by Kara Sharpe
“You’re playing a dangerous game. You’ve got no conception of how fast flirting with danger like this will go truly bad for you.” Elijah tried to make himself sound intimidating, mimicking the way he though Emelie would fix this sort of problem. She could make herself exude menace while still sounding quite pleasant, but Elijah didn’t think he really had the knack of it. He probably just sounded mild-mannered and conversational.
Finn gave him an irritated glare. “Quit it with that bullshit. I don’t want to hear more lectures, and especially not from you. My band are all being sanctimonious assholes about you being here at all, so the least you can do is give me the kind of dangerous time they think you’re giving me.”
Finn shoved him down into one of the room’s worn armchairs and then climbed in too, the seat wide enough that he was able to plant a knee on either side of Elijah’s thighs and trap him in place. Elijah could throw him off if he needed to, of course, but he was reluctant to make Finn any angrier than his already acidic mood.
Finn kissed him then, hard and hungry, his mouth burning hot against Elijah’s cooler temperature. Elijah felt annoyed that clearly they weren’t going to talk about the things that they really needed to talk about, but it was hard to resist how good Finn tasted, how nice it was to kiss him, the bite of bitter coffee in his mouth as Elijah licked in deeper.
It felt good, incredibly good, and Elijah realized that he’d been lulled into letting his guard down with how good it was when Finn scraped his own lip over the point of one of Elijah’s fangs, hard enough to draw blood, before kissing him again even harder.
The taste was exhilarating, and Elijah couldn’t help the groan of desire he made at the power of it.
“Bite me more. My neck,” Finn ordered, barely moving their mouths apart to speak, every syllable smearing more of that incredible blood from his lips to Elijah’s.
Finn arched back, bearing his neck to Elijah, guiding his head down with one trembling hand. Elijah knew he should put up a fight, try harder to resist. But Finn’s blood was singing in his mouth, and Elijah wanted more than anything to be weak.
He sucked a kiss against Finn’s throat, not quite breaking the skin, and Finn arched against him with a gasp.
“You’re so hot. Are all vampires as hot as you, Jesus,” he muttered, burying a hand in Elijah’s hair.
“Yes,” Elijah murmured, pulling back enough to answer, blowing air against the spit-slick mark where he’d kissed Finn’s neck. “We’re predators. It’s one of the ways we catch our prey. We’re deliberately alluring, like how a venus flytrap tastes sweet to the insects it draws close. Our skin is smooth and soft, our eyes bright, our lashes dark, our lips flushed.”
“Your mouth talking, when it should be biting,” Finn complained, pressing closer to Elijah, urging him back to his neck.
Elijah knew it was a bad idea, knew it would make everything even more complicated and difficult to fix. But it also felt inevitable, like he could no more stop himself from biting Finn than he could stop the sun from coming up. Some things were just absolute laws of nature, and how much Elijah needed Finn’s blood in his mouth was one of them.
The bite made Finn shudder as if he’d touched a live wire, his whole body trembling violently as Elijah drew that first long deep draught of red from him. He grabbed one of Elijah’s hands, shoving it against the front of his pants, making Elijah feel how hard he was.
Their position was awkward and restricted in the chair, but that wasn’t enough to stop the way Finn was gasping and making little broken cries and grunts, thrusting urgently into Elijah’s hand.
Elijah was hard too but that didn’t matter at all. It was just a fact, paling into nothing, compared to the taste of blood in his mouth and the noises Finn was making.
He felt Finn tense and heard the long, drawn-out noise of pleasure as the man above him reached climax. Elijah didn’t stop drinking. Perversely, he wanted to make Finn tell him to stop, and knew that the flow was slow and safe enough to present no immediate danger from blood loss.
Finally, Finn broke away from Elijah and managed to find his footing, rising and staggering back from his place on the chair, pressing a palm against the shallow wounds on his neck.
“You better stick around for the show,” he ordered Elijah in a shaky voice. “I gotta go shower before I go onstage.”
7
FINN
After the show, same as after all the shows, lots of fans hung around to drink and chat with the band. Some of them were breathtakingly beautiful, the kind of hotness that belonged in a magazine, but Finn was still way too wrapped up in thoughts of Elijah’s incredible mouth to even consider hooking up with any of them.
“We’ve been invited to a local afterparty,” Jessica told him, still wearing her stage outfit. “You up for it?”
Local parties like that meant drugs, usually, and almost always more chances for hooking up with pretty fans. All Finn could think about was Elijah, though, so he shook his head. “Nah, I’m good.”
The rest of the band went, which made Finn a little bummed out. Going to that kind of thing as a group had remained the one thing they all still agreed on until now, and now Finn was out of step with the rest of them even on that.
But he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything anymore.
All through the concert he’d felt a little lightheaded, like he was high. Losing blood should have dragged him down with lethargy, shouldn’t it? But instead it had fizzled him up, made him feel like he was floating. He guessed that was why they called it lightheaded.
Finn found Elijah easily enough, hanging by the bar again.
“Come back to the bus, we can watch a movie or something.”
“Is that a euphemism? Like ‘Netflix and chill?’” Elijah asked, cocking an eyebrow. Finn laughed, still feeling light and giddy.
“Nah. I don’t think we’d even get good enough coverage for Netflix on the bus anyway. I always keep a couple of classic mainstays downloaded. C’mon.”
The bus was like most other tour buses Finn had been on over the years, first as a music journalist and then later as a musician himself. A tiny kitchenette, then a small seating area with built-in seats and a table, two small couches, then the bunks with their blackout curtains towards the back.
“It gets claustrophobic sometimes, of course,” he told Elijah as they climbed aboard. “But it’s also nice to have a home base on tour that’s familiar, instead of just a string of hotel rooms with no continuity between one night and the next.”
He retrieved is laptop from his cluttered bunk and settled down on one of the couches, motioning for Elijah to join him.
“I’m kinda in the mood for the Dawn of the Dead remake, is that okay?”
Elijah shrugged. “I’ve never seen it, so I can’t comment one way or the other.”
“Nice.” Finn grinned. “You don’t know to be an asshole about it. Most people are.
“And okay, it’s true that the zombies are the fast kind instead of the slow kind, but people who claim that ‘fast zombies aren’t scary’ or ‘don’t really count as zombies’ have never considered what it would be like to be pursued by a horde of ravening undead who knew how to sprint, you know? Sure, the slow inexorable march of death is scary, but the fast unavoidable race of death is pretty terrifying too, right?
“I mean, I’m not gonna oversell it,” Finn went on, aware that he’d kind of been doing exactly that. “It’s not some heartbreaking work of staggering genius or whatever but it’s solid, the actors do a good job in making you care about the characters.
“The original version worked as a metaphor about consumerism, but this one doesn’t try for anything so sophisticated. Which is fine, it’s a zombie movie, they don’t have to have a deeper meaning every time, you know?
“People get really pretentious about horror sometimes, and while I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a place for complex textual analysis in the genre, I love it when it’s meaty enough for that, b
ut sometimes it’s okay if it’s just… you know, meaty.”
Elijah gave a laugh at that. “You’ve certainly got a lot of very strong feelings about this. Horror movies, I mean.”
“Hell yeah I do. Sometimes they’re the best part of my week.”
That made Elijah look surprised. “Really? Even compared to performing with the band?”
They were straying dangerously close to deep and meaningful conversation. Finn gave a shrug, dismissing the question.
“Nothing’s all good all of the time, not even the glittering life of a Crystal Pulse guitarist. Anyway, lemme put this on and we’ll enjoy some good old-fashioned zombies.”
“I thought the whole point was that they aren’t old-fashioned. They’re new-fangled.”
Now it was Finn’s turn to laugh.
The movie played through in all its gory glory, zombies and tragedy. It was exactly the distraction from real life that Finn hoped it would be, and Elijah was a great watching companion, laughing and chatting in the more lighthearted stretches and remaining quiet when the action got tense.
As the credits rolled, Finn cleared his throat.
“You should stay. In the bus, I mean. That way you wouldn’t have to keep following us from venue to venue and sometimes miss the shows.” He didn’t look at Elijah as he spoke. “Groupies should at least get to see their bands, especially if they’re getting pulled into weird bullshit by guitarists like you are. Plus, you’ll save money on transport.”
“Money’s not especially a concern for me, but I’m sure you already guessed as much,” answered Elijah.
“There’s more than enough space for you to have your own bunk. I wouldn’t make you share with my dirty socks. Back at the start of the tour we were all in the same bus, the whole band: me, Jessica, Damien and Curtis.
“But since…” Finn’s voice caught in his throat. He paused and swallowed and tried again. “But now Damien and Curtis are riding in the crew bus instead. They finally hit their limit for how much bullshit they were willing to tolerate from us, I guess.
“I never thought it’d happen, but…. I guess people have a way of disappointing you. Or we had a way of disappointing them, more specifically. More fool them for putting any faith in us that we were better than shit, I guess.”
As quickly as he could, Finn dropped the bitter tone and switched to flippant. “Or you can share my bunk if you want, of course. Maybe being close to my heartbeat while we sleep the mornings away will get you so fired up that you’ll drain me dry before you even realize you’ve done it.”
A smile made half of pity and half of amusement played at Elijah’s lips. “I’ve shared narrow beds with humans in the past without incident, I’m afraid.”
Finn shrugged. “Okay, whatever. If you hate the idea—”
“I didn’t say I hated the idea. I actually like it a lot. It’s a long time since I slept beside someone. But won’t Jessica mind having a stranger on her bus?”
It was impossible to hold back the frown that pulled at Finn’s features in response to the question. “The days when Jessica and I cared about what the other thought of our dumb decisions are in the past. She doesn’t get a say in this.”
“I didn’t mean to touch a nerve. I apologize.”
Finn let out his breath in a sigh. “It’s fine. Or, well, it’s not fine, but it is what it is. Let’s watch another movie.”
8
ELIJAH
Elijah hadn’t slept beside someone else in a small space in long enough that he wasn’t exactly sure of how long it had been. It was nice to do it again now, though, with the narrowness of the bunk requiring the two of them to spoon close, Finn lying behind him with one possessive arm draped across Elijah’s waist.
In the afternoon they reached the next town on the tour schedule, and Finn left the bunk to go take care of the usual routines before a show. Elijah lay awake in the warmth of the dark little space, castigating himself for getting into this situation.
The warmth wasn’t especially unpleasant; it took severe extremes of temperature in either direction before Elijah’s body would feel discomfort, and this was just the mild heat of a small space that had, until recently, been occupied by a warm human body.
He didn’t need any more sleep, so all there was to do until nightfall made it safe for him to emerge was stew in his own thoughts, feeling guilty and cross at himself.
As far as things to feel regret over, a night spent watching zombie movies probably ranked among the lowest of misdemeanors, but Elijah felt extremely frustrated with himself.
Finn was clearly in a very unhappy, destructive place emotionally, to the point of claiming to be suicidal. Whatever joy being in Crystal Pulse had once brought him had obviously been curdled into a sour version of itself, adding to the darkness of the young man’s life.
However alluring Elijah found him, however much Elijah wished to help solve whatever elements of his situation could be solved, the basic truth was that Elijah was present in Finn’s life because he’d been ordered to do damage control to stop Finn saying anything more in public about vampires.
He was supposed to be there to fix that, not to listen to impassioned lectures about variations in zombie speeds. Biting him before the show had been a mistake. Staying on the bus last night had been a mistake.
Elijah was a sucker for those simple moments, the watching-movies-together moments. He knew that about himself — that a quiet comfortable evening in good company was as alluring to him as the raucous energy of the crowd. Indulging in that was as hedonistic for Elijah as the intoxicating closeness of the biting and the sex, and giving in was evidence of how weak he was around Finn, how badly he was screwing up what he was supposed to be here to do.
And he knew there wasn’t much time left in which to get it done, either. If Elijah didn’t convince Finn to drop this whole thing soon, Emelie was going to step in and brute-force a solution with mesmerism.
Elijah had no definitive proof that mesmerism hurt anyone’s abilities as an artist. The only way to get even anecdotal evidence would be to go out and use the power on a selection of creative minds and then observe the results, and the thought of doing something like that was against everything Elijah stood for.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t create anymore after their minds had been affected or anything, it was that their creativity always seemed… changed afterwards.
Elijah had observed it many times over the years — never from his own hand, but he was far from the only vampire who liked to prey on artists, and most had far less compunction about hypnotizing their victims in order to remove the memory afterwards.
Elijah didn’t want to change anything about any of the people he fed off. He didn’t want to have any impact on what kind of art they made. The idea of some part of his power making its way into the songs of the artists he enjoyed so much made his skin break out in clammy, uneasy gooseflesh because it distressed him so much.
Elijah wanted to be invisible in the story of the world, affecting as little as possible. After so long alive, he should have more of a grip on how to avoid being a disaster.
The hours in the bunk passed very slowly.
9
FINN
“Any updates for us about the torrid gothic fling you mentioned starting? Your epic vampire romance?”
Finn had done some music journalism before he’d joined Crystal Pulse, so he knew how hard it could be to find shit to ask bands about when they’d already done five interviews that day and the same number on every other stop on the tour.
You could only recycle the same meaningless bullshit so many times before it became unusable, which is why he tried to think up new meaningless bullshit all the time. That didn’t make the interviews any less pointless, but maybe it kept everyone entertained: him, the interviewer, the fans.
That was what he was there for, right? To add a little bit of brightness into people’s days?
Otherwise, what was the point of any of it?
/> Finn flashed the young interviewer a bright smile. He’d bet money that she was a fan. For one thing, nobody did work like music journalism anymore unless they had a genuine passion for it, because nobody was making a good living off those column inches. The fact she knew what he’d been saying in random recent interviews suggested it as well.
If he wasn’t in the middle of this… whatever it was, with Elijah, she might even have been someone Finn would have arranged to hook up with after the show that night.
So considering all that — her effort to ask a fun question, her probable status as a fan, her potential as a hook up in other circumstances — Finn was surprised at himself when he found that he was hesitant to answer her question.
It should have been easy enough. Throw out a few new tidbits about Elijah, do a little more to goad the kind of eventual reaction he wanted he wanted from the vampire.
But Finn sensed he’d pushed things dangerously close to the edge with Elijah. If he kept escalating things now, everything might fall apart.
Despite the various threats he’d made, Finn didn’t want those shadowy mysterious ‘powerful beings’ that outranked Elijah to get involved — he wanted Elijah himself, a vampire too kindhearted to kill anyone, to be the one who had to do the deed and kill Finn.
He wanted to ruin everything good and pure left in the world, especially a cute immortal predator who spent his afterlife being a groupie to middle-tier popular bands.
He gave the interviewer a shallow, lascivious smile. “Just love bites for now. I’m a sucker for a good hickey.”
10
ELIJAH
Elijah waited in the venue after nightfall for Finn to arrive for soundcheck, trying to make himself scarce from the rest of the band. Jessica had looked concerned and pissed off when she’d found out he was traveling in the bus now, and even if Finn said that it wasn’t any of her business, Elijah wanted to avoid her anger as much as possible.