For the Dead Travel Fast
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It was dark past the beam of her headlights, the interstate endless. Traffic had thinned as she'd driven away from New Jersey. I80 cut straight across Pennsylvania without running into any major cities, but tantalizing offers of Baltimore and Pittsburgh on the signs overhead made her think and rethink her decision. In the end, with the pastoral scenes, the flash of the town of New Castle (like a promise), she was still on track for Cleveland.
She had been driving for nearly six hours. There was nothing but time stretched ahead of her, time and worry, time and dwelling on it, all the mistakes she'd made from the beginning, all the stupid choices, all the pain she'd caused. From the day her mother had not shown up for dinner to the gunshot ringing out from the kitchen this morning, she could follow the links in the chain she had forged, link by link, and this was death.
It couldn't be waved away with the magic of Christmas. This was his life hanging in the balance, and hers, if she were being honest with herself. He could turn on her. As Ava had (and for no other reason than the boredom of age). As Royce had, because she hadn't been enough, hadn't lived up to his expectations.
Of course, she and Rick had gone through their share of relationship woes, they had fought those battles. It wasn't that. It was the vampire in him now that worried her. Gnawed at her.
Pun not intended.
(Would he find this funny? Would he be as enthusiastic over his vampirism as a case which suggested CIA conspiracies or alien abductions? Would he pepper her with questions and want to know everything and look at her the way he had in those first years of their partnership, when he was desperate to be more than just her annoying shadow, when he declared her his muse?
She hoped so. She was, in fact, counting on it.)
The back and forth of her own fears was giving her a headache. And with the headache came an awareness of her body's limitations, the other aches trying to make themselves known, trying to warn her she was approaching no man's land.
With one hand on the steering wheel, she skimmed her hand between her breasts to the place where the bullet had entered—and never exited. She tentatively probed, chewing on her bottom lip to get a taste of her own blood, just to cut the need that was building saliva in the back of her throat. As she blindly inspected her ribs, she suddenly felt the wicked burn of the bullet.
Kate gasped, the SUV swayed in its lane.
She struggled to right their trajectory, hunched over the wheel as the pain refused to abate. She gripped the steering wheel now with two hands, afraid she was going to lose consciousness. She was traveling at eighty miles an hour and she couldn't get to the side of the road; she had to hang on through it.
Like being shot all over again.
Eventually, the narrow tunnel of her vision began to dilate once more. She wasn't able to sit up straight, but her breathing wasn't so labored. The bullet seemed to settle back into a position that didn't do her active damage, and she forced out shaky breaths through her clenched teeth, determined not to crash them, to keep going.
The lake, Lake Erie, the Great Lake. For some reason, instinct said if she could get to water—
She had just entered into Ohio when the pulsing was too unbearable to keep going safely, and she had to pull into the emergency cutout and kill the engine. She rolled the windows down before breaking open another Gatorade, telling herself it was the dehydration, and not the scent of the man in her backseat, not the weakness in her blood, not the bullet still somewhere in that accidentally-healed wound in the center of her torso. It wasn't any of that. It was dehydration.
She was good at telling herself lies; she always had been. In normal conditions, 'fake it 'til you make it' could be healthy and helpful. The way Beckett went at things, it would probably kill her.
She just couldn't let it kill him too.
She got out of the car to stretch her legs, hoping to give the bullet some space, and as she paced the side of the road, the furious ache began to dull. The night air, humid as it was, helped allay the sense of desperation that had been building too. When she thought she could handle herself again, she opened the back door of the SUV to check on him.
Still curled on his side as if to protect his vital organs, Rick looked wan, pale. His body's reserves were being burned through, but there was perspiration on his forehead, the small of his back—she had not put a shirt back on him, why?—which was an indication that he had not yet burned himself up. When she tipped Gatorade against his mouth, his lips moved, and he swallowed.
But when she leaned close to wipe his chin, he latched onto her thumb, tried to sink his teeth into her.
She yanked her hand back (though the moment's electric buzz of just that passing graze was enough to make her want to lean in and give herself over to him, swoon).
So. He wasn't catatonic, just deep in the bowels of the phase. Good sign, right? She was going to take it as progress that the instinct to drink was struggling to the surface. Rather than be terrified she was his only well.
She finished the Gatorade herself and tossed the container up into the front passenger seat floorboard for later. Trashing his beautiful car but she had an hour until Cleveland and her head was killing her. All the supplements and electrolytes in the world could not instantly provide her what she fundamentally lacked: blood.
She lifted her head to the wind, inhaled a warning she had not realized she'd been scenting.
She smelled roadkill.
She wondered if that was why she'd stopped. She'd been seeing dead deer on the side of the interstate for miles now, ever since crossing into Ohio's pasturelands. She smelled the raw meat and maggot of it, and it was not at all appetizing to the human in her. And theoretically, there would be blood-borne infections, Lyme's disease, babesia parasites, Powassan, spotted fever, things that could potentially bring her so far down she wouldn't be able to fend him off if he went for her neck.
And if he was going to be drinking from her to control his thirst, her feeding off carcasses was a bad idea.
Or maybe he couldn't get those diseases, maybe his blood had done it right. Maybe the transition needed exactly what she wasn't giving him, and they were both screwed.
She really hated vampires. Made it difficult for her to not hate herself, of course, and hadn't that been a regular in therapy? Good ole Dr Burke, no clue of her updated and modified genetics, had really grown frustrated with that unknown root cause of her issues. She couldn't explain. I am a creature of the night. Well, she wasn't even that. She was a bastardized version of a creature of the night, by all accounts, and they wanted nothing to do with her. She had shunned them, but they had shunned her first, starting with Royce.
Over the hiss and tick of the car cooling off, she heard the sharp crack of a stick from the grass.
She turned her head.
Red eyes watched in the darkness.
She cursed and jumped back, nearly forgot she was on the side of the damned interstate. The eyes moved, and she slammed the back door and hauled herself into the driver's seat. The animal paused, hunt broken by the sound of the door (or worse, the scent of machine oil and her determination-laced panic) but just as she started the engine, the eyes came forward.
It was not an animal.
It was vampire.
"Fuck," she gasped, throwing the car into reverse. She burned rubber to back away from the prowling unhuman, jammed the SUV into drive once more and floored it.
The red eyes resolved into a teenager, shaggy-haired, no way of knowing male or female, teeth broken in the open maw.
She hit the vampire at twenty miles an hour, but it did not stop, a weird and unnatural bounce on the hood of the SUV, and the ragged hands closed around the windshield wipers. Kate twisted the wheel, but the thing was strong, and wouldn't be dislodged as they tore across the emergency lane. She had to check her side mirror to be sure she wouldn't hit a car—how ridiculous was that?—trying to gain enough speed to get back on the interstate.
Those blood-filled red hunter's eyes peered into the windshield, straight back to Castle unconscious on the seat.
Kate hit the windshield wipers.
The stream of blue cleaner startled the vampire so badly it lost its footing—hysteria made laughter bubble in Kate's throat at the look on its unhuman face. The SUV went over the corrugated pavement which made her tires sing a high-pitched warning—and the vampire suddenly dropped.
She heard the body hit the road, but she did not look back, racing a coupe in the next lane to pull ahead, going faster, faster.
She should have known. That many dead deer, big red-blooded kills laid out like a buffet—she should have known it would draw a horde. And whatever diseases the deer had, so did the vampires, lending them that unnatural look, that kind of non-human intensity. She'd never seen that before in her damn life, and now twice, with Castle's scent luring them out of the woodwork, she'd come face to face with just how twisted and warped her kind could get when blood was scented.
She would just keep driving. She didn't know how long.
However long it would take.
That was all there was to it. However long it took.
—-xxx—-