"We learned not to meet anymore, we don't raise our eyes to one another, but we ourselves won't guarantee what could happen to us in an hour."

Chapter 4

RAYMOND

An hour. "Fifty-seven minutes," Lydia corrected pedantically, which he pointedly ignored.

An hour. That's how long he'd been standing under this goddamn pier with his thumb up his ass like it was high noon at the O.K. corral and he was waiting for a showdown. That or his drug dealer. It was closer to the former, but it wasn't from Max's progeny that he was expecting opposition.

Just promptness.

It didn't surprise him that they —he'd been reliably informed that they were all coming except Max himself, which made sense, you don't put your king piece out front and center, and the three half-vampires, which made even more sense, were late. It annoyed him, but it didn't surprise him. You'd have to get up pretty early to catch him off guard.

Nevertheless, for the first time in a long time, that was what he felt when he realized there were four and a half vampires walking down the slope of the beach like they were in a music video toward them instead of four.

Surprise.

Raymond, and this came as a shock to exactly no one, didn't like surprises. He trusted half-vampires even less, for the same reason most head vampires didn't trust them either, with one foot in the door and one out, it was impossible to know for certain where their loyalty truly laid, and Raymond didn't like uncertainty.

He knew immediately that the reverse King Kong with the chip on her shoulder the size of Southern California was or used to be the human that killed Patrick. She was trying and failing to keep the wild assumptions rattling around her head from spilling out of her ears, mostly about him, he noted, despite his best efforts to blend in with the piling behind him. Smart kid. Not that smart, otherwise she wouldn't be a half-vampire, but still. He'd never liked Patrick, no one did, so he certainly wasn't mourning his passing, but seeing her in person, he found it hard to believe she could have killed Patrick on her own.

Smart money was on Captain Peroxide over there giving him the stink-eye being the other half of the happy murder couple. There was tension between the two of them you could cut with a chainsaw that the little one in the back was being rubbed entirely the wrong way by. The only one who seemed to be unaware of the love triangle was the girl, and the tall blonde one with a whole lot of empty real estate between his ears, but he probably didn't even know where he was right now.

"Fuck you."

Oh and he was an eavesdropper too, but that only proved his point about him. If he'd learned anything over the years it was that more often than not, keeping his mouth shut was the smartest thing to do, the "keep you alive" thing to do, and if the hollow whistling noise he was getting from Scrappy Doo's head and the dirty look the one who looked like his mother shot up bleach during her pregnancy was giving him was any indication, he'd never kept his mouth shut in his life, not even to breath through his nose.

The wind came up like a bad dinner: violently, and though he thought he was safe behind the piling, it still stung Raymond's cheeks with saltwater and pieces of sand-coated rotting wood, but the only one who seemed bothered by it was the young blonde, who spent the better part of a minute picking her hair out of her mouth.

"You're late," Lydia said, with somehow both the theatricality of Vincent Price and the enthusiasm of a death row inmate at ten minutes to midnight simultaneously. Raymond would have squeezed the bridge of his nose if he could actually get headaches and they weren't in mixed company.

"You were early." He who Raymond assumed to be David said mildly, which was an effortless sidestep of taking responsibility that Raymond had absolutely anticipated. He wasn't here because these boys had good judgment, after all.

I'm always early, he thought so quietly that if they weren't every last one of them vampires, no one would have heard him.

David glanced at him, but otherwise didn't comment.

"Which one of you speaks for Max?" Lydia asked.

David huffed through his nose quietly. "None of us is here to speak for Max. We speak for ourselves, if you want to talk to Max, I'm sure you already know where to find him."

Lydia frowned deeply, not that it was easy to tell with her, she always looked like that to Raymond. "Max does know you're here?"

David took a cigarette out from behind his ear and lit it carefully, blowing the smoke sideways out of the corner of his mouth. The wind coming up from the water blew it directly into the blonde girl's face, and she waved it away violently. "Of course."

"But you don't speak for him."

David laughed. "Clearly you've never met Max."

Lydia couldn't look less amused even if her face didn't already look like a puckered asshole. "Clearly."

"Max played no part in what happened to Patrick," David raised his eyebrows slightly. "unless you're here for something else? I hear the surf is nice."

Lydia didn't miss a step. "So you don't deny that you killed him?" Her hawkish eyes were glued to David now.

"No," David replied, exhaling quietly. His right hand wrapped around the half-vampire's arm absently, and the sound her wrist made when he squeezed it was just barely audible even to them.

The half-vampire glared unflinchingly at him, though the tense line between her untamed eyebrows said just how rough he was being with her. "David didn't kill Patrick," she bit out spitefully without breaking eye contact with him. She yanked her arm out of his hand, but only because he let her, and looked at Lydia directly. "I did."

Raymond laughed quietly with his mouth closed. Say whatever else you wanted about her, she didn't beat around the bush.

"You're the human that killed Patrick?"

The half-vampire's jaw clenched. "I used to be." That was a can of worms they really didn't have time to open.

"Missy," the cigar store mascot said quietly, but she ignored him too. She stepped in front of David.

"Patrick tried to kill me first," she said. "he tortured me."

"That's irrelevant," Lydia said.

"It is not!" Missy said, her pale cheeks turning splotchy, and filling with blood that every one of them could hear.

"Stop talking, Missy." David said, but he sounded too much like Willy Wonka going "stop, don't, come back" to be believable.

"You think David killed Patrick because of me," well, yeah. "he didn't. He doesn't even like me." Keep telling yourself that, kid. "Patrick tried to kill me when I was still human. I just defended myself."

"You did this on your own?" Lydia asked carefully. "No one helped you?"

Missy's heart skipped a beat audibly, but she was still telling the truth as far as Raymond could tell when she said: "They tried to." She tucked her hair behind her ears with both hands, holding the back of her neck nervously. "They wanted to, I think."

"Why didn't they?" Raymond asked. The half-vampire looked over at him suddenly with comically wide eyes.

"David wouldn't let them," she said with a verbal shrug that belied the nervous look in her eyes. "I didn't want them to."

"Why?" Raymond asked. Lydia glanced at him, but didn't comment on his sudden curiosity or talkativeness.

Missy bit her lip so hard it turned white where her teeth made contact with it. "I didn't want them to get in trouble." Despite the fact that she still looked like a cat someone dragged out from under the bed by its tail, her heartbeat was remarkably steady.

"Trouble?" Lydia furrowed her brow. "With whom?"

"I wasn't sure, I just knew there were rules." Only because Dwayne told me, her mind supplied for him. "I couldn't let them kill Patrick because of me, so I lit him on fire."

Raymond was used to seeing memories from other people's perspectives, that was par for the course when you were a vampire, but right away, it was obvious why David had brought the half-vampire with him. Her memories were all over the place, like a ransom note pieced together from seven different magazines, but painfully vivid.

"You lit him on fire?" Lydia asked incredulously.

"Yes," Missy replied.

The little one and the dumbass snickered simultaneously. Lydia barely spared them a glance. "So all of this occurred while you were still human?"

"Yes." Missy said immediately. Raymond saw the trap that Lydia was leading her into before David did, but he still caught on a lot quicker than any of the others did. He tried to catch Missy's eye out of the corner of hers, but she ignored him.

"Patrick tortured you."

"Yes."

"And you killed him."

"Yes."

Lydia tilted her head, pursing her mouth slightly. "How did you know that burning him would stop him?"

Besides the fact that burning anything alive would at the very least ruin its day?

"Well, vampires are really flammable."

David sighed audibly. Missy still didn't realize what the rest of them already had. She'd said too much. She glanced at David nervously now out of the corner of her eye. Why wasn't she reading their minds, Raymond wondered. Maybe she was but she was just dumber than she looked.

"What?" Missy glanced behind her for an explanation, but the dumbass and the little one provided none. Nor did their taller, quieter friend. She looked at David. "What did I say?"

Well, you weren't supposed to say anything at all, said the look David gave her in response, but too much, Missy, too much.

Lydia didn't quite smile, which was just as well, she had one of those faces that almost certainly wouldn't be improved by smiling, closing her trap behind Missy. "How did you know that Patrick was a vampire?"

The dumbass swore under his breath, revealing that he was finally up to speed with the rest of them, but it took Missy another couple of seconds to catch up. "He basically told me," she said nervously. "I think." Raymond could barely keep up with her thoughts now. "I don't remember," Missy said. "I was being tortured at the time," she added tartly. "Does it matter? He's dead."

Not really, Raymond thought, but Lydia was determined to go through the rigamarole of pretending this was about anything other than what it actually was, so.

If there was anything he hated more than vampires, it was vampire politics.

"It matters," Lydia said carefully. "because you were, by your own admission, human when Patrick was killed."

"So?" Missy unconsciously took a step back defensively, as if it made a difference.

"So how did you know vampires were real?" Lydia asked.

Crap, Missy thought.

"Crap indeed." Raymond replied.

"So. How did you know?" To her credit, Missy was trying very hard not to let her subconscious throw her friends under the bus, bur she was also, obviously, too honest for her own good.

"I saw their reflections." Or lack thereof, obviously, and dollars to donuts she was talking about the Wonder Twins, though she neither incriminated them nor denied it. "I just got lucky. They didn't tell me," she was quick to add. "I figured it out on my own." A metaphorical brick wall appeared in Missy's subconscious, but not before Raymond was able to glean two words from Missy's thoughts that curiously peaked his interest, and only because he was really looking. Edgar and Alan. Whoever they were, and they had to be important to her, otherwise she wouldn't have been so obvious about trying to hide them from him, Missy really didn't want any of them, namely him, Lydia, and to a much lesser extent Luther, to know about them.

"That's irrelevant." Lydia said.

"Oh, THAT'S irrelevant?" The blonde with the mind of a dead Stephen Hawking snapped incredulously. Mighty Mouse took a cheap shot at his ribs with his elbow which mercifully shut him up.

"Why is that irrelevant?" Missy asked.

"Because she doesn't really care, she's just being a bitch." Paul, according to Missy's thoughts, said bluntly. "She's saying we should've killed you when we found out you knew."

Missy chewed on her lip, peeling tiny pieces of skin off with her flat front teeth, only stopping when she drew blood. "Not for lack of trying," she looked pointedly at David, who deigned to smile somewhat despite himself. "but that's kind of a moot point now, isn't it?" She glanced at the one whose name Raymond didn't know, let's just call him Tonto. "I mean, I'm already a vampire. Half anyway."

"You know, that's a really good point." Paul slung his arm around her neck, pulling her backwards against his front. He rested his chin on her shoulder and raised his eyebrows pointedly at Lydia. "What else you got?"

"Paul," David said carefully.

"It's not a moot point," Lydia said.

"Regardless," David said. "it's already been addressed by Max. If you have a problem with his decision, you know where he is. Feel free to ask him to justify himself."

Raymond unfortunately knew Lydia well enough by now to know that the look on her face wasn't just because she was a butterface. She wanted to argue, but Raymond was sick to death of this line of inquiry, and of pretending that he or anyone else gave a shit about Patrick or this newborn giraffe of a half-vampire who killed him. If Lydia wanted to waste her time making Sadie and Park's wet dreams of finding some technicality to fuck Max on come true, that was her business, but he wasn't sticking his neck out any further than he had to. "Lydia," he said, killing the next words out of her mouth in the crib. She clenched her jaw, but said nothing.

"That's not why we're here." Not why he was here, at least. He couldn't give any less of a crap about Patrick, neither could Lydia for that matter, but she was nothing if not Park's little bitch, and if he said roll over, she'd roll over, and if he sicced her on Max, she wasn't letting go until she had her teeth in his ass, which was more of an indication of Lydia's tenacity than it was Park's particular ability to inspire loyalty. Park inspired a lot of things in Raymond, chiefly eye rolls, but loyalty wasn't one of them.

"So why are you here?" David was the only one to acknowledge Raymond's grave tone of voice directly.

"Yeah," the one called Paul said. "'cause if you wanted to fight you should've brought more than Tiny Tim," addressing Lydia only still as if he hadn't spoken.

Lydia scoffed quietly through her nose. "If we were here for that reason, we wouldn't be having this conversation." And the half-vampire would already be dead, Raymond thought mildly. Though the reaction he was rewarded with was decidedly not.

The locals responded, with the exception of David, who seemed to be the only one who had any idea what "playing it close to the vest" meant, to his not so thinly inferred threat exactly the way he expected them to, with the little one reaching over and dragging her behind him by the arm pointedly. Honestly he was just surprised they didn't outright piss on her right in front of him.

Of all the bad habits a vampire could acquire throughout his presumably long life, sentimentality was probably the most egregious.

Missy tellingly didn't react, proving to Raymond that she either didn't believe that they really would kill her if they wanted to, or she severely overestimated her boys' ability to keep her safe, or, and Raymond was leaning toward the latter, she couldn't read his mind. That wouldn't surprise him. She was a month old at best if their time-line of the events preceding Patrick's death was accurate, she could probably barely hear her own thoughts. She'd be hard-pressed to tell him what number he was thinking of even if he asked her to.

Isn't that right, Tonto?

The rest of them had been scratching at the door like a dog to be let in, but none of them seemed as interested, or as frustrated in their denial, in what was going on inside his head as the Indian was. He obviously wasn't used to being shut out by anyone, least of all a stranger. Raymond couldn't blame him, his buddies weren't exactly "The Sound and the Fury", his mind probably was a lot harder to read by comparison. That, of course, wasn't saying much. That was a lot like being the tallest midget in the room.

"Then why are you here?" Missy asked, proving how useless her short friend was as a human shield.

"To warn you," Raymond replied. Even in the dark, it was easy to see that she was looking at him, her lips parted in fear, presumably, if her obnoxiously loud heartbeat, and the sharp, almost clinical smell of adrenaline was anything to go by. He gave her credit though, she was pigheaded as hell, clenching her jaw despite the fact that she knew he could read her mind.

"Warn us about what?" She asked. "I didn't think you guys gave straight answers ever. I mean, nobody thought it was a good idea to warn me about the psychotic vampire stalking me." She hit David with a look that could wilt concrete, and made Raymond almost sorry that she was definitely going to die. Only being half wouldn't save her, just like only being twelve hadn't him. Monsters didn't have principles, and the most dangerous kind of monster was the one who thought he was doing God's work, though Raymond didn't even know if he thought Dutton was wrong about that anymore. "So forgive me if I'm a little skeptical about your supposedly good intentions."

Fair enough, but she didn't have to believe him, none of them did. They could all die for all he cared, he was only doing this out of some misguided respect for Simon, and because he cared too much about his own skin to say no outright to Sadie. Maybe he was just trying to lighten the load on what was already a very damned soul. One good deed wouldn't make a difference, but neither would doing nothing, he was damned regardless, and he doubted very much if God gave a damn about any of them, by which he meant vampires. Present company included.

He could feel Lydia's eyes on his forehead. She was waiting for him to get to the point, somewhat hypocritically if you asked him, but not patiently. "First of all," he said, making it clear in no uncertain terms just with his tone just how much he didn't want to be here. "I don't care about Patrick. Or Max's ever growing collection of half-vampires." This time he heard Lydia's jaw clench, but as badly as she wanted to contradict him regarding their actual agenda, she was too well-trained to do it in front of company. At least out loud. Her thoughts weren't nearly as charitable when it came to the chain of command and how she felt about him being in charge. "Patrick," he said mildly. "was a psychopath."

"Yeah, no shit."

"Paul," David said, with a tone of voice that would brook no argument from the taller blonde, and made it abundantly clear that this would be the last time he told him this tonight. "enough."

Surprisingly, at least to Raymond, Paul had enough sense to recognize a last warning when he heard one, and wisely shut his mouth.

"Those of us present who had the misfortune of meeting the late Patrick," he glanced at Missy, who spitefully held his gaze. "know that besides being crazier than a dog in a hubcap factory, he was good at drawing attention to himself. No shit, indeed." He added to Missy, who clenched her teeth quietly and started doing multiplications in her head. "That's why he never stayed in one place for very long. Of course, that just meant more bodies in more places, even the human police can't ignore that, but fortunately for them, and us, they wouldn't know how to deal with it even if they knew what they were dealing with." Lucky for the human police, but then again, if they'd known all it took to get Patrick out of their asses for good was loosing a teenager from the Pacific Northwest on him, Sadie and Park would probably kill themselves out of embarrassment. "Unfortunately for all of us, he got himself on the radar of someone who does."

"Does what?" Paul asked, before he or anyone else could stop himself.

Raymond let out a prolonged sigh. "Know what they're dealing with, moron."

Missy, proving once again that appearances were deceiving, because she certainly looked dumber, asked: "What do you mean? A vampire hunter?" The assembled vampires all looked at her, but it was Raymond who snapped his fingers and pointed at her, saying "Bingo." deadpan.

Missy's mind and heart started to race. It had been a minute since Raymond had been around anyone with a beating heart for longer than the obvious, and it was honestly making his head hurt, but far be it from him to tell other vampires what kind of company to keep.

"A vampire hunter." The dumbass said incredulously.

The little one rolled his eyes. "There hasn't been a vampire hunter that actually knew what they were doing ever," he said. "it's always some Count of Monte Cristo wannabe who's seen one too many movies."

"This one does." Raymond replied darkly. "Trust me."

There was a moment of silence punctuated only by scoffs from Tweedles Dee and Dumbass.

"Who is he?" David asked at the same time that Missy did "What does he want?"

Raymond licked his lips, chewing on the grains of sand between his molars. "His name is Charles Thomas Dutton," the name drew looks of recognition from David and Tonto, and despite themselves, Raymond saw Lydia and Luther tense up out of the corner of his eye. "and he's a vampire hunter, sweetheart, what do you think he wants?" He glanced at David. "I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've heard of him." The expression of David's face all but confirmed this.

"Who is he?" Missy asked.

"Death," Raymond said simply. "and he's coming for you."

"Why? We didn't do anything to him!"

Raymond huffed. "I don't mean to tell you your business, but I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what vampires are." Her expression crumpled. "The Reverend believes he's a righteous man. By virtue of what you are, you have it coming. As far as he's concerned he's just doing the Lord's work."

"Why would your Reverend come here?"

Raymond glanced at the dark-haired one who spoke. "Besides the fact that your town is charmingly known as the murder capital of the world thanks to you?" They, with the exception of David and Missy, collectively gave him a shitty look. "Patrick," he said. "We don't know where The Reverend picked up his scent, somewhere near New Orleans, we think, it doesn't matter, but he followed him, and Patrick led him right to you."

The look on Missy's face, if Raymond cared about her at all, would have been heartbreaking. She really never was going to get away from Patrick, she thought. Patrick was dead, but they were still in danger because of him.

"Whatever," Paul said, looking at Missy out of the corner of his eye. "we can take him." Surprising exactly no one, Raymond thought.

He scoffed quietly. "And you're obviously going to be the first to die."

"Hey, fuck you, Thumbelina!" Paul lunged forward, but the little one caught him by both arms and held him still.

"Correction," Raymond held up one finger without taking his hands out of his pockets, and indicated Missy with his chin. "she'll probably be the first to die." This time it was more than just the dumb one who showed his teeth.

Luther, finally remembering that he wasn't just here to carry Raymond's purse, appeared in front of him, standing so close that his back was touching his front, which considering he was still leaning up against the piling, felt a little unnecessary.

Raymond sighed.

"We didn't have to warn you." Lydia said, scowling, but then again, that could have just been her face. "We could have just left you all to die."

"Well to be fair, they're still probably going to die," Raymond said absently.

"Fuck you too!" Paul shouted, at Lydia more than him.

"Paul."

The waves lapped weakly around the pilings, and from this distance, the roar of the wooden roller coaster sounded like rain.

"David," Missy said, barely audible even for them over Paul and Lydia going at each other's throats. "I hear something."

"Shut up, Missy." David replied automatically.

That she didn't immediately snap back at him should've been the first clue that something was really wrong. "No, David," she grabbed his arm blindly. "I really hear something."

Raymond heard it too, too late, because Missy's heart was so loud by comparison, it drowned almost everything else out but his own thoughts.

A second heartbeat.

Shit.

"Luther—" The first bolt hit him directly in his center mass as he turned to look at Raymond, just to the right of his heart. The next one was a bulls-eye.

Raymond hit the deck.

Blood spurted violently out of Luther's nose and mouth like a hose was pumping it directly up his throat from his own asshole, spraying Missy across the face. She gasped, and immediately coughed when Luther's blood got in her mouth.

Raymond felt Lydia hit the sand beside him.

"Get down!" David shouted. The little one grabbed Missy from behind and body slammed her face first onto the sand, covering her head with his forearm as Luther did his best impression of an empty tube of toothpaste, his insides becoming not, a dark red, wet mess that barely resembled organs anymore, shoved all at once out of his mouth, leaking blood and stomach bile out of his nose.

Luther's corpse collapsed on the sand next to Luther's innards like an empty bag, rapidly desiccating out of the corner of Raymond's eye.

"What the fuck?" That sounded like Paul, but Raymond was too afraid to lift his head, even though he wasn't expecting a third shot.

How had he miscalculated so badly? He could see Luther's corpse even without moving his head. The realization that it could just as easily have been him made him want to vomit. He'd been so wrong. Dutton wasn't on his way to Santa Carla.

He was already here.

Thank you for reading.