Part Seven
The inside of the van was choked with adrenaline, mostly Scud's, by the time that it arrived back at the warehouse. It tended to strain human nerves, being in such close proximity to so many vampires for an extended period of time. Given everything else that he knew, Blade wondered briefly what Scud's long-term plans were, since being around vampires in the short term was on the verge of making his skin crawl right off of his bones, before he cut off the line of thought with a businesslike efficiency. It was not his responsibility to wonder at people's motivations or lower the bar for them, only to fix, unresisting, the standards that they had to rise to in order for the operation to continue to function.
A glance might have been slid Whistler's way on that part. The old man did not see it.
It was the smell of blood that drew Blade's attention from the moment that he stepped out of the van, blood and the scent of fried circuitry. Scud had the good sense to blanch and then duck quickly back into the van before anyone else could see him. Only the memory of all of the other things that he had let Frost slide on over the years, when he had even killed familiars for less, kept Blade from dragging Scud out and slamming him back against the side of the vehicle. He noticed that all of the vampires had picked up on the scent of blood, as well, and were hiding it with various levels of effort from either good manners or good sense. Even Whistler inhaled sharply and then ducked his head.
"Deal with this," Blade snapped at Nyssa, pointing back into the van where the Reaper corpse was growing cold, and then headed for the stairs. The scent of blood was strongest there.
Behind him, Reinhardt chuckled. Blade's hand trailed towards the bomb's trigger for a second before he jerked it away again. Even the lowest life form could have its uses. He could remember saying that once, too. Blade looked forward to the moment when Reinhardt's usefulness came to its end.
"Guess he's a chew toy, too," Reinhardt said. He had to have been dropped on his head when he was a baby bloodsucker to have that kind of over-inflated sense of his own importance. "Think Frost gets overtime for doing double duty?"
He wasn't that fucking important. Blade's hand strayed towards the trigger again and was only halted when Nyssa snapped, "You will keep your opinions to yourself until you have something useful to add, Reinhardt." Reinhardt fell into a shocked silence. If he recovered in time to snap back at her, Blade did not hear it.
The door to the living quarters was closed, but the light beyond it was still on. Blade entered and then nearly took a step back as he was struck, not only by the smell of freshly spilled blood but also of charred flesh. There were ashes on the floor. "Nice," Blade said as he kicked at them.
Frost was seated in the chair where Blade usually rested when he was administering his serum. He was slumped back into it as if he had just finished a battle, and his always-pale face was even more stripped of color than usual. Blade could still smell fear-sweat on him, and could hear that his pulse was ragged and strained. Frost had gauze pressed against his forearm, soaked in red. Though he had surely heard the door open to allow Blade's entrance, he did not open his eyes until Blade actually spoke.
"I would have put my toys away," Frost said, "but they went and broke on me." He pulled his hand away from his forearm long enough to jerk his thumb in the direction of the UV lamp.
Blade cast a glance around the rest of the room and took in the guns, the sword, the rumpled bed. Frost had a bruise blossoming on the side of his face in addition to the wound on his arm. "What happened?" Blade asked as he took Frost's forearm in his hands and pulled the gauze away. There were two deep lacerations in Frost's arm that were still weeping blood. Blade dragged his thumb through the half-clotted mess so that he could see what he was doing, ignoring Frost as he hissed and attempted to pull away, and noticed that the lacerations had begun their lives as a set of puncture wounds. It looked as if Frost had struggled after being bitten.
"We had some visitors," Frost said flatly. He was a bit more alert now, but still sounded as if all of his reactions were coming to him a few seconds too slowly. Whether that was because of the roughly three pints of blood that looked as if they had been thrown around the room during the struggle or the impressive head injury that Frost was currently sporting, Blade had no way of knowing.
Frost had taken out bandages and antiseptic, though he had yet to begin cleaning the wound himself when Blade had walked through the door. Blade picked up fresh gauze and antiseptic and began cleaning the lacerations, noting as he did so that beneath the stack of bandages was a syringe of Karen's cure. Frost had yet to inject himself. Blade was surprised that Frost had even gotten it out.
"You were bitten," he said as he began winding the bandages around Frost's forearm. Frost needed stitches, probably, but they had bigger issues on the horizon than whether or not Frost's arm healed prettily so long as it healed. At the rate that Frost was going, he was going to wind up collecting scars the way that some women collected cheap shoes.
"Apparently I make as good a chew toy as I do anything else," Frost answered. Off of Blade's look, he smiled mirthlessly and then reached out to tap his foot against a vent in the floor. "Voices carry, if you know how to listen for them." When he noticed that Blade was moving the bloodied gauze and spare bandages to the side so that he could pick up the hypodermic, the smile fell off of his face. "I figured you would just stand back and watch to see if I injected myself as one of your tests. Seemed more like your style."
"What the hell. You look like you could use a break." Blade cleaned the inside of Frost's elbow with alcohol before he injected him just a few inches above where the clean white bandage ended and the skin began. Outside of tensing slightly, Frost did not move.
Watching the place where the needle was entering the flesh, he said in a colorless voice, "You're a real son of a bitch sometimes, you know that?"
Blade was standing so close to Frost, nudging Frost's thighs apart with one negligent knee, that Frost had to tilt his head against the back of the chair in order to meet Blade's eyes. "So I've been told," Blade said. He withdrew the needle and, keeping his thumb against the place where it had been, kissed Frost, deep and hungry, until Frost was sighing and squirming up against him.
Frost was breathing hard by the time that Blade released him. "You have the damnedest kinks." His eyes were dilated, his lips swollen and begging for Blade to do it again.
Blade found Frost's cock through the front of his pants, just beginning to stir, and gave it a squeeze. "Oh, I'm the one with the kinks?"
Frost first gasped and then glared. "I'm still not used to this whole sense of humor thing that you're trying out."
Blade chuckled and told himself that it was not relief before he twined his fingers through Frost's hair and tugged his head back so that he could scrape his teeth over Frost's jugular vein and feel the way that the pulse jumped up into his mouth. Frost made a soft sound from the back of his throat before he clamped his lips shut around any further sound. Blade had always been one for a challenge. Even he had to admit that now was not the time, though.
"You were right," Frost admitted when the parted. They were still so close to one another that his words were a vibration against Blade's mouth. He tilted his head back against the chair again so that he could regard Blade through hooded eyes. "They cut through the new security protocols like butter, no way of knowing what they were really after. Just thought that you might like to know."
Blade swore beneath his breath, a loss of control that he almost never evidenced and that made Frost widen his eyes briefly. "I thought that I might be."
Still leaning back against the chair and giving Blade that sharp, speculative look, Frost asked, "This another one of your asinine tests, or do you plan to actually do something about it?"
Blade tugged at Frost's hair hard enough to make him wince and glare. "Not a test. I'm going to do something about it when the time is right." He had ceased consciously setting out tests for Frost to pass or fail some months before, though all hell would break loose if Frost himself was ever allowed to know that.
"Sure thing, stud," Frost said, looking pale and bruised and tired. "Hail the conquering hero. Do your thing."
Blade answered by kissing Frost again, lingering and slow in a way that they both liked and that neither would admit to, this poison that he could not make himself purge from his system. "The security system will be yours when this is done," he reminded Frost when he finally parted from him, right when Frost was starting to squirm upwards and against him again.
Frost let out a mirthless laugh and then dropped his head back against the chair again. "You keep holding that out like it's some kind of prize at the bottom of a cereal box," he said. The corner of Frost's mouth quirked up for a moment before it dropped back and then became solemn again. "Message received, stud. I get it."
"Good." Blade leaned back slightly. "I'm getting sick of delivering it."
The door opened with a soft snicking noise. Blade's head snapped towards the sound; he had not heard anyone on the stairs. "Oh," Nyssa said when she saw the two of them, Frost sprawled out in the chair as if he had either just been fucked or was about to be fucked, Blade leaning over him so closely that they were nearly kissing all over again, Blade's knee pressed between Frost's thighs. She was nearly was nearly blushing, her eyes cast downwards, as she said, "The corpse is ready for dissection." Blade noticed that her eyes came up again in order to scan Frost's forearm and the white bandage that was now wrapped around it. A few red roses of blood had appeared across the surface.
Frost noted where she was looking and, scowling, pulled his arm back from where it had been resting on the table so that he could cradle it against his chest. He stood from the chair and pushed past Blade so that he could exchange his torn and blood-spattered shirt for a clean one. While Nyssa eyes roamed across the skin of his shoulders and back, Blade noted, she was still much more interested in his forearm. "Sorry if you had an early lunch, princess," Frost said as he began buttoning up his shirt again. "But I lost enough, and I don't feel like sharing."
Nyssa's eyes were flat and cold. "I can control myself," she said stiffly.
Frost's eyes moved up and down the length of Nyssa's body, and he flashed her a devil's grin. "Didn't say that I was going to take it that far."
Nyssa paused and looked confused for a moment. Blade was not sure that she was used to being flirted with at all, let alone idly. "We're waiting for the two of you before we begin," she said. Nyssa inclined her head in Frost's direction before she added, in a tone that sounded genuine, "I am glad that you were not seriously injured."
Frost paused in buttoning up the cuffs on either of his sleeves, wincing as he manipulated his injured arm. He looked surprised. "I'm glad not to be seriously injured, princess," he answered her. Frost was too blindsided to even sound snide.
Nyssa nodded once more, looking as if she was greatly regretting entering the room at all, and turned to march out with a soldier's precision. Blade watched her leave, and Frost watched them both. "She's pretty," he said when Blade noticed the attention. "Didn't figure you for the type who liked to share, though."
Blade put his hand on the back of Frost's neck and squeezed as he passed him on the way to the door. It was hard enough to make Frost wince briefly; the long white line of his scar flashed as he rolled his eyes and pulled away. "I'm not," Blade said.
---
Deacon followed Blade down the stairs and to the rest of the group. Whistler looked surprised to see that he was alive and on his feet, making Deacon wonder just how quickly the last of his vampiric senses were fading from him, while the rest of the vampires looked nearly impressed and Nyssa looked as if she had just been struck in the head with a board. Scud looked only as if he very much needed to be struck in the head with a board, but Deacon was willing to concede that he was not the most objective voice in that argument any longer. His arm hurt like a bitch, and he wished that he had paused before coming down the stairs so that he could eat a handful of painkillers. Too late now. There was a list of painful ways of dying that Deacon was willing to submit to before he showed weakness in front of such enemies.
Reinhardt raked his eyes up and down Deacon's form as if Deacon was a treat that he was waiting for the right moment to fall upon. His nostrils flared as he looked at Deacon's forearm, wound and bandages now hidden beneath the sleeve. It was unnerving, given that he could remember looking at the cattle like that before he had rejoined them.
Deacon still thought about kicking Blade in the head at least a dozen times a day for doing that to him. Today he thought that he might actually reach the triple digits.
"You must have gotten your rabies shot," Reinhardt mused as Deacon entered the main floor directly behind Blade. "Or is that more like being neutered?" Blade brushed past Reinhardt without speaking on his way to Nyssa. Nyssa for her part looked troubled, but unwilling to intervene.
"I've started to think of it as penicillin," Deacon answered cheerily. He took a long, slow look at Reinhardt's groin area before he ended Reinhardt's amused expression by adding, "You've had a few brushes with penicillin, haven't you, hoss?"
Reinhardt's face blanched of color even further in anger, and he snarled. The explosive on the back of his head beeped once in warning; Blade had not turned around. "What do you think I'm going to do when I get this muzzle off, bitch?" he asked Deacon in a low voice.
Deacon still wore his wolf's smile frequently these days, and it still felt good every time that he pulled it out. "Think that we're going to have ourselves a dogfight," he replied as he left to join Nyssa and the others here they had clustered around the body of the Reaper. It had been stretched out on one of the worktables, the only vampire that he had ever seen to die and actually leave a corpse.
Deacon let out a low wolf whistle as he joined Nyssa where she was staring down at the body. It was not Nomak, but the features were damned similar. "Pretty," he remarked.
Nyssa cast him a sidelong glance. She did not seem to know quite what to do with him now that she had caught he and Blade very nearly in the middle of a public display of a private affection. Deacon was doing his best not to allow too much of his amusement to show on his face. "It's evolution," she said, and then frowned as she seemed to remember the three-day limit that had been imposed upon them. If she was making the same cognitive leap that Deacon had made upon hearing that bit of news for the first time, then it was not showing on her face. "They are fast and powerful enough so that they do not need to pass among…your kind…in the way that a traditional vampire must be able to obtain prey." Deacon did not know what was making Nyssa look more like she had swallowed a bug: the respect that had been forced into her voice as she pronounced 'your kind', or confronting the fact that she was not at the top of the food chain any longer. It was a real bitch, that tumble.
"You'll be on your throne again soon enough, princess," Deacon whispered to her as he leaned over to examine the body more closely. He could not shake the conviction that it was still alive, somehow, since there was a corpse. It was odd that the most animalistic vampires that Deacon had ever seen should also be the only ones who could carry out that most basic of human abilities, leaving behind a body to show that they had lived at all.
Deacon had intended his words for Nyssa alone and so had deliberately pitched his voice so low that it was hardly more than a vibration on the air, in deference to the highly sensitive vampire ears that surrounded them on all sides. She frowned at him. "I do not understand why you amuse him so."
Deacon grinned. "I have a way about me."
Nyssa snorted. It was such an unrefined and unladylike sound that it took them both by surprise as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves and then picked up a scalpel that had been provided for her. Fighting vampires meant that supplies needed to be kept on hand for the digging out of both bullets and fangs.
Nyssa's expression was rapt as she leaned over the body of the Reaper with her tools in hand. It was so nice to know that many of her scarier qualities had nothing to do with her being a vampire and everything to do with her simply being Nyssa. "Open the mouth, Scud."
Scud had been deliberately hanging towards the back of their small pack, though his face as he had looked at the corpse had been as fascinated as everyone's. Upon hearing Nyssa's suggestion, he looked more as if she had just asked him to put his hand into a garbage disposal. He snorted and shook his head. "I don't think so, sugar."
Nyssa narrowed her eyes and glared at him. As much as Deacon made sure to put a mocking note into his voice whenever he called her 'princess', she was a damned alluring woman when she actually behaved like royalty. He was on the verge of telling her so when she, still glaring at Scud, gritted out, "Open. The. Mouth." There was such force in her voice that all of the members of her team began to shift uneasily among themselves, as if they were on the verge of reaching out and opening the mouth for her, and Deacon's smirk turned into an outright grin. He did not know what it was about Scud that had made a bug crawl up Nyssa's fit, shapely ass, but, as the world was still listing from side to side on him whenever he turned too quickly as a result of the blood that he had lost, he was not feeling inclined to argue with her. Half of the charm of women, he had learned from his decades of sampling all of the finest females that the vampire world had to offer, was in rolling with their moods. It occurred to Deacon for a moment that she might know a little something of the games that Scud was running on the side before he decided that that was more likely than not something that would make her want to kiss his face rather than snap at him.
Scud himself had twitched when Nyssa had issued her ringing command, as if he had been on the verge of obeying before he had caught himself. He threw Blade a beseeching look. "B, come on…"
Nyssa's only response was to turn and look at Blade expectantly. It was all that Deacon could do not to swear and, woman or not, plant Nyssa one good punch directly in the mouth. As so much of their tentative alliance hinged upon Nyssa's own ability to keep her people in line, she was now asking if Blade could do the same. Even Asad looked faintly anxious at the idea that Blade should issue a wrong answer, while Reinhardt looked as if he was on the verge of putting his feet up and grabbing a snack.
Blade stared Scud right in the eye. "Sissy," he growled. A level of anger had entered his voice that made even Reinhardt and Whistler look surprised. Deacon did swear then, drawing a surprised look from Nyssa. Poor her, then; they did not need for Scud to know that anyone was on to him until he had entirely committed and damned himself, and Blade was on the verge of throwing all of that right out of the window. It wasn't like him.
"I'll do it," Deacon said smoothly before Scud could get over being shocked and then let all of the wheels in his brain start turning. There were no comments from the peanut gallery, though Whistler looked equal parts confused and displeased. As he had been wearing that look ever since they had brought him back, Deacon did not see anything worthy of stopping the presses.
It only took a single nip from a Reaper to make someone turn; that Priest was no longer among their number was the unspoken elephant in the room. Since the latex gloves were only slightly better than working with nothing at all, Deacon decided to stick with the former option. He had placed two fingers against the Reaper's soft palate and tilted its head back, grimacing in disgust, before he noticed that Nyssa was looking at him.
"That was not intended for you," Nyssa said to him. She was keeping her voice pitched low, likely from surprise, though not so low that the other vampires around her could not in theory hear them.
"Things are going on that you don't understand, princess," Deacon muttered back. Unlike her, he did not forget to keep their audience in mind. "Get on with it."
Nyssa looked suspicious and unsatisfied. If only Damaskinos had given birth to a stupid daughter, there would not a situation growing up between herself, Deacon, and Blade that was making Deacon strongly consider drawing up a flow chart. After her attempt at a stare down with Deacon got her nowhere, she looked down at the corpse again. She used her scalpel to first push the Reaper's multi-tentacled tongue to the side and then to make a small, experimental cut across the tastebuds. A viscous clear substance oozed out and began bubbling the second that it hit the air.
"Only the tongue carries the virus," Nyssa said after staring for several seconds in silent fascination. Her tone suggested that she was pushing Deacon's odd answer to the side and was once again indulging in the part of herself that would fry ants with a microscope purely because she could. Deacon felt slightly better with two of his fingers in the monster's mouth now that he knew that the chances of becoming one himself, and of a far nastier kind than that which had had already been, were pretty much nonexistent, but only slightly. Nyssa made a small gesture indicating that he should open the Reaper's mouth further, and he complied. She continued to peer about in fascination for several more seconds before she went on, "Look at these barbs on the tongue. Those are likely injection points. It has overdeveloped massiter muscles." Nyssa looked up at Deacon. "Those allow for a much stronger bite than one of us."
Deacon leaned forward so that he could see, interested in spite of himself. "Because their victims are much more likely to struggle," he said, thinking of their earlier discussion. Deacon pictured a lion trying to hold down a zebra as it kicked and flailed, or a crocodile dragging a man beneath the surface of the water. "Life's hard when you're not pretty."
Nyssa nodded and then used the scalpel so that she could flip the two halves of the Reaper's lower jaw apart. They made a wet sucking noise as they fell open. "The jaw structure seems the same, but there is no mandible bone." She tapped at one of the fangs with the scalpel. "Can you squeeze that tooth?"
"Anything for a pretty woman," Deacon said, though he grimaced as he complied. Nyssa's eyes cut up quickly to meet his before she dropped them back to the venom that was seeping from the end of the fang. As she collected it between her thumb and forefinger and rubbed them together, Deacon gratefully withdrew his hands from the animal's mouth.
Nyssa smelled of the venom at her fingers before she drew back and wrinkled her nose. "It's a neurotoxin," she said. "Likely to paralyze the victim while the Reaper feeds." Nyssa looked up at Deacon again. "Life's hard when you're not pretty." She exchanged her used latex gloves for a fresh pair and, reclaiming her scalpel, began to make the Y incision.
Scud, though he had not spoken since Deacon had taken his task for him, still had not taken up his old place at the back of the pack. "Garlic don't work, silver don't work," he said as he watched Nyssa peel each half of the Reaper's chest back. "We gotta go with sunlight, right?"
Nyssa looked up sharply. Her scalpel halted, hovering over the Reaper's chest and flecked with blood. "That's deadly to us, too," she snapped before she looked towards Blade, who had his arms folded over his chest and was giving away nothing. "So let's see what else we can find." She returned her scalpel to the Reaper's abdomen and continued to draw it down, spreading the skin as she went. Nyssa stared for a moment in what was, if what she was seeing was in any way similar to what Deacon was seeing, an equal mixture of horror and fascination before she said, "These things are as different from us as we are from you." She finished baring the chest cavity.
Deacon shook his head once as Nyssa revealed a rib cage that had fused together until it was one solid mass of calcium, like a shield. "Son of a bitch," he breathed while Reinhardt let out a low, appreciative whistle. Nyssa tapped the scalpel against the bone before she said, "Look at that. The heart is encased in bone." She continued to tap around the rest of the ribcage and added, "Only the side is vulnerable."
For the first time, Whistler looked actively engaged in what was going on. Once a hunter, always a hunter. He leaned around Frost, taking great pains to avoid actually touching him, and said, "Good luck getting a stake through that." He sounded more thoughtful than actually gloomy, as if he really was trying to come up with a way to stop the Reapers that would not involve incinerating their temporary allies. It was more than Deacon had expected from him.
Proving Whistler's words correct, Nyssa was grunting as she struggled to pull the sheet of bone free and bare the heart. Asad went to help her, and after a few seconds they managed to pull the ribcage free and lay it to the side. The heart looked human. There was little enough else that did. "If you pull the leg off of a spider," she said, once again using the tone of a little girl who fried ants in her spare time, "the leg will keep moving on its own." She pulled her glove off and, carefully setting her saliva-flecked scalpel to the side, picked up a fresh one so that she could make a cut across the pad of own of her own fingers. "It tries to walk even though the body is not attached." Blood began to well up and then trickle down to her knuckle.
"What are you doing?" Scud asked her, his voice torn between disgust and disbelief.
"We're all just hardwired, aren't we?" It sounded as if Princess was trying to convince herself as much as she was trying to instruct all of them. Deacon felt his eyebrows go up. They then jerked up even higher as the heart began to pump hard, making gasping noises as it sucked in air rather than blood. For a few seconds there was no difference between human and vampire, as they were all united in expressions of shock.
"The brain's dead," Blade said. Though he had not spoken a word during Nyssa's entire autopsy, Deacon had glanced at his face a few times and knew that he was carefully recording and analyzing everything that was said or done. "Body's still trying to feed." A subtle change overcame his face, the kind that he had just had an entire plan snap into place for him, and Deacon made an irritated noise before he could help himself. He would lay down money that Blade would not see fit to tell anyone about his plan until they were all directly in the middle of it and scrabbling for their lives, too. He noticed that Whistler was watching him and felt a scowl move across his face. 'Yeah, Gramps, I know your boy well enough to read him. Either get over it or throw a bullet, but make some kind of choice already. I have bigger things to worry about than you here.'
As he turned and walked away from the autopsy table, Blade threw over his shoulder, "We got six hours until sunrise. Be ready by then."
The heads of all of the vampires snapped up, but Asad was the only one who reacted overtly. He initiated the unprecedented action of actually doing something without Nyssa's direct approval by stepping swiftly around the table and stalking after Blade. Deacon had not known that he had it in him. "What happens at sunrise?" Blade kept going towards the stairs without acknowledging that Asad had even spoken at all. An edge entering his voice, Asad snapped, "Blade! I'm talking to you!" Blade turned at last, midway up the staircase, and cocked an eyebrow at him. "What happens at sunrise?"
"We hunt," Blade said simply. In the early days, Deacon had sworn that Blade only gave that kind of cryptic non-answer to cover the fact that he was making up all this shit as he went along. Eventually he had learned better.
"In daylight," Asad said in a dead voice, as if he was convinced that Blade was playing some kind of obscure joke on them all. Deacon ducked his head quickly to hide his grin, as he, unlike Asad, knew how to read the signs. Blade's look put all of Asad's hopes to death soon enough.
"You've gotta be fucking kidding me," Reinhardt snapped.
Whistler, looking happier than Deacon had seen him at any point yet, said with nearly tangible glee, "Better get your sunscreen, Buttercup."
Chupa growled at him. "Listen, shitkicker, you are about one cunt hair away from hillbilly heaven."
Whistler smirked at him. "I love it when you talk dirty to me," he cooed before he stalked off towards the weapons cabinet.
Blade's eyes followed Whistler, and Deacon thought that he even looked pleased before he remembered that he had a larger audience that needed to be attended to. "Let's get one thing straight," he announced. "This is a marriage of convenience. You." He leveled his finger at each of them in turn. "Are not my priority. If sunlight is the only way to take the Reapers out, then that's what we'll use." The smallest flicker of his eyes in Nyssa's direction betrayed him. Deacon did not know whether he ought to be smirking or letting his scowl deepen.
Nyssa watched as Blade traveled up the stairs and looked troubled. "Your face will freeze that way if you don't watch out, princess," Deacon told her as he sidled up to her. "And wouldn't that be a shame."
Nyssa looked nearly amused as she glanced up to meet his eyes, which was a step up from all of their previous interactions. She picked up a scalpel and began poking at the Reaper corpse again, though as far as Deacon could tell there was no further scientific knowledge that could be harvested. Weird woman. "Why does he speak like that?" she asked, sounded genuinely troubled and perhaps even a little hurt. Really weird woman. "As if we are nothing?"
Deacon gaped at her. "You're kidding, right?" When Nyssa only shook her head and frowned at him, he said, "Princess, you hunt us." It did not sting to say 'us' as it had used to, but it was still a shock whenever he did it reflexively. "Unless you have a hidden vegan agenda that you want to share with the rest of the class, you don't get top priority here." Nyssa still looked sulky and unsatisfied. Deacon grinned. "You're not at the top of the food chain any longer. Try to cope with it."
Nyssa's scowl turned into an outright glare. "Do not make this about me being a pureblood," she warned him.
Deacon stepped away from the table and held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture. He could feel that his grin was not wavering. "Easy there. I wasn't thinking about purebloods at all." That was a lie, but he was good at it. "You're the one who decided to bring politics into it."
Nyssa did not look convinced, and her stabbing of the Reaper corpse grew more aggressive. "My father rose to power because of what you did, because of La Magra," she said reluctantly. Deacon saw her turn a sly glance his way, as if she was testing the waters before she added, "Vampires tried for centuries to translate that manuscript. You wrote a program that managed it in only a few weeks. That is very impressive."
"Thank you." Deacon was so shocked by the olive branch that he forgot to be sarcastic. As Nyssa continued to stab energetically at the Reaper corpse, he put forth cautiously, "Working out some aggression there?"
Look at that. He even got a wry smile this time. "I'm looking for the adrenal glands," she told him. "All of the Reapers save for Nomak do not seem capable of speech. They must be communicating some way, though. Most likely pheromones."
"Clever," Deacon said as he picked up a scalpel and then began to help her. Off of Nyssa's look, he added, "It's been a very long time since I was squeamish."
"I was not thinking that." She clearly was, but since Deacon was feeling generous he was going to allow her to get away with it. Nyssa finally stabbed at a bit of flesh that emitted a pungent smell once she withdrew the scalpel. She wrinkled her nose and stepped back quickly. "We can concentrate this and use it to draw the Reapers together in one place. If we must use sunlight to kill them, at least my people will only be at risk to them for a short period of time."
"Clever," Deacon said again. He looked about the warehouse, frowning. They had some lab equipment available to them, in order to make Blade's serum, but there were great portions of it that Deacon did not know how to use. "I know computers," he admitted. "Not chemistry."
"I'll do most of the work." Nyssa stabbed at the Reaper a few more times, for what looked as if it was mostly her own pleasure, before she looked towards the stairs. "I saw equipment in there," she began, "when…" Nyssa looked as if she was actually about to blush as she trailed off.
"When you interrupted grown-up time," Deacon finished for her. "Yeah, some. I'll get it."
Deacon had no idea what he said that was so challenging, but Nyssa cut him a sharp glance. "I do not need you as a buffer," she told him. "I can poke the bear myself."
Deacon held up his hands again. "Have at it." As he watched her go, he wondered how far away from poking her back that Blade actually was. There was something that wanted to be jealousy, and something that wanted to be lust, and would end up being an unsatisfactory blend of both. He scowled and stabbed at the Reaper a few more times. Nyssa seemed to derive some kind of therapeutic benefit from the action, but Deacon felt no different than he had before.
---
Nyssa had been taught to knock on doors before she entered rooms that were not hers. She had also been taught that her father's words were gospel, that the only correct reaction to seeing the Daywalker was to kill him immediately, and that humans were meals. It was a day for the reconstruction of foundations.
Thinking of this, wrapped up within her won insecurities and doubts and with the scent of Frost still heavy in her nose, the smell of male and human and blood, etiquette was hardly the first and foremost thought within Nyssa's mind. She grabbed for the door to Blade's quarters and allowed herself entrance without pausing to worry that she might catch him in an indelicate position as she had both times before. Nyssa remembered how Frost and Blade had looked, twined around one another, and took a deeper breath. Vampires had much slower heart rates than did humans. She could still feel hers speeding up.
Blade was seated in the same chair where Frost had been less than an hour before, a tourniquet wrapped around his forearm. He was preparing a syringe of his serum, the one that dampened his thirst and made him little more than a human, when Nyssa came in. Her eyes were drawn automatically towards the vein.
"You're not big on knocking, are you?" Blade asked her, lifting one of his eyebrows. He did not sound angry, but then, Nyssa did not know him well enough to know where his landmines were.
Nyssa dipped her head. "We need some of this," she said, gesturing towards the lab equipment behind Blade. "In order to synthesize a pheromone so that sunlight is not our only option." At Blade's slight nod of acknowledgment, she went to collect what she needed, glancing back once over her shoulder at Blade as she did so. He had not yet injected himself with his serum. Likely he was waiting for her to leave before he completed a very private act. Nyssa was beginning to realize that she had a way of walking in the middle of those. Nyssa wondered what that must be like, to cut himself off from such an essential part of himself so thoroughly. She could not fathom it.
Nyssa paused in collecting her supplies and turned, a beaker in her hands. The set of Blade's shoulders was tense. "They way that you speak to them," she began hesitantly, not sure that she was doing the right thing. "What you said to me…"
Blade's shoulders tensed even further. "What about it?" he asked without turning around.
The tone of his voice said that now was not a wise time to go about, as Frost was so fond of saying, poking the bear, but Nyssa could not seem to halt herself that her curiosity had been piqued without being slaked. "Why do you hate us so much?"
Blade let out a disbelieving huffing sound that could not quite manage to be a laugh and then turned around. His eyes were as incredulous as Nyssa had ever seen them. "You kill people," he said flatly. "You kill my people. You can't connect A and B on that one?"
It was very nearly the same thing that Frost had said to her downstairs. Nyssa still felt a flush rising in her cheeks. "I was born a vampire," she said hotly. "This is all that I have ever known." In her head, it had not sounded nearly so much like the plea of a woman who was confused, whose foundations were being rattled and who did not know where to find new ones. "Frost was turned, but you don't seem to mind having him around, so don't act like you're a stranger to self-service."
Nyssa had fought Blade to a standstill with a sword and knew that he was fast, but she was still taken aback by the speed with which he lunged from his seat and whirled around it. A big hand was wrapped around her throat before she could hope to react and then Blade was in her face, squeezing down on her windpipe. She did not need to draw a breath, not with her low oxygen needs, but she still winced at the pain. Blade bent her back against the low refrigerator that held his serum until her spine creaked and she gasped.
Blade did not strike her, but instead held her pinned immobile there, leaning over her face. "You might want to tread carefully," he told her. "Else you might stumble into something that you are not prepared for." It was similar enough to Nyssa's earlier thoughts of landmines to make her stare. Blade's grip about her throat loosened, and his thumb stroked at the skin of her jaw as if he was fascinated by it. Nyssa had always had smooth, creamy skin without a blemish on it; outside of her eyes, it was the feature that garnered her the most compliments. Blade's thumb had calluses on it from his long hours handling weaponry, though his touch was light and nearly gentle. Even though Blade was touching only her throat and her face, Nyssa felt blood beginning to flow and tingle elsewhere. She stared up at Blade with an expression that she knew to be nearly defiant.
Blade stared down at her in return for several long seconds before he abandoned her throat altogether and, tilting her chin up with his fingers, dipped his head to take her mouth. Nyssa found her lips being parted before she had time to even think of a protest, found all of those possible protests being pushed to the side by Blade's tongue entering her mouth. He mauled her mouth with a casual arrogance that made her head spin and her pulse sound in her ears, drawing back only so far as he needed to take her lower lip between his teeth. Nyssa had taken lovers before, but always vampire, and the experience of blunt teeth was new to her. She shivered and then gasped as Blade moved on to her neck, mouth fastening briefly to a point just behind her ear, where her pulse would sound if she had anything other than a vampire's shallow echo. The beaker that she had been holding slipped from her fingers and bounced against the floor. Luckily, it was plastic and did not break. She put her hand against the back of Blade's neck and directed his head upwards so that she could kiss him in turn, an action that he seemed to have no problem with. His mouth was warm, and that startled Nyssa almost as much as teeth that did not tear her skin.
Nyssa broke away from Blade finally, panting on air that she did not need and staring at Blade with eyes that she knew were unnaturally wide. Blade did not appear concerned by this as he allowed her to step back from the refrigerator. Her back ached, and so did the space between her legs. "I need to begin work," she muttered, stooping to retrieve the beaker.
"You do that," Blade told her as he reclaimed his seat and picked up his syringe again. Nyssa hurried towards the door. "Nyssa?" She turned in time to watch the needle enter his skin. "I'll keep you safe if I'm able."
"I appreciate that," Nyssa said, her voice calmer than she felt. She left Blade alone and clattered down the stairs, her hand on her burning lips, as she wondered what she had done.
End Part Seven