[ multichapter ] Blood House I [ original ]
Title: Blood House
Author: frostberryjam
Rated: NC-17 (overall)
Fandom: Original.
Warnings: Gayness, smut, blood, violence.
Summary: It's 2010; there's an oil spill threatening to turn the Gulf of Mexico into the Dead Sea, the President is Obama, Simon Cowell finally left American Idol -- and vampires are an accepted part of society.
Evan Banks wants to spend only one night with a vampire, to satisfy a curiosity even he can't explain. One night with the vampire known as Santos however turns out to be far more complicated than Evan ever thought it'd be. Because if there's only one sure truth when it comes to vampires, it's that they all have secrets.
Author Notes: I can hear the 'finally!' coming from my fans who migrated from AFF to here. My apologies. Life has been -- hell, to be quite frank. Never the less, here we go.
Chapter One
Sex for blood.
Starkly put; his entire reason for being in a brothel.
Evan’s fingers curled, blunt nails digging into his palms. Nerves were getting the best of him, crawling like so many ceaseless ants over his skin, making him itchy and restless.
Funny, the way life threw curveballs. If asked a year back whether or not he‘d ever step foot in a House, he‘d have snorted with derisive laughter. He hadn’t been a vamp groupie as a teenager. The flipside of society hadn‘t been intriguing. It was the same as acknowledging Australia existed. Undeniable, hundreds of years old, and yet entirely easy to be blasé towards, since it was about as real to him as a star a million miles away.
Therefore, vampires were like Australia. A fact of life and yet one that had very little to do with his life.
If only things had remained that way.
Uneasy, he examined the room. It was an elegant chamber, styled in moderate grays, utilizing wood-carved furniture to supply the room with a dash of vibrancy. Despite the decorator‘s best efforts, it was still a cold room -- bringing to mind the sterility of a clinic.
Paintings hung on the walls, favoring the abstract style. Nobody could come upon the building itself and leave with the impression that they were in a brothel. It was too neat and refined. Nor did it indicate that vampires stalked the hallways. No shadowy niches, no cobwebs, no virgins in lacey nightgowns being deflowered by predators with ceraceous complexions. No Twilight Zone background music.
Curveballs. They were a bitch. One accidental meeting was all it had taken for his life to derail.
Fact; vampires existed.
Fact; they kept to themselves due to the dangers humans presented.
Therefore, finding one in the middle of the evening rush in the subway, never mind being pressed up against one, had been an alarming experience.
Evan had rapidly learned several things. They were definitely not the walking undead, regardless of what crazy religious maniacs swore. Nothing dead could give off such an intense heat. Or be that hot. Incredibly hot, with a sleek, muscled body and a hint of a bosky cologne.
Unlike friends he could mention, he didn’t get hard for every single attractive male that scampered in his path. But he’d gone from zero to ninety when the man had looked down at him and flashed a knowing smile, revealing sharp eyeteeth. Thousands of people got surgery for that, pretending to be what they weren’t -- but Evan had known that this was no fakery. The lambent light in the man’s eyes had transfixed him.
Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to look away. Evan had drowned in clear, cool blue eyes until someone had jostled him from behind, almost smashing him into a window. He was spared from the bruises by strong fingers around his wrist, pulling him close and offering shelter under a long arm. Evan’s spine had snapped into a painfully straight lock, fear graying out the edges of reality.
“Shh,” the vampire had hushed his automatic protest. “You are safe.”
True to his word, the train had reached Evan’s station and the vampire assumed the duty to guide him out. Evan hadn’t been able to form a single question the whole time. His heart had been beating with the savage rhythm of jungle drums, a strange white roar in his head.
He hadn’t been the same after that.
What had been an unusual occurrence had planted a little insidious seed of curiosity that grew no matter how many times Evan yanked the roots out. It was like a weed resistant to everything; fear, common sense, sanity.
Nascent stages had been innocuous. Suddenly he wasn’t tuning out the news when they began to discuss vampire rights. He was lingering over glossy magazines with vampire models on the cover.
Then, roughly two months after the train ride, he’d started renting movies. Dracula, Twilight, Interview with the Vampire -- didn’t matter what. As long as there were vampire characters in it. Then he switched over to watching movies and TV series with vampire actors.
At that point he’d started to face the fact that the whole thing was aggrandizing instead of subsiding. But he’d been caught, hook, line and sinker. It wasn’t long before he nervously started wondering about what it’d be like to get bitten by a vampire. What it would be like to have one as a lover.
It probably would have remained just that: curiosity. Until the day he accidentally discovered there was a House in the city.
A House was the politically correct term for a vampire brothel. Vampires sustain themselves from purchased blood. Blood banks were a thriving business. Yet there were some that insisted the nutritional value of such blood was execrable and proposed a solution also simultaneously addressing the issue of mortals trying desperately to get close to them; blood for sex.
Legalized prostitution. It would have never gone through as a law if it hadn’t gotten such overwhelming support from the public. After humanity’s deepest fears had been assuaged as to whether vampires or not were dangerous to their position as dominant species, it turned out that many people would be willing to cut off their right arm to spend a night with a vampire.
And why not, Evan thought resignedly. They were gorgeous, each and every one of them. Some of them not in the classical meaning of the word -- although he’d never heard of an ugly vampire -- but there was something alluring to them, a forbidden appeal.
Therefore, sex for blood. There were less than two thousand vampires in the United States, and more than half preferred to sustain themselves on blood banks. There were only a few Houses across the US, in heavily populated areas. One in Miami. Another in Seattle. New York City, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles.
And, apparently, one in Boston. He’d stumbled on to that scrap of information online and hadn’t been able to ignore the possibility of going in. Hadn’t been able to stop himself from arranging a meeting.
Which circled back to his situation, perched on the sofa in the sitting room, with his nails still digging into his palms.
It was… more professional than he’d imagined. There were security checkpoints, there were rules, papers to sign. He’d even had to bring medical records and provide blood samples. Not because they feared he had STDs, they assured, but because they required certifiable proof that he was healthy and in a state of mind to be fucked mindless and snacked on.
Evan crossed his legs, feeling his cock twitch. Oh, yeah. Sex with a vampire was rumored to be so fantastic that even if one wasn’t a junky for being bitten, you wanted to come back. It’d taken Evan three weeks to get an appointment, but maybe that was because he’d requested for a male vampire; there couldn’t be that many gay vamps calling Boston ‘home‘.
The thought of having sex with a stranger was stressful, but wouldn’t be the first time. He’d had two nameless, faceless fucks in nightclubs. This was kind of the same, except there was no alcohol involved to ease the way. Would they shake hands? Introduce themselves to one another? ’Hello, my name is Evan, does the fucking or the sucking come first?’
Awkward.
How long had it been since he’d been waiting, anyway? There was no clock in the room, and the rules instructed he come to the House wearing no accessories. Vampires had mild allergies to silver, even when mixed with other metals, and it was better to simply avoid the issue all together. Which meant he didn’t have a wristwatch.
Fifteen, twenty minutes. No more than that. Evan concluded. He had decided to give it another five minutes when the door opened and his personal contact, Ms. Wyatt entered.
“I’m sorry for the wait, Mr. Banks.” She looked contrite enough, and vaguely frazzled. “Do you have any last questions? If not, I’ll lead you to the room immediately.”
No. Evan didn’t have any questions. He stood, nerves suddenly twisting. “Lead the way, Ms. Wyatt.”
She gave him a smile, fangs flashing, then led him down the hallway. They took an elevator, descending; the doors opened to another hallway riddled with numbered doors. All in all, it was much like a posh hotel, everything in modulated good taste.
“Here.” Ms. Wyatt indicated a door marked #9. “You have six hours, at which point if you haven’t come out, someone will stop by to check on you. If you want to leave before then, dial one on the telephone and someone will be down to assist you.” She gave him a deliberate look. It was a remarkably thoughtful sort of stare, not malicious. He attributed that to maybe not a whole lot of gay guys showing up at the House’s doorstep.
“Thank you. Ms. Wyatt. Is the door unlocked?” He reached for the doorknob when she nodded.
The room possessed stained wooden furniture and white walls, offsetting the myriad of pale and darker greens that gilded the room. Evan closed the door. Carved jade figurines were placed to draw the eye without crowding the senses. Some were more than a foot tall, depicting a variety of animals. Evan distractedly admired a rearing horse captured in stone on the coffee table until someone cleared their throat.
Evan whirled around guiltily. Seeing the lean, tall shape of a man resting a forearm against an open doorway, he stuttered. “I-I have an appointment.”
The man’s lips quirked at the ends. It was hard to tell with the way he lounged against the doorframe but he had to be in the neighborhood of six-two, perhaps even six-three. Thick, dark hair that didn‘t quite reach his shoulders complimented a tan skin tone. A six o’clock shadow added to the sense that there was something untamed behind the careless smile.
The fact that he was barefoot in only slacks lent credence to the notion.
“Evan, yes?”
Evan’s gaze snapped from wandering down the vampire’s body to his face. “Yeah. Uh. You’ve got me at a disadvantage.”
“I do, don’t I?” The smile widened. From the distance between them Evan couldn’t tell for sure, but he was willing to lay his next paycheck on the line that the man’s eyes were an identical green to the statues. “Santos.”
He cleared his throat. Floundered, then approached, offering his hand.
His paycheck was safe. The vampire’s eyes were green.
“Nice to meet you.”
Santos replied by taking his hand and squeezing it, smiling lopsidedly. “You and I are going to have fun, Evan. I promise.”
Author: frostberryjam
Rated: NC-17 (overall)
Fandom: Original.
Warnings: Gayness, smut, blood, violence.
Summary: It's 2010; there's an oil spill threatening to turn the Gulf of Mexico into the Dead Sea, the President is Obama, Simon Cowell finally left American Idol -- and vampires are an accepted part of society.
Evan Banks wants to spend only one night with a vampire, to satisfy a curiosity even he can't explain. One night with the vampire known as Santos however turns out to be far more complicated than Evan ever thought it'd be. Because if there's only one sure truth when it comes to vampires, it's that they all have secrets.
Author Notes: I can hear the 'finally!' coming from my fans who migrated from AFF to here. My apologies. Life has been -- hell, to be quite frank. Never the less, here we go.
Chapter One
Sex for blood.
Starkly put; his entire reason for being in a brothel.
Evan’s fingers curled, blunt nails digging into his palms. Nerves were getting the best of him, crawling like so many ceaseless ants over his skin, making him itchy and restless.
Funny, the way life threw curveballs. If asked a year back whether or not he‘d ever step foot in a House, he‘d have snorted with derisive laughter. He hadn’t been a vamp groupie as a teenager. The flipside of society hadn‘t been intriguing. It was the same as acknowledging Australia existed. Undeniable, hundreds of years old, and yet entirely easy to be blasé towards, since it was about as real to him as a star a million miles away.
Therefore, vampires were like Australia. A fact of life and yet one that had very little to do with his life.
If only things had remained that way.
Uneasy, he examined the room. It was an elegant chamber, styled in moderate grays, utilizing wood-carved furniture to supply the room with a dash of vibrancy. Despite the decorator‘s best efforts, it was still a cold room -- bringing to mind the sterility of a clinic.
Paintings hung on the walls, favoring the abstract style. Nobody could come upon the building itself and leave with the impression that they were in a brothel. It was too neat and refined. Nor did it indicate that vampires stalked the hallways. No shadowy niches, no cobwebs, no virgins in lacey nightgowns being deflowered by predators with ceraceous complexions. No Twilight Zone background music.
Curveballs. They were a bitch. One accidental meeting was all it had taken for his life to derail.
Fact; vampires existed.
Fact; they kept to themselves due to the dangers humans presented.
Therefore, finding one in the middle of the evening rush in the subway, never mind being pressed up against one, had been an alarming experience.
Evan had rapidly learned several things. They were definitely not the walking undead, regardless of what crazy religious maniacs swore. Nothing dead could give off such an intense heat. Or be that hot. Incredibly hot, with a sleek, muscled body and a hint of a bosky cologne.
Unlike friends he could mention, he didn’t get hard for every single attractive male that scampered in his path. But he’d gone from zero to ninety when the man had looked down at him and flashed a knowing smile, revealing sharp eyeteeth. Thousands of people got surgery for that, pretending to be what they weren’t -- but Evan had known that this was no fakery. The lambent light in the man’s eyes had transfixed him.
Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to look away. Evan had drowned in clear, cool blue eyes until someone had jostled him from behind, almost smashing him into a window. He was spared from the bruises by strong fingers around his wrist, pulling him close and offering shelter under a long arm. Evan’s spine had snapped into a painfully straight lock, fear graying out the edges of reality.
“Shh,” the vampire had hushed his automatic protest. “You are safe.”
True to his word, the train had reached Evan’s station and the vampire assumed the duty to guide him out. Evan hadn’t been able to form a single question the whole time. His heart had been beating with the savage rhythm of jungle drums, a strange white roar in his head.
He hadn’t been the same after that.
What had been an unusual occurrence had planted a little insidious seed of curiosity that grew no matter how many times Evan yanked the roots out. It was like a weed resistant to everything; fear, common sense, sanity.
Nascent stages had been innocuous. Suddenly he wasn’t tuning out the news when they began to discuss vampire rights. He was lingering over glossy magazines with vampire models on the cover.
Then, roughly two months after the train ride, he’d started renting movies. Dracula, Twilight, Interview with the Vampire -- didn’t matter what. As long as there were vampire characters in it. Then he switched over to watching movies and TV series with vampire actors.
At that point he’d started to face the fact that the whole thing was aggrandizing instead of subsiding. But he’d been caught, hook, line and sinker. It wasn’t long before he nervously started wondering about what it’d be like to get bitten by a vampire. What it would be like to have one as a lover.
It probably would have remained just that: curiosity. Until the day he accidentally discovered there was a House in the city.
A House was the politically correct term for a vampire brothel. Vampires sustain themselves from purchased blood. Blood banks were a thriving business. Yet there were some that insisted the nutritional value of such blood was execrable and proposed a solution also simultaneously addressing the issue of mortals trying desperately to get close to them; blood for sex.
Legalized prostitution. It would have never gone through as a law if it hadn’t gotten such overwhelming support from the public. After humanity’s deepest fears had been assuaged as to whether vampires or not were dangerous to their position as dominant species, it turned out that many people would be willing to cut off their right arm to spend a night with a vampire.
And why not, Evan thought resignedly. They were gorgeous, each and every one of them. Some of them not in the classical meaning of the word -- although he’d never heard of an ugly vampire -- but there was something alluring to them, a forbidden appeal.
Therefore, sex for blood. There were less than two thousand vampires in the United States, and more than half preferred to sustain themselves on blood banks. There were only a few Houses across the US, in heavily populated areas. One in Miami. Another in Seattle. New York City, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles.
And, apparently, one in Boston. He’d stumbled on to that scrap of information online and hadn’t been able to ignore the possibility of going in. Hadn’t been able to stop himself from arranging a meeting.
Which circled back to his situation, perched on the sofa in the sitting room, with his nails still digging into his palms.
It was… more professional than he’d imagined. There were security checkpoints, there were rules, papers to sign. He’d even had to bring medical records and provide blood samples. Not because they feared he had STDs, they assured, but because they required certifiable proof that he was healthy and in a state of mind to be fucked mindless and snacked on.
Evan crossed his legs, feeling his cock twitch. Oh, yeah. Sex with a vampire was rumored to be so fantastic that even if one wasn’t a junky for being bitten, you wanted to come back. It’d taken Evan three weeks to get an appointment, but maybe that was because he’d requested for a male vampire; there couldn’t be that many gay vamps calling Boston ‘home‘.
The thought of having sex with a stranger was stressful, but wouldn’t be the first time. He’d had two nameless, faceless fucks in nightclubs. This was kind of the same, except there was no alcohol involved to ease the way. Would they shake hands? Introduce themselves to one another? ’Hello, my name is Evan, does the fucking or the sucking come first?’
Awkward.
How long had it been since he’d been waiting, anyway? There was no clock in the room, and the rules instructed he come to the House wearing no accessories. Vampires had mild allergies to silver, even when mixed with other metals, and it was better to simply avoid the issue all together. Which meant he didn’t have a wristwatch.
Fifteen, twenty minutes. No more than that. Evan concluded. He had decided to give it another five minutes when the door opened and his personal contact, Ms. Wyatt entered.
“I’m sorry for the wait, Mr. Banks.” She looked contrite enough, and vaguely frazzled. “Do you have any last questions? If not, I’ll lead you to the room immediately.”
No. Evan didn’t have any questions. He stood, nerves suddenly twisting. “Lead the way, Ms. Wyatt.”
She gave him a smile, fangs flashing, then led him down the hallway. They took an elevator, descending; the doors opened to another hallway riddled with numbered doors. All in all, it was much like a posh hotel, everything in modulated good taste.
“Here.” Ms. Wyatt indicated a door marked #9. “You have six hours, at which point if you haven’t come out, someone will stop by to check on you. If you want to leave before then, dial one on the telephone and someone will be down to assist you.” She gave him a deliberate look. It was a remarkably thoughtful sort of stare, not malicious. He attributed that to maybe not a whole lot of gay guys showing up at the House’s doorstep.
“Thank you. Ms. Wyatt. Is the door unlocked?” He reached for the doorknob when she nodded.
The room possessed stained wooden furniture and white walls, offsetting the myriad of pale and darker greens that gilded the room. Evan closed the door. Carved jade figurines were placed to draw the eye without crowding the senses. Some were more than a foot tall, depicting a variety of animals. Evan distractedly admired a rearing horse captured in stone on the coffee table until someone cleared their throat.
Evan whirled around guiltily. Seeing the lean, tall shape of a man resting a forearm against an open doorway, he stuttered. “I-I have an appointment.”
The man’s lips quirked at the ends. It was hard to tell with the way he lounged against the doorframe but he had to be in the neighborhood of six-two, perhaps even six-three. Thick, dark hair that didn‘t quite reach his shoulders complimented a tan skin tone. A six o’clock shadow added to the sense that there was something untamed behind the careless smile.
The fact that he was barefoot in only slacks lent credence to the notion.
“Evan, yes?”
Evan’s gaze snapped from wandering down the vampire’s body to his face. “Yeah. Uh. You’ve got me at a disadvantage.”
“I do, don’t I?” The smile widened. From the distance between them Evan couldn’t tell for sure, but he was willing to lay his next paycheck on the line that the man’s eyes were an identical green to the statues. “Santos.”
He cleared his throat. Floundered, then approached, offering his hand.
His paycheck was safe. The vampire’s eyes were green.
“Nice to meet you.”
Santos replied by taking his hand and squeezing it, smiling lopsidedly. “You and I are going to have fun, Evan. I promise.”