The aftermath of Christina's attack

Three months later

Myka put her hat on over her curls carefully, wincing slightly at the sunlight that burned her skin, still. Summer was gone and with it, the oppressive heat and humidity that had her sweating out half her body's water content before breakfast. She still used a couple of bottles of sunscreen a week, however.

It was Monday and it was her turn to take David to school before her shift. The night before had been the last night of this month's full moon and Tracy and Sameen were God knows where, out there in the depths of the woods with their pack.

"Aunt Myka," David piped up from next to her. "It's time for school. I'm gonna be late!"

"Okay, buddy, whatever you say," she said, tipping her hat to him. He giggled. She had grown to love that sound.

She dropped the boy off, waving and smiling as he ran eagerly to the door of the elementary school. His teacher loved him and his gift had given him a sensitivity and strength that drew other children to him. It was in moments like this, however, that Myka loved him the most – when he was just a child, grinning and running around like an idiot.

She drove through the small town slowly, waving lazily at those she knew well, and keeping a sharp eye out for trouble. There had been precious little of that, however, since the thing with Christina and Myka's announcement of a new vampire deputy. She arrived at the station and found a cup of steaming coffee along with an everything bagel in a paper bag. She ate quickly, hungry as she usually was these days.

"Good morning Sheriff," Mrs Frederic intoned, and Myka looked up with a calm smile. It had been a while since anyone had sneaked up on her, even someone as incredibly sneaky as the Mayor. She had actually heard the woman open the main door to the station, which put paid to Myka's belief that she materialised from the ether like a house elf.

"Good morning, Ma'am," she said, suppressing the urge to stand up and salute. She put it down to all the time she was spending with ex-military types.

"Are you well, Sheriff?" the Mayor asked, sitting down as Leena magically appeared with a cup of steaming coffee and a plateful of cookies.

"Very," Myka said honestly.

"And there have been no... unexpected effects?" Mrs Frederic asked delicately.

Myka shrugged.

"Nothing too strange," she said, "but Drs Ludwig and Calder have me under close watch. Not to mention Dr Cho. I'm being well observed, I would say," she said, taking a sip of her coffee.

"That is good news," Mrs Frederic said, and to Myka's surprise, she actually appeared to be relieved.

"I suppose this has never happened before?" Myka asked, and Mrs Frederic tilted her head, seemingly thinking about how much to tell her.

"You are aware that you have a relative, a distant cousin of sorts, in Louisiana?" Mrs Frederic asked, and Myka nodded.

"She, too, imbibed a large quantity of vampire blood at one time, but she had not, at that point, formed any sort of blood bond with a vampire, so it appears that it didn't have the same effect as it apparently did on you. This is why the doctors are keeping such a close eye on you. You are an anomaly and we do not like anomalies, Sheriff," Mrs Frederic said almost sternly. Myka smiled.

"I've been an anomaly all my life, Madame Mayor," she said with a shrug. "Why change now?"

The ghost of a smile chased across Mrs Frederic's lips and disappeared. She stood to leave, nodding at Myka cordially.

"Mrs Frederic?" Myka said, impulsively, and the woman raised an eyebrow.

"What... what are you?" Myka blurted.

Mrs Frederic smiled enigmatically, and Myka sighed. She hadn't really expected an answer. She looked down for a second and when she looked up, the woman was gone.

Myka's job at the station had become a lot quieter since things with Christina Wells and James MacPherson had been stopped in their violent rampage. MacPherson was in custody, being held in Jackson until his trial. Helena was planning to testify, to say that MacPherson was mainly responsible for Christina's rampage. At the very least, he could have mitigated the amount of death by taking control of the child vampire. It was unclear whether Helena herself would be censured for making Christina into a vampire in the first place, but according to Helena she was likely only to be fined for turning Christina and for killing her. Vampire deaths had a monetary penalty, apparently. An elegant solution for a society of immortals, rather than losing more lives, Helena said.

Myka packed up for the day and after checking that David was safe at home with Tracy and Sameen, drove to Abigail Cho's house. She had a receptionist now; her practice had expanded quite a bit following all of the death and mayhem caused by Christina Wells and James MacPherson, not to mention that caused by Sally Stukowski. Tracy had a regular appointment, as did Sameen, who had, after a month of nightmares, had a quiet conversation with Helena in the early hours of one morning. She'd made her first appointment that same day.

"Hey, Myka," Abigail said as her new receptionist (a human – Myka had checked) showed Myka in and made them both coffee.

"Hey," Myka said, with a crooked smile.

"How are you feeling?" Abigail asked, and Myka shrugged.

"I feel fine, really. Just… adjusting."

"Yeah, I get that," Abigail said, nodding. After some testing by Artie, it had become clear that she was not entirely human either. She was an empath, her gift similar to Myka's except that she read emotions alone, in a much purer way than Myka did.

"Are you ready?" Abigail asked, and Myka nodded. She lay on the couch, taking off her hat and boots and wriggling until she got comfortable. Abigail turned on some background noise – sounds of rain and waterfalls and soft soothing music – until Myka was completely relaxed and ready to revisit the night everything had changed. Again.

"No, Christina, please! Not her," Helena had pleaded, and Myka couldn't see her, but she could hear the anguish and horror in the vampire's voice. That voice that she loved so much, that velvety soft, rich voice that had started her real awakening to who she was and to the world around her. Myka felt pain, physical and emotional, so strong that it ripped through her, tears streaming from her eyes. She was so sad that she had to leave. She loved Helena so much. She tried to say that she was sorry but her lips wouldn't frame the words. She was just glad that David was safe. She called out to him, saying that she loved him, and she knew he'd heard her. She threw a last thought out to her vampire, wishing for once that she could hear Helena's mind, and then she let herself drift away. She stopped fighting, and the sea of red swallowed her up.

When she woke again, she felt a sense of relief and also a small sense of disappointment. She had been ready to die; ready to have this all end. She pushed that thought aside and tried to reconnect herself with her senses. The first noise almost deafened her. It was so loud. And it was so bright. It hurt her eyes and her skin, and she whimpered a little, hearing people talk distantly.

"She's blistering. She needs to get out of the sun," said a voice she recognised but couldn't place.

"Her ears are bleeding. We need to get her somewhere away from noise as well as light," Dr Calder said urgently.

"I know where she can go," Tracy said, and a few moments later Myka felt herself placed inside an almost airless space, a silent and completely dark space, and she relaxed her body, finding another body next to her. At first she thought it was Helena, but it couldn't be the cool body of her vampire; it felt almost warm to her. She slipped away into sleep as her pain lessened.

The next time she woke it was quieter and darker, but it was still loud to her. She could hear thunderous thumps of heartbeats in the room and outside of it. She didn't know where she was or why she was even alive. Surely even vampire blood couldn't have saved her this many times? She tried opening one eye but the light, slight though it was, was too painful. She closed it again quickly.

"Sleep, my love," Helena said, her hands soothing Myka's brow. They weren't cool anymore, and Myka couldn't process that. Something had happened to her Helena, but she was so tired, she just drifted off, feeling the vampire pull her close, wrapping her body around Myka's longer one. "I love you, my darling," Helena said, and Myka let the whisper carry her away again.

The first time she woke up for real, it was sundown. She could feel it. Her eyes opened and she looked around the rapidly darkening room, wondering why it didn't hurt anymore to open them. The sound was still thunderous; there was no-one in the room with her but there were others in the house and their voices and their breathing and their heartbeats – even the swishing of the blood in their veins – it was all deafening. She took a deep breath and concentrated on building another shield, this time a shield against what she was hearing, a shield made entirely of her own willpower. After a few moments, the noise abated – or rather her awareness of it faded enough to allow her to relax a little. She heard a noise from behind her and suddenly Helena was there.

"You're awake!" Helena said, her tone surprised, and Myka looked up, seeing the vampire for the first time in… well, she didn't know how long, but Helena was standing there and Myka had never expected to see her again. She sat up gingerly and extended a hand to Helena, pulling her on to the bed. She put a hand on Helena's shoulder, letting her hand slide round to the back of her neck and into her hair, before leaning forward to kiss her gently. Helena's lips felt warm. Myka relished the sensation before breaking away and looking at Helena closely. The vampire was smiling widely.

"I have missed you so much," she murmured, her hands on Myka's face, on her neck, in her hair.

"Where have I been? What happened, Helena?" Myka asked, her face screwed up in confusion. "It's all such a blur."

"You… Christina was killing you, darling. She had almost drained all of your blood. She was quite demented, in the end. Worse than I had ever seen her before. As she was biting you, the silver chains you were wearing – they were burning her skin. It must have been agonising. Her skin was smoking but she still carried on. In any case, the idea of your death was unacceptable to me. I had brought a stake and a mallet just in case I was forced to kill James, and I… I used it on her. I killed her, and because of your position, you swallowed a great deal of her blood," Helena explained, and it dawned on Myka, then.

"Am I… a vampire?" she asked, appalled as she remembered that Helena's skin felt warm to her, that light burned her, that her senses had increased exponentially.

"No, you're not a vampire," Helena said carefully. There was a distinct 'but' hanging in the air.

"I'm not a vampire. But I am different, right?" Myka asked, and Helena nodded solemnly.

"Dr Calder and Dr Ludwig have been keeping an eye on you. You're not a vampire. They think that if you were entirely human you would have become a vampire after taking in the amount of blood that you did. But your fairy heritage has in some way fought off the vampirism. You are now something else, something in between, we think. The doctors will be able to explain it more eloquently, I would imagine," Helena said, and Myka nodded.

"I'm sorry," she said, and Helena tilted her head quizzically.

"For what, my love?" she asked, and Myka raised a hand to her face.

"I'm sorry that you had to kill her," she said, and Helena's eyes began to fill.

"I should have killed her long ago. But I couldn't, not until she – she almost took you from me. I almost let you die, Myka, and I can never forgive myself for that," she said, and her bloody tears were running down her face in earnest, now.

"I forgive you, Helena. I understand. If it were David? And he's not even my kid! I don't know if I could do it. That you did it for me… I don't know how to begin to thank you," Myka said.

Helena fell forward into Myka's arms and let herself go, sobbing for the daughter she saved, the daughter she should have let die. Myka held her, marvelling at how warm she felt, kissing her hair and rubbing her back as she sobbed.

"I love you, so much," Myka whispered, and Helena pulled her even closer.

A long time later, Helena cleaned her face and Myka accompanied her downstairs to meet with her family. She had no idea how long she'd been asleep, or close to death, or whatever the hell she had been since Christina's attack.

Sameen, Pete, Tracy, Amanda and David were all sitting in Helena's living room watching the huge television on the wall, and it took them a moment to realise that Myka was there, but when they did there was a roar of noise that made Myka's head hurt. They surrounded her, a riot of warmth and smiles and hugs and tears and it was a while before everything settled down enough for Myka to make sense of a word that anyone was saying.

Eventually she managed to work out that she had been asleep for over a week, the larger part of which she had spent in Helena's hidey-hole behind the false wall in her bedroom, with a switch flipped to allow air in since Helena didn't need to breathe and Myka did.

Dr Ludwig, the tiny doctor who had assisted her when Sally Stukowski had attacked, had joined with Dr Calder to look after Myka and keep her alive through her transition into… well, whatever she was, now.

"What did they do?" she asked curiously, and the others exchanged looks before looking away. Myka sighed and let her shields down, and snapped them back up right away.

"I've been drinking blood? Are you kidding me?" she yelled, completely sickened.

"It's all right, darling," Helena said soothingly. "The doctors are fairly certain that you won't need to do that anymore. It was just helpful in feeding the vampire side while you were dealing with the change.

"Fairly certain?" Myka asked, her voice much higher than normal.

"Almost 100%" Helena said, and Myka wasn't entirely sure she believed her, but she nodded anyway.

"It's okay, Mykes," Pete said. "You didn't, like, try to eat our faces or anything. Well, apart from Shaw's, but she did get way too close, so it was kind of her own fault."

Myka looked around at them, her family surrounding her, and tried to work out if Pete was joking or not. Sameen's face was straight and didn't seem to have been eaten any time recently, so it might just have been a joke. She decided she preferred not to know.

"How's Claudia?" she asked, suddenly, turning to Helena.

"She is well. Or as well as can be expected. Leena, the witch from your station? She is assisting Claudia, helping her temper her… appetites," Helena said delicately. Myka took a moment to absorb that before her eyes widened.

"Claudia and Leena?" she whispered, and Helena nodded. "Wow," she said, and wondered whether Leena would live to tell the tale, given that, as Helena put it, new vampires had indiscriminate appetites of all kinds and were unlikely to be gentle in sating said appetites. But then, Leena was a fairly advanced witch, from what Myka could tell, and that might make all the difference.

"What about MacPherson?" she asked darkly, her mind turning to the reason for Claudia's change.

"He is imprisoned in your silver box, awaiting transport to Jackson for trial," Helena said, and Pete nodded.

"Trial by whom?" Myka asked.

"We worked out a compromise with the King and his people," Pete said, suddenly all professional. "He's going to stand trial for murder, accessory to murder and for turning a human without consent. The court in Jackson will liaise with the vamps to decide what happens to him. They'll be paying reparations to the town at the very least, Mrs Frederic says, for the loss of its children. They've already paid for a construction crew to start rebuilding your house, Mykes. They were very insistent about that. I don't think they like the bad press that the murders have been getting, and they want to keep us quiet," he finished.

"Okay," Myka nodded, thinking all of that through. If she were to be perfectly honest, she wished she'd killed James MacPherson that night, but he deserved to suffer longer for all that he'd done, so perhaps this was the more just way to do it. It was unlikely that the King or whoever would let him live after what he'd done. From what Helena had said about the man, he was likely to be unrepentant anyway, and would want to continue killing indiscriminately and making humans into vampires whenever he felt like it. He needed to die and that was just the way it had to be. Myka wasn't normally an advocate of the death penalty, but when it came to immortal beings who were set on being the master race and killing all of the humans – hell yeah, she was fine with it. Kill them and burn them and salt the earth.

They ate a while later, Myka being extremely relieved to find that she was still human enough to want solid food, although she did have a craving for rare beef rather than the admittedly delicious salmon teriyaki that Tracy had put together. When they finished eating, David attached himself to Myka and Helena like a limpet, squirming his way in between them and managing to fall asleep with his feet in Myka's face. It was, aside from the smell of feet, incredibly pleasant. They had all fallen into a companionable silence after catching up on what had been happening during Myka's absence, and were watching some sort of mind-numbing ballroom dance competition that Helena was trying to pretend she didn't like, while watching avidly and tensing when her favourite couple's scores were called out. Myka hid her smile behind the kid's feet – at least they were good for something.

A little later Amanda and Pete retired, and Tracy and Sameen went shortly after, dragging a protesting David along with them. Myka and Helena were alone, and Myka suddenly felt nervous.

"What's wrong, my darling?" Helena asked quietly.

"I was just… do I have fangs, Helena?" she blurted, and Helena smiled.

"No, my love. Not that I've noticed, in any case. If you had, they would have extended when you were fed the small amounts of blood that we fed to you during your convalescence. You do not have fangs. You are not a vampire, but you do now share some traits with vampires. Strength, speed, enhanced senses. Your heart still beats but you are colder. I don't know what that will mean for the long-term; I would imagine that Drs Calder and Ludwig will want to speak to you and observe you for at least a while. The changes you've undergone seem to have given you most of the strengths and none of the weaknesses of a vampire," Helena said, and there was something a little envious in her eyes at that moment.

"I'm sorry, Helena. I… can I go out, during the day? I remember my skin blistering…" Myka said hesitantly.

"The doctors believe you will be able to, yes. You might have to wear longer sleeves for a while until your skin gets used to the sunshine," Helena said, and Myka relaxed a little. She had worried that she would never be able to walk in daylight again; never be able to feel the sun on her skin.

"Thank you for letting everyone stay here," Myka said after a few moments of silence.

"They are your family, now, Myka. Which means that they are mine. Assuming that you haven't had a change of heart now that you have been changed," Helena said, slightly nervously.

"I haven't had a change of heart, Helena. I love you and I want to be with you. I don't know how that's going to go, given that you're immortal and I'm not, but we'll take things as they come," Myka said, and Helena smiled at her, a hint of fang showing.

"That's great, Myka. You remembered a lot more, that time." Abigail's voice broke into her thoughts, and she was startled to realise that she was in the therapist's office and not on her way upstairs with Helena.

"I felt like I was really there," Myka said, wonderingly, and Abigail smiled a little shyly.

"I'm getting the hang of this, I think – guiding you to let your emotions through, to remember every detail. Even your nephew's feet," Abigail said with what sounded suspiciously like a giggle. Myka smiled back at her.

"Same time next week?" Abigail asked, and Myka nodded.

"Thank you, Abigail," she said, and it was heartfelt. A lot of her memories of the days after she woke were fragmented and difficult to access. She hadn't been prepared for the change in her physical state. She and Helena had broken the bed, later that night, because Myka was as strong as Helena, now. She'd been holding on to the headboard and she tightened her grip just a little when Helena… well. It had splintered, in any case, and Helena had ordered a new one the following day. Myka was used to being different, but this new physical power - it was a heady feeling, and a frightening one.

Almost done, now. 1 chapter to go, possibly with a short epilogue. Thank you all for reading :)