DN -- The Hunt IV: The Harm
Title: The Hunt
Chapter: 4. The Harm
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: Matt/Mello/Near, Light/L
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,227
Warnings: language, violence, implied sketchiness, (non-sparkly) vampires
Summary: Discovering a new coven is never a good thing, but there's something strange about this one - and that's even worse. The vampires are closing in. The Hunt is on.
Author's Note: JKFDSLJ this fic. Thanks to eltea for looking this chapter over, because otherwise I was going to kick it out a window or something.
CHAPTER IV. THE HARM
When Odd had led Raye off in search of a clean bed, as Roger attended Naomi’s much less serious wounds, Mello had the time to glance around and the luxury to observe the glaring problem in the familiar church.
“What the hell is that?” he demanded, pointing sharply to the dark-haired, red-eyed thing lounging at the altar rail, shaded by a faded beach umbrella, each section of which was a different color of the rainbow.
“Poignant word choice,” the thing declared, pleasantly. “‘Hell’ is a good start, and I love the impersonality of the definite pronoun-distancing, no less.”
“Don’t argue with him,” Wammy interjected as Mello opened his mouth. “He just gets worse.”
“Or better,” the thing offered cheerfully.
Pausing to look more closely, Mello saw the hint of strain in the round-toothed smile, the bent shoulders shying from the cross, and the chain wrapped three times around the rail. Whatever this thing was, it was trapped.
It was also grinning at him like a cat.
“Curious, aren’t you?” it asked. “Dreadfully inquisitive. There’s just so much we don’t know, isn’t there? And so much that’s worth knowing.”
“So enlighten me,” Mello shot back, folding his arms, making sure to jar the crucifix that hung around his neck.
The uncanny red eyes danced. “I don’t know much,” the thing answered. “Aren’t most freaks held in the dark about the very nature of their freakishness, just in case it could become a weapon?” White fingers like a skeleton’s trilled playfully across the rail. “Ah, but who’s doing the holding? Maybe that’s what you should ask.”
“Wammy,” Mello asked the man sidelong, “why are we keeping a clown?”
“My riddles aren’t very funny,” came the murmur through the Cheshire smile.
“Meet Beyond Birthday,” Wammy remarked. “He showed up just before dawn.”
“Arrived,” Beyond corrected idly. “Plagues show up. I arrived, voluntarily, with the best and noblest of intentions.”
The silence was thick with only to be locked up without so much as a by-your-leave.
Yeah, his riddles were pretty damn lame.
Mello let the quiet start to fester as he looked this Beyond guy up and down. The thing gazed unblinkingly back.
“Ask L,” Beyond suggested seconds before Mello meant to speak. “L knows more than he’s told you or anyone.”
“If you’re ‘in in the dark,’” Mello countered, “how do you know that?”
Beyond motioned to his eyes with two bound hands. “Given the circumstances,” he said, “I see rather well.”
Mello could see himself kicking this guy’s ass.
“No one will be bothering L until tonight,” Wammy cut in, moving to Roger’s side to help an overwhelmed Naomi to her feet. “Tonight, we’ll talk about Driskin as well.”
“Just wake me up,” Naomi told them. “And duck; I tend to throw things.”
Wammy smiled and shot Mello an indulgent glance. “We have plenty of experience with that.”
Wammy wasn’t smiling anymore when they laid out the map that evening, setting weights on the corners so the edges wouldn’t curl. L was up at last, looking pouch-eyed but resolute, and the assembled team spoke in low voices, hoping Beyond-thing wouldn’t overhear.
Beyond-thing didn’t seem to mind; he was humming Christmas carols.
“We can try that spot again,” L mused, thumb to lips. “If they’re as organized as they seem to be, it’s likely that we’ll encounter them again, and we can do our best to eliminate the lot.”
Exterminate, Mello thought. Eradicate.
Like vermin.
L fiddled with a frayed corner of the map. “I cautiously doubt that there will be more of this type,” he noted. “They acted… defensive, as if they couldn’t afford to lose any among their number. Perhaps these are the only ones we have to track down.”
There was a pause in which no one stated the obvious.
Or no one would have; Beyond-thing was happy to oblige.
“Don’t count your chickens,” he advised, “before they hatch into velociraptors.”
L gave him a look, and Beyond returned a toothy grin.
“I was going to say,” L muttered, “that we ought to prepare for the worst regardless.”
“Fair enough,” Wammy replied. “Let’s see what the storeroom has to offer before you go.”
They called it the storeroom, but it was really more of an armory/arsenal spread out in the catacombs beneath the church, an eerie home for cobwebbed sepulchers and gleaming guns.
Mello thought it was awesome.
-
Guns were important.
Near didn’t like them the way Matt did-he didn’t admire them aesthetically; he didn’t rank them according to their various statistics; he didn’t coo over them and stroke their barrels like some strange ritual-but he appreciated them for their capacities and kept track of them to maximize their usefulness.
Different guns fired different bullets at different speeds: basic. More bullets, fired faster, kept a vampire down longer: logical. Bullets were expensive, and Near was too small to fight the vampires off manually: there was the rub.
He buckled a holster at his left hip and pulled it tight, settling a sleek semiautomatic pistol comfortably in its embrace. Six shots; reloading would take a minute, but he dropped another round of bullets into his pocket anyway. He’d have to save every one of those shots-choose six opportune moments.
He slung a rifle across his back and pushed his hair out of his eyes, stepping out of the narrow, firearm-lined aisle between old tombs to let Mello take his pick. When Matt had made his selections after, the three of them settled briefly on a low-set sarcophagus to wait for the others. Matt sat in the middle, Mello on his left, Near on his right, and kissed insistently at their ears and necks until each of them had cracked a grin.
“You’re such a puppy,” Mello muttered, struggling not to smile.
Matt stuck his tongue out and panted.
Mello laid a palm on the butt of his handgun. “Lick me and die.”
“A good life philosophy,” Wammy commented, moving over to them. “I think it’s time to go, gentlemen.”
Odd fidgeted, dwarfed by his assault rifle, grave but working up a smile. “Get your top hats,” he added, “and your canes.”
Canes actually sounded like a good idea-they could be used to beat the vampires back, push them away, keep them at cane’s distance.
Near wondered if this was a sign that he was going insane.
He then wondered if anyone in a troupe of vampire-hunters would be able to tell the difference. The good news was that, given the current life expectancy in the region, he’d probably die well before he had a chance to lose his mind. Or was that the bad news?
Near thought he might stick with less thinking and more leech-slaying. This, too, was a reliable philosophy for life.
Linda joined them, and then L approached, a stark vision all in plain black gear, everything but his hair in perfect order and array. He carried a familiar and well-protected cherry-wood box.
In it lay three oak stakes.
“Last time,” L announced, “there were six of them. There are currently six of us. Who do you think should hold these?”
“Near,” Mello said immediately.
Near wasn’t sure whether to be flattered at the trust or irked at his demotion to a walking gunsafe.
As it were.
“L should have one,” Matt put in.
“And Odd should,” Linda finished before anyone else could speak.
“Oh,” Odd said, looking like he’d arrived at the same revelation as Near.
“Sounds good,” was Wammy’s verdict. He proffered three brown leather belts, each with a loop at the side. Near donned his, adjusting it around the gun already settled on his hip, accepted one of the stakes, and slotted it safely into the loop. They carved the stakes to facilitate this arrangement-the wood tapered towards the end, ideal for stabbing through virus-thickened flesh, and had a notch towards the top, delineating a handle and keeping them secure where they hung in the strap.
Near wasn’t, on the whole, the best recipient of this kind of responsibility; his staking lacked power and finesse-sometimes, depending on his angle, to a hazardous extent. The way they’d plotted out tonight, of course, he’d probably be passing the object back and forth, more than anything else, acting as something of a guardian to keep watch over the precious real weapon, stepping in to employ it if someone got into trouble and couldn’t fight out.
He was capable of that much-and a one-to-two ratio of stakes to Hunters was optimistic indeed.
That didn’t mean his heart wasn’t rattling the bars of his ribcage as he settled the heel of his hand on the base of the stake and followed Mello up the stairs and out into the evening.
Bad feelings were just the product of a strained imagination. They had far more firepower than was usually the case-including the means to put a few leeches down for good. What could go wrong?
Near winced, realizing that he’d started tempting fate since the moment he’d thought to ask.
Hopefully, fate would be above temptation tonight.
-
As he strode at the head of his troupe, navigating terrain only familiar in the dark, L was indexing all of his weapons, compulsively he knew.
They were well-equipped tonight, which he hoped meant the odds were on their side.
He smiled; the Odd certainly was, but probability was a fickler friend.
Pistol, rifle, Bowie knife, stake. Standard, assertive, comfortable, safe. They knew this neck of the woods, and they knew how to kill the ones that made it bleed.
This was their arena. Let the games begin.
Apparently the vampires agreed.
There wasn’t so much as a crackle of leaves as the monsters broke from the trees-shadows flickering and then gaining life, gaining form, gaining teeth. L snapped his flashlight on, the beam weak and thin in the darkness, and the shying away of the shadows was tantalizingly temporary.
The brown-haired leader stepped directly into the light, vast pupils dwindling, overtaken by the red. L swallowed hard, his fingers creeping towards his pistol, and struggled to block out the brightness of the mutated eyes-so clear, so lucid, and so afraid.
How was he supposed to put a bullet between those eyes?
Well, actually, that was easy enough.
In fact, he did it, swinging the Smith and Wesson up sideways like something out of a Western, arcing it towards the pale face centered in the light. Black blood dribbled from the hole, and the vampire dropped, elegant limbs askew.
No, the trouble was the stake. The trouble was ending a life-an afterlife-an un-life-destroying something twisted but beautiful, something with a dark sort of value all its own.
Before he could hesitate with an oak judgment raised, another vampire darted into his path, snarling, another once-man who had been youthful before he’d been bled dry and animated anew.
L put a single bullet in this one’s heart and lunged forward. No space for compassion; no time to think twice. No time for anything but drawing the stake, lifting his arm-
But then there was another-wide-eyed and innocent-faced, with a widow’s peak that jutted like a spike into his forehead. He looked incongruous as an antagonist-like he never should have been here, sharp-toothed, in a forest broken only by tiny flashlights. He looked like he should have been out on a cigarette break.
Wishful thinking was pointless. This was the world they had, and the only way to change it was one moment, one muscle, one movement at a time.
L’s next movement was ducking a set of claws, feeling the breeze of the slash fluttering against his face, and the movement after that was leaping back from the next swipe. He fired the pistol twice, but the creature shifted just enough to take the bullets in the shoulder, not the heart, which barely even slowed it down.
L didn’t like the look of this.
He also didn’t like the feel of it, particularly when his attacker, claws flexing, bent low and barreled towards him, aiming to take him out at the knees.
Steeling himself, L let the mass of vampire hit him at full strength and speed, the impact sending an aching shudder through his bones, and held his left arm out to cushion the fall just slightly-pulling it away before their combined weight could snap his humerus. This way, slamming into the leaves left him dizzy but not winded, and he could force his eyes to focus on the barrel of his gun. He jerked it up to the vampire’s broad forehead and fired once, incapacitating the thing for the next fifteen seconds-which he didn’t plan to waste.
L shoved the vampire’s jittering, healing body off of his, wet leaves crushed beneath it, and rolled hastily to his knees, lifting the stake he’d somehow held onto.
Miraculously, it wasn’t broken.
He plunged the sharp end into the center of the vampire’s chest, slotting it between two ribs, angling it just enough to bypass the sternum and delve into the bulk of the heart.
He skewered it like a pinboard butterfly.
The vampire hadn’t quite recovered from the bullet, and his body finally relinquished him to a death long overdue.
L wrenched the stake free, climbing to his feet and staggering a step away-even now, watching the virus betray its host, seeing the flesh crumble and shred, blacken and collapse, bearing witness to the expedited decay, was nothing short of gruesome.
Reflection-and revulsion-were too slow to indulge in now. There wasn’t space in this dance for any new choreography: their steps were unflinching and instinctual, and whoever made an error first lost the chance to make another. High-stakes, low-tolerance, and L desperately needed to win.
The leader was back. L had the pistol raised, had it trained, the stake loosely clenched in his left hand.
He wondered what color those eyes had been before the red had drowned it out.
“It’s him,” the vampire said, with a slow, triumphant grin.
L sensed the other Hunters pausing, turning, curious but wary, as he’d taught them a thousand times.
L didn’t have time to be proud of them before the five remaining vampires descended on him like a flock of crows.
Foreheads, noses, eyes-he nailed the first to dive at him, not waiting for the spurt of blood like oil. The second, huge and broad-shouldered, came too close too fast, giving him a clear shot at the temple, and crumpled like a giant rag doll to the leaves. L whirled on the third-slender, young, with a discordant beaming smile-and raised the pistol, but wet blackness splattered in his face before he could pull the trigger. When the body tumbled, Mello stood behind it with the smoking gun in hand.
Near shouted, a hoarse, unfamiliar cry, tossing his stake; Mello snatched it from the air and half-turned to bury it in the latest victim, but another vampire tackled him to the ground, defending its brother.
The faintest crunch of damp leaves sent L spinning to face the latest enemy-the leader again.
He had lifted the gun and was gripping the trigger before he remembered.
“You’re out of bullets,” the vampire noted, smirking contentedly.
L pitched the empty pistol at his face.
The vampire stopped smiling.
A bruise blossomed in fast-motion, a flare of purple, muddling to brown, then yellow, and then fading to match the surrounding pallor again. The vampire hissed, poised to leap.
“Your mother is out of bullets,” L said, unsheathing his knife.
The vampire stared incredulously for a second-long enough for L to surge forward and strike first.
Cut off the head, kill the snake.
He stabbed for the vampire’s throat, rewarded for his aggression by the satisfying squelch of steel sinking into undead flesh. Black blood welled, but the vampire clasped two supernaturally strong hands around L’s wrist before he could pull the knife out or shove it sideways for a partial decapitation.
Speaking of cutting off heads, though, vampires could take that, too-one of the others would retrieve the head and hold it in place as threads of neck and shoulders meshed and squirmed, sealing the gap and rewiring the nerves, in a process that was every bit as rapid as it was viscerally disturbing.
Usually, the entire troupe was moved to vomiting by the time the vampire was reassembled, which made it a rather ineffective attack strategy on the whole.
L felt sick enough now-hollow-sick, a riotous foreboding stirring in his stomach, darts of anxiety waging a campaign to overtake him. The vampire’s grip on his wrist tightened until L’s fingertips tingled, pins and needles seething up his arm, and he clenched his teeth and hefted the stake in his left hand. Their eyes were locked-blood-red and a shade of gray.
He wasn’t supposed to be here.
They should have listened.
This shouldn’t have been happening at all.
He brought the stake down in an almost-perfect weak-handed arc.
Before the stake’s point landed, in the split-second of leeway, the vampire twisted L’s wrist, yanked it and the knife from the wound, and hurled L sideways as if he weighed nothing at all.
He felt as though it was true. He felt completely insubstantial-time slowed; the world shifted, second by second, in stop-motion frames like a half-broken movie reel; faintly he heard Mello screaming over the rush of air.
Then he crashed into a tree trunk, and everything went precipitously black.
Well, shit.
-
Mello flung himself forward, howling like an animal, and only Matt’s arms around his waist kept him from throwing himself unarmed at the five vampires gathering around an unconscious L.
Blurry in their haste, flashlight beams flicking at their backs, the vampires avoided the fallen stake and slung L over the big one’s shoulder.
Odd fired three bullets into the leader’s chest, eyes streaming, but the brown-haired bastard just sneered, unnaturally strengthened by success, and melted into the dark.
And then they were gone.
It was quiet-impossibly quiet; the silence thick and brimming. They were alone with the scrag-fingered trees and the damp leaves, the eyeless sky and the drifting mist curling its cold hands around them. A sickening, wizened corpse and a shard of oak lay listlessly in the crisscrossing tracks of displaced foliage. A cricket chirped.
Near’s knees were shaking as he shuffled across the clearing and picked up the stake.
Matt let go of Mello’s arm, and the other boy sank to the ground and sobbed.
No one spoke for a long time.
“Get up,” Linda said.
Mello gave her a look that would have melted through glass.
“Get up,” she repeated, louder. “We’ll need a hell of a lot more Hunters if we’re going to track them down.”
Slowly, Mello pushed himself to his feet, straightened, and dragged one arm across his eyes.
“Give me that stake, Near,” he ordered.
Wordlessly Near handed it over.
Mello admired the weak fragment of wood, still stained with brackish virus-blood.
“This is the one I’ll kill him with,” he announced. “You’re hearing me make this as a promise. I’m going to kill the fucker with this stake, and I’m going to watch him die.”
Matt saw the fierce, cold light in Mello’s eyes and believed it.
[Chapter III] [Chapter V]
Chapter: 4. The Harm
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: Matt/Mello/Near, Light/L
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,227
Warnings: language, violence, implied sketchiness, (non-sparkly) vampires
Summary: Discovering a new coven is never a good thing, but there's something strange about this one - and that's even worse. The vampires are closing in. The Hunt is on.
Author's Note: JKFDSLJ this fic. Thanks to eltea for looking this chapter over, because otherwise I was going to kick it out a window or something.
CHAPTER IV. THE HARM
When Odd had led Raye off in search of a clean bed, as Roger attended Naomi’s much less serious wounds, Mello had the time to glance around and the luxury to observe the glaring problem in the familiar church.
“What the hell is that?” he demanded, pointing sharply to the dark-haired, red-eyed thing lounging at the altar rail, shaded by a faded beach umbrella, each section of which was a different color of the rainbow.
“Poignant word choice,” the thing declared, pleasantly. “‘Hell’ is a good start, and I love the impersonality of the definite pronoun-distancing, no less.”
“Don’t argue with him,” Wammy interjected as Mello opened his mouth. “He just gets worse.”
“Or better,” the thing offered cheerfully.
Pausing to look more closely, Mello saw the hint of strain in the round-toothed smile, the bent shoulders shying from the cross, and the chain wrapped three times around the rail. Whatever this thing was, it was trapped.
It was also grinning at him like a cat.
“Curious, aren’t you?” it asked. “Dreadfully inquisitive. There’s just so much we don’t know, isn’t there? And so much that’s worth knowing.”
“So enlighten me,” Mello shot back, folding his arms, making sure to jar the crucifix that hung around his neck.
The uncanny red eyes danced. “I don’t know much,” the thing answered. “Aren’t most freaks held in the dark about the very nature of their freakishness, just in case it could become a weapon?” White fingers like a skeleton’s trilled playfully across the rail. “Ah, but who’s doing the holding? Maybe that’s what you should ask.”
“Wammy,” Mello asked the man sidelong, “why are we keeping a clown?”
“My riddles aren’t very funny,” came the murmur through the Cheshire smile.
“Meet Beyond Birthday,” Wammy remarked. “He showed up just before dawn.”
“Arrived,” Beyond corrected idly. “Plagues show up. I arrived, voluntarily, with the best and noblest of intentions.”
The silence was thick with only to be locked up without so much as a by-your-leave.
Yeah, his riddles were pretty damn lame.
Mello let the quiet start to fester as he looked this Beyond guy up and down. The thing gazed unblinkingly back.
“Ask L,” Beyond suggested seconds before Mello meant to speak. “L knows more than he’s told you or anyone.”
“If you’re ‘in in the dark,’” Mello countered, “how do you know that?”
Beyond motioned to his eyes with two bound hands. “Given the circumstances,” he said, “I see rather well.”
Mello could see himself kicking this guy’s ass.
“No one will be bothering L until tonight,” Wammy cut in, moving to Roger’s side to help an overwhelmed Naomi to her feet. “Tonight, we’ll talk about Driskin as well.”
“Just wake me up,” Naomi told them. “And duck; I tend to throw things.”
Wammy smiled and shot Mello an indulgent glance. “We have plenty of experience with that.”
Wammy wasn’t smiling anymore when they laid out the map that evening, setting weights on the corners so the edges wouldn’t curl. L was up at last, looking pouch-eyed but resolute, and the assembled team spoke in low voices, hoping Beyond-thing wouldn’t overhear.
Beyond-thing didn’t seem to mind; he was humming Christmas carols.
“We can try that spot again,” L mused, thumb to lips. “If they’re as organized as they seem to be, it’s likely that we’ll encounter them again, and we can do our best to eliminate the lot.”
Exterminate, Mello thought. Eradicate.
Like vermin.
L fiddled with a frayed corner of the map. “I cautiously doubt that there will be more of this type,” he noted. “They acted… defensive, as if they couldn’t afford to lose any among their number. Perhaps these are the only ones we have to track down.”
There was a pause in which no one stated the obvious.
Or no one would have; Beyond-thing was happy to oblige.
“Don’t count your chickens,” he advised, “before they hatch into velociraptors.”
L gave him a look, and Beyond returned a toothy grin.
“I was going to say,” L muttered, “that we ought to prepare for the worst regardless.”
“Fair enough,” Wammy replied. “Let’s see what the storeroom has to offer before you go.”
They called it the storeroom, but it was really more of an armory/arsenal spread out in the catacombs beneath the church, an eerie home for cobwebbed sepulchers and gleaming guns.
Mello thought it was awesome.
-
Guns were important.
Near didn’t like them the way Matt did-he didn’t admire them aesthetically; he didn’t rank them according to their various statistics; he didn’t coo over them and stroke their barrels like some strange ritual-but he appreciated them for their capacities and kept track of them to maximize their usefulness.
Different guns fired different bullets at different speeds: basic. More bullets, fired faster, kept a vampire down longer: logical. Bullets were expensive, and Near was too small to fight the vampires off manually: there was the rub.
He buckled a holster at his left hip and pulled it tight, settling a sleek semiautomatic pistol comfortably in its embrace. Six shots; reloading would take a minute, but he dropped another round of bullets into his pocket anyway. He’d have to save every one of those shots-choose six opportune moments.
He slung a rifle across his back and pushed his hair out of his eyes, stepping out of the narrow, firearm-lined aisle between old tombs to let Mello take his pick. When Matt had made his selections after, the three of them settled briefly on a low-set sarcophagus to wait for the others. Matt sat in the middle, Mello on his left, Near on his right, and kissed insistently at their ears and necks until each of them had cracked a grin.
“You’re such a puppy,” Mello muttered, struggling not to smile.
Matt stuck his tongue out and panted.
Mello laid a palm on the butt of his handgun. “Lick me and die.”
“A good life philosophy,” Wammy commented, moving over to them. “I think it’s time to go, gentlemen.”
Odd fidgeted, dwarfed by his assault rifle, grave but working up a smile. “Get your top hats,” he added, “and your canes.”
Canes actually sounded like a good idea-they could be used to beat the vampires back, push them away, keep them at cane’s distance.
Near wondered if this was a sign that he was going insane.
He then wondered if anyone in a troupe of vampire-hunters would be able to tell the difference. The good news was that, given the current life expectancy in the region, he’d probably die well before he had a chance to lose his mind. Or was that the bad news?
Near thought he might stick with less thinking and more leech-slaying. This, too, was a reliable philosophy for life.
Linda joined them, and then L approached, a stark vision all in plain black gear, everything but his hair in perfect order and array. He carried a familiar and well-protected cherry-wood box.
In it lay three oak stakes.
“Last time,” L announced, “there were six of them. There are currently six of us. Who do you think should hold these?”
“Near,” Mello said immediately.
Near wasn’t sure whether to be flattered at the trust or irked at his demotion to a walking gunsafe.
As it were.
“L should have one,” Matt put in.
“And Odd should,” Linda finished before anyone else could speak.
“Oh,” Odd said, looking like he’d arrived at the same revelation as Near.
“Sounds good,” was Wammy’s verdict. He proffered three brown leather belts, each with a loop at the side. Near donned his, adjusting it around the gun already settled on his hip, accepted one of the stakes, and slotted it safely into the loop. They carved the stakes to facilitate this arrangement-the wood tapered towards the end, ideal for stabbing through virus-thickened flesh, and had a notch towards the top, delineating a handle and keeping them secure where they hung in the strap.
Near wasn’t, on the whole, the best recipient of this kind of responsibility; his staking lacked power and finesse-sometimes, depending on his angle, to a hazardous extent. The way they’d plotted out tonight, of course, he’d probably be passing the object back and forth, more than anything else, acting as something of a guardian to keep watch over the precious real weapon, stepping in to employ it if someone got into trouble and couldn’t fight out.
He was capable of that much-and a one-to-two ratio of stakes to Hunters was optimistic indeed.
That didn’t mean his heart wasn’t rattling the bars of his ribcage as he settled the heel of his hand on the base of the stake and followed Mello up the stairs and out into the evening.
Bad feelings were just the product of a strained imagination. They had far more firepower than was usually the case-including the means to put a few leeches down for good. What could go wrong?
Near winced, realizing that he’d started tempting fate since the moment he’d thought to ask.
Hopefully, fate would be above temptation tonight.
-
As he strode at the head of his troupe, navigating terrain only familiar in the dark, L was indexing all of his weapons, compulsively he knew.
They were well-equipped tonight, which he hoped meant the odds were on their side.
He smiled; the Odd certainly was, but probability was a fickler friend.
Pistol, rifle, Bowie knife, stake. Standard, assertive, comfortable, safe. They knew this neck of the woods, and they knew how to kill the ones that made it bleed.
This was their arena. Let the games begin.
Apparently the vampires agreed.
There wasn’t so much as a crackle of leaves as the monsters broke from the trees-shadows flickering and then gaining life, gaining form, gaining teeth. L snapped his flashlight on, the beam weak and thin in the darkness, and the shying away of the shadows was tantalizingly temporary.
The brown-haired leader stepped directly into the light, vast pupils dwindling, overtaken by the red. L swallowed hard, his fingers creeping towards his pistol, and struggled to block out the brightness of the mutated eyes-so clear, so lucid, and so afraid.
How was he supposed to put a bullet between those eyes?
Well, actually, that was easy enough.
In fact, he did it, swinging the Smith and Wesson up sideways like something out of a Western, arcing it towards the pale face centered in the light. Black blood dribbled from the hole, and the vampire dropped, elegant limbs askew.
No, the trouble was the stake. The trouble was ending a life-an afterlife-an un-life-destroying something twisted but beautiful, something with a dark sort of value all its own.
Before he could hesitate with an oak judgment raised, another vampire darted into his path, snarling, another once-man who had been youthful before he’d been bled dry and animated anew.
L put a single bullet in this one’s heart and lunged forward. No space for compassion; no time to think twice. No time for anything but drawing the stake, lifting his arm-
But then there was another-wide-eyed and innocent-faced, with a widow’s peak that jutted like a spike into his forehead. He looked incongruous as an antagonist-like he never should have been here, sharp-toothed, in a forest broken only by tiny flashlights. He looked like he should have been out on a cigarette break.
Wishful thinking was pointless. This was the world they had, and the only way to change it was one moment, one muscle, one movement at a time.
L’s next movement was ducking a set of claws, feeling the breeze of the slash fluttering against his face, and the movement after that was leaping back from the next swipe. He fired the pistol twice, but the creature shifted just enough to take the bullets in the shoulder, not the heart, which barely even slowed it down.
L didn’t like the look of this.
He also didn’t like the feel of it, particularly when his attacker, claws flexing, bent low and barreled towards him, aiming to take him out at the knees.
Steeling himself, L let the mass of vampire hit him at full strength and speed, the impact sending an aching shudder through his bones, and held his left arm out to cushion the fall just slightly-pulling it away before their combined weight could snap his humerus. This way, slamming into the leaves left him dizzy but not winded, and he could force his eyes to focus on the barrel of his gun. He jerked it up to the vampire’s broad forehead and fired once, incapacitating the thing for the next fifteen seconds-which he didn’t plan to waste.
L shoved the vampire’s jittering, healing body off of his, wet leaves crushed beneath it, and rolled hastily to his knees, lifting the stake he’d somehow held onto.
Miraculously, it wasn’t broken.
He plunged the sharp end into the center of the vampire’s chest, slotting it between two ribs, angling it just enough to bypass the sternum and delve into the bulk of the heart.
He skewered it like a pinboard butterfly.
The vampire hadn’t quite recovered from the bullet, and his body finally relinquished him to a death long overdue.
L wrenched the stake free, climbing to his feet and staggering a step away-even now, watching the virus betray its host, seeing the flesh crumble and shred, blacken and collapse, bearing witness to the expedited decay, was nothing short of gruesome.
Reflection-and revulsion-were too slow to indulge in now. There wasn’t space in this dance for any new choreography: their steps were unflinching and instinctual, and whoever made an error first lost the chance to make another. High-stakes, low-tolerance, and L desperately needed to win.
The leader was back. L had the pistol raised, had it trained, the stake loosely clenched in his left hand.
He wondered what color those eyes had been before the red had drowned it out.
“It’s him,” the vampire said, with a slow, triumphant grin.
L sensed the other Hunters pausing, turning, curious but wary, as he’d taught them a thousand times.
L didn’t have time to be proud of them before the five remaining vampires descended on him like a flock of crows.
Foreheads, noses, eyes-he nailed the first to dive at him, not waiting for the spurt of blood like oil. The second, huge and broad-shouldered, came too close too fast, giving him a clear shot at the temple, and crumpled like a giant rag doll to the leaves. L whirled on the third-slender, young, with a discordant beaming smile-and raised the pistol, but wet blackness splattered in his face before he could pull the trigger. When the body tumbled, Mello stood behind it with the smoking gun in hand.
Near shouted, a hoarse, unfamiliar cry, tossing his stake; Mello snatched it from the air and half-turned to bury it in the latest victim, but another vampire tackled him to the ground, defending its brother.
The faintest crunch of damp leaves sent L spinning to face the latest enemy-the leader again.
He had lifted the gun and was gripping the trigger before he remembered.
“You’re out of bullets,” the vampire noted, smirking contentedly.
L pitched the empty pistol at his face.
The vampire stopped smiling.
A bruise blossomed in fast-motion, a flare of purple, muddling to brown, then yellow, and then fading to match the surrounding pallor again. The vampire hissed, poised to leap.
“Your mother is out of bullets,” L said, unsheathing his knife.
The vampire stared incredulously for a second-long enough for L to surge forward and strike first.
Cut off the head, kill the snake.
He stabbed for the vampire’s throat, rewarded for his aggression by the satisfying squelch of steel sinking into undead flesh. Black blood welled, but the vampire clasped two supernaturally strong hands around L’s wrist before he could pull the knife out or shove it sideways for a partial decapitation.
Speaking of cutting off heads, though, vampires could take that, too-one of the others would retrieve the head and hold it in place as threads of neck and shoulders meshed and squirmed, sealing the gap and rewiring the nerves, in a process that was every bit as rapid as it was viscerally disturbing.
Usually, the entire troupe was moved to vomiting by the time the vampire was reassembled, which made it a rather ineffective attack strategy on the whole.
L felt sick enough now-hollow-sick, a riotous foreboding stirring in his stomach, darts of anxiety waging a campaign to overtake him. The vampire’s grip on his wrist tightened until L’s fingertips tingled, pins and needles seething up his arm, and he clenched his teeth and hefted the stake in his left hand. Their eyes were locked-blood-red and a shade of gray.
He wasn’t supposed to be here.
They should have listened.
This shouldn’t have been happening at all.
He brought the stake down in an almost-perfect weak-handed arc.
Before the stake’s point landed, in the split-second of leeway, the vampire twisted L’s wrist, yanked it and the knife from the wound, and hurled L sideways as if he weighed nothing at all.
He felt as though it was true. He felt completely insubstantial-time slowed; the world shifted, second by second, in stop-motion frames like a half-broken movie reel; faintly he heard Mello screaming over the rush of air.
Then he crashed into a tree trunk, and everything went precipitously black.
Well, shit.
-
Mello flung himself forward, howling like an animal, and only Matt’s arms around his waist kept him from throwing himself unarmed at the five vampires gathering around an unconscious L.
Blurry in their haste, flashlight beams flicking at their backs, the vampires avoided the fallen stake and slung L over the big one’s shoulder.
Odd fired three bullets into the leader’s chest, eyes streaming, but the brown-haired bastard just sneered, unnaturally strengthened by success, and melted into the dark.
And then they were gone.
It was quiet-impossibly quiet; the silence thick and brimming. They were alone with the scrag-fingered trees and the damp leaves, the eyeless sky and the drifting mist curling its cold hands around them. A sickening, wizened corpse and a shard of oak lay listlessly in the crisscrossing tracks of displaced foliage. A cricket chirped.
Near’s knees were shaking as he shuffled across the clearing and picked up the stake.
Matt let go of Mello’s arm, and the other boy sank to the ground and sobbed.
No one spoke for a long time.
“Get up,” Linda said.
Mello gave her a look that would have melted through glass.
“Get up,” she repeated, louder. “We’ll need a hell of a lot more Hunters if we’re going to track them down.”
Slowly, Mello pushed himself to his feet, straightened, and dragged one arm across his eyes.
“Give me that stake, Near,” he ordered.
Wordlessly Near handed it over.
Mello admired the weak fragment of wood, still stained with brackish virus-blood.
“This is the one I’ll kill him with,” he announced. “You’re hearing me make this as a promise. I’m going to kill the fucker with this stake, and I’m going to watch him die.”
Matt saw the fierce, cold light in Mello’s eyes and believed it.
[Chapter III] [Chapter V]