Blood Song

by Kara Sharpe

  Finn knew with the objectivity of a former music journalist that every band had heard those same words, that kids in need of something to get them through the dark times would find salvation in whatever music was available, but the subjective part of him that was once one of those kids himself was touched at having played that role for them. It felt like an important honor, one that it was important to take seriously.

  “I’m the one who should be thanking you,” he told the kids, and meant it.

  Back on the bus as evening fell, Finn fiddled around a little with his guitar. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d picked it up just to enjoy playing it.

  “You seem in good spirits,” Elijah noted with a smile, sipping his tea, and Elijah smiled back. It felt like things were good, the way they used to be before the bad shit happened. Like things could be that way again, thanks to Elijah.

  It was nice to have his company nearby, his quiet presence. Touring stopped feeling romantic pretty quickly, as cramped and boring and grimy as it was, but some of the romance had come back with Elijah’s addition into Finn’s life — the spaces no longer felt cramped but compact instead, an efficient little world where everything Finn needed was right there, close and easy to reach.

  No, he was being stupid. He needed to stop thinking like such an idiot. Elijah was only there because Finn had blackmailed him into it; the guy was just making the best of a bad situation.

  Jessica returned, looking well-scrubbed and surprisingly happy after such a difficult time the night before, and the bus rumbled off towards its next destination.

  “I should incorporate using IV vitamins and fluids into my regular routine, even if I’m gonna stop drinking,” she declared to Finn, downing a Diet Coke like she was dying of thirst in the desert.

  “They don’t do anything if you aren’t crazy sick, idiot. They’re just a wellness scam,” he retorted, tone without venom. She made a face at him.

  “Models and K-pop stars use them. They must be good for something.”

  “Oh, yeah, because the modelling and K-pop industries are known for how well they treat their talent, you totally wanna base your healthcare on those,” he teased, unable to stop himself smiling when she stuck her tongue out at him instead of replying.

  It was nice to just talk to Jess, to make fun of her and laugh with her. Finn hadn’t done that in a long time, since before everything went to shit.

  The thought pulled him up sharply, reminding him of just why everything had changed. His smile faded on his face, his heart sinking. They didn’t deserve this anymore, didn’t deserve the smiles. They never would again.

  22

  ELIJAH

  Another show, another few hours on the bus, and then another hotel, yet another bland little room that didn’t seem nearly so bland because of the company he shared it with.

  Not that Finn was particularly good company; he’d been quiet and moody since the end of his conversation with Jessica earlier, despite being in good spirits before that.

  Elijah was extremely tired of how fast Finn’s moods could shift from one extreme to another.

  “Don’t go back in your head like this,” he told the man now. “I know that look you’ve got on your face, that’s the hate-myself look, and it turns into you demanding that I bite you, and it’s tiresome.”

  “Oh yeah, and you really restrain yourself when it comes to the biting,” Finn sniped back. “It’s clearly a real chore for you.”

  “Yep, there he is, the nihilist asshole version of Finn. I’m tired of putting up with this shit from you.”

  “You’re tired of putting up with shit from me?” Finn echoed in disbelief. “Are you fucking serious? You’re a vampire who won’t kill someone who’s desperate to die. Literally pleading. What kind of absolute bullshit it that?”

  “You’re not desperate to die, Finn,” Eli answered wearily. “You’re terrified of living. It’s a very different thing.”

  “Is it? How am I supposed to just go back to everything being like before, after what happened?”

  “What did happen?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Finn’s answer was immediate.

  “Well it obviously does, if it’s enough to make you want to end your life. Please tell me.”

  “It’s not your problem, leave it.”

  “Just fucking tell me!” Elijah threw up his arms in frustration. “I’m so exhausted with you talking so much and refusing to say anything!”

  “FINE!” Finn shouted, pacing back and forth across the small amount of space afforded by the room, his arms hugged across his chest protectively. “Piotr, our manager at the label, made us sign a thing promising that we’d never talk about it to anybody. I guess they’re scared of the band getting sued — anything we say can be held against us, you know? If we mention it, that might look like we’re admitting fault.

  “But I’m going to tell you, because I already took your biggest secret and splashed it out for all the fucking world to see — the least I can do is give you an opportunity to do the same in return to me, right?

  “And… I want to tell you. I need to tell someone, and I want it to be you.”

  Finn stopped pacing, sat down, then stood up and began pacing again. The amount of nervous energy he was giving off was astounding.

  “At a show a few months back…” he said finally. “A festival spot, not a solo show, lots of bands on one after the other, you know?

  “We didn’t play any more festivals after this one. This was the last one.”

  He drew a shuddering breath. “I’m rambling. Sorry. It was a really great show. The energy of the crowd was so strong. I felt like I was connecting to the audience on a really visceral level, you know?

  “Sometimes shows are like that, you vibe on this almost spiritual way, like you’re all a part of the same beautiful story, just for a little while.

  “But during the band right after us on the bill, security had to lift a girl out of the crowd. She’d collapsed. Her friends said later she’d been having trouble for a while. Trouble breathing, I mean. She was feeling tired and light-headed.

  “But we were her favorite band, so she stayed. Kids are idiots, you know? At sixteen you think missing seeing a band you like play is…” A bitter laugh. “Life or death. So she stayed in the crowd.

  “And after we were finished, she tried to leave and she couldn’t get out. The crowd was so excited. The crush was too much for her. She… she died later that night. Her name was Eva. She wanted to be a chef when she left school. A chef, you know? So much more valuable than a bunch of shitty fucked up rock stars. Such a fucking stupid, awful way to die.

  “That’s when Jessica got really bad with drinking and drugs. She’s always had a bit of a problem with it, but never to a point where I was frightened for her. It was always a…a controlled chaos, as contradictory as that sounds. No hospital visits.

  “Now it feels like everything’s fallen apart. It’s when I started being pretty sure I wanted to be dead, too. I guess you figured that out already.”

  Finn sat down again, burying his head in his hands. “But the worst thing is that I don’t feel like that all the time anymore.

  “It’s the stupidest fucking thing, but being around you — the guy I basically kidnapped because I wanted him to kill me — makes me happy. So I don’t want to die anymore. And the guilt about that, about just going on when this kid is cold and still in the ground, is eating me up.

  “You make me happy, but what fucking right do I have to be happy?”

  23

  FINN

  “Make me forget about it. Bite me again,” he pleaded with Elijah. “If you hate this dumb bullshit version of me, then you know the way to get me to shut up. Or are you going to give me some sanctimonious lecture about how I shouldn’t use coping mechanisms to avoid my pain?”

  Elijah snorted. “Like you’d listen to me anyway. I’m not your keeper, Finn. I can’t tell you what to do.”

  “Then bite me,” Fin
n challenged again, stepping closer to Elijah, who stood so that they were eye to eye.

  “You’re a piece of work,” Elijah replied. “You really are.”

  Finn kissed him, hard and hungry. Elijah maneuvered them back until Finn’s shoulder blades thumped against the wall behind him. He didn’t give in to being pinned without a fight, though, biting at Elijah’s lip and lapping inside his mouth greedily.

  Finn wanted to slice his own lip open on Elijah’s fang and draw blood, to force the kiss into something more violent and interesting that way, but when he moved to do so Elijah gave him a low growl of warning and pulled back.

  “Don’t push your luck,” came the warning. “Stay still.”

  Elijah sank to his knees, opening Finn’s fly and working him to hardness with mercilessly wonderful and efficient strokes of his hand before deep throating him.

  “Fuck, fuck, your mouth is heaven,” Finn said, shoulders tense with the effort of staying against the wall like Elijah had ordered him to.

  There was a wet noise as Elijah pulled back, eyes blazing as they stayed locked with Finn’s. Finn wanted to touch him, wanted to bury a hand in his hair, wanted that perfect mouth back on his dick, wanted to come on those beautiful lips.

  “You feel too good,” Finn moaned as Elijah went back down. “I don’t want it to be good, I want it to hurt. I just need to feel something, anything. You’re the only thing that makes me feel.”

  24

  ELIJAH

  In almost no time at all Finn came, shuddering and shaking, slumping against the wall. Elijah rose to standing and kissed him, forcing him to taste himself.

  Finn moaned into the kiss, reaching out to feel Elijah’s own hardness, clearly intending to reciprocate.

  Elijah grabbed his wrist before he could, stopping him.

  Then Elijah did something that he’d never done before, not in all the long moonlit decades of his ageless existence. He bit deep into Finn’s carotid artery, the greedy strike of a predator that is careless of the terror of its prey.

  He levered the wound open wide with a stretch of his jaw, gulping hungrily at the throb of blood that spilled forth.

  The Elijah part of him, rational and reasonable, lover of culture and people, shied away from the act in abject horror and disgust, even as the darker, more primal, more monstrous part of him surged forward with animalistic glee, delighting in this singular chance to revel in the red wash of another creature’s life force spilling out for his consumption.

  Finn jerked weakly in his grip, trying to push him off and away and failing utterly. Even at full strength he couldn’t have matched Elijah’s true capabilities, and even that meagre power was already long gone, drained away with his blood. Soon Finn would be at the brink of death, the dark cusp that only Elijah’s kind had ever seen beyond the edge of and returned to talk about.

  It was almost impossibly difficult to stop, to rein in that savage side of himself enough to pull away. If it hadn’t all been for Finn’s sake in the first place, Elijah wasn’t sure if he’d have managed it.

  “There’s no romance here,” he rasped wetly. Finn’s eyes were lidded to half-mast, face white with shock, but Elijah knew he was listening despite his glazed expression. “No absolution. If I kill you now, the only thing that happens is that you die.”

  A beat. Another. Then Finn spoke, humiliation making his voice barely a whisper.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  25

  FINN

  Waking up was like being slammed with three hangovers at once, the feeling lousy enough that Finn wondered if survival was really worth it after all.

  “There’s orange juice and cookies on the nightstand,” Elijah told him. “Have some when you can and you’ll feel better.”

  “God, fuck.” Not his most articulate speech ever, but Finn felt he should get points for effort. “Maybe Jessica’s onto something with those IV infusions after all.”

  “You absorb fluids and sugars just as well taking them orally as you do via IV,” Elijah answered. Finn opened his eyes for long enough to see that the vampire was sitting on the side of the bed, watching him closely. “Jessica needed them because she was in and out of consciousness.”

  “That’s discrimination against me for being awake. But I guess you are the expert on oral fluids.”

  Elijah gave a snort. “Was that meant to be some kind of clever quip? Because it really wasn’t.”

  “Leave me alone, I had all my intelligence sucked out last night.”

  The thick curtains on the hotel room window were pulled tight, blocking any of the late afternoon sunlight from penetrating the room.

  “You’re here for another night. No more shows for a couple of days. Time to sleep it off,” Elijah told him.

  “Thank God. That was…” Finn trailed off, having no idea how to say what he wanted to say. “Thank you. I needed the wakeup call.”

  “You can’t give up on life because of one awful thing,” Elijah told him quietly, taking one of Finn’s hands in his own. “Awful things are always on the cards sooner or later, no matter how we try to avoid the risks. We can’t ever make everything perfectly safe, it just isn’t possible.

  “The only people whose futures we can predict with 100% accuracy are the ones who are already dead and gone.”

  Finn didn’t know if the truth in Elijah’s words made things better or worse. Was it better to live in a world where every tragedy could be blamed on something, could be prevented with enough effort, or in one where sometimes shit just happened, and nothing could stop it?

  Finn didn’t know. One thing he did know, though, was that he wasn’t the only one in that room who needed to learn that same lesson.

  “Are we really so different?” he asked Elijah, easing himself so he was sitting up and they could see eye to eye. “We’ve both gotta carry, forever, that we played a part in hurting someone.

  “Maybe there’s no way to atone enough for that. But if you’re so keen on me moving on from what happened with Eva, if you’re telling me that I’m supposed to find some way to be brave despite the enormous risk and how terrified I am, then why don’t you have to do the same thing? How come you’re allowed to keep hiding from knowing people, letting people know you, just because it went shitty one time?”

  Elijah shook his head with a frown. “That’s very different. You’re human. Being alive is a changing, shifting, beautiful process of learning. I’m a predator—”

  “Sorry to burst your bubble, but a predator who’s never killed anyone is just a regular dude,” Finn interrupted.

  “—A predator,” Elijah repeated, ignoring the comment. “And by my nature harmful to the humans I’m around.”

  “You haven’t been harmful to me. You’ve been good for me,” Finn admitted softly. “I don’t know if I’d’ve gotten through all this shit without you. I don’t know if Jess would have, either.”

  “It’s not the same,” Elijah repeated sadly.

  “Okay, whatever, say it’s totally, wildly different, just as a thought experiment,” Finn agreed, feeling worked up. “Do you really plan to just be on the periphery forever, yearning — literally hungering, what with the bloodthirstiness and all — for human contact and denying any meaningful version of that? Are concerts and hookups really enough?”

  “They have to be.”

  “Do other vampires content themselves with that? I bet they don’t. I bet they have relationships with humans all the time.”

  Elijah gave a tight smile. “Other vampires don’t mind hurting people.”

  26

  ELIJAH

  “Forget about what you think you deserve or what you have to atone for or whatever, and think about what would make you happy,” Finn said, clearly not understanding how fundamentally different his position was from Elijah’s. “Does being alone do that, or do you want to be around people? Cos I’m guessing from the way you love a crowd, the way you’ll give so much time and care even to a crazy piece of shit who�
�s trying to blackmail you into killing him, that you love people. That you’ll do anything to be around them. So let yourself be around them.

  “You don’t do your relative’s memory any kind of service by being unhappy forever. It doesn’t change the past.”

  “You don’t have to save me, Finn. I’m all right.”

  “Bullshit. You think I can’t tell how much you’re hurting? I know you, Elijah.”

  The pain those words gave him was exquisitely beautiful. Elijah thought maybe he could survive eternity on the strength of them alone — the knowledge that once, for a brief period of time, a beautiful fucked-up man named Finn had known him. It had been a long time since a human had known Elijah.

  “No more talking,” Elijah managed to say, voice feeling tight. “Do you feel well enough for…?”

  “Dude, always,” Finn answered with a lazy, sexy grin. “Come here.”

  Elijah loved kissing Finn, loved the slow drain of tension from Finn’s posture as he gave in to feeling good, trusting Elijah to take care of him.

  Elijah brought his hand up to stroke against Finn’s chest, smoothing over the lithe, firm planes of his body, feeling his nipple pebble and harden beneath the touch. Finn shuddered at the feeling, pushing harder into the kiss.

  Elijah broke away from the delicious taste of Finn’s lips for long enough to shed what remained of his own clothing and grab the lube from Finn’s luggage, tossing it down onto the bed before rejoining Finn there.

  Finn’s eyes were huge and dark, with only a thin rim of iris visible at their edge. His mouth was plush and flushed from kissing, his skin painted a ghostly blue by the room’s shadows and low light.

  Elijah positioned him easily, vampire strength more than enough to lift and shift Finn into position on his back with his hips raised by a pillow. Elijah poured lubricant onto his hand and then began to open Finn up.