For the Dead Travel Fast

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epilogue

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Castle ran his gel-damp fingers through his hair, turned his head to inspect the effect. Not bad. His profile continued to startle him—the sharp angle of his nose, the severity of his jawline—but Kate no longer lamented the loss of what once had been kindly termed love handles. He still went to the gym, because he'd seen what was out there, what might be coming for them or his kids, but he'd never get used to the drastic changes in his face.

Or the shadows at the edges of his vision, as if the ancestors watched him.

His eyes had never quite settled to their natural color. When they'd returned to New York, that had been the first thing his daughter had noticed: What happened to you? Looking in his eyes with tears streaming from her own. What has she done to you? They had spent a long time in explanations and examples, offers of proof, and his eyes had shifted blue to grey, ice to ocean, depending on the context.

These days, not even Alexis balked at the faint grey that iced him sometimes. Of course, he had grey in his hair to match, so it wasn't such a focal point. At the first, Kate had waxed poetic about the color change, perhaps in an effort to soothe his troubled mind about all the other changes to his body from the transition, but she no longer made the effort. As was only fair; it was a part of life now.

"You ready?" Her voice drifted from the bedroom. "Rick, I want to be on time. The family shouldn't wait."

"I'm ready," he answered, checking his hair once more.

She approached from behind, stealthy and quick, her arms sliding around him. He dropped a hand to capture her forearm, his thumb squeezing the tattoo inked there: the spiral pattern from the kiva, the same spiral pattern that showed up under a microscope when Harris had sent them a thick file on their blood family. It was the spiral of their old-world, newly-arisen antigens.

OG vampires, he'd told Kate. She'd taken it as a sign of something—maybe acceptance from the universe?—he wasn't sure of the particulars of her personal conversion. He only knew that when she'd gone down in that silent cold water, she'd had a revelation, and that the vision she'd seen had been his own.

A great cloud of ancestors, always with them.

She'd shown up tattooed after an all-nighter at work, crawling into bed with a piece of plastic mashed over her inside arm, and he'd woken to find her newly inked and sleep-deprived. Oh, and also pregnant. Apparently the plan had been really clear in her mind, but when he'd woken her with coffee around noon the next day, her off day, she'd been bewildered about her own reasoning and had told him artlessly oh, well, we finally made it work. The tattoo had been romantic, perhaps, or a message, or a vow. Something.

Now it was where he liked to bite her.

Castle brought her wrist to his lips and she hummed at his back, her body instantly conforming to his spine, readying for him. He lightly nipped, he didn't tear—they didn't have to tear at each other; they were in control; they were civilized beings.

The blood welled, as if leaping to his mouth, ready to give up its rich metallic tang. He pressed his kiss into her offering, now freely given if slightly taken, pressed his lips against her blood with his mouth sealed until he couldn't stand it a second longer—

But she broke first. "Just do it," she husked. "God. Take it."

"You said you didn't want to be late."

She growled in frustration and sank her teeth at the nape of his neck. No blood there, nothing at the surface, it was entirely animal, possessive, meant to goad him into taking, even as she Let.

He sipped.

She moaned, shuddering against his back. His heart quickened as her lips rubbed at the nape of his neck, a terrible tease. He lapped at the little bright dots of iron seeping from her wrist—it was intense, the taste of her like this, sip by sip—and he felt her fingers at his belt buckle, frantic.

"No need to tear at each other," he reminded her.

"Tear at you all damn day," she snapped, rocking her hips into his ass. Her breathing was rough now, she was yanking down his zipper, barely clearing his growing bulge, and finally—oh God, finally—her fingers stroked his cock.

"Yes," he hissed. Eyes nearly rolled back. His own hips bucked into her hand. She bumped the heel of her hand into his chin in reminder, and he opened his eyes to concentrate on the taste of life coursing through her veins to meet his lips.

She stroked him in time to the lathe of his tongue along her wrist. He bit a little harder.

Kate whimpered, clutching at him from behind in a sudden spurt of too much. "Enough foreplay," she panted. Her teeth sank into the side of his neck; he cursed and might have ravaged her wrist were it not for the way she yanked him backwards.

They stumbled away from the bathroom mirror; he could see their half-crazed passion in the shadows that flitted at the corner of his vision. But he didn't bother to chase down those after-images; sex didn't need a crowd (though her exhibitionism enjoyed—).

She threw him on the bed.

"Not fair," he groaned. He was as of yet only halfway through the buttons of his shirt. "Tangled up in my pants." They were knotted around his calves, only reason she'd gotten the upper hand.

"Make it up to you," she said, sinking to her knees.

Castle whimpered, abandoning the shirt to fist the bedding—it was mussed from this morning, when they hadn't been able to keep their hands off each other. She said first trimester hormones; he said vampire hormones; they fucked most mornings, made love on the weekends, explored the limits of the lichen on those nights when neither of them could sleep for all the strange.

Her mouth closed around his cock. He shouted as her teeth grazed. He might have grabbed the back of her head; she might have choked on him and bitten his erection, blood welling in her mouth even as his cock swelled proportionately. But then they settled.

It was lazier than it might have seemed. His hips rolled with the up and down of her mouth. His fingers were tangled in her hair, but he didn't push or pull—he didn't need to. She sensed what he needed, withheld what he wanted, rode the plunge and dip of the rhythm expertly. Too expertly.

"Kate," he warned, his voice growing thin.

She tickled his balls with her fingers, teased her tongue along his head as she withdrew. He made some vague gesture in the guise of a command, but she was already crawling up onto his lap and scoring his chest with her nails.

He yelped, grasping her hips reflexively. He didn't need to tear at her flesh when he could tear at her clothing, yanking the silk sheath (so pretty, so soft) from her body, warm from her skin, he would want to sleep with this silk against his cock—

"Hurry," she whined. She was trying to undo her bra, twisting on his lap for it. He grunted, a real pain, and dug his fingers under and into her panties, hearing a bit of a tear, but she didn't seem to care. Not when he stroked heaven, velvet and hot, ruthlessly rubbing between her legs.

Just when she seemed to give up on the underthings, aiming her mouth down for the blood she'd scored on his ribs, he flipped her to the mattress. While she was dazed, he yanked the panties to her knees, damn relieved when he could finally press himself between her legs.

Kate gasped, arching. He edged a hand beneath her and shifted her hips to fit him. There was some awkward writhing to get the panties all the way off, to free her breasts just enough, and of course she was deadly on his open dress shirt, so that he finally pulled it off just to keep it unstained, untattered.

She was scratching him up, scoring him like an overwrought cat, up and down his ribs, darting her tongue out to touch the faint impressions of blood. He enjoyed pressing her down, having the upper hand, watching her lose her mind trying to get at him, taste him.

"Castle," she moaned. "Lick me."

The moment his cock pushed inside her, he bent his head to obey.

Broken skin around her nipples, light teasing touches of his tongue to stop up the blood. She panted harshly; she was vibrating with the hard beat of her heart. Anything deeper, a longer Letting, and they'd not make it at all, let alone the fifteen minutes late they were about to be.

He took her nipple between his teeth.

"Oh God yes," she groaned.

Slow thrusts of his hips to set himself as deep as possible, to give her that friction. She found a good counter-movement, rising as he fell, her breaths fast as she built towards something. She was giving it good, her nails digging into his ass, one leg twined around his. He palmed a breast and worked her blood-sticky nipple in his fingers, since the thrusting was just too good to break right now.

"So good," she breathed. He must have to whimpered it into her ear. She gave it back, words to his soul, the tickle of her lips. "Don't even need the blood. Got our own edge."

He chuckled against her jaw. "True, but."

She laughed, whined as he thrust hard. A little rougher now. She liked it rough. He loved, more than anything, giving it to her rough. Doing creative things to her. Seeing her go wild. (Knowing it was the wild, the fierce, that had seen them through death itself, and out the other side into life.)

He also loved this dark reciprocal craving in himself for the reverse. From life back down into spiraling death—finding it inside her bite, la petite mort, the draining of his life that emptied him clean.

He was the master of the macabre, wasn't he?

Drain me, he'd said this morning, in the heat of things. She'd slowed and stared down into his eyes.

The reality of it had hit them both, and he'd cringed while she'd murmured promises of later. They'd have to do some research; they'd have to explore cautiously, expand their horizons with all their guard rails in place. (He longed to throw caution to the wind; he wanted her to just take him—)

"Fuck yes!" She climaxed suddenly, without warning, bucking up against him as she rode his cock through the worst of it. He had meant to hang on, had thought to put his wrist to her lips and let the blood drip down her climax-open mouth, but instead his own orgasm ripped through him at the end of things.

It was furious and mercifully brief, though he collapsed on top of her and she had to roll him off. He was limp and panting, eyes closed, when she patted his chest with a sweat-damp palm and dusted a kiss to his mouth.

"Drink a little," he husked, knew there was too much yearning in it.

She didn't protest, merely bent low over him, her warm body melting over his. Her teeth raked his nipple and he flinched, but she was already drawing a line up to his heart, where the teeth marks still lingered, scars from where she'd torn him out of the grip of death.

The pierce of her bite now was a paroxysm of pain-pleasure. He whimpered, at her mercy until she began to suckle.

Rick sighed, a deep relief penetrating to his bones. Certainty, settlement, rightness. Her tongue lapping, her lips pursed to drink from him. He lifted a weary hand to the back of her head to hold her to him while she drank, now on the downside of lust. Falling into love.

It was over too soon. She was lifting her head, licking her red-tinted lips, her eyes dark and glimmering with the richness of his blood. Angel of Mercy/Angel of Death, his very own.

She shook her head free of his hand, pressed his knuckles against her breasts. He fondled the invisible scars, scars only he knew, healed from her flesh but forever in his heart. What life could deal them, how it had taken and taken—

"Gotta get back to the Normies, Rick." She shook her head, her thumb wrestling his.

"I know."

"It's your anniversary," she smiled softly. "Don't you want to celebrate with family—blood and Blood?"

"You know I do." Still he didn't move. Their fingers and thumbs tangling. A fancy dinner at an Italian place owned by a cluster of Peacekeepers who had been given dialysis treatment made from their Blood Family. They'd been near-deranged; one of them had been on the road hunting them as they'd escaped, a year ago today.

His Transition Anniversary. Vampire for a year.

He grinned.

"Enough lazing about," she smiled slowly, knowing it would prick his indignation. And even though he knew she'd done it on purpose, it still did.

But as he sat up, he was surprised when Kate bent her head to his scarred transition marks and broke open the scabs with her tongue.

He gasped, a fistful of her mussed hair. She sucked hard, ruthlessly, and his ecstasy soared.

"I love you," she said. She rubbed her lips in it, his blood, and finally lifted her head. He could see the blood glistening, could see her eyes wet too. "If it weren't for you, I'd never have any of this. I'd have died, and it would have been a mercy, but there was so much I wanted and couldn't even let myself want, and now—"

"Now we start our own family, Blood and blood." He touched his thumb to the center of her bottom lip, came away with a faint impression of his stain. Whorls of blood.

She stood gracefully, unfolding from him as if she hadn't been near-desperate and almost-weepy. Instead, she was radiant. The pregnancy showed not at all, not yet, but she showed herself off for him as she slowly began to re-dress. The angle of her thigh, the sharp rise of her hips, the binding of her breasts.

When he had convinced himself, finally, not to try seduction again, Castle himself rose from the bed and began to repair his state of dishabille.

She watched of course.

They were hand in hand out to the elevator. Alexis was waiting in the lobby—perhaps she'd texted and this was discretion—but the car was waiting outside, and his mother and Jim Beckett were already side by side on the seat. There was a flurry of melodramatics, of redheaded excitement at being back with the volk. Jim asking after the baby's health. Alexis offering another ridiculous baby name, this time Cullen, which Kate didn't get the reference for, and so Alexis regaled them with the Twilight saga, even though no one had asked for it.

Castle sat back into the seat. Kate sneaked her fingers into his pocket and played at the thin lining, making his skin prickle, making him want her.

He gave her a warning look.

Later, she mouthed, a smirk, a promise.

Such promise.

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