So my two week holiday turned into a month-long break from writing, please forgive me through this gift of a lengthy chapter.
Half way through this chapter I realised I'd made an awful mistake. The slayers guild is safe from vampires because it's invitational… but I'd just let Erin and Mir waltz in there. Oops.
Cheyenne was here. He could sense it. Just as strongly as he could sense Erin and her tangled thoughts crouched behind him.
Her eyes were as pale as the moon above and her thoughts rippled like stars in the very air around them. The knowledge that had bought them to this place was a mere fraction of what she knew, and he could feel that there was so much more. She'd deliberated telling him; each time she'd leaned into the thread connecting them she'd considered it. He considered it too.
"Y'think she knows 'im or sumthing?" The voice of a slayer rattled on the other side of the wall. Mir steeled himself against the urge to remove the man's internal organs without a second thought.
"I'd say so. She did sprint down there yelling his name." Had they not have been trying to follow through with a rescue mission Mir might have laughed; Chey had the tendency to be somewhat overbearing. But he didn't. He considered removing both of the speaker's spines instead.
"'Ow are we gonn get her to tell us?" There was an irritated grunt. "'Urting humans is against protocol."
Behind him Erin bristled and Mir tried to ignore the conversation whilst attempting to work out how many slayers might be in the building.
"She doesn't know that." Ignore it, ignore it. He told himself as he counted the heartbeats in hearing vicinity. "Just… scare her a bit."
"Yes Ma'am." Then this human thought about just how he would go about scaring Mir's girlfriend.
The window nearest to the slayers exploded in a shower of glass and Mir leapt straight at the man, a snarl curving his lips as he took them both to the floor.
In his peripheral vision he saw Erin take the other.
The absence of Vlad and his memories was noticeable in Mir's combat skills because however much of pacifist Vlad had been, Bertrand had been thorough with his training.
Erin, having already dispatched her target without difficulty eyed slayer and vampire, sprawled on the floor. Maneuverers that shouldn't have been effective on a vampire with any prior slayer interaction constantly took the advantage away from Mir and gave the combatant another chance to avoid the vampire's fangs.
The pair scrambled on the floor, human reaching for the stake several metres away while the vampire pressed a hand to his face over a blistering garlic-burn. She wondered whether she should assist Mir.
Then the slayer snatched the stake and plunged it into Mir's heart.
She definitely should've assisted him.
There was a swelling in her chest, and Erin wasn't sure if it was joy or despair. Time seemed to freeze, the stake poised millimetres away from the vampire's death-spot. Her creator, her lover, her killer, her obsession was about to die. She stumbled backwards much like the manner she had after she'd slain her first vampire.
The coldness of the wall provided some comfort as her back slammed against it and she slid to the floor, still watching the stake inch closer to Mir's heart. Her glacial blood was on fire, every cell in her body responding to the impending death of her sire.
The crude weapon made contact with his skin. Erin drew in a breath she didn't need. Mir glanced towards her, his eyes of bleached navy boring into hers. His lips twitched and the vampire expected to see resignation and fear. There was no frown however.
Mir smirked.
Time started moving again. The tip of the stake that had just broken the surface of Mir's skin bent. The vampire in question grinned at the dumbfounded slayer (an expression that Erin shared) and snatched the human's throat, digging his nails into the vulnerable flesh.
A wooden stake clattered to the floor. The female vampire stayed pressed against the wall but eyed the (now curved) weapon.
Mir had just survived a stake. Vladimir had just survived a stake. Vlad had just survived a stake. Erin glanced to the vampire but Mir didn't react to her thinking of him. He was too busy with the slayer.
How was that possible?
How was that possible?
Erin was an ex-slayer; there was no such vampire who could survive a stake. Not even the Chosen One.
Suddenly there was a pale hand under her nose and Erin slowly glanced up at Mir.
"Like my party trick?" His eyes glittered deviously, like the lure of a forbidden jewel. The vampire allowed him to guide her to her feet.
She recovered herself and glanced at him from under puzzled brows. "Should I even ask how you can do that?"
Mir had already started towards one of the doors and he didn't glance back at her when he said "I don't remember."
Things were pretty simple from there onwards. They fetched the slayer that was still alive, choking out her last "fuck you" through coughs of blood and forced her invite them into the main building.
The base was relatively empty, the majority of slayers prowling the town leaving only the skeleton crew. Vampire slayer's were always so unconcerned about their base – they seemed to believe that if a vampire needed an invitation there was no possible way they could get an one.
It wasn't very hard if the only two slayers in the base went and smoked in the garage, a room that didn't need an invitation. And smoking? In Lancashire slayers weren't allowed to smoke as it damaged their health and made them less physically able to deal with the undead. Obviously they didn't have any nests here like they did back at Garside.
"Mir!" Having separated to do her own independent search Erin returned to the main corridor at the breather's cry.
Cheyenne clung onto Mir like he was the only anchor in a storm. A spike of rage unexpectedly flooded her heart. She wanted the breather out the way. Out the way for what she wasn't sure. But she knew it. She wanted the human gone. Erin wanted Cheyenne gone.
Once she reappeared in the corridor Mir gave her an appreciative nod, showing just a slit of compassion. Then he was gone, and Erin sped back to the apartment after him.
The couple immediately went to the bedroom whilst Erin lurked in the dark. She could hear their interactions. Their nauseating, human interactions. Mir was as soft as a monster like him could possibly be and Cheyenne, like putty in his arms. His lips would be tracing her skin and he'd be the person that Mir's experiences had made him. That piece of Vlad that he held onto was Erin's alone.
Her lip curled unpleasantly. Why should she care what they did together? Why should she care what he gave her? He wasn't hers any longer and she loathed him with all she had.
Or she had loathed him.
What they had now… whatever was between them… She didn't know what it was, nor where it might lead. She wasn't supposed to. It wasn't supposed to exist.
But the contempt she held for him had bent over backwards and was looking at him through shades of grey, a line between hate (and something Erin refused to acknowledge) becoming blurred.
"Stay with me." Cheyenne's plead reached through the walls, earning Erin a scowl. "Please." The vampire got to her feet and stalked to the kitchen area.
Her malignance for Cheyenne almost levelled her fury for Vlad. And Erin feared she knew why.
It was all changing. She was changing most of all. She felt like she could forgive. She felt like she could exist without the cloud of rage. She felt like she wanted something she shouldn't have.
Erin sighed.
Was this truly what she wanted? She could outdo Cheyenne. She could control this breather and she could destroy this second-rate blonde. There would be no contest, especially considering what she had.
Her eyes flicked towards the bedroom door.
There was no contest.
The handle twisted under her frozen hand.
Cheyenne was asleep. Brilliant azure gleamed maliciously from the darkness.
"Come with me." She said.
Mir rose from the bed, studying her intensely. She offered him her hand, much like she had when they went hunting for the first time.
He glanced back at the sleeping breather. There it was, his piece of Vlad, his loyalty to Cheyenne, the promise he'd made to stay with her. The seconds grew long.
Her eyes drifted to the floor as the breather won, as Vlad leaked into the atmosphere and as the crimson, the toxic anger filled her again.
Then it stopped.
Cold, white hands in hers. His eyes glittered with darkness and a broken promise.
"Come with me." She told him.
The apartment blurred as she flitted them away from Cheyenne and the scrap of Vlad.
Mir pulled away from Erin the second they stopped.
His cold eyes scanned the night, the concrete drive and the looming building inspiring a combination of curiosity and anxiety in his chest. Erin studied him, rings of faded green starving for a reaction. She wanted his weakness and she wanted him and she didn't know what she wanted.
"Why here." The female vampire twitched as the question curled off his tongue in a soft, deadly murmur. She didn't answer and he stepped closer, forcing himself into her space. "Why… here?" His words rumbled with metallic undertones.
Erin had been lurching away from him but she turned around staring head-on into him, her eyes the only light in their lampless street. "Why here?" Her mimic was a surrender and a question of her own. "What is here, to you?"
He glanced at the stretch of road again. His fractured memories pulled together a tatty replication of the sight before him, highlighting details he shouldn't have known of. There was a single bullet buried in the floor a hundred metres up from where they stood. There was a stake rotting away in the patch of grass at the side of the drive. There was a memory of this place. It was saturated in fear, the need to run, the drive that had prompted him to flee the night he became.
Became what?
The night Vlad became Mir was what Erin's thoughts suggested.
She was still looking at him. Waiting for him to lie to her or for him to get defensive. He tightened his lips. "Here is the first thing I remember." The need to know suddenly expanded in his chest and he snatched her hand. "Show me more."
She led him up the drive and into a courtyard. Eagerly he took in his surroundings. He pounced on the feelings of déja vu as his eyes devoured the cobblestones and the beige balcony diagonal from him. "I've been here." He turned to the arches directly behind them. "I walked through these and you were shouting. You were human." He added as a memory unfolded, but unfortunately he couldn't identify the words being spoken.
After five minutes of silent staring Erin directed them to the door, pointing out that despite it being winter dawn would break in a few minutes.
Mir's hand almost trembled as he pressed a finger to the doorbell.
There was the sound of feet on stairs, much too loud and clumsy to be that of a vampire. Mir could feel a human approaching the door, her thoughts uneasy and strained. Yet her thoughts tasted familiar, and he found he didn't want to violate this person's privacy as he tended to with most strangers. He also found that this new place had stolen away his appetite as the thought of a warm blooded snack sent revulsion through his veins.
The door was pulled open.
"Oh my- Vlad."