemesis.
Erza's painted lips curl. "Tea?"
"That's an unnecessary inconvenience."
"Nonsense. I'll be back." She sweeps by, trailing the heavy train of her scarlet dress.
Gray stares after her, feeling uneasy. She has plenty of servants to do the menial work for her. Why did she leave? He feels the grains of the sharp ash stake tucked in under his cloak for reassurance.
"If you pulled that out here, the treaty would be moot, and we'd be within our rights to punish you as we see fit," interjects a voice as smooth as honey.
Gray closes his eyes and counts to three before he opens them again and finds Erza's consort. He's closer than Gray is comfortable with, suddenly, and inexplicably, on the loveseat opposite. He didn't hear Jellal enter the room, let alone cross it, and settle down on the cushions. Gray swallows the sour taste in his mouth.
"The treaty doesn't mean very much these days, does it?"
Jellal lifts a single eyebrow, a slightly bemused smile on his mouth. "What makes the ignoble Fullbuster say such things? Is it because you staked and killed one of our own the night before last?"
Gray can still feel the stake sliding through rib bones and cartilage. The cool blood splashing on his hands. The heady, inescapable stench of iron choking the air.
He swallows.
"Your hands are shaking."
Gray balls them into fists and holds them tight on his knees. "She was attacking me."
"She was a child."
"I don't think I have to tell you how illegal that is," Gray hisses. Nothing emboldens him like the moral high ground.
Jellal simply shrugs. "It wasn't any of ours that turned her, but a life is a life, and she was protected under the treaty act."
"Unless she breaks the treaty," Gray reminds him.
Erza suddenly appears at Gray's back. She bends forward and her long rope of scarlet hair slides over her shoulder and over Gray's as well, smelling like Roseberry. He wishes she smelled like congealed blood. A good dose of nightmare fuel would quell any fascination he has with her.
Her long fingers curl in the collar of Gray's cloak and pull it aside, revealing the four petite teeth marks the child left behind. She tuts. "I heard she bit you."
Gray leans away from her, though there's nowhere to go. "It was unavoidable."
Jellal's eyes dance with something like mirth. "Yet, when I suggested the same, I believe you used some expletive inappropriate for polite company."
"It's not against the law if you ask for it, right?" Erza enjoins.
Gray musters all the indignation he can and pulls his collar from Erza's hand. "We're here to talk business."
Jellal speaks again. "I prefer topics of pleasure. Should we pick up where we left last time?"
Last time is a blur of whispers and silk, lilting ballroom music, fingers crushing fabric and humid breaths pleading for a taste of his blood, all beneath the eyes of the public.
Gray can feel himself flushing from his head to his feet. His tongue feels swollen, and his mouth is dry, and he can't tell if he's afraid or slightly aroused by the pressings of these two very real, very dangerous creatures. "I was being diplomatic."
"Don't tease him, Jellal. You know he's sensitive." Erza, thankfully, comes around the front of the couch and hands Gray his tea. He doesn't sip it, conscious of the case two decades ago where a coven drugged a woman's dinner and then sipped from her like she was a punch bowl filled to the brim with wine, giggling and mildly self-destructive as only a drunk can be.
She folds herself into the seat beside Jellal and drapes over him casually. These beasts have been together for a century or more. No one knows exactly how long for certain. The records are spotty and folk tales are rampant in an age where only the wealthy are educated.
Gray wants to put his tea down but there's nowhere to set it, so he holds it and glances into its amber depths, imagining if he could see poison coiling in them, he would. That isn't above Jellal, and Erza will partake because she likes to be the best at everything, the best vampire, the best destroyer, the best manipulator. And I'm her crowning jewel, he thinks with no small amount of morose. The moment she saw him murder-side at a vampire slaying, a rotted body at his feet and a clipboard filled with meticulous notes in hand, she dubbed him a puritan and has set all her efforts to the ways of corruption. No human cares about vampires were her first words. They're going to destroy you, were her next. Gray realizes now they're was her and Jellal and destroy was just a synonym for torment to the brink of insanity.
"I apologize. Sensitive is the wrong word. Complex? Not yet at home with his desires?" Erza smiles, showing off needle-like teeth that will grow when she's about to feed.
Gray's sweating in his cloak though the mansion is cold. "Will you help me or not?"
"We don't even know what we're helping you with," Erza points out.
He tells himself not to get flustered. It's a losing battle. "Human children are missing in the streets."
"Orphans." The way Jellal says it could be considered flippant. Gray latches onto that and finds his self-righteousness again.
"It doesn't matter who it is. Children are going missing. Their bodies have been found in the river. They're bloated and mutilated, but I found bitemarks. Vampire bitemarks." Erza looks a little more compassionate than Jellal. Gray directs his pleading to her. "Help me track down the culprits."
Jellal answers. "What do we get in return?"
Gray stalls. "Pardon?"
"Well, we're not contractually obligated to help you solve your crimes, that's what the council of vampires is for. You're circumventing them, which is interesting, and though I'm proverbially dying of curiosity to find out why, I won't make you divulge your secret. I do, however, want to know what we get in return."
"The satisfaction in knowing you helped put a murderer in their grave."
Jellal shrugs. "Those children could have been willing participants. You don't know how the conversation went."
Gray quotes, "No child under the age of sixteen may consent to vampirism."
Too late, he realizes Erza has been waiting for his puritanism to remerge. A grin splits her face. "Is there anything else?"
Gray's brow creases and his suspicion skyrockets. "Are you mocking me?"
"When you've been around for as long as we have, your laws seem silly," Jellal says without apology. "But they make you feel safe, and that is fascinating."
Gray's tea spills a little when he clenches his fists again. "I won't sit here and be mocked and threatened. You invited me in knowing the topic of discussion."
"Why don't you drink your tea while it's still hot?" Erza watches the hot water sink into the fabric of the loveseat.
Gray shakes his head. "You owe me a yes, or no answer, now."
Erza meets his eyes and purses her lips. "No."
"Now what?" Jellal elevates his eyebrow yet again.
"Pray you're not involved. No treaty will save you if you are." Gray's heart is throbbing in his chest.
The goodwill bleeds out of his hosts. They get quiet and still, reminding Gray of crocodiles sitting below the surface of the water, waiting for the hapless deer to come waterside.
As calmly as possible, he sets his cup down on the ground and stands. His hands are still shaking. This time, it's adrenaline. If he must pull his stake, they'll steady, but the moments leading up to that, he's a mess.
Neither Jellal nor Erza move, though they both watch him curiously, waiting to see what he'll do. It takes a lot of courage to turn his back on them, but Gray does, and shows himself out.
In the following silence, Erza lifts Gray's untouched tea and hands it instead to Jellal. He sips the burning liquid and smiles.
"Rosary pea? That's cruel, even for you."
"I didn't think he'd drink it," she confesses.
He tips his head back. He can already feel the poison slipping through his veins and clouding his thoughts. If his heart weren't long ago dead, it would have stopped already. Now he feels lucid and dream-like, floating, detached. "Wouldn't want the fun to stop."
"Do you want to bet on if he'll be back?"
Jellal snorts. "That sounds like a bet I'll lose."
"Maybe not. He didn't want to kill us so much the last time."
Jellal's mind sluggishly returns to the solstice ball, when his body was pressed almost tight against both Erza's and Gray's, and he smiles. This is a game he enjoys. Desperately, he hopes this run of cat and mouse never gets tired. He wants everything he shouldn't, and everything that shouldn't want him, including Gray Fullbuster, infamous vampire hunter. "He'll be back," Jellal slurs.
"I hope so."
Erza lifts her dress just enough that she can put her leg over Jellal's. He holds her in his lap and tilts his neck for her. Erza's lips are as cool as his skin, but Jellal feels like he's on fire when she bites and drinks his poisoned blood. It won't sustain her the way human blood will, but it's an act of intimacy that cannot be mimicked.
Erza's clever fingers fuss at Jellal's belt. The clasp clinks when it's come undone. Jellal barely notices. He feels falling-down drunk when you're dizzy and happy and pliant. Even when Erza pulls him out, hard, he does nothing but slouch down a little more to give her a better angle.
Gray hopes to enter his room unheard, but all rooms in the boarding house are attached by this one hallway, and Lucy must have been waiting for his return because her door swings open as soon as the entry door swings closed, and she fills the hallway.
She's in her nightdress. It's supposed to be billowy but clings to her breasts and her hips. Gray's not sure where to look. When he studies her face, it's her plush lips that give him pause. The rest of her body would be inappropriate. He chooses a place on the wall just over her shoulder and hopes she doesn't think him rude.
"Lucy."
She stands in his way and will not let him pass. "Did you go to see them?"
He sighs. "Yes."
"Did they hurt you?"
"No."
She doesn't believe him. "Look at me."
Reluctantly, he lets his eyes track back to her face. Those plush lips have settled into a disapproving frown as she looks for signs of vampirism, red eyes, pallor starting in his lips, a perpetual stoniness settling in his demeanor. She finds none of the signs, of course, and relaxes some.
"What happened?"
"They said no." He can see no point in lying, beyond protecting his ego.
Lucy's shoulders drop with relief. She touches his arm just under his bicep and squeezes gently. "You'll find another way to solve this crime. You shouldn't get involved with those two."
"It would be faster than doing the legwork," he tells her.
"You're good at this." She smiles in encouragement and repeats, "You'll find another way."
Gray holds back a groan. He will find another way, she's right, but how many more children will find their way to the canal, bloated, mutilated, and drained of blood? "I should turn in."
Lucy smiles at him again. He wishes she wouldn't. "Maybe we can have tea tomorrow?"
He opens his mouth to say no, but instead nods. "Okay."
She beams. "Goodnight."
He watches her return to her room before turning to his. He isn't sure what he's doing. Women like Lucy. Women like Erza. Men like Jellal. His sigh is muted by the snicking of his door.
A/N: At the risk of becoming a liar, this is going to be a short sordid tale approximately four chapters long. Which means see you in 80,000 words :') But hopefully not.