Fic: Thicker Than Water (5/10)
Fic: Thicker Than Water (5/10)
Series: Special Projects
Summary: Vampires are not nice monsters. Especially vampires embroiled in a nest war.
Author: pen37
Beta: Clarksmuse
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean
Pairing:Chloe/Dean
Rating: R for violence
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #95 New Year The table is here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6a, Part 6b, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
While Chloe stood guard over Dean with another vial of dead man’s blood, Sam went to get the tow chain from the Impala. When he returned, the two of them carried Dean to the bathroom. Then they put him in the tub and shackled him to the iron legs.
“Think that will hold him?” Chloe asked.
“Probably,” Sam said as he patted Dean’s pockets down and removed any loose items he could find. Paperclips, pens, keys or anything that could be used to pick a lock. He stopped short of taking Dean’s protective amulets and jewelry.
“Hey, what’s this?” Sam asked as he found an envelope shoved down into the pocket of Dean’s jacket.
“What is it?” Chloe asked.
He looked at the writing on the outside. “I don’t recognize the handwriting. It’s addressed to you,” he said.
Chloe raised an eyebrow as he passed the envelope to her, and then opened it. She scanned it over and inhaled sharply. “I think it’s from whoever turned Dean.”
Sam looked at her incredulously. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Wish I was,” her face twisted in a frown. “It says: if you’re reading this, then Mr. Winchester didn’t kill you. In which case, I suggest you give me a call. There’s a number, but no name.”
“Sonofa --” Sam’s eyes widened as the implications of the letter sank in. “What exactly are we dealing with here?”
“I don’t know,” Chloe said. “But maybe we should call your vampire contact before we do anything else.”
“Good idea,” Sam nodded.
***
Once Sam was certain that Dean was secure, he and Chloe moved back to the kitchen counter. There they positioned themselves on opposite sides to plan. Once there, he took his phone up and dialed Lenore’s number. Within a few rings, it clicked on, and her voice - rich and aged like a fine wine - filled his earpiece.
“Sam Winchester. You’re someone I didn’t expect to hear from again,” she said with a slight chuckle.
“Lenore,” Sam smiled. “How have you been?”
“Alive. In this day and age that’s something,” she said with an edge to her voice that reminded Sam that she was still a vampire, and he was still a hunter. “What do you need, Sam?”
“What can you tell me about vampires in Taos New Mexico?”
There was a long pause on the line that filled him with dread.
“You’re not there now, are you?”
“What’s going on, Lenore?”
“Sam, you need to get out of there as quickly as you can. It’s very dangerous for you to be there.”
“Why?”
Sam heard a sigh that sounded like the gurgle of an ancient, icy brook as it wound its glacial way down the side of a craggy mountain.
“My sire once told me that when two clans had settled too closely together - conflicts would arise. It’s something that hasn’t happened in a couple of hundred years. There are too few of us to be killing each other off in pointless raids.”
“Wait - you’re telling me that the vampires in Taos are killing each other?” Sam asked incredulously.
“It’s a war, Sam.”
“Why?” Sam asked, mystified.
“Difference of opinion. Politics. Whatever you want to call it. This actually started a few years back. At the time, there was one clan in Taos. It was taken over by a younger vampire named Aiden.
“Aiden is what you might call a progressive thinker. He was created in the sixties, and he’s convinced that the way for us to survive as a race is to put ourselves into the public eye.”
Sam’s eyes cut over to Chloe. Hadn’t she predicted that it was only a matter of time before someone tried that? Wasn’t that the reason that she’d started hunting with them? To learn more about the paranormal in the event that something like that happened?”
“So how did that degenerate to vampires killing each other?” Sam asked.
“Aiden has passion, but his ideas are misguided,” Lenore explained patiently, as if this was an argument that she had rehashed often. “If we had tried something like this thirty years ago it might have worked. But with the numbers of our kind so greatly diminished, our race would never survive the backlash that comes with that kind of forced change.”
“You sound like you’ve argued this before,” Sam said.
“We’re a fragmentary population, Sam. But we stay in touch with each other. Right now every single clan is concerned with the question of survival. Aiden’s most vocal opponent is Caius. He’s . . .” Lenore broke off as if searching for the right words. “Possibly the oldest of my kind. When Aiden proposed this change of status quo, Caius and his followers rose up to oppose him. Hence the conflict that you no-doubt stumbled into.”
Sam inhaled wearily, and put his head into his hands. “This is not good.”
“Are you not in a position where you can leave?” Lenore asked quietly.
“It’s complicated,” Sam said. “Has - do you know of any vampires who have come back across?”
There was a significant pause on the other end of the line. “You’re not just going to be able to walk away from this, are you?”
“I really don’t know how to answer that,” Sam said truthfully. He looked across the counter at Chloe’s concerned face and shook his head.
“Even if I knew the answer to that question,” Lenore sighed. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you, Sam. You’re still a hunter. I owe my allegiance to my own kind.”
“Thought as much,” Sam said grimly. “Can’t blame me for trying though.”
“I will tell you this,” Lenore said quietly. “If your brother was turned, then you have to keep him fed. That’s the key to staying in control of your higher functions. Bovine blood may be disgusting, but it takes the edge off the hunger. So long as he isn’t trying to fill that gaping hole, he’ll be somewhat himself.”
Sam looked out the window at the slanting morning rays. “That gives us a little time to prepare,” he said flatly. “Thanks for your help.”
“I owed you one for Red Lodge,” Lenore said. “I consider that debt canceled now.” With that, she clicked off her phone. Sam stared at it thoughtfully, and then looked back into Chloe’s worried face.
“I think we’re caught between a rock and a hard place.” He quickly relayed his phone message to Chloe.
“So who do you think would pick up the phone if I dial this number,” Chloe indicated the note that she’d found in Dean’s pocket. “Aiden, or Caius?”
Sam shrugged. “Part of me wants to say who cares and just barricade in. But,” he broke off and looked back at the bathroom where Dean was resting.
“I know,” Chloe nodded. “Chances are they won’t just let us hole up and wait while they kill each other off.”
Sam nodded in agreement. “My gut tells me that what happened to Dean wasn’t just crossfire. But the only way we’re going to find out is if we call that number.”
***
Chloe felt the knot of tension and anxiety that had been forming in her stomach tighten. She nodded and picked up her phone.
The dial tone rang once and then clicked over. She could hear breathing on the other end of the line, but no greeting.
“Hello?” She began tentatively.
“Miss Sullivan.”
When she heard the greeting, she bit her lip. Whomever had been on the other end of the line sounded eerily like Lionel Luthor. It was like being back in high school that awful year that she’d made the deal and Clark wasn’t speaking with her.
“So who am I speaking with, Aiden or Caius?”
“You’ve done your research,” came the chuckle through the line. “Trust me, if it were Caius, he would have killed you all rather than just transforming your mate.”
“Aiden then,” she said flatly.
“I’m surprised at you. No demands to know what’s going on?”
“I have some idea,” Chloe said. “I don’t appreciate your attempt at coercion.”
“Coercion is such a harsh word,” the vampire on the other end of the line tisked. “I prefer to think of it as motivation to see the world from a new point of view. We’re not that different, when you come to think of it. We were all born human. And then we all had something foreign invade our bodies.”
Chloe felt her blood run cold. “You seem to know an awful lot about me.”
“How do you think those tissue samples made it as far as your friends at the CDC?” Aiden said. “Do you think that my kind would have let them fall into scientific hands that easily? Particularly after spending centuries hiding from humans. We don’t make mistakes.”
She swallowed. “You lured us here.”
“Gold star,” he chuckled. “I suppose in a way, we’re meta-humans as well.”
“Yeah? Well when I’m hungry, I go out for a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, not a couple of guys named Ben and Jerry.”
“Not all of us are like that. I’m sure with a word or two in the right ear, you could help us convince people of that.”
“If not for your sake, then for my boyfriend’s?” she said sardonically.
“Something like that,” he chuckled.
“And if I refuse?”
“Well, that’s your right,” Aiden said. “It’s still a free country, after all. But you do have a hungry young vampire on your hands. And another clan here in Taos with everything to gain by silencing you. Think about that for a while. And then call me back.” With that, the line went dead.
Chloe hung up the phone and looked at Sam with concerned eyes. “You want to know how hard that rock is?” Quickly she relayed everything that she’d been told by Aiden.
When she was done, Sam shook his head grimly. “We need to keep them from being able to track us,” he said as he reached for their phones and quickly stripped the chips and batteries from them. “There are a couple of rituals that I know of to camouflage our scent. Beyond that - we need to find a blood supply for Dean, and then we should barricade ourselves in. With any luck, they’ll kill each other off out there, and we can deal with the last ones standing.”
“That could be quite a long siege,” Chloe said.
“They won’t make a move during the daytime,” Sam said confidently. “That gives us ten or eleven hours each day to act.”
“And to babysit a cranky vampire,” Chloe glanced over to the bathroom again. “One who’s only thought is going to be getting loose and killing himself.”
“Not once he knows what’s going on,” Sam said confidently. “There is no way he’d leave us to deal with this kind of mess on our own.”
“Unless he thought we stood a better chance without him,” Chloe said.
Sam looked at her with new-purpose in his eyes. “We’ll just have to convince him that isn’t the case.”
Series: Special Projects
Summary: Vampires are not nice monsters. Especially vampires embroiled in a nest war.
Author: pen37
Beta: Clarksmuse
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean
Pairing:Chloe/Dean
Rating: R for violence
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #95 New Year The table is here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6a, Part 6b, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
While Chloe stood guard over Dean with another vial of dead man’s blood, Sam went to get the tow chain from the Impala. When he returned, the two of them carried Dean to the bathroom. Then they put him in the tub and shackled him to the iron legs.
“Think that will hold him?” Chloe asked.
“Probably,” Sam said as he patted Dean’s pockets down and removed any loose items he could find. Paperclips, pens, keys or anything that could be used to pick a lock. He stopped short of taking Dean’s protective amulets and jewelry.
“Hey, what’s this?” Sam asked as he found an envelope shoved down into the pocket of Dean’s jacket.
“What is it?” Chloe asked.
He looked at the writing on the outside. “I don’t recognize the handwriting. It’s addressed to you,” he said.
Chloe raised an eyebrow as he passed the envelope to her, and then opened it. She scanned it over and inhaled sharply. “I think it’s from whoever turned Dean.”
Sam looked at her incredulously. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Wish I was,” her face twisted in a frown. “It says: if you’re reading this, then Mr. Winchester didn’t kill you. In which case, I suggest you give me a call. There’s a number, but no name.”
“Sonofa --” Sam’s eyes widened as the implications of the letter sank in. “What exactly are we dealing with here?”
“I don’t know,” Chloe said. “But maybe we should call your vampire contact before we do anything else.”
“Good idea,” Sam nodded.
***
Once Sam was certain that Dean was secure, he and Chloe moved back to the kitchen counter. There they positioned themselves on opposite sides to plan. Once there, he took his phone up and dialed Lenore’s number. Within a few rings, it clicked on, and her voice - rich and aged like a fine wine - filled his earpiece.
“Sam Winchester. You’re someone I didn’t expect to hear from again,” she said with a slight chuckle.
“Lenore,” Sam smiled. “How have you been?”
“Alive. In this day and age that’s something,” she said with an edge to her voice that reminded Sam that she was still a vampire, and he was still a hunter. “What do you need, Sam?”
“What can you tell me about vampires in Taos New Mexico?”
There was a long pause on the line that filled him with dread.
“You’re not there now, are you?”
“What’s going on, Lenore?”
“Sam, you need to get out of there as quickly as you can. It’s very dangerous for you to be there.”
“Why?”
Sam heard a sigh that sounded like the gurgle of an ancient, icy brook as it wound its glacial way down the side of a craggy mountain.
“My sire once told me that when two clans had settled too closely together - conflicts would arise. It’s something that hasn’t happened in a couple of hundred years. There are too few of us to be killing each other off in pointless raids.”
“Wait - you’re telling me that the vampires in Taos are killing each other?” Sam asked incredulously.
“It’s a war, Sam.”
“Why?” Sam asked, mystified.
“Difference of opinion. Politics. Whatever you want to call it. This actually started a few years back. At the time, there was one clan in Taos. It was taken over by a younger vampire named Aiden.
“Aiden is what you might call a progressive thinker. He was created in the sixties, and he’s convinced that the way for us to survive as a race is to put ourselves into the public eye.”
Sam’s eyes cut over to Chloe. Hadn’t she predicted that it was only a matter of time before someone tried that? Wasn’t that the reason that she’d started hunting with them? To learn more about the paranormal in the event that something like that happened?”
“So how did that degenerate to vampires killing each other?” Sam asked.
“Aiden has passion, but his ideas are misguided,” Lenore explained patiently, as if this was an argument that she had rehashed often. “If we had tried something like this thirty years ago it might have worked. But with the numbers of our kind so greatly diminished, our race would never survive the backlash that comes with that kind of forced change.”
“You sound like you’ve argued this before,” Sam said.
“We’re a fragmentary population, Sam. But we stay in touch with each other. Right now every single clan is concerned with the question of survival. Aiden’s most vocal opponent is Caius. He’s . . .” Lenore broke off as if searching for the right words. “Possibly the oldest of my kind. When Aiden proposed this change of status quo, Caius and his followers rose up to oppose him. Hence the conflict that you no-doubt stumbled into.”
Sam inhaled wearily, and put his head into his hands. “This is not good.”
“Are you not in a position where you can leave?” Lenore asked quietly.
“It’s complicated,” Sam said. “Has - do you know of any vampires who have come back across?”
There was a significant pause on the other end of the line. “You’re not just going to be able to walk away from this, are you?”
“I really don’t know how to answer that,” Sam said truthfully. He looked across the counter at Chloe’s concerned face and shook his head.
“Even if I knew the answer to that question,” Lenore sighed. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you, Sam. You’re still a hunter. I owe my allegiance to my own kind.”
“Thought as much,” Sam said grimly. “Can’t blame me for trying though.”
“I will tell you this,” Lenore said quietly. “If your brother was turned, then you have to keep him fed. That’s the key to staying in control of your higher functions. Bovine blood may be disgusting, but it takes the edge off the hunger. So long as he isn’t trying to fill that gaping hole, he’ll be somewhat himself.”
Sam looked out the window at the slanting morning rays. “That gives us a little time to prepare,” he said flatly. “Thanks for your help.”
“I owed you one for Red Lodge,” Lenore said. “I consider that debt canceled now.” With that, she clicked off her phone. Sam stared at it thoughtfully, and then looked back into Chloe’s worried face.
“I think we’re caught between a rock and a hard place.” He quickly relayed his phone message to Chloe.
“So who do you think would pick up the phone if I dial this number,” Chloe indicated the note that she’d found in Dean’s pocket. “Aiden, or Caius?”
Sam shrugged. “Part of me wants to say who cares and just barricade in. But,” he broke off and looked back at the bathroom where Dean was resting.
“I know,” Chloe nodded. “Chances are they won’t just let us hole up and wait while they kill each other off.”
Sam nodded in agreement. “My gut tells me that what happened to Dean wasn’t just crossfire. But the only way we’re going to find out is if we call that number.”
***
Chloe felt the knot of tension and anxiety that had been forming in her stomach tighten. She nodded and picked up her phone.
The dial tone rang once and then clicked over. She could hear breathing on the other end of the line, but no greeting.
“Hello?” She began tentatively.
“Miss Sullivan.”
When she heard the greeting, she bit her lip. Whomever had been on the other end of the line sounded eerily like Lionel Luthor. It was like being back in high school that awful year that she’d made the deal and Clark wasn’t speaking with her.
“So who am I speaking with, Aiden or Caius?”
“You’ve done your research,” came the chuckle through the line. “Trust me, if it were Caius, he would have killed you all rather than just transforming your mate.”
“Aiden then,” she said flatly.
“I’m surprised at you. No demands to know what’s going on?”
“I have some idea,” Chloe said. “I don’t appreciate your attempt at coercion.”
“Coercion is such a harsh word,” the vampire on the other end of the line tisked. “I prefer to think of it as motivation to see the world from a new point of view. We’re not that different, when you come to think of it. We were all born human. And then we all had something foreign invade our bodies.”
Chloe felt her blood run cold. “You seem to know an awful lot about me.”
“How do you think those tissue samples made it as far as your friends at the CDC?” Aiden said. “Do you think that my kind would have let them fall into scientific hands that easily? Particularly after spending centuries hiding from humans. We don’t make mistakes.”
She swallowed. “You lured us here.”
“Gold star,” he chuckled. “I suppose in a way, we’re meta-humans as well.”
“Yeah? Well when I’m hungry, I go out for a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, not a couple of guys named Ben and Jerry.”
“Not all of us are like that. I’m sure with a word or two in the right ear, you could help us convince people of that.”
“If not for your sake, then for my boyfriend’s?” she said sardonically.
“Something like that,” he chuckled.
“And if I refuse?”
“Well, that’s your right,” Aiden said. “It’s still a free country, after all. But you do have a hungry young vampire on your hands. And another clan here in Taos with everything to gain by silencing you. Think about that for a while. And then call me back.” With that, the line went dead.
Chloe hung up the phone and looked at Sam with concerned eyes. “You want to know how hard that rock is?” Quickly she relayed everything that she’d been told by Aiden.
When she was done, Sam shook his head grimly. “We need to keep them from being able to track us,” he said as he reached for their phones and quickly stripped the chips and batteries from them. “There are a couple of rituals that I know of to camouflage our scent. Beyond that - we need to find a blood supply for Dean, and then we should barricade ourselves in. With any luck, they’ll kill each other off out there, and we can deal with the last ones standing.”
“That could be quite a long siege,” Chloe said.
“They won’t make a move during the daytime,” Sam said confidently. “That gives us ten or eleven hours each day to act.”
“And to babysit a cranky vampire,” Chloe glanced over to the bathroom again. “One who’s only thought is going to be getting loose and killing himself.”
“Not once he knows what’s going on,” Sam said confidently. “There is no way he’d leave us to deal with this kind of mess on our own.”
“Unless he thought we stood a better chance without him,” Chloe said.
Sam looked at her with new-purpose in his eyes. “We’ll just have to convince him that isn’t the case.”