For the Dead Travel Fast
—-xxx—-
It was easier now that she was awake. Now that her hands cupped the back of his head and his eyes were on hers. Harris had retreated to monitor from a distance (he had no doubt she was still monitoring) when it was evident that he had more control with Kate conscious.
The little moans she made, the flutter of her stomach under his hands—it was always going to be better to have her awake for this—but that kind of feedback kept him in the game, kept him present with her rather than devolving into a self-absorbed loop of eternal sensation.
Because it was damn good for him.
He paused, resting his chin against her hip bone, her fingers in his hair. His kiss against the inside of her wrist was damp for reasons neither of them was comfortable with, but he didn't dwell on that. She was smiling, if heavy-lidded, and her thumb skipped across his lips.
"Why'd you stop?" she breathed.
"Don't want to shoot too soon," he answered softly.
Her chuckle made them both groan, her likely because of the still-open wound, and him just because he was on a hair-trigger, no kidding. She laid her head back on the raised hospital bed, breathing slowly, but her fingers continued to play in the hair at the nape of his neck.
He really loved that. The familiarity of her fingers on him in a moment like this, resting at her inside thigh. Never before had they both been so clothed, nor hunched over a hospital bed in an almost awkward position to lick a gunshot wound, so no, not really the same.
And it shouldn't have been that familiar. But it was. And the comfort inherent in that familiarity gave him the strength to keep going.
"I'm not supposed to stop until the deep layers begin to close up," he murmured, realized he was almost apologizing.
"No, no don't stop now," she smiled.
Beside her head was a tray holding the tubes necessary for the next round of tests: a lavender topped tube, a red one, and a mint green. The blue tube was separate from the others, but Castle assumed it would be used as well, as it had been last time, when Dr Harris had first taken about 2mL of her blood for each tube to test in a lab somewhere he hadn't yet been.
There were a lot of places he hadn't yet been; he, in fact, had not moved out of this negative pressure room since being tricked/duped inside it.
As much as he yearned to trust in someone about all this, he couldn't be sure that person was Dr Harris.
Kate tugged on his ear in hurry-up, and he took a deep breath—
"Are you trying to psych yourself up?" she murmured. "If it's, um, distasteful, for lack of a better word—"
"God, no. Kate. It's not at all. It's—you—are quite tasty. I'm just prepping myself."
"That's what I mean. If you have to prepare yourself to—"
"To not lose control," he insisted. "A deep breath of you is like an immediate high."
"Oh."
"Yeah. So if I take a few deep breaths, then I'm acclimated to how intense an experience this is. Or, well, almost acclimated. Trying to acclimate. Nothing can really prepare for the way this feels."
"Good," she husked. "Me too."
He nodded against the tight grip of her fingers. His lips, still faintly sticky, brushed her wrist and left pale crimson dots. Her blood had at least stopped looking so… discolored. And no longer tasted like it was tainted.
"Get to it then, Castle."
He laughed softly and her whole body rippled in anticipation. When his lips touched lightly at the outside edge of the horribly-disfigured wound, she whimpered.
The fact that he knew that noise from other nights in other positions was almost as heady as the instant hit of arousal that this one little taste gave him. The vampire was strong in him, and the urge to suckle was difficult to beat back, but he was ever-mindful of the need to lick. Not suck. Not bite.
Just spread his lichen-loaded saliva across her flesh.
Tongue her.
—-xxx—-
She could really get used to this.
If she'd known that it would be like this, if she had been given any kind of hint that this could be so good, she might not have turned away from the vampire in her.
God, it was amazing.
(Was this why Royce kept coming back and draining her? Because he was sexually frustrated?)
And since the Binding was controlled, she was able to give herself up to it a bit more, relax in it, in him, awash in the wonderful feeling of this particular pleasure. She stopped having hang-ups about the actuality of her blood on his tongue, stopped worrying about the ways this tainted him or them, and she let herself go.
She wasn't sure how long it went on, only that she was carried in waves, up and up and then slowly swirling back down in eddies of feeling. Her heart was elevated, sweat prickled her scalp, her thighs shifted against the weight of him. Orgasm was just out of reach, but it was the most beautiful edging she'd ever experienced.
She was coming down from that gentle high when Castle lifted his head and kissed her wrist, her fingertips, the soft inside of her arm. She couldn't yet form words, too blissed, too wonderful, but he was patient and waited for her to return to him. He was so good; she was so very lucky this man had chosen to love her.
"Hey," she rasped.
"Hey." His smile was as brilliant as the sun. She could cry just looking at him.
"Dr Harris is on her way in," he murmured. "ETA ten seconds."
"Oh," she said, plummeting a bit now.
"In five-four-three—hey, Dr Harris, how's it look?"
"Doing good, but not as good as you too. My guess is your serotonin levels are elevated, huh?" Dr Harris came to the bed, a preternatural calm pulled over her face. Kate could see the wariness below it, the sense that vampires had to be watched, monitored, never trusted, despite the joking.
Kate cleared her throat. "I feel pretty good. I could sit up, I think." Harris had pulled a velcro lap belt across her hips when they'd first started, and she hadn't let Castle take it off her. Castle himself was free, and so were her hands, her legs, but it still felt as if Harris didn't trust them. "We should be getting out of your hair soon, you know."
Castle made a disagreeing noise, but Harris was nodding. "Yes, eventually. For now, I want to run another CBC, check your levels. VL load should be maxed right now, and I want to see what happens as you come down from the Binding. Your levels were so screwy to start with." She shook her head and the beads in her braids made that pretty tinkling sound that Kate was now beginning to associate with her disapproval. "Of course, so far, through four rounds of Binding, your algae components haven't caught up the way I'd like, but they're doing some interesting things to his, and I want to make sure this will actually do what we need it to do without compromising either of you."
"Compromised?" she said sharply. "What's wrong with his levels?"
"He's rebounding so far," Harris answered. "But there are anomalies with each blood-swap."
"Blood-swap?" she asked. It seemed like every time Harris talked, she was using new terminology. "I thought it was just, well, swapping saliva. No blood."
"It's just what we say when we're talking about the process of antigen shifting. Every time you trade body fluids—in Binding, his algae-rich saliva to your fungal-rich blood—the red blood cells in your system get a tiny tweak of their antigens. In those of us with high VL loads, ie fully transitioned vampires, it's not that big a deal, but you want to stay within your blood family. Your VL family."
"Right," Castle said, nodding. "That makes sense. Just like you wouldn't want to receive a blood transfusion from someone not your blood type."
Harris hesitated. "Well. Essentially, yes."
But Kate was stuck on that phrase those of us with high VL loads. "Didn't you just say my VL load was out of whack? Not balanced. So am I... not considered a fully transitioned vampire?"
Again Harris seemed to hesitate. "Since your transition seems to have been rather start and stop, your VL load isn't as high as it should be, and you're not able to stay balanced naturally. I hesitate to call you an immature vampire, but I think you must have been taking some over the counter supplements? Yeah, that accounts for some of what I'm seeing. And when you set into motion his transition, well, honestly, it should have been impossible for you to do so correctly, but aside from that—"
"What do you mean, what does that mean, impossible?" A wild clutch at her heart sent the monitor beeping a warning, and Castle growled at her to lie back, pressing his hand over her heart as if he could still its thumping. "I'm fine, it's fine, tell me what that means—"
"You started out with a deformed lichen, that's what I'm saying. It wasn't in proper alignment in your system, you were taking electrolytes, iron supplements, probably anemic most of the time, probably low appetite, insomnia, difficulty building muscle mass, any injuries sustained would have persisted longer than usual with—"
"Yes," Castle said sharply. "That's her, that's exactly what happened after she was shot—"
"Castle—"
"It just means you didn't start off with the ideal material for transitioning. Think of it like a mutated version of a chromosome. If you have the DNA material to produce a mutation, your offspring will have it too, right? Well, you started with a mutated VL and you passed it on to him. Except somewhere along the line, he encountered something that set his off on the right course. While you..." Harris shrugged, as if that was all there was to it. "I'd like to isolate whatever it was that put him to rights when you're still so out of whack. But of course, there are so many variables—the woman with vampire-prion disease who took a swipe at you and released spores all over him, the initiating transition and its perilous circumstances. I mean, it could be possible that having a fatal wound gave him a hard restart, but..."
Kate blinked, staring at Castle. Her husband. Whom she might have damaged irreversibly with her ignorance.
"It's okay," he said, gripping her hand tightly. "Look, I'm fine, we're both okay. You're healing now, it's worked, don't look too hard at it, Kate." He bent to kiss her and she smelled the copper on his breath, the tang of arousal, and tears burned at the back of her throat as his mouth touched hers.
"Anyway, I'm going to draw blood again, as you've gone through the last round, and check your levels, then we'll do another draw in a couple hours. See where we're at."
"A couple hours," she whispered, her throat rough with tears she wouldn't give way to. "How long can we possibly hide down here?"
"Not long, no," Harris said grimly. "I'm on call, so I keep having to go back into the clinic, and the decon process is kind of involved."
"Decon?" Castle said.
"Decontamination. You two might not smell yourselves, but let me make it clear everyone else can. Not just you, Mr Castle, but also your wife, due to the Binding. Without this negative pressure room, you'd have filled up the clinic with your transition spores, and you'd have vampires salivating to get at you. Especially those who don't know better."
"Or those who are diseased," Castle said grimly.
"Exactly." Harris gave it a cheerful tone as if she was proud of Castle's clever mind finally figuring it out. "And in the meantime, I want you to be thinking about the transition process, in detail, how it happened, what you recall. Both of you. Any little detail might be the key to unlocking this mystery of your levels."
How could Kate possibly unlock this mystery when all of vampirism was a mystery?
She swallowed roughly and looked at Castle, whose bright and eager face reminded her, once more, of what it was they did best—and where their partnership had started.
Together, they were excellent at mysteries.
"You have a white board?" she asked, clearing her throat. "We're gonna need to build a timeline."
—-xxx—-