Fic: Gods and Devils 8/14
Disclaimers and previous parts can be found here.
Part Eight
No one slept over the remainder of that night. Whistler was not certain that he would have slept even if there had not been so much work to do so that they would be ready for battle once the sun rose, or even if the warehouse was not so flooded with vampires that any human who dared to lie down and relax their guard for even a moment was like as not to wake up a pint or two low. Whistler’s mouth still ached and his eyes burned to pick out shapes from the light that Whistler had never realized was so poor before, and he had not seen Blade for hours. Blade did not need anyone to follow him and mind him to make sure that he was not doing anything over the line…or at least he had not, the last time that Whistler had seen him. Things were different now, and Whistler could not help but wonder who Blade was spending his time with while he was out of sight.
He glanced in the direction of Nyssa and Frost, who had set up one of Scud’s tables as a makeshift lab beside the corpse of the Reaper and were energetically conducting what looked to be the world’s goriest chemistry experiment. Nyssa seemed to be the one in charge, directing Frost’s actions as they both moved around the corpse, while Frost’s face was still focused and intent. That they were both doing God only knew what to that corpse and were allowed to it unsupervised while everyone else busied themselves with only slightly less menacing tasks was the clearest sign that Whistler needed to let him know that things that been going downhill in his absence. He had seen the looks that Nyssa had been flashing towards Blade from beneath her lashes, that Blade was allowing her to give him, and already knew what Blade had been doing over the past two years rather than killing Frost as he ought to have done. Whistler wondered again where Blade gotten off to, what he was doing once he was there. The two primary suspects were well within sight, but that did not mean anything. If Blade was willing to be with a vampire, then there was no reason to believe that he would not push his limits even further.
It was like being a parent, Whistler reflected as he turned back to watching Scud struggle with his UV grenade. Worse, even. If he had actually been Blade’s parent, then he would have had a far easier time of putting an end to this foolishness. Then again, Whistler reflected, it was not as if he had all that much experience being a parent, after all. All of his children save for one had died while they were small, and all that he knew of Abigail was spending ten minutes holding a goggle-eyed baby too small to support her own head yet.
Dead because of creatures like Nyssa, and like Frost had been and would still be if he had not been hit with the right hypodermic cocktail at the right moment in time. He was wrong if he believed that that was a stink that was ever going to wash off of him.
As if he could feel Whistler staring at him, Frost ceased fussing around in the Reaper’s mouth and looked up, meeting Whistler’s eyes. Whistler could not keep his lip from curling as he went back to watching Scud play with the grenade. He had tried to make one along the same basic lines, years before when he had first designed the UV flashlights that no one traveled without any longer, but had never been able to make it work. Either too little light emerged to do anything more than give a vampire an annoying burn, or else too much and it blew out, every time. Scud was smart, though, Whistler reluctantly had to admit, and approached problems in a way that as entirely different from the way that Whistler himself did. Couple that with Whistler’s own experience, and they might have a shot.
“So,” Scud began as he tightened a screw on the inside of the grenade, “how long have you know Blade, anyway?” His voice was carefully nonchalant, curiosity bleeding in around the edges.
Whistler nearly smiled in spite of himself. “Going on twenty years,” he replied. Whistler reached out and corrected Scud’s hand before he could cut a wire that did not need cutting. The kid accepted it with good grace, grinning and shrugging before he moved to cut the correct one.
“You know, Blade doesn’t talk about the old days that much,” Scud went on. He looked up at Whistler, almost as if he was asking for permission before he went further.
Whistler did smile then. “Blade doesn’t talk about anything that much,” he said.
Scud made a soft sound that might have been a laugh. “Yeah,” he agreed, setting down his tools for a minute. “You want to hear something funny? Blade kind of looks to you like a, y’know, a father figure.” He grinned when he saw Whistler’s face. “I know, right? It’s hard to imagine that he didn’t hatch from an egg.”
“He didn’t,” Whistler said brusquely, thinking of the boy that he had nearly killed in an alley when he thought that boy was one of the bloodsuckers himself. He made a sound that was equal parts derision, embarrassment, and pleasure. Again he thought of how much easier things would be if he was actually Blade’s father.
Before the silence could wind on long enough to let Scud know that had had actually struck a nerve, Whistler continued, “Tell me something. How did you and Blade cross each other’s paths?”
Scud’s face went white, though his smile remained easy. “Ain’t that a story,” he said, reaching for the joint that he had set to the side and taking a long drag off of it. His knuckles were the color of pearls. “I was backpacking through Romania about a year ago. Old vampire country, you know?”
“I’ve heard,” Whistler said as he continued to tinker with the grenade. “Blade and I stuck to the states.”
“I read Dracula when I was in high school,” Scud said. “Before I met Blade, that was the beginning and end of everything that I knew about vampires. Anyway, I meet these two chicks, and they’re…you know, the ladies are stacked. Way out of my league.:
“Warning sign,” Whistler said.
“I know that now,” Scud said. “But then I was pretty much thinking with another Scud. I invite Janet and Chrissy back to my tent for a little three’s company action, ‘til it turns out that they’re into something kinkier than what I had in mind.” Scud unbuttoned his shirt long enough for Whistler to see that his stomach and abdomen were criss-crossed with long, thin scars.
Whistler grimaced in spite of himself. “Pretty,” he said.
“Skin-eaters,” Scud said. He caught Whistler’s confused expression and said, “You didn’t know about them?”
Whistler had been creeping towards leaving his foul mood behind. He could feel that chance falling away from him. “No,” he grunted.
Scud heard the warning in Whistler’s tone and cast his eyes back down to his work as he went on. “That’s what Deac called ‘em, anyway. Said that they were some kind of abominations. Chrissy was the one who gave him the scar on his neck. So Blade shows up with him, saves my ass, and after that everything kind of fell into place.”
Whistler set his tools to the side so that he would not break what he was trying to build. “When I was a part of this operation, killing suckheads was more important than learning about them.”
“Yeah, guess you got a point there,” Scud said, but he sounded as if he was doing it only to avoid angering Whistler further. Whistler felt his scowl deepen; it had not had a chance to truly leave his face in the first place.
“Let’s try it,” Whistler said as he finally finished tinkering with the grenade. It would either work or it wouldn’t, but either way he had done all that he could. That seemed to be a philosophy worth adopting everywhere else, too, now that Whistler thought about it.
“All right.” Scud flipped a switch on the grenade and then quickly stepped back. They watched the grenade expectantly, and it responded by throwing out a few weak, flickering glows before going dead altogether. Scud made a frustrated, dispirited sound. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I fucked up, or maybe you were right and it’s not possible-“
The grenade interrupted Scud in order to make a high whining sound, as if it was saying, no, wait, it might have a surprise left yet. The whining was replaced with a brilliant white light that shot out without warning, obliging Scud and Whistler both to raise their arms quickly and shield their eyes. He swore that the light felt warm against his skin. The vampires working at other intervals throughout the warehouse yelled in alarm and then shouted obscenities towards Whistler and Scud for not firing a warning shot first. Whistler flipped his middle finger in their direction without looking around and could have laughed.
Scud whooped and leaped, pumping his fist into the air. “All right!” He and Whistler slapped palms. “Papa’s got a brand new bag,” Scud finished, grinning. He picked up the grenade and flipped it around, examining it from all angles even though he had just constructed it himself. “I’ll start duplicating this bad boy.” He hurried off.
That was one hell of a powerful weapon to have to have on their side, even after the Reapers had been dealt with. Maybe the day could turn itself around, after all. Whistler felt a smile touch at the corners of his mouth and then winced as a shooting pain radiated through his jaw and even into the roof of his mouth. He could not remember what it had felt like to teeth when he was a baby himself, and he could only dimly remember what it was like to grow fangs during the hazy period of his own turning. Those weren’t memories that he felt like digging back up and turning over. Hurt like a bitch, though.
“Chew ice.” Whistler would have been annoyed to hear any voice behind him, regardless of who that person was, because it would mean that he had allowed someone to get behind him in the first place. That it was Frost’s voice only meant that it was all that he could do not to spin around and plant his fist into Frost’s face. It was an urge that came over him frequently, and only the fact that Frost had thus far wisely kept his distance had prevented him from actually acting upon it.
“That supposed to mean something to me?” Whistler asked as he turned around. Frost had been stupid enough to put himself within arm’s reach, too. Grabbing him and throttling him would be the easiest thing in the world, and there was nothing that Whistler wanted to do more. He took a deep breath through his nose in order to keep himself from acting upon this urge. Frost’s eyes flicked upwards, taking in the gesture, but he still did not step back.
“Ice,” Frost repeated. He jutted his chin out at Whistler. “I saw you touching at your jaw.” Frost’s lips twisted into a bitter smile. “Funny thing about Karen’s ‘cure’.” Whistler could hear the quotation marks in Frost’s voice. “She didn’t really run any clinical trials before she decided to start stabbing people with it. If you haven’t turned yet, then it’s nothing more than a booster shot.” Frost touched at his forearm briefly, not seeming to realize that he was doing it. Whistler had heard that it was a vampire bite that had injured Frost while he, Blade, and the rest had been gone. Wasn’t it interesting that the security system suddenly became so frail whenever Frost was there, and that he had a way of walking out of a vampire attack with relatively minor injuries. “If you’ve already turned, then it’s messier. Happens in stages. Your mouth is hurting because you have overdeveloped muscles in the roof of your mouth right now that are trying to turn back to human now that they don’t have to support fangs any longer.” Frost flashed a cold smile. “Ice and aspirin. It’ll get better in about a week. In the meantime, have fun.”
Frost turned to go, finally taking himself out of Whistler’s reach and removing the temptation. This did not relax Whistler in any meaningful way. He glared at Frost’s retreating back and snapped, “Why are you telling me this? Guilty conscience?” There was a nearly tangible sarcasm in his voice.
Frost paused and then turned back, grinning. “Repent and be saved?” he threw back at Whistler. That grin did not fade. Whistler was amazed that he did not have more people striking it from his face. Given the fresh bruise that was crawling along the side of Frost’s face, maybe that was a moot point. “Don’t fucking kid yourself,” he snapped. Ah, that was more like the monster that Whistler could remember caving his ribs in for him. Perhaps that explained why Frost was now very carefully hanging back and out of Whistler’s immediate reach. “Call it a scientific experiment, if you want. Right now you and I are the only variables.”
“You sure it’s not so that Blade won’t put you out?” Whistler asked. The line of Frost’s spine and the sudden tension in his shoulders let him know that he was getting into the neighborhood. “Keeping your keeper happy.”
Frost drew his lips back from his teeth. It was nothing like a smile. “I have other ways of doing that,” he said. “Coy’s not a good look on you, old man.” Frost turned and stalked off. He brushed past Nyssa as he did so, who looked alternately concerned and troubled by her worry.
Whistler took some aspirin before they left to hunt. He did not go anywhere near the ice.
*
Deacon missed being a vampire every day, the way that a man would miss a limb that had been severed from him, and worse. His humanity was a new one growing back that he hardly recognized, that he had not even known how to use well the first time around, and that would flare up without his permission more and more. Deacon ground his teeth together until the enamel felt as if it was in danger of cracking altogether. He did not know why he had told Whistler that chewing on ice would help to numb his mouth while the muscles devolved back into something that would be found on a human, something that he himself had not figured out until he was in his third day among the glorious human race and after he had become so irritable and snappish as a result of the ache that Blade had been on the verge of allowing him to be turned again solely so that he would have an excuse to kill him with impunity.
It occurred to Deacon that this could be about Blade, that Whistler might be within a hair’s breadth of being right, before he snorted and threw the thought from his head. He and Blade had had their fight about Whistler-had had several fights about Whistler-over the months that it had taken to find him, and now all that was left was something that came close to being both a weary and a wary peace.
God help him, he was only a few inches away from actually being content as a human again. That alone was nearly a reason to pick a fight.
Deacon pushed past Nyssa as he stalked away from Whistler. For her part, she had finally lost interest in the Reaper corpse and had instead been drawn towards the ensuing confrontation. Their shoulders collided; Deacon did not think that it was often that Nyssa had to cope with people who touched her roughly or without her permission. “What is it?” she asked him, and when he did not answer: “Frost!”
There was no part of the warehouse that was not filled with bloodsuckers. Deacon could not even pinpoint the moment when they had become bloodsuckers to him, rather than merely vampires, and that only made things worse. He ground his teeth together even harder and kept going, aware that he was trailing Nyssa behind him like an annoyed, regal shadow. “Not in the mood, princess,” he told her over his shoulder. “Find another lab partner for now.” Beneath the stairs, it was relatively secluded. Seemed like that was becoming quite the place for forbidden conversations, now that Deacon thought about it. If he was pushed much farther or clenched his teeth much harder, he was going to wind up cracking them all off at the gums.
“Do not call me that!” In the shadows beneath the stairs, Nyssa reached for his arm. She was strong, much stronger than he was now, though two years before he would have shaken her free easily and then been able to slam her up against the wall.
Slammed her against the wall, slid his knee between her legs to part those long thighs that he was willing to bet were every bit as creamy and flawless as the skin of her face and neck, pushed his mouth down onto those lips that she had still found time to paint. He would not give her time to part for him, would only thrust his tongue into her mouth without waiting for an answer, but it would not matter. Nyssa would still be soft and welcoming, making quiet sounds from the back of her throat as Deacon took a sweep of the inside of her mouth. It took time to unravel a woman like Nyssa, but it was worth it in the end.
As if she could hear the way that his pulse and breathing was quickening, Nyssa pulled her hand away from his arm and stepped back. Goddamn these human senses, Deacon had been starting to forget how weak they were until he was forced into such close contact with the upgraded version. He took a breath that shuddered on the end and pushed the panic away. It had been months since he had felt it this strongly.
“I am a pureblood,” Nyssa snapped at him.
“No shit, sugar,” Deacon snapped back.
Color rose in Nyssa’s cheeks. She must have been in the grip of a powerful emotion, in order to make sluggish vampire blood move that quickly. “I am a pureblood,” she repeated. “That does not mean that I cannot understand human conflicts. I did not grow up in a tower.”
The way that she said ‘human conflicts’ made Deacon think of an anthropologist’s study, something that she would watch from a distance on the Discovery Channel rather than experiencing for herself. Deacon felt his hackles going up.
“There a problem?”
Blade had a way of phrasing questions that made it sound as if it was the very height of stupidity that he even had to ask in the first place. He was using that voice to its full effect now. Deacon blew all of the air out of his lungs on a long sigh and turned to watch Blade where he had come down the stairs and was standing at the entrance of their isolated alcove, his expression caught somewhere between an invitation and a warning. Deacon did not miss the way that Blade’s eyes moved across Nyssa, across her flushed cheeks and the shadow of her cleavage, and could not say that he minded. They had an unspoken dance that took place between them every day, and as improbable as it was that they had been able to work it out peacefully over the past two years in the first place, surely it was no more improbable that they should then work out the steps to accommodate three as well as two.
“We’re doing great, stud,” Deacon told Blade in a chirpy voice that convinced no one. “And how about you? Have a nice nap, or whatever it was that you were doing?”
The invitation faded from Blade’s face and became pure warning instead. As if Deacon had not become good at ignoring them altogether. “You think that we have time for this shit?”
Deacon snorted. “Then we’ll make it.” He could have said a lot more and probably would have had Blade not filled the distance between them so ably, a dark angry cloud. Blade, it seemed, had only one method of shutting Deacon up now that striking him was out of the question; he was predictable like that. The air ran out of Deacon’s lungs when he felt Blade’s hand on his arm at the same time that his mouth was on Deacon’s own, stroking the wounds, bordering on the painful. It was about as close to gentle as Blade ever got, and Deacon could feel the impatience in that contact that Blade was struggling to hold back. As if Deacon was not already impatient with himself, as if he liked or understood this strange in-between person that he had become. Blade’s hand left Deacon’s arm and found its way instead to the long white scar that marked Deacon’s neck. Blade had a fetish about that scar. Deacon always felt jumpy and uncertain when it was touched.
“Jesus fuck,” Deacon muttered when Blade had ceased plundering his mouth, Blade’s idea of a cheap sedative. It would be so much easier to be a smartass if he could not feel it working on him. He rested his forehead against the crook of Blade’s neck, and Blade allowed him for a few seconds before he put his hand on the back of his neck and pulled him away. They were getting downright sappy.
Over Blade’s shoulder, Deacon saw Nyssa as he lifted his head. Even with her large dark eyes he could see that her pupils were dilated, those lush curving lips parted slightly so that she could draw breath. Hell, she was nearly panting. It was a far cry from the startled, embarrassed woman who had stumbled across the two of them several hours before.
“That’s kinky, sweetheart,” Deacon told her, purely so that he could watch her flush more deeply. Red was a fine color on her. Between her lips and her cheeks, she ought to wear it more often. Nyssa cast her eyes down to the ground. Deacon did not think that she was fulfilling the promise of the vampire nation, staring after the humans-or near enough-like that, but that was not his problem. “Think of what your daddy would say.” Nyssa’s eyes jerked back up to meet his, angry and hot.
“That’s not playing nice,” Blade said again against Frost’s ear. Frost swore that Blade had realized early on that there were more efficient ways to keep Frost in line than violence, and that was keeping him battling back an erection at all times. Blade was a son of a bitch like that.
“I don’t know how,” Deacon responded. As irritable and out of sorts as Blade’s hand on the back of his neck was causing him to feel, the sensation doubled when Blade released him.
Well. Deacon guessed that he could deal with what happened next as a consolation prize. Blade took Nyssa by the back of the neck in the same way that he had gripped Deacon only moments before-man had a control fetish like none that Deacon had ever seen before-and bent her back like a movie star in an old black and white, his hand splayed against the small of her back to keep her from falling, and kissed her as deeply as if he wanted to drown in her. Nyssa went rigid for a second and even put her hand against his chest as if she meant to push him away before she gradually began to melt so thoroughly that Blade was the only thing holding her up by the time that it was over. Having been in that position before, Deacon did not blame her. Blade released Nyssa’s neck so that he could cup her breast instead, running his thumb over the place where her nipple was hidden beneath the fabric of her top. She gasped and even began to squirm against him.
All three of them were voyeurs. It was the only explanation that fit. Having abandoned all moral principles save for those that he had been absolutely forced to take up again, Deacon found that he did not particularly have any problem with that. He let out a breath of air and watched as Nyssa’s hand found Blade’s ass, gripped it, and struggled to bring him closer to her. Deacon’s lips curved. God, he loved a woman who knew what she wanted.
Blade released Nyssa’s mouth at long last and helped her to stand upright again. She looked dazed and even had trouble finding her feet for a few seconds, touching at her lower lip as if she could not quite believe what had just happened. It was enough like something out of a movie to make Deacon’s lips curve in amusement, and his mood lifted from black into a sooty shade of gray. Considering everything else that had happened and likely would happen before the day was over, that was quite an accomplishment.
Most of Nyssa’s lipstick was gone. Her lips were swollen and pouty enough to make up for it. Nyssa ceased touching at them only so that she could glare at Blade instead. “I would be within my rights to slap you,” she pointed out.
Blade smiled at her. He did not do it often, and did it even less in a manner that was not meant to convey a threat. Deacon for a second was not even sure what he was doing. “That’s not what you’re thinking of doing right now at all.” Getting laid regularly had done wonders for the man’s sense of humor. If the butterfly effect was true, then that might turn out to be Deacon’s single greatest gift to the human race.
Blade turned to go, ticking his head slightly as an indication that Nyssa and Deacon should follow after him. Deacon saw a frown flicker across Nyssa’s face for a moment, as she apparently enjoyed being told what to do about as much as he did. She followed, though, tucking her rumpled curls swiftly back behind her ears as she did so. Deacon had not been sure that she was even capable of such a nervous betrayal, that her regal bloodline would even allow it. It was cute.
“Congratulations, he likes you,” Deacon sidled up close to her in order to murmur. “In Blade-speak, that’s about one step away from asking you if you want to go to the holiday dance, with a box for you to check yes or no at the bottom of the note.”
In truly shocking news, Nyssa frowned at him. “I understood about half of what you just said.”
Deacon leaned even closer to her in response, so that they were nearly kissing themselves. “It’s all right, we’ll talk later.” He turned away. Nyssa paused for a moment longer, visibly collecting herself, before she went to collect the pheromones that he had been working on with her for most of the night.
The members of the Blood Pack noticed that Blade was waiting for everyone’s attention and moved towards him without saying a word, like the flowing of water downhill. They likely did not even realize that they were doing it. Had they, Deacon imagined that there likely would have been many more pissed-off faces, Reinhardt being their only exception. He was likely to be an angry ball of Aryan sunshine no matter where he was or what was happening around him.
“Sun will rise in an hour,” Blade began by telling them all. “We leave within thirty minutes.”
Chupa shifted his weight restlessly from one foot to the other, clearly not liking that answer, before he said, “Let me ask one question: how in the hell are we going to find these Reapers?”
Blade ticked his head in the direction of Whistler, who had drawn up when Blade had begun to speak. The old man was currently holding an unspoken competition with Reinhardt to determine who could hold the most sour expression and for the longest before their face wound up freezing that way.
“We won’t have to,” Blade said. “We’ll start in the sewers where Whistler found the first Reaper. After that, they’ll come to us.”
Nyssa took that as her cue to toss a small canister over to Chupa. Deacon noticed that she still looked troubled and confused, and that there were twin spots of color high up on her cheeks. Like a teenaged girl sorting her way through her first deep attraction, she would not look in either Blade’s or Deacon’s direction.
“Pheromones,” Nyssa told him. Speaking to her own warriors again, she was clearly sliding back into her element and was drawing comfort from the role. Her voice was even, her face calm and authoritative. It was an entirely different woman from the one that she and Blade had managed to fluster so.
Deacon thought that he liked the other one better.
“Harvested from the Reaper’s adrenal glands,” Nyssa went on. “It’s how they communicate. With it, we will be able to draw them to us.”
Reinhardt leaned over to Chupa and muttered in a horrified voice, just loudly enough for everyone to hear, “They want us to spray ourselves with some suckpuppy’s nut juice?” Chupa looked suspiciously as if he agreed with Reinhardt’s assessment, and as if he was thinking that a review of Nyssa’s sanity might be in order.
Blade sounded nearly amused as he said, “You were trained to kill me. If you can’t handle these guys, then I’m not worried for my safety. First use your firearms to drive them back, then go to the UV grenades.”
“Right on,” Scud said. He gave an affectionate slap to a box that was sitting on the worktable next to him. To Deacon it looked more like cartoon dynamite than anything else, complete with lever. The only thing that was missing was the ACME logo stenciled on the side. “This here is for the grand finale. I hot-wired a couple of these bad boys into a nitro vacuum.” Scud smirked. “As in life, just be real careful where you pop your load.”
“You’re not coming?” Nyssa asked him, sounding surprised.
Scud made a flirtatious bow in her direction. Nyssa looked charmed in spite of herself. Little Miss Pureblood was starting to find pulses all over the place that she would not mind getting to know better. Deacon grinned.
“Nah,” Scud answered her. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
Deacon watched Scud start to leave and remembered the nervous, calculating look that had crossed the kid’s face when Deacon had stayed behind the last time. Maybe the final domino needed a nudge before it fell into place, and maybe it already had enough momentum to go over on its own, but that was still not the kind of thing that Deacon liked to leave to chance. “Don’t worry,” he told Nyssa, his voice crawling with innuendo. It was far enough removed from the tone that he had used every over time that he had spoken to her to make her blink in surprise. “I’ll go along to keep you safe from everything that bumps in the night just a little harder than you do.” Deacon grinned at her in a manner suggesting that it would not be long after this daring rescue before they did their own kind of bumping. That part was not entirely feigned. Nyssa still looked as if she would not mind slapping it off of his face for him.
“No, you’re not.” Blade’s voice could become a weapon in and of itself when he wished it. It cracked the air and made it shiver when he snapped out the command. It startled even Deacon, who had been expecting it. He glanced over and saw that Blade was nearly glaring at him. “You’re staying here. No one goes on this mission who isn’t ready for a fight.”
The sudden bristling that overtook Deacon was not fully feigned, either. He was aware of everyone in the room staring at he and Blade as if they were the best show that anyone had seen in a long time. “I seem to recall taking out four vampires alone only a few hours ago.” He watched Scud from the corner of his eye was he spoke. The kid was good; while he looked as perversely interested in the lover’s spat as everyone else did, his face otherwise betrayed nothing of what he was actually thinking.
“How’s your arm?” Blade snapped back at him in response. “You’re staying behind where you’re safe. That’s an order.”
Deacon had not been entirely sure that Blade had understood what Deacon was trying to do until the very end. Blade was not the type who actually voiced concerns about other people’s welfare. He was the type who let them walk right up the edge of the pit and then yanked them up by the scruff of the neck without saying a word as they began to go over. Deacon cut his eyes in Scud’s direction as all of the vampires began to hoot appreciatively right on cue. The kid actually appeared more relaxed now, thinking that the second set of eyes in the warehouse were not going to be there for the sake of monitoring him and were going to be all kinds of pissed-off and unlikely to do a good job of it, in any case.
Glancing back at Blade, Deacon was unsurprised to see that he was watching the same scene. They met eyes for a moment, Blade looking nearly approving, once you knew how to read him. Deacon lifted his shoulders into the very faintest of shrugs. ‘Doing my job.’
Reinhardt was meanwhile grinning as if Christmas had come early and one of his presents was a naked blonde with low self-esteem. “Goddamn,” he said gleefully. “I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a familiar that obedient before. Hat’s off to you, Blade.” Reinhardt came close, into Deacon’s personal space, and clearly meant to intimidate Deacon into taking a step back. Deacon was an old hand to such games from well before he had been turned. He did not feel like moving. “You take orders that well from anyone else, or is this a master’s voice kind of thing?”
There were several things that Deacon could not help but admire about the way that Blade ran his operation. One of them was the way that weapons managed to be strewn just about anywhere without anyone raising an eyebrow. Deacon’s hand lit upon a gun almost immediately, and he had the safety flicked off, his finger on the trigger, and the barrel pointed at Reinhardt in under a second. There was a moment of internal debate wherein Deacon could not decide which head he actually wanted to aim at, before he decided to go for the one that Reinhardt used most often. Reinhardt’s grin became just a trifle uneasy, but it did not stop him from drawing closer still. “Ain’t that cute.” Deacon made a big show of pulling the hammer back. Reinhardt paused finally and glanced over at Blade. “You want to take in his leash or what?”
Blade lifted his shoulders very slightly. “Sometimes it’s better to let them roam every once in a while.” He met the acid look that Deacon gave him with a cool stare.
A subtle change came over Reinhardt’s grin, like a worm boring its way into an apple. Deacon knew that he was watching the first moment when an insinuation became a promise. Reinhardt backed away from Deacon, his hands held up in a conciliatory gesture, still grinning. Deacon let out a breath that he had not realized he had been holding and resolved that the first person to try to take the gun from him would have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers. He had seen grins like that before.
Glancing up, Deacon saw that Blade was also following Reinhardt’s retreat with a speculative gleam to his eye. Turning briefly back towards the rest of the vampires, he finished, “The UVs have a ten second delay. Nyssa, just remember to take cover.” Nyssa looked nearly as startled as Deacon himself felt. Blade, breaking his own rules and actually displaying signs of worry rather than simply orchestrating a last-minute rescue. Either he was starting to go soft in his advancing age, or Blade really did not expect the rest of the night to go well.
As everyone dispersed to begin collecting weaponry, Deacon walked up to Blade. Blade cast him an appraising once-over, starting with his face and ending with the gun. “I have a feeling that you’ll bite me if I take that from you.”
Deacon loved these moments when Blade displayed a sense of humor, he really did. It wasn’t at all like he picked the very worst possible moments in which to do it or anything. Deacon scowled. “Fuck that, you’ll lose the hand.” The tiny upward lift to the corners of Blade’s mouth only made him actually want to try it. “You have any idea of how this is going to play out?”
Blade glanced up at Reinhardt again. “Ideas. Nothing concrete. Don’t put down your gun.”
That was Blade’s way of saying that he expected things to go pear-shaped, and hard. Deacon winced. “From my cold, dead hands,” he replied. “Thanks for making me that new enemy, by the way. I needed that.”
“You have no trouble making them on your own. Don’t need my help.” Blade touched Deacon lightly on the back of the neck and was gone. Deacon regarded the gun in his hands and wondered who he would wind up shooting with it, as he seriously doubted that the night would end without him pulling the trigger.
*
Whistler watched Blade, Nyssa, and Frost disappear into the shadows together. He watched as Nyssa emerged moments later looking dazed, Frost looking unbearably smug, and Blade looking different in a way that Whistler had once known how to read and was now frustrated to discover that he could not. He watched as Frost was threatened and Blade obliquely used the vampires’ own language in talking about their familiars in order to defuse it, as Blade exhorted Nyssa to keep herself safe from the very enemy that he ought to have been using to take her out of existence, watched as Blade and Frost had a conversation that ended with Blade placing what was nearly a caress to the back of Frost’s neck before he walked away. He watched until he had decided that he had done more than enough watching, and maybe the situation would not have gotten nearly so out of hand if he had been willing to speak up a little sooner.
“Blade!” Whistler called, lifting up a heavy weapons vest. Goddamned things seemed to gain ten pounds every time that he picked one of them up. “Give me a hand here?” Blade came over and wordlessly helped him adjust the vest across his shoulders. It would be a cold day in hell before Whistler really needed help figuring out the ins and outs of a weapons vest, and he suspected that they both knew it. “You were getting a little cozy there.”
Blade’s hands paused for only a second before they resumed their task. That second was still long enough for Whistler to read volumes. “I would not worry about that if I was you.”
If Whistler had been put off a task that easily, he would not have built their operation in the first place. Thinking of the early days, and of the way that Blade now seemed hell-bent upon shattering all of that, only made Whistler angrier. He tried to control his voice, but he could still hear the edge that crept through as he snapped, “Looks to me like you’re getting confused about which side you’re standing on.”
The movement of Blade’s hand stopped, and the man himself stepped back. There had been a terrible anger wedged within Blade from the moment that Whistler had met him. Before he had come to know the kid and then to regard him nearly as he had his own children before they had been taken, his only thought had been to turn that anger into a weapon, into something useful. Even in those early days, it had never occurred to him that Blade might then take that weapon that he had crafted and turn it against Whistler himself.
The speed with which Blade had gone from neutral to seething was shocking. “Those are real hollow words coming for a man who just spent two years running with the enemy,” Blade said, leaning close.
Whistler drew back for a second, shocked, before he leaned forward himself. “Which one of us are you talking about?” he asked.
Blade pulled his lips back from his teeth. Whistler always wondered what he was thinking when he did that, whether he was imagining himself with fangs rather than blunted human teeth. He had never asked, either, for fear that that was exactly the response that he would get. “You know, Whistler,” Blade growled, enunciating each word carefully, as if he was seeking to make a weapon out of it, “there’s an old saying: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. You might want to remember that.” He stormed off without saying another word. It was all that Whistler could do not to put his fist into the wall.
End Part Eight
Part Eight
No one slept over the remainder of that night. Whistler was not certain that he would have slept even if there had not been so much work to do so that they would be ready for battle once the sun rose, or even if the warehouse was not so flooded with vampires that any human who dared to lie down and relax their guard for even a moment was like as not to wake up a pint or two low. Whistler’s mouth still ached and his eyes burned to pick out shapes from the light that Whistler had never realized was so poor before, and he had not seen Blade for hours. Blade did not need anyone to follow him and mind him to make sure that he was not doing anything over the line…or at least he had not, the last time that Whistler had seen him. Things were different now, and Whistler could not help but wonder who Blade was spending his time with while he was out of sight.
He glanced in the direction of Nyssa and Frost, who had set up one of Scud’s tables as a makeshift lab beside the corpse of the Reaper and were energetically conducting what looked to be the world’s goriest chemistry experiment. Nyssa seemed to be the one in charge, directing Frost’s actions as they both moved around the corpse, while Frost’s face was still focused and intent. That they were both doing God only knew what to that corpse and were allowed to it unsupervised while everyone else busied themselves with only slightly less menacing tasks was the clearest sign that Whistler needed to let him know that things that been going downhill in his absence. He had seen the looks that Nyssa had been flashing towards Blade from beneath her lashes, that Blade was allowing her to give him, and already knew what Blade had been doing over the past two years rather than killing Frost as he ought to have done. Whistler wondered again where Blade gotten off to, what he was doing once he was there. The two primary suspects were well within sight, but that did not mean anything. If Blade was willing to be with a vampire, then there was no reason to believe that he would not push his limits even further.
It was like being a parent, Whistler reflected as he turned back to watching Scud struggle with his UV grenade. Worse, even. If he had actually been Blade’s parent, then he would have had a far easier time of putting an end to this foolishness. Then again, Whistler reflected, it was not as if he had all that much experience being a parent, after all. All of his children save for one had died while they were small, and all that he knew of Abigail was spending ten minutes holding a goggle-eyed baby too small to support her own head yet.
Dead because of creatures like Nyssa, and like Frost had been and would still be if he had not been hit with the right hypodermic cocktail at the right moment in time. He was wrong if he believed that that was a stink that was ever going to wash off of him.
As if he could feel Whistler staring at him, Frost ceased fussing around in the Reaper’s mouth and looked up, meeting Whistler’s eyes. Whistler could not keep his lip from curling as he went back to watching Scud play with the grenade. He had tried to make one along the same basic lines, years before when he had first designed the UV flashlights that no one traveled without any longer, but had never been able to make it work. Either too little light emerged to do anything more than give a vampire an annoying burn, or else too much and it blew out, every time. Scud was smart, though, Whistler reluctantly had to admit, and approached problems in a way that as entirely different from the way that Whistler himself did. Couple that with Whistler’s own experience, and they might have a shot.
“So,” Scud began as he tightened a screw on the inside of the grenade, “how long have you know Blade, anyway?” His voice was carefully nonchalant, curiosity bleeding in around the edges.
Whistler nearly smiled in spite of himself. “Going on twenty years,” he replied. Whistler reached out and corrected Scud’s hand before he could cut a wire that did not need cutting. The kid accepted it with good grace, grinning and shrugging before he moved to cut the correct one.
“You know, Blade doesn’t talk about the old days that much,” Scud went on. He looked up at Whistler, almost as if he was asking for permission before he went further.
Whistler did smile then. “Blade doesn’t talk about anything that much,” he said.
Scud made a soft sound that might have been a laugh. “Yeah,” he agreed, setting down his tools for a minute. “You want to hear something funny? Blade kind of looks to you like a, y’know, a father figure.” He grinned when he saw Whistler’s face. “I know, right? It’s hard to imagine that he didn’t hatch from an egg.”
“He didn’t,” Whistler said brusquely, thinking of the boy that he had nearly killed in an alley when he thought that boy was one of the bloodsuckers himself. He made a sound that was equal parts derision, embarrassment, and pleasure. Again he thought of how much easier things would be if he was actually Blade’s father.
Before the silence could wind on long enough to let Scud know that had had actually struck a nerve, Whistler continued, “Tell me something. How did you and Blade cross each other’s paths?”
Scud’s face went white, though his smile remained easy. “Ain’t that a story,” he said, reaching for the joint that he had set to the side and taking a long drag off of it. His knuckles were the color of pearls. “I was backpacking through Romania about a year ago. Old vampire country, you know?”
“I’ve heard,” Whistler said as he continued to tinker with the grenade. “Blade and I stuck to the states.”
“I read Dracula when I was in high school,” Scud said. “Before I met Blade, that was the beginning and end of everything that I knew about vampires. Anyway, I meet these two chicks, and they’re…you know, the ladies are stacked. Way out of my league.:
“Warning sign,” Whistler said.
“I know that now,” Scud said. “But then I was pretty much thinking with another Scud. I invite Janet and Chrissy back to my tent for a little three’s company action, ‘til it turns out that they’re into something kinkier than what I had in mind.” Scud unbuttoned his shirt long enough for Whistler to see that his stomach and abdomen were criss-crossed with long, thin scars.
Whistler grimaced in spite of himself. “Pretty,” he said.
“Skin-eaters,” Scud said. He caught Whistler’s confused expression and said, “You didn’t know about them?”
Whistler had been creeping towards leaving his foul mood behind. He could feel that chance falling away from him. “No,” he grunted.
Scud heard the warning in Whistler’s tone and cast his eyes back down to his work as he went on. “That’s what Deac called ‘em, anyway. Said that they were some kind of abominations. Chrissy was the one who gave him the scar on his neck. So Blade shows up with him, saves my ass, and after that everything kind of fell into place.”
Whistler set his tools to the side so that he would not break what he was trying to build. “When I was a part of this operation, killing suckheads was more important than learning about them.”
“Yeah, guess you got a point there,” Scud said, but he sounded as if he was doing it only to avoid angering Whistler further. Whistler felt his scowl deepen; it had not had a chance to truly leave his face in the first place.
“Let’s try it,” Whistler said as he finally finished tinkering with the grenade. It would either work or it wouldn’t, but either way he had done all that he could. That seemed to be a philosophy worth adopting everywhere else, too, now that Whistler thought about it.
“All right.” Scud flipped a switch on the grenade and then quickly stepped back. They watched the grenade expectantly, and it responded by throwing out a few weak, flickering glows before going dead altogether. Scud made a frustrated, dispirited sound. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I fucked up, or maybe you were right and it’s not possible-“
The grenade interrupted Scud in order to make a high whining sound, as if it was saying, no, wait, it might have a surprise left yet. The whining was replaced with a brilliant white light that shot out without warning, obliging Scud and Whistler both to raise their arms quickly and shield their eyes. He swore that the light felt warm against his skin. The vampires working at other intervals throughout the warehouse yelled in alarm and then shouted obscenities towards Whistler and Scud for not firing a warning shot first. Whistler flipped his middle finger in their direction without looking around and could have laughed.
Scud whooped and leaped, pumping his fist into the air. “All right!” He and Whistler slapped palms. “Papa’s got a brand new bag,” Scud finished, grinning. He picked up the grenade and flipped it around, examining it from all angles even though he had just constructed it himself. “I’ll start duplicating this bad boy.” He hurried off.
That was one hell of a powerful weapon to have to have on their side, even after the Reapers had been dealt with. Maybe the day could turn itself around, after all. Whistler felt a smile touch at the corners of his mouth and then winced as a shooting pain radiated through his jaw and even into the roof of his mouth. He could not remember what it had felt like to teeth when he was a baby himself, and he could only dimly remember what it was like to grow fangs during the hazy period of his own turning. Those weren’t memories that he felt like digging back up and turning over. Hurt like a bitch, though.
“Chew ice.” Whistler would have been annoyed to hear any voice behind him, regardless of who that person was, because it would mean that he had allowed someone to get behind him in the first place. That it was Frost’s voice only meant that it was all that he could do not to spin around and plant his fist into Frost’s face. It was an urge that came over him frequently, and only the fact that Frost had thus far wisely kept his distance had prevented him from actually acting upon it.
“That supposed to mean something to me?” Whistler asked as he turned around. Frost had been stupid enough to put himself within arm’s reach, too. Grabbing him and throttling him would be the easiest thing in the world, and there was nothing that Whistler wanted to do more. He took a deep breath through his nose in order to keep himself from acting upon this urge. Frost’s eyes flicked upwards, taking in the gesture, but he still did not step back.
“Ice,” Frost repeated. He jutted his chin out at Whistler. “I saw you touching at your jaw.” Frost’s lips twisted into a bitter smile. “Funny thing about Karen’s ‘cure’.” Whistler could hear the quotation marks in Frost’s voice. “She didn’t really run any clinical trials before she decided to start stabbing people with it. If you haven’t turned yet, then it’s nothing more than a booster shot.” Frost touched at his forearm briefly, not seeming to realize that he was doing it. Whistler had heard that it was a vampire bite that had injured Frost while he, Blade, and the rest had been gone. Wasn’t it interesting that the security system suddenly became so frail whenever Frost was there, and that he had a way of walking out of a vampire attack with relatively minor injuries. “If you’ve already turned, then it’s messier. Happens in stages. Your mouth is hurting because you have overdeveloped muscles in the roof of your mouth right now that are trying to turn back to human now that they don’t have to support fangs any longer.” Frost flashed a cold smile. “Ice and aspirin. It’ll get better in about a week. In the meantime, have fun.”
Frost turned to go, finally taking himself out of Whistler’s reach and removing the temptation. This did not relax Whistler in any meaningful way. He glared at Frost’s retreating back and snapped, “Why are you telling me this? Guilty conscience?” There was a nearly tangible sarcasm in his voice.
Frost paused and then turned back, grinning. “Repent and be saved?” he threw back at Whistler. That grin did not fade. Whistler was amazed that he did not have more people striking it from his face. Given the fresh bruise that was crawling along the side of Frost’s face, maybe that was a moot point. “Don’t fucking kid yourself,” he snapped. Ah, that was more like the monster that Whistler could remember caving his ribs in for him. Perhaps that explained why Frost was now very carefully hanging back and out of Whistler’s immediate reach. “Call it a scientific experiment, if you want. Right now you and I are the only variables.”
“You sure it’s not so that Blade won’t put you out?” Whistler asked. The line of Frost’s spine and the sudden tension in his shoulders let him know that he was getting into the neighborhood. “Keeping your keeper happy.”
Frost drew his lips back from his teeth. It was nothing like a smile. “I have other ways of doing that,” he said. “Coy’s not a good look on you, old man.” Frost turned and stalked off. He brushed past Nyssa as he did so, who looked alternately concerned and troubled by her worry.
Whistler took some aspirin before they left to hunt. He did not go anywhere near the ice.
*
Deacon missed being a vampire every day, the way that a man would miss a limb that had been severed from him, and worse. His humanity was a new one growing back that he hardly recognized, that he had not even known how to use well the first time around, and that would flare up without his permission more and more. Deacon ground his teeth together until the enamel felt as if it was in danger of cracking altogether. He did not know why he had told Whistler that chewing on ice would help to numb his mouth while the muscles devolved back into something that would be found on a human, something that he himself had not figured out until he was in his third day among the glorious human race and after he had become so irritable and snappish as a result of the ache that Blade had been on the verge of allowing him to be turned again solely so that he would have an excuse to kill him with impunity.
It occurred to Deacon that this could be about Blade, that Whistler might be within a hair’s breadth of being right, before he snorted and threw the thought from his head. He and Blade had had their fight about Whistler-had had several fights about Whistler-over the months that it had taken to find him, and now all that was left was something that came close to being both a weary and a wary peace.
God help him, he was only a few inches away from actually being content as a human again. That alone was nearly a reason to pick a fight.
Deacon pushed past Nyssa as he stalked away from Whistler. For her part, she had finally lost interest in the Reaper corpse and had instead been drawn towards the ensuing confrontation. Their shoulders collided; Deacon did not think that it was often that Nyssa had to cope with people who touched her roughly or without her permission. “What is it?” she asked him, and when he did not answer: “Frost!”
There was no part of the warehouse that was not filled with bloodsuckers. Deacon could not even pinpoint the moment when they had become bloodsuckers to him, rather than merely vampires, and that only made things worse. He ground his teeth together even harder and kept going, aware that he was trailing Nyssa behind him like an annoyed, regal shadow. “Not in the mood, princess,” he told her over his shoulder. “Find another lab partner for now.” Beneath the stairs, it was relatively secluded. Seemed like that was becoming quite the place for forbidden conversations, now that Deacon thought about it. If he was pushed much farther or clenched his teeth much harder, he was going to wind up cracking them all off at the gums.
“Do not call me that!” In the shadows beneath the stairs, Nyssa reached for his arm. She was strong, much stronger than he was now, though two years before he would have shaken her free easily and then been able to slam her up against the wall.
Slammed her against the wall, slid his knee between her legs to part those long thighs that he was willing to bet were every bit as creamy and flawless as the skin of her face and neck, pushed his mouth down onto those lips that she had still found time to paint. He would not give her time to part for him, would only thrust his tongue into her mouth without waiting for an answer, but it would not matter. Nyssa would still be soft and welcoming, making quiet sounds from the back of her throat as Deacon took a sweep of the inside of her mouth. It took time to unravel a woman like Nyssa, but it was worth it in the end.
As if she could hear the way that his pulse and breathing was quickening, Nyssa pulled her hand away from his arm and stepped back. Goddamn these human senses, Deacon had been starting to forget how weak they were until he was forced into such close contact with the upgraded version. He took a breath that shuddered on the end and pushed the panic away. It had been months since he had felt it this strongly.
“I am a pureblood,” Nyssa snapped at him.
“No shit, sugar,” Deacon snapped back.
Color rose in Nyssa’s cheeks. She must have been in the grip of a powerful emotion, in order to make sluggish vampire blood move that quickly. “I am a pureblood,” she repeated. “That does not mean that I cannot understand human conflicts. I did not grow up in a tower.”
The way that she said ‘human conflicts’ made Deacon think of an anthropologist’s study, something that she would watch from a distance on the Discovery Channel rather than experiencing for herself. Deacon felt his hackles going up.
“There a problem?”
Blade had a way of phrasing questions that made it sound as if it was the very height of stupidity that he even had to ask in the first place. He was using that voice to its full effect now. Deacon blew all of the air out of his lungs on a long sigh and turned to watch Blade where he had come down the stairs and was standing at the entrance of their isolated alcove, his expression caught somewhere between an invitation and a warning. Deacon did not miss the way that Blade’s eyes moved across Nyssa, across her flushed cheeks and the shadow of her cleavage, and could not say that he minded. They had an unspoken dance that took place between them every day, and as improbable as it was that they had been able to work it out peacefully over the past two years in the first place, surely it was no more improbable that they should then work out the steps to accommodate three as well as two.
“We’re doing great, stud,” Deacon told Blade in a chirpy voice that convinced no one. “And how about you? Have a nice nap, or whatever it was that you were doing?”
The invitation faded from Blade’s face and became pure warning instead. As if Deacon had not become good at ignoring them altogether. “You think that we have time for this shit?”
Deacon snorted. “Then we’ll make it.” He could have said a lot more and probably would have had Blade not filled the distance between them so ably, a dark angry cloud. Blade, it seemed, had only one method of shutting Deacon up now that striking him was out of the question; he was predictable like that. The air ran out of Deacon’s lungs when he felt Blade’s hand on his arm at the same time that his mouth was on Deacon’s own, stroking the wounds, bordering on the painful. It was about as close to gentle as Blade ever got, and Deacon could feel the impatience in that contact that Blade was struggling to hold back. As if Deacon was not already impatient with himself, as if he liked or understood this strange in-between person that he had become. Blade’s hand left Deacon’s arm and found its way instead to the long white scar that marked Deacon’s neck. Blade had a fetish about that scar. Deacon always felt jumpy and uncertain when it was touched.
“Jesus fuck,” Deacon muttered when Blade had ceased plundering his mouth, Blade’s idea of a cheap sedative. It would be so much easier to be a smartass if he could not feel it working on him. He rested his forehead against the crook of Blade’s neck, and Blade allowed him for a few seconds before he put his hand on the back of his neck and pulled him away. They were getting downright sappy.
Over Blade’s shoulder, Deacon saw Nyssa as he lifted his head. Even with her large dark eyes he could see that her pupils were dilated, those lush curving lips parted slightly so that she could draw breath. Hell, she was nearly panting. It was a far cry from the startled, embarrassed woman who had stumbled across the two of them several hours before.
“That’s kinky, sweetheart,” Deacon told her, purely so that he could watch her flush more deeply. Red was a fine color on her. Between her lips and her cheeks, she ought to wear it more often. Nyssa cast her eyes down to the ground. Deacon did not think that she was fulfilling the promise of the vampire nation, staring after the humans-or near enough-like that, but that was not his problem. “Think of what your daddy would say.” Nyssa’s eyes jerked back up to meet his, angry and hot.
“That’s not playing nice,” Blade said again against Frost’s ear. Frost swore that Blade had realized early on that there were more efficient ways to keep Frost in line than violence, and that was keeping him battling back an erection at all times. Blade was a son of a bitch like that.
“I don’t know how,” Deacon responded. As irritable and out of sorts as Blade’s hand on the back of his neck was causing him to feel, the sensation doubled when Blade released him.
Well. Deacon guessed that he could deal with what happened next as a consolation prize. Blade took Nyssa by the back of the neck in the same way that he had gripped Deacon only moments before-man had a control fetish like none that Deacon had ever seen before-and bent her back like a movie star in an old black and white, his hand splayed against the small of her back to keep her from falling, and kissed her as deeply as if he wanted to drown in her. Nyssa went rigid for a second and even put her hand against his chest as if she meant to push him away before she gradually began to melt so thoroughly that Blade was the only thing holding her up by the time that it was over. Having been in that position before, Deacon did not blame her. Blade released Nyssa’s neck so that he could cup her breast instead, running his thumb over the place where her nipple was hidden beneath the fabric of her top. She gasped and even began to squirm against him.
All three of them were voyeurs. It was the only explanation that fit. Having abandoned all moral principles save for those that he had been absolutely forced to take up again, Deacon found that he did not particularly have any problem with that. He let out a breath of air and watched as Nyssa’s hand found Blade’s ass, gripped it, and struggled to bring him closer to her. Deacon’s lips curved. God, he loved a woman who knew what she wanted.
Blade released Nyssa’s mouth at long last and helped her to stand upright again. She looked dazed and even had trouble finding her feet for a few seconds, touching at her lower lip as if she could not quite believe what had just happened. It was enough like something out of a movie to make Deacon’s lips curve in amusement, and his mood lifted from black into a sooty shade of gray. Considering everything else that had happened and likely would happen before the day was over, that was quite an accomplishment.
Most of Nyssa’s lipstick was gone. Her lips were swollen and pouty enough to make up for it. Nyssa ceased touching at them only so that she could glare at Blade instead. “I would be within my rights to slap you,” she pointed out.
Blade smiled at her. He did not do it often, and did it even less in a manner that was not meant to convey a threat. Deacon for a second was not even sure what he was doing. “That’s not what you’re thinking of doing right now at all.” Getting laid regularly had done wonders for the man’s sense of humor. If the butterfly effect was true, then that might turn out to be Deacon’s single greatest gift to the human race.
Blade turned to go, ticking his head slightly as an indication that Nyssa and Deacon should follow after him. Deacon saw a frown flicker across Nyssa’s face for a moment, as she apparently enjoyed being told what to do about as much as he did. She followed, though, tucking her rumpled curls swiftly back behind her ears as she did so. Deacon had not been sure that she was even capable of such a nervous betrayal, that her regal bloodline would even allow it. It was cute.
“Congratulations, he likes you,” Deacon sidled up close to her in order to murmur. “In Blade-speak, that’s about one step away from asking you if you want to go to the holiday dance, with a box for you to check yes or no at the bottom of the note.”
In truly shocking news, Nyssa frowned at him. “I understood about half of what you just said.”
Deacon leaned even closer to her in response, so that they were nearly kissing themselves. “It’s all right, we’ll talk later.” He turned away. Nyssa paused for a moment longer, visibly collecting herself, before she went to collect the pheromones that he had been working on with her for most of the night.
The members of the Blood Pack noticed that Blade was waiting for everyone’s attention and moved towards him without saying a word, like the flowing of water downhill. They likely did not even realize that they were doing it. Had they, Deacon imagined that there likely would have been many more pissed-off faces, Reinhardt being their only exception. He was likely to be an angry ball of Aryan sunshine no matter where he was or what was happening around him.
“Sun will rise in an hour,” Blade began by telling them all. “We leave within thirty minutes.”
Chupa shifted his weight restlessly from one foot to the other, clearly not liking that answer, before he said, “Let me ask one question: how in the hell are we going to find these Reapers?”
Blade ticked his head in the direction of Whistler, who had drawn up when Blade had begun to speak. The old man was currently holding an unspoken competition with Reinhardt to determine who could hold the most sour expression and for the longest before their face wound up freezing that way.
“We won’t have to,” Blade said. “We’ll start in the sewers where Whistler found the first Reaper. After that, they’ll come to us.”
Nyssa took that as her cue to toss a small canister over to Chupa. Deacon noticed that she still looked troubled and confused, and that there were twin spots of color high up on her cheeks. Like a teenaged girl sorting her way through her first deep attraction, she would not look in either Blade’s or Deacon’s direction.
“Pheromones,” Nyssa told him. Speaking to her own warriors again, she was clearly sliding back into her element and was drawing comfort from the role. Her voice was even, her face calm and authoritative. It was an entirely different woman from the one that she and Blade had managed to fluster so.
Deacon thought that he liked the other one better.
“Harvested from the Reaper’s adrenal glands,” Nyssa went on. “It’s how they communicate. With it, we will be able to draw them to us.”
Reinhardt leaned over to Chupa and muttered in a horrified voice, just loudly enough for everyone to hear, “They want us to spray ourselves with some suckpuppy’s nut juice?” Chupa looked suspiciously as if he agreed with Reinhardt’s assessment, and as if he was thinking that a review of Nyssa’s sanity might be in order.
Blade sounded nearly amused as he said, “You were trained to kill me. If you can’t handle these guys, then I’m not worried for my safety. First use your firearms to drive them back, then go to the UV grenades.”
“Right on,” Scud said. He gave an affectionate slap to a box that was sitting on the worktable next to him. To Deacon it looked more like cartoon dynamite than anything else, complete with lever. The only thing that was missing was the ACME logo stenciled on the side. “This here is for the grand finale. I hot-wired a couple of these bad boys into a nitro vacuum.” Scud smirked. “As in life, just be real careful where you pop your load.”
“You’re not coming?” Nyssa asked him, sounding surprised.
Scud made a flirtatious bow in her direction. Nyssa looked charmed in spite of herself. Little Miss Pureblood was starting to find pulses all over the place that she would not mind getting to know better. Deacon grinned.
“Nah,” Scud answered her. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
Deacon watched Scud start to leave and remembered the nervous, calculating look that had crossed the kid’s face when Deacon had stayed behind the last time. Maybe the final domino needed a nudge before it fell into place, and maybe it already had enough momentum to go over on its own, but that was still not the kind of thing that Deacon liked to leave to chance. “Don’t worry,” he told Nyssa, his voice crawling with innuendo. It was far enough removed from the tone that he had used every over time that he had spoken to her to make her blink in surprise. “I’ll go along to keep you safe from everything that bumps in the night just a little harder than you do.” Deacon grinned at her in a manner suggesting that it would not be long after this daring rescue before they did their own kind of bumping. That part was not entirely feigned. Nyssa still looked as if she would not mind slapping it off of his face for him.
“No, you’re not.” Blade’s voice could become a weapon in and of itself when he wished it. It cracked the air and made it shiver when he snapped out the command. It startled even Deacon, who had been expecting it. He glanced over and saw that Blade was nearly glaring at him. “You’re staying here. No one goes on this mission who isn’t ready for a fight.”
The sudden bristling that overtook Deacon was not fully feigned, either. He was aware of everyone in the room staring at he and Blade as if they were the best show that anyone had seen in a long time. “I seem to recall taking out four vampires alone only a few hours ago.” He watched Scud from the corner of his eye was he spoke. The kid was good; while he looked as perversely interested in the lover’s spat as everyone else did, his face otherwise betrayed nothing of what he was actually thinking.
“How’s your arm?” Blade snapped back at him in response. “You’re staying behind where you’re safe. That’s an order.”
Deacon had not been entirely sure that Blade had understood what Deacon was trying to do until the very end. Blade was not the type who actually voiced concerns about other people’s welfare. He was the type who let them walk right up the edge of the pit and then yanked them up by the scruff of the neck without saying a word as they began to go over. Deacon cut his eyes in Scud’s direction as all of the vampires began to hoot appreciatively right on cue. The kid actually appeared more relaxed now, thinking that the second set of eyes in the warehouse were not going to be there for the sake of monitoring him and were going to be all kinds of pissed-off and unlikely to do a good job of it, in any case.
Glancing back at Blade, Deacon was unsurprised to see that he was watching the same scene. They met eyes for a moment, Blade looking nearly approving, once you knew how to read him. Deacon lifted his shoulders into the very faintest of shrugs. ‘Doing my job.’
Reinhardt was meanwhile grinning as if Christmas had come early and one of his presents was a naked blonde with low self-esteem. “Goddamn,” he said gleefully. “I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a familiar that obedient before. Hat’s off to you, Blade.” Reinhardt came close, into Deacon’s personal space, and clearly meant to intimidate Deacon into taking a step back. Deacon was an old hand to such games from well before he had been turned. He did not feel like moving. “You take orders that well from anyone else, or is this a master’s voice kind of thing?”
There were several things that Deacon could not help but admire about the way that Blade ran his operation. One of them was the way that weapons managed to be strewn just about anywhere without anyone raising an eyebrow. Deacon’s hand lit upon a gun almost immediately, and he had the safety flicked off, his finger on the trigger, and the barrel pointed at Reinhardt in under a second. There was a moment of internal debate wherein Deacon could not decide which head he actually wanted to aim at, before he decided to go for the one that Reinhardt used most often. Reinhardt’s grin became just a trifle uneasy, but it did not stop him from drawing closer still. “Ain’t that cute.” Deacon made a big show of pulling the hammer back. Reinhardt paused finally and glanced over at Blade. “You want to take in his leash or what?”
Blade lifted his shoulders very slightly. “Sometimes it’s better to let them roam every once in a while.” He met the acid look that Deacon gave him with a cool stare.
A subtle change came over Reinhardt’s grin, like a worm boring its way into an apple. Deacon knew that he was watching the first moment when an insinuation became a promise. Reinhardt backed away from Deacon, his hands held up in a conciliatory gesture, still grinning. Deacon let out a breath that he had not realized he had been holding and resolved that the first person to try to take the gun from him would have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers. He had seen grins like that before.
Glancing up, Deacon saw that Blade was also following Reinhardt’s retreat with a speculative gleam to his eye. Turning briefly back towards the rest of the vampires, he finished, “The UVs have a ten second delay. Nyssa, just remember to take cover.” Nyssa looked nearly as startled as Deacon himself felt. Blade, breaking his own rules and actually displaying signs of worry rather than simply orchestrating a last-minute rescue. Either he was starting to go soft in his advancing age, or Blade really did not expect the rest of the night to go well.
As everyone dispersed to begin collecting weaponry, Deacon walked up to Blade. Blade cast him an appraising once-over, starting with his face and ending with the gun. “I have a feeling that you’ll bite me if I take that from you.”
Deacon loved these moments when Blade displayed a sense of humor, he really did. It wasn’t at all like he picked the very worst possible moments in which to do it or anything. Deacon scowled. “Fuck that, you’ll lose the hand.” The tiny upward lift to the corners of Blade’s mouth only made him actually want to try it. “You have any idea of how this is going to play out?”
Blade glanced up at Reinhardt again. “Ideas. Nothing concrete. Don’t put down your gun.”
That was Blade’s way of saying that he expected things to go pear-shaped, and hard. Deacon winced. “From my cold, dead hands,” he replied. “Thanks for making me that new enemy, by the way. I needed that.”
“You have no trouble making them on your own. Don’t need my help.” Blade touched Deacon lightly on the back of the neck and was gone. Deacon regarded the gun in his hands and wondered who he would wind up shooting with it, as he seriously doubted that the night would end without him pulling the trigger.
*
Whistler watched Blade, Nyssa, and Frost disappear into the shadows together. He watched as Nyssa emerged moments later looking dazed, Frost looking unbearably smug, and Blade looking different in a way that Whistler had once known how to read and was now frustrated to discover that he could not. He watched as Frost was threatened and Blade obliquely used the vampires’ own language in talking about their familiars in order to defuse it, as Blade exhorted Nyssa to keep herself safe from the very enemy that he ought to have been using to take her out of existence, watched as Blade and Frost had a conversation that ended with Blade placing what was nearly a caress to the back of Frost’s neck before he walked away. He watched until he had decided that he had done more than enough watching, and maybe the situation would not have gotten nearly so out of hand if he had been willing to speak up a little sooner.
“Blade!” Whistler called, lifting up a heavy weapons vest. Goddamned things seemed to gain ten pounds every time that he picked one of them up. “Give me a hand here?” Blade came over and wordlessly helped him adjust the vest across his shoulders. It would be a cold day in hell before Whistler really needed help figuring out the ins and outs of a weapons vest, and he suspected that they both knew it. “You were getting a little cozy there.”
Blade’s hands paused for only a second before they resumed their task. That second was still long enough for Whistler to read volumes. “I would not worry about that if I was you.”
If Whistler had been put off a task that easily, he would not have built their operation in the first place. Thinking of the early days, and of the way that Blade now seemed hell-bent upon shattering all of that, only made Whistler angrier. He tried to control his voice, but he could still hear the edge that crept through as he snapped, “Looks to me like you’re getting confused about which side you’re standing on.”
The movement of Blade’s hand stopped, and the man himself stepped back. There had been a terrible anger wedged within Blade from the moment that Whistler had met him. Before he had come to know the kid and then to regard him nearly as he had his own children before they had been taken, his only thought had been to turn that anger into a weapon, into something useful. Even in those early days, it had never occurred to him that Blade might then take that weapon that he had crafted and turn it against Whistler himself.
The speed with which Blade had gone from neutral to seething was shocking. “Those are real hollow words coming for a man who just spent two years running with the enemy,” Blade said, leaning close.
Whistler drew back for a second, shocked, before he leaned forward himself. “Which one of us are you talking about?” he asked.
Blade pulled his lips back from his teeth. Whistler always wondered what he was thinking when he did that, whether he was imagining himself with fangs rather than blunted human teeth. He had never asked, either, for fear that that was exactly the response that he would get. “You know, Whistler,” Blade growled, enunciating each word carefully, as if he was seeking to make a weapon out of it, “there’s an old saying: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. You might want to remember that.” He stormed off without saying another word. It was all that Whistler could do not to put his fist into the wall.
End Part Eight