“It’s so uncool that you do that,” Jay says by way of announcing himself, bending low to rest his chin on Blake’s shoulder as Blake sits as the computer.
“Stop reading over my shoulder, then,” Blake replies, baring his teeth in a feral smile. Jay looks unimpressed.
“I should start trading messages with Alexander about what an awful jerk you are, and all the things we hate about you. That’d serve you right.”
“I don’t read Alexander’s emails,” Blake replies, shutting off his computer and standing with a stretch before pushing his desk chair aside so he can embrace Jay properly. He can’t help but think about how entertained Nell would be if she could see him now. It took more than a century and a half, but Cupid’s arrow finally caught Blake just as surely as it ever pierced Nell’s hide. Blake imagines she’d enjoy seeing someone else moon over a human like a love-struck poet for a change, since she’s gone through it herself so often.
Blake rather hopes that his affair with Jay will lack the tragic-fairytale finale which so many of Nell’s romances fell prey to. If Blake’s got any say in it, he’d much prefer to avoid having a finale at all. What’s the point in living forever, after all, if not to avoid the unpleasantness of endings?
“Which means that you do read mine,” deduces Jay, looking more unimpressed than genuinely put out. “Has anyone else managed to earn the right to privacy?”
If Timothy was still the same Timothy he’d been before his injury, Blake would have given him the same courtesy he extends to Alexander. As things stand, though, Alexander is the only one. “Please don’t tell me your sensibilities are still offended when I do something untoward, my dear boy. I am, after all, an evil creature of the night.”
Jay just smirks and shakes his head, letting his forehead rest against Blake’s shoulder. “You don’t fool me, you know.”
“Hmm?”
“This whole wicked-creature-of-the-night thing. I don’t buy it. I never have. The first time we met, you were buying a kitten. It would have been pretty hard for me to be convinced of your evil nature after that, and I never have been.”
“So my tendency to kill people, often violently, that isn’t a sufficiently compelling argument?”
“No. That’s just what you are. I don’t think that means it has to be who you are as well.”
“Then pray, tell me who I am.”
Jay takes a step back, crossing his arms over his chest and giving Blake a long, appraising look. “You play with the cat when you’re thinking hard about something to do with yourself, but you push it away when you’re planning things for your gang. You’re sentimental enough that you keep an attic’s worth of mementos of your life, and not just things like your autographed copy of Dorian Gray, either. You keep photographs and paper fans and pressed flowers and hats and coats and dresses.
“It would have taken care of the whole problem if Alexander had killed Min, like the people who left her expected that he would, but he didn’t.
“It would have solved everything if you’d done it, when it became clear he wouldn’t. But you didn’t.” Jay shrugs. “That’s who you are.”
“And failing to murder a child, that’s a compelling argument for my good nature? Surely you have more exacting standards,” Blake smirks.
“No. That tells me enough.”
The simple honesty— and the dark underlying history behind that honesty— in Jay’s response takes a moment to sink in, but when it does Blake has to pause for another moment before he can recover from the reply and step forward, kissing Jay and cupping the boy’s sharp-angled jaw in his palm. Jay allows the kiss, then laughs softly to himself.
“You don’t even let Bette carry her Chanel handbag around the house, because you know how much Alexander hates Nazis. This whole gang is hilariously bad at being really bad, what with the kittens and the hating Nazis and the consideration for each others’ feelings, okay.”
“Shall I do something terrible to counter your hypothesis?” Blake asks quietly, stroking the back of his knuckles against Jay’s cheek. “We’ll go and find a party, choose some beautiful unlucky boy or girl, seduce them, and then you can sit and observe as I bite them and drain them dry? How would that be?”
Jay’s breath catches in shock and surprise, his eyes blooming dark and glassy at the cruel suggestion. He looks guilty, betrayed by how excited his body is by the idea of watching Blake do exactly that.
“Yes,” he whispers hoarsely. “That would… uh… that would be okay.”
Blake brushes his fingertips lightly over the silk-soft skin of Jay’s neck, smiling indulgently. “You make it very hard for me to resist killing you, when you say things like that. You would make such a delectable vampire, Jason.”
Jay’s posture tenses, a frisson of fear overlaying his excitement, body warming even more against Blake’s cooler flesh. “Don’t. You know I don’t want that.”
“Would you leave me if I did it? Would you be angry enough to do that?” Blake asks, genuinely curious. It’s doubtful that an answer of yes would be enough to deter Blake, if he decided he wanted to turn Jay, but it would make him hesitate before he went ahead and did it, at least.
“Don’t,” Jay says again by way of answer, shaking his head. “Don’t you want to see who I become when I get older? I might be like a fine wine and just keep improving with age.”
Blake laughs. “You make a compelling argument. And you are indeed the finest wine, I assure you of that.”
Jay rolls his eyes. “Jesus Christ, you are so corny. Aren’t you meant to be coolly manipulative and debonair or some shit? And not a complete fucking sentimental dork?”
~
Bette’s shed some of her old, obnoxious habits, but most remain: she never hangs her clothes up after wearing them, or remembers to pass along phone messages meant for someone else, or knocks when she wanders from room to room in search of something to alleviate her boredom. Therefore, Blake is not surprised when she slumps her way into his study, dragging her feet, and collapses down into one of his armchairs.
“It’s so lovely to see that the youth of today are so full of wholesome enthusiasm,” Blake says conversationally, signing yet another dreary form in triplicate. “You’re distracting me from briberies related to your nightclub, you know. If the extortion rate goes up because I didn’t get these in the mail, you can pay the difference out of the spending money I know Timothy slips you from time to time.”
“Shouldn’t I be doing all that, then?” Bette asks, sitting up a little straighter. No matter how glum the girl may be, her mood never fails to perk at the mention of Scrimshaw. Blake shakes his head.
“When you’ve had time to cement yourself in the social cobweb of our world, my dear. These deals rely largely on who owes who the bigger favor.” He gives her a teasing smile. “And if I do these for you, that will give me at least one favor I can demand from you in future years.”
Bette rolls her eyes, flopping back down into the chair. “You know I already owe you everything anyway.”
Not really annoyed at being interrupted from his boring tasks, Blake sets his pen aside and comes to sit in the chair opposite Bette’s. “Are you thirsty? I can have Mikhail bring us up some tea, if you like. Or blood.”
Making a face, Bette shakes her head. “It’s weird how you treat them like servants sometimes. Like, creepy. We don’t live in the age of upstairs, downstairs and shit like that anymore, you know.”
Blake smirks. “Oh, believe me, I would never mistake you for anything but a thoroughly modern girl, Elizabeth.”
“Bette.”
“And anyway, the division of labor in this house is just another example of what I was talking of before. It’s all a system of favors and tributes. The other vampires who make this house their home entrust me with the responsibilities of leadership, and along with those responsibilities come certain rights. Such as the right to request refreshments in my study when I’m working. But, if you aren’t thirsty, it’s irrelevant any
way. I ate earlier. Now what is it you’ve come to complain about this time?”
Bette sighs. “I can’t stop thinking about Rose.”
“And naturally you assumed that I can think of nothing I’d rather do with my immortality than listen to teenage romance dramatics.”
Bette slumps down even further, so her foot is close enough to his that she can kick him in the shin. “Fuck you, dude. Your immortality basically is teenage romance dramatics, forget listening to them.”
“Then take myself and Jay as an example of a potential solution for your own situation. We are happy as we are, despite our differing positions on the food chain, and perhaps one day I’ll turn him, and then things shall become even simpler.”
“But Jay doesn’t want to be a vampire.”
Blake sighs. “Bette, I am considerably stronger than the boy, as I’m sure has not escaped your notice. If I want to make him a vampire, he will have very little chance of avoiding such a fate.”
“See? You don’t give a shit what he misses out on or never gets to have in exchange,” Bette says, sitting up and gesturing with her hands as she speaks, a dark unhappy fire animating her movements. “I can’t… I don’t know how to be you. I don’t know if I’ll ever know it. I… god, it’s so fucked up, but sometimes I hope it’ll just, like, kick in, you know? The vampire selfishness. I’ll wake up one night and not care about anything but what I want. When I hope for that, I always hope it happens while Rose is still alive. So I can have her forever.”
Blake taps his chin with one index finger thoughtfully.
“You parted ways with her because you thought that would be simple,” he observes. “You knew things never would be, if the love affair continued— her a hunter, you a vampire. Ease was never on the cards for you as a pair. You can claim a conscience all you like, but in the end that was the only reason. If you’d stayed together the choices would have been too hard: keep her alive, or kill her so she’ll be yours forever? Live as your instincts dictate, or try to be housebroken for her sake?
“Navigating that terrain seemed so daunting that you thought the task of it was surely bigger than the desire you felt for her. And now that both of you have realized how wrong you were in that assumption, and so the both of you sigh and pout and act like the romantic idiots you are, rather than admitting— as every true love eventually has— that what you have between you is worth the cost, worth the risk, worth how hard it will be.
“Humans and vampires aren’t so different, not in matters of the heart. Love wants. It wants like hunger and suffocation. It wants like gravity. I want Jay and Jay wants me and of course it isn’t simple, of course it isn’t easy, but difficulty alone isn’t nearly sufficient reason to deter me. I suspect it isn’t for you and Rose, either. Not forever.”
Slowly, reluctantly, Bette nods. “Sometimes, when I think about how much I miss her, it’s like… it’s like my veins ache. Not because I miss the taste of her—” Bette’s white cheeks flush to pale pink in an embarrassed blush. “—but because it’s like… I don’t even know what it’s like! Nothing else has ever made me feel like this. It makes me think of that line from Romeo and Juliet, when they have to be apart. ‘Dry sorrow drinks our blood.’ The feeling makes me think of that.”
Blake tries very, very hard not to laugh at her. He doesn’t manage it. She kicks him in the shin again, much harder this time. “You’re such a fucking asshole,” Bette tells him with a scowl.
“I’m sorry, my dear one. I’m truly sorry.” Blake manages to get his chuckles under control. “But I always find the melancholies of the lovesick utterly hilarious. Quoting Shakespeare as you did was more than I could bear quietly. There is nothing noble about the way the two of you are acting, really, so you should do away with this ridiculous pretense that you are choosing the more admirable course. To put it into the vernacular of your times: suck it up and deal, and go see her.”
Bette sighs, the sound impressively loud considering her lack of need to breathe. “You’re totally useless.”
Blake pats her on the knee. “Of course I am. You’re absolutely right.” He gets up and goes back to his contracts. Bette huffs in outraged protest, standing up.
“You don’t care about my problems at all!”
“No, I don’t,” Blake agrees cheerfully, waving his hand at the door. “Run along now. Go listen to horrible music in the dark, or whatever it is your generation enjoys as a method of wallowing. I always liked writing verse, myself. Poetic pretension can make your own misery seem terribly interesting, if you really put your heart into it.”
Bette stomps out of the room with another loud huff of outrage, leaving the door open behind her. Blake decides not to call her back in order to have it closed; she’d probably slam it.
He smiles to himself as he bends his head back down to the papers before him. The rearing of teenage girls remains just as entertaining to him as it ever was.
ASH
The next time Ash sees Will and Lily, it’s not in the circumstances she would have liked. Then again, it’s been kind of a long fucking time since circumstances have been the way she’d’ve liked them to be.
She’s out with Blake and Alexander, just walking around the city for the sheer joy of it. Ash wonders if there are any other creatures— apart from, maybe, domesticated pets like cats and dogs— who are as adapted to life amongst urban human society as vampires are. She knows vampires must have been able to live in smaller settlements, once upon a time, because cities haven’t always been as huge as they are now. As easy to become invisible within. But, even knowing that it must be true, Ash can’t really imagine what it would have been like.
She’s read these discussions people have on messageboards online sometimes, about how vampires can’t exist because of the mathematics that would be involved in getting enough blood and killing enough people and everything. They dress it up with numbers, but Ash is pretty sure that the real reason people think like that is because they’re just absolutely certain that they would know
if vampires were real. Someone would know.
Ash wonders if the people who think like that have any idea how much goes on below the shiny surface-city that the ordinary people live in. There are little signs, cracks in the brightness, here and there: the homeless people shivering on corners, begging for spare change. Drug dealers loitering near where kids congregate after school. Drunks getting rolled for spare change in gutters. The city is teeming with predators and victims, but people only ever see what they want to see. Ash used to be just the same, before she stopped having that blindness as an option.
She hasn’t told most of the others yet that she’s stopped drinking blood. Ash was scared that the cocktail— the gross, gross, gross cocktail, which Bette has promised to keep helping her with— wouldn’t be enough, that the craving would build and build and break her apart. But it’s been okay so far. It doesn’t feel as nourishing as blood, of course. But she can survive on it, and Ash thinks that she prefers the feeling of being in control of herself to the feeling of being content. That explains why she always felt kind of miserable when she was high on pills, and why starving herself used to feel super-good.
Jesus Christ, she’s kind of fucked up.
They’re not far from home— from the townhouse, that is, which Ash is increasingly thinking of as home, and it always makes her feel guilty because her parents need to have at least one of their kids stick around. But just wishing things that are still normal with her isn’t enough to make things normal, and maybe it’s not fair to her parents to keep pretending.
Will and Lily are walking with two others, a man and a woman whom Ash recognizes as Russ and Anna, the other members of Remember the Stars. Ash didn’t really get close to Michelle and Tommy and Jay until after Remember the Stars had already broken up… well, until after two of the members of the band had been killed by Blake and turned into vampires, which had pretty much forced a permanent hiatus. But she’s heard enough about Anna and Russ to know
that she doesn’t really like them.
Like Lily and Will, Anna and Russ both became vampire hunters when they were teenagers. That alone would be enough to make Ash resent them: partly because she’s a vampire and doesn’t really like the idea of being hunted, but mostly because she holds hunters responsible for Jenna’s death, even though it was Alexander who did the murdering. What’s the point of hunters if they can’t even save a teenage girl? They didn’t save Jenna, they didn’t save Bette. They didn’t even save Lily or Will, and Ash thinks all that evidence is indication enough that Anna and Russ should have stayed gone when they left Chicago the first time.
She knows that she’s not really being fair. There are probably a huge number of people who’re still alive because of the hunters. Blake says hunters are an important and natural part of the ecosystem of the city. But fuck it, Ash is a vampire. She’s under no obligation to be fair. She doesn’t like Anna and Russ. That’s just how things are.
“I see we’re not the only ones enjoying an evening stroll, then,” Blake says, but Ash can see that he’s pulling off his gloves, exposing the sharpness of his fingernails. Ash has never been in a real fight before. She finds herself more excited than afraid by the prospect.
“You can come back to our place and insult the decor, if you like,” Ash ventures. “So we’re even.” Lily, Russ, and Anna all look totally perplexed by the comment. Will just looks concerned and severe. The tentative smile on Ash’s own mouth fades, and she shifts her stance into a fight-ready posture. Fine. If they don’t want to give her a chance, she won’t give them one, either.
“Would it be boorish of me to point out that you appear to be a little confused as to what constitutes an ally?” asks Alexander, speaking to Anna. “Because if you’re intending to exterminate all vampires, I feel I should point out that you’re currently standing next to two of us.” He gestures to Lily and Will, his own sharp fingernails gleaming lethal in the streetlights.
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