For the Dead Travel Fast
—-xxx—-
The range of the Porsche Cayenne was somewhere over 400 miles due to its hybrid nature. She had heard the specs ad nauseam when he'd been researching SUVs, had been forced to nod and smile, faintly miffed at how long it was taking him to just pick a damn car. She'd really thought he'd be the one to jump in feet first, buy something shiny with all the latest gadgets, regret it later.
Only when she had realized it was a stand-in for their botched wedding did she understand his hesitation to pull the trigger.
A bad metaphor, all things considered. He'd bought the Porsche only after they'd last-minute eloped to the Hamptons; it was such a clear and obvious symbol of their return to normalcy that neither of them had commented on it. She was grateful now for this purchase because she had not yet been forced to stop (though she knew it was coming and she dreaded it).
She dreaded it so much, apparently, that other considerations escaped her.
She was approaching Youngstown, Ohio, when she realized that Cleveland would be no better than New York. Any town with a sizable population could be potentially dangerous, but those with airports? She would be asking for trouble. She would be inviting the horde.
Before she could think about it too hard, she was exiting the interstate for the first route heading north—towards the lake—heading for water. She didn't know why, she didn't have the capacity to even question it; she needed to get him to the water, she had to get to the Great Lakes.
The rural route was quieter, darker. There were less lights out here, and more dead deer, and she could admit she was scattered, exhausted. She wasn't thinking in a straight line; much of her reasoning and logic was suspect. Since she'd heard the gunshot that had brought Castle down, she'd been making decisions on the fly, reacting rather than acting. It wasn't good, and she didn't normally live her life this way—not personally, but also not professionally.
In the box with a suspect, she never asked questions she didn't know the answers to. She controlled the interview. She controlled everything. Here, in the car on the road in the darkness, it was all out of her control. Even herself.
There were faster routes. She hadn't wanted to use GPS, but she'd seen signs for Buffalo. Before that, Rochester, Syracuse. She wouldn't have wanted to drive them into those cities, no, but she could have taken the interstate north to Lake Ontario, to the northern edge of Erie at Buffalo; there had been other options than this random route to the middle of Lake Erie.
She couldn't think around it. Water, something about water. She wished Castle were awake to bounce ideas off of; she yearned for it. He'd say something funny but clever, underneath the immature humor, and she'd scoff at him but it would trigger something in her, and they'd be off. He would read to her from the Little Black Book, intrigued and likely faux horrified, her notes from Royce, from Ava the cold-blooded therapist, making sardonic comments about what idiots they'd been to betray her, all while reminding Kate that she wasn't that naive girl any longer, that she was smarter and stronger than they gave her credit for.
God. She was going to cry. She couldn't cry. She had to get them to Lake Erie. For whatever reason. If he were awake—when he was awake—they'd figure it out, why the vastness of the Great Lakes was so important to her vampire instincts. What about this lake made it special, why hadn't she taken those other routes. Why couldn't she think.
"Could really use you here, Rick."
She swallowed roughly at the sound of her own voice in the dark. Wasn't right. She sounded weak, ineffectual. She wanted to be confident.
She wasn't confident in any of this. She'd been running scared since she heard the gunshot in her kitchen. One crisis after another, just get through the next thing, just drag them both, undead or half-dead or however it had to be, get them both to safety.
Her mind went in circles. She was on Route 7 heading north for whatever was there, whatever street got her to some township on the lake which would allow her to rent a cabin—
A cabin.
Her own moan in the car was chilling as the implications crashed down on her.
She was seeking a hiding place. To lick her wounds.
Was that all this was? Her own stupid animal fight or flight?
She'd run to her father's cabin after fighting off Royce and escaping, but she'd been out of her mind. Instinct then too, but only for home, for something familiar, for a place that would open its arms to her and rock her back to sleep. Royce had caught up with her, locked her inside with him, holding her hostage even as he'd saved her life. If she'd gone it alone, she'd never have survived; she'd have turned into that thing she'd seen eating the roadkill, desperate and inhuman.
Despite everything else, Royce had not allowed that to happen.
It had been worse at the cabin than her TO's apartment, in the end, because of all that had been forever out of her reach—vibrant and rich with memories. It had been worse, her time there, but of course, after she'd been shot in the heart in a cemetery and woken to Josh in a hospital telling her she'd died, she'd retreated to the cabin then too.
The cabin was where she went to die—knowing it wouldn't let her.
This road trip couldn't be predicated on homesickness. That was unacceptable. She was taking them into unknown territory because of some vague idea that a cabin on the lake would be safe? Because, as a child, she'd felt safe in theirs? Because her mom had loved it there?
Kate groaned aloud, slumping over the steering wheel.
At that moment, the gas light dinged as it came on, illuminating the darkness with a stark reprimand.
She had run out of range. The Porsche was at the end of its tether and she'd turned off onto a rural route with no civilization in sight.
Tears pricked her eyes.
And then in the dark, she saw two things loom just ahead: a sign welcoming her to Conneaut on the Great Lake Erie, and the telltale light of a Marathon gas station.
And now she didn't feel quite so damned.
—-xxx—-
He wrestled with it, this shadow that weighed like an elephant, this unnatural ghost which pinned him, sapped him of strength.
He surfaced and was brought down again, battled to the light only to be terrorized by it and returned to the darkness. And then the darkness gained texture and nuance, and he found a way. A hole in the fabric of his weighted-blanket of unconsciousness. He struggled out, awake, and found himself in the backseat of his Porsche Cayenne SUV, a vehicle he'd bought with the intention of going fully electric in the next few years (the specs on this SUV were very clear to him, inordinately clear, as if emblazoned on the inside of his retinas and he could read it off).
There was silence. And then, slowly, sounds filtered through: the ticking of the air conditioning, the electric click of the fuel cells in the frame of the vehicle, the crickets in the woods beyond—
Beyond? Beyond what?
The windows were down.
The night air was jasmine sweet, long nights in Reykjavik with—
No. That wasn't right.
He tried to sit up but found his body unresponsive. Paralyzed, a painful rictus, his muscles clenched so hard that pain radiated through his bones. He was trembling in that full-body clench, sweat-soaked. He breathed deeply and it hurt. His chest was... a resounding ache. His cheek was pressed against the leather of the interior and stuck, grimy, and now he felt the irrational urge to cry for help.
Something broke free of his paralysis, a noise rattling in his chest, and his cry called for a response, because next: there was her.
Haloed by a halogen lamp and her face in shadows, mystical and unreal, and she whispered his name Rick (and in that moment he remembered his name), and she kissed his forehead (and then in that moment he scented the most lovely erotic—)
"No! Shit! Castle!"
He tasted sex and moaned for it—she hissed and danced away, her hand clasped to her chest, bouncing on her toes, cursing shit shit shit.
He sat up. He could sit up, his body leaning out after her. He felt overheated, dumb. He was in the backseat of a car he knew intimately and yet he had no idea this woman cursing him and calling him—
"Oh shit, Kate," he gasped. His brain was wrong—his thoughts... wrong. Something was wrong.
She was bleeding.
She was standing away from him, a good six feet under the lights of a gas station, bleeding. Bleeding. Dripping blood to the concrete as it ran down the perfectly-formed curve of her thumb to the base of her wrist and then down a long straight shot to her elbow where it clung—one fraction of a second—before its death on the pavement below, wasted. He wanted to cry, watching it go, he wanted to kneel at her feet and beg forgiveness, mouth open to catch the clinging drop—
He moaned.
She stepped back another cautious step.
He gripped the edges of the doorframe and pressed himself forward, even as he held himself back. He shook his head, rattled his brain in his skull, thick and dumb and she smelled so good—
"Something—wrong with me," he rasped. Stared at the lingering black-red drop as she bent her head— "Are you licking that?" he gasped. Watched, entranced, as her tongue curved into the cup of her palm and down against the torn flesh. "Can I have some?"
She shivered, her eyes caught his.
"Please," he whispered.
She stepped forward, one step—Kate, his wife, this was his wife—and then again, and he had to push back against the metal frame of the car to keep from lunging out after her. Wouldn't do to scare her. (He was scaring himself.)
"No teeth," she said, a warning. Her eyes were wide. His dropped to the savagery of her thumb.
"I bit you," he mumbled, tearing his eyes away from her blood-soaked hand. Meeting her dark gaze again.
She swallowed. "It was instinct."
"You're my wife," he rasped.
She smiled—so radiant—and stepped in against his knees, offering her torn and ragged hand like a child offering picked wildflowers.
He cupped her hand in his and she flinched, a sucked in breath. He paused, made himself pause, hovering just above the delicate beautiful scent of her blood. "What?" he husked.
"You're hot," she said.
He quirked his lips.
She laughed, seemed surprised to be laughing. "No, you're feverish, I mean, Rick. You have a fever. It's very high. Burning my skin."
He blinked. Her ravaged hand made him dizzy. "I feel crazy," he said, his voice rasping in his dry throat. "My brain hurts."
"Don't try to think," she said, her bloodied fingers uncurling and stroking just at his chin. "I promise I'll explain everything when you don't hurt so much."
"You smell good," he rasped. He felt stupid, shaky too. He wanted very badly to touch his tongue to the base of her thumb. "Can I please?"
"No teeth, just your tongue, okay? You have to get it right. It's very important. You could kill me."
"No." Horror struggled in him.
"Lick me," she murmured. "I want you to."
He leaned forward; she stiffened, but he just wanted to kiss her palm. He just wanted to kiss her palm and feel it against his lips. It sent a sigh burning through him—everything was burning—and when he could control the shivering, he touched his tongue to the pool of blood that had welled up from the ragged flesh.
She whimpered.
"Does it hurt?" he husked. Lips brushed her wrist as he went after a renegade drop.
"N-no. Opposite."
"Feels very good," he breathed. The blood had already slowed. He curled a long groove of his tongue against the wound.
She nodded. Shivered.
He snaked his tongue along her thumb and couldn't resist sucking it lightly, into his mouth, pulling from her skin that very essence which made him—
She withdrew; she even stepped back. "What did I say?" she whispered.
"But I want to just a little," he growled.
"No. No teeth. Remember in the Hamptons on the beach when—"
He grinned, felt wolfish and animal at the memory. Her eyes, dark and wide in the shadows here as then. "I remember," he husked. "Everything about that night. I didn't bite you, but I wanted to. That perfect pearl. I remember. Everything about you, how you taste, smell—"
"You'll remember more, better, every time," she promised. "But to have a next time, you have to do as I say, just like you did then, your mouth on me in the sand."
"No teeth," he promised. He was sure he could change her mind, given time. He was a charming bastard; he remembered that too. "But can I suck you into my mouth-?"
"I don't think it's wise to tempt fate," she hummed. She wanted it too; he could feel it in her, the way she leaned toward him. "No, Rick."
"I'll be good," he said, and tugged. She came in, closer, and he had her now, she was his now. He could lap at the blood and curl his tongue around her thumb and sink his teeth in before she—
No.
This was Kate, his wife. This was Beckett.
Something skittered at the back of his skull, memory, phantoms. Violence. "I... don't feel so good," he husked. Smell was… wrong. Hurt his head. There was no jasmine, just rot.
Everything was decay.
"Lick me," she said, more insistent now. "You've torn me open, you must need it."
Need it? Was he really sitting here imaging ways to bite her? Was he sitting here hard and imagining kissing up her neck and lulling her into—
"No," he croaked.
"You can't drink, though, I can't give that to you right now. It's already closing up, with your help. But a taste, to keep you calm. A taste—"
"Calm?" he echoed, a frisson of panic sliding through his guts. He shook his head, but the panic was clawing up his esophagus. "Something—something is wrong." He tasted rot in the back of his throat. He gagged.
"Oh God. I'm so sorry. I promise I'll explain everything, Rick. You just—"
Out of the night, a beast—a thing of decay—crept across the concrete under the halogen lights. He jerked, the stench making his chest heave, the face of a woman snarling back at him. "Ka—"
Kate gasped, spun—but the thing had pounced. A madwoman. She landed on Kate's back—Kate staggered—and tore from Kate's shoulder with yellow teeth.
Castle lunged forward, mine, he still had his wife by the wrist, locked her against his chest, mine, and threw a left hook at the madwoman's head. "She's mine!"
Jaw snapped, a sound of teeth, the thing fell back. He felt gristle in his fist and moved to hit again.
Kate went to her knees, her blood spurting, dragging at him—Castle's head whipped down—the scent—jasmine
The decaying thing leapt on him, knocked him back into the car, and her teeth were at his throat.
—-xxx—-