For the Dead Travel Fast

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The moment her eyes rolled back, Castle lost it.

"Get her on the bed," Harris snapped.

Since he'd already been reaching for her, Castle obeyed without question, no longer surprised by how easy it was to lift Kate from the floor and carry her to the hospital bed. His back didn't lock up, his knee didn't feel like a swollen balloon about to pop—okay, maybe he was still a bit surprised.

But the pleasant surprise was suppressed by the dark clamoring urge to sink his teeth into her neck and drink. Because that would solve everything. Because that was what they were made for. Because she was his wife and she needed—

"Step back, step back," Harris said.

"—help," he rasped. "She needs help."

Dr Harris brought out a plant mister like the one she'd used on him outside, and his whole body flinched and jerked away. She kept her distance, eyeing him like she had cornered a wild animal. "I know what kind of help you want to give her, and you need to step the hell back."

The harsh tone alone wouldn't have done the job, but the quick mist of putrid scent she sprayed towards him had him stumbling, breaking his tunnel vision. Kate murmured and started to rouse, her fingers twitching, a shudder going through her body as the scent fell over her as well. But Castle couldn't approach, his head suddenly throbbing, his mouth dry, eyes stinging.

"What—what was that."

"Has a bit of garlic, among other things. Makes your VL do some heavy work to get you balanced, has the added benefit of redirecting the bloodlust. Basically I kept you human for another few minutes, but when you smell blood, the phase tries to kick in." Harris kept the bed between them and leaned in over Kate, two fingers at her neck.

The snarl of possession that erupted in his chest was violent enough to scare Castle into scuttling backwards, his hands shaking as he realized just how damn changeling he was.

"Know better than to get between you," Harris muttered darkly. "Her pulse is thready."

"Is she okay?" His hands in fists, the pulse an ache behind his eyes now. "Before you burned my nose hairs with that stuff, she didn't smell okay." He was gritting his teeth as he spoke.

"She's lost a lot of blood," Harris answered, cutting through the ties on the hospital gown and pushing it aside. The bandage was soaked in bright crimson, not just a stain of it where it had seeped through, but the whole thing. Castle moaned, unsure whether it was fear or lust making his heart pound; Harris gave him a grim look. "She didn't want to drink from you, but she didn't say no to you doing the drinking."

"She's already lost blood. If I drink—"

"You won't be drinking her down, you'll be cleaning her out. She said you already had, she said you did it accidentally."

"Tongue not teeth," he rasped, remembering. "What if I lose my control?"

"We're going to do this in stages, very carefully, and under my supervision." Harris peeled the bandage off so carefully and pulled her traveling cart closer, opening drawers, gathering products onto the tray. "Mr Castle? Are you listening?"

"I'm..." His breath whistled in through his teeth as he tried not to take in the scent of her blood. Coppery, rich, wrong. He hoped the vampire in him wanted to fix her more than kill her. God, please. "I'm here, yeah."

"I need you to take another couple steps back, Mr Castle."

He was nearly at her bedside again. When had he drifted forward, drawn by the shiny luster of her blood? "Shit."

"I have on me that syringe that will put you on ice again. I don't want to have to do that, Mr Castle. If I put you on ice, you won't be able to act as a the catalyst for her—"

"Why are you calling me Mister?"

She stared at him a moment. "Because you're scaring the shit out of me right now and sometimes formality knocks the humanity back into people. It's when you can't keep a civil tongue that the shit hits the fan."

He swallowed, tore his eyes from Kate to look at the woman. "Then let us be formal, Dr Harris. You said stages?"

There passed a quick understanding, unspoken, between them. Harris nodded. "It's not a Blood Letting per se; she just happens to be bleeding while you do something known as Binding."

"Binding will heal her."

"It's not magic, but yes. Effectively so." She was dousing a white bandage in a brownish-green liquid, and now she slapped it against Kate's wound. His wife didn't even flinch, didn't move, still passed out on the bed. "This should jumpstart the process. Ideally, I'd take levels from you and her, saliva samples to compare Lichen Loads, but we just don't have the time. It's clear that your levels change with proximity, and she said it worked once before—too well—closing up the wound before the bullet could be rejected."

"Yeah. In the first phase, it was like a sexual experience. I thought I was—" He flushed and stumbled through an explanation of the blood letting-as-oral sex that sent his heat racing and his mouth watering despite knowing he had not actually been going down on her. "Even my memory of that event is replaces the blood and the wound with, ah, sex organs."

"You do realize I'm a doctor." He couldn't tell if she was joking, and she relented just a little. "I understand. And yes, what I'm asking is for you to repeat what is essentially a very intimate act. While I watch and monitor. There are many adult vampires who can't get past that. Performance anxiety."

"I appreciate your stab at levity, but—"

"It's not a joke, Mr Castle. If you can't get back to the place where it is an intimate act, then you're not going to be producing the right chemicals in your body, which means your saliva won't have the right components to do what we need it to do." She pointed to the brown-green liquid. "React with that."

"Performance anxiety," he repeated, feeling pale.

"You seem to have a knack for it, though, so I'm not too worried that you'll… go soft."

He winced. Her jokes were just too on the nose. "But... what prevents me from drinking? In the car when Deputy Dave pulled up, it was only the flash of his police lights and that hit of the siren that broke the... the weird hypnotic trance I was in. I didn't even know I was taking from her, I had no intention of taking from her, but I was—and taking too much. If it hadn't been for him, I don't know what would've happened. What will keep me from killing her this time?"

Harris gave him a hard look. "I will use deterrence methods to pry you off her."

"Like that spray."

"There are others."

Yikes. The look on her face—no, he did not want to know. "If you use the syringe to ice me—"

"I'm going to try not to do that. I don't know how long she can last with these levels of toxicity in her blood if you're on ice. Your spores during phase seemed to be affecting those levels and bringing them back within tolerable ranges again. So if you're in deep freeze, she doesn't get those spores, toxicity increases. I'm damn surprised she lasted this long without a mate. Likely transitioning you triggered something in her, and whatever shaky balance she'd achieved went off the rails."

He swallowed hard, passed his hand down his face. "You're telling me if I can't control myself—can't stop these vampire instincts—she'll die. All because she saved me by compromising herself."

There was such a long silence after his statement that it subversively made him calm again. It was just too true, too accurate, and so it wouldn't happen.

He hadn't killed her last time; he wouldn't kill her this time.

"Look, Mr Castle, I know you're afraid. I am too. But I don't know what else can be done for her. Your mutualism within the symbiosis is a thing I haven't seen before, and I'm banking on that codependency to pull her through."

Castle dropped his hand, nodding. "What is it I need to do?"

Harris stepped back, pointing to the puckered mouth of the wound under Kate's breast. "Go down on her."

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