Werewolves in London: Part 4
Title: Werewolves in London
Part: 4
Previous: Part 1 ~ Part 2 ~ Part 3
Pairing: EW, DM
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: This is a complete work of fiction, no disrespect intended.
Notes: Thanks to impasto for editing and reworking when the story needed it.
“Midnight is the only time for hag-hunting,” Elijah heard Viggo’s voice in his memory, a lesson from his earliest days at the CDC in Los Angeles, and he looked up at the heavily waxing moon above them with mistrust. He had reservations about this excursion, not the least of which was concerning the people involved. Sean was coming along - to supervise, he said, on Elijah’s first time out in the field here - but he’d also included Dom, who was trotting along after them like a gleeful puppy.
Elijah’s main worry was that Dom had no weapons - there was little enough they would do against a hag anyway, they’d have to rely upon luck and counter-sorcery - but Dom seemed completely fearless, expression eager as he tagged along behind Sean and stole quick looks at the dark houses they passed. Elijah reminded himself that Dom had probably been doing this for even longer than Elijah had, but that didn’t assuage the sense of unease at having Dom walking defenseless into danger beside them.
“I see 1954,” Dom hissed, making Elijah startle at the sudden sound. He cast a quick glare over his shoulder, and Dom appeared to look contrite, but still pointed excitedly at the house. “See, over there? This is the neighborhood, she’s at 1981, right? So the other side of the street, but we’re close now.”
“Dominic,” Sean said softly, and Dom’s mouth snapped shut, eyes bright and excited but attentively silent.
Elijah realized he was peering at Sean’s collar and forced his eyes away, feeling ridiculous and slightly ashamed for spying on his supervisor’s privacy. All the same, Miranda’s words had left him unsettled, and he caught himself glancing at Sean’s button-down shirt collars every time the thought crossed his mind, looking for evidence of a recent bite.
“Elijah,” Sean said quietly, gesturing towards the side of a large stone house, outlined against the sky by a few dim streetlights and the unfiltered moonlight. Elijah slipped into the shadows immediately, skirting the pool of lamplight in the street and keeping to the hedgerow. Sean signaled again and Elijah nodded, creeping up to the house and climbing carefully up the rose-trellis towards the only lighted window.
“What are you doing?” Dom whispered from behind him and Elijah nearly lost his grip, catching himself at the last second out of instinct and swearing silently at the noise it made. He looked down to see Dom staring up at him, interested and obviously eager to assist.
“Reconnaissance,” Elijah hissed, and jerked his head back towards the street. “Get back to Sean, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Dom looked disappointed but did as he was told, and by the time he reached the hedgerow Elijah thought he could see the enthusiasm return. Shaking his head, Elijah focused on his task and drew himself up slowly, staying out of the light but turning so that he could see through the window.
It was definitely a hag. He could see the scars on her arms from blood-rites, and her skin was wrinkled like a prune’s, hanging from her as she raised her arms in the beginning of a midnight ritual. From where he was, he could see how her fingernails tapered into claws, and winced at the idea of taking her on without ‘use of deadly force’, as Sean had called it during their brief meeting.
The hag drew a black-handled knife across her forearm, and Elijah saw the red glint of blood droplets before she scattered them over a ramshackle altar. He took note of everything in the room, as well as what little he could make of the ritual itself, and lowered himself with painstaking slowness back down the trellis.
Dom was at his side when his feet touched the ground, but Elijah was less startled by his appearance this time, and merely gestured impatiently for them to join Sean. “He’s in the yard,” Dom whispered, and led Elijah away from the house to where Sean was waiting behind a gnarled tree.
“She’s alone, no victims, black altar blood-rite, the door is closed and there are two windows, one on the back side of the house,” Elijah reported, dropping into a crouch beside Sean. Across from him, Dom did the same, glowing with an anticipation for the hunt that Elijah didn’t remember feeling in years. “Both windows are closed, but I didn’t see any ashes, so she may not have warded the door. I’d say that’s our best bet.”
“Let’s get a move on, then, before she finishes the rite,” Sean murmured, and Elijah nodded agreement, already trying to match what he’d seen in the room to a specific rite so that he could estimate how much time they had left while the hag’s defenses were down.
“Wait,” Elijah said suddenly, glimpsing movement around the side of the house, where he had just been. There was a dark shape in the shadows, moving with purpose towards the wall. The figure was slight, not overly tall, and Elijah recognized the glint of metal from a gun in its hand. “We’re not the only ones here,” Elijah said shortly, as the shape disappeared around the back of the house. “Is that another one of your people?”
“No,” Sean answered, and Elijah looked around in surprise at the grim tone of his voice. “Elijah, get Dominic out of here. I want you to head for safety, but don’t risk leading anyone there if you think someone might be following you. I’ll take care of the hag. Go, now,” he ordered, and Elijah didn’t have time to speak before Sean was moving, following the path that the other had taken around the back of the house.
He glanced at Dom, and was shocked to find him white and frightened in the moonlight, his fingers plucking nervously at Elijah’s sleeve. “Back the way we came,” Dom whispered, his voice barely a thread in the silence. “It’s no good heading further out, we need to get back to the city. He can’t track us as easily there.”
“Who?” Elijah demanded, but Dom just shook his head, rising from a crouch and heading for the street, his shadow clinging to the hedgerow. He froze when he stepped into the circle of lamplight, and Elijah swore, moving out of his own cover to grab Dom’s arm and pull him out of the light, rushing them both down the street.
“What are we looking out for, here?” Elijah hissed as they turned the corner and began to lose themselves in the labyrinth of streets and houses that lay in this area. “Give me a clue and we’ll have a better chance. Vampire? Another werewolf?”
Dom shook his head, stumbling over his feet. “Not an Other,” he answered, and Elijah threw a worried glance back over his shoulder at the shadows, searching in vain for a glimpse of movement.
They were almost back into the city when Dom cried out softly and jerked back, making Elijah lose his grip on Dom’s sleeve. “What is it?” Elijah whispered fiercely, fearing Dom was hurt, but then he saw it, too; the fleeting swirl of darkness where there should be none. Biting back an oath, he pulled Dom backwards onto a side street, and then half-dragged him through a maze of twists and turns until he was fairly certain they were close to where they’d started, only a few blocks away.
“You said this is a human?” he whispered, and Dom nodded, silent for once, looking terrified as he searched the shadows with wide, dismayed eyes. Elijah swallowed his own trepidation and gripped Dom’s arm firmly. “How have you evaded him before? I don’t know the territory here, Dom, you have to help me out.”
“Sewers,” Dom whispered, shrinking back a little further as he tore his gaze away from the darkness. “It’s easier to lose someone down there, there’s more noise and you can come out anywhere.”
“That’s what we’ll do, then,” Elijah decided, although the idea of crawling through the sewers at midnight with a werewolf and God only knew what on their trail was not the most appealing thought he’d ever had. “Where’s the nearest entrance? I want to get us off the street as soon as possible.”
“This way,” Dom replied, and to Elijah’s relief he seemed to snap out of whatever trance he’d been in, returning to alertness as he sniffed the air and headed off down the street. Elijah followed him, keeping a safe distance between them and one hand on the holster of his gun, scanning every street they crossed for a hint of motion.
The actual manhole was in the center of a fairly major intersection, which made Elijah sweat as Dom spent what felt like hours prying it up and lowering himself inside, fully illuminated by the brightly-shining streetlamps. Elijah followed him as soon as he disappeared from sight, reluctantly relinquishing his grip on the gun-butt to pull the cover back into place over his head.
Dom was waiting at the bottom of the ladder, and even in the poor light cast by Elijah’s mini-flashlight he could see that Dom was trembling. “Do you know your way around in here?” Elijah asked warily, worried that they might have just sealed themselves off in a trap. If whoever was hunting them knew the sewers better than they did, they were as good as caught.
Dom nodded, and after a brief hesitation, started off down the narrow walkway at the sewer’s edge. Elijah grimaced at the smell but headed after him, following the sound of rushing water and Dom’s silhouette.
Movement caught his eye and Elijah whirled, gun raised in defense almost without a second thought, but there was nothing there. Dom shook his head, his eyes searching the darkness, and turned to continue on. “Shadows,” he said, and Elijah jumped at the way his voice echoed softly against the walls, fading to a distant whisper. “They live down here sometimes.”
Elijah opened his mouth to ask what exactly Dom meant by that, but Dom was already too far ahead and Elijah couldn’t risk making that much noise. He put it aside to ask for later and pressed on, still watching the dark tunnel for any sign of life, human or otherwise.
A dark wisp of something brushed up against him and Elijah froze, hardly daring to breathe as it coalesced and dissipated again, gone between one second and the next. Dom looked back and saw him, shaking his head again. “They shouldn’t hurt you,” he said. Elijah opened his mouth to retort, still shaken by the cold, misty touch, but Dom was through an archway, foot on the bottom rung of a ladder, so he fell silent and hurried instead to catch up, shuddering at the damp chill on his skin.
They came out in a neighborhood Elijah didn’t know, but Dom led him down another series of streets to a rickety apartment building guarded by a locked glass door. Dom produced the key after a few seconds of fumbling at a jingling ring, and Elijah felt much better once the door closed behind them, leaving them in the dim light of a poorly-decorated foyer.
“Is this where you live?” Elijah asked, climbing after Dom up several flights of stairs, keeping his hands from the peeling wallpaper and bland, crookedly-hung still life paintings that decorated the hall.
Dom shook his head. “This is the safe house,” he answered, his voice still low despite the fact that they were inside now. Elijah understood all-too-well, remembering the fleeting touch of what Dom had called Shadows; the spooky feeling hadn’t quite been shaken.
Dom rearranged the keys on his ring and let them into a small bare room, with a single twin bed and a stained armchair standing on the floorboards. “We’re supposed to come here if something goes wrong, and wait for Sean to call and say it’s all clear.” He gestured to the phone sitting on an uneven wooden side table next to the bed, and Elijah frowned, looking around at the inhospitable room.
“How do you know we won’t be followed?” Elijah asked, checking the window and wishing he had sea salt, although if Dom was correct about what had been tracking them, it wouldn’t do much good.
He looked around to find Dom sitting on the bed, hands twitchy while the rest of him remained almost unnaturally still. “I don’t,” he said wearily. “But no one else knows about this place, not even Orlando. Not the other hunters.”
Elijah’s ears pricked, and he focused on Dom eagerly, sensing answers. “What other hunters?” he asked, remembering fragments of things Sean had told him before.
But Dom only shook his head and said solemnly, “We aren’t the only ones in London.” He padded to the bathroom when Elijah would have pressed, closing the creaky door behind him with a firm thump. Elijah reached for the door to knock and then decided to give Dom his space, letting his hand fall empty to his side.
Elijah scrubbed a hand over his eyes. It was still early by his standards, but the hag-hunting and then their inexplicable flight through the sewers had left him weary, if not exactly tired. He saw a threadbare towel hanging on the back of the bathroom door and resolved to shower, nose wrinkling at the smell he caught wafting up from his sneakers and the wet hems of his jeans.
When Dom came out, he only nodded acknowledgement at Elijah’s announcement, and sat back down on the bed. “There’s a change of clothes in the drawers,” he offered. “Take anything that fits. We try to keep this place stocked, just in case.”
There was little doubt in Elijah’s mind of what that meant, after tonight. He had more questions, and wasn’t entirely certain that Dom was all right again, but when he started to speak Dom turned away, his body language saying he’d closed himself off and wasn’t in the mood to talk. Elijah gave up for the moment, deciding to try again after he smelled a bit better, and took Dom’s place in the small bathroom.
He saw a wet washcloth lying on the edge of the sink and guessed that Dom had taken the opportunity to clean himself up, as well. Elijah peeled off his jeans with a grimace of distaste and folded the rest of his clothes haphazardly, seeing no reason not to put them back on after his shower.
The pressure wasn’t great and the hot water tended to go in fits and starts, but he still felt clean when he emerged, skin pink and well-scrubbed with the bar of cheap soap he’d found in the dish. He pulled on his boxers and shirt, leaving the rest on the back of the toilet, and emerged from the bathroom with his hair still plastered damply to his skull.
Dom was asleep, or pretending to be, curled up on his side in a fetal ball with one hand tucked beneath his head. He’d left the pillow available, but the bed was too small for two people, and Elijah wasn’t tired yet anyway. He sat in the armchair instead, squirming around until he felt somewhat comfortable, and watched Dom for a while, pondering everything he did and didn’t know about this place. It seemed stranger by the day, not at all what he’d expected, and he almost felt a lump of homesickness rise before he shrugged it off.
Werewolf, he thought, and was mildly surprised to hear it not in Viggo’s gravelly voice, but his own. Other hunters, and he strained to remember anything at all, a snippet of information once mentioned and long forgotten. Others, in Sean’s voice, and his own thought that they weren’t all that strange after all, in some ways, only different, and then he was nodding off in spite of himself, his eyelids drooping as he watched Dom sleep.
When the phone rang, it was in the early hours of the morning, with the sun just barely rising and Elijah jerking from sleep with a crick in his neck, seeing Dom blink sleepily awake as Sean’s rough-burred voice told them it was safe to go home.
Part: 4
Previous: Part 1 ~ Part 2 ~ Part 3
Pairing: EW, DM
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: This is a complete work of fiction, no disrespect intended.
Notes: Thanks to impasto for editing and reworking when the story needed it.
“Midnight is the only time for hag-hunting,” Elijah heard Viggo’s voice in his memory, a lesson from his earliest days at the CDC in Los Angeles, and he looked up at the heavily waxing moon above them with mistrust. He had reservations about this excursion, not the least of which was concerning the people involved. Sean was coming along - to supervise, he said, on Elijah’s first time out in the field here - but he’d also included Dom, who was trotting along after them like a gleeful puppy.
Elijah’s main worry was that Dom had no weapons - there was little enough they would do against a hag anyway, they’d have to rely upon luck and counter-sorcery - but Dom seemed completely fearless, expression eager as he tagged along behind Sean and stole quick looks at the dark houses they passed. Elijah reminded himself that Dom had probably been doing this for even longer than Elijah had, but that didn’t assuage the sense of unease at having Dom walking defenseless into danger beside them.
“I see 1954,” Dom hissed, making Elijah startle at the sudden sound. He cast a quick glare over his shoulder, and Dom appeared to look contrite, but still pointed excitedly at the house. “See, over there? This is the neighborhood, she’s at 1981, right? So the other side of the street, but we’re close now.”
“Dominic,” Sean said softly, and Dom’s mouth snapped shut, eyes bright and excited but attentively silent.
Elijah realized he was peering at Sean’s collar and forced his eyes away, feeling ridiculous and slightly ashamed for spying on his supervisor’s privacy. All the same, Miranda’s words had left him unsettled, and he caught himself glancing at Sean’s button-down shirt collars every time the thought crossed his mind, looking for evidence of a recent bite.
“Elijah,” Sean said quietly, gesturing towards the side of a large stone house, outlined against the sky by a few dim streetlights and the unfiltered moonlight. Elijah slipped into the shadows immediately, skirting the pool of lamplight in the street and keeping to the hedgerow. Sean signaled again and Elijah nodded, creeping up to the house and climbing carefully up the rose-trellis towards the only lighted window.
“What are you doing?” Dom whispered from behind him and Elijah nearly lost his grip, catching himself at the last second out of instinct and swearing silently at the noise it made. He looked down to see Dom staring up at him, interested and obviously eager to assist.
“Reconnaissance,” Elijah hissed, and jerked his head back towards the street. “Get back to Sean, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Dom looked disappointed but did as he was told, and by the time he reached the hedgerow Elijah thought he could see the enthusiasm return. Shaking his head, Elijah focused on his task and drew himself up slowly, staying out of the light but turning so that he could see through the window.
It was definitely a hag. He could see the scars on her arms from blood-rites, and her skin was wrinkled like a prune’s, hanging from her as she raised her arms in the beginning of a midnight ritual. From where he was, he could see how her fingernails tapered into claws, and winced at the idea of taking her on without ‘use of deadly force’, as Sean had called it during their brief meeting.
The hag drew a black-handled knife across her forearm, and Elijah saw the red glint of blood droplets before she scattered them over a ramshackle altar. He took note of everything in the room, as well as what little he could make of the ritual itself, and lowered himself with painstaking slowness back down the trellis.
Dom was at his side when his feet touched the ground, but Elijah was less startled by his appearance this time, and merely gestured impatiently for them to join Sean. “He’s in the yard,” Dom whispered, and led Elijah away from the house to where Sean was waiting behind a gnarled tree.
“She’s alone, no victims, black altar blood-rite, the door is closed and there are two windows, one on the back side of the house,” Elijah reported, dropping into a crouch beside Sean. Across from him, Dom did the same, glowing with an anticipation for the hunt that Elijah didn’t remember feeling in years. “Both windows are closed, but I didn’t see any ashes, so she may not have warded the door. I’d say that’s our best bet.”
“Let’s get a move on, then, before she finishes the rite,” Sean murmured, and Elijah nodded agreement, already trying to match what he’d seen in the room to a specific rite so that he could estimate how much time they had left while the hag’s defenses were down.
“Wait,” Elijah said suddenly, glimpsing movement around the side of the house, where he had just been. There was a dark shape in the shadows, moving with purpose towards the wall. The figure was slight, not overly tall, and Elijah recognized the glint of metal from a gun in its hand. “We’re not the only ones here,” Elijah said shortly, as the shape disappeared around the back of the house. “Is that another one of your people?”
“No,” Sean answered, and Elijah looked around in surprise at the grim tone of his voice. “Elijah, get Dominic out of here. I want you to head for safety, but don’t risk leading anyone there if you think someone might be following you. I’ll take care of the hag. Go, now,” he ordered, and Elijah didn’t have time to speak before Sean was moving, following the path that the other had taken around the back of the house.
He glanced at Dom, and was shocked to find him white and frightened in the moonlight, his fingers plucking nervously at Elijah’s sleeve. “Back the way we came,” Dom whispered, his voice barely a thread in the silence. “It’s no good heading further out, we need to get back to the city. He can’t track us as easily there.”
“Who?” Elijah demanded, but Dom just shook his head, rising from a crouch and heading for the street, his shadow clinging to the hedgerow. He froze when he stepped into the circle of lamplight, and Elijah swore, moving out of his own cover to grab Dom’s arm and pull him out of the light, rushing them both down the street.
“What are we looking out for, here?” Elijah hissed as they turned the corner and began to lose themselves in the labyrinth of streets and houses that lay in this area. “Give me a clue and we’ll have a better chance. Vampire? Another werewolf?”
Dom shook his head, stumbling over his feet. “Not an Other,” he answered, and Elijah threw a worried glance back over his shoulder at the shadows, searching in vain for a glimpse of movement.
They were almost back into the city when Dom cried out softly and jerked back, making Elijah lose his grip on Dom’s sleeve. “What is it?” Elijah whispered fiercely, fearing Dom was hurt, but then he saw it, too; the fleeting swirl of darkness where there should be none. Biting back an oath, he pulled Dom backwards onto a side street, and then half-dragged him through a maze of twists and turns until he was fairly certain they were close to where they’d started, only a few blocks away.
“You said this is a human?” he whispered, and Dom nodded, silent for once, looking terrified as he searched the shadows with wide, dismayed eyes. Elijah swallowed his own trepidation and gripped Dom’s arm firmly. “How have you evaded him before? I don’t know the territory here, Dom, you have to help me out.”
“Sewers,” Dom whispered, shrinking back a little further as he tore his gaze away from the darkness. “It’s easier to lose someone down there, there’s more noise and you can come out anywhere.”
“That’s what we’ll do, then,” Elijah decided, although the idea of crawling through the sewers at midnight with a werewolf and God only knew what on their trail was not the most appealing thought he’d ever had. “Where’s the nearest entrance? I want to get us off the street as soon as possible.”
“This way,” Dom replied, and to Elijah’s relief he seemed to snap out of whatever trance he’d been in, returning to alertness as he sniffed the air and headed off down the street. Elijah followed him, keeping a safe distance between them and one hand on the holster of his gun, scanning every street they crossed for a hint of motion.
The actual manhole was in the center of a fairly major intersection, which made Elijah sweat as Dom spent what felt like hours prying it up and lowering himself inside, fully illuminated by the brightly-shining streetlamps. Elijah followed him as soon as he disappeared from sight, reluctantly relinquishing his grip on the gun-butt to pull the cover back into place over his head.
Dom was waiting at the bottom of the ladder, and even in the poor light cast by Elijah’s mini-flashlight he could see that Dom was trembling. “Do you know your way around in here?” Elijah asked warily, worried that they might have just sealed themselves off in a trap. If whoever was hunting them knew the sewers better than they did, they were as good as caught.
Dom nodded, and after a brief hesitation, started off down the narrow walkway at the sewer’s edge. Elijah grimaced at the smell but headed after him, following the sound of rushing water and Dom’s silhouette.
Movement caught his eye and Elijah whirled, gun raised in defense almost without a second thought, but there was nothing there. Dom shook his head, his eyes searching the darkness, and turned to continue on. “Shadows,” he said, and Elijah jumped at the way his voice echoed softly against the walls, fading to a distant whisper. “They live down here sometimes.”
Elijah opened his mouth to ask what exactly Dom meant by that, but Dom was already too far ahead and Elijah couldn’t risk making that much noise. He put it aside to ask for later and pressed on, still watching the dark tunnel for any sign of life, human or otherwise.
A dark wisp of something brushed up against him and Elijah froze, hardly daring to breathe as it coalesced and dissipated again, gone between one second and the next. Dom looked back and saw him, shaking his head again. “They shouldn’t hurt you,” he said. Elijah opened his mouth to retort, still shaken by the cold, misty touch, but Dom was through an archway, foot on the bottom rung of a ladder, so he fell silent and hurried instead to catch up, shuddering at the damp chill on his skin.
They came out in a neighborhood Elijah didn’t know, but Dom led him down another series of streets to a rickety apartment building guarded by a locked glass door. Dom produced the key after a few seconds of fumbling at a jingling ring, and Elijah felt much better once the door closed behind them, leaving them in the dim light of a poorly-decorated foyer.
“Is this where you live?” Elijah asked, climbing after Dom up several flights of stairs, keeping his hands from the peeling wallpaper and bland, crookedly-hung still life paintings that decorated the hall.
Dom shook his head. “This is the safe house,” he answered, his voice still low despite the fact that they were inside now. Elijah understood all-too-well, remembering the fleeting touch of what Dom had called Shadows; the spooky feeling hadn’t quite been shaken.
Dom rearranged the keys on his ring and let them into a small bare room, with a single twin bed and a stained armchair standing on the floorboards. “We’re supposed to come here if something goes wrong, and wait for Sean to call and say it’s all clear.” He gestured to the phone sitting on an uneven wooden side table next to the bed, and Elijah frowned, looking around at the inhospitable room.
“How do you know we won’t be followed?” Elijah asked, checking the window and wishing he had sea salt, although if Dom was correct about what had been tracking them, it wouldn’t do much good.
He looked around to find Dom sitting on the bed, hands twitchy while the rest of him remained almost unnaturally still. “I don’t,” he said wearily. “But no one else knows about this place, not even Orlando. Not the other hunters.”
Elijah’s ears pricked, and he focused on Dom eagerly, sensing answers. “What other hunters?” he asked, remembering fragments of things Sean had told him before.
But Dom only shook his head and said solemnly, “We aren’t the only ones in London.” He padded to the bathroom when Elijah would have pressed, closing the creaky door behind him with a firm thump. Elijah reached for the door to knock and then decided to give Dom his space, letting his hand fall empty to his side.
Elijah scrubbed a hand over his eyes. It was still early by his standards, but the hag-hunting and then their inexplicable flight through the sewers had left him weary, if not exactly tired. He saw a threadbare towel hanging on the back of the bathroom door and resolved to shower, nose wrinkling at the smell he caught wafting up from his sneakers and the wet hems of his jeans.
When Dom came out, he only nodded acknowledgement at Elijah’s announcement, and sat back down on the bed. “There’s a change of clothes in the drawers,” he offered. “Take anything that fits. We try to keep this place stocked, just in case.”
There was little doubt in Elijah’s mind of what that meant, after tonight. He had more questions, and wasn’t entirely certain that Dom was all right again, but when he started to speak Dom turned away, his body language saying he’d closed himself off and wasn’t in the mood to talk. Elijah gave up for the moment, deciding to try again after he smelled a bit better, and took Dom’s place in the small bathroom.
He saw a wet washcloth lying on the edge of the sink and guessed that Dom had taken the opportunity to clean himself up, as well. Elijah peeled off his jeans with a grimace of distaste and folded the rest of his clothes haphazardly, seeing no reason not to put them back on after his shower.
The pressure wasn’t great and the hot water tended to go in fits and starts, but he still felt clean when he emerged, skin pink and well-scrubbed with the bar of cheap soap he’d found in the dish. He pulled on his boxers and shirt, leaving the rest on the back of the toilet, and emerged from the bathroom with his hair still plastered damply to his skull.
Dom was asleep, or pretending to be, curled up on his side in a fetal ball with one hand tucked beneath his head. He’d left the pillow available, but the bed was too small for two people, and Elijah wasn’t tired yet anyway. He sat in the armchair instead, squirming around until he felt somewhat comfortable, and watched Dom for a while, pondering everything he did and didn’t know about this place. It seemed stranger by the day, not at all what he’d expected, and he almost felt a lump of homesickness rise before he shrugged it off.
Werewolf, he thought, and was mildly surprised to hear it not in Viggo’s gravelly voice, but his own. Other hunters, and he strained to remember anything at all, a snippet of information once mentioned and long forgotten. Others, in Sean’s voice, and his own thought that they weren’t all that strange after all, in some ways, only different, and then he was nodding off in spite of himself, his eyelids drooping as he watched Dom sleep.
When the phone rang, it was in the early hours of the morning, with the sun just barely rising and Elijah jerking from sleep with a crick in his neck, seeing Dom blink sleepily awake as Sean’s rough-burred voice told them it was safe to go home.