For the Dead Travel Fast

—-xxx—-

Kate Beckett was a monster.

She should have stopped him long ago, but the second his mouth was on her, she lost all rational thought. She lost coherence.

The raw ecstasy flowed through her, an outpouring of pleasure so vibrant and harsh that she gave herself over to it. There was some part of her that clamored for attention, for warning, knowing that she would let him drink her dry, become nothing but a husk, just to live here, dwell in this beautiful darkness.

But it was drowned out in the swell of this euphoria.

It was profound. His mouth was sensitive and luscious, as ever, and her body's response just as violent and all-consumed. While the blood drained from her, these slow absorptions, she was spiraling higher, tighter, impossibly entranced.

He was moaning as he drank deeply. The slide of his tongue and suction of his mouth created a closed circuit that charged her flesh and made her writhe. She was heady, immobilized by the weight of his body, her legs pinned, her back arching.

He slowed as they both drew closer to the end, as the rapidly approaching terror finally caught them both by the throats. She cried out, clawing at his shoulders, when he shuddered and collapsed into full-body climax, spasms of phase jolting through him and so against her, the lick of electricity as he grunted at her stomach.

She'd been so close. Damn.

His energy spent, wasted, something still alive or in love inside him sent his lips sighing across her breast before he passed out on top of her.

Shaking, shivering, Kate's own mind was slow to return, sluggish with blood loss. She had allowed the letting to go on too long; she would have not been able to stop it.

How easily she lost herself with him.

How quickly he might have killed her.

Kate cradled the back of his head, trembling, weakened by the still-thumping beat of unfulfilled pleasure. And now also the thirst. That letting had been nothing but a whet, a sharpening of her thirst, which had not been slaked in so long… a decade or more. Today had seen the throwing off her self-imposed shackles, and she was turning out to be bad at this.

But they were alive, both of them. Rick was moving through the phases with some unpredictability, but what experience did she have?

He was still fevered, and while the phase would dry him out as it raced through his body's resources, she thought now there was some dampness at the back of his neck. A faint sweat at his palms.

There should be; he'd just drunk deeply from her. Enough to leave her cold on the bathroom tile, head spinning, unsure whether she could actually move.

Such an intense experience, the Letting with him slaking his thirst and she the one to be drained. She had not been prepared for this level of intensity.

When she'd been warned about the Letting, she'd thought ensnared, she'd dreamed ensorceled (as the folk lore had suggested), she had even expected the tiredness and exhaustion afterwards. But this, full-body pleasure, this near-orgasmic experience, the total lack of violence in it, but the sweet-blooming invasion, bursting with life, which had flooded her senses.

No wonder Royce had turned away from her after she'd transitioned. If he'd been expecting this and instead found in her veins the same dry and bitter-tasting concoction she'd found in his—

Kate pushed away the betrayals of the past, determined not to be the same to Rick. She summoned the willpower to snake out from under her husband, the ice already evaporated by the heat burning through his body.

Since he was lying on his stomach, she gently lowered his head to the tile and then gathered towels to make a nest. She couldn't quite wrestle him into it—she was that weak, like a newborn animal—but she laid a damp cloth over his back and neck to keep him cool during phase. Or at least to prevent the raw sensitivity her skin still remembered from when she'd been like this.

She hoped anyway. She didn't know what the right thing was; she knew only what had gone wrong with her.

Kate crawled out of the bathroom on her hands and knees. She scrounged through the duffle for her iron supplements, her hands shaking again with exhaustion. She cursed herself and the drug-maker for the childproof caps which she couldn't bear down on to open. She had to lean against the desk and close her eyes just to summon the energy, her arms weak, her vision tunneling to black.

Stupid to have let herself go, stupid to think she could control it. When had she ever controlled herself around Castle? She'd been lost to him in normal conditions, she was lost to him now manifoldly so.

She still felt his mouth at the wound. The sharp buck of pleasure when his tongue came to her blood.

Kate brought her hand to the place, just below her breast, and froze in horror.

The wound had closed.

He had licked her clean. He had healed the wound in a matter of moments and that shouldn't be possible. Was it possible? Had she and Royce just been so very bad for each other that this, in fact, was normal?

She held herself still, trying to think, but she had so little to go on. The Little Black Book of Death held only her own notes, things she'd observed, snatches of information Royce had given over, albeit grudgingly. She knew nothing about what a Letting felt like—Royce had never let it get that far—or how long it was supposed to go for. If Castle's drinking was anything to go by—

She inspected the wound, probing her skin. Some of it was permeable still, flashes of pain, and there'd be a scar, but it had closed up, pink and raw and sensitive. He had not used his teeth; she had prevented the tearing opening she'd seen in LA, at least, and the tearing she'd been unable to control when she'd begun his transition, on the blood-soaked floor of their kitchen.

It was healed, cleanly too. Was he more powerful than her? Had she disappointed Royce in that way? Were there even scales to measure the power of a vampire?

She was a vampire.

And she had turned her sweet, beautiful, gentle, kind husband into one too.

Before she could break down in tears, Kate finally hacked at the bottle of supplements with the edge of the desk until the cap popped off. She fished out four more gummies, chewing furiously, choking on iron until it stayed down.

The truth of the matter was this: she was going at vampirism blind, and now so was he.

When the iron had supplemented what she'd lost (okay, two more gummies and that would do it), she was finally able to stand. She stripped the mattress of its bedding, built up a pallet on the bathroom tile, and then carefully roll Castle's inert form into the makeshift nest. She draped a cooling cloth over his sensitive eyes, eased his head back onto a pillow, and made sure the sheets under him were a bit damp.

Then she stood before the bathroom mirror and properly inspected the gunshot wounds, all of them, because she was all he had, and she was not going to abandon him.

Caleb Brown had gotten her three times: upper abdomen just below her breast (the wound Castle had drunk from), lower abdomen at the bottom of her rib cage which had torn a chunk of flesh, and apparently an opposite graze where her firing stance had exposed her ribs on her left side.

All but the first had exited cleanly, and for that one, she wasn't sure what the now-healed wound would mean for the bullet somewhere inside her. She hadn't been thinking clearly in the haze of exsanguination—all she'd known was drinking, and drinking fast, needing Brown's nutrients to replace her own. (Because she had foolishly given everything to Castle, first. More than everything. She had killed him with her tearing at his flesh.)

Drinking from Caleb had been more than just distasteful, it had felt like betrayal. Because what she had done with Castle to spark his transition had been more like an epiphany, a religious experience, a soul clutching at another soul and pressing each to each, melding, flowing into each other—

Communion, she thought wildly.

What she'd experienced with Castle... flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. Communion. She wasn't even sure that wasn't what the Catholics meant, because maybe Christ was where it all started, this Letting and letting go. Follow me and I'll make you fishers of men. The following was real enough; she had loved Royce so intensely.

Royce had made her get tested for STDs for six months after she'd transitioned. Royce, drunk at a bar like her father, and yet she'd shown up every time to carry him home, eager for him to just look at her, remember her, remember her taste.

She hadn't realized just how much hatred she'd been carrying around for him, hatred disguised as old longing, disguised as misguided crush. He'd done this to her and then left her with nothing.

Kate fished the Little Black Book of Death from between the mattress and the headboard, sank to the edge of the bed to read its pages. She flipped through each one, notes made in pencil and rewritten in ink once she could 'confirm' it as fact. She'd started in red pen, thinking she was clever or cute, but it was sickening now, to read her twenty-something eagerness, her obvious desperation. She'd thought it would make her search for her mother's killer into an epic crusade; she'd thought this is how I win. But it was only how she'd lost. Time and again, losing.

She had expected to have to lose Castle one day. He had changed her mind about the loss itself, worked his way into her every breath, her very heartbeat. She'd tried to protect him anyway.

And now this.

She returned slowly to the bathroom and knelt beside his head, pushed the book under his pillow, smoothed his hair down on his forehead. Hot, burning, a little damp. She kissed his skin.

The scent of fire and love wafted up from his body, a scent she could sink her teeth into.

—-xxx—-