[fic] The Boy with the Sigil Tattoo 2/3

[keire_ke]

The thing about finding Sebastian Shaw was that it was almost offensively easy. All Erik had to do was walk out of his apartment around midnight, cross the street and frighten a hobo, when he got smacked in the face with a sulphuric cloud. This became a problem, when Erik wasn’t wholly decided where he stood on the issue of finding him in the first place. Was he ready? Probably not. Did he plan for this? Well, if lying awake and imagining all the things that he could do to a vampire corpse before it ran away counted, then yes, but few of those things he imagined required breaking the laws of physics, so no, he had no plan.

“Erik Lehnsherr,” said Sebastian Shaw. “Just the man I wanted to see.”

“Rest assured your desires remain unrequited. Get out of my way.”

Sebastian straightens his back and brushes a speck of dust off his impeccable coat. Erik discreetly looks around for a GQ label in the air around him. He’s no expert, but the suit looks expensive. “If you’re hungry, I have a few snacks back at my place.”

“I am capable of feeding myself.”

“Yes,” Sebastian drawled. “I noticed. You feed on them and leave them to walk away, like a common mosquito.”

“I’m comfortable with who I am.”

“You are a vampire, Erik. Have you no pride?”

Erik narrowly stopped himself from full-blown incredulity. “I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer. What do you want?”

“Such hostility. You wound me, childe.”

“You murdered me, father. Please do keep that in mind when seeking me out.”

Sebastian waved his misgivings away like he would an annoying fly. “I would have thought we were beyond that. I bestowed on you a gift of eternal life.”

“Mur-dered. Should I spell it out, as well? Don’t expect friendliness from homicide victims.”

“Interesting,” Sebastian said, leaning forward. His vampire mask was fixed on his features more often than not, which, as Erik understood it, was a staple of the ancient vampires. He wasn’t sure how old Shaw was, not exactly. Certainly old enough to remember the civil war, most likely older. “Hostility towards one’s sire is such a human emotion, and yet you held on to it. You, my boy, are still polluted with humanity.”

“Alternatively,” Erik said sweetly, “you are a sadistic and insane freak of nature and it is in my best interest to sever all ties. I mean, I could be wrong there.”

“You are young, Erik, so I will forgive you the insolence. You have no perspective. We are children of the night; we should rule this pathetic little world. Instead, we hide like rats.”

Here we go, Erik thought. Where was a bowl of popcorn when you needed one?

“Blah, blah, blah,” went Shaw, adopting the heroic pose all the soliloquies should be delivered in, channelling the spirit of Shakespeare at his most pompous. Erik exchanged a weary glance with the red demon, who stood to the side, polishing the edge of his tail-fin, or whatever it was his tail tapered into. Erik wasn’t up to date on demon anatomy.

Just go with it, said Azazel’s eyebrows.

Does he ever stop? Erik asked with the slightest of nods.

Not once he gets in the zone, the demon told him. He had the most eloquent facial hair Erik had ever had the pleasure of conversing with. Whatever cruel twist of fate had him in Sebastian’s debt was an injustice; a sense of style and a wardrobe full of stylish suits was a poor compensation for having to listen to this drivel every day.

I get by, said the twitch of the eyelid and a lazy swing of the tail.

“I’m sorry, what?” Erik held up a hand, because as interesting as the conversation with Azazel had been, something in Shaw’s speech had caught his attention. “What did you just say?”

“The Watcher Council,” Sebastian repeated patiently. “They have located the Slayer. She is in town, right now.”

“So? The little girl makes you worry?”

“Ah, she is not a problem,” Shaw said with the confidence of an ancient vampire with no less than seven Slayer notches on his belt. “What does worry me, however, is the Council itself. I need your help, Erik, and they will be out of our hair forever.”

“I don’t follow.”

“We get rid of the Watchers,” Shaw said waving his arms up and down like an overexcited puppy might wag his tail. Any more excitement and he would start to flutter just off the ground. “If they are gone, there will be no one to school the girls. If there is no one to school them, they cease being a problem.”

Oh fuck, Erik thought numbly. I’m fucked.

“Which is why I need you, my dear boy.”

“Not interested.”

“You will be,” Sebastian said and made a vague gesture, and fuck, why did Erik forget? He remembered everything he shouldn’t have done just as Azazel winked out of existence and there was a heavy hand on his shoulder, after which the world winked out of existence.

To be fair to his usual brainwork, the things he shouldn’t have done began with getting out of bed that evening, and when the mistakes began right there, in one’s own bed, then the day (or night) could only go downhill. Like this one.

For starters, you got your ribs broken. Maybe a dislocated shoulder. Then, if all went well, you might experience a light flaming sensation around your inexplicably bare chest. Being a vampire would be a useful advantage, because it meant that when you were strung up by your wrists you wouldn’t have trouble breathing. It still hurt, but at least you weren’t in danger of suffocating, and you would be able to scream when, and this was just a wild example, a crazed psychopath started burning lines into your torso with a blowtorch.

Erik screamed when a crazed psychopath burned a deep, scorched mark alongside his sternum with a blowtorch.

“This is simple, Erik,” Sebastian told him, with the earnest expression of a school teacher eager to make their students love fractions. Erik took pleasure in cataloguing the wrinkles which the fight left on his lovely suit – he might have been outnumbered, but he’d be fucked if he didn’t go down with maximum fight. “You know what I want from you, and yet you refuse to give it to me! I don’t think I’m being unreasonable do you?”

Erik dangled on his rope, stretched his shoulders enough to rub his scapulae together, and smiled, as sweetly as he could under the circumstances. “I don’t know, actually. You have cleverly refrained from voicing your evil plans, and proceeded straight to interrogation.”

Sebastian had the grace to look chastised. “Do excuse the oversight. At least to the extent it would be useful. What I want from you, Erik, is information.”

Sebastian sashayed to a chest in the corner and came up with a dusty crucifix. His palm smoked when he wrapped it around the hilt, and Erik carefully held in the smile as Jesus’ pained grimace was confronted with his face.

After a long moment of a very uncomfortable staring contest with a disapproving wooden Jesus and the satisfaction of watching Sebastian’s palm emit copious amounts of white smoke, Erik sighed. “I’m Jewish, Sebastian. At least do me the courtesy of respecting my faith.”

“Dear me. What an embarrassment.” Sebastian set the crucifix on fire and, alright, it hurt then. Erik screamed, cursed and counted to ten.

“Information about what?” he asked pleasantly when he felt capable of speech.

“You are, or rather you were, a Watcher, my dear boy. You know just enough about how they operate. You have the chance to avenge yourself on your colleagues.”

Erik stared. “That’s your clever plan. Outdated information on the Watcher Council structure? You are old.”

“Do correct me, if you think I’m wrong.” Sebastian shot a quick look behind Erik’s back and smiled all too charmingly.

“Have you ever heard of the computer age?” Erik managed around a fairly brutal whip across his back. “Could you not do that? I’m trying to concentrate on logic and common sense here.”

Azazel stepped into view, coiling the red whip around his knuckles. He looked apologetic. Erik was willing to take it at face value, except it wasn’t a whip he was coiling; it was, in fact his own tail. That bordered the line of too much information. Erik turned back to Sebastian, wound down his sense of humour until it reached sub-basement levels and got in touch with his inner kindergarten teacher, with whom he had severed all contact some years previously.

“Sebastian, it is the twenty-first century. Computerisation has turned every institution upside down and that is only in the past five years. I’d been tentatively researching possible applications of magic via the computer networks as means of defence, and that was sixteen years ago. Believe me when I say they would have gone much further than that since then.”

“The Watcher Council is an institution of tradition; I very much doubt honest progress was involved since your unfortunate demise.”

“Murder, Sebastian, murder.”

“If you insist.”

Inner peace. Inner peace. Three whips, one blowtorch stripe and a flaming crucifix to the shoulder, and Erik was in a place so serene it was practically the moon. Too bad it was only a tiny island on a flaming ocean of anger. “Look, I’d love to help you, but you are clearly insane and your plan is doomed to failure. Not that I mean to discourage such attempts. I’m sure it will be fun. Do you mind if I go home now and possibly murder you along the way?”

“You still haven’t told me a thing.”

Erik rolled his eyes. “There are eleven Watchers on the Council. An unspecified number of kids they train to pick up the slack in case of a sudden death. Plus a handful of freelance operatives. Many of the Watchers are adept magicians. What, precisely, do you want to know?”

“Everything,” Sebastian said sweetly. “Their weaknesses. Their defences.”

“You realise I was here only once, right? I’d been based in Düsseldorf.”

“You were a Watcher, Erik,” Sebastian said again, with the zeal of a British crusader stuck in Arizona, asking for directions to the Holy Land. Erik caught Azazel’s eye.

Yes, he is for real, the demon said with a very shrug of his shoulders.

“This will be a long night.” Erik hanged on the annoyingly strong rope, swaying gently whenever Azazel or Shaw would give him a prod, and talked. Most of it was nonsense. A little he made up, to spice up the tale. About twenty percent was fact, although heavily outdated fact. Really, get with the times, Sebastian, Erik thought when Shaw seemed to have swallowed the tale of paper index cards in the library.

If the vampire hadn’t wrapped his brain around Google until now, he had no business wandering about god’s green earth, in Erik’s humble opinion. He deserved whatever the Watchers sent his way, and more.

“Thank you, Erik, that was illuminating,” Sebastian said.

Azazel was grinning into his goatee. Erik would return the grin, if it wasn’t for the blinding pain shooting up his spine and shoulders. Hey, no pressure. He’d just hang there, for a few hours, until his arms went completely numb.

He might actually have to kill someone when he got out.

“Not that I have plans for tonight, but how much longer do I need to stay up here?” Erik tugged at the rope until he got enough slack to plant both feet firmly on the ground. “Not that I mean to reject your hospitality, mind.”

“I really did have high hopes for you, Erik,” Sebastian said sadly. “But I’m afraid you’re not nearly as amenable to my plans as I imagined you would be.”

No fucking shit, you wanker.

“Goodbye, Erik.”

What.

“What?” Erik said, managing to convey the notion of a two dimensional plane in one simple syllable.

“Prove me wrong, dear boy. If you get out of here, I might allow you back into the family.”

“You can’t leave me here!”

Sebastian seemed almost distracted. “Oh, don’t worry. You have plenty of time to think of something. The dawn isn’t for another three hours.”

Azazel exploded in a faint sulphuring cloud, taking Sebastian with him, and Erik was left gaping at the empty space with what was, he was certain, a very stupid expression on his face.

What. Shit. Fuck. Not good. Not good at all. Erik looked up at the skylight directly above him, then at the other skylight and then it occurred to him that there was precious little roof to count on for staying undead. He was well and truly fucked. He tugged at the rope, but Azazel was thorough and the support beams were strong. The only things that even suggested grinding were the bones in his wrists.

Erik stopped pulling and just hanged there for a minute or two. How much time did he have left? It would be just like Shaw to give him a false estimate. Did he have an hour? Two hours? How much time had passed?

Overhead, the sky was getting brighter, turning from a murky city grey to a dull purple. Dawn was coming and he was no closer to getting out of the goddamned rope. Fuck it, Erik thought and gritted his teeth. If he was going to die again, at the very least he would have preferred it not happen at Sebastian fucking Shaw’s claws. He would not die because of him again, he swore to himself, but what could he do, when his wrists were by now nothing but loose sacks of bone-chunks and his shoulders felt like they were on fire.

The portions of the sky visible through the skylight turned blue, with a pinkish hue around the edges, which was about the time when the rope gave out and Erik fell to the floor in a boneless heap. The end of the rope was right in front of his eyes, neatly severed a few yards away from his hands.

“Hurry,” Azazel said from the support beam, where he was perched like a giant, red hellcat, with his pointed tail swinging like a pendulum, counting down the seconds Erik had before the sun showed its odious face in the windows. “I hate sweeping.”

Erik got to his knees, despite the ache across his shoulders and the stiffness of his leg muscles. Through a combined effort of will and sheer dumb luck he staggered towards the thankfully unlocked door, and tumbled down the stairs. Whoever designed this house must have been deathly afraid of vampires coming to get him, he groused on the way down. Every flat surface of the wall was made of glass. The staircase faced west, so at least he would need to wait until midday to be fried, which he had no intention of doing, unless his body gave out underneath him and he would be given no choice.

He would conclude his existence by becoming a KFC special. Excellent.

Erik stumbled on the last stretch of stairs and hit the door with his shoulder. Big mistake, that. He bit through his lip to quench the scream and focussed instead on working out the knot that held his wrists bound. Small steps, he told himself. Get the rope off. Get out of here. Find a snack. Hide. Or hide then find the snack. You are a fucking vampire, you can live through this hungry.

The rope gave after a few violent tugs and Erik wrenched the door open with his good hand, ripping the lock out in his haste, then immediately slammed it shut again. Right outside there was a sunlit street.

“Fuck,” he said, taking a few steps back. Down here there were reinforced windows on every side, with a merry little sticker informing everyone of that fact in the corner of each panel. It was a matter of hours, if he was lucky, before the sun lit up the whole landing. There was no basement in sight, no place to hide but the narrow space under the stairs, which would still be illuminated before sundown. Erik stumbled that way and sat down heavily. Temporary cover was a cover nonetheless; temporary cover meant time to think.

What happened next was a string of subsequent miracles, the likes of which lead to the great scientific discoveries. As he sat he became aware of an object in his pocket, digging into his thigh. His mobile phone. Torture, whipping, a controlled fall down three flights of stairs, very infrequent charging (it’s not like he had many people he could call), and the bloody thing was in perfect working order.

God bless Nokia.

There remained one problem. Who could he call? The few people he stayed in contact with were vampires, so no help there. The one sun-proof demon he could maybe trust to help, if he was in a bind, was in Alaska. His mother… had finished mourning him fifteen years ago, and she was in Germany. Even if she could bear the shock of her dead son calling out of the blue, she would have been too late to rescue his arse.

Erik scrolled through his very limited contact list, which was turning out to be a list of people who wouldn’t spit on him when he was on fire, either because they would be on fire too, or they were too far away. Except one, if he dared to break the ultimate taboo.

Well, he was about to die. Greetings and salutations, world, he thought as he hit connect. Fuck your stupid rules.

“Hi Charles,” he said when the signal went through. “Do you perhaps have a minute to spare?”

“Erik? This is rather sooner than I expected. Much earlier than I expected, too.” A whoosh of jaw-popping exhalation filled the receiver. Charles was speaking again before the yawn passed, mashing the words together. “Is my book alright?”

“Fuck,” Erik said, having just worked out the pitfalls of his cunning plan to be rescued. “I don’t know where I am.”

On the other end of the line Charles hesitated. “Is everything alright?”

“No.” A bright rectangle of direct sunlight on the opposite wall highlighted a half-arsed graffiti signature. Goddamned vandals. “Damn it. Your book is in my flat. Corner of Kingston and Longworth. Look in the attic.”

“You live in the attic?” Charles sounded almost amused, if one discounted the worry colouring his voice. “What happened to you?”

“A number of unpleasant things, chief among them getting stuck with no cover and the promise of inevitable sunlight within a few hours.” He supposed he could look outside, to check for the address, but that carried the risk of being incinerated on the spot. If he wasn’t hurt, maybe he would risk it. As it were, he was just tired.

“Oh shit,” Charles said.

“Yes, I know.” Erik let his hand fall. The screen of the cell continued to glow for a few minutes more and if he strained his ears he could hear Charles talking. He didn’t bother.

Altogether it would probably be a good idea to just open the door and walk out into the sun right now. The waiting game was frustrating to the highest degree. What could it hurt? He would be incinerated within seconds, leaving nothing but a handful of dust and a mobile phone behind.

He really was hungry.

He hoped Charles would find his book.

He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew the door was opening and someone slid inside. “There you are!”

Erik made the effort to focus, which very nearly gave him a heart attack, because the only thing he could see was sky-blue. Then his brain kindly kicked in, and started sorting the stimuli. There was sky-blue, he wasn’t hallucinating yet, but it was limited to a pair of eyes.

“Charles?”

“How many people did you call at five in the morning?”

“Just you.”

“Then I don’t see why you’d be so surprised. Come on. Take a deep breath.”

“Ha fucking ha,” Erik managed when Charles threw a tarp and then a thick blanket over his head, then proceeded to guide him outside and into what must have been a car.

“Corner of Kingston and Longworth, please. Park as close to the door as you can.”

The car started moving, and Erik slid down the seat. Fuck him sideways, he thought dumbly. He got out of the glass trap alive. Wasn’t it a day for surprises.

Fifteen minutes later they rolled to a stop. Erik heard Charles pay the cabbie and then manoeuvre them both out into the street. “It’s okay, the way is in the shade,” he said. “I hope there’s an elevator, you’re bloody heavy.”

“I’m not and there isn’t.”

Charles sighed. “It’s going to be a long morning.”

He was right. By the time they got to the final landing, Erik was half conscious and all but hanging on Charles for support. He unlocked his door, took a few more steps and fell face-first onto the bed, into the welcoming abyss of his pillow.

He woke again to a mouthful of blood. He swallowed it hungrily, even though it tasted a little stale; what could it matter, though, when it was blood, when it was life. He went for another, then another, until he could feel his fingertips tingle with anticipation. This was waking after a long sleep, on the morning of a battle; this was coming back to life.

“What happened to you?”

Erik sat up and opened his eyes to find Charles leaning over him with a half-full blood bag in his hand.

“Where the hell did you get that?” he asked instead of replying. It was genuine human blood; there was no mistaking the taste.

“We keep a small supply of blood. In case, you know. Something happens.” Charles fingered the corner of the bag, probably in an attempt to hide the embarrassed flush of his face. A pointless exercise, when Erik could chart his blood flow down to the least capillaries by smell.

“Something happens.” Erik had a good idea what that something could be. It had, after all, gotten him killed.

Charles avoided his eyes, but Erik already knows what he was going to say. “Something like interrogating a vampire.”

“You realise that it could get all of you killed. Feeding a vampire you first pissed off is not a good plan.”

“We know that. The last time someone tried five Watchers were murdered.” Charles sat down on the lone chair and handed Erik the bag. “Here.”

“I know.”

Charles took a moment before replying. “Was it you?” His hands tightened on a sharpened stake he held by his thigh, while the other went for the lighter in his pocket. He was still too young, and too poor a poker player, to hide the nervous reflex, despite his enviable acting skills.

Erik would have like to draw the moment out, torment the stupid child with the uncertainty of who, exactly, he had just saved. He didn’t. “I was murdered then, yes.”

“You were a Watcher?” Charles’ eyes grew wide in wonder and both his hands came forth, empty, to rest on his knees. “Really?”

“I’m not that excited, it got me killed. Not that being a vampire doesn’t have its perks.” Erik lay back down and sucked the blood bag dry. It was nowhere near enough, but before he could finish Charles was holding out another. “Thank you. How did you find me?”

“Tracking spell.”

“You can do that?”

“It’s a simple spell.”

It was a simple spell, like most, to a focussed, trained mind. Erik was tentatively impressed and a whole lot more ravenous. Waiting quietly for death left a man subdued, maudlin even. Returning from the edge, however, ignited the spirit, ignited the blood. Soon he wouldn’t be pleasant to be around. Soon he wouldn’t be safe.

“What happened to you?” Charles asked. His voice was too quiet. Erik could barely hear it over the rush of blood. He could, however, feel Charles’ gaze on his naked chest, where the burns and cuts were visible. He must have cleaned them while Erik was out, because there was the faint stench of rubbing alcohol.

“My sire is a little unhinged, shall we say.”

“You look awful.”

“I don’t feel much better.” Erik closed his eyes and sucked on the plastic blood bag. Despite the staleness, this was a quality meal – clean, sweet and filling; the donor must have been young. Wrong train of thought. Shutting off his nose was this side of impossible, so he was essentially chewing through dry popcorn in an effort not to dive for the fucking steak, fried with garlic and honey. Erik had saliva flooding his mouth. His brain was helpfully listing the many ways in which he could dispose of a body in the privacy of his attic, and Charles was babbling like a two year old on speed, mindless of the danger.

“You should go,” Erik interrupted his diatribe on vampire nutrition. “I’m very hungry right now.”

Charles didn’t react visibly, although his heart did pick up the pace ever so slightly. Ah, the stupidity of youth. He got up, clutching the stake to his chest in a casual manner, like it was just an object he happened to be holding, and not the only thing standing between Erik and the best dinner of his life. “I can’t believe I’m even here, to be honest.”

“Welcome to the club.”

“Bye.” Charles picked up his backpack and turned to leave.

“Hey.” Erik lifted himself off the bed an inch. Fuck vampire solidarity, if there was any. They were bloody demons. Treachery was in the job description. “Tell your folks to be careful. Shaw is planning to move against the Watchers and he is absolutely insane, so there’s no telling what his clever plan entails. It could be a nuke from orbit, or it could be rubbing garlic soup into your hair. He has a pet demon which teleports, so chasing him might get complicated.”

“We’ll be careful.”

Erik waited until the boy was very nearly at the door before he spoke again. “Thank you, Charles.”

Charles stopped with his hand on the handle. He didn’t look back. “Well, I can’t say anytime, for obvious reasons, but you’re welcome. Goodbye, Erik.”

When he left, Erik fell asleep. He woke later that evening with his stomach crawling out of his mouth to get to the nearest warm neck. It took all the self-control he possessed to get dressed (fuck, his shoulder protested being made to put on a shirt) and get far enough from his home to feed properly. Blood in bags was tasteless sustenance; blood out of the veins was living. He felt marginally better when he was dropping the bloodless corpse in the back of the alley.

He didn’t go looking for Charles after that, mostly because the child had saved his life and there was a good chance he would want the favour returned, which Erik wasn’t going to bother with. The boy was food. He should skip town and not eat him; that would see the debt repaid. Better still, he should eat him, then skip town. He would be happy and everyone would move on with their lives.

Everybody except Charles, who would be dead.

Pro: Erik would get to drain the kid down to the last drop. He’d even go as far as kidnapping him to his lair and taking his time, until he was a dry husk.

Con: it would be a one-time thing only. Charles wasn’t the only worthy meal in the neighbourhood, but he ranked high enough to make any vampire with a discerning palate reconsider.

Pro: he would be delicious.

Con: Charles had a fondness for vintage sci-fi, and was willing to run interference with the library on Erik’s behalf. Killing him would mean being bored out of his skull until September, at the very least.

Pro: mouth-watering.

Con: permanent.

Pro: really fucking tasty.

Con: the most interesting conversationalist, scoring bonus points for not limiting himself to world domination or magic.

Pro: … yum.

Alright, the pro/con game was a wash. Erik trudged into the bar, ordered a whiskey, took it into the corner and started brooding. He took up the best table in the establishment, but no one dared disturb him, because he brooded like a champion even when he was alive, and with the added vampire charm he could clear the room by smiling at it. Keeping one measly table unoccupied was easy as pie.

Now that he was past the initial denial, he ought to be able to get himself out of the pickle with ease. He was smart and in possession of no moral compass whatsoever; why was the problem of killing the boy so mind-numbing?

Killing him posed the obvious set of problems: the boy was attractive, white and, judging by his mien, rich. No way in hell his death would go unnoticed. Then there was the fact that he belonged to a sect which devoted its members to killing Erik’s kind; altogether the prospects of the authorities dismissing his murder as a freak death were low, even in this town. If there was anyone there with whom Charles had an honest connection, Erik would find himself on the business end of a personal vendetta, and those very rarely ended well for a vampire. They were fragile creatures.

He could turn him. Here was a thought. Erik wasn’t one for companionship, but there was no rule that said he needed to stick around all the time. This, however, invited a host of other problems. Sure, the brain and the love for sci-fi would remain, but how many vampires retained their personality after turning? Or at least the important bits of it? The more time he spent circling the underground the more Erik understood that he was a freak of nature, in that he managed to hold on to his intensely pragmatic views (not that he was blind to the fact that he could casually cut up a human being and enjoy the screams as a sign of a job well done, which, in life would have caused him to wince or possibly wear headphones). There was no telling what would climb out of Charles’ grave. It would certainly be smart, but other than that? It wouldn’t be compassionate enough to help out a sworn enemy. It would be clever, meticulous, and a vicious bloodsucker. Charles liked to know how people worked, which was easy enough to glean from the fact he would speak with Erik with genuine curiosity and very little judgement.

Erik had met a similar child, once. Some incautious moron had turned the girl, just to see what her boyfriend would do. There had been vivisections. When she finally killed her sire, she had been clad in a necklace made from chunks of his bone, and nothing else.

“What the fuck am I even doing,” Erik asked the distorted reflection of the wall behind his back. Being able to admire what was directly behind him through a mirror was relatively useful, if confusing.

“You seem to be talking to yourself.” Charles was beaming as he took a seat opposite Erik, holding his wrist at such an angle that the watch was clearly visible, but his sudden presence momentarily blinded Erik to the fact that he just spent an hour debating the merits of murdering the owner of that watch.

“How is that in a bar full of vampires and demons you, a tender, juicy human, are the only one brave enough to come to my table?” Erik asked, hitting himself in the teeth with the glass.

“I take it I’m the only one who’s ever spoken with you. I can’t say the dramatics are unattractive, but come on. How old are you?”

“Old enough. What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to confirm some details. You weren’t answering your phone.”

Erik had removed the battery, ground the SIM card into pieces and threw the whole thing into three separate sewers. Relying on outside help would get him killed. Relying on the human’s help would make surviving unbearable.

“Maybe you should take a hint,” he told Charles and busied himself with raising the alcohol content in his bloodstream by sheer force of will.

“Look, I don’t want to be here anymore than you do. I just came across a few holes in my research, and I was hoping you could help me. It’s about your sire.”

“Do you know what I’ve been doing, Charles?” Erik leaned over the table and, after making sure no one was looking in his direction, forced his vampire face to form. “I’ve been trying to work out how to kill you without getting dusted by your friends.”

“Well, whatever you try, please don’t turn me,” Charles said, with remarkable shrewdness. Erik felt the jolt shoot straight through him.

“You are appallingly calm about this.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? I have no intention of letting you kill me, and if you seriously tried, a few people would come after you with stakes and fire, whether I lived or died. I’m concerned about being turned, because my research indicates that psychic powers contribute to insanity and intelligence tends to translate into cruelty, when it’s not kept in check by empathy. I am very empathic and still I manage to hurt people’s feelings when it really suits me. I think I would be a terrible vampire, and I mean that as in Vlad the Impaler terrible.”

“You are very ambitious.”

It was like he wasn’t even speaking, because Charles went right on with the monologue. “It makes me wonder about you. You’re not particularly cruel, but you obviously are intelligent. Either my theories are wrong, or something else is at work here.” Charles propped his chin on his hands. “You feel just like every other vampire I’ve met, so it must be something else.”

“Chalk it up to teenage rebellion. I wasn’t keen on empathy when I was alive; I’m making up for it now.”

Charles fluttered with excitement. Erik could imagine him whipping up a notebook on vampire customs and jotting down the new and interesting facts. “How do you know?”

A fair question. Demons felt, Erik was sure of it – at least the demon who thought he was Erik thought he felt – even if their emotional range wouldn’t surpass that of a great white shark, tempered by his understanding of consequences and the reach of the Watcher community. One superpowered girl in the entire world was not nearly a problem for a solitary vampire, she could be avoided; a millennia-old organisation of magic users, spanning the globe, was a problem to a solitary vampire who had once been a member.

“My wife said as much when she walked out the door, after we lost a child. I believe her actual words were ‘you’re a fucking soulless icicle, Erik, and I hope you burn in hell.’”

Charles deflated. “That seems harsh,” he ventured.

“It’s a loose translation. The actual words were less savoury.” Erik shrugged. “I was complaining about her whining about it immediately before.” One would imagine that it went away when the man died and the demon replaced him, but Erik remembered the ache with vivid clarity, even now. He couldn’t feel it any more than he could feel sympathy for Magda, but he remembered the choking sadness that caused him to attempt drowning in a glass of scotch. Not feeling anything was a liberating experience, in comparison. Even after sixteen years Erik was content to float on the cloud of not giving a fuck whether – or how – anyone lived or died. It was the quintessence of freedom: no emotional attachments, no religion, no government, no one to define his boundaries, but himself.

“Wow. I see what you mean.” Charles was giving him a faintly horrified look, one that was nonetheless backed up by fascination. He was looking at Erik but also through him; perhaps those were the psychic powers at work. Perhaps he’d seen the bottom of the empty pot of Erik’s emotions, or lack thereof. Perhaps it would be enough to scare him off.

Charles was still there, however, three minutes later, giving Erik an appraising once-over. The appraisal must have turned out favourably, because he was digging into his backpack and coming up with a small laptop. “Drat, lousy battery. Would you mind?”

Erik rolled his eyes but connected the charger to the socket behind his chair.

“Thanks. So, here’s what I have.” Charles swivelled the computer around and moved to a chair next to Erik. “Far as I could tell he first appeared in our records in 1267, although I think he is far older than that. I have a theory that he was a prophet when he was alive – some of his recorded comments would indicate a propensity for visions, and given that every mention of him inevitably ends up in either nukes or rubbing soup into people’s hair, I figure he must have been quite the strong one. I narrowed it down to three possible candidates.”

As the kid spoke, Erik’s eyebrows inched higher and higher, until he felt them merge with his high hairline. He was looking at a neat, precise spreadsheet, with a timeline and reference notes, cataloguing not only the source of the information, but also cross-references, substantiating the validity of the claim and the source. It was certainly more than Erik bothered to find out about Sebastian when they first met, or any of the times after.

“This is very nice,” he said, feeling Charles swell up with pride beside him, “But all it does it tells us he is insane and sadistic, which we already knew.”

“I know.” Charles rubbed the back of his neck and deflated visibly. “Okay, but I was bored and I figured it never hurts to study the threat. I also did one on you.”

“I’m flattered.”

Charles’ red mouth curved into an impish smile. “It is very boring.”

“I’m enjoying my unlife. I don’t want to draw attention to it.”

“I guess that makes sense.” Charles flipped through the sheets in Shaw’s file until he stopped at something Erik vaguely recognised as…

“Moon phases. You were bored.”

“There is the theory that psychics are attuned to the cycles of the moon. I thought it might be worth verifying, and I do think there is a correlation.” He went to another chart, and this time Erik leaned in with genuine interest, then disbelief.

“You’re trying to tell me Sebastian’s insanity is in direct proportion to how much moon is visible,” he said flatly.

“The data seems to suggest as much. This is why I’m here tonight. If I’m right he will be on the soup rubbing stage this week, and I think I can survive a pot of soup to the head.”

Erik’s gaze flickered to the shiny, well-groomed hair atop his head and tries not to imagine the cursing which would follow food’s contact with it. “You are insane.”

“I have factual support. I grant you, it may prove to be a coincidence. I don’t think our records have much where the finer points of his mental stability are concerned; we were much busier with him sticking people on poles and leaving them to scream their way down. There are only a few soup incidents and those would be easily explained by, oh, anything.”

“That is a little insane.”

“Vampires aren’t known for their common sense and psychics are sensitive to the moon phases. It’s a well-documented fact. My abilities go up and down like a yo-yo depending on the moon. Right now it’s mostly about the range; around full moon I’m aware of the whole city.”

“I’m always happy to hear about your menstrual cycles. How does that help?”

Maybe it was the alcohol, but Charles bristled in the most adorable fashion. He was about as threatening as a tiny cocker spaniel, and held grudges about as well. “Not much, I admit,” he said half a minute later. “I mostly went looking for you to find out if you can help me add some details from the time you were with him.”

Erik let out a long, pointless sigh. “What do you want to know?” He regretted it. Charles proceeded to quiz him about just about everything. Literally everything. “I hardly see how the colour of his favourite shirt is relevant.”

“It’s not, but it might come in useful, if he’s ever caught on camera. Plus, my great-grandmother had this theory that colour coordination is correlated with life choices.” At Erik’s sceptical glance he added, “She wasn’t wholly sane. Powerful psychic, but she leaned towards the insane on the spectrum of usefulness, at least it seemed that way when she was alive.”

“An insane prophet, how shocking.”

“I got to meet her a few times before she died. She was a wonderful person. My parents used to tell me I looked just like her when I was little. I have done so much research on her! She wrote the most amazing stories in her diaries. She was psychic, of course, so she knew where to hide them for me, or rather for her future granddaughters, because about half are about a Slayer and an ensouled vampire and a tragic romance. It’s all very Shakespearean.”

“You have a lot of free time. In my day there was a lot less time to be spent on insane grandmothers.”

Charles rolled his eyes and flipped through the accumulated spreadsheets. “Most of the classes are easy and I get bored so easily. Research is fun and Shaw is a very old vampire, so it’s both challenging and interesting, knocking together all those historical facts and backgrounds. You’d know all about it, of course; I read your research papers.”

Erik blinked. “You read my papers?”

“Changing your name didn’t exactly make it impossible to identify you, you know. And I read them before, immediately after they were translated into English.” Charles switched between windows and brought up a folder filled with .pdf files. “This one is my favourite.”

It was Erik’s favourite, too. It had been a slow year, so he burrowed deep in the bowels of the Düsseldorf library on the supernatural, creating what he would later find out to be a defining work on St. Germain. It pleased him to no end that the original title had been preserved in the electronic version, even if “Dead or Alive: Still a Dickhead” didn’t roll off the tongue in academic context.

Charles tapped the arrow keys a few times, just so Erik could fully appreciate the neatness of electronic conversion, and asked, “So, is there any chance I could get a signed copy?”

“If you have a copy to sign.”

“I can arrange something.”

Some two hours and three glasses of scotch later Charles finally packed up his laptop and the two of them wandered out into the street, laughing. Erik didn’t remember what they were laughing about, just that at some point of the interview Charles’ smile turned from a polite crook of the lips to a full-blown grin, which lit up not only his face but the entirety of the grimy, demon-infested bar, and Erik couldn’t help but adjust the anecdote to include a penis joke, and well. They started giggling, in unison, as though it was the most hilarious thing known to man.

This was a revelation. Erik hadn’t thought Watchers had much in the way of sense of humour, and he had been one of them.

It was a lovely night. Sure, the sky was strewn with clouds, and the only stars that could be seen through the light pollution were the really persistent ones, but the beauty shone through all the same. The traffic was minimal, the streetlamps bathed the alleys in a thoroughly creepy yellowish light, and a vampire was strolling down the avenue with a Watcher in tow.

“We should walk into a bar,” Erik told Charles. Never mind they just got out of one, they should find another and walk into it, purely for the sake of narrative causality.

Charles responded to the suggestion by doubling over in laughter.

Erik completely understood. It was very funny. He should pursue a career in stand-up comedy, he was sure to make a killing.

Somehow it was growing less funny when he kept looking at Charles. He didn’t even remember making a conscious decision, but somehow when Charles stopped laughing to draw a breath he was trapped between Erik and the brick wall at his back. Neither of them was laughing anymore.

Erik tried to remember the boy was a rather competent Watcher; that he had the lighter with which he killed vampires as easily as he shared his research with them, and that Erik had neglected holding his wrists immobile. It seemed unimportant when his teeth were only inches away from the curve of Charles’ jaw, inches away from the beating pulse, from his red blood. The roar was deafening; as loud as a thundering waterfall, nearly enough to send his still heart into throes of a frantic, echoing beat. Erik bent his head and followed the smooth curve of Charles’ jaw to his chin. He could bite his neck in half. He could drain him in seconds, he could kill and maim and destroy, he was a fucking vampire, goddamn it!

Discovering that he was kissing Charles instead of ripping his arteries open was therefore more than a little surprising. The dry brick was coarse against his palms, the alley smelled of dirt and trash and sweaty bodies – there might have been a back entrance to some club, Erik didn’t care – but Charles’ lips were warm, open and inviting.

He’d almost forgotten what it was like to kiss a living creature, not to revel in pain, neither causing nor receiving it. Charles was making soft noises into his mouth, his hands twisted in Erik’s shirt under his jacket, lightly digging into the skin. Erik could swear he could feel the pulse in his fingertips radiating throughout his dead flesh, meeting the waves caused by his heartbeat, the two interfering and exploding on contact until his whole being was a pulse, until he could swear he was alive again.

Living, the demon thought, was underrated.

“Eww, dudes, tone down the PDA. No one wants to see you playing tonsil hockey.”

Erik brushed a final kiss onto Charles’ mouth, then the tip of his nose. He needed to breathe like he needed sunglasses at night, but he took a deep breath all the same. The thoroughly offensive tone struck a primordial urge to spill some blood. “Why don’t you come on closer and we discuss this in detail,” he said, sickly sweet.

“Erik,” Charles started saying, but Erik stilled his mouth with a delicate brush of his lips, barely touching the skin.

“You heard me. I ain’t caring what you get up to in your place, but keep yourselves off the streets, ‘kay? Some of us enjoy not throwing up our dinners.”

The kid talked big, with his three chums shadowing his every move. Erik grinned manically, which was lost on the audience for lack of proper lighting. He let go of Charles and, fast enough that the unfortunate dickhead would only know what hit him, not that it did, was across the alley to punch him in the face.

One of the lesser advantages to being undead was that he could finally punch morons in the face without worrying about pesky breaks of his own carpal bones, and hot damn was it satisfying.

“Comments?” he asked the cronies, who stood over the still body of their fearless leader. They had between them more brains then the fallen idiot, because as one they vamoosed from the alley, as though the devil himself was on their heels.

Erik watched them go, still grinning, until his gaze fell on Charles’ enraged expression. “What? They were dicks.”

“They were human.” Charles knelt by the unfortunate dickhead and checked his pulse.

“I wouldn’t have killed him,” Erik muttered. “I’m not a moron.”

“I bloody well hope not.” Charles fished out a mobile from his jeans and dialled nine-nine-nine. “Hello, I’m in an alley just off High Street, opposite number two-oh-three. There’s a man here, I think he might be badly concussed. Yes, he has a pulse. He’s breathing. I don’t know what happened, he might have hit a brick wall with his face. Hard to say if he’s conscious.” The guy groaned. “He is making pained noises; I’ll take that as a yes. He might be under the influence. Of course. Thank you.”

Erik folded his arms. “He doesn’t deserve your help.”

“Sadly, chronic stupidity is not a crime yet. I can’t just leave him here.”

“Darwin is weeping in his grave. Why not allow natural selection to take care of it?”

Charles looked up at him brushing the bangs off his forehead impatiently. The man at his feet groaned pitifully. “How on earth do you qualify as natural selection, luv? You’re anything but natural.”

“I’d have socked him when I was alive, too,” Erik said, folding his arms.

“And you would have gotten a broken nose for your trouble.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I used to be decent in hand-to-hand combat.”

“You can’t fly off the handle whenever someone looks at you wrong. Do control yourself.”

Erik glared, and he was certain that, for a moment, he went full-on vampire. “He interrupted me.”

Charles returned his gaze coolly, not in the slightest fazed by the implication. Not that Erik was going to take it anywhere, but he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t an option. “He interrupted us, Erik. I do get a say.”

“We’re an ‘us’ now?” Erik all but spat.

“You can’t kiss someone like that and not have an ‘us’ in mind.” Charles bent to check the pupils of the half-conscious victim of Erik’s jerkophobia. Erik didn’t much care for the dismissal.

“You live a charmed life, on a collision course with massive disappointment, if you believe that.”

“Walk away then.” Charles stared at him, and something inside Erik, something small and thoroughly demonic, boiled.

“Maybe I will.” But he remained rooted to the spot, never breaking eye-contact.

The wailing of an ambulance cut through their glaring contest. The van parked right in front of the alley and who should jump out if not Charles’ little girlfriend. Fantastic, Erik thought, crossing his arms. Just what they were missing.

“Hello again, Erik, was it?”

“None of your business,” he growled in her direction and turned to glare at Charles some more, except Charles wasn’t there. There was only the growling heap on the floor, which immediately commanded Moira’s full attention, and, above it all, the faintest hint of sulphur in the air.

Erik was certain that if he hadn’t been dead for the past decade and a half, his heart would have stopped beating right then. Shaw had Charles.

Shaw had Charles.