Fic: Once Bitten; Twice Shy, Part One
Title: nce Bitten; Twice Shy
Fandom: Being Human US
Rating: G-13
Pairing: ishop/Aidan
Total Word Count: Over 13,000
Summary: egend says that a wish made on the Christmas Star will come true. So Bishop wishes that Aidan loved him. Aidan wishes they had never met. There's no way anything could go wrong, right?
Notes: haracters aren't mine. Titles is from that "Last Christmas" song. I'm afraid this may have turned into a massive headcanon dump, but there's a plot and I'm actually really happy with how it turned out. Happy Whatever Offends You The Least, guys!
There is a legend among the vampires, passed down for generations, stated as fact and morphed slowly into legend with each retelling.
Once upon a time, in the Middle East, a vampire fell in love. This was not an odd occurrence. Love is older than time itself, older than humanity and monsters. This particular instance of love was different, though. Special. For this vampire fell for a mortal man.
His name was Joseph. Hers was Mary.
Their love ran deep as it could, and they spent every moment together. They pined. They planned. They barely escaped persecution, a horrible, permanent death for Mary at the hands of those who refused to see the truth.
Joseph clung to his humanity, and his lover understood. She missed her own life, her breath, the fluttering of a heart that no longer beat within her chest.
Mostly, she missed her chance at having a family. Her only hope of a child lay in turning one, and that never ended well.
The couple mourned their loss. They wailed their despair at the heavens until the heavens answered. One mild night in the desert, as they sought shelter from the elements, the sky became suddenly illuminated by the brightest, most beautiful light either of them had ever seen.
It was a star. An impossible star. It blotted out the light of every other body in the sky, shining brighter than even the sun. They gazed upon the star and they voiced their plea once more, whispering to the heavens. “A son,” they said, “bring us a son.”
The star answered.
A child awaited them in a manger. His eyes were bright and intelligent, his heart beat with strength, but he was cold to the touch. He did not cry, for he did not feel the cold. He truly was theirs, a perfect mixture of human and vampire.
They named him Jesus.
This is the story that vampires tell when the air turns crisp and the snow falls, when the stars dot the sky earlier and earlier in the evening and humans recite tall tales of salvation and eternal life to their own youth.
This is the story of the vampires’ star.
It is the Christmas story.
---
The snow was drifting lazily down from the sky, swirling across the streets and sidewalks to create beautiful patterns on the concrete before being disturbed by passing cars and shuffling feet. Aidan walked along in silence, his hands shoved deep into his pockets even though he barely felt the cold. Lights twinkled above and around him, but he barely paid them any notice.
It was Christmas Eve. Josh was spending the evening with his family. Sally was haunting her own parents and siblings. They wouldn’t be back until late. Aidan was left alone.
Well, he didn’t have to be alone. There was Rebecca. She’d invited him over for dinner, but he knew what that meant and wasn’t too interested. There was always Bishop, holed up in his old house with an oversized tree and some Christmas special droning on in the background, but Aidan shuddered at the thought. Knocking on that door would mean weakness, would be seen as a submission. He wasn’t going to be lured in by a few decorations and Claymation cartoons. He couldn’t be so easily bought with human traditions.
He wondered, though. What it would be like. A real Christmas. No blood, no death, just a group of people sitting around a table soaking in each other’s presence. Gifts. Music. Stories and laughter and warmth.
He hadn’t even realized he’d stopped to stare at one of the decorated house windows until a curtain was pulled aside and Bishop’s face appeared. He smiled and waved, the reds and greens and golds of the flashing lights reflecting in his eyes.
Aidan frowned at him, pulling his coat further around himself, and stalked off into the night.
He didn’t want a fake Christmas, a false family. Didn’t want bribes and ultimatums, ulterior motives.
He’d had it once. A real family. A wife and a son. Parents and in-laws. A warm house and hot supper. Laughter and jokes and love. He wasn’t going to go running back to the person who’d stripped it all away for a sad approximation. He wasn’t running back to Bishop. Not again.
So he walked down the cold streets of Boston, his eyes cast to the ground, watching the snow swirl around his feet. It took him by surprise sometimes, how much he still missed them. When he was alone with his thoughts it seemed overwhelming. The memories and pain and anger. What he wouldn’t do to get them back.
Aidan stood on his doorstep and looked up at the sky. The snow was falling harder now, sticking in his eyelashes and blurring his vision. He frowned.
There was a light in the sky, hanging low over Boston, brighter than the streetlamps. A single star that managed to outshine the city. Beautiful in its radiance, it seemed to pulse with bright silvers and blues, a steady beat that managed to calm him, to push out the pain and anger and crushing loneliness of the holidays. It was an invitation, open arms ready catch him if he fell, something that would understand.
“I wish I’d never met James Bishop,” Aidan muttered, finally pulling his eyes from the star. He unlocked the door and stepped into the dark house, letting the bricks blot out the light as the emptiness of the place enveloped him.
---
“I just wish he loved me back.”
---
He wasn’t in his bed.
His thoughts immediately went to Bishop, but not in the way he would have expected. He didn’t blame his Maker for the strange sheets and peeling wallpaper, the slight stench of urine and blood and bleach.
No, Aidan woke up in a strange room on Christmas morning and his first thought was the sudden and painful realization that he hadn’t bought anything for Bishop. For Josh and Sally and Emily and Nora and Rebecca, yes. But not for Bishop.
It was a wrong that he had to right.
There were clothes piled up on the cold hardwood of the floor, still smelling relatively fresh. He stumbled to the pile and pulled them on, gazing around the room. Through the three broken slats on the blinds, he could see the city, which meant he was outside of the city, which didn’t make any sense.
He finished buttoning his jeans and threw on his jacket, reaching for the key ring that sat on a table by the door out of instinct as he left. Maybe he had been there before.
The street outside of the apartment building was as unfamiliar as the room, and Aidan couldn’t help but look around as he walked toward the hustle of Boston. He knew the area, at least. It was the closet to the city a vampire could be without getting swept up in the politics of the place. The Outskirts. The Wilderness. There were a few of their people living out there, exiles who hoped for a triumphant return, a few generic-looking vampires who managed to sneak in to the blood dens once in a blue moon without being caught. As far as Aidan knew, it wasn’t a fun place to be, and he was starting to worry about how he had gotten out there in the first place.
Then the buildings rose around him and he found himself in the city with all thoughts of the Outskirts fading from his mind. He stepped into the first open store he could find, a run-down little place with bars across the windows and doors. The shelves were barren and the place smelled like mold, but there was an old rack of paperbacks shoved awkwardly into the corner. The pages were yellowed with age and covered in dust, but a brief bit of browsing paid off.
Tucked into the very back of the metal rack, shoved in between a laughable vampire novel and the thirty-third book in a series he’d never heard of, Aidan found a gem. A thick paperback with bent edges and a faded cover. A Stephen King novel that Bishop had admitted to wanting to read but never being able to find after a night of drunken debauchery.
Perfect.
“You want that giftwrapped?” the toothless man at the register drawled, turning the book over slowly in his greasy hands. He shoved the book into a bag without waiting for an answer.
“Thanks,” Aidan muttered as he walked out of the store.
It maybe wasn’t the best gift. Certainly not well thought out. But he needed something, anything, to try and make things right. He had to apologize for everything, and a book was always a great start.
He arrived at the older vampire’s house with sweaty palms and a nervous stomach. Which was odd. Because it had been centuries since he reacted to Bishop’s presence in any way. He used to be awed or scared, but over time the emotions had ground down to an angry, numb feeling, and he’d forgotten about them all together.
But walking up the steps to Bishop’s front door, he actually felt nervous. Excited. Like whatever was beyond that door was important, more important than anyone else. He really needed to see Bishop, to talk to him, to apologize for how thoughtless he’d been, maybe curl up on the couch and watch a movie, or read together. He just wanted to be with Bishop, and he wasn’t even sure why.
He reached out a hand and knocked, shifting the bag in his other hand. He could hear footsteps just beyond the door. If his heart could beat, he was sure it would be hammering right out of his chest. The locks clicked. The knob turned. The door opened.
It wasn’t Bishop.
It was a brunette in her mid-thirties. She frowned at him. Aidan frowned back. He took a step back to look up at the house, take in the familiar bricks, the tarnished numbers by the door.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m looking for someone. I thought he lived here.”
She shook her head. “Not unless the last time you saw him was over ten years ago.”
“He was here last night. I saw him in the window. He waved at me.” Aidan pointed to the window in question and took a shocked step back. The curtains were green. They’d been blue the night before, had been blue for years, decades, had been blue since he’d helped Bishop move in and pick out the furniture and a color scheme
He looked back at the woman. “Where is he?”
“Where is who?” she asked. “Are you ok?” She was looking at him like he was dangerous, some deluded homeless man with day-old clothes and messy hair and a crazy look in his eyes.
And maybe he was.
“Sorry to have bothered you,” he muttered, taking the steps two at a time as he rushed from the door and the miscolored curtains.
Home. He needed to go home. He needed to plop down on the couch and talk to Josh and Sally, find out what was going on, ask them where he’d been and why he’d woken up in a strange room. He just needed to go home.
Home was a vacant lot.
There was police tape around it, burnt wood and the remnants of ash clinging to dirt inside of it. There had been a fire. There had been a fire a while ago, if the fading scorch marks and general disinterest of the few passersby on the sidewalk were anything to go by.
He turned and fled, running faster than he should have through the streets until he was at the door of the funeral home. That, at least, remained unchanged. The sign out front, the oversized doors, even the décor and smell of the place had remained constant since it had become overrun with vampires.
If Bishop wasn’t at his home, he would be there.
Aidan pushed the office doors open and strode in, his fingers tightening around the bag at his side. The lights were on, so he’d been right. Someone was home. “Bishop!”
“I’m sorry?”
The voice wasn’t right, was so wrong that it stopped Aidan in his tracks and sent a chill up his spine. He rounded a corner, peeked around a hearse, and stared at the figure bent over the desk. Bishop’s desk. Not Bishop.
“Carlo?” he asked, not liking the way his voice shook.
Bishop’s Maker looked up at him with wide eyes. “Aidan, what are you doing here? If Annabelle finds you, she’ll rip you apart.”
Aidan stopped just short of the desk, staring at the dead man. “Who?”
“Your Maker,” Carlo sighed. “The one who exiled you.” He squinted, leaning back in his chair. “You’ve been drinking again.”
“No.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m looking for Bishop,” Aidan said. “He wasn’t home.” He dropped his voice to a whisper as things finally began to sink in for him. “My house is gone, too.”
“Bishop?” the older vampire asked.
Aidan nodded. “Bishop. James Bishop. About ye high, blond hair, blue eyes, fan of awkward animal metaphors. You turned him.”
Carlo’s eyes finally lit up with recognition. “James? Aidan, he died before you were even born.”
The younger vampire felt his heart sink. There was a rushing sound in his ears, his own thoughts repeating over and over in his head, series of whats and nos and hows stringing together until they made one thunderous sound and he had to sit down. He fell back into a chair. “No.”
It should have been good news, Bishop being dead. It was something he’d thought about, a fantasy he’d entertained when his mouth tasted of blood and the shame of what he was wrapped around him like a blanket. What if Bishop was dead? How much better would his life be? No one to dog him, no one to hold out a warm hand and welcome him back with open arms. No Bishop meant an end to his problems. That was why he had wished…
That was why he had wished they’d never met.
“Bishop didn’t turn me?”
“Of course not,” Carlo said. “Aidan, are you feeling all right? Do you need me to get someone to take you home?”
“We never met,” he mused, “but I’m still a monster. How old am I?”
“What?”
“I mean, how old was I?”
“Annabelle found you when you were thirty-five. And she will find you again. We need to get you home.”
“I’m in exile.”
Carlo frowned. “Do you need a clean-up, Aidan?”
“I didn’t kill anyone. I’m just… How’d he die?”
“He was in Salem during the trials,” Carlo explained. “He chose to stay in Salem.” He sighed. “You weren’t around yet, and nobody really talks about it, but it was bad. There was an exodus of sorts after they started burning people. Vampires left in droves, but some were unlucky enough to be caught and tortured. The ones who left moved into the bigger towns, established communities like the one here. A few went back.”
“And he never went back?”
“He never left. I never went looking. I suppose, if you want, you can travel up there and see what you can find. Just ask for Sophia at the Witch Museum. She’s one of us. She kept the records of every vampire that left Boston during that time and where they went. If James is still alive, she would know.”
Aidan nodded and got to his feet, taking a deep breath to steady himself. “Thanks.”
“Anything to get you out of Boston, my friend.” Carlo leaned back in his chair. “Out of curiosity, why are you looking for someone you’ve never even met?”
“Because I love him.”
---
The realization wasn’t as shocking as it should have been. The fluttery feeling in his chest, the butterflies in his stomach, the gift, the need to see Bishop, to apologize, to get back in the older vampire’s good graces (if he’d ever even left them in the first place). The way he couldn’t stop thinking about him. Aidan was in love. He just wasn’t sure why.
He’d had to borrow Carlo’s car, unsure if he even had one of his own anymore. He was unsure about a lot of things. If Bishop had never moved to Boston - if he’d died in the late 1600’s as Carlo suspected - then he hadn’t fought in the Revolution. And if he hadn’t fought, then he hadn’t turned Marcus (or Aidan). And if he hadn’t turned Marcus, if Marcus had died a human in the War or shortly after, then he’d never cornered Josh in that alley. And if he hadn’t beaten up Josh, then Aidan had never saved Josh, and they’d never met. They’d never worked together. Never become friends. Never moved in together. They’d never met Sally, which was why the house was gone. Danny had figured out a way to get rid of her once and for all. And without the help of people who could see her, it was possible that she didn’t even know why. She’d probably gone back to haunt him because she still loved him.
Sally was dead and Josh was alone and Aidan was still a vampire. He glanced up into the rearview mirror and frowned at the new lines around his eyes, the strands of gray that had started to streak through the hair at his temples. He was thirty-five. He looked thirty-five. He was going to look like that forever and everyone he knew and cared about was dead because he didn’t want to spend Christmas with the man who’d made him.
Perfect.
He pulled up outside of the museum and stopped the car, staring up at the building. He couldn’t take his hands from the wheel, couldn’t bring himself to get out of the car and find out the full extent of what he’d done.
The Salem Witch Trials. They’d never talked about that point in history. No one Aidan knew who had lived through the period did. He’d never given it much thought. It was something that had happened before his lifetime, something that happened to woman who looked at their neighbors wrong, to people who acted odd, something of a black spot that time couldn’t quite erase.
Aidan forced himself to get out of the car and walk into the building. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to, but he had to. He still had the book rolled up in its little plastic bag in the passenger seat of the car. It seemed more important than before that he find a way to get that gift to Bishop.
There was a woman standing behind a desk at the front of the museum. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail and she had the sleeves of her brown cardigan pushed up past her elbows. Her nametag said “Sophia” and she smiled at him as he entered.
“I’m looking for someone,” Aidan said in lieu of a greeting. “I was told you might be able to help me find him.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. She didn’t look much older than sixteen, and he had to wonder how old she really was, if she was more than just the keeper of the list of names, if she had been the one to write them down in the first place. “Is that so?”
“Carlo sent me,” Aidan clarified, “ from Boston.”
“From Boston, huh?”
His fingers twitched impatiently at his sides as his eyes slid to black. “Yes. Now can you help me, or not?”
The smile returned to Sophia’s face. “Well, why didn’t you say so. Come on, follow me.” She slid from behind the desk and led him up a flight of stairs, down a hallway lined with disturbing paintings of drownings and people burning, and into a locked room. “Been a while since anyone’s come to see me for more than your typical history lesson.”
She closed the door behind them and locked it back up. The room was small, unimpressive, mismatched furniture and a bare floor. A storage room of sorts that contained covered paintings and antique furniture and a single safe set into the wall. Sophia opened it with a flourish of her wrist and pulled out a battered old leatherbound book, which she set on the nearest desk.
Aidan walked around to stand beside her, looking down at the yellowed pages. “Every vampire who left during the trials,” she explained, “and where they ended up.” She flipped to the back of the book, to a short stack of pages written in red. “The martyrs.” She turned to look up at him. “You got a name?”
“James Bishop,” he said.
Sophia pursed her lips. “You’re kidding, right?”
Aidan sighed. He’d been afraid of that. “If you can just tell me what they did with the remains, if there’s maybe a memorial or a headstone somewhere, that’d be ok.”
“He’s not dead. Well, I don’t think he’s dead. He might be dead.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know?” she asked.
“Know what?”
“Well, I just figured that if you were looking for him, then you would know.”
“What?” Aidan demanded, leaning in closer.
Sophia licked her lips. “James Bishop was burnt at the stake.” She closed the book, her fingers fiddling with a small rip in the cover. “A local man accused him of witchcraft, of seducing him and a few others. He was cornered in his house, dragged out into the streets, tied up, and drowned.” She looked up and met Aidan’s eyes. “Vampires are dead. They don’t need oxygen. He didn’t die.”
Aidan felt his stomach drop and clenched his teeth against the sudden feeling of falling.
“They stoned him,” she continued. “They tied him to a post in the center of town and they threw rocks at him. They left him to bleed out. When they went back the next day and he’d healed, they tried to crush him. But - “
“Vampires don’t breathe,” Aidan guessed.
“As long as our heads and our hearts are intact, we survive,” Sophia said. “It’s usually considered a gift.” She sighed. “That was about the time our kind started leaving Salem, realizing that we were in danger of basically being tortured. I kept the list so families could keep track of each other. We spread the news to other communities, warned them to stay away.”
“You said they burned him.”
She nodded. “When nothing else worked, they tied him up and set him on fire. By this time, they were spreading the word to other towns that they had definitive evidence of the existence of witches. A man with black eyes and wolf’s teeth that just wouldn’t die.” She dropped her gaze back to the book. “I stood and I watched the flesh fall from his bones. I listened to him scream. And I did nothing. Eventually, the ropes fell away and he ran into the woods. He was still on fire.” She looked back at Aidan, who was having trouble hearing what she was saying over the rushing in his ears. “That was the last time anyone saw James Bishop. There are legends, of course, that he survived in the forest, maybe made it down to the Jersey Pine Barrens just long enough to inspire another legend or two, but he’s gone. On his own like that, he probably didn’t survive very long. We need community, you know?”
She returned the book to its place in the safe. “Can I ask why you’re looking for him?”
Aidan shook his head, struggling to get words past the lump in his throat. He’d been hurt before, battered and bruised, left to die in fields and in medical tents, stabbed through the chest in a back alley. He knew pain, but he didn’t know torture, couldn’t comprehend fully what she was saying because he had no real point of reference.
“I think I love him,” he muttered.
Sophia laughed. “Yeah, ok, well, you find him, you come tell me. I’ll cross his name out of the back of the book.”
He nodded numbly. “Yeah. Will do.”
---
He started in New Jersey. In the Pine Barrens. He’d heard the legend from various shows on various networks about people hunting for monsters and urban legends. The Jersey Devil. He knew there was a cabin (it was empty) and a path (also empty) and some eyewitnesses (who described something that couldn’t possibly be Bishop, even on his worst day).
It was a wholly unsuccessful endeavor, but it did put Aidan in touch with a small community of vampires in the area, mostly dedicated to hanging out in the woods and scaring teenagers. One of them had been there since the 1700s and knew what Aidan was talking about, had heard the legend trickling down from Salem, and had heard mutterings that whatever had originally haunted the Pine Barrens had moved inland a few years after arriving. Whoever it was, if it was actually a real monster, had headed into the Wilderness.
So Aidan had a lead.
The Wilderness was surprisingly civilized. It wasn’t the free-for-all that some vampires made it out to be in stories designed specifically to scare the new recruits into line. There were smaller clans, tiny family units sprinkled throughout the southern United States, clusters that kept their heads down and their hands clean.
The cities - Boston, New York, and Chicago - were not the end-all be-all of vampire civilization. While the big families were situated in the northeast, there were thriving communities in almost every state in the country, and Aidan had visited most of them with Bishop in his lifetime. They went with news or offers of allegiance, promises of protection and supplies, with revolutionary ideas.
So Aidan started his search with some of those tribes, driving south until he hit a small pocket of vamps just north of the Florida line. One of them had heard the stories about a vampire disappearing after the witch trials, but the rest were clueless and largely unhelpful.
The small clans in Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana weren’t much help, either. A man in Kentucky thought the description Aidan gave him sounded familiar, and said that there were whispers of a new family gaining power in California. It was worth a shot.
Vampires of the west coast were generally more secretive, more independent. They’d refused to organize since the settling of the area, taking care of their own individual problems and largely ignoring each other, so it was a shock to find that they’d started banding together just north of LA.
Aidan did stop in Texas and Arizona hoping to confirm the rumors, maybe get a better idea of what he was heading into and who was heading up the operation. Three of the four clans in the area had heard that a change was taking place in California, and that was all he needed to hear.
Bishop wasn’t there. There was an older gentleman with blond hair and blue eyes trying to rally whatever stragglers he could find into a family with connections and power, but he wasn’t Bishop and he was far from being successful.
He had, however, recently spoken to a man who was part of a nomadic tribe in the Midwest who, he said, had an interesting story about a random encounter with a vampire like the one Aidan had gotten so used to describing. Last known location of the nomad was southern Idaho, and Aidan was able to leave California with new hope.
He’d been traveling a little over six weeks when he finally found a good, solid lead. The man’s name was Miles and he was part of a small clan that traveled through the Midwest.
He was full of stories, living in such a dangerous area. The reason most vampires stuck to the coasts and boarders was because the Midwest was frequented by hunters, people who killed things like them for a living. Because of the constant threat, any family living in the middle of the country was forced to move constantly, never staying in a single place for more than a few months at a time.
Miles had stories of narrow escapes and bloody disasters, hunters breaking into their homes and ripping their families apart. He was a decent storyteller with the scars to back it up, but Aidan wasn’t interested in his life. He only wanted to know about Bishop.
“Who?” Miles asked.
“James Bishop,” Aidan said. “About this tall, blond hair, blue eyes. If I had a picture, I’d show you. Someone in California said you saw him?”
Miles seemed to consider for a moment. “The hobo? Why you lookin’ for him?”
“So you have seen him? Where?”
The other vampire shrugged. “’Bout a year and a half back,” he said. “I was passing through this little one-horse town in Montana, scopin’ the place for hunters or other clans - don’t wanna run inta other clans, start a turf war, ya know?”
“Bishop?”
“Right. Right, your guy. Well, I’d blown through my readin’ material for the trip, I saw a bookstore, thought why not? I go in, I browse. There’s this guy at the counter - your guy - got this stack a books ‘bout as tall as he is. This guy - you gotta realize - he’s all dirty and scruffy, smells like maybe the crusty stuff under his nails is blood, ya know, so now I’m intrigued.
“Cashier tells him the total, but he don’t got no money. She says she can’t just give him the stuff for free and he reaches out and touches her arm, looks her in the eye, says ‘but I’mma regular.’ She tells him to enjoy the books and have a nice day.”
“He compelled her.”
Miles nodded. “Now this guy, you could tell just by lookin’ at him that don’t have no family. Matted hair, old clothes, the works. And I don’t want this guy walkin’ around this town in the cold, on the streets. We’re all a family, ya know, even if we have our differences sometimes. So I go after him, try to get him to come back with me, thinkin’ we can clean him up, get him a decent meal, but when I get out onta the street, he’s gone. Poof.”
“I need the name of the town, Miles.”
“Sure. It was, uh, Golden something.”
“I’m gonna need the exact name of the town,” Aidan said.
“What do you want from me, man? It’s been over a year.”
“I need to find him.”
“All right. Um. Golden Canyon? Golden Valley? Golden Gulch? Something like that. The last one, yeah. Definitely the last one.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
It was the first real glimmer of hope Aidan had seen since he’d left Salem. There was even a Golden Gulch on the map, a small town in southern Montana. It was surrounded by woods, which were surrounded by wide open plains. The place really was in the middle of nowhere, and that made it the perfect place to hide.
The town was as small as Miles had made it out to be, consisting of some scattered farms and a single main street lined with dying businesses. There was a used bookstore.
The cashier seemed disinterred until Aidan told her who he was looking for. “He comes in here all the time,” she said. “No one knows his name, just that he lives north of town.” Her eyes blanked out for a moment, glazing over. “He’s a regular.” She blinked. “Good luck finding him.”
There was only one road leading out of town to the north, and Aidan followed it until he couldn’t anymore. It just stopped about a mile into the woods without warning, nearly causing him crash into a small cluster of tree stumps. There was a smaller trail leading past the stumps and further into the trees, and Aidan followed it on foot.
The trail was long and winding, and just when he was about to give up hope he heard a sound. A soft bleating. Sheep.
Aidan peeked around a tree and saw a small pen at the edge of a clearing housing three sheep. The animals saw him and wandered toward him, making soft snuffling noises as they did. Which was odd. Animals could usually tell he wasn’t human, could smell the death and blood on him. Animals usually ran.
He walked up to the pen and reached out a hand, patting one of the animals on the head. It looked up at him with dark eyes and nuzzled into the touch.
Just beyond the pen were a pile of chopped wood and an axe. There was a single large bale of hay.
There was a house in the clearing. Not a large house. More like a shack. A tiny thing that leaned slightly to the right, with a door and some windows and a chimney.
Aidan abandoned the sheep to inspect the shack. It seemed sturdy, despite the lean. The wood was starting to warp in a few places, and it looked as through the roof had been recently repaired. There were soft noises, hums and shufflings, coming from inside the place.
The vampire took a deep breath and stepped up to the door.
He knocked.
There were footsteps, the muted sounds of a deep voice, and the door was pulled open. Bishop. It was Bishop. With dirty clothes and a few days’ worth of stubble and long dirty hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. Bishop.
Aidan felt himself smile, felt relief and happiness at the knowledge that his nearly two-month-long journey had finally come to an end and he had found him. And yeah. Yeah, he was definitely in love. Definitely, head over heels, irrevocably and unconditionally in love with James Bishop.
“Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” Aidan said. “My name’s Aidan. You don’t know me, but I love you.”
To his surprise, Bishop let him in.
---
“So let me get this straight,” Bishop said, staring up at Aidan from his place on the dirty mattress. “You made a wish on the Christmas star on Christmas Eve that you and I had never met, and it came true?”
Aidan, who had spent most of his outlandish explanation digging a groove in the shack’s single table with his fingernail, nodded. “I know it sounds crazy, but -“
Bishop held up a hand to silence him. “My only question is this: if you wanted me out of your life that bad, why come and find me?”
“I wondered about that,” the younger vampire admitted, “when I started looking for you. At first, I was just confused. I woke up in a strange house in a bed that wasn’t mine. My friends were gone. I didn’t know what was happening, but you always had a way of understanding exactly what was going on. And I felt guilty.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t get you anything for Christmas.” Bishop smiled at that, prompting Aidan to continue. “The longer I looked, the more I needed to find you, and then it just hit me. I was in love.”
“But you wanted me gone.”
Aidan nodded. “I wondered about that, too. The whole time I was driving around looking for you, I thought about it. You must have made a wish, too.”
“I don’t recall it.”
“That’s because it wasn’ you ou, it wa my ou.”
Bishop hummed at that. “And what did your me wish for, then?”
“You wished that I loved you.” He slid out of the single chair and sat beside Bishop on the old mattress, close enough that their shoulders were touching. “But I don’t think it was that. I think you wished I would love you back, because I’ve never felt this way about anyone. It’s not just that I wanted to find you, but that I had to. I needed it. I needed to see you and talk to you and I bought you a Christmas present, but I left it in the car, and I guess it’s late enough we can call it a Valentine’s Day gift, huh? But it’s different, the way I feel now. It’s not some appreciation of looks that leads into wanting to be with you. I just lov you. Everything about you.”
Bishop stared at him for a while, the silence stretching between them, and Aidan suddenly realized how crazy he sounded. He should have planned it better, tried to make it into some random meeting that could blossom into more, turn the whole thing into something more logical. He should have lied.
“Aren’t you mad?” Bishop asked, voice suddenly quiet, almost a whisper.
“What?”
“If you’re right, if I made you love me, if I forced this onto you when you clearly didn’t want it, and you’ve figured out that I did it, shouldn’t you be mad?”
Oh. He hadn’t thought about that. It honestly had not crossed his mind. He should have been angry. He should have gone into a blind rage at being manipulated and controlled like that, losing his freedom, taking his thoughts and emotions and twisting them into something else. But when he tried to summon the anger and the hate, all he could do was think about Sophia’s story, about how horrible it must have been to be burnt alive, to be tortured and not die, to flee the familiar and never return.
“What happened?” he asked. “What happened in Salem?”
Bishop frowned at the obvious change of subject. “Why do you care?”
“Because where I come from, you didn’t stay in Salem. You went with Carlo to Boston. Anything that happened to you after he left is my fault, and I want to know.”
The older man licked his lips and considered for a moment. “We were traveling,” he said. “Carlo and I. Trying to find more of our own to bring them to Boston, which was becoming this mecca for vampires. So many of us situated there, trying to escape the persecution of the hunters by finding safety in numbers. We stopped in Salem for a few weeks to see if we could drum up any support.
“There was a man there, a human. His name was Samuel Waite.”
“What?” Aidan interrupted.
Bishop flinched away. “I figured you knew, considering you worked out that I made you love m back. Is it a problem?”
“What? No, not that. The guy.” He sighed and shook his head. “Samuel Waite was my great-grandfather. My father was named for him, actually. I was always told he was an upstanding guy.”
The older man grinned. “We used to sneak out of town and neck in the woods. Hope that’s not a problem, either.”
Aidan smiled back. “I can look past it if you can.”
“So, uh, Sammy was my crush for a while. I’d watch him around town, try and catch his eye. Finally got up the nerve to talk to him a week before we were supposed to leave, and Carlo gave me a choice: stay in Salem and try my luck, or go with him. I chose Samuel.” He shook his head. “Things were great. We got together. We couldn’t really be public about it, of course, but we were happy with secret meetings and various fantasies.
“We were in love. So in love that I couldn’t hide it anymore. So I told him what I was, showed him. I promised that I would never hurt him or turn him if he didn’t want me to, and he took it so well. Two days later there’s a knock at the door, half the town with pitchforks - if you’d believe that - and it turns out he turned me in. Accused me of seducing him, being in league with the Devil, turning him to sin.
“He said he loved me, and he sat by while they… well, if you’re here asking about it, you probably know what they did.”
Aidan nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Ancient history,” Bishop said with a shrug. He turned to look at the younger vampire and smiled. “You have his eyes, you know.”
“I didn’t.”
“You’re really not mad?”
“I’m really not mad.”
Bishop stood and brushed some unseen dust off of his pants, turning around and looking down at Aidan. “I only have one bed.”
Aidan smiled. “I think I can live with that.”
---
He gave Bishop the book for Valentine’s Day, chest swelling at the look of pure joy and surprise on the older man’s face.
“How’d you know I like Stephen King?”
Aidan shrugged. “Some things never change.”
Bishop’s face fell as he flipped through the pages. “I didn’t get you anything.”
“I turned up on your doorstep less than a week ago. Why would I expect anything?”
“Wait here.” Bishop disappeared through the front door. Aidan could hear the sound of chopping and hammering outside, and after about half an hour the older vampire returned holding a wooden chair. He set it down at the table opposite the one that had been there before and smiled. “Now you have one, too.”
It was a sad little shack, only containing the mattress, a table, the two chairs, and a few bookcases. There was no fireplace like Aidan had thought, and no electricity. No running water. Bishop didn’t have lanterns or flashlights, relying instead on their innate ability to see in the dark.
He kept out of the town as much as possible, only venturing out to collect feed for the sheep or new books to read.
The livestock, he’d explained to Aidan on his first day there, were the main food source. Any mysterious deaths or disappearances in such a small town - especially if there were a large number over time - would attract the attention of hunters, and that was the last thing he wanted. So he lived by tapping the sheep, stealing a new one each time one of his own died, and stalking the woods for bigger prey if he ever got injured.
“You have no idea the number of wolves and coyotes I’ve gutted trying to kill my sheep,” he’d told Aidan with a laugh, and it was true. His third day at the shack, Aidan was woken in the night by the sound of the sheep screaming. He’d run outside to find Bishop crouching near the pen, his clothes covered in fur and blood, the mangled body of a wolf laid out before him.
It was safe and practical, he had to admit, and it kept them both from having to kill humans, but it struck Aidan as barely a life. The cabin was freezing, even so late in winter, and as the weeks dragged on, it got worse.
Bishop didn’t seem to notice. He took Aidan out, letting him borrow a spare holey coat that reeked of old blood and decay, hoping to make a frame for the bed they’d been sharing. It was cold on the floor, and Aidan had started complaining, but for some reason raising the bed was the only idea the older vampire would even entertain.
They trekked through the snow together, Bishop pointing out certain trees or animal tracks, making small talk as Aidan shivered behind him. They weren’t supposed to feel the cold, which meant that it was well below freezing. “You’re not cold?” Aidan asked again, earning a chuckle.
“Well, I have been out here for almost 300 years,” Bishop reasoned. “Guess I had time to get used to it.”
“Can we at least start a fire when we get back?”
“No!” It was the first time in their nearly three weeks together that Bishop had snapped at him, and the older man went full monty, eyes flashing black as his fangs descended. He blinked, features sliding back into soft lines, amiable. “No, we can’t.”
Aidan sighed and trudged along after him, his foot hitting an exposed root and sending him toppling suddenly forward. He slammed into Bishop and the two rolled down a nearby embankment, snow sticking to their clothes as they tumbled end over end toward a frozen stream.
Somehow, Bishop ended up on top of him, looking down at him with a soft smile and softer eyes, and Aidan was unsure how he’d never realized just how lue hey were. How light and haunted and sad. Sadder than anything he could remember seeing, and that was saying a lot because he looked in the mirror almost every day, had to stare at himself, meet his own gaze, and Bishop’s eyes were probably the saddest thing he’d ever seen.
Before he knew what was happening, Bishop was leaning down, pressing a chaste kiss to his lips, and then rolling off of him to stand.
Aidan propped himself up on one elbow and looked back at the older man, noticing the small smile and the way he was wringing his hands in the rough fabric of his jacket.
“You coming?” Bishop asked, and Aidan got to his feet and followed him deeper into the woods, brushing snow off of his clothes, too busy in his thoughts to realize that he wasn’t even cold anymore.
---
The temperature had dropped below zero, which apparently wasn’t weird for the Midwest, even in March. Aidan was sure that if his fingers could’ve turned blue, they’d be black by now, but Bishop refused to do anything more than pile an extra blanket on their bed.
“We need a fire,” Aidan said for maybe the fiftieth time that night. “It’s freezing.”
Bishop had started the evening off by glaring at him whenever he asked, before moving on to sighing and rolling his eyes, and finally to biting his lip. This time, Aidan got a different response.
“Fine,” Bishop muttered.
“What?”
“Move those bookcases,” the older man said, waving a hand at two shelves that sat side-by-side against a wall. “Make sure the flume is open and the chimney’s clean.”
“So there is a fireplace?”
Bishop nodded. “Yeah. I’ll go grab some wood from outside.”
Aidan did as he was told, sliding the two bookcases apart from each other to reveal an old fireplace set into the wall. The stones were crumbling a bit and the hearth was small, but it would be enough to heat up the small shack.
“Why were there shelves in front of it?” Aidan asked when he heard the door open.
Bishop dropped a few logs onto the floor beside him. “Because,” he said with a shrug before retreating back to his corner or the room. He opened up the torn paperback he’d been skimming, burying his nose in the pages.
Aidan shook his head and got to work loading the logs into the fireplace, smiling as the first bit of kindling (a handful of dried leaves that had blown into a corner sometime before he’d arrived at the shack) sparked and held the flame. In no time, he had a roaring fire going, the room instantly warming, everything illuminated by the shaky glow.
He turned with a smile on his face. “See? Isn’t that better?”
Bishop was pressed tight against the wall, his legs pulled to his chest, black eyes peeking over his knees. His nails were digging into his skin, drawing blood, but he didn’t seem to notice. The firelight reflected in his eyes, reds and yellows playing in the dark pools, and realization hit Aidan like a sharp blow to the head.
He pulled off his coat threw it onto the fire, pushing and patting, singeing his skin as he struggled to put it out. The room was plunged into darkness and all he could hear was the eerie silence of the snow-covered wilderness and Bishop’s labored breathing.
He blinked and the world came back into focus, the darkness fading, eyes adjusting in the way that they were always meant to, the predator overriding whatever was left of the human.
He was selfish. The thought hit him with the same bright focus as the rest of the room. He was selfish and he hadn’t thought. Not about Bishop. Only about himself. He was cold. He was uncomfortable.
Aidan crawled across the floor and sat next to the older man, back against the wall. It was colder there, frigid air seeping through the cracks and breaks in the wood, the heat of the brief fire already beginning to fade.
“I’m sorry.”
Bishop was silent. Kept staring at the dark fireplace, at the glow of heat that still pulsed a lazy red.
“I didn’t think.”
It made sense, of course. Why the small shack was so cold and dark all the time. No electricity for someone who wanted to stay off the grid left candles and lanterns and warm hearths as the only options, but those had all been ignored.
Because of the fire.
Because the man sitting so tense beside him had been burned, had been burned alive, and the scars were still there. Aidan had forgotten that. He’d forgotten, and he was worried that maybe he’d forgotten something else, something important, so many important things that would be trivial to him but so big to Bishop. Maybe not here and now, but before. In Boston. How many times had he hurt this man without realizing it?
“You were cold,” Bishop whispered, and Aidan realized that he was shaking, they were both shaking, the scent of cold and fear mixing in the air around them.
Aidan leaned closer, wrapping his arms around the older vampire, feeling muscles relax as Bishop fell into him. “There are other ways to keep warm.”
Fandom: Being Human US
Rating: G-13
Pairing: ishop/Aidan
Total Word Count: Over 13,000
Summary: egend says that a wish made on the Christmas Star will come true. So Bishop wishes that Aidan loved him. Aidan wishes they had never met. There's no way anything could go wrong, right?
Notes: haracters aren't mine. Titles is from that "Last Christmas" song. I'm afraid this may have turned into a massive headcanon dump, but there's a plot and I'm actually really happy with how it turned out. Happy Whatever Offends You The Least, guys!
There is a legend among the vampires, passed down for generations, stated as fact and morphed slowly into legend with each retelling.
Once upon a time, in the Middle East, a vampire fell in love. This was not an odd occurrence. Love is older than time itself, older than humanity and monsters. This particular instance of love was different, though. Special. For this vampire fell for a mortal man.
His name was Joseph. Hers was Mary.
Their love ran deep as it could, and they spent every moment together. They pined. They planned. They barely escaped persecution, a horrible, permanent death for Mary at the hands of those who refused to see the truth.
Joseph clung to his humanity, and his lover understood. She missed her own life, her breath, the fluttering of a heart that no longer beat within her chest.
Mostly, she missed her chance at having a family. Her only hope of a child lay in turning one, and that never ended well.
The couple mourned their loss. They wailed their despair at the heavens until the heavens answered. One mild night in the desert, as they sought shelter from the elements, the sky became suddenly illuminated by the brightest, most beautiful light either of them had ever seen.
It was a star. An impossible star. It blotted out the light of every other body in the sky, shining brighter than even the sun. They gazed upon the star and they voiced their plea once more, whispering to the heavens. “A son,” they said, “bring us a son.”
The star answered.
A child awaited them in a manger. His eyes were bright and intelligent, his heart beat with strength, but he was cold to the touch. He did not cry, for he did not feel the cold. He truly was theirs, a perfect mixture of human and vampire.
They named him Jesus.
This is the story that vampires tell when the air turns crisp and the snow falls, when the stars dot the sky earlier and earlier in the evening and humans recite tall tales of salvation and eternal life to their own youth.
This is the story of the vampires’ star.
It is the Christmas story.
---
The snow was drifting lazily down from the sky, swirling across the streets and sidewalks to create beautiful patterns on the concrete before being disturbed by passing cars and shuffling feet. Aidan walked along in silence, his hands shoved deep into his pockets even though he barely felt the cold. Lights twinkled above and around him, but he barely paid them any notice.
It was Christmas Eve. Josh was spending the evening with his family. Sally was haunting her own parents and siblings. They wouldn’t be back until late. Aidan was left alone.
Well, he didn’t have to be alone. There was Rebecca. She’d invited him over for dinner, but he knew what that meant and wasn’t too interested. There was always Bishop, holed up in his old house with an oversized tree and some Christmas special droning on in the background, but Aidan shuddered at the thought. Knocking on that door would mean weakness, would be seen as a submission. He wasn’t going to be lured in by a few decorations and Claymation cartoons. He couldn’t be so easily bought with human traditions.
He wondered, though. What it would be like. A real Christmas. No blood, no death, just a group of people sitting around a table soaking in each other’s presence. Gifts. Music. Stories and laughter and warmth.
He hadn’t even realized he’d stopped to stare at one of the decorated house windows until a curtain was pulled aside and Bishop’s face appeared. He smiled and waved, the reds and greens and golds of the flashing lights reflecting in his eyes.
Aidan frowned at him, pulling his coat further around himself, and stalked off into the night.
He didn’t want a fake Christmas, a false family. Didn’t want bribes and ultimatums, ulterior motives.
He’d had it once. A real family. A wife and a son. Parents and in-laws. A warm house and hot supper. Laughter and jokes and love. He wasn’t going to go running back to the person who’d stripped it all away for a sad approximation. He wasn’t running back to Bishop. Not again.
So he walked down the cold streets of Boston, his eyes cast to the ground, watching the snow swirl around his feet. It took him by surprise sometimes, how much he still missed them. When he was alone with his thoughts it seemed overwhelming. The memories and pain and anger. What he wouldn’t do to get them back.
Aidan stood on his doorstep and looked up at the sky. The snow was falling harder now, sticking in his eyelashes and blurring his vision. He frowned.
There was a light in the sky, hanging low over Boston, brighter than the streetlamps. A single star that managed to outshine the city. Beautiful in its radiance, it seemed to pulse with bright silvers and blues, a steady beat that managed to calm him, to push out the pain and anger and crushing loneliness of the holidays. It was an invitation, open arms ready catch him if he fell, something that would understand.
“I wish I’d never met James Bishop,” Aidan muttered, finally pulling his eyes from the star. He unlocked the door and stepped into the dark house, letting the bricks blot out the light as the emptiness of the place enveloped him.
---
“I just wish he loved me back.”
---
He wasn’t in his bed.
His thoughts immediately went to Bishop, but not in the way he would have expected. He didn’t blame his Maker for the strange sheets and peeling wallpaper, the slight stench of urine and blood and bleach.
No, Aidan woke up in a strange room on Christmas morning and his first thought was the sudden and painful realization that he hadn’t bought anything for Bishop. For Josh and Sally and Emily and Nora and Rebecca, yes. But not for Bishop.
It was a wrong that he had to right.
There were clothes piled up on the cold hardwood of the floor, still smelling relatively fresh. He stumbled to the pile and pulled them on, gazing around the room. Through the three broken slats on the blinds, he could see the city, which meant he was outside of the city, which didn’t make any sense.
He finished buttoning his jeans and threw on his jacket, reaching for the key ring that sat on a table by the door out of instinct as he left. Maybe he had been there before.
The street outside of the apartment building was as unfamiliar as the room, and Aidan couldn’t help but look around as he walked toward the hustle of Boston. He knew the area, at least. It was the closet to the city a vampire could be without getting swept up in the politics of the place. The Outskirts. The Wilderness. There were a few of their people living out there, exiles who hoped for a triumphant return, a few generic-looking vampires who managed to sneak in to the blood dens once in a blue moon without being caught. As far as Aidan knew, it wasn’t a fun place to be, and he was starting to worry about how he had gotten out there in the first place.
Then the buildings rose around him and he found himself in the city with all thoughts of the Outskirts fading from his mind. He stepped into the first open store he could find, a run-down little place with bars across the windows and doors. The shelves were barren and the place smelled like mold, but there was an old rack of paperbacks shoved awkwardly into the corner. The pages were yellowed with age and covered in dust, but a brief bit of browsing paid off.
Tucked into the very back of the metal rack, shoved in between a laughable vampire novel and the thirty-third book in a series he’d never heard of, Aidan found a gem. A thick paperback with bent edges and a faded cover. A Stephen King novel that Bishop had admitted to wanting to read but never being able to find after a night of drunken debauchery.
Perfect.
“You want that giftwrapped?” the toothless man at the register drawled, turning the book over slowly in his greasy hands. He shoved the book into a bag without waiting for an answer.
“Thanks,” Aidan muttered as he walked out of the store.
It maybe wasn’t the best gift. Certainly not well thought out. But he needed something, anything, to try and make things right. He had to apologize for everything, and a book was always a great start.
He arrived at the older vampire’s house with sweaty palms and a nervous stomach. Which was odd. Because it had been centuries since he reacted to Bishop’s presence in any way. He used to be awed or scared, but over time the emotions had ground down to an angry, numb feeling, and he’d forgotten about them all together.
But walking up the steps to Bishop’s front door, he actually felt nervous. Excited. Like whatever was beyond that door was important, more important than anyone else. He really needed to see Bishop, to talk to him, to apologize for how thoughtless he’d been, maybe curl up on the couch and watch a movie, or read together. He just wanted to be with Bishop, and he wasn’t even sure why.
He reached out a hand and knocked, shifting the bag in his other hand. He could hear footsteps just beyond the door. If his heart could beat, he was sure it would be hammering right out of his chest. The locks clicked. The knob turned. The door opened.
It wasn’t Bishop.
It was a brunette in her mid-thirties. She frowned at him. Aidan frowned back. He took a step back to look up at the house, take in the familiar bricks, the tarnished numbers by the door.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m looking for someone. I thought he lived here.”
She shook her head. “Not unless the last time you saw him was over ten years ago.”
“He was here last night. I saw him in the window. He waved at me.” Aidan pointed to the window in question and took a shocked step back. The curtains were green. They’d been blue the night before, had been blue for years, decades, had been blue since he’d helped Bishop move in and pick out the furniture and a color scheme
He looked back at the woman. “Where is he?”
“Where is who?” she asked. “Are you ok?” She was looking at him like he was dangerous, some deluded homeless man with day-old clothes and messy hair and a crazy look in his eyes.
And maybe he was.
“Sorry to have bothered you,” he muttered, taking the steps two at a time as he rushed from the door and the miscolored curtains.
Home. He needed to go home. He needed to plop down on the couch and talk to Josh and Sally, find out what was going on, ask them where he’d been and why he’d woken up in a strange room. He just needed to go home.
Home was a vacant lot.
There was police tape around it, burnt wood and the remnants of ash clinging to dirt inside of it. There had been a fire. There had been a fire a while ago, if the fading scorch marks and general disinterest of the few passersby on the sidewalk were anything to go by.
He turned and fled, running faster than he should have through the streets until he was at the door of the funeral home. That, at least, remained unchanged. The sign out front, the oversized doors, even the décor and smell of the place had remained constant since it had become overrun with vampires.
If Bishop wasn’t at his home, he would be there.
Aidan pushed the office doors open and strode in, his fingers tightening around the bag at his side. The lights were on, so he’d been right. Someone was home. “Bishop!”
“I’m sorry?”
The voice wasn’t right, was so wrong that it stopped Aidan in his tracks and sent a chill up his spine. He rounded a corner, peeked around a hearse, and stared at the figure bent over the desk. Bishop’s desk. Not Bishop.
“Carlo?” he asked, not liking the way his voice shook.
Bishop’s Maker looked up at him with wide eyes. “Aidan, what are you doing here? If Annabelle finds you, she’ll rip you apart.”
Aidan stopped just short of the desk, staring at the dead man. “Who?”
“Your Maker,” Carlo sighed. “The one who exiled you.” He squinted, leaning back in his chair. “You’ve been drinking again.”
“No.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m looking for Bishop,” Aidan said. “He wasn’t home.” He dropped his voice to a whisper as things finally began to sink in for him. “My house is gone, too.”
“Bishop?” the older vampire asked.
Aidan nodded. “Bishop. James Bishop. About ye high, blond hair, blue eyes, fan of awkward animal metaphors. You turned him.”
Carlo’s eyes finally lit up with recognition. “James? Aidan, he died before you were even born.”
The younger vampire felt his heart sink. There was a rushing sound in his ears, his own thoughts repeating over and over in his head, series of whats and nos and hows stringing together until they made one thunderous sound and he had to sit down. He fell back into a chair. “No.”
It should have been good news, Bishop being dead. It was something he’d thought about, a fantasy he’d entertained when his mouth tasted of blood and the shame of what he was wrapped around him like a blanket. What if Bishop was dead? How much better would his life be? No one to dog him, no one to hold out a warm hand and welcome him back with open arms. No Bishop meant an end to his problems. That was why he had wished…
That was why he had wished they’d never met.
“Bishop didn’t turn me?”
“Of course not,” Carlo said. “Aidan, are you feeling all right? Do you need me to get someone to take you home?”
“We never met,” he mused, “but I’m still a monster. How old am I?”
“What?”
“I mean, how old was I?”
“Annabelle found you when you were thirty-five. And she will find you again. We need to get you home.”
“I’m in exile.”
Carlo frowned. “Do you need a clean-up, Aidan?”
“I didn’t kill anyone. I’m just… How’d he die?”
“He was in Salem during the trials,” Carlo explained. “He chose to stay in Salem.” He sighed. “You weren’t around yet, and nobody really talks about it, but it was bad. There was an exodus of sorts after they started burning people. Vampires left in droves, but some were unlucky enough to be caught and tortured. The ones who left moved into the bigger towns, established communities like the one here. A few went back.”
“And he never went back?”
“He never left. I never went looking. I suppose, if you want, you can travel up there and see what you can find. Just ask for Sophia at the Witch Museum. She’s one of us. She kept the records of every vampire that left Boston during that time and where they went. If James is still alive, she would know.”
Aidan nodded and got to his feet, taking a deep breath to steady himself. “Thanks.”
“Anything to get you out of Boston, my friend.” Carlo leaned back in his chair. “Out of curiosity, why are you looking for someone you’ve never even met?”
“Because I love him.”
---
The realization wasn’t as shocking as it should have been. The fluttery feeling in his chest, the butterflies in his stomach, the gift, the need to see Bishop, to apologize, to get back in the older vampire’s good graces (if he’d ever even left them in the first place). The way he couldn’t stop thinking about him. Aidan was in love. He just wasn’t sure why.
He’d had to borrow Carlo’s car, unsure if he even had one of his own anymore. He was unsure about a lot of things. If Bishop had never moved to Boston - if he’d died in the late 1600’s as Carlo suspected - then he hadn’t fought in the Revolution. And if he hadn’t fought, then he hadn’t turned Marcus (or Aidan). And if he hadn’t turned Marcus, if Marcus had died a human in the War or shortly after, then he’d never cornered Josh in that alley. And if he hadn’t beaten up Josh, then Aidan had never saved Josh, and they’d never met. They’d never worked together. Never become friends. Never moved in together. They’d never met Sally, which was why the house was gone. Danny had figured out a way to get rid of her once and for all. And without the help of people who could see her, it was possible that she didn’t even know why. She’d probably gone back to haunt him because she still loved him.
Sally was dead and Josh was alone and Aidan was still a vampire. He glanced up into the rearview mirror and frowned at the new lines around his eyes, the strands of gray that had started to streak through the hair at his temples. He was thirty-five. He looked thirty-five. He was going to look like that forever and everyone he knew and cared about was dead because he didn’t want to spend Christmas with the man who’d made him.
Perfect.
He pulled up outside of the museum and stopped the car, staring up at the building. He couldn’t take his hands from the wheel, couldn’t bring himself to get out of the car and find out the full extent of what he’d done.
The Salem Witch Trials. They’d never talked about that point in history. No one Aidan knew who had lived through the period did. He’d never given it much thought. It was something that had happened before his lifetime, something that happened to woman who looked at their neighbors wrong, to people who acted odd, something of a black spot that time couldn’t quite erase.
Aidan forced himself to get out of the car and walk into the building. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to, but he had to. He still had the book rolled up in its little plastic bag in the passenger seat of the car. It seemed more important than before that he find a way to get that gift to Bishop.
There was a woman standing behind a desk at the front of the museum. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail and she had the sleeves of her brown cardigan pushed up past her elbows. Her nametag said “Sophia” and she smiled at him as he entered.
“I’m looking for someone,” Aidan said in lieu of a greeting. “I was told you might be able to help me find him.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. She didn’t look much older than sixteen, and he had to wonder how old she really was, if she was more than just the keeper of the list of names, if she had been the one to write them down in the first place. “Is that so?”
“Carlo sent me,” Aidan clarified, “ from Boston.”
“From Boston, huh?”
His fingers twitched impatiently at his sides as his eyes slid to black. “Yes. Now can you help me, or not?”
The smile returned to Sophia’s face. “Well, why didn’t you say so. Come on, follow me.” She slid from behind the desk and led him up a flight of stairs, down a hallway lined with disturbing paintings of drownings and people burning, and into a locked room. “Been a while since anyone’s come to see me for more than your typical history lesson.”
She closed the door behind them and locked it back up. The room was small, unimpressive, mismatched furniture and a bare floor. A storage room of sorts that contained covered paintings and antique furniture and a single safe set into the wall. Sophia opened it with a flourish of her wrist and pulled out a battered old leatherbound book, which she set on the nearest desk.
Aidan walked around to stand beside her, looking down at the yellowed pages. “Every vampire who left during the trials,” she explained, “and where they ended up.” She flipped to the back of the book, to a short stack of pages written in red. “The martyrs.” She turned to look up at him. “You got a name?”
“James Bishop,” he said.
Sophia pursed her lips. “You’re kidding, right?”
Aidan sighed. He’d been afraid of that. “If you can just tell me what they did with the remains, if there’s maybe a memorial or a headstone somewhere, that’d be ok.”
“He’s not dead. Well, I don’t think he’s dead. He might be dead.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know?” she asked.
“Know what?”
“Well, I just figured that if you were looking for him, then you would know.”
“What?” Aidan demanded, leaning in closer.
Sophia licked her lips. “James Bishop was burnt at the stake.” She closed the book, her fingers fiddling with a small rip in the cover. “A local man accused him of witchcraft, of seducing him and a few others. He was cornered in his house, dragged out into the streets, tied up, and drowned.” She looked up and met Aidan’s eyes. “Vampires are dead. They don’t need oxygen. He didn’t die.”
Aidan felt his stomach drop and clenched his teeth against the sudden feeling of falling.
“They stoned him,” she continued. “They tied him to a post in the center of town and they threw rocks at him. They left him to bleed out. When they went back the next day and he’d healed, they tried to crush him. But - “
“Vampires don’t breathe,” Aidan guessed.
“As long as our heads and our hearts are intact, we survive,” Sophia said. “It’s usually considered a gift.” She sighed. “That was about the time our kind started leaving Salem, realizing that we were in danger of basically being tortured. I kept the list so families could keep track of each other. We spread the news to other communities, warned them to stay away.”
“You said they burned him.”
She nodded. “When nothing else worked, they tied him up and set him on fire. By this time, they were spreading the word to other towns that they had definitive evidence of the existence of witches. A man with black eyes and wolf’s teeth that just wouldn’t die.” She dropped her gaze back to the book. “I stood and I watched the flesh fall from his bones. I listened to him scream. And I did nothing. Eventually, the ropes fell away and he ran into the woods. He was still on fire.” She looked back at Aidan, who was having trouble hearing what she was saying over the rushing in his ears. “That was the last time anyone saw James Bishop. There are legends, of course, that he survived in the forest, maybe made it down to the Jersey Pine Barrens just long enough to inspire another legend or two, but he’s gone. On his own like that, he probably didn’t survive very long. We need community, you know?”
She returned the book to its place in the safe. “Can I ask why you’re looking for him?”
Aidan shook his head, struggling to get words past the lump in his throat. He’d been hurt before, battered and bruised, left to die in fields and in medical tents, stabbed through the chest in a back alley. He knew pain, but he didn’t know torture, couldn’t comprehend fully what she was saying because he had no real point of reference.
“I think I love him,” he muttered.
Sophia laughed. “Yeah, ok, well, you find him, you come tell me. I’ll cross his name out of the back of the book.”
He nodded numbly. “Yeah. Will do.”
---
He started in New Jersey. In the Pine Barrens. He’d heard the legend from various shows on various networks about people hunting for monsters and urban legends. The Jersey Devil. He knew there was a cabin (it was empty) and a path (also empty) and some eyewitnesses (who described something that couldn’t possibly be Bishop, even on his worst day).
It was a wholly unsuccessful endeavor, but it did put Aidan in touch with a small community of vampires in the area, mostly dedicated to hanging out in the woods and scaring teenagers. One of them had been there since the 1700s and knew what Aidan was talking about, had heard the legend trickling down from Salem, and had heard mutterings that whatever had originally haunted the Pine Barrens had moved inland a few years after arriving. Whoever it was, if it was actually a real monster, had headed into the Wilderness.
So Aidan had a lead.
The Wilderness was surprisingly civilized. It wasn’t the free-for-all that some vampires made it out to be in stories designed specifically to scare the new recruits into line. There were smaller clans, tiny family units sprinkled throughout the southern United States, clusters that kept their heads down and their hands clean.
The cities - Boston, New York, and Chicago - were not the end-all be-all of vampire civilization. While the big families were situated in the northeast, there were thriving communities in almost every state in the country, and Aidan had visited most of them with Bishop in his lifetime. They went with news or offers of allegiance, promises of protection and supplies, with revolutionary ideas.
So Aidan started his search with some of those tribes, driving south until he hit a small pocket of vamps just north of the Florida line. One of them had heard the stories about a vampire disappearing after the witch trials, but the rest were clueless and largely unhelpful.
The small clans in Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana weren’t much help, either. A man in Kentucky thought the description Aidan gave him sounded familiar, and said that there were whispers of a new family gaining power in California. It was worth a shot.
Vampires of the west coast were generally more secretive, more independent. They’d refused to organize since the settling of the area, taking care of their own individual problems and largely ignoring each other, so it was a shock to find that they’d started banding together just north of LA.
Aidan did stop in Texas and Arizona hoping to confirm the rumors, maybe get a better idea of what he was heading into and who was heading up the operation. Three of the four clans in the area had heard that a change was taking place in California, and that was all he needed to hear.
Bishop wasn’t there. There was an older gentleman with blond hair and blue eyes trying to rally whatever stragglers he could find into a family with connections and power, but he wasn’t Bishop and he was far from being successful.
He had, however, recently spoken to a man who was part of a nomadic tribe in the Midwest who, he said, had an interesting story about a random encounter with a vampire like the one Aidan had gotten so used to describing. Last known location of the nomad was southern Idaho, and Aidan was able to leave California with new hope.
He’d been traveling a little over six weeks when he finally found a good, solid lead. The man’s name was Miles and he was part of a small clan that traveled through the Midwest.
He was full of stories, living in such a dangerous area. The reason most vampires stuck to the coasts and boarders was because the Midwest was frequented by hunters, people who killed things like them for a living. Because of the constant threat, any family living in the middle of the country was forced to move constantly, never staying in a single place for more than a few months at a time.
Miles had stories of narrow escapes and bloody disasters, hunters breaking into their homes and ripping their families apart. He was a decent storyteller with the scars to back it up, but Aidan wasn’t interested in his life. He only wanted to know about Bishop.
“Who?” Miles asked.
“James Bishop,” Aidan said. “About this tall, blond hair, blue eyes. If I had a picture, I’d show you. Someone in California said you saw him?”
Miles seemed to consider for a moment. “The hobo? Why you lookin’ for him?”
“So you have seen him? Where?”
The other vampire shrugged. “’Bout a year and a half back,” he said. “I was passing through this little one-horse town in Montana, scopin’ the place for hunters or other clans - don’t wanna run inta other clans, start a turf war, ya know?”
“Bishop?”
“Right. Right, your guy. Well, I’d blown through my readin’ material for the trip, I saw a bookstore, thought why not? I go in, I browse. There’s this guy at the counter - your guy - got this stack a books ‘bout as tall as he is. This guy - you gotta realize - he’s all dirty and scruffy, smells like maybe the crusty stuff under his nails is blood, ya know, so now I’m intrigued.
“Cashier tells him the total, but he don’t got no money. She says she can’t just give him the stuff for free and he reaches out and touches her arm, looks her in the eye, says ‘but I’mma regular.’ She tells him to enjoy the books and have a nice day.”
“He compelled her.”
Miles nodded. “Now this guy, you could tell just by lookin’ at him that don’t have no family. Matted hair, old clothes, the works. And I don’t want this guy walkin’ around this town in the cold, on the streets. We’re all a family, ya know, even if we have our differences sometimes. So I go after him, try to get him to come back with me, thinkin’ we can clean him up, get him a decent meal, but when I get out onta the street, he’s gone. Poof.”
“I need the name of the town, Miles.”
“Sure. It was, uh, Golden something.”
“I’m gonna need the exact name of the town,” Aidan said.
“What do you want from me, man? It’s been over a year.”
“I need to find him.”
“All right. Um. Golden Canyon? Golden Valley? Golden Gulch? Something like that. The last one, yeah. Definitely the last one.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
It was the first real glimmer of hope Aidan had seen since he’d left Salem. There was even a Golden Gulch on the map, a small town in southern Montana. It was surrounded by woods, which were surrounded by wide open plains. The place really was in the middle of nowhere, and that made it the perfect place to hide.
The town was as small as Miles had made it out to be, consisting of some scattered farms and a single main street lined with dying businesses. There was a used bookstore.
The cashier seemed disinterred until Aidan told her who he was looking for. “He comes in here all the time,” she said. “No one knows his name, just that he lives north of town.” Her eyes blanked out for a moment, glazing over. “He’s a regular.” She blinked. “Good luck finding him.”
There was only one road leading out of town to the north, and Aidan followed it until he couldn’t anymore. It just stopped about a mile into the woods without warning, nearly causing him crash into a small cluster of tree stumps. There was a smaller trail leading past the stumps and further into the trees, and Aidan followed it on foot.
The trail was long and winding, and just when he was about to give up hope he heard a sound. A soft bleating. Sheep.
Aidan peeked around a tree and saw a small pen at the edge of a clearing housing three sheep. The animals saw him and wandered toward him, making soft snuffling noises as they did. Which was odd. Animals could usually tell he wasn’t human, could smell the death and blood on him. Animals usually ran.
He walked up to the pen and reached out a hand, patting one of the animals on the head. It looked up at him with dark eyes and nuzzled into the touch.
Just beyond the pen were a pile of chopped wood and an axe. There was a single large bale of hay.
There was a house in the clearing. Not a large house. More like a shack. A tiny thing that leaned slightly to the right, with a door and some windows and a chimney.
Aidan abandoned the sheep to inspect the shack. It seemed sturdy, despite the lean. The wood was starting to warp in a few places, and it looked as through the roof had been recently repaired. There were soft noises, hums and shufflings, coming from inside the place.
The vampire took a deep breath and stepped up to the door.
He knocked.
There were footsteps, the muted sounds of a deep voice, and the door was pulled open. Bishop. It was Bishop. With dirty clothes and a few days’ worth of stubble and long dirty hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. Bishop.
Aidan felt himself smile, felt relief and happiness at the knowledge that his nearly two-month-long journey had finally come to an end and he had found him. And yeah. Yeah, he was definitely in love. Definitely, head over heels, irrevocably and unconditionally in love with James Bishop.
“Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” Aidan said. “My name’s Aidan. You don’t know me, but I love you.”
To his surprise, Bishop let him in.
---
“So let me get this straight,” Bishop said, staring up at Aidan from his place on the dirty mattress. “You made a wish on the Christmas star on Christmas Eve that you and I had never met, and it came true?”
Aidan, who had spent most of his outlandish explanation digging a groove in the shack’s single table with his fingernail, nodded. “I know it sounds crazy, but -“
Bishop held up a hand to silence him. “My only question is this: if you wanted me out of your life that bad, why come and find me?”
“I wondered about that,” the younger vampire admitted, “when I started looking for you. At first, I was just confused. I woke up in a strange house in a bed that wasn’t mine. My friends were gone. I didn’t know what was happening, but you always had a way of understanding exactly what was going on. And I felt guilty.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t get you anything for Christmas.” Bishop smiled at that, prompting Aidan to continue. “The longer I looked, the more I needed to find you, and then it just hit me. I was in love.”
“But you wanted me gone.”
Aidan nodded. “I wondered about that, too. The whole time I was driving around looking for you, I thought about it. You must have made a wish, too.”
“I don’t recall it.”
“That’s because it wasn’ you ou, it wa my ou.”
Bishop hummed at that. “And what did your me wish for, then?”
“You wished that I loved you.” He slid out of the single chair and sat beside Bishop on the old mattress, close enough that their shoulders were touching. “But I don’t think it was that. I think you wished I would love you back, because I’ve never felt this way about anyone. It’s not just that I wanted to find you, but that I had to. I needed it. I needed to see you and talk to you and I bought you a Christmas present, but I left it in the car, and I guess it’s late enough we can call it a Valentine’s Day gift, huh? But it’s different, the way I feel now. It’s not some appreciation of looks that leads into wanting to be with you. I just lov you. Everything about you.”
Bishop stared at him for a while, the silence stretching between them, and Aidan suddenly realized how crazy he sounded. He should have planned it better, tried to make it into some random meeting that could blossom into more, turn the whole thing into something more logical. He should have lied.
“Aren’t you mad?” Bishop asked, voice suddenly quiet, almost a whisper.
“What?”
“If you’re right, if I made you love me, if I forced this onto you when you clearly didn’t want it, and you’ve figured out that I did it, shouldn’t you be mad?”
Oh. He hadn’t thought about that. It honestly had not crossed his mind. He should have been angry. He should have gone into a blind rage at being manipulated and controlled like that, losing his freedom, taking his thoughts and emotions and twisting them into something else. But when he tried to summon the anger and the hate, all he could do was think about Sophia’s story, about how horrible it must have been to be burnt alive, to be tortured and not die, to flee the familiar and never return.
“What happened?” he asked. “What happened in Salem?”
Bishop frowned at the obvious change of subject. “Why do you care?”
“Because where I come from, you didn’t stay in Salem. You went with Carlo to Boston. Anything that happened to you after he left is my fault, and I want to know.”
The older man licked his lips and considered for a moment. “We were traveling,” he said. “Carlo and I. Trying to find more of our own to bring them to Boston, which was becoming this mecca for vampires. So many of us situated there, trying to escape the persecution of the hunters by finding safety in numbers. We stopped in Salem for a few weeks to see if we could drum up any support.
“There was a man there, a human. His name was Samuel Waite.”
“What?” Aidan interrupted.
Bishop flinched away. “I figured you knew, considering you worked out that I made you love m back. Is it a problem?”
“What? No, not that. The guy.” He sighed and shook his head. “Samuel Waite was my great-grandfather. My father was named for him, actually. I was always told he was an upstanding guy.”
The older man grinned. “We used to sneak out of town and neck in the woods. Hope that’s not a problem, either.”
Aidan smiled back. “I can look past it if you can.”
“So, uh, Sammy was my crush for a while. I’d watch him around town, try and catch his eye. Finally got up the nerve to talk to him a week before we were supposed to leave, and Carlo gave me a choice: stay in Salem and try my luck, or go with him. I chose Samuel.” He shook his head. “Things were great. We got together. We couldn’t really be public about it, of course, but we were happy with secret meetings and various fantasies.
“We were in love. So in love that I couldn’t hide it anymore. So I told him what I was, showed him. I promised that I would never hurt him or turn him if he didn’t want me to, and he took it so well. Two days later there’s a knock at the door, half the town with pitchforks - if you’d believe that - and it turns out he turned me in. Accused me of seducing him, being in league with the Devil, turning him to sin.
“He said he loved me, and he sat by while they… well, if you’re here asking about it, you probably know what they did.”
Aidan nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Ancient history,” Bishop said with a shrug. He turned to look at the younger vampire and smiled. “You have his eyes, you know.”
“I didn’t.”
“You’re really not mad?”
“I’m really not mad.”
Bishop stood and brushed some unseen dust off of his pants, turning around and looking down at Aidan. “I only have one bed.”
Aidan smiled. “I think I can live with that.”
---
He gave Bishop the book for Valentine’s Day, chest swelling at the look of pure joy and surprise on the older man’s face.
“How’d you know I like Stephen King?”
Aidan shrugged. “Some things never change.”
Bishop’s face fell as he flipped through the pages. “I didn’t get you anything.”
“I turned up on your doorstep less than a week ago. Why would I expect anything?”
“Wait here.” Bishop disappeared through the front door. Aidan could hear the sound of chopping and hammering outside, and after about half an hour the older vampire returned holding a wooden chair. He set it down at the table opposite the one that had been there before and smiled. “Now you have one, too.”
It was a sad little shack, only containing the mattress, a table, the two chairs, and a few bookcases. There was no fireplace like Aidan had thought, and no electricity. No running water. Bishop didn’t have lanterns or flashlights, relying instead on their innate ability to see in the dark.
He kept out of the town as much as possible, only venturing out to collect feed for the sheep or new books to read.
The livestock, he’d explained to Aidan on his first day there, were the main food source. Any mysterious deaths or disappearances in such a small town - especially if there were a large number over time - would attract the attention of hunters, and that was the last thing he wanted. So he lived by tapping the sheep, stealing a new one each time one of his own died, and stalking the woods for bigger prey if he ever got injured.
“You have no idea the number of wolves and coyotes I’ve gutted trying to kill my sheep,” he’d told Aidan with a laugh, and it was true. His third day at the shack, Aidan was woken in the night by the sound of the sheep screaming. He’d run outside to find Bishop crouching near the pen, his clothes covered in fur and blood, the mangled body of a wolf laid out before him.
It was safe and practical, he had to admit, and it kept them both from having to kill humans, but it struck Aidan as barely a life. The cabin was freezing, even so late in winter, and as the weeks dragged on, it got worse.
Bishop didn’t seem to notice. He took Aidan out, letting him borrow a spare holey coat that reeked of old blood and decay, hoping to make a frame for the bed they’d been sharing. It was cold on the floor, and Aidan had started complaining, but for some reason raising the bed was the only idea the older vampire would even entertain.
They trekked through the snow together, Bishop pointing out certain trees or animal tracks, making small talk as Aidan shivered behind him. They weren’t supposed to feel the cold, which meant that it was well below freezing. “You’re not cold?” Aidan asked again, earning a chuckle.
“Well, I have been out here for almost 300 years,” Bishop reasoned. “Guess I had time to get used to it.”
“Can we at least start a fire when we get back?”
“No!” It was the first time in their nearly three weeks together that Bishop had snapped at him, and the older man went full monty, eyes flashing black as his fangs descended. He blinked, features sliding back into soft lines, amiable. “No, we can’t.”
Aidan sighed and trudged along after him, his foot hitting an exposed root and sending him toppling suddenly forward. He slammed into Bishop and the two rolled down a nearby embankment, snow sticking to their clothes as they tumbled end over end toward a frozen stream.
Somehow, Bishop ended up on top of him, looking down at him with a soft smile and softer eyes, and Aidan was unsure how he’d never realized just how lue hey were. How light and haunted and sad. Sadder than anything he could remember seeing, and that was saying a lot because he looked in the mirror almost every day, had to stare at himself, meet his own gaze, and Bishop’s eyes were probably the saddest thing he’d ever seen.
Before he knew what was happening, Bishop was leaning down, pressing a chaste kiss to his lips, and then rolling off of him to stand.
Aidan propped himself up on one elbow and looked back at the older man, noticing the small smile and the way he was wringing his hands in the rough fabric of his jacket.
“You coming?” Bishop asked, and Aidan got to his feet and followed him deeper into the woods, brushing snow off of his clothes, too busy in his thoughts to realize that he wasn’t even cold anymore.
---
The temperature had dropped below zero, which apparently wasn’t weird for the Midwest, even in March. Aidan was sure that if his fingers could’ve turned blue, they’d be black by now, but Bishop refused to do anything more than pile an extra blanket on their bed.
“We need a fire,” Aidan said for maybe the fiftieth time that night. “It’s freezing.”
Bishop had started the evening off by glaring at him whenever he asked, before moving on to sighing and rolling his eyes, and finally to biting his lip. This time, Aidan got a different response.
“Fine,” Bishop muttered.
“What?”
“Move those bookcases,” the older man said, waving a hand at two shelves that sat side-by-side against a wall. “Make sure the flume is open and the chimney’s clean.”
“So there is a fireplace?”
Bishop nodded. “Yeah. I’ll go grab some wood from outside.”
Aidan did as he was told, sliding the two bookcases apart from each other to reveal an old fireplace set into the wall. The stones were crumbling a bit and the hearth was small, but it would be enough to heat up the small shack.
“Why were there shelves in front of it?” Aidan asked when he heard the door open.
Bishop dropped a few logs onto the floor beside him. “Because,” he said with a shrug before retreating back to his corner or the room. He opened up the torn paperback he’d been skimming, burying his nose in the pages.
Aidan shook his head and got to work loading the logs into the fireplace, smiling as the first bit of kindling (a handful of dried leaves that had blown into a corner sometime before he’d arrived at the shack) sparked and held the flame. In no time, he had a roaring fire going, the room instantly warming, everything illuminated by the shaky glow.
He turned with a smile on his face. “See? Isn’t that better?”
Bishop was pressed tight against the wall, his legs pulled to his chest, black eyes peeking over his knees. His nails were digging into his skin, drawing blood, but he didn’t seem to notice. The firelight reflected in his eyes, reds and yellows playing in the dark pools, and realization hit Aidan like a sharp blow to the head.
He pulled off his coat threw it onto the fire, pushing and patting, singeing his skin as he struggled to put it out. The room was plunged into darkness and all he could hear was the eerie silence of the snow-covered wilderness and Bishop’s labored breathing.
He blinked and the world came back into focus, the darkness fading, eyes adjusting in the way that they were always meant to, the predator overriding whatever was left of the human.
He was selfish. The thought hit him with the same bright focus as the rest of the room. He was selfish and he hadn’t thought. Not about Bishop. Only about himself. He was cold. He was uncomfortable.
Aidan crawled across the floor and sat next to the older man, back against the wall. It was colder there, frigid air seeping through the cracks and breaks in the wood, the heat of the brief fire already beginning to fade.
“I’m sorry.”
Bishop was silent. Kept staring at the dark fireplace, at the glow of heat that still pulsed a lazy red.
“I didn’t think.”
It made sense, of course. Why the small shack was so cold and dark all the time. No electricity for someone who wanted to stay off the grid left candles and lanterns and warm hearths as the only options, but those had all been ignored.
Because of the fire.
Because the man sitting so tense beside him had been burned, had been burned alive, and the scars were still there. Aidan had forgotten that. He’d forgotten, and he was worried that maybe he’d forgotten something else, something important, so many important things that would be trivial to him but so big to Bishop. Maybe not here and now, but before. In Boston. How many times had he hurt this man without realizing it?
“You were cold,” Bishop whispered, and Aidan realized that he was shaking, they were both shaking, the scent of cold and fear mixing in the air around them.
Aidan leaned closer, wrapping his arms around the older vampire, feeling muscles relax as Bishop fell into him. “There are other ways to keep warm.”