Part Three
It had been two years since he had been so rudely knocked from the top of the food chain, wings still dripping wax from his disastrous attempt to touch the sun, and too dazed to even appreciate that he had somehow made it to the other side alive. He had seen the sun since then, and seen it often enough so that he could now pull his eyes away from it before his retinas were seared from his head. He had eaten human food, he had fought with a gun and a sword, he had been fucked until he could not stand and he had earned scars on battlefields that he had touched at continually for months afterwards, unable to reconcile himself for a long time afterwards to the fact that they would not fade away within the day. He had been forced headlong back into the cattle yard that he had fought so hard to shed the taint of fifty years before, much to the bitter amusement that Blade made no attempt to hide, until he had almost become accustomed to it again.
After all of that, Deacon knew that he still vastly preferred the night. He sat in his seat in a helicopter that he knew damned well had been chosen as much for the display of power as it had been for expedient transport-he himself would have employed just such a method, had he the means to do so-and looked out over the city, glittering with lights like diamonds. It did not look like that during the day.
Deacon did not turn around to catch them at it, but he could still feel Whistler's and Nyssa's eyes on him as he studied the infrastructure below him. They would probably be horrified to learn how similar their expressions could be sometimes. Blade, of course, was indifferent.
The four of them all rode in one helicopter, though there was really only room for three, while Asad rode alone in the second. Nyssa had been unwilling to leave them alone with the familiar pilot, while none of the group of relative humans had been willing to split up while they were heading into enemy territory.
Enemy territory. "Motherfuck," Deacon whispered softly, too low to be heard by anyone other than himself, as he continued to look out over the night.
Scud was not with them. Someone, after all, had needed to stay back and make sure that the security system was not breached again. Deacon had caught Blade alone during the day and had asked him, in the calmest and most civil terms that he could manage, if Blade had lost his fucking mind.
"I'm testing him," came Blade's flat reply, in a tone suggesting that Deacon think long and hard before he chose today of all days to start shit. Whistler was still close at hand, making his displeasure at Frost's very existence known, and danger rode the air.
Deacon had taken a step back, but certainly had not retreated all the way. "You and your tests," he had snapped. They had gone one for months after Deacon had made his glorious return to homo sapiens sapiens. For all that he knew, they were still taking place. "Like a damned schoolmarm."
Blade smiled more now, but rarely did they have any mirth in them. Deacon thought that they were mostly an excuse for Blade to show his teeth. He had only gripped at the back of Deacon's neck, a gesture that managed to be equal parts possessive and threatening, and walked away without saying a further word.
Deacon took a deep breath and turned away from the door, only to find himself meeting Nyssa's dark-eyed stare. She was beautiful, and Deacon had partaken of enough women of every shape, color, and creed over the decades that he had walked over the earth to consider himself a connoisseur. She did not seem to know how lovely she was, either, which was always an edge. Didn't stop her from being a pain in the ass. He arched his eyebrows when he saw the smirk on her face.
"Pureblood or not," Deacon drawled, ignoring both Whistler's poison stare and Blade's seeming indifference that really saw everything, "your face is going to freeze if you leave it that way, sugar."
"Doubtful." Nyssa's smirk deepened before she spoke again. "They tell pureblood vampires stories of the Daywalker when they are small, do you know that? Like he is the bogeyman."
'More like an avenging angel,' Deacon thought. Darkness was just a matter of convenience for Blade. He would be more than happy to kick someone's ass for them in the broad daylight if that was what was required of him.
Nyssa sniffed and finished, "Frankly, I'm disappointed. I expected more of a fight."
Meaning that she wanted to get sweaty with him some more. Deacon felt his lips turning up into a smirk as he folded his arms over his chest and settled deeper down into his seat. Nyssa was barely managing to keep her lip from curling as she looked him over. Purebloods. They were like the Aryan Brotherhood. "Are you now?" Deacon mused. He reached over and nudged at Blade's leg with his foot. "Come on, stud, she's a lady. Hate to disappoint her."
Blade turned away from his own scrutiny of the city long enough to flick Deacon a dryly amused glance before he opened up his jacket. When Nyssa saw the amount of plastique that he had stored there, her eyes widened. Many women wore that kind of expression when they were given a present of diamonds. "Think your pureblood superiority will save you if you're blown into a whole bunch of pieces the size of your thumb?" Deacon asked her. Nyssa's smirk only deepened. Noticing that Whistler was still watching him, Deacon snapped, "What?"
Whistler jerked his chin in the direction of Blade and the explosives. "Surprised, is all. From what I heard of you, you were more the type to let other people do your heavy lifting and put their asses on the line." Unless Deacon was dealing with an old man, was the unspoken subtext, and then he had needed the audience.
Deacon stared hard at Whistler, the last man that he had ever killed, the one that had caused the chain reaction that had brought them all here to this place. He supposed that he ought to feel some kind of remorse for all of his wicked ways. Mostly he only felt tired, on edge about walking into pureblood territory where the enemy so clearly had the advantage, and a little concerned that Whistler's sudden calm meant that he was contemplating reaching over and shoving Deacon out of the helicopter altogether.
"I believe in an afterlife," Deacon said as he leaned back into his chair again. "Me and Blade, we have a deal. He gives me enough warning to get out a deathbed repentance, he gets to be a crazy man in the meanwhile. Best of both worlds." He could not seem to stop himself from reaching for it, every time. It was not Blade's or Whistler's expressions that changed in response to Deacon's crack, but Nyssa's. She wore an expression of genuine amusement as the helicopter sat down on the top of a tall, sleek building. A dozen guards could be seen at regular intervals along the roof, each one carrying an automatic rifle within his or her hands. Deacon squinted as the helicopter's blades ceased moving and they were able to step out, but could decipher no details. "They ought to be human," he said. "Usually the exterior guards-"
"They are," Blade cut him off as he stepped down from the helicopter himself and followed after Nyssa and Asad. Deacon shut his mouth so hard that he almost made a clicking noise as his teeth came together.
Whistler cast him an amused look as he walked past him. The old bastard was too perceptive for his own good, was what he was. "What happens when you're not useful anymore?" Whistler asked.
"Old man," Deacon said, "I'm still useful in ways that you can't even begin to fathom." Whistler's expression looked more confused than outrage, so Blade must not have told him about the original basis of the truce that he and Deacon had called him one another. Something to look forward to.
They caught up to the rest of the group. Nyssa and Asad looked more curious about their delay than Blade himself did. Of course not, Deacon thought with gritted teeth. He was not going to interfere, except for those moments when he did. Deacon ground his teeth together even harder as he stared up at the pureblood fortress, the ultimate symbol of everything that had been denied him while he has still been walking on the fanged side of the fence. His home back in New York looked cheap and trashy in comparison.
There were some moments when Deacon had become so used to being human again that he no longer felt the ache. There were others when it was still all that he could do not to take on the entire universe at once for what it had done to him. This was not one of the happier moments.
Deacon sucked in a deep lungful of air until he could no longer feel his heart hammering in his chest or the color rising high in his cheeks. Blade was watching him, but for once Deacon could honestly say that there was no part of him that gave a flying fuck about what the Daywalker thought. This was about something else entirely; this was about measuring up to the next rung on the universal ladder that he had tried to take through force even as he had been knocked virtually all the way back down to the ground again. Apparently, he was a people person who was just never going to be able to rid himself of that fact.
Bitter smiles still seemed to be the kind that he was best at.
Deacon watched with interest as Nyssa passed through security by submitting a blood sample via several needles driven into the palm of her hand. He had never employed security measures so rigid when he had been a vampire. There was a punch line there, but Deacon was too tired to go searching for it at the moment. He could feel the eyes of all of the human guards ringed around them, the muzzles of the guns. Bullets did a hell of a lot more to human flesh than it did vampire. If that was a thought that weighed on Whistler in any kind of significant way, then he was holding his cards close to his chest.
"You sure about this?" Deacon heard Whistler say to Blade in a low voice. His tone made it clear that he was talking about a great deal more than the fortress. Whistler had been making his thoughts on the subject of cooperating with vampires clear all day long, until Deacon was sure that he was only waiting for an excuse to write an encyclopedia on the subject.
There was an edge to Blade's voice as he replied, "Well, if I'm not…" He patted briefly at the explosives hidden beneath his jacket.
Nyssa glanced once over her shoulder, in time to catch the gesture, before she went back to entering another series of codes into a new checkpoint. They were deep within the fortress now, and the nighttime sky was no longer within sight. Deacon could not help but feel uneasy without it. He looked around the interior with interest, memorizing both the way that they had come and the meaning of all that he could see. It was clean and sterile, modern down to the very last inch. Dracula would have been appalled.
A flicker of a frown crossed Nyssa's face as she watched Blade before she inserted the long metal tube, the one that had guaranteed them safe passage, into the final checkpoint. In giving it to Blade, Nyssa had essentially been baring the throat of the vampire population, for as along as he had been in possession of it he would have been able to travel nearly everywhere. The wall began to sink downwards slowly, revealing a room that none would have realized was there otherwise. The sense of whiteness and sterility ended there. The light became dark and moody, the walls rich, weathered stone rather than crisp plaster. Deacon was almost surprised to see that the floor was also stone, and not heavily packed earth. While Blade remained impassive and ready, focusing on the danger rather than the trappings, and Whistler stared about with all of the curiosity of the villager viewing a real city for the first time, it was all that Deacon could do not to wrinkle his nose in disgust. Old country, old ways. It was a pureblood tendency to cling to some mythical time when the word "vampire" was not spoken without first making the sign of the cross, rather than realizing that it was the modern world that allowed them to blend in and conduct their business. It was the modern world that had nearly made him a god.
Their world. Some things never changed. Deacon shivered abruptly and took a further look around the opulent room, nothing over again how uneasy it was making him when he previously would have strutted through it in the knowledge that he was going to make it his. And a lot of things seemed to change so rapidly that he could not guarantee that anything was going to remain solid beneath his feet, either. It was the modern world that had brought him to his current state.
"The true power of the vampire nation lies here," Nyssa said as the wall finally finished sliding down into the floor so that they could all step over it. Deacon thought that she was deliberately looking over at him as she spoke, old power pushing itself against the new and marking where it had failed. She had to have had a cute moment or two when she was small. The law of averages, if nothing else, demanded it. She stepped ahead of them all to approach the oldest vampire that Deacon had ever seen, who was sitting at a desk and reading a book that if anything appeared to be even older. He was completely without hair, his skin a pasty color that Deacon could tell was a result of having never seen the sun in his life, and the skin loose and folded over until he looked like one of those little Chinese dogs. Deacon had never liked the damned things. The vampire looked up at them at last, though he had surely been aware of their presence ever since the wall had begun to sink downward. Nyssa approached him first and dropped into a swift bow. She was still clad in the skintight fighting uniform that she had worn while fighting Blade, and the muscles in her ass and thighs flexed enticingly as she went down. Deacon could not help but stare as she did so. She may be a pain in the ass while her mouth was moving, but as a specimen of the female form she was captivating.
"Father," Nyssa greeted the wrinkled old crypt keeper in a deferential tone.
Deacon very nearly choked on his own saliva. "Father?" he said softly, so softly that he could only be heard by the people on the other side of him. Nyssa's youthful appearance was a guarantee of nothing, especially if she was pureblood, but the entire idea of that wrinkled lump of flesh working himself between female thighs was nearly enough to bring up what little Deacon had eaten over the day.
"Behave yourself," Blade leaned close and murmured to him, his voice a rumble against Deacon's ear. Deacon shivered and wondered how Blade could possibly miss the irony of telling him to mind his manners while he did such damnable things to any concept of personal space while he was at it.
Deacon snorted softly. "Tell me that you're not thinking exactly the same thing."
"Behave," Blade repeated as he stepped away. Whistler looked like he was about to shit himself. The night might be redeemed, after all.
Asad, who had been a cool and silent shadow ever since leaving the helicopter, spoke up to say in tones even more deferential than Nyssa's own had been, "Blade, this is Overlord Eli Damaskinos."
Deacon blinked and cocked his head to one side. That was something new. He had been isolated from all of the developments in the vampire world since he had been so violently dragged back down to the human race, or course, but he had assumed that a new council would be erected to replace the one that he had destroyed. That this Damaskinos person had risen from relative obscurity to fill that power vacuum so quickly was…certainly interesting. Maybe Nyssa's birth stopped being such a mystery because of it. Deacon had never met a woman who didn't get all tingly and moist for a partner who quested for power.
Damaskinos closed his book, though he did not rise from his seat. The threads of power in the room were as intricate and sticky as spider webs. "Welcome, Daywalker," he said to Blade in vampire, and Deacon felt his eyes narrow even further. Letting Blade know without a doubt whose turf he was on, and one whose terms. Damaskinos's eyes flicked to Deacon and then took a long, slow moment to linger there, head to foot, as if he was sizing up something to buy. Deacon felt as if his spine had been filled with white-hot lead. He straightened.
In English, Damaskinos continued, "It has been said, 'Be proud of your enemy and enjoy his successes.' I should thank you."
A line appeared between Blade's eyes for a second before it smoothed out. "For what?" he asked. He did not seem to notice that Deacon was on the verge of flying into pieces right in front of him, but his buddy Whistler sure did. His look was for once more curious than hostile for once. Deacon ground his teeth and hoped that he was as much of a hillbilly now as he had been when Deacon had had cause to deal with him last. Otherwise, he figured that he was more or less fucked.
Damaskinos's eyes moved up and down Deacon's form again, slow and insinuating. And Deacon as supposed to what, he wondered. Jump around like Pavlov's goddamned dog? Deacon held himself very still and matched Damaskinos glare for glare. 'Not for nearly sixty years, Count Chocula,' he thought fiercely in Damaskinos's direction. 'And not for your fungus-laden ass, either. No tip in the world could be big enough.' The staring match continued for several long seconds, tension making the air in the room grow thick until it was on the verge of stretching like taffy, until Whistler was looking openly confused and even Blade was beginning to betray that he knew something was going on beneath the surface that he was not privy to. Nyssa and Asad were as still and impassive as statues that had been breathed with life and did not know quite what to do about it yet. Purebloods did not dirty themselves with such things.
Damaskinos did not answer. He had a human to do that for him, a tall and elegant man who stepped out of the shadows as if he had been born to them. A long-term familiar, then, one who had been around vampires for so long that he had come to imitate their movements almost unconsciously. Deacon had always tended to run through his own familiars rather more quickly than that. The human, who was wearing a three-piece suit that cost more than it would take to feed a family of four, and feed them well, for more than a month, hardly gave Deacon a second glance. That was nearly worse, and Deacon was sure that he would be wearing the expression of a snarling dog before it was all over.
"For eliminating Deacon Frost. You did us all a favor." The human looked Deacon over again, clinically, sizing up as he would either evidence or merchandise. "Though we certainly would have preferred that you had killed him. Keeping him busy through his…old form of employment is a second-rate gesture at best."
A roaring noise exploded into Deacon's ear with such speed and force that it blotted out all other sounds. Pulling his lips back from his teeth, he started to lunge forward. Maybe the days when he could have taken on another vampire unarmed were behind him, but the familiar still seemed to be about his speed. That the man's expression did not change in the slightest was not doing a hell of a lot to calm him down, either.
"Frost!" Deacon was not sure if Blade needed to raise his voice towards a yell in order to cut through his anger, or if the mere sound of his voice was enough, but it sliced through the buzzing in his head when nothing else would have been able to do so. Deacon fell back automatically and then spun around, towards Blade. "Later," Blade told him, his voice not giving any hint that disobedience was even an option. His eyes told a much fuller story. It was still all that Deacon could do not to tell Blade to fuck right off and shut Deacon up himself if he thought that he could manage it, until he remembered where he was and how much of their operation he was putting in danger with his tantrum by showing that they were on some level divided.
Their operation. Yeah, that was exactly what Deacon needed running through his head right now. He exhaled slowly, threw Blade an ugly look that was only met with a glare of Blade's in kind, and fell back.
The only bright side of the entire situation turned out to be Whistler, who looked as if someone had just struck him in the head with a board. So he was not so slow on the uptake as Deacon had previously guessed. It was going to be a grand old time once they got back to the warehouse, but for now it was about the only entertainment that he could hope to pull out of the situation. Nearly ruining it was Nyssa, who looked only mildly surprised by the revelation, as if it was something that she had expected in the back of her mind all along. 'The lower classes, you know how they are.'
While Deacon was taking deep breaths through his nose and when Blade was certain that he was going to continue to behave himself, Blade reached out and took the hand that the human was offering him. Rather than shaking it, however, he immediately jerked the hand out to reveal the glyph that the man had tattooed into the fleshy area beside his thumb. "You're a familiar."
The man at least had the intelligence to look nervous when Blade held onto his hand for a few seconds too long. Wincing, he finally extricated himself and admitted, "For several years now. I'm a lawyer." Useful familiar to have. Maybe there was more to Damaskinos than a tendency to spend a little too much time adhering to the finer parts of Bram Stoker. "Carter Kounen, European Health Consortium." Blade turned a pointed look Deacon's way, asking if he intended to table personal matters and get back to the business of doing his actual job, and waited until Deacon managed a very slight nod before he gave his undivided attention to the lawyer again. Right. European Health Consortium meant that Damaskinos likely had his fingers in the blood banks, medical research centers, monitoring the morgues to keep the vampire population manageable. It was not unknown for purebloods to pick off vampires who had been turned as they were rising for the first time. It was an exercise of pureblood superiority and a method of keeping the population down low enough to avoid attracting too much attention, all in one fell blow. It also meant that Damaskinos would have far fewer street-feeders under his umbrella, and that chipping away at his organization was going to take a much larger investment in the way of time and danger.
Deacon already knew that he was going to begin arguing that it was a worthwhile risk as soon as they got back to the warehouse. He might have risen slightly above the status of devil over the course of the past two years, but he had no intention of joining the side of the angels quite yet.
"Acquired vampirism," Damaskinos said, looking Deacon over again. He sounded nearly pitying. It took several long seconds before Deacon was sure that he would not lose his control. "As we all know, it is a terrible virus, carried in the saliva. Anyone bitten who does not die immediately finds themselves turning within seventy-two hours as it spreads through the body and creates new parasitic organs."
"Like cancer," Blade said curtly. Damaskinos had begun to sound just a little too proud of himself for anyone's tastes, as if he was a creator rather than merely a lucky recipient.
"Cancer with a purpose," Damaskinos countered. He was still wearing a smug smile. Deacon leaned forward, growing interested again in spite of himself, as an alarm bell telling him that there was something else going on within the surface began to go off within his mind. It faded before he could determine that it was being set off by anything other than his own paranoia.
The pet lawyer was in part responsible for that, for he hurried forward to speak again quickly, as if he was worried that his master might say something disastrous if left untended for too long. "Unfortunately, the similarities end there. Cancer does not evolve. Viruses do. So, apparently, has vampirism. We call it the Reaper strain, for reasons that will soon become apparent. This is the sort of crisis that inspires gallows humor, I'm afraid." Kounen held up a small disc. "And, like any good pathogen, it has found a carrier." He nudged his master's book to the side and replaced it with a sleek laptop, into which he inserted the disc. Footage began to flash across the screen immediately. They all leaned forward for a better look. A vampire bearing an unfortunate resemblance to Damaskinos, for he was bald and colored the same slick hue of dead things even as his skin was still supple and young, was shown being led into a room and then strapped into a chair in spite of his increasingly strident protests. A few seconds later, he was tearing through the room and everyone in it.
"Looks like the cattle figured out how to fight back," Deacon murmured. He was soundly ignored by everyone in the room save for Nyssa, who looked more than a little discomfited to discover that her position at the top of the food chain was being yanked out from under her. Deacon supposed that he ought to feel more sympathy for her, having been in a similar position in the not-so-distant past, but the organs necessary for pity had still not managed to come back. Besides, if she had gotten to meet Blade by innuendo-laden sparring, while Deacon still referred to his glorious return to the human race as that one time when Blade quite literally broke his face, he figured that Little Princess was getting off lightly.
"There," Kounen said, pausing the video as the vampire in it craned his head upwards to glare into the camera. "Jared Nomak."
"He was born a vampire," Damaskinos said. "However, like you, he is an anomaly. He does not feed just upon humans, but also upon other vampires."
"Looks like he's doing me a favor," Blade replied.
Nyssa shook her head and set all of those curls to swinging. "You're missing the point," she said. "A human bitten by one of us will die unless we specifically leave enough blood for them to turn. His victims are turned even if they are drained to the last drop, and then they become carriers themselves."
"You've got to understand," Asad said. His voice sounded ragged, leading Deacon to wonder if they had just watched footage of any friends or lovers of his becoming meat. "These things are like crack addicts. They need to feed daily. Nomak's been up for three days." Deacon shifted his weight abruptly from one foot to the other; Blade was the only one who noticed the gesture. "By our estimates, there are already dozens of Reapers. There will be hundreds before the week is out. Thousands within the month. You do the math." Asad turned away.
They were all then treated to a very rare sight: that of Blade being visibly amused, and making no attempt to hide it. "Let me get this right," he said, sounding as if he was sure that he was going to be interrupted and corrected at any moment. "You want me to hunt them…for you." When put that way, it did begin to sound like the punch line to the world's biggest joke. Deacon half-expected a camera crew to come racing around the corner at any moment.
Damaskinos was still wearing that smile as he asked, "When they are finished with us, who do you think that they will turn on next?" His gaze included Deacon and Whistler in turn. "Your precious humans. Not a one of them will be left."
Sounding nearly apologetic, as if he hated to interrupt his master's plan but was afraid that his master was going to get his face dented in if he was allowed to continue speaking (and with the way that Blade had bristled up at even an oblique threat to Whistler, that was not an unfair guess to make), Kounen hurried on, "We have spent two years training a small tactical unit, the Blood Pack. We want you to lead them."
"Two years?" Blade asked, arching his eyebrow. It made it difficult to believe any protestations that Nomak had only risen three days before. There were other reasons, as well, but Deacon preferred to keep his own counsel for now.
Speaking in that eerie, rhythmic tone again, all traces of her previous uncertainty wiped clean from her face, Nyssa said, "We were training them to fight you."
Blade stared at her for a long moment before his gaze turned sideways to take in Whistler and, at the periphery, Deacon as well. Even before he opened his mouth to officially say yes, Deacon knew that they were in.
---
The same helicopters that took them to Damaskinos's swingin' vampire pad also took them back, minus Nyssa and Asad. Blade had been particularly forceful on that score, and Deacon understood why. Vampires had excellent hearing. If they were going to fill the warehouse with them, it would soon become impossible to have any kind of secure conversation at all. Best to get everyone on the same page while they still could.
Some people were happier about the respective pages that they had found themselves on than others.
Blade, after a brief conversation about security with Scud, began to dismantle his weapons, clean them, and reassemble them as soon as they got back. It was a lot of weapons, and even with Blade's speed it was going to take a lot of time. Deacon would have called it overkill if he had not seen the video of what they were up against. He stood to one side of Blade, Whistler to the other, the both of them watching in silence for a moment before they spoke. Deacon would have thought that Whistler would begin his harangue as soon as they were out of enemy territory, but he looked as if he was so disgusted that he did not even know where to begin.
"What do you think?" Deacon asked, watching as Blade's hands moved deftly, gently over the tools of his trade.
"Sounds like a plan." Blade's voice was almost amused. Deacon rolled his eyes. "What the hell was that about, back there?"
It was a coin toss as to whether he was talking about the moment when Deacon had allowed Damaskinos to find and then push his buttons so thoroughly that he had been reduced to a four year-old throwing a tantrum, or the moment when he had actually paid attention and done his job. Deacon decided to go with the least humiliating option. "Damaskinos isn't telling us everything," he said. Blade lifted his head long enough to suggest that Deacon could stick his head out and see what color the sky was, if he thought that that was also going to be a shock to him. Deacon made a face and shook his head. "No, I'm talking about something here. He said that Nomak is a pureblood I and /I that he's only been up for three days. The guy that we saw in the video was an adult. Baby vampires grow up quickly, but they don't grow up I that /I quickly. Maybe his pureblood mania is strong enough that he's willing to lie about the first part, but…" Deacon trailed off and shrugged. "Chances are that they've known about Mother Nature's newest bosom child for a lot longer than three days."
Blade looked approving when faced with the evidence that Deacon had ad the very least gotten it together and remembered that he had a job to do by the end. Deacon could have struck him for it, had he not known that it would only get him flipped over the railing as a result.
"What does that tell you?" Whistler asked.
"That they're going to fuck us over the first chance they get." Blade, for him, sounded damned near jovial. Of course, he was inviting a beast that vastly outnumbered them into their home when things were already on the verge of flipping out as it was. Why wouldn't that be a trip to the amusement park? Deacon made a soft snorting sound as Blade went on. "It'll take us deeper into their world than we've ever been before." He looked directly at Deacon. "You never were a pureblood." Blade was either entirely obtuse, or the most sadistic son of a bitch that Deacon had ever met. "All of the information that you had originally is past its expiration date, anyway." And of the two, Deacon knew exactly which one he was voting for. "So you're going to have to pay attention, put everything that you see into context that the rest of us can't." Unspoken: don't let yourself be baited like an overzealous trout again. He was still a sadistic son of a bitch, that didn't mean that Deacon had changed his mind.
Whistler shook his head and let out a low, bitter chuckle. "Why the hell not?" he asked. "Since sleeping with the enemy seems to be our new way of doing things." He gave Deacon the same look that Damaskinos had given him, but hotter, angrier, the cop that would have beaten the living shit out of him rather than the john who would have slipped him the money in the first place. Always assuming, after all, that they did not turn out to be one in the same; life had a way of being funny like that. Whistler stomped away from the balcony so hard that even Scud looked up, alarmed. Deacon saw him rub briefly at his jaw as he went, but he figured that the opportunity to share a remedy for that had already slid right past them.
"Okay!" Deacon said in a faux-bright voice as he turned back towards Blade. "I think that that went very well, how about you?"
Blade's response was to grab Deacon and drive him back hard against the railing, that mouth coming down hard on Deacon's own at the same time that he grabbed for Deacon's wrists and held them down by his sides. Control freak. Deacon could feel the metal railing digging into his spine but was hardly squirming to get away, hearing himself make a sound as Blade parted his lips with his tongue, explored his mouth as if it was the first time rather than the thousandth. Deacon had thought once, semi-dazedly, that there had been a time before meeting Deacon that Blade had been good at this, even if he had allowed himself to fall out of practice in the space between. Obviously, it was a skill more akin to riding a bicycle than to performing brain surgery. If there was any justice in this world, Blade was even half as dizzy as himself by the time that they pulled away from each other.
Deacon leaned further back against the railing, not precisely slumping but close, as he felt as if he was going to jump out of the borrowed human skin that still did not feel as if it fit correctly, as he felt his borrowed human heart spin and dance in a way that was completely outside of his control. "Blade," Deacon began, and only his long practice at control was able to halt his wince as he realized how needy he sounded, how needy and weak and human. He hardly knew what he would say, anyway. It was hard to say that Damaskinos and his pet had been lying, when Deacon himself had freaked out so thoroughly that people watching could speak another language and still would have seen that a nerve had been struck. That he wasn't Blade's whore or pet, then? That sounded human also, terribly emotional and terribly human, and Deacon figured that if he could still spit the word out as an epithet after two years then he likely always would. It was a human thing to do, this questioning of everything, human and Deacon hated it even if he had at least come to terms with it, even as he knew that he could no more say this than he could say that he still thought of throwing everything into the air and cracking Blade's skull in.
Blade's response was to kiss Deacon again before he could betray himself with some weak response that would probably be inadequate, anyway, weak human words that had only been designed in the first place to answer uncertainties that were not supposed to be within Deacon's arena any longer. The second was even more plundering than the first; Deacon had no idea that Blade had planned all along to keep him subdued through oxygen deprivation. He was a cunning bastard like that.
"Do your job," Blade told him flatly once he pulled away, in a tone that said without room for argument that no more reassurances would be coming his way, if indeed that was what that had been. Deacon felt his face begin to shut down, save for his scowl. It was the question over what his job was, exactly, that was up in the air, he wanted to snap, or hadn't Blade been paying attention? Before he could, Blade went on, still leaning his weight forwards and against Deacon's wrists so that Deacon really had no choice but to stay put and listen. "This plays out the way it's looking, the security system is going to be yours. Whistler does large machinery and weapons, doesn't know a goddamned thing about computers. Learn it." Blade pressed down one final time on Deacon's wrists in warning before he turned, conversation over, and walked away.
"I designed most of that system, you ass," Deacon muttered, but Blade did not turn. Rubbing at his wrists, Deacon blew all of the air out of his lungs on a long sigh. Yeah, this was going to be a hell of a party before it was over.
End Part Three