Doc Worth had a hell of a mess on his hands.
This was not so unusual in and of itself - if there was ever going to be anything qualifying as a mess in Doc Worth's life, it could only be big, because everything else was just the price of living the life Lucian Worth lived.
The thing was, see, that he should have let the gangsters 'kill' the stupid vampire, shoulda let the stupid vampire play dead, shoulda explained it all away - drug addict, rabies case, whatever. Make off like the fuckwit deserved to be shot, and good riddance. Then he coulda helped Conrad die legally, gotten that part of his life squared away, been useful to him. Helpful. Significant. All sorts of good things that coulda shoulda woulda happened, if Worth hadn't killed the bodyguard.
And Worth did feel real bad about that - yeah. He was a junkie and a crook and a masochist, not a murderer.
But the man had shot his... his. Had shot Connie. A lot. Emptied the clip, even, which had been the excessive twinge of sadism that had really yanked on Worth's temper - it hadn't been enough to just floor Conrad, no, the thug had to try and make a statement like a dog pissing on a fire hydrant and then the six nearest trees. And Worth wasn't the type of stray to just let other strays go pissing all over his favorite tree.
Not to mention, the 'kill' had come as a surprise. Worth had been half joking about the Don's lethal grade of secrecy - obviously Conrad hadn't known who the guy was, or else he wouldn't have used such a tone, right? The worst Worth had honestly expected on Conrad's behalf would have been a hefty threat, possibly made good by a bribe - the same extortion as he himself had been given. But then, Conrad wasn't the doctor under hire to provide Don Armanini's dialysis treatments.
It was Worth's good luck that the Don and his people had thought Conrad for a living persons, now deceased at the hand of their guard, or else the Don might not have been so understanding of Worth's removal of said guard from the mortal plane. An eye for an eye, Armanini reasoned, but his people couldn't be seen anywhere near the incident. One of the women of the group dropped a baggie of heroin on the dead guard and ushered everyone out of the tiny, bloodied apartment (and presumably out of the building and to the rest of their lives, leaving Doc Worth with the burden of the corpses).
Doc Worth had briefly considered calling the police and making out as if he'd heroically defended himself against a heroin dealer, but Conrad's teethmarks were still all over him and the whole scene was just too weird and fucked up to be any kind of salvageable. So he took the baggie off of the very dead man, rifled in the kitchen drawer for a spoon and plucked a lighter from the basket on the folding card table.
Conrad, face-down on the soaked carpet stirred, groaning.
Worth made a few calls from the wall phone, setting a tea tray with his sundries. He kicked on over to the half-bloody armchair, pleased to see Connie having latched on to the bleeding corpse like a piglet to its mother's tit, and took a seat - placing the tea tray on the low coffee table. He wasn't bleeding horrendously, was Doc Worth - the bites had been more out of irritation during their fight than hunger, and Connie's wimpy little fang-tooth could only do damage if it snagged and tore - in example, if Doc Worth tried to pull himself away (which he had not, for obvious reasons).
" 'Ey," Worth pressed the pointy tip of his snakeskin boot to Conrad's ribs. "If 'e's still alive, you go on ahead and finish it up," he offers generously, slipping a neck tie out of the coffee table's drawer and shrugging out of his longcoat.
Conrad does not respond, a hollow-eyed ghoul crouched slurping ravenous over the body whose throat had been surgically altered to more resemble a second mouth. Doc Worth watched this with detached arousal, one mouth closing over 'another', the thick black lashes of Conrad's eye closed against the pale crest of his cheek, blood painted wet and dark down one half of his face.
Worth ties the necktie around his collar properly, then loops it off his neck and sticks his arm through instead, rolling up the sleeve of his t-shirt to draw the fabric in a tight noose just above his bicep. He takes the syringe and fills it with water from the glass, holding the spoon delicately between shaking fingers as the water is squeezed out into the spoon basin. The syringe is traded for the lighter, the spoon heated over an anemic butane flame until there are bubbles. The heroin is sprinkled in. Liberally. The tincture is brought to a caramelized brown, and the lighter is traded for syringe.
Doc Worth is sniffling the whole while, muttering curses under his breath, watching Conrad with all the weariness he might watch a goldfish known to leap from its bowl to its doom. The needle, now beget with heroin, hovers over the inside of Worth's exposed arm. Doc Worth works his fist until a vein pops into view, and with it a trickle of blood from one of the wounds Connie had left biting through the fabric of Worth's coat. The sight of the blood stills the needle's descent.
"Fuck," Worth flips the syringe to the tea tray like an artist flinging a dry brush, slumping back into his armchair with a morose sigh. He toes at Conrad's ribs again. " 'Ey, sugarbits. Go ahead and leave off th' bastard, will ya?" Worth claps hands on knees, pushing himself to a stand with a groan. He takes two steps and reaches down, fingers threading into a fistful of Connie's (slicked, gelled-up) black hair to tug his stupid mouth from its stupid-erotic latch on the stupid fucking bodyguard. The man was dead - had been, would have been - Worth wasn't going to fret about that until such a time as the adrenaline wore off, but Worth couldn't just let his - couldn't let Conrad - go on disgracing himself. It weren't fuckin' meet.
And Worth was, at the forefront, jealous of the skin that had been met by such a hungry mouth, when not moments prior it had been him under Conrad's furious attention (after little enough provocation - indeed Worth could find and push Conrad's buttons more easily the longer he knew him, as that kind of thing often went).
Conrad was in a bad way. Bullets passed through dead flesh like they passed through wet cardboard - unspectacularly - but there had been a lot of bullets in that clip and a few had more probably met bone (which acted as bone might dead or alive). Worth curled his arms under Conrad's shoulders and hauled him to his feet, suffering the sharp scrape of panicked fingertips against the back of his forearm. He could hear the pain in Conrad's mumbled curses, and grew anxious that Conrad's usual venomous energy had not yet resurfaced.
" 'Ey," Worth prompted, again, smoothing a hand through Conrad's hair to right it, bracing him against his chest, patting Conrad's shoulder before relenting to his wobbling ability to stand on his own. "Nothing hit ya nowhere important? You wanna use the shower, get a change of shirt afore you go stalking down the main road back to yer not-cave?"
Conrad leaned away - that was, forward - stifling a belch. When he vomited, the rattle of bullets could be heard through the splatter of blood, a cascade on the coffee table to which the heels of his palms had fallen.
"Hawt," Worth observed around the lighting of his cigarette. "Toothbrush in there, too, if you don't mind sharing."
But Conrad had pushed past and stumbled to the stairway door, a flail of limbs and breathy exhalation distancing itself down wooden clatters - and so exited the evening of Doc Worth's (now extreme) financial uncertainty.
Lucian Worth ambled to his bedroom, ears straining after the silence the Don's crowd had left behind, breathless over the thought of Conrad running into any lingering goons, exhaling only once he'd packed the small leather briefcase and snapped its lid shut over the change of clothes and clutter of bare necessities. He eyeballed the heroin for a heart-sick moment, attention sliding to the short stack of blank papers that had once held Hannah's runes on them, shoved under a leg of the coffee table to right its crooked wobble.
Worth stood in place for a good twenty minutes, until the support crew thundered through the door Connie had left ajar.
The last thing Lamont Toucey heard out of Doc Worth was "Thanks fer the cleanup, fatass. Goin' on a walkabout, yer money's been wired." And, bizarrely, Worth had clapped an arm around Lamont's shoulder in the usual chummy way, but also swung his sharp birdie head around to kiss Lamont full on the mouth, gripping his jaw firmly, inarguably. It wasn't a goodbye kiss - it was brief, and brimming, a happy act. Congratulatory, almost. Lamont had pushed Worth away, and spat to the bloody carpet, frazzled and alarmed and in no mood to ask any questions that didn't already have obvious, horrifying answers.
