Dreams Chapter 7, a companions of the night fanfic

Dreams

Chapter 7

"Look," Kerry told him as she approached her car. "I have things to do tonight, and you're not on the list."

Michel opened his mouth to respond, but she beat him to the punch.

"And neither is Luke, so just quit it with the innuendoes and sly remarks."

"I wasn't going to say anything like that. I was just going to mention that I'm carpooling with you to the house."

Kerry paused, her hand hovering over the door handle for a moment before giving an internal shrug and getting into the driver's seat. She really should have seen that coming, and this was a little better than showing up at Lucy and Dave's to finding him sitting in his chair, looking exactly the same as he had when they had first met. Kerry knew that would have unnerved her – especially if seeing him there was unexpected. Even with an audience, her heart still would have tripped over itself like a drunken teenager, and he would have known immediately. She could almost see the way he would have raised his glass – a prop he happened to have in this imagined scenario, though she wasn't sure why – to salute her, his infuriatingly smug grin on his lips as he suggested she take a seat.

She possibly got that scene right out of a vampire movie. Dracula anyone?

"It's been a while since I've been in a car with you behind the wheel," he told her. "I'm assuming you've improved since you were 16? And that you did eventually get a valid driver's license, yes?"

Kerry shot him an irritated look, but it broke when she saw him checking the veracity of his seatbelt by tugging on it, with a grim expression on his face. "I'm a pretty good driver. I was then, too, there were just some extenuating circumstances. You see, these crazies were shooting at me and this incredibly cute guy I just saved."

"So would you say you were trying to impress this cute guy?"

Kerry chuckled as she turned on the car. "I'm not sure that was on my mind at the time, considering the bullets and the getaway and all. Plus, I had just risked my life to saw through these ropes tying his wrists with a razor blade and he was kind of bleeding all over my car."

"That's really inconsiderate of him." Michel's hand was still clenched around his seatbelt.

"Are you a nervous passenger?" She asked, slightly surprised to find he might have a personal weakness after all.

"A what?" he asked, relaxing his fist and sliding his hands over his thighs in an attempt to look casual.

"You know how some people are nervous drivers when they're behind the wheel? Well do you get nervous when someone else is driving? Is it a need to be in control, Michel, or do you just not trust anyone else to get you there safely?"

"That's ridiculous." He told her primly.

Kerry smiled. She then lowered her voice into a comforting tone. "Don't worry. You're in good hands."

He opened his mouth, as though to make one of his caustic remarks, and instead closed it again as she deliberately took a corner sharply. She wondered if he knew that the thought he might have a weakness – a not-quite a phobia, but a little more than a quirk – about relinquishing control in a moving vehicle made her heart unclench just a little towards him. Sometimes she forgot that despite the many personas and facades of Michel, there was still a person in there somewhere.

She'd have to be careful to not start thinking of him as human, though, either, because he was anything but.

"I want you to know that I was never using you back then, or whatever it was you thought I did. I think that maybe it's time to clear the air between us and I don't know why, but it just seems like something that needs to be said. Sometimes I still feel bewildered and resentful towards you for leaving my life in such extreme turmoil – and so abruptly— but other times I'll look at a sunrise or be enjoying a quiet meal with my boyfriend, and I'll suddenly be really glad you did what you did. That I'm still human."

Kerry finished her monologue and looked over at him, expecting to see him staring at her, possibly with his inscrutable expression, but more likely with that infernal smile across his lips. Instead, he was staring out the window at nothing. "I'm sorry," he told her finally. "I reacted badly that night. If we're going to clear the air, I think you should know that."

"Okay," Kerry told him, wondering what was up. If it was usually this easy to get an apology out of Michel, she didn't think they would have ever gotten to this place where they were virtual strangers masquerading as former lovers.

"Okay," he echoed, still staring out the window. "I'm glad we have that settled."

But it wasn't, Kerry realized as she pulled up in front of Ethan Bryne's old house. Nothing felt resolved, and judging by the silence in the car for the last five minutes, things might actually be worse between them. Somewhere in there things had gone horribly wrong, as though neither of them had heard the words they actually wanted to hear.

It was unsettling.

x.x.x

Dave waylaid Michel the moment they were through the door, pulling him aside and leaving Kerry to follow Lucy into the living room. Kerry had hesitated on the threshold, wondering if they wanted to talk about personal things or the investigation. If it was the former, she was perfectly comfortable leaving them alone for a few minutes, but if it was the latter, she resented the idea that she had to go sit like a little lady in the parlour while the men spoke business.

Deciding she'd just have to trust that Michel actually wanted her to be aware of everything going on – though that took a great deal of trust, considering his secretive nature – she perched herself on the couch in awkward silence as Lucy watched her.

"Lucy," Kerry directed her conversation, ignoring the two vampires as they talked in shallow tones on the other side of the room. "Have I ever told you how much I love the new color you and Dave painted the house? I mean, I always thought the house was lovely, but now it's so eye catching I just can't take my eyes off it." She shot a quick look at Michel to judge just how much attention he was paying her. She figured he was distracted enough for her to say the next part – not that she didn't think he could hear it, but she didn't think he would call her on it. "When I got back to town, I avoided driving by like the plague, but at some point things just changed and I found myself driving by as often as I could. Sometimes I would just stop and look, and I'm glad I did. I could tell that someone new lived here now, and the house looked so lived in for the first time in a while."

"I'm glad you approve," Lucy responded coldly.

"I'm sorry," Kerry frowned, her attention turning fully back to Lucy at the frosty tones in her response. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No." Lucy seemed to blink into herself, clearing her mind in a way that was obvious. "I'm just distracted and worried right now. We've got a kid, and the longer it takes to find this guy, the more danger my family is in. That's what Dave and Ethan are talking about right now. Dave wants out."

Kerry patted Lucy's arm awkwardly. "He'll understand."

"Who?" Lucy snorted. "Your Michel?" she asked, deliberately giving the name the French pronunciation Kerry used instead of the regular anglicized version he went by with other vampires. "He believes that any kind of personal connections are liabilities. He's so against the idea of a vampire having a family that he looks like he's going to throw up every time he sees my son."

Kerry wondered what Michel looking nauseated looked like, but couldn't really picture it. "Maybe, but he's not evil."

"Kerry?" Michel called out from the doorway of the living room, where he had turned away from Dave and was gesturing towards her. "We're leaving."

Kerry gave Lucy a 'told-you' look as she stood, grabbing her purse from the floor as she walked towards Michel. "That was decent of you," she told him once they were back in the car.

"It wasn't nearly as altruistic as you think," Michel told her, buckling himself in with no signs of trepidation. For some reason, he seemed to take pleasure in reminding her that he wasn't all that nice of a person. It made Kerry think that maybe he was protesting too much, but then she remembered who she was talking to.

"Yeah, because not making someone who is worried about their family chase after a serial killer makes you a complete bastard."

Michel shook his head. "That was just an excuse. Dave's never been that bright. He probably couldn't find the killer if the guy was slicing open his neck right beneath his nose."

"Literally," Kerry couldn't resist inserting, sharing a small grin with him at her corny joke.

"I'm pretty confident that allowing him to investigate from the sidelines won't hurt our progress much. In fact, it might help."

"What progress?" she asked him, realizing as she turned the corner that she was heading back to her apartment without asking him where he wanted to go. "Where am I supposed to be driving you?" The question was asked with a sense of irritation, as she realized she had fallen back on old habits of assuming that where ever it was they were going after dark, the two of them would be going together. It was the little things that caught her up sometimes, like when she heard a sound in the dark and expected to see him, or when he made her laugh and the years seemed to melt away.

"Here's fine," he told her with an amused grin and a knowing look in his eye. She could see the gleam of his white teeth in the glow from the moving street lights as he smiled.

It was on the tip of her tongue to say something abrasive to him and confront him about all the times he made fun of her without saying a word, but instead she held her words, knowing they would only fuel his amusement.

"Oh? Are you living around here somewhere, then?" she asked instead.

"No," he responded, not clarifying as she pulled up in her parking space and got out of the car. She left him sitting there without a word, but by the time she walked around the back of the vehicle he was out, his cool fingers cooling around her wrist.

If she hadn't almost expected he would try to stop her in some way, he would have frightened her. She hadn't seen him move, or heard the car door open or close. He was like a ghost sometimes, only far more dangerous because this dead man could walk, talk, and kill. Kerry looked down at his fingers, then back at his face. "Yes?"

He was silent, looking around for something. "Come on," he said finally, pulling her across the small lot and through a break in a hedge bush. They came out in the public park in the lot next door, and he gave her a gentle shove towards one of the benches.

"Is there something you want to talk about?" she asked, taking a seat. "We could have done that in the car."

"So your boyfriend could come across us on one of his nightly patrols? What would he think, to see us sitting so intimately in a confined space, the windows steamed up from the breath of our passionate... conversation."

Kerry shot him a scornful look, but it was ruined by the way she had to purse her lips to keep from snickering. She couldn't do anything about the amused glint that was sure to be in her eyes. She'd never been very good at lying to him.

"I just wanted to observe Brockport at night," he said finally. "Judge to see if anything takes notice of a couple of young people sitting in a park at night."

"I... see." Kerry responded, her mind playing catch-up with his reasoning. Bait, it told her. The word made her uncomfortable. The idea of the two of them sitting alone in the dark for any other reason made her more so.

"So far the victims don't match either of our descriptions," he reminded her, as though that was a comfort. "And together even less. I just want to see what goes on in Brockport after midnight these days."

She should have pointed out that after midnight wasn't really "day" in the most general sense of the word, just to annoy him. She also should have been interested that his way of finding out what happened in town was to sit on a bench in the middle of what seemed to be nowhere to her and observe. That didn't really surprise her.

"It's after midnight!" she groaned, shooting him a dirty look that wasn't mock anything. Then she realized how like a middle-aged lady her habits had been recently.

"What's wrong Kerry?" Michel asked, his voice mocking. He never was one to pass up an opportunity to rib her a little. It was one of his more annoying traits that she had always found endearing and a little sexy. "You used to be such a party animal, staying up all night. Remember that time you begged me to fuck you over the back of the couch. You seemed to like it too. What happened to her? She was fun."

"She still is fun," Kerry responded, deciding that her best response to him when he was like this was to give it back a little instead of becoming indignant. It might have been the late hour, but that reasoning made complete sense to her. "And I seem to remember you being a little bit of a prude that night, worried you might hurt me. But then I knew the best ways to seduce you. I wonder Michel, if I leaned in and scraped my teeth over your neck, right here, would you make the same noise in the back of your throat that you did that night?"

She ran her finger over the pulse of his neck, leaning towards him in a way that was tempting fate.

"Kerry Nowicki!" Michel said with dark bemusement, and just a little bit of delight. "Apparently there are more dangerous things in the night than a madman with a knife."

Kerry laughed, proud of herself. Then she realized she had actually kind of just propositioned him. A little. "We probably don't even have that kind of physical connection anymore," she protested.

He slid the back of his fingers over her cheeks in a surprisingly intimate gesture for the banter they were sharing. They moved over her lips in a caress, the tip of his middle finger catching on her bottom lip, tugging gently on it as his touch skimmed down her chin. "I don't think that would be a problem."

"No," Kerry breathed, pulling away. She couldn't rid her face of the expression of yearning or regret, so she looked away from him. "It has to be a problem."

"I understand," he told her, but his hand still closed over her wrist again, as though he wanted to say something entirely different.

"I have to go," Kerry said quietly, drawing away from him so softly that it was barely a movement. "Good night, Michel."

x.x.x

I was standing at the bus stop in the freezing rain, the small, sharp shards of it stinging my face as I tried to burrow my chin into the collar of my jacket. I was pretty sure the weather channel had been wrong about the forecast. This was not freezing rain, or even sleet, but some ingenious form of torture thought up by the legions of Hell. I shuffled my feet inside my flats, wondering what had possessed me to wear a pair of summer, or at best early autumn, shoes in the middle of January. Where were my nice, warm boots that clunked heavily when I walked?

Oh yeah, at home where I left them, all nice and warm in the foyer.

Unlike me, Kerry the human popsicle.

I was so involved in my misery of whining in my head about late buses and rain in the middle of winter, that I completely missed his approach from behind. I jumped when he pulled a chunk of frozen snow out of my hair, his breath warm against my cheek. "Come on," he cajoled. "It isn't that bad."

"Maybe not for those of us who don't have body temperatures," I responded, curling my arms around his waist in a hug that was more of an attempt to share warmth with him than a true mirror of my feelings at seeing him here. If I was to do that, my legs would be wrapped around his hips and my mouth fused to his right now. It wasn't that I thought he wouldn't be responsive if I did that at certain times, but not only were we in public at the moment, but it was also a little too tinged in desperation. Since he had shown up here on his own volition, I wasn't going to be the one to send him running away, back to whatever hole or urban condo he crawled out of this time. "But this is the shittiest weather ever."

Michel snorted. "You have it lucky. You should try living in... Canada."

I looked up at him curiously, my cheek slicking against his wet jacket. I was almost sure he was about to say something other than Canada, something that would have been too personal and far beyond the boundaries of his life that he had set up. A year, perhaps. 'You should try living in 1875' or 'You should try living in a time without hot showers' sounded like something an old vampire might say.

Of course, I never had established an age for him. Sometimes I thought he couldn't possibly be that old, just in the way he enjoyed the game. A centuries old vampire couldn't possibly enjoy playing emo, could he? "The only way you could know how cold Canada is is if you lived there when you were human. Is that where you're from? It would explain the French bit." I turned the tables on him, enjoying this game just as much as I had when we first met, even if I would never have admitted it at the time. Maybe, that's why we liked each other. It was all in the mind games.

"Give it up, Ker. You aren't ever going to find out. Now, where are you going tonight that has us standing out in the cold all shivery and wet?" He wasn't shivering, but his hand was rubbing up and down my back as though it helped warm me up. I thought he'd have better luck rubbing himself against my front if he wanted to generate heat.

"Class," I informed him, tilting my chin stubbornly and staring at him.

"Skip it," he suggestion casually.

"I can't just skip class!" I responded to him indignantly, thinking that if he just pressed a little further that I would do anything for him.

"Sure you can," he said slowly, pressing his mouth against mine. My toes curled in my wet shoes, and I was sure they were steaming. His mouth was slow and thorough against my lips and I knew that though the game had changed, we were still playing. We'd be playing until one of us finally gave in, and despite his almost dependable visits to see me, I knew it wouldn't be him. I wanted this too much; the sensation of his lips on mine, my arms resting across his firm shoulders and my breasts pressed against his chest, even through all the layers of clothing, was enough, too much, and far too little contact for me, and my body sung and whispered with pleasure and dissatisfaction. "Let me take you home," he urged.

"Yes," I agreed, breaking away and gently touching my mouth with a gloved hand. I noticed the bus lights in the distance, already past my stop and on to the next one. I glared at him for a moment and slipped my hand into his.

"You know I'm worth it."

x.x.x

When Kerry awoke the next morning she felt refreshed. Her body still felt a bit tired from the long nights she was putting in, but her mind was surprisingly clear. Luke was standing in front of his dresser, his back to her as he took off his uniform. Unlike her, his shoulders were hunched in exhaustion, and he looked defeated.

Kerry grimaced, overcome by guilt at what she had been doing to him for the last two days. There was a certain sense of betrayal behind her actions – not only investigating behind his back, but also spending so much time with her ex-lover – and without telling him a thing about it. And she and Michel, well after last night she had more to feel guilty about, didn't she? "Why don't you come to bed?" she asked, looking at the clock and seeing that it was time for her to get up. That meant he was home at least an hour late.

"I didn't mean to wake you," he told her, turning towards her as he dropped his shirt on the floor and crawled into bed with his pants still on.

"I have to get up anyway," she told him, and her heart hurt a bit to look at him. "But I kept the bed warm for you."

"Thanks," he rumbled from his pillow, but he sounded anything but. Kerry leaned over and kissed his head as she climbed out of bed.

"I'm taking lunch with Dr. R today," she told him. "If we go to that little specialty sandwich shop next to the morgue, I'll pick you up one of those danishes you like." Kerry didn't know why she said it, probably just to reconnect with him before she had to leave for a long day of work, but she immediately fell foolish when he grunted, half asleep.

"Could you try to be quiet this morning," he asked, voice a grumble against the pillow. "I'm on call this afternoon and if we pick up another case I'll have to go in. Try not to get into any car accidents today, kay?"

"Sure," Kerry told him, feeling bad for even the little bit of conversation she had already tried to engage him in that morning.

x.x.x.x

"Dr. Roberts?" Kerry called out, entering the morgue through the front door. It wasn't locked, but then again, he rarely locked it during the day. The day was sunny and surprising warm for spring, but inside the morgue it was the same cool temperature it usually was. This is what had made it one of the best summer jobs she ever had – the lack of sweating beneath the hot sun, or in a stuffy corner of some enclosed building with no windows.

Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she had skipped breakfast again, and that her eating habits had stopped revolving around a set time. In college, she always knew that the story she was writing was going to be big if she found herself so involved she forgot to grab a sandwich somewhere along the way. She remembered that her editor used to get one of the junior reporters to make sure there were always a bottle of water on her desk and a package of trail mix in the drawer.

No one looked out for her like that anymore. But then again, wasn't she old enough now to look after herself?

Kerry was thinking about that as she entered the autopsy room, only to find it empty. Assuming that there wasn't a body for Roberts to work on today, she turned and headed into his office. At first, she thought that was empty too.

"Doctor Roberts?" Kerry asked, noticing his shoe sticking out from behind the desk at an angle that was impossible for an empty shoe to rest in. She already knew what she would find on the floor from the sinking sensation in her stomach, but she walked around the desk anyway.

He was face-down on the floor, and she could tell from the way his head rested, tilted upwards towards her as if he were straining to look up, that she would find his neck ripped open like the last body. There was so little blood, only a small pool of it around his shoulders, soaking through the same sweater he had been wearing the night before.

He had never made it home.

She didn't touch the body, didn't check to see that he was really dead. Kerry already knew he was. She could also see from the color and consistency of the blood – dried around the edged, congealing in the middle – that he had been dead for a while.

Kerry swallowed the bile rising up in her throat and pulled her sleeves down over her hands. She then rummaged through the notes on his desk, trying to find if any mention of vampires or his conversation with Michel was recorded anywhere. When she couldn't find anything there, she checked the recent documents on his computer.

When she was finished, she retched into the garbage can, her stomach mercifully empty so that she only gagged without throwing up. She then pulled out her cell phone and called the police, leaving the scene of the crime intact.