For the Dead Travel Fast
—-xxx—-
He woke.
His body was swollen with heat, sluggish, disoriented.
Kate.
"I got you, babe, I got you, hang on."
He struggled, sick, overheated. Bile rose in his throat, he rocked forward—the car stopped. Hissing of AC as it spattered the pavement, drip drip drip, door opened, a wave of humidity buffeted him and he groaned.
"It's okay, it's gonna be okay."
Gathered up, cool lovely fingers against his neck, his cheeks, a damp cloth. He slumped back.
"Drink this," she murmured.
He flinched—flashes of blood, moaning, intensity, orgasm—
"Gatorade, you need it. You need to replenish fluids. Can't all come from me."
He wrenched his eyes open, unsure, startled to find an angel hovering above him. Gold and white, streaked with feathers of wings. "Dying," he rasped. I'm dying.
"No." The ferocity bent towards him and the halo vanished, eclipsed by his wife's face, those golden eyes now green-brown, mossy, furious. The feathers were clouds through a window. "You are not dying."
"Kate," he breathed. His lungs and chest wouldn't work, labored, everything was a labor, a work he was not able to shift. "Feel bad."
She nodded, the fight drained from her. Gentle fingers. "Drink this."
He struggled to make his mouth work; it was like his tongue and teeth were malformed, impossible to coordinate. Gatorade spilled down his throat, inside and outside, and he choked.
She pulled him upright, let him cough through it. His was weak, damaged. He couldn't figure out where he was; he clung to her arm as she lowered him once more.
He felt dizzy. He stared up and remembered the ceiling of his kitchen, the ceiling and the sound of the gas range on the stovetop, the hissing of flame. "Burn the bodies," he mumbled. Eyes fell shut. The dark was better, the dark was easier.
"I won't let that happen."
He faded out.
—-xxx—-
She had taken the left-hand lane, not because it had been the right decision, but because she had not been able to think at all—the car was already there, it went with the interstate's lanes, now she was traveling through Pennsylvania and seeing signs for Cleveland.
A great lake, she thought numbly. Something about the water was vital. Necessary. She would drive to Cleveland and then she would start to think, to plan.
The Gatorade bottle was open in the cupholder beside her; the air conditioning was on high, though she'd been forced to crack the windows again, just to breathe. She was shivering and sweating both; she wasn't sure she was fully healed, and after two lettings, with a bullet still rattling around in her body somewhere, she could admit that it wasn't ideal.
She had been forced to stop twice to prevent Castle from dying.
He had said that. I'm dying. Her hands clenched the steering wheel; she told herself he was remembering, locked in memory of transition.
She told herself she'd done everything right, even though that was impossible to know.
She'd been going on instinct, desperation. Did the instincts of an ousted vampire even count? Did such a recently transitioned fool even have the necessary chemical catalysts in her saliva to do it right?
She tried to remember the stages of transition, the order of the phases.
Paralysis, that had happened—he had stopped thrashing against the tearing of her teeth quickly, gone limp, just that gurgling in his chest as his heart had crashed. She remembered the paralysis of Royce's bite, the almost-gentle way he had pressed his teeth into her breast, and then the terrifying puncture, the sense that something foreign was being sunk inside her, deeper, a penetration wholly alien, so that she'd begun to flail against him.
At least it hadn't been that for him. She knew what it felt like to be shot in the chest, to feel the crushing pressure, as if your rib cage were collapsing, as if your partner hovering above you—and all the terror and fear for you in his eyes—was bearing you down to the earth, and forcing you under it.
She'd seen that in his face. But not the panic of other. Of foreignness. Of being possessed.
But what did she know? Maybe it was supposed to be the way Royce had done it, maybe the pain and terror and seizures, the crazed moaning, the tearing off her clothes and running away, maybe the agony alive in the bones and burning through the back of the skull so that the only way it could escape was out of the mouth, screaming, screaming—
Kate shuddered, clamped down on those old worn memories.
The therapist she'd seen after had been explicit about how wrong it all was, how unhealthy Royce's fixation on her. Ava Bauer. A long-lived vamp with knee-length black skirts, her blonde hair in a tight bun, lips the color of blood, and an office in Chelsea. Beckett had seen her once a week for a year. Ava was half the content in the Little Black Book of Death, notes made during sessions, advice given over a drink, secrets whispered under sheets.
Royce had been considered a black sheep for a long time, his methods gauche (that was the term they used, as if her agony had been second to the thing not done). Of course, a Training Officer should have never—and the way he'd attacked her while she'd been in phase? Unacceptable. With Ava's help, Kate had been able to collect the pieces of herself once more, process the transition, figure out how to navigate the heightened senses. The rest will come, in time, the woman had told her. Give it time, liebchen.
Only the rest had never come. She had been stuck like this, out of phase and resurrected but weak, ineffectual, both wholly awake to the frailty of her humanness and half-asleep to the irresistible nature of her kin.
Ava's past had been exposed in a fit of cold violence, her German life revealed, the nature of her work during wartime. The horrors she'd inflicted just because she could, because she was so long-lived, had been casually detailed as if of no importance.
Kate had never forgotten the betrayal inherent in Ava's world, in Royce's. What had been kindness and pleasure, what had seemed to be intimacy, had instead been a play. An experiment. When the experiment had run its course, so had the warmth.
Kate had put the bullet in Ava's heart herself.
But she should never have thought she could live this life without them.
She could only hope that her own instincts held true.
Castle was not dying.
She wouldn't let him.
—-xxx—-