Eight Crazy Nights four, TVD/SPN/Revenge edition
for 
giandujakiss: TVD, Bonnie/Damon. Where Bonnie is awesome. (Author’s note: my reaction was, “That’s easy. Is Bonnie in the story? There, done.”) Warning: Blood exchange.
“And I don’t have a boyfriend,” Bonnie finished, with the air of someone who knew that this was not an inherently persuasive complaint.
“Neither do I,” Damon pointed out, to remind her exactly who was on the other end of this conversation. He smiled at Bonnie, who had paused in her examination of the huge chain-encrusted box they’d found in the cave.
Bonnie gave him the evil eye. Not the witchy one, which was good because no way had he earned the headache, just a girl evil eye. “What, you and Alaric not getting along again?”
Damon smirked at her. “Ric and I aren’t like that. I mean, there was that one night, but he probably doesn’t want me to talk about it-”
“The sad thing is, I don’t even know whether you’re being serious,” Bonnie told him.
Damon pouted. “I don’t kiss and tell. Kiss and kill, yes, but I’m more of a show and tell type. If I were really fucking Ric, I’m pretty sure you’d know about it.”
“Yeah, like you’d be the one doing the-” Bonnie snapped and stopped, looking everywhere but at Damon.
“Okay, first, you really shouldn’t be making judgments about what people like in bed based on their behavior out of it; maybe that’s part of your boyfriend trouble. And second, in my extensive experience, it’s actually fucking on both sides. Or all three sides, or whatever number you prefer.”
Bonnie scowled. He liked to think it was because she was imagining him in a threesome and was uncomfortable with how hot that was. “Whatever. Have you figured out which way goes back to the surface yet?”
“Right this way,” Damon said, holding his hands out to the side like a presenter on The Price is Right. “You’re the one delaying us with the dish on your love life,” Damon pointed out. Bonnie, of course, didn’t acknowledge the justice of his observation, only picked up her lantern and left him to carry the giant box, which was awkward even with vampire strength, plus filthy from being stuck in the earth for decades. (Seriously, what was it with this area? Any more secret underground stashes and Damon was going to start wondering if they were really trapped in a Matrix-style video game. Or looking for giant tunneling mole rats. Possibly both.)
Damon got his own back, though, when the dire wolves showed up-though it would have been more amusing if they’d been naked mole rats-and Bonnie had to handle them on her own because his hands were full and the thing inside the box got busy trying to claw its way out.
When Bonnie had reinforced the spells on the chains enough to diminish the box’s movements to a subtle shaking, she put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow at Damon. “Thanks so much for your help,” she said.
“Thanks for yours! This creature tried to aerate me while you were playing dogcatcher!” Damon explained, totally reasonably. He held up his bloody arm for emphasis. “Besides, I would’ve had your back if you’d needed it.”
Bonnie snorted, but she seemed to be in a good mood as they made their way to the light.
****
Damon held his hand to the side of his head, very much like a silent movie heroine; Bonnie was not impressed. “Ow. Can’t you direct that mojo of yours just at the bad vampires?”
Since they were, for the moment, unmolested, and since it would be nice to have an extra advantage when the next wave attacked, she gave it a moment’s thought. “I could,” she concluded, “but I’d have to mark you.”
“Mark me?” Damon repeated, making it sound even sillier.
Before she could overthink it, she grabbed his head and pulled it down to hers, bringing their mouths together and biting down on his lip hard enough to draw blood. It felt-like a shock of electricity, like a machine shuddering to life, like the first time she’d levitated an object. His blood was salty, stinging her mouth like she was the one who’d been bleeding.
When she let him go (spitting out what she could; she didn’t know what happened to witches who died with vampire blood fresh inside them, but odds were it wasn’t good) he just stared at her, his eyes impossibly wider and his eyebrows arched even more parodically. “There,” she told him. “Now you’re marked.”
She felt the power rising in her, buzzing inside more strongly than it had any time except for when she’d borrowed other witches’ power. And then the room was full of other, more homicidal vampires, and there was no more time for embarrassment.
****
Damon systematically searched the round room for a door or passageway that would let them escape. The floor was uneven, peppered with rocks, and the walls weren’t much better. Even with his enhanced senses, he could barely see. “How do we get ourselves into these messes?” Damon asked rhetorically.
“Well, you’re an idiot,” Bonnie snapped, making her own circuit, using her phone as a flashlight to explore.
Damon wasn’t going to dignify that with an answer. Except: “Oh, and you’re here because you’re a genius, I see.”
“Dumb enough to hang around with you,” Bonnie muttered. Honestly, he didn’t know why they’d both been taken, or even how they’d both been knocked out and brought to this place, though it felt like it was underground (of fucking course). Why would anyone want both a witch and a vampire in good working order? He knew excellent reasons to want parts from one or both, but two live ones just didn’t compute.
“Hey,” Bonnie said, and when Damon looked over she gestured. Above their heads, about ten feet up, there was a ledge. The hole behind it was darker than black, hardly welcoming.
Waiting until this hole filled up with boiling oil or started compressing like the trash compactor in Star Wars wasn’t on his to-do list, however, so he went to stand beneath it and got down on one knee. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he asked when Bonnie just stood there. “Get climbing. I can boost you up.”
“What if there’s something dangerous up there?”
“All the better for me if you find it,” Damon pointed out. He sighed. “So, what you’re saying is, you want me to jump up, check it out, then jump back down if it’s safe, help you get up there, then jump up again. You do know that, as a vampire, I don’t need an extensive exercise regimen to keep this body in its superfine condition, right?”
“Damon,” Bonnie said, and there it was-that barely concealed desire to do real violence he enjoyed so much. Even after all they’d seen, Elena and Stefan persisted in believing that Bonnie was basically harmless. Damon knew better.
“Fine,” Damon conceded. “Stand back.”
But when he got to the little hollowed-out area in the wall, he had to raise a finger to shush Bonnie’s increasingly annoyed entreaties, because he could hear their captors. Discussing some mysterious ritual, of course, and rudely failing to exposit so that Damon could figure out exactly what was up or whether these bad guys were connected with Klaus or any of his ilk, but the point was that they would be in a room with an actual exit. Damon heard “… give it an hour,” which was good news, and then one of them left, confirming the ‘exit’ theory.
Damon landed like a cat. A very graceful cat. Anyone who said differently was lying.
“How are you on breaking through a couple inches of stone and/or an iron grate?”
Bonnie looked at him skeptically. “Isn’t that more of a vampire strength thing?”
“Sure, I could do it. But it would be loud and slow and we’d end up with a bunch of whatever they used to knock us out the first time pointed at us. Better if you can do it. I’m happy to break necks on the way out, though.”
Bonnie chewed her lower lip. “Listen, if I-”
Damon waited. And waited some more. He smiled; she glared. Finally she caved. “When I tasted your blood, last time-I felt more powerful.”
She looked so uncomfortable he almost didn’t feel the need to say anything. “If you get killed-”
“Yes, I know,” she said irritably. Given all the hybridized monsters they’d already seen, Damon was willing to bet that a witchpire was not a thing he wanted in his life, regardless of how useful Bonnie had been to date. Bonnie’s jaw was tight, but she swallowed and continued: “So just-keep me from getting killed, all right?”
“Easy-peasy,” he said, even though this was undoubtedly going to bite him on the ass and not in a fun way.
“So, uh, how do we do this?” she asked, clearly hating herself for any hint of reliance on him.
Just for that, he flashed her a wide grin before he fanged out and bit into his wrist. “Come on,” he said when she just stood there. “I heal up fast.”
It was nothing like forcing Elena to drink his blood. Bonnie took his arm in both her hands, holding it up to her mouth the way she might’ve held a dish of water. Her hot little tongue pressed against his flesh, increasing the burn of the shredded skin. She gagged on her first swallow, but then it changed. She sucked almost like a real vampire would have, and he could feel the pull of suction and the half-sharp edges of her teeth.
“Okay!” he said when she threatened to take more than he could afford. He had to put his hand over hers, prying her fingers loose, before she stopped.
She dropped his arm like it was red-hot and gaped at him in horror. Her bloody mouth made presently inappropriate parts of him wake up and pay attention. Damon pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and tied it around the wound while she collected herself.
“I won’t ask if it worked,” he said. She was practically crackling with power. He had a sudden vision of Bonnie with a vampire or two (he had an idea about who that might be) locked up in her basement, available for power-ups at will.
This time, when he knelt to boost her up, she came to him quickly.
****
Honestly, Bonnie felt bad that Damon had taken three bullets for her, even though she knew he was substantially more durable than she was. Even his complaining-“already down three pints-ow-you owe me a shirt, witch”-hadn’t entirely erased her feeling of obligation, plus she was still amped up and unable to relax, so after she got him settled in his ridiculous bed she went to snag some bags of blood from the downstairs cooler.
How did this become my life, she wondered as she headed back upstairs. I drank a vampire’s blood, which sounded like a Chuck Norris joke but was substantially more disturbing in practice. Especially since it had worked, which implied that it would make sense to do again. And it had felt amazing-the werewolves behind their capture had flown back like they were made of tissue paper when Bonnie had raised her hand. She’d saved her friends from some idiot shaman’s attempt to counter Klaus’s hybrid army by reusing the orginal materials, including Elena’s blood, and she wasn’t even out of power yet. Sure, she could sense an unpleasant crash off in the distance, like the end of year tests at school, but right now she could have levitated herself up and down the stairs.
Damon chugged down the blood with all the grace of a frat boy at a beer bong. The bullet holes were already fading, and she couldn’t even see a trace of the holes he’d chewed in his own veins for her. “That’s better,” he said on a gasp, tossing the last empty bag aside. He licked his lips, removing the traces of blood that further reddened his lips. “Back to fighting form. Now all I need is a good lay-”
Which should’ve been her cue to leave. But Elena and Caroline were out hunting information on this latest set of nemeses and their no doubt complicated and fatal plans, and Bonnie wasn’t quite ready to go home yet. Maybe it was the vampire blood still in her system. Maybe it was Damon’s blood.
“What’s it like?” she asked, startling him into actually looking at her. “Having sex whenever you want, with no emotions involved.”
“Fun?” Damon offered, after a pause. “I’d be happy to demonstrate.”
He was just lying there in the middle of that huge bed, shirtless and lazy. And damn he was pretty, especially if you ignored anything that came out of his mouth. Probably it was just the near-death adrenaline-that and the fact that she hadn’t had a real date in months-but she stepped forward and pulled off her top, tossing it aside before her knees hit the bed.
She straddled him-he was staring at her but had the horse sense to not talk, though his eyebrows were doing their best to be insulting even without words-and leaned down so that their faces were inches apart. Damon, predictably, dropped his eyes to her chest.
“Yeah?” she breathed.
And she was on her back, his hands braceleted on her wrists. It had been so fast she hadn’t even felt the motion. “Be careful what you wish for,” Damon growled. “You might get it.” He pulsed his hips against hers, and she felt him already hard and ready.
She arched her back to press their bodies even more closely together and smiled, putting just enough challenge into it to make Damon’s pupils dilate and his nostrils flare. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
And if his mouth when it met hers was cooler than a human’s, well, that was something she could ignore, just for now.
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elliemurasaki: Supernatural. Female Jewish hunter, first encounter with demons.
Hannah crouched in the cemetery, her stomach growling loud enough to drown out most of the night sounds. She wondered, not for the first time, whether she’d made a mistake trusting the Babylonian Talmud over the Ghostfacers, who didn’t mention fasting in any of their directions. Then she remembered the Ghostfacers’ directions generally, and promised herself that she’d eat a whole pizza and a double scoop of coffee ice cream as soon as she got this thing done.
At long last, she heard the rustling of leaves on the path and the heavy step of a person. Or something living in a person, anyway.
The guy who walked into her line of sight was mid-twenties, tall, good-looking. No surprise there: if you were a demon, wouldn’t you want to wear a pretty one?
Hannah licked her lips nervously. The text had explained how to attract demons, but had been pretty vague on keeping them once you had them. It would’ve been a lot easier if there’d been the rest of the community with her to restrain the afflicted one.
Of course, if she wanted that then she’d probably have to take the agricultural society that went with it, and Hannah was fond of veggie burgers, cars, and voting, so she wasn’t going to complain too much.
“Hello?” the man called out, hesitating just shy of the place she needed him to be. “Is there anybody out here?” He looked around, then behind himself, as if considering whether to give it all up and go home.
All in, Hannah decided, and stepped out from behind the cenotaph she’d been using as a place to sit and spy. “Hey,” she said.
The man jumped. He was doing a good impression of a human, she decided. The Ghostfacers said they had access to the host’s memories, so that shouldn’t have surprised her, but the apprehension on his face was convincing.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
The gun was warm at the small of her back, comforting even if it was a false comfort.
“I’m not really sure,” she said. “I just-” she dared a step towards him. Blessedly, he did the same. “I felt-” Again. “I had to-” And he was there, inside the boundaries of the trap she’d chalked underneath the carefully re-scattered leaves. “I had to see if I could really summon a demon.”
“What?” The man did a great impression of confrontation with the delusional. He had really nice eyebrows, Hannah noted. Also dimples, though they weren’t much in evidence right now.
The problem was, the remaining texts only had advice on how to detect demons in incorporeal form. The possessed just kind of showed up, already identified. Fine; she could be syncretic if she needed to be; the first law was to choose life, after all. “Christo,” she said, meaningless in her mouth, but the man-the demon-shuddered back anyway, eyes flaring black like a special effect in a movie.
“What are you-?” he said, still trying to shake her confidence, then noticed that he wasn’t able to move any further away.
Hannah swallowed. It was real, all of it. Despite what she’d seen last month, a large part of her had wanted to write it off as tricks of stress under near-death circumstances. But no. Demons walked the earth as in days of old.
She fumbled with the bag at her hip. She’d come overprepared, with every substance and incantation she could dig up (and given her doctorate, that was a lot). She’d even managed to bring the heart and liver of a fish from the Tigris river, courtesy of a colleague with friends at the Embassy and a willingness to tolerate weird requests.
Watching the demon, she pressed the button on her ancient cassette player to start the recorded psalm of David, made by another colleague who could actually play the lyre and paid for with Hannah’s promise to make three batches of her special fudge in the coming weeks. She hurried to light the mandrake root, edging as close to the demon’s trap as she dared to put the burning plant in front of it.
“What the fuck is that?” the demon demanded, rudely. “You think you can get me out with incense and ch-” It stopped and yowled, grabbing at its host’s head with fingers that left scratches where the nails dug into the man’s temples.
Hannah was too busy remembering the incantations to tell it, yes, I do think that. Possession-detection difficulties aside, exorcism was the most thoroughtly documented Jewish magical practice of the Second Temple period, and she ought to know. She knelt, careful to stay out of the demon’s reach, and set up her tiny camp stove, with the disgusting fish parts on top. The smell of the smoking fish quickly overwhelmed the sulphurous, old-fruit scent of the mandrake.
The demon was still writhing, down on his knees now as Hannah stood and began the Delos curses. What if this was all for nothing? What if none of it worked, mistranscribed or parts deliberately left out to hide the true mysteries from the uninitiated (those sages had a lot to answer for)?
But just at the end of the curse cycle, the demon screamed and opened its jaw wide, so wide it might be tearing something in the host, and vomited out a black cloud that swirled in a circle above them and then flashed into nonexistence.
The man collapsed.
Hannah took a deep breath and reached into the circle to prod at him. No reaction. He was barely breathing, and his skin was too pale. She pulled back. What if it was a bluff? What if the demon woke and pulled her into its prison, free to do anything it chose to her?
She couldn’t stop now. She reached down again and peeled back the man’s eyelid. “Christo,” she repeated, and it didn’t sound stupid this time if only because her heart was pounding so hard that the word came out high and shaky. No color change, iris clear and brown, pupil nonresponsive.
Hannah stuffed her materials back into her bag, except for the burnt mandrake and fish, because the smell was unbelievable. Those got kicked under more leaves at the side of the path. Then she got out her phone and called 911. “I was taking a walk in Grey’s Cemetery, out on Route 9,” she told the dispatcher, and her voice was still stretched-thin with adrenaline. “There’s a man here, he’s unconscious, please send someone.”
Hannah didn’t know CPR. It had never been a priority. She shook the man, but he didn’t wake. His breathing stuttered and slipped. The wind rustled the treetops, and though her ears stretched for the first echoing sirens she heard no human sound.
He was supposed to be fine. In the stories of exorcisms carried out in town squares and private homes, the victim was always fine. At least that’s what they’d written down.
Hannah knelt on the cold ground and realized just how much more there was she didn’t know.
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serrico, Revenge: Emily understands that part of the reason Nolan keeps pushing Jack at her is because Nolan knows he can't have Jack himself. It's a little awkward, but Emily's good at dealing with awkward things. PG-13 for language.
If all that Nolan had wanted from Jack was to fuck him, Emily knew, this would have been much easier. She doubted that Nolan even understood what he was really trying to do with his matchmaking. If she’d said, you’re trying to make him happy, Nolan would have laughed at her, and he would have believed it when he said, I only try to make myself happy.
Which was a pity. Emily was sure that, had Nolan possessed some actual insight into his motivations, he would have hired a strapping young dark-haired boathand, broad with muscle, with whom to work out his issues.
As it was, she could neither hire such a boathand for him-Nolan wouldn’t use him properly, not without self-understanding-nor could she convince him to back the hell off. It was very frustrating, if she were to be honest about the matter. All things surrounding Jack were frustrating. His fond memories, the increasingly difficult matter of Amanda, even his little brother nosing around and making trouble not of Emily’s creation in the Grayson family. If she could have transported the filthy rich-and she did mean filthy-of this town somewhere else, leaving Jack and his entire existence behind, she would have.
Unfortunately, money was not yet able to violate the laws of physics, no matter how high it was piled up. So she had to keep Nolan under control, one way or another. If that meant throwing two-bit hustlers in his direction like a baseball machine at a batting cage, fine.
All the same, there were moments she wanted to shake him. He was so very invested in the idea that he was above all the ordinary human emotions. Still, Nolan knew enough to understand that Jack would never want someone like him (even if he’d come with breasts and a cunt), and that he’d be bad for Jack even if he was wanted, and he thought that meant that he didn’t have feelings for Jack.
Nolan was, like most people, a fool.
That was all right, though. The foolish had their uses. And if the time came when Nolan’s triangulation of his desire through Emily would get her what she wanted, well-
Jack should’ve known better than to listen to Nolan long enough to get drawn into all this.
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giandujakiss: TVD, Bonnie/Damon. Where Bonnie is awesome. (Author’s note: my reaction was, “That’s easy. Is Bonnie in the story? There, done.”) Warning: Blood exchange.
“And I don’t have a boyfriend,” Bonnie finished, with the air of someone who knew that this was not an inherently persuasive complaint.
“Neither do I,” Damon pointed out, to remind her exactly who was on the other end of this conversation. He smiled at Bonnie, who had paused in her examination of the huge chain-encrusted box they’d found in the cave.
Bonnie gave him the evil eye. Not the witchy one, which was good because no way had he earned the headache, just a girl evil eye. “What, you and Alaric not getting along again?”
Damon smirked at her. “Ric and I aren’t like that. I mean, there was that one night, but he probably doesn’t want me to talk about it-”
“The sad thing is, I don’t even know whether you’re being serious,” Bonnie told him.
Damon pouted. “I don’t kiss and tell. Kiss and kill, yes, but I’m more of a show and tell type. If I were really fucking Ric, I’m pretty sure you’d know about it.”
“Yeah, like you’d be the one doing the-” Bonnie snapped and stopped, looking everywhere but at Damon.
“Okay, first, you really shouldn’t be making judgments about what people like in bed based on their behavior out of it; maybe that’s part of your boyfriend trouble. And second, in my extensive experience, it’s actually fucking on both sides. Or all three sides, or whatever number you prefer.”
Bonnie scowled. He liked to think it was because she was imagining him in a threesome and was uncomfortable with how hot that was. “Whatever. Have you figured out which way goes back to the surface yet?”
“Right this way,” Damon said, holding his hands out to the side like a presenter on The Price is Right. “You’re the one delaying us with the dish on your love life,” Damon pointed out. Bonnie, of course, didn’t acknowledge the justice of his observation, only picked up her lantern and left him to carry the giant box, which was awkward even with vampire strength, plus filthy from being stuck in the earth for decades. (Seriously, what was it with this area? Any more secret underground stashes and Damon was going to start wondering if they were really trapped in a Matrix-style video game. Or looking for giant tunneling mole rats. Possibly both.)
Damon got his own back, though, when the dire wolves showed up-though it would have been more amusing if they’d been naked mole rats-and Bonnie had to handle them on her own because his hands were full and the thing inside the box got busy trying to claw its way out.
When Bonnie had reinforced the spells on the chains enough to diminish the box’s movements to a subtle shaking, she put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow at Damon. “Thanks so much for your help,” she said.
“Thanks for yours! This creature tried to aerate me while you were playing dogcatcher!” Damon explained, totally reasonably. He held up his bloody arm for emphasis. “Besides, I would’ve had your back if you’d needed it.”
Bonnie snorted, but she seemed to be in a good mood as they made their way to the light.
****
Damon held his hand to the side of his head, very much like a silent movie heroine; Bonnie was not impressed. “Ow. Can’t you direct that mojo of yours just at the bad vampires?”
Since they were, for the moment, unmolested, and since it would be nice to have an extra advantage when the next wave attacked, she gave it a moment’s thought. “I could,” she concluded, “but I’d have to mark you.”
“Mark me?” Damon repeated, making it sound even sillier.
Before she could overthink it, she grabbed his head and pulled it down to hers, bringing their mouths together and biting down on his lip hard enough to draw blood. It felt-like a shock of electricity, like a machine shuddering to life, like the first time she’d levitated an object. His blood was salty, stinging her mouth like she was the one who’d been bleeding.
When she let him go (spitting out what she could; she didn’t know what happened to witches who died with vampire blood fresh inside them, but odds were it wasn’t good) he just stared at her, his eyes impossibly wider and his eyebrows arched even more parodically. “There,” she told him. “Now you’re marked.”
She felt the power rising in her, buzzing inside more strongly than it had any time except for when she’d borrowed other witches’ power. And then the room was full of other, more homicidal vampires, and there was no more time for embarrassment.
****
Damon systematically searched the round room for a door or passageway that would let them escape. The floor was uneven, peppered with rocks, and the walls weren’t much better. Even with his enhanced senses, he could barely see. “How do we get ourselves into these messes?” Damon asked rhetorically.
“Well, you’re an idiot,” Bonnie snapped, making her own circuit, using her phone as a flashlight to explore.
Damon wasn’t going to dignify that with an answer. Except: “Oh, and you’re here because you’re a genius, I see.”
“Dumb enough to hang around with you,” Bonnie muttered. Honestly, he didn’t know why they’d both been taken, or even how they’d both been knocked out and brought to this place, though it felt like it was underground (of fucking course). Why would anyone want both a witch and a vampire in good working order? He knew excellent reasons to want parts from one or both, but two live ones just didn’t compute.
“Hey,” Bonnie said, and when Damon looked over she gestured. Above their heads, about ten feet up, there was a ledge. The hole behind it was darker than black, hardly welcoming.
Waiting until this hole filled up with boiling oil or started compressing like the trash compactor in Star Wars wasn’t on his to-do list, however, so he went to stand beneath it and got down on one knee. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he asked when Bonnie just stood there. “Get climbing. I can boost you up.”
“What if there’s something dangerous up there?”
“All the better for me if you find it,” Damon pointed out. He sighed. “So, what you’re saying is, you want me to jump up, check it out, then jump back down if it’s safe, help you get up there, then jump up again. You do know that, as a vampire, I don’t need an extensive exercise regimen to keep this body in its superfine condition, right?”
“Damon,” Bonnie said, and there it was-that barely concealed desire to do real violence he enjoyed so much. Even after all they’d seen, Elena and Stefan persisted in believing that Bonnie was basically harmless. Damon knew better.
“Fine,” Damon conceded. “Stand back.”
But when he got to the little hollowed-out area in the wall, he had to raise a finger to shush Bonnie’s increasingly annoyed entreaties, because he could hear their captors. Discussing some mysterious ritual, of course, and rudely failing to exposit so that Damon could figure out exactly what was up or whether these bad guys were connected with Klaus or any of his ilk, but the point was that they would be in a room with an actual exit. Damon heard “… give it an hour,” which was good news, and then one of them left, confirming the ‘exit’ theory.
Damon landed like a cat. A very graceful cat. Anyone who said differently was lying.
“How are you on breaking through a couple inches of stone and/or an iron grate?”
Bonnie looked at him skeptically. “Isn’t that more of a vampire strength thing?”
“Sure, I could do it. But it would be loud and slow and we’d end up with a bunch of whatever they used to knock us out the first time pointed at us. Better if you can do it. I’m happy to break necks on the way out, though.”
Bonnie chewed her lower lip. “Listen, if I-”
Damon waited. And waited some more. He smiled; she glared. Finally she caved. “When I tasted your blood, last time-I felt more powerful.”
She looked so uncomfortable he almost didn’t feel the need to say anything. “If you get killed-”
“Yes, I know,” she said irritably. Given all the hybridized monsters they’d already seen, Damon was willing to bet that a witchpire was not a thing he wanted in his life, regardless of how useful Bonnie had been to date. Bonnie’s jaw was tight, but she swallowed and continued: “So just-keep me from getting killed, all right?”
“Easy-peasy,” he said, even though this was undoubtedly going to bite him on the ass and not in a fun way.
“So, uh, how do we do this?” she asked, clearly hating herself for any hint of reliance on him.
Just for that, he flashed her a wide grin before he fanged out and bit into his wrist. “Come on,” he said when she just stood there. “I heal up fast.”
It was nothing like forcing Elena to drink his blood. Bonnie took his arm in both her hands, holding it up to her mouth the way she might’ve held a dish of water. Her hot little tongue pressed against his flesh, increasing the burn of the shredded skin. She gagged on her first swallow, but then it changed. She sucked almost like a real vampire would have, and he could feel the pull of suction and the half-sharp edges of her teeth.
“Okay!” he said when she threatened to take more than he could afford. He had to put his hand over hers, prying her fingers loose, before she stopped.
She dropped his arm like it was red-hot and gaped at him in horror. Her bloody mouth made presently inappropriate parts of him wake up and pay attention. Damon pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and tied it around the wound while she collected herself.
“I won’t ask if it worked,” he said. She was practically crackling with power. He had a sudden vision of Bonnie with a vampire or two (he had an idea about who that might be) locked up in her basement, available for power-ups at will.
This time, when he knelt to boost her up, she came to him quickly.
****
Honestly, Bonnie felt bad that Damon had taken three bullets for her, even though she knew he was substantially more durable than she was. Even his complaining-“already down three pints-ow-you owe me a shirt, witch”-hadn’t entirely erased her feeling of obligation, plus she was still amped up and unable to relax, so after she got him settled in his ridiculous bed she went to snag some bags of blood from the downstairs cooler.
How did this become my life, she wondered as she headed back upstairs. I drank a vampire’s blood, which sounded like a Chuck Norris joke but was substantially more disturbing in practice. Especially since it had worked, which implied that it would make sense to do again. And it had felt amazing-the werewolves behind their capture had flown back like they were made of tissue paper when Bonnie had raised her hand. She’d saved her friends from some idiot shaman’s attempt to counter Klaus’s hybrid army by reusing the orginal materials, including Elena’s blood, and she wasn’t even out of power yet. Sure, she could sense an unpleasant crash off in the distance, like the end of year tests at school, but right now she could have levitated herself up and down the stairs.
Damon chugged down the blood with all the grace of a frat boy at a beer bong. The bullet holes were already fading, and she couldn’t even see a trace of the holes he’d chewed in his own veins for her. “That’s better,” he said on a gasp, tossing the last empty bag aside. He licked his lips, removing the traces of blood that further reddened his lips. “Back to fighting form. Now all I need is a good lay-”
Which should’ve been her cue to leave. But Elena and Caroline were out hunting information on this latest set of nemeses and their no doubt complicated and fatal plans, and Bonnie wasn’t quite ready to go home yet. Maybe it was the vampire blood still in her system. Maybe it was Damon’s blood.
“What’s it like?” she asked, startling him into actually looking at her. “Having sex whenever you want, with no emotions involved.”
“Fun?” Damon offered, after a pause. “I’d be happy to demonstrate.”
He was just lying there in the middle of that huge bed, shirtless and lazy. And damn he was pretty, especially if you ignored anything that came out of his mouth. Probably it was just the near-death adrenaline-that and the fact that she hadn’t had a real date in months-but she stepped forward and pulled off her top, tossing it aside before her knees hit the bed.
She straddled him-he was staring at her but had the horse sense to not talk, though his eyebrows were doing their best to be insulting even without words-and leaned down so that their faces were inches apart. Damon, predictably, dropped his eyes to her chest.
“Yeah?” she breathed.
And she was on her back, his hands braceleted on her wrists. It had been so fast she hadn’t even felt the motion. “Be careful what you wish for,” Damon growled. “You might get it.” He pulsed his hips against hers, and she felt him already hard and ready.
She arched her back to press their bodies even more closely together and smiled, putting just enough challenge into it to make Damon’s pupils dilate and his nostrils flare. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
And if his mouth when it met hers was cooler than a human’s, well, that was something she could ignore, just for now.
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elliemurasaki: Supernatural. Female Jewish hunter, first encounter with demons.
Hannah crouched in the cemetery, her stomach growling loud enough to drown out most of the night sounds. She wondered, not for the first time, whether she’d made a mistake trusting the Babylonian Talmud over the Ghostfacers, who didn’t mention fasting in any of their directions. Then she remembered the Ghostfacers’ directions generally, and promised herself that she’d eat a whole pizza and a double scoop of coffee ice cream as soon as she got this thing done.
At long last, she heard the rustling of leaves on the path and the heavy step of a person. Or something living in a person, anyway.
The guy who walked into her line of sight was mid-twenties, tall, good-looking. No surprise there: if you were a demon, wouldn’t you want to wear a pretty one?
Hannah licked her lips nervously. The text had explained how to attract demons, but had been pretty vague on keeping them once you had them. It would’ve been a lot easier if there’d been the rest of the community with her to restrain the afflicted one.
Of course, if she wanted that then she’d probably have to take the agricultural society that went with it, and Hannah was fond of veggie burgers, cars, and voting, so she wasn’t going to complain too much.
“Hello?” the man called out, hesitating just shy of the place she needed him to be. “Is there anybody out here?” He looked around, then behind himself, as if considering whether to give it all up and go home.
All in, Hannah decided, and stepped out from behind the cenotaph she’d been using as a place to sit and spy. “Hey,” she said.
The man jumped. He was doing a good impression of a human, she decided. The Ghostfacers said they had access to the host’s memories, so that shouldn’t have surprised her, but the apprehension on his face was convincing.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
The gun was warm at the small of her back, comforting even if it was a false comfort.
“I’m not really sure,” she said. “I just-” she dared a step towards him. Blessedly, he did the same. “I felt-” Again. “I had to-” And he was there, inside the boundaries of the trap she’d chalked underneath the carefully re-scattered leaves. “I had to see if I could really summon a demon.”
“What?” The man did a great impression of confrontation with the delusional. He had really nice eyebrows, Hannah noted. Also dimples, though they weren’t much in evidence right now.
The problem was, the remaining texts only had advice on how to detect demons in incorporeal form. The possessed just kind of showed up, already identified. Fine; she could be syncretic if she needed to be; the first law was to choose life, after all. “Christo,” she said, meaningless in her mouth, but the man-the demon-shuddered back anyway, eyes flaring black like a special effect in a movie.
“What are you-?” he said, still trying to shake her confidence, then noticed that he wasn’t able to move any further away.
Hannah swallowed. It was real, all of it. Despite what she’d seen last month, a large part of her had wanted to write it off as tricks of stress under near-death circumstances. But no. Demons walked the earth as in days of old.
She fumbled with the bag at her hip. She’d come overprepared, with every substance and incantation she could dig up (and given her doctorate, that was a lot). She’d even managed to bring the heart and liver of a fish from the Tigris river, courtesy of a colleague with friends at the Embassy and a willingness to tolerate weird requests.
Watching the demon, she pressed the button on her ancient cassette player to start the recorded psalm of David, made by another colleague who could actually play the lyre and paid for with Hannah’s promise to make three batches of her special fudge in the coming weeks. She hurried to light the mandrake root, edging as close to the demon’s trap as she dared to put the burning plant in front of it.
“What the fuck is that?” the demon demanded, rudely. “You think you can get me out with incense and ch-” It stopped and yowled, grabbing at its host’s head with fingers that left scratches where the nails dug into the man’s temples.
Hannah was too busy remembering the incantations to tell it, yes, I do think that. Possession-detection difficulties aside, exorcism was the most thoroughtly documented Jewish magical practice of the Second Temple period, and she ought to know. She knelt, careful to stay out of the demon’s reach, and set up her tiny camp stove, with the disgusting fish parts on top. The smell of the smoking fish quickly overwhelmed the sulphurous, old-fruit scent of the mandrake.
The demon was still writhing, down on his knees now as Hannah stood and began the Delos curses. What if this was all for nothing? What if none of it worked, mistranscribed or parts deliberately left out to hide the true mysteries from the uninitiated (those sages had a lot to answer for)?
But just at the end of the curse cycle, the demon screamed and opened its jaw wide, so wide it might be tearing something in the host, and vomited out a black cloud that swirled in a circle above them and then flashed into nonexistence.
The man collapsed.
Hannah took a deep breath and reached into the circle to prod at him. No reaction. He was barely breathing, and his skin was too pale. She pulled back. What if it was a bluff? What if the demon woke and pulled her into its prison, free to do anything it chose to her?
She couldn’t stop now. She reached down again and peeled back the man’s eyelid. “Christo,” she repeated, and it didn’t sound stupid this time if only because her heart was pounding so hard that the word came out high and shaky. No color change, iris clear and brown, pupil nonresponsive.
Hannah stuffed her materials back into her bag, except for the burnt mandrake and fish, because the smell was unbelievable. Those got kicked under more leaves at the side of the path. Then she got out her phone and called 911. “I was taking a walk in Grey’s Cemetery, out on Route 9,” she told the dispatcher, and her voice was still stretched-thin with adrenaline. “There’s a man here, he’s unconscious, please send someone.”
Hannah didn’t know CPR. It had never been a priority. She shook the man, but he didn’t wake. His breathing stuttered and slipped. The wind rustled the treetops, and though her ears stretched for the first echoing sirens she heard no human sound.
He was supposed to be fine. In the stories of exorcisms carried out in town squares and private homes, the victim was always fine. At least that’s what they’d written down.
Hannah knelt on the cold ground and realized just how much more there was she didn’t know.
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serrico, Revenge: Emily understands that part of the reason Nolan keeps pushing Jack at her is because Nolan knows he can't have Jack himself. It's a little awkward, but Emily's good at dealing with awkward things. PG-13 for language.
If all that Nolan had wanted from Jack was to fuck him, Emily knew, this would have been much easier. She doubted that Nolan even understood what he was really trying to do with his matchmaking. If she’d said, you’re trying to make him happy, Nolan would have laughed at her, and he would have believed it when he said, I only try to make myself happy.
Which was a pity. Emily was sure that, had Nolan possessed some actual insight into his motivations, he would have hired a strapping young dark-haired boathand, broad with muscle, with whom to work out his issues.
As it was, she could neither hire such a boathand for him-Nolan wouldn’t use him properly, not without self-understanding-nor could she convince him to back the hell off. It was very frustrating, if she were to be honest about the matter. All things surrounding Jack were frustrating. His fond memories, the increasingly difficult matter of Amanda, even his little brother nosing around and making trouble not of Emily’s creation in the Grayson family. If she could have transported the filthy rich-and she did mean filthy-of this town somewhere else, leaving Jack and his entire existence behind, she would have.
Unfortunately, money was not yet able to violate the laws of physics, no matter how high it was piled up. So she had to keep Nolan under control, one way or another. If that meant throwing two-bit hustlers in his direction like a baseball machine at a batting cage, fine.
All the same, there were moments she wanted to shake him. He was so very invested in the idea that he was above all the ordinary human emotions. Still, Nolan knew enough to understand that Jack would never want someone like him (even if he’d come with breasts and a cunt), and that he’d be bad for Jack even if he was wanted, and he thought that meant that he didn’t have feelings for Jack.
Nolan was, like most people, a fool.
That was all right, though. The foolish had their uses. And if the time came when Nolan’s triangulation of his desire through Emily would get her what she wanted, well-
Jack should’ve known better than to listen to Nolan long enough to get drawn into all this.
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