For the Dead Travel Fast
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She came awake.
Violently—she cried out, eyes snapping open, grasping the back of his head to hold him against her.
Her eyes caught on the woman perched near the bed and Kate shuddered, her vision telling her one thing, her body another.
"Kate!" Muffled against her stomach.
She dropped back to the bed, panting; her arms fell from his shoulders. Castle lifted his head, his mouth stained dark, his eyes dark on her, worried.
She felt herself fading but struggled past it to stay.
He cupped her hips with his hands, as if to hold her down. The woman—it was Harris, it was the doctor—approached with caution. "Heart rate is good, a bit elevated, but we'll take it."
Kate slid her gaze from the blood staining Rick's mouth to the monitor at her head. A heart monitor. She felt the sticky leads against her chest, the damp cling of the hospital gown where her sweat had made it stick. Her abdomen was exposed, a faint coolness at the edges, but a startling heat under her breast, and his hands were hard on her hip bones.
He squeezed and she shifted her gaze back to him. "What's… What did you do?"
Castle straightened, a wounded look on his flushed face.
Kate fumbled at the gunshot wound with the hand that had the IV line in it, flinched as her fingers encountered wet, permeable resistance. She had her hand slapped and she jolted, twisting to look at the doctor.
"Don't touch that. You'll get the IV tangled, and your hands aren't clean."
"But his mouth is?" she rasped. She closed her eyes. "I feel dizzy."
"Mr Castle, one more round, I think."
"I can't yet," he said over her body. "Still, uh, aroused."
"What?" she grunted. When she opened her eyes, she saw the flushed cheeks, the way his eyes avoided hers, the shifting on his feet. "Oh God. That wasn't a dream. What the hell is going on, what—"
"He's keeping you stable, that's what he's doing. Not to mention he's healing this gunshot wound and cleaning you of infection as well. Miraculously."
"Infection?" she croaked.
"Remember the woman who jumped us at the gas station?" Castle's face was grim. Also defensive. She felt bad for that; she hadn't meant to make it seem so… taboo. "She was infected with something Doc calls a prion disease. It affects the protein-folding on your red blood cells. So while you were bleeding, you were helpfully sloughing the bad, contaminated blood."
"What?" Her hand shook as she reached for him. He caught her hand in his, brought it to his lips with a bit of gallantry—which backfired as they both watched the bloodstain appear in the shape of his mouth. "Castle."
"You neglected to mention you'd run into one of the mad," Dr Harris said.
"Mad. She was deranged," she husked. "I've never met—this was the first time I'd seen vampires break cover and come for us in broad daylight. Happened in the city, a man stepped out into traffic, no self-preservation, just came for us."
"He did?" Castle hissed. He was clutching her hand too hard, clinging, leaning in so close.
His hips were pressed against the hospital bed, almost rubbing, and she was weirdly fascinated by the idea of his arousal. "Did you say you're still aroused?"
"Kate," he grunted.
"It's a natural part of the Blood Letting ritual," Dr Harris bit out. "It's designed that way so that the Vampire Lichen will be passed back and forth between matched pairs, two or more individuals whose glycoprotein antigens become more and more alike, thus less able to be used by other VL families. It kept down on wholesale slaughter of innocents, medieval times."
"Are you saying vampires have regular blood orgies?" she cracked. The joke fell a bit flat, considering that Dr Harris had been… guiding Castle just a few moments ago in the whole process. "Sorry. I'm… I feel weird. I have this taste in the back of my mouth, like I've drowned in the ocean."
"Salty? Or seaweed?" Harris asked.
Kate blinked. "A bit of both?"
"Good, that's good. Indicates your algae function is increasing."
"Okay, sure," she rasped. She swallowed against the weird taste and looked at Castle. The faint pink in his ears meant he was still aroused, but also embarrassed, and she squeezed his hand. "You said one more round?"
"When he's in better control of himself. I had to spray him once, the second round, and believe me, it's not pretty."
"You weren't the one rolling on the floor in pain," Castle shot back, as if the two had a rapport Kate wasn't privy to, "like someone had kicked you in the nuts and then dropped your balls in ice water. Meanwhile my wife's heart has stopped because of it."
"Oh, Rick. My heart stopped?" She laced her fingers through his, drawing his attention once more. "I don't… I passed out on the floor, last thing I remember."
"When she sprayed me with that stuff, you got some of it too, and you were just enough unstable that it stopped your VL functioning cold."
Kate turned an accusatory look on Dr Harris.
She put up both hands. "Look, this is all new for me, the way you two interact, your mutualism and its rules. He was about to sever the hepatic artery—"
"She didn't mean to hurt you," Castle said quietly. "And yeah, I was losing control of it, using my teeth." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Tongue not teeth, you said, but I couldn't hang onto it."
Kate swallowed roughly as she realized that might have been the only good thing Royce had ever given her—a terror of the vampire teeth so intrinsic she had passed it on to Castle. "What's supposed to be happening when you're... doing this to me?"
"It's called Binding, and it's the way we form VL families. Mr Castle's saliva is filled with higher levels of algae, due to the alliinase inhibitor heavily present—and necessary—in the newly-transitioned. Depending on the phase, of course, the spores he secretes through his sweat and in his saliva are exactly the elements you need to achieve lichen load balance."
"Load balance?"
"You have toxic amounts of heme iron in your system," Castle murmured, his lips once more against her knuckles, hunched over the bed near her head. "The fungal nature of the lichen, if I'm remembering right, is overloaded and, uh, eating, the algae, so the iron is building up even as your VL keeps telling your body that you need more and more. It's the balance of the two which gives vampires their nature. Strength, speed, agility, healing, all that."
"I…"
Dr Harris briskly took over, bringing out the iPad again, as if charts could explain what Kate just didn't have the vocabulary for. "ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) and CRP (C-reactive Protein) are extraordinarily high; they're markers of an inflammatory response. Ferritin, which is the storage vehicle for iron, should be low in someone with VL, but yours, here, are sky high. Look, here's Mr Castle's for comparison. As his VL proliferation continues, you can see, hour to hour, how his markers have done the opposite of yours. Until, of course, he started Binding you."
"Yeah," Castle said, the corner of his lips twitching as he caught sight of her face. "That's exactly how I looked when she started explaining. But look, the more I taste your blood, the more mine infects yours. And because I'm going through the transition still, my VL load is high enough that it overcomes yours, which is, uh, well, she used this word to describe your VL load but—"
"My VL load is what?" she croaked, her head spinning.
"Uh, deficient," he winced. "She thinks you were, um, likely arrested in development while under transition. And since I'm transitioning now, I can kind of bring you along."
She had a vague memory of Dr Harris explaining something like that to her. About Royce and how he'd deformed her with his constant feeding.
"Are you—does it hurt you?" she rasped. "When you…" She gestured vaguely towards the wound, feeling helpless. "Bind me."
Castle's ears bloomed red again and he shook his head. "Does it hurt you?"
"No." She felt her own cheeks flushing hotly.
Harris snorted. "I already told you both. Its vehicle is arousal. In fact, I have no doubt that you woke up because you were having an orgasm, Kate. Now, granted, there are some elements of non-consent in what we're doing, as you were unconscious, but no one is getting hurt here."
Oh God, she really had been, hadn't she. Climaxing in front of the doctor. "Shit, I knew you were an exhibitionist," she muttered, slapping at Castle's hand.
He laughed, bowed his head over hers, touched a kiss to her lips that tasted of copper.
"Are we ready to get back to it?" Harris interrupted. "I think it's important that we make one more pass, Mr Castle. And then I'll do another quantitative PCR titer to see how much VL is floating in her blood. Compare it to a saliva PCR to see how the concentration differs—"
"Oh God, you're killing the mood," Kate said, waving away the iPad.
Castle laughed again, sounding a bit more like himself, and she smiled to hear it. He squeezed her hand.
"Okay, are we doing this?" she asked softly. "Don't want my Lichen Load dropping."
"No, don't want that," he smiled.
"You two have no clue what you're even talking about, do you?"
—-xxx—-