Being Human: Mad Season [Hal/Cutler]
Title: “Mad Season”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: R
Timeline: post-Series 4 finale [SPOILERS]
Summary: Hal and Tom are less than thrilled when Alex accepts Cutler’s help looking for her body. A man like Nick Cutler always has ulterior motives. Or does he? [Hal/Cutler; sequel to The Pinnacle of Being Alive]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC.
A/N: This is hopefully the last part of the fix-it trilogy (currently) that’s come to be known as Lavender Blue. No idea how it got so long. O_o
MAD SEASON
Stay gone.
Stay clean.
I need you to need me.
Kleerup. “Until we bleed”
There is always something awkward about meeting your past victims. Not that it ever happens to most vampires for obvious reasons. Of course, every once in a while one of them gets away, but you don’t usually bump into them in a crowd or have them deliver a newspaper to your doorstep just to feel like a school bully meeting his geeky prey ten years later. And you certainly don’t come deliberately knocking on their door, knowing that they might slam said door shut in your face, catching your hand between the door and the doorframe in the process.
Which is exactly what Alex Mayhew does upon seeing Nick Cutler on her porch.
He yelps when his fingers get trapped in the door and pushes it open nearly on autopilot.
“Do you mind!?” he snaps because - damn, that actually hurts.
“Get out!” Alex shrieks. She actually kicks him in the shin with the toe of her boot. Three times in a row.
“Will you stop that?” Cutler says irritably.
She glares at him and folds her arms across her chest, trying to look impressive.
“Hal is not here.” Her accent is atrocious, and she is loud and annoying, but he does not tell her that because he has made up his mind to be civil even if she makes it rather challenging.
“I know,” he says. “I’m here to talk to you.”
That takes a bit of her feistiness away for a moment. She blinks in confusion and frowns.
“About what?” A suspicion comes to her mind. She gasps and hisses at him: “Oh God, you’re not here to apologize, are you? I knew Hal would put you up to this!”
At that, Cutler decides that he has had enough. He pushes past her into the house, rubbing his pinched fingers. He begins to understand why Hal always seems to be on edge. Sharing a house with that must be quite wearisome.
“Look,” he says, with all the patience he can muster, “I feel like we have got off on the wrong foot-.”
“You think?” Alex smiles and kicks him hard in the knee. That’s it; next time he kills someone he is definitely taking off their boots first.
“Ow!” he cries out and darts behind the sofa in search of a cover. As soon as his limbs are relatively safe, he continues: “I heard you’ve been having problems tracking your body down.”
“Did Hal tell you that? Are you two gossiping about me?”
“Yes,” Cutler says with an unapologetically straight face. “Because we have nothing else to discuss.” She flashes him a dirty look. “Anyway, I have a reason to believe that whoever took your body, also took something from me. So I figured: I help you, you help me, we forget that whole killing you business, we both get what we want, and everybody’s happy.” He emphasizes the ultimate point with a generous flourish of his hand and addresses her his most convincing smile. “What do you say?”
Alex squints. He doesn’t exactly have her where he wants her yet, but this is a start.
“What did they take from you?” she asks. Cutler hesitates. “Oh, come on!” she snorts. “If I’m going to be helping you,” she grimaces, emphasizing the word, “I have to know.”
“The footage of Tom in the club,” Cutler confesses reluctantly. “The one I was going to show the Old Ones.”
Her face contorts in anger. She tosses a coffee mug at his head telekinetically. He ducks, but it is a narrow escape. He has to admit this impish Scottish girl makes a rather intimidating ghost.
“I will not let you get it back so you could take over the world with it or something!” she exclaims.
“You don’t understand. I have no use for it anymore. The Old Ones are gone and it’s not like I ever held any personal grudges against Tom.” That, and Hal would have his head if he tried anything against the bloody mongrel. “But you don’t know what those people might want it for.”
She is obviously considering it. Slowly, belligerently, she comes round to his way of thinking.
“I haven’t been able to find anything substantial yet,” she mutters. “I’ve been to the club and I’ve gone to the police, but so far nothing on the mystery men. They’re passing me off as a missing person, which is actually a lot better than what’s really happened.” She gives him a pointed glare, which he ignores.
“Do you remember anything unusual about them?” he asks. “Or anything at all?”
Alex wrinkles her forehead.
“I think they were human,” she says thoughtfully. “I was right there, and they didn’t see me. Also, time seemed to be an issue. They mentioned something about pulling the whole thing off in forty-five seconds. Pretty impressive if you ask me.”
Especially if that includes taking his disc. Cutler lowers himself on the sofa. It appears they have something to think about after all.
* * *
The press-ups were Leo’s idea, much like all of Hal’s routines. He used to think of them as redundant (vampires are stuck in whatever state they were recruited in, so what is the point of working out?), but he performed them anyway, every day, and soon it was no longer about making Leo happy. They genuinely helped.
Fifty-five years of regular exercise. Hal missed a few days when he was restrained, but overall, he has been able to successfully keep it up.
If he were human, it would all be about breathing. But he doesn’t concern himself with such things. He focuses on the sensations. The way his muscles flex. The way sweat pools in the hollows on his skin. The way his limbs strain. His body knows the pattern, but he still has to focus on his actions, and that leaves no room for any sort of ruminations.
Rise and fall. It is always the same, predictable, reliable. Eighty-three. Eighty-four. Eighty-
Somebody knocks on the door. Hal’s eyes snap open. Eighty-five. Eighty-six. The rapping continues. It throws him off. He grits his teeth and continues the press-ups stubbornly, hoping against all better judgment that the insolent person on the other side of the door will just go away. It cannot be Tom because Tom knows he should not be disturbed at this time, so it is either Alex who refuses to respect his timetable or someone else. Considering Alex could just pop in without making all that noise, Hal’s bets are on the latter.
Eighty-six. Eighty-seven. Eighty-eight.
The rapping grows more persistent until it’s a bloody The Raven re-enactment. Hal propels himself up and jerks the door open. Of course it’s Cutler. Who else would it be?
“I knocked,” he says like that explains everything.
“I heard,” Hal says coolly. “My silence should have been a clue.”
Cutler shrugs and looks him over, meticulously taking in the naked torso, the linen trousers and the hair that sticks up ridiculously - the resultant fiasco of Hal’s latest attempt to give himself a haircut. Leo always did that. Without Leo, he runs the risk of getting Tom hair.
“I was right then,” Cutler says, satisfied with his examination. “You do work out.”
“What do you want?” Hal asks irritably.
Cutler invites himself into Hal’s room, and that is a disruption of the process. The process that has been running smoothly for years. Hal grinds his jaws, pushing exasperation back.
“Did your ghostie tell you about our little agreement?”
Hal nods. Alex called a house meeting over it. The second bloody house meeting initiated by her. She is getting the hang of the bossy ghost lifestyle pretty quickly.
“So?” Cutler prods. “Are you going to assemble your merry band of misfits and help an old friend out?”
“I’m helping Alex,” Hal says, pointedly.
The door remains open. He expects Cutler to step out, but true to himself, Cutler proceeds to look around. Hal casts a quick look at the alarm clock on the night table.
“This is cutting into my reading hour,” he says, huffishly.
“Really? You’re on a schedule?”
“It helps me to manage my situation.” He glances at Cutler who suddenly seems to avoid eye contact, and asks: “Speaking of which, how are you?”
It feels bizarre to openly express interest in another vampire’s rehab even if he is your own misfortunate creation. Cutler hunches his shoulders awkwardly and stares deliberately at the bookcase. Hal would be counting the backs of the books in his place.
“Fine,” he mumbles, and adds unenthusiastically: “Crazy most of the time. I killed a dog this morning.” He elaborates before Hal has a panic attack: “A dog dog, not a werewolf. It didn’t do anything, it just kept barking. I couldn’t concentrate, so I bashed its head in. Got blood all over my shirt. Afterwards, I just sat there and stared at the blood for half an hour, no less.”
Hal pushes the door shut and commands:
“Get on the floor.”
“Excuse me?”
“You need a routine to keep yourself grounded,” Hal explains. “This is a good way to start. You asked me to help you. I’m helping. Now, don’t make me repeat myself.”
Cutler snorts in disbelief. He takes off his jacket and positions himself on the floor. Hal stretches himself next to him and continues his set: eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one. He watches Cutler from the corner of his eye, forcibly splitting his mind into two parts. One is peaceful, accumulating the cleansing experience of physical exertion; the other is sorely Cutler-ridden. He feels almost elated at the prospect of sharing his rituals with someone having the same needs.
Cutler only gets to four before he collapses with a long-drawn-out sigh of veritable suffering.
“This,” he declares, rolling on his back, “is definitely not my thing.”
Ninety-nine. One hundred.
Hal shifts into a sitting position easily. He can practically feel Cutler’s studious look travel up and down his skin.
“Make it your thing,” he says. It comes out more harshly than he has planned it to. “Physical activity is important. It helps to maintain control over your urges.”
“Sounds good for someone who is not going to have sex for the next hundred years,” Cutler chuckles.
“You aren’t.”
Cutler goggles at him. Hal doesn’t think he has ever seen such an expression of profound shock on anyone’s face. As if he’s just told Nick the Earth had already exploded.
“Sorry,” Cutler says, “this is my What!? face in case you’re not catching up.”
Why do people keep making such a big deal out of it? Hal hasn’t had sex for fifty-five years and he is still standing.
“It’s too dangerous. You can’t know for sure what it might lead to.”
Cutler jumps to his feet, making Hal get up as well. They face each other, Cutler searching his maker’s face for any signs of trickery.
“I don’t kill people during sex, Hal,” he insists. He sounds scandalized by the very idea. “It’s messy.”
“You’d be surprised how easy it is to lose yourself in the process. Now that you’re on the wagon, all bets are off. Whatever defences you had before, they are no longer functional. You mustn’t let yourself get distracted.”
He should stop this. Stop giving advice like it’s any of his business.
Their stand-off is interrupted by the sound of Alex clearing her throat politely. She wants to know if she is butting in (like that has ever stopped her before). Hal shakes his head. Cutler mutters a gloomy “no” and proceeds to put his jacket back on.
“Hal’s just killed me,” he declares as he exits the room.
“Figuratively speaking, I assume.” Alex winks at Hal. “Which is a shame.”
He rolls his eyes. That’s twenty-two minutes out of his reading hour.
Alex sizes him up with a suggestive look. Hal quickly slips on a t-shirt, picks up his book and waves dismissively at her. Before he has even removed the bookmark, she vanishes, and he hears her voice in the corridor.
“So, did you find anything on-?”
“Not as such,” Cutler’s voice comes. “I’ll keep you informed.”
Hal pores over the book, determined to shut the noise out. There is a small window in his timetable, the one he normally uses to do nothing and stare broodily at the wall. He might think about their latest common problem then. But that window is three hours ahead, and he should stop letting everyone interfere with his rota.
* * *
The music is loud and repetitive; try as he might, Hal cannot imagine anyone who would listen to it voluntarily. He suspects that even Alex doesn’t like it very much, but she feels like dancing, so she turns the volume up and moves in a strange, drunken trajectory across the room. Tom joins her occasionally, but he’s a worse dancer than she is, and it’s like watching a pair of string puppets writhe in agony. Hal even pricks his finger with a needle once or twice to make sure he’s not asleep and seeing a nightmare.
Another song comes up, no better than the first one. Tom flops into the arm-chair, laughing. Alex holds her hand out to Hal.
“Your turn. Don’t tell me you can’t dance.”
“I can dance,” he snorts, a little insulted: anyone his age can dance. “But I dance to music, and this is the heartbreaking scream of a dying culture.”
Tom snickers. “Leave it, Alex. He ain’t got no moves, is all.”
Hal sets aside his embroidery and rises swiftly from the sofa. He marches up to the radio and switches to the classical music station. He catches a waltz. Alex laughs uncomfortably, but slides her fingers into his open palm, and he leads her into a fluid, dignified dance. She stumbles and giggles and tells him:
“Okay, if you wanted to make a fool out of me, you succeeded.”
“Whyever would I want that?” Hal asks, dispassionately.
“Blimey,” Tom breathes, hugging a cushion dreamily. “You two are like in films.”
They are nothing like it, to be honest. They are imperfect and unsteady, and she has already stepped on his foot half a dozen times. But it reminds him of a similar evening, many years ago, when Pearl made him dance with her. It was Armstrong of course, Leo’s favourite, and Leo watched them together with the same dreamy expression that Tom is wearing now. Except it was not the same, as Hal knows now. It was the expression of a man unable to look away from the most beautiful woman on the planet, the one who makes the angels sing with the sound of her voice, the one who turns everyday words into love songs.
Afterwards, Leo whispered to him: You have to teach me that. And Hal did teach him to dance so that next time it was Leo who held her in his arms, and Hal knew that Leo felt like the happiest man on earth then.
“Guys,” Tom’s voice breaks into his thoughts. He is looking at the dark street through the window, his body tense, poised to strike. “Vampires.”
Hal and Alex join him instantly. There are two strangers keeping watch on the house from the shadows across the street. Hal doesn’t know them, but it doesn’t matter: every nerve in his body is ablaze. He barely notices it when Tom rushes outside, pulls a stake from the flower pot (the same flower pot Annie had expressly told him not to hide weapons in) and marches decidedly towards the unwelcome guests.
“What’s he doing?” Alex screeches. “We have to stop him!”
Her words barely reach Hal. He feels like he is muffled up in layers of cotton, a cocoon of heat and hunger. Who are these people? There has been no one else in Barry, not since the Old Ones got “proper dead”, in Cutler’s words.
Hal observes the brief, violent confrontation that follows, and as they fall to dust, so does his nauseating thirst. His hands are shaking. He finds himself unable to move.
“Well done, Terminator!” Alex scoffs at Tom on the porch. “Shouldn’t we have, I dunno, asked who sent them and maybe what they wanted?”
“Cutler, who else?”
Something stirs in Hal. Denial mingled with anger.
“God,” sighs Alex, “is this gonna be our life now? Maybe we shouldn’t stay here then.”
Hal stares at her, too shocked by the prospect of moving again to voice his protest. That is not an option. He cannot possibly grow accustomed to a new place, new living conditions again so soon, not when he is this weak. Last time he almost killed someone.
“There ain’t that many places where we can afford the rent,” Tom muses. “What d’ya think they wanted, though, Hal? Hal?”
Hal doesn’t listen. He is running down the street, skipping over sparse pools of lamp-light, towards the warehouse where he may yet get some answers.
* * *
In Cutler’s opinion, there is something cheaply cinematic about living in an abandoned warehouse, but there is little he can do about it. His current living situation may not be ideal, but it grants him certain anonymity. Not to mention it’s inexpensive, and considering that the disappearance of all of his vampire clientele and his subsequent temporary disability have rendered him unemployed, to say his financial resources are tight at the moment would be putting it mildly.
Nevertheless, the warehouse is better than a crypt (which would be an obvious choice for a film vampire). Little by little, Nick has managed to fashion it into a semblance of home. He has a small bed with a mattress and a pillow (the frame comes from a local scrapyard and the rest was borrowed - that’s the word - from a charity shop), a small plastic table and a folding chair (a raid on a campsite, thanks for not asking) and for some reason a toaster, which he has nowhere to plug in anyway (he keeps toiletries in it).
He has been lucky enough to keep most of his technical equipment. Keeping it fully charged presents a slight challenge, but Nick Cutler would not be Nick Cutler if he failed to take occasional advantage of wall outlets in public places. As such, he retains his access to the Internet - and it is not the bearer of good news lately.
Nick has just finished browsing a forum on werewolves that seems to have been pruned significantly since the last time he logged in when the door flies open and Hal storms in. Cutler takes an instinctive step back, but there is really no place to hide. Hal grips the lapels of his jacket and spits into his face:
“You said you have not been keeping contact with any other vampires!”
“I haven’t-!” Cutler protests automatically before his brain even catches up with his tongue. “I’m not! What brought this on?”
“Then why did Tom just stake two vampires outside our house?”
Cutler snorts. He makes it sound like it’s something out of the ordinary.
“I can’t help it if Tom gets trigger-happy at the sight of fangs.”
“Are you telling me you have nothing to do with it?”
“I swear I don’t.”
Hal releases him and half-turns away, looking momentarily lost. It is strange to see him like this, so anguished, spread thin over the multitude of mundane things that comprise his life now. He could not be further away from the ancient, terrifying creature Cutler first saw in that jail cell over half a century ago, and yet he is still Hal Yorke. He is ingrained in Cutler’s very system, deeper than blood, deeper than his misguided plans for world domination, deeper than anything really.
Cutler touches Hal’s shoulder hesitantly and says in a quiet, ingratiating voice:
“Hal, you are the last remaining Old One. You should be ready for it. Soon they will be queuing at your door, begging for you to lead them into a brighter tomorrow. With the War Child gone-.”
“Eve’s death only means the decline of our race,” Hal cuts him off.
“But they don’t know it. In fact, no one knows anything about those silly myths. But word travels fast, word of actual events. By now they must know that they are orphaned. Their forefathers are dust, but you, you are still standing. Hal Yorke, truly the most spectacular of them all.”
Hal shakes him off tetchily. “I have no intention to lead anyone anywhere.” He casts a suspicious look about, having only just noticed the interior changes. “Did you find anything?”
Cutler leaps at the chance to change the subject. “Only that any and all videos from the club as well as my original werewolf footage have been pulled from the net. There are no mentions of werewolves, no Twitter hashtags, no Facebook pages, nothing. Someone has cleaned it all up very meticulously.”
Hal frowns. The scale of this operation is truly magnificent. Cutler had spent ages setting up the reveal - and they took it all down within weeks, maybe even days. Like most things in his life, this is somewhat unfair.
“Someone seems to be really invested in keeping it all hush-hush,” Cutler goes on. “And it’s not just us. I’ve looked through some old headlines. Werewolf kills. I mean, I know for a fact because I’ve done my research.” There is a swell of pride in his voice. He throws his hands up dramatically. “It’s all just gone poof! No evidence left. They were not even made to look like animal attacks. They either vanished completely or were passed off as more mundane deaths. Carcrashes. Fires. Suicides. Nobody knows anything.”
“Somebody has to,” Hal objects.
Cutler can tell what he is thinking because it was not long ago that he considered the same thing. If this is some kind of a supernatural research centre, there should be ripples. Whispers, escapees, anything. Such organizations rise from time to time in different corners of the world; they have always existed in some form or another, but they seldom managed to remain hidden for too long.
Something dawns on Hal. “Regus!” he exclaims, and elaborates needlessly when Cutler knits his eyebrows quizzically: “The Vampire Recorder.”
“Yes, the dick with the stupid job. What about him?”
“His stupid job is to keep track of such things. If anyone knows something, it would be him.” Momentary elation gives way to frustration. Hal sours visibly. “But I haven’t got a clue how to contact him without stirring up the vampire community.”
Cutler shrugs. “I might.” He hovers by his laptop, fingers flitting deftly over the keyboard.
“You can’t expect to just punch in his name and have something turn up,” Hal notes.
“What, like this?”
Cutler turns the laptop around, letting Hal have a look at the screen. Hal recognizes the dark, gothic-styled background of the website opened in the browser’s tab. Huge red letters designed to look like they are dripping blood splatter across the page, proclaiming: “THE VAMPIRE RECORDER”, with a smaller subtitle underneath: “For all your vampire recording needs.”
Cutler moves to stand next to Hal and hunches over the laptop, awkward and angular - and still looking less like an idiot compared to Hal who is downright gaping at the sight. A sepulchral melody begins playing as Cutler scrolls down to the bottom of the page and reads out a small message done in an ornate print:
“If you are a vampire and need something recorded, please contact Regus or Michaela via the guestbook.” Yep. Definitely the same Regus. Cutler glances at Hal curiously. “Who’s Michaela?”
“Trust me,” Hal says slowly, “you don’t want to know.”
* * *
The only thing worse than discussing Cutler with Tom and Alex turns out to be having all three in the same room. It took Regus only an hour to reply to the message Cutler had left on his website; he promised to come and discuss the matter in person. This idea didn’t sit well with Hal, but any information Regus possessed could constitute their first serious breakthrough, and he did not want to deny Alex that chance. As such, they all assemble at Honolulu Heights, waiting impatiently for Regus’s arrival.
Alex is pacing, snapping her fingers and pretending rather poorly that she is not worked up. Cutler reclines in the arm-chair, mostly staring at his phone, eyes darting up to survey Hal occasionally. Tom is hugging a pillow, underneath which he is hiding a stake.
“I don’t like it,” he states glumly.
“Yes, Tom, you made your point crystal clear the first six times you said that,” says Cutler, without looking up from his phone.
Tom bristles. Hal breaks the brewing confrontation up before it escalates.
“Shut up, Cutler,” he snaps out. Tom grins victoriously at that, but Nick only shrugs.
Silence wears on. Hal can feel it tingling against his skin like the second invisible layer of it.
“Bugger,” Cutler grouses and all but tosses the phone on the sofa. “They shut down my back-up Twitter account. Same stupid reason as before.” He snorts with disdain and airquotes: “Criminal behaviour.”
“Who did?” Hal asks. Not that he is so interested in Cutler’s online machinations, but the wait is getting on his nerves more and more.
Cutler grimaces. “Authorities.”
“Those men work for the government?” Alex blurts out. It’s nice that she has stopped fussing around.
“If they do, I’m sure the government has no clue about it.”
Hal grits his teeth. The thought of having another vampire around seems less and less sane to him. He bears with Cutler because he believes that the latter is quite adamant about staying clean, but he can hardly demand that of every vampire he will come in contact with. He leans against the bar and rearranges the teacups that Alex has left there and grumbles because was it really so difficult to wash them?
The room sinks back into the restive silence until the sound of knocking breaks it. Hal starts for the door, but stops mid-way and gestures to Alex pleadingly. She rolls her eyes but opens the door.
Regus greets them with a smile and addresses Hal as “M’Lord”. He nods to Tom and executes a small, clumsy bow when Hal introduces him to Alex. As he spots Cutler, he raises his eyebrows and asks in a clipped tone: “What’s he doing here?”
“He is the one that summoned your fat arse in the first place,” Cutler parries, puffing up with hurt pride.
“You little nit-,” Regus begins, just as Michaela steps into the room, teeth bared in a smile that probably passes for charming in her book.
Hal glares at Regus. Why the hell did he have to bring her?
Michaela appears to be as full of joie de vivre as ever (which is an odd thing for a vampire and a goth). She lunges at Hal and captures him into a hug and she pats Tom’s brittle crew cut, calling him her “favourite wolf-man” (if ever there was a vampire completely devoid of prejudice, it would be Michaela Thompson). Alex watches her with undisguised amusement. Even Cutler looks up and flashes her a small, intimidated smile upon catching her curious look.
“I’ll look through my recordings,” says Regus when he hears them out. Alex is the one doing most of the talking as per their prior unanimous decision. Hal is only too happy to leave her to it. Regus clears his throat, looking slightly embarrassed. “It might take a while, so I was wondering if we could stay here.”
“Don’t see why not,” Alex shrugs.
Hal glowers at her as does Tom. She returns their looks, blinking innocently. The vampires artlessly pretend not to notice anything. Hal motions briskly towards the kitchen, and the three retreat there immediately.
“They cannot stay here!” Hal hisses in a strangled voice.
“It’s just until he finds something,” Alex protests. “It’s not like they’re moving in.”
“I can’t spend the night under the same roof as two blood-drinking vampires! Can you even begin to imagine the sacrifice I’m making by having them over?”
“Ooh, you wanna talk about sacrifice?” snaps Alex. “Try working with the guy who killed you because he seems to be your last bleeding shot at finding your lost body. Try babysitting a bipolar vampire who caused your death in the first place. Try having your family wait hopefully for your return when you know you never will and the police has absolutely nothing to tell them! How’s that for bloody sacrifice, Lord Harry?!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I did not-.”
“Shut up!” Tom cries out. They are all shouting now, without any regard for the audience in the living-room. “Both of you.” He is shaking, hands balled into fists. Every words comes out much clearer than it normally does, sharpened by indignation. “This is Annie’s house. You can’t fight in Annie’s house. You can’t have vampire sleepovers in her house either. Eve and her have been gone for only two months, and we haven’t said so much as three words about it like it don’t matter. But it does! We keep pretending it’s such a good thing they’re gone, but death ain’t ever a good thing. ‘Specially the death of a baby.”
Chill creeps into Hal’s bones. He doesn’t know how long Tom has been nursing these feelings. He knew Annie longer than Hal did and he was still basically a child. He missed the mother figure in her and he missed the baby too. Hal never noticed how much looking after Eve meant to Tom. To him, she was never the War Child or the saviour or whatever nonsensical figure the old scrolls cared to proclaim her to be. She was George and Nina’s baby.
Tom doesn’t even look angry. He looks let down. He turns around and storms out. Hal exchanges looks with Alex and goes after him. The vampires in the living-room have been listening in, if unintentionally, but they promptly pretend to be otherwise engaged. Regus pores over his scrolls, Michaela pulls up her tights and Cutler drills the screen of his phone with an extra fascinated stare. He glances up as Hal rushes past him, his face unreadable.
Tom hasn’t gone far. Hal finds him on the porch, poking mindlessly at the shrubbery as if testing if anything nasty is lurking there. Hal touches his shoulder gently and says:
“Of course it’s not a good thing they’re gone. I miss them too. But Annie did a great thing, not just for us, but for the world. And we have to believe there is a proper reward for that. We have to hope that she is with the people she loves now. George and Nina and Mitchell.” The names taste foreign in his mouth. He didn’t know those people and he shouldn’t care about them, but he recalls the way Annie spoke of her friends and he feels a small pang of sadness. “And Eve is with her parents. In a good place.”
Tom keeps quiet for a moment. “I thought you didn’t believe vampires go to a good place. So Mitchell prolly ain’t there.”
Hal lowers his head in resignation. “Like I said, we have to believe.”
* * *
Hal spends the night barricaded in his room as if there is once again a succubus in the house. He can almost feel the alien presence downstairs. Hiding from Regus of all people is both laughable and sad, yet despite the certainty that the Vampire Recorder who still fears him and owes him allegiance would not do anything to compromise Hal’s rehabilitation, Hal cannot help dealing in labels. A blood-drinking vampire. Not clean. He can tell that Regus hasn’t had blood for some time, most likely in a conscious effort to be considerate towards Hal’s situation, but the ghostly whiff, searing and taunting, still haunts Hal. Just being around a blood-drinker fills his mouth with a rich taste of copper, making his jaws ache like he is a muzzled hound.
He stares numbly at the wall, knees pulled up to his chin, blankets pooling around him. Sweat drips into his eyes. Red stains flicker over the light-coloured wallpaper. The trick is not to move. Night shifts slowly into morning, and Hal continues motionless, teeth painfully clenched, nails digging into his palms. When the sun rises, tension inside him fades slowly, grudgingly, struggling to consolidate its grip on Hal.
He performs his morning rituals on autopilot and descends into the living-room, anxiety safely concealed beneath the mask of polite indifference. He finds Regus still planted on the sofa amidst his papers, nose deep in research. Tom, Alex and Michaela are nowhere to be seen.
“You must find it rather taxing,” Hal says to initiate a conversation, “to handle a new recruit.” In his experience, conversation often helps to keep distracted if one concentrates on the words and not the partner.
Regus glances up briefly, a content smile flashing on his lips.
“Not at all.”
“You are happy then, I take it.”
“Oh yes.” His smile grows wider and becomes sort of dreamy, but at the same time his eyes sparkle with unwonted acumen. “What I’m saying, Hal, is there’s no need for you to go on a guilt trip about it. I recruited her, right? And we’re both the better for it, eh? I mean, the sex is-.”
“Is she killing?” Hal cuts him off.
Regus drops his eyes. “I’m not saying she never does. But she’s not a monster. We’re trying. We really are. So don’t worry about it.”
It’s easier said than done. Hal cannot but wonder where she is now. He doesn’t think Michaela will drain anyone dry in broad daylight, but he would still prefer to keep an eye on her. The younger you are, the less self-control you possess. He would have appreciated her potential back when he was still a drinker; now it only makes him feel more pity and wariness towards her.
“In case you want to know what I’ve found,” says Regus, “it’s not much. But I did find a name. More like a moniker really, but you never know.” He sustains a dramatic pause, which Hal reacts to with a glare of exasperation, and adds: “It’s Mr Rook.”
“Mr Rook?”
“From what I can tell, it must be the leader of those men you saw in the club.”
An unremarkable-looking Englishman of average height, brisk, efficient, clearly well accustomed to working below the radar. Hal knows the type but he has never heard so much as a whisper of this particular person. That is alarming in its own right. There are few things an Old One would happen to be unaware of, and potential enemies or allies of their race are usually not those things.
Hal murmurs a quick excuse and heads for the door. Even as he walks up to it, he has no idea where he plans to go when he has stepped outside. Either the café, or the warehouse.
“I was surprised, you know,” Regus calls after him. “To see that upstart Cutler still hanging about. Griffin didn’t think too highly of him.” Something mischievous twinkles in his eyes. “Didn’t think too highly of me either. Look where it got him.”
Hal nearly throws the door open and winces as sunlight hits his eyes. The warehouse it is.
* * *
On his way to Cutler’s Hal muses upon Regus’s words. Griffin was indeed little inclined to pay heed to young recruits regardless of their talent, just as he thought very little of their race’s history and folklore. Griffin was a military man to the bone, but if he could at least command respect, Fergus, his brief successor, appeared to be hardly more than a brutish mercenary. People like Cutler and Regus would never prosper under such leaders.
Hal does not trust either of them. Cutler, with his unwavering, puppy-like devotion, used to be so easy to predict. He used to worship his three deities: Hal, blood, and ambition, mostly in this particular order, - and he was an open book to Hal. Part of him laments the passing of those simpler times.
He walks into the warehouse and starts saying: “Cutler, I have news of-,” and stops dead as he sees two bodies on the bed. One of them is undeniably Cutler. He raises his head quickly and stares at Hal, blinking owlishly with still sleepy eyes. The other body is female, and Hal clenches his teeth, bracing himself for the worst: a corpse. But there is no smell of blood, and as the woman stirs and meets his bewildered look, he recognizes Michaela.
“Awkward,” she mumbles, collecting her scattered clothes rapidly and trying to cover herself rather unsuccessfully. Hal spins around on his heels and marches outside decidedly, thinking: Definitely the new Ivan and Daisy.
Five minutes later, a disheveled and oddly guilty-looking Cutler is standing before him by the warehouse door. Silence is getting thicker, accumulating more and more awkward implications.
“You slept with Michaela,” Hal says finally. He still can’t fathom it.
“You said I could never have sex again,” Cutler blurts out. “I panicked! Anyway, I believe the experience was beneficial for both of us.” He grins, not without pride, and lowers his voice. “She’s writing a poem about it as we speak.”
“I can’t believe you!” Hal mutters indignantly. He cannot understand what has got him so worked up. He sincerely hopes that should Regus find out about this, he and Michaela will take their drama elsewhere.
“Easy for you to say,” Cutler fires off. “You may be able to live like common people, but some of us want an opportunity to call someone about the fucking cockroaches on the wall!”
“What?” Must be another pop reference that Hal doesn’t know - and doesn’t care to understand. It makes him angry.
Cutler rolls his eyes theatrically. “Oh, forget it!” That shouldn’t be too hard. Hal whirls off, and Cutler yells after him: “Go on then! Running away is kind of your thing these days, isn’t it?”
* * *
“So, this Mr Rook,” Alex says in the evening when they are half-watching the latest installment of the film saga about sparkling vampires. “What do you think his story is?”
She has been marathoning these mind-numbingly maudlin films lately, laughing at them like they are comedies. She says: Once you have lived with a real vampire, you can never take any fiction seriously.
Hal glues his eyes to the telly and cannot bring himself to look away. He finds that he doesn’t really understand what is going on. It’s a little like watching a plane crash in slow motion. Exactly what he needs right now.
“I can only imagine what state we might find my body in,” Alex continues. “If we ever do, that is. But there’s really no way to make it look presentable for my family now, is there?”
“May I ask you a personal question?” Hal interrupts. She gives a nonchalant shrug. “What do you think of sex?”
Alex raises her eyebrows in surprise and releases a curt, shocked giggle.
“That it’s something I’m never gonna have with you,” she says. He looks away from the film couple and watches her face change slowly in realization. “Or at all.” She fixes her eyes on the screen, a sour expression on her face. “You know what this film lacks? Ghosts! That’s discrimination right there.”
Hal tilts his head back and lays it on the back of the sofa, watching the ceiling as Alex keeps providing her running commentary on the film. Maybe if he doesn’t move an inch, he will melt away into the soft upholstery. Agitation crackles inside him. He finds himself glancing at the window every now and then, counting down the seconds until some distant, indefinite event.
* * *
He isn’t sure why he goes to see Cutler again. He is drawn to the warehouse like it’s a living thing. Just standing on the doorstep makes his body tingle like it did when Cutler offered him his first glass of blood in over half a century.
Cutler looks up from his laptop, eyes a little wide, still uncertain where they stand. The morning confrontation is not at all forgotten, but Hal couldn’t care less about it at the moment.
“Oh, good,” says Cutler, sensing it. “You’re here. Maybe you can finally explain what you wanted to share this morning. I can’t get a damn word out of our highly distinguished chronicler.”
Silently, Hal closes the distance between them and slams Cutler into the wall, pressing his body full-length against Cutler’s. Nick’s eyes grow wider. Hal’s name slips out of his mouth in a half-smothered whisper. Hal mashes their lips together, biting at his mouth. Shell-shocked, Cutler arches his back half-consciously. The heat and the friction between them are almost too hard to bear.
Hal’s hands roam up and down Cutler’s body none too gently. He claws at the layers of clothing separating them and tugs at Cutler’s jacket, ripping the sleeve at the shoulder seam without much consideration. Quick on the uptake, Cutler struggles with Hal’s impeccably buttoned up clothes, wrestling control of the kiss away from Hal.
Hal pulls away, releases his fangs and sinks them into Cutler’s shoulder, tearing through the dirty-white cotton of his shirt. Blackness pools in Nick’s eyes. He spits like a wounded cat and goes for Hal’s neck.
Blood fills Hal’s mouth. He drinks in swift, painful gulps, almost choking on it, and it burns toxic on the inside, even if it’s the thin and insipid blood of a fellow immortal. Cutler tilts his head back with a low, guttural sigh. His face mirrors Hal’s, bloodstained fangs and empty dark eyes. He moans: “Hal,” making it sound like a prayer. Hal strokes him through the fabric of his trousers, and Nick thrusts eagerly into his hand.
Hal kisses him again. He grinds their bodies together, dazed, drifting on the faint borderline between pleasure and excruciating thirst. Every sound Cutler makes, every shaky gasp, every groan drowned out by another kiss - everything resonates within Hal, sharpening his motions. Cutler licks the bitemark on his neck, and Hal fails to contain a moan. Encouraged by this, Cutler bites him again and drinks a few greedy sips. He digs his fingers unwittingly into Hal’s burnt shoulder. Hal bucks his hips, letting Cutler unfasten his trousers and slip his hand in deftly. The contact of skin to skin is almost enough to bring Hal over the edge. The litany of ragged sighs rings out in his ears. The release is swift, almost painful, fueled by the intoxicating flavour of blood.
Hal sags against Nick, his body betraying him for a moment. The impact of his impulsiveness dawns on him as the daze begins to dispel. He sinks onto the floor, too drained to be properly angry with himself or Cutler.
Fifty-five years of perfect self-control gone down the drain in a blink of an eye just because some impertinent brat from his past gives him a glass of blood to drink. Then he dies and just as Hal is about done mourning him, he has the gall to reappear and start his own bloody redemption campaign, which, Hal has to say, does not seem to be running as it should.
Hal looks around, trying to concentrate. Cutler says something, but his words are lost on Hal. He cannot listen to him now. His blood still burns hot in Hal’s mouth.
He is about to get up when his gaze lingers on a few dark stains under the table. They are tiny, just a few dry dots in the dust, but he would recognize them anywhere. Cutler follows the direction of his look.
“That is not… exactly what you think,” he stutters.
“I think it’s blood,” Hal says. “I think it’s human. What is the ‘not exactly’ part?”
He staggers up. Cutler follows him, looking anxious.
“It’s medical,” he chatters. “From a bloodbag. No one died! I don’t see the problem-.”
Hal spins around to face him. Fury fountains inside him.
“The problem is you can’t survive off that blood! It’s all or nothing. That blood has no substance but it’s strong enough to hold power over you so that all you can think about is feeding. You won’t stop. It’s only a matter of time before you go back to killing.”
He is shaking uncontrollably, teeth chattering, words coming out slurred and clipped. He can barely speak past the lump of horror and disgust in his throat. The coppery taste in his mouth becomes more pronounced. He brings his hand up to his face, gripped by sudden nauseating terror. Cutler drank human blood and he drank Cutler’s. He touches his teeth, as if to wipe off the blood, but he is already contaminated. He can feel it coursing through him, settling down inside him like a time bomb ready to go off. Shock gives way to repulsion mingled with horror.
“Hal, if you’d just let me explain-,” Cutler starts saying.
No. No explanations. No more. They are done.
* * *
Candle flame flickers on the wicks. They have candles for each of them: Annie, Eve, George and Nina, Mitchell, MacNair, Leo and Pearl. They don’t talk about it; they just set up eight candles and light them, and Alex makes tea, and Hal finally crawls out of his barricaded bedroom.
They raise their cups (“For Eve who brought us together,” “For Annie who made us a family”) and they talk and they laugh. Alex shares a couple of droll stories about her slapdash brothers. Tom recollects MacNair’s version of Beauty and the Beast, in which the girl kissed the werewolf, got the curse and they lived happily ever after under the full moon. Hal remembers how he prompted Leo poetry to read to Pearl and that was a mixed success.
It’s not a wake and it’s not a memorial service. But it is what Tom wanted and all three of them needed.
Hal has spent days locked in his room trying to forget the way Cutler’s blood tasted on his tongue. He hasn’t thought about Cutler for what seems like centuries. It is better that way. Sharing his rehab with someone was a mistake. It’s not like they have group therapy for such addictions.
Cutting Cutler out of his life was strangely easy. Hal never expected him to give up so easily but if Cutler tried to see him, he is not aware of that. Maybe things are finally getting better. No more interruptions. No more getting sidetracked. The cycle will finally be broken.
Inspired with hopes for the future, Hal nearly jumps on the sofa when he hears Alex drop Cutler’s name in conversation. He catches it out of context and blinks rapidly, struggling to pick up the thread of a story.
“What did you say? About Cutler?”
Breath hitches in his throat. He expects the worst. Cutler’s killing again. Cutler’s dead. Between the two, he wouldn’t know which one is the worst.
“Well, he’s gone,” Alex reiterates impatiently. “He left two days ago to follow up on a new lead from Regus.”
“Didn’t you know?” Tom cuts in.
Hal looks at them, shell-shocked. He should be happy that he is finally rid of Cutler. He should be happy to be the only vampire in Barry. Yet all he feels is cold, dull surprise. Why would Cutler leave without saying goodbye? Why would he leave at all?
“Did he say when he planned to come back?”
“No,” Alex shrugs indifferently. “He left a phone number though. Just in case.”
Hal nods curtly but later that night he goes back to pull a card from under the phone and he dials the number, which he half-expects to be fake. Cutler picks up a few moments later.
“What are you doing?” Hal fires off in a steely voice.
“Eating.” Cutler’s voice sounds distant, and there is a strange buzzing at the background like he is on a boat or something. “Don’t freak out. It’s nothing two-legged or even remotely intelligent.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I told Alex, didn’t I? I’m going to find Mr Rook.” Hal be damned if that’s not a slight tinge of pride in the bastard’s voice. “I have reasons to believe those men want me as much as you lot want them, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”
“What the hell are you thinking?” Hal exclaims. “This is a potentially dangerous group of people that even I, in all my five hundred years, have never even heard of. You can’t just show up on their doorstep and politely ask them to give Alex’s body back. What kind of a hare-brained enterprise is that?”
There is a quick noise as if Cutler moves the phone into the other hand.
“Aw, you’re worried about me,” he teases. “I’m touched.”
They are both silent for a moment. Hal winds the phone cable around his wrist half-consciously. Cutler sighs and says:
“Look, Hal, this cold turkey thing isn’t working for me.” He sounds different. More serious. Grown up, somehow. “I’m not giving up but I have to take it slow. Baby steps.” He pauses. “Hal, I will come back. I’ll have results. And then you’ll see me.”
Something about this phrasing unsettles Hal. But I see you, he wants to say. He listens to the silence that reigns after Cutler hangs up, and whispers:
“Good luck.”
April 4-17, 2012
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: R
Timeline: post-Series 4 finale [SPOILERS]
Summary: Hal and Tom are less than thrilled when Alex accepts Cutler’s help looking for her body. A man like Nick Cutler always has ulterior motives. Or does he? [Hal/Cutler; sequel to The Pinnacle of Being Alive]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC.
A/N: This is hopefully the last part of the fix-it trilogy (currently) that’s come to be known as Lavender Blue. No idea how it got so long. O_o
MAD SEASON
Stay gone.
Stay clean.
I need you to need me.
Kleerup. “Until we bleed”
There is always something awkward about meeting your past victims. Not that it ever happens to most vampires for obvious reasons. Of course, every once in a while one of them gets away, but you don’t usually bump into them in a crowd or have them deliver a newspaper to your doorstep just to feel like a school bully meeting his geeky prey ten years later. And you certainly don’t come deliberately knocking on their door, knowing that they might slam said door shut in your face, catching your hand between the door and the doorframe in the process.
Which is exactly what Alex Mayhew does upon seeing Nick Cutler on her porch.
He yelps when his fingers get trapped in the door and pushes it open nearly on autopilot.
“Do you mind!?” he snaps because - damn, that actually hurts.
“Get out!” Alex shrieks. She actually kicks him in the shin with the toe of her boot. Three times in a row.
“Will you stop that?” Cutler says irritably.
She glares at him and folds her arms across her chest, trying to look impressive.
“Hal is not here.” Her accent is atrocious, and she is loud and annoying, but he does not tell her that because he has made up his mind to be civil even if she makes it rather challenging.
“I know,” he says. “I’m here to talk to you.”
That takes a bit of her feistiness away for a moment. She blinks in confusion and frowns.
“About what?” A suspicion comes to her mind. She gasps and hisses at him: “Oh God, you’re not here to apologize, are you? I knew Hal would put you up to this!”
At that, Cutler decides that he has had enough. He pushes past her into the house, rubbing his pinched fingers. He begins to understand why Hal always seems to be on edge. Sharing a house with that must be quite wearisome.
“Look,” he says, with all the patience he can muster, “I feel like we have got off on the wrong foot-.”
“You think?” Alex smiles and kicks him hard in the knee. That’s it; next time he kills someone he is definitely taking off their boots first.
“Ow!” he cries out and darts behind the sofa in search of a cover. As soon as his limbs are relatively safe, he continues: “I heard you’ve been having problems tracking your body down.”
“Did Hal tell you that? Are you two gossiping about me?”
“Yes,” Cutler says with an unapologetically straight face. “Because we have nothing else to discuss.” She flashes him a dirty look. “Anyway, I have a reason to believe that whoever took your body, also took something from me. So I figured: I help you, you help me, we forget that whole killing you business, we both get what we want, and everybody’s happy.” He emphasizes the ultimate point with a generous flourish of his hand and addresses her his most convincing smile. “What do you say?”
Alex squints. He doesn’t exactly have her where he wants her yet, but this is a start.
“What did they take from you?” she asks. Cutler hesitates. “Oh, come on!” she snorts. “If I’m going to be helping you,” she grimaces, emphasizing the word, “I have to know.”
“The footage of Tom in the club,” Cutler confesses reluctantly. “The one I was going to show the Old Ones.”
Her face contorts in anger. She tosses a coffee mug at his head telekinetically. He ducks, but it is a narrow escape. He has to admit this impish Scottish girl makes a rather intimidating ghost.
“I will not let you get it back so you could take over the world with it or something!” she exclaims.
“You don’t understand. I have no use for it anymore. The Old Ones are gone and it’s not like I ever held any personal grudges against Tom.” That, and Hal would have his head if he tried anything against the bloody mongrel. “But you don’t know what those people might want it for.”
She is obviously considering it. Slowly, belligerently, she comes round to his way of thinking.
“I haven’t been able to find anything substantial yet,” she mutters. “I’ve been to the club and I’ve gone to the police, but so far nothing on the mystery men. They’re passing me off as a missing person, which is actually a lot better than what’s really happened.” She gives him a pointed glare, which he ignores.
“Do you remember anything unusual about them?” he asks. “Or anything at all?”
Alex wrinkles her forehead.
“I think they were human,” she says thoughtfully. “I was right there, and they didn’t see me. Also, time seemed to be an issue. They mentioned something about pulling the whole thing off in forty-five seconds. Pretty impressive if you ask me.”
Especially if that includes taking his disc. Cutler lowers himself on the sofa. It appears they have something to think about after all.
* * *
The press-ups were Leo’s idea, much like all of Hal’s routines. He used to think of them as redundant (vampires are stuck in whatever state they were recruited in, so what is the point of working out?), but he performed them anyway, every day, and soon it was no longer about making Leo happy. They genuinely helped.
Fifty-five years of regular exercise. Hal missed a few days when he was restrained, but overall, he has been able to successfully keep it up.
If he were human, it would all be about breathing. But he doesn’t concern himself with such things. He focuses on the sensations. The way his muscles flex. The way sweat pools in the hollows on his skin. The way his limbs strain. His body knows the pattern, but he still has to focus on his actions, and that leaves no room for any sort of ruminations.
Rise and fall. It is always the same, predictable, reliable. Eighty-three. Eighty-four. Eighty-
Somebody knocks on the door. Hal’s eyes snap open. Eighty-five. Eighty-six. The rapping continues. It throws him off. He grits his teeth and continues the press-ups stubbornly, hoping against all better judgment that the insolent person on the other side of the door will just go away. It cannot be Tom because Tom knows he should not be disturbed at this time, so it is either Alex who refuses to respect his timetable or someone else. Considering Alex could just pop in without making all that noise, Hal’s bets are on the latter.
Eighty-six. Eighty-seven. Eighty-eight.
The rapping grows more persistent until it’s a bloody The Raven re-enactment. Hal propels himself up and jerks the door open. Of course it’s Cutler. Who else would it be?
“I knocked,” he says like that explains everything.
“I heard,” Hal says coolly. “My silence should have been a clue.”
Cutler shrugs and looks him over, meticulously taking in the naked torso, the linen trousers and the hair that sticks up ridiculously - the resultant fiasco of Hal’s latest attempt to give himself a haircut. Leo always did that. Without Leo, he runs the risk of getting Tom hair.
“I was right then,” Cutler says, satisfied with his examination. “You do work out.”
“What do you want?” Hal asks irritably.
Cutler invites himself into Hal’s room, and that is a disruption of the process. The process that has been running smoothly for years. Hal grinds his jaws, pushing exasperation back.
“Did your ghostie tell you about our little agreement?”
Hal nods. Alex called a house meeting over it. The second bloody house meeting initiated by her. She is getting the hang of the bossy ghost lifestyle pretty quickly.
“So?” Cutler prods. “Are you going to assemble your merry band of misfits and help an old friend out?”
“I’m helping Alex,” Hal says, pointedly.
The door remains open. He expects Cutler to step out, but true to himself, Cutler proceeds to look around. Hal casts a quick look at the alarm clock on the night table.
“This is cutting into my reading hour,” he says, huffishly.
“Really? You’re on a schedule?”
“It helps me to manage my situation.” He glances at Cutler who suddenly seems to avoid eye contact, and asks: “Speaking of which, how are you?”
It feels bizarre to openly express interest in another vampire’s rehab even if he is your own misfortunate creation. Cutler hunches his shoulders awkwardly and stares deliberately at the bookcase. Hal would be counting the backs of the books in his place.
“Fine,” he mumbles, and adds unenthusiastically: “Crazy most of the time. I killed a dog this morning.” He elaborates before Hal has a panic attack: “A dog dog, not a werewolf. It didn’t do anything, it just kept barking. I couldn’t concentrate, so I bashed its head in. Got blood all over my shirt. Afterwards, I just sat there and stared at the blood for half an hour, no less.”
Hal pushes the door shut and commands:
“Get on the floor.”
“Excuse me?”
“You need a routine to keep yourself grounded,” Hal explains. “This is a good way to start. You asked me to help you. I’m helping. Now, don’t make me repeat myself.”
Cutler snorts in disbelief. He takes off his jacket and positions himself on the floor. Hal stretches himself next to him and continues his set: eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one. He watches Cutler from the corner of his eye, forcibly splitting his mind into two parts. One is peaceful, accumulating the cleansing experience of physical exertion; the other is sorely Cutler-ridden. He feels almost elated at the prospect of sharing his rituals with someone having the same needs.
Cutler only gets to four before he collapses with a long-drawn-out sigh of veritable suffering.
“This,” he declares, rolling on his back, “is definitely not my thing.”
Ninety-nine. One hundred.
Hal shifts into a sitting position easily. He can practically feel Cutler’s studious look travel up and down his skin.
“Make it your thing,” he says. It comes out more harshly than he has planned it to. “Physical activity is important. It helps to maintain control over your urges.”
“Sounds good for someone who is not going to have sex for the next hundred years,” Cutler chuckles.
“You aren’t.”
Cutler goggles at him. Hal doesn’t think he has ever seen such an expression of profound shock on anyone’s face. As if he’s just told Nick the Earth had already exploded.
“Sorry,” Cutler says, “this is my What!? face in case you’re not catching up.”
Why do people keep making such a big deal out of it? Hal hasn’t had sex for fifty-five years and he is still standing.
“It’s too dangerous. You can’t know for sure what it might lead to.”
Cutler jumps to his feet, making Hal get up as well. They face each other, Cutler searching his maker’s face for any signs of trickery.
“I don’t kill people during sex, Hal,” he insists. He sounds scandalized by the very idea. “It’s messy.”
“You’d be surprised how easy it is to lose yourself in the process. Now that you’re on the wagon, all bets are off. Whatever defences you had before, they are no longer functional. You mustn’t let yourself get distracted.”
He should stop this. Stop giving advice like it’s any of his business.
Their stand-off is interrupted by the sound of Alex clearing her throat politely. She wants to know if she is butting in (like that has ever stopped her before). Hal shakes his head. Cutler mutters a gloomy “no” and proceeds to put his jacket back on.
“Hal’s just killed me,” he declares as he exits the room.
“Figuratively speaking, I assume.” Alex winks at Hal. “Which is a shame.”
He rolls his eyes. That’s twenty-two minutes out of his reading hour.
Alex sizes him up with a suggestive look. Hal quickly slips on a t-shirt, picks up his book and waves dismissively at her. Before he has even removed the bookmark, she vanishes, and he hears her voice in the corridor.
“So, did you find anything on-?”
“Not as such,” Cutler’s voice comes. “I’ll keep you informed.”
Hal pores over the book, determined to shut the noise out. There is a small window in his timetable, the one he normally uses to do nothing and stare broodily at the wall. He might think about their latest common problem then. But that window is three hours ahead, and he should stop letting everyone interfere with his rota.
* * *
The music is loud and repetitive; try as he might, Hal cannot imagine anyone who would listen to it voluntarily. He suspects that even Alex doesn’t like it very much, but she feels like dancing, so she turns the volume up and moves in a strange, drunken trajectory across the room. Tom joins her occasionally, but he’s a worse dancer than she is, and it’s like watching a pair of string puppets writhe in agony. Hal even pricks his finger with a needle once or twice to make sure he’s not asleep and seeing a nightmare.
Another song comes up, no better than the first one. Tom flops into the arm-chair, laughing. Alex holds her hand out to Hal.
“Your turn. Don’t tell me you can’t dance.”
“I can dance,” he snorts, a little insulted: anyone his age can dance. “But I dance to music, and this is the heartbreaking scream of a dying culture.”
Tom snickers. “Leave it, Alex. He ain’t got no moves, is all.”
Hal sets aside his embroidery and rises swiftly from the sofa. He marches up to the radio and switches to the classical music station. He catches a waltz. Alex laughs uncomfortably, but slides her fingers into his open palm, and he leads her into a fluid, dignified dance. She stumbles and giggles and tells him:
“Okay, if you wanted to make a fool out of me, you succeeded.”
“Whyever would I want that?” Hal asks, dispassionately.
“Blimey,” Tom breathes, hugging a cushion dreamily. “You two are like in films.”
They are nothing like it, to be honest. They are imperfect and unsteady, and she has already stepped on his foot half a dozen times. But it reminds him of a similar evening, many years ago, when Pearl made him dance with her. It was Armstrong of course, Leo’s favourite, and Leo watched them together with the same dreamy expression that Tom is wearing now. Except it was not the same, as Hal knows now. It was the expression of a man unable to look away from the most beautiful woman on the planet, the one who makes the angels sing with the sound of her voice, the one who turns everyday words into love songs.
Afterwards, Leo whispered to him: You have to teach me that. And Hal did teach him to dance so that next time it was Leo who held her in his arms, and Hal knew that Leo felt like the happiest man on earth then.
“Guys,” Tom’s voice breaks into his thoughts. He is looking at the dark street through the window, his body tense, poised to strike. “Vampires.”
Hal and Alex join him instantly. There are two strangers keeping watch on the house from the shadows across the street. Hal doesn’t know them, but it doesn’t matter: every nerve in his body is ablaze. He barely notices it when Tom rushes outside, pulls a stake from the flower pot (the same flower pot Annie had expressly told him not to hide weapons in) and marches decidedly towards the unwelcome guests.
“What’s he doing?” Alex screeches. “We have to stop him!”
Her words barely reach Hal. He feels like he is muffled up in layers of cotton, a cocoon of heat and hunger. Who are these people? There has been no one else in Barry, not since the Old Ones got “proper dead”, in Cutler’s words.
Hal observes the brief, violent confrontation that follows, and as they fall to dust, so does his nauseating thirst. His hands are shaking. He finds himself unable to move.
“Well done, Terminator!” Alex scoffs at Tom on the porch. “Shouldn’t we have, I dunno, asked who sent them and maybe what they wanted?”
“Cutler, who else?”
Something stirs in Hal. Denial mingled with anger.
“God,” sighs Alex, “is this gonna be our life now? Maybe we shouldn’t stay here then.”
Hal stares at her, too shocked by the prospect of moving again to voice his protest. That is not an option. He cannot possibly grow accustomed to a new place, new living conditions again so soon, not when he is this weak. Last time he almost killed someone.
“There ain’t that many places where we can afford the rent,” Tom muses. “What d’ya think they wanted, though, Hal? Hal?”
Hal doesn’t listen. He is running down the street, skipping over sparse pools of lamp-light, towards the warehouse where he may yet get some answers.
* * *
In Cutler’s opinion, there is something cheaply cinematic about living in an abandoned warehouse, but there is little he can do about it. His current living situation may not be ideal, but it grants him certain anonymity. Not to mention it’s inexpensive, and considering that the disappearance of all of his vampire clientele and his subsequent temporary disability have rendered him unemployed, to say his financial resources are tight at the moment would be putting it mildly.
Nevertheless, the warehouse is better than a crypt (which would be an obvious choice for a film vampire). Little by little, Nick has managed to fashion it into a semblance of home. He has a small bed with a mattress and a pillow (the frame comes from a local scrapyard and the rest was borrowed - that’s the word - from a charity shop), a small plastic table and a folding chair (a raid on a campsite, thanks for not asking) and for some reason a toaster, which he has nowhere to plug in anyway (he keeps toiletries in it).
He has been lucky enough to keep most of his technical equipment. Keeping it fully charged presents a slight challenge, but Nick Cutler would not be Nick Cutler if he failed to take occasional advantage of wall outlets in public places. As such, he retains his access to the Internet - and it is not the bearer of good news lately.
Nick has just finished browsing a forum on werewolves that seems to have been pruned significantly since the last time he logged in when the door flies open and Hal storms in. Cutler takes an instinctive step back, but there is really no place to hide. Hal grips the lapels of his jacket and spits into his face:
“You said you have not been keeping contact with any other vampires!”
“I haven’t-!” Cutler protests automatically before his brain even catches up with his tongue. “I’m not! What brought this on?”
“Then why did Tom just stake two vampires outside our house?”
Cutler snorts. He makes it sound like it’s something out of the ordinary.
“I can’t help it if Tom gets trigger-happy at the sight of fangs.”
“Are you telling me you have nothing to do with it?”
“I swear I don’t.”
Hal releases him and half-turns away, looking momentarily lost. It is strange to see him like this, so anguished, spread thin over the multitude of mundane things that comprise his life now. He could not be further away from the ancient, terrifying creature Cutler first saw in that jail cell over half a century ago, and yet he is still Hal Yorke. He is ingrained in Cutler’s very system, deeper than blood, deeper than his misguided plans for world domination, deeper than anything really.
Cutler touches Hal’s shoulder hesitantly and says in a quiet, ingratiating voice:
“Hal, you are the last remaining Old One. You should be ready for it. Soon they will be queuing at your door, begging for you to lead them into a brighter tomorrow. With the War Child gone-.”
“Eve’s death only means the decline of our race,” Hal cuts him off.
“But they don’t know it. In fact, no one knows anything about those silly myths. But word travels fast, word of actual events. By now they must know that they are orphaned. Their forefathers are dust, but you, you are still standing. Hal Yorke, truly the most spectacular of them all.”
Hal shakes him off tetchily. “I have no intention to lead anyone anywhere.” He casts a suspicious look about, having only just noticed the interior changes. “Did you find anything?”
Cutler leaps at the chance to change the subject. “Only that any and all videos from the club as well as my original werewolf footage have been pulled from the net. There are no mentions of werewolves, no Twitter hashtags, no Facebook pages, nothing. Someone has cleaned it all up very meticulously.”
Hal frowns. The scale of this operation is truly magnificent. Cutler had spent ages setting up the reveal - and they took it all down within weeks, maybe even days. Like most things in his life, this is somewhat unfair.
“Someone seems to be really invested in keeping it all hush-hush,” Cutler goes on. “And it’s not just us. I’ve looked through some old headlines. Werewolf kills. I mean, I know for a fact because I’ve done my research.” There is a swell of pride in his voice. He throws his hands up dramatically. “It’s all just gone poof! No evidence left. They were not even made to look like animal attacks. They either vanished completely or were passed off as more mundane deaths. Carcrashes. Fires. Suicides. Nobody knows anything.”
“Somebody has to,” Hal objects.
Cutler can tell what he is thinking because it was not long ago that he considered the same thing. If this is some kind of a supernatural research centre, there should be ripples. Whispers, escapees, anything. Such organizations rise from time to time in different corners of the world; they have always existed in some form or another, but they seldom managed to remain hidden for too long.
Something dawns on Hal. “Regus!” he exclaims, and elaborates needlessly when Cutler knits his eyebrows quizzically: “The Vampire Recorder.”
“Yes, the dick with the stupid job. What about him?”
“His stupid job is to keep track of such things. If anyone knows something, it would be him.” Momentary elation gives way to frustration. Hal sours visibly. “But I haven’t got a clue how to contact him without stirring up the vampire community.”
Cutler shrugs. “I might.” He hovers by his laptop, fingers flitting deftly over the keyboard.
“You can’t expect to just punch in his name and have something turn up,” Hal notes.
“What, like this?”
Cutler turns the laptop around, letting Hal have a look at the screen. Hal recognizes the dark, gothic-styled background of the website opened in the browser’s tab. Huge red letters designed to look like they are dripping blood splatter across the page, proclaiming: “THE VAMPIRE RECORDER”, with a smaller subtitle underneath: “For all your vampire recording needs.”
Cutler moves to stand next to Hal and hunches over the laptop, awkward and angular - and still looking less like an idiot compared to Hal who is downright gaping at the sight. A sepulchral melody begins playing as Cutler scrolls down to the bottom of the page and reads out a small message done in an ornate print:
“If you are a vampire and need something recorded, please contact Regus or Michaela via the guestbook.” Yep. Definitely the same Regus. Cutler glances at Hal curiously. “Who’s Michaela?”
“Trust me,” Hal says slowly, “you don’t want to know.”
* * *
The only thing worse than discussing Cutler with Tom and Alex turns out to be having all three in the same room. It took Regus only an hour to reply to the message Cutler had left on his website; he promised to come and discuss the matter in person. This idea didn’t sit well with Hal, but any information Regus possessed could constitute their first serious breakthrough, and he did not want to deny Alex that chance. As such, they all assemble at Honolulu Heights, waiting impatiently for Regus’s arrival.
Alex is pacing, snapping her fingers and pretending rather poorly that she is not worked up. Cutler reclines in the arm-chair, mostly staring at his phone, eyes darting up to survey Hal occasionally. Tom is hugging a pillow, underneath which he is hiding a stake.
“I don’t like it,” he states glumly.
“Yes, Tom, you made your point crystal clear the first six times you said that,” says Cutler, without looking up from his phone.
Tom bristles. Hal breaks the brewing confrontation up before it escalates.
“Shut up, Cutler,” he snaps out. Tom grins victoriously at that, but Nick only shrugs.
Silence wears on. Hal can feel it tingling against his skin like the second invisible layer of it.
“Bugger,” Cutler grouses and all but tosses the phone on the sofa. “They shut down my back-up Twitter account. Same stupid reason as before.” He snorts with disdain and airquotes: “Criminal behaviour.”
“Who did?” Hal asks. Not that he is so interested in Cutler’s online machinations, but the wait is getting on his nerves more and more.
Cutler grimaces. “Authorities.”
“Those men work for the government?” Alex blurts out. It’s nice that she has stopped fussing around.
“If they do, I’m sure the government has no clue about it.”
Hal grits his teeth. The thought of having another vampire around seems less and less sane to him. He bears with Cutler because he believes that the latter is quite adamant about staying clean, but he can hardly demand that of every vampire he will come in contact with. He leans against the bar and rearranges the teacups that Alex has left there and grumbles because was it really so difficult to wash them?
The room sinks back into the restive silence until the sound of knocking breaks it. Hal starts for the door, but stops mid-way and gestures to Alex pleadingly. She rolls her eyes but opens the door.
Regus greets them with a smile and addresses Hal as “M’Lord”. He nods to Tom and executes a small, clumsy bow when Hal introduces him to Alex. As he spots Cutler, he raises his eyebrows and asks in a clipped tone: “What’s he doing here?”
“He is the one that summoned your fat arse in the first place,” Cutler parries, puffing up with hurt pride.
“You little nit-,” Regus begins, just as Michaela steps into the room, teeth bared in a smile that probably passes for charming in her book.
Hal glares at Regus. Why the hell did he have to bring her?
Michaela appears to be as full of joie de vivre as ever (which is an odd thing for a vampire and a goth). She lunges at Hal and captures him into a hug and she pats Tom’s brittle crew cut, calling him her “favourite wolf-man” (if ever there was a vampire completely devoid of prejudice, it would be Michaela Thompson). Alex watches her with undisguised amusement. Even Cutler looks up and flashes her a small, intimidated smile upon catching her curious look.
“I’ll look through my recordings,” says Regus when he hears them out. Alex is the one doing most of the talking as per their prior unanimous decision. Hal is only too happy to leave her to it. Regus clears his throat, looking slightly embarrassed. “It might take a while, so I was wondering if we could stay here.”
“Don’t see why not,” Alex shrugs.
Hal glowers at her as does Tom. She returns their looks, blinking innocently. The vampires artlessly pretend not to notice anything. Hal motions briskly towards the kitchen, and the three retreat there immediately.
“They cannot stay here!” Hal hisses in a strangled voice.
“It’s just until he finds something,” Alex protests. “It’s not like they’re moving in.”
“I can’t spend the night under the same roof as two blood-drinking vampires! Can you even begin to imagine the sacrifice I’m making by having them over?”
“Ooh, you wanna talk about sacrifice?” snaps Alex. “Try working with the guy who killed you because he seems to be your last bleeding shot at finding your lost body. Try babysitting a bipolar vampire who caused your death in the first place. Try having your family wait hopefully for your return when you know you never will and the police has absolutely nothing to tell them! How’s that for bloody sacrifice, Lord Harry?!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I did not-.”
“Shut up!” Tom cries out. They are all shouting now, without any regard for the audience in the living-room. “Both of you.” He is shaking, hands balled into fists. Every words comes out much clearer than it normally does, sharpened by indignation. “This is Annie’s house. You can’t fight in Annie’s house. You can’t have vampire sleepovers in her house either. Eve and her have been gone for only two months, and we haven’t said so much as three words about it like it don’t matter. But it does! We keep pretending it’s such a good thing they’re gone, but death ain’t ever a good thing. ‘Specially the death of a baby.”
Chill creeps into Hal’s bones. He doesn’t know how long Tom has been nursing these feelings. He knew Annie longer than Hal did and he was still basically a child. He missed the mother figure in her and he missed the baby too. Hal never noticed how much looking after Eve meant to Tom. To him, she was never the War Child or the saviour or whatever nonsensical figure the old scrolls cared to proclaim her to be. She was George and Nina’s baby.
Tom doesn’t even look angry. He looks let down. He turns around and storms out. Hal exchanges looks with Alex and goes after him. The vampires in the living-room have been listening in, if unintentionally, but they promptly pretend to be otherwise engaged. Regus pores over his scrolls, Michaela pulls up her tights and Cutler drills the screen of his phone with an extra fascinated stare. He glances up as Hal rushes past him, his face unreadable.
Tom hasn’t gone far. Hal finds him on the porch, poking mindlessly at the shrubbery as if testing if anything nasty is lurking there. Hal touches his shoulder gently and says:
“Of course it’s not a good thing they’re gone. I miss them too. But Annie did a great thing, not just for us, but for the world. And we have to believe there is a proper reward for that. We have to hope that she is with the people she loves now. George and Nina and Mitchell.” The names taste foreign in his mouth. He didn’t know those people and he shouldn’t care about them, but he recalls the way Annie spoke of her friends and he feels a small pang of sadness. “And Eve is with her parents. In a good place.”
Tom keeps quiet for a moment. “I thought you didn’t believe vampires go to a good place. So Mitchell prolly ain’t there.”
Hal lowers his head in resignation. “Like I said, we have to believe.”
* * *
Hal spends the night barricaded in his room as if there is once again a succubus in the house. He can almost feel the alien presence downstairs. Hiding from Regus of all people is both laughable and sad, yet despite the certainty that the Vampire Recorder who still fears him and owes him allegiance would not do anything to compromise Hal’s rehabilitation, Hal cannot help dealing in labels. A blood-drinking vampire. Not clean. He can tell that Regus hasn’t had blood for some time, most likely in a conscious effort to be considerate towards Hal’s situation, but the ghostly whiff, searing and taunting, still haunts Hal. Just being around a blood-drinker fills his mouth with a rich taste of copper, making his jaws ache like he is a muzzled hound.
He stares numbly at the wall, knees pulled up to his chin, blankets pooling around him. Sweat drips into his eyes. Red stains flicker over the light-coloured wallpaper. The trick is not to move. Night shifts slowly into morning, and Hal continues motionless, teeth painfully clenched, nails digging into his palms. When the sun rises, tension inside him fades slowly, grudgingly, struggling to consolidate its grip on Hal.
He performs his morning rituals on autopilot and descends into the living-room, anxiety safely concealed beneath the mask of polite indifference. He finds Regus still planted on the sofa amidst his papers, nose deep in research. Tom, Alex and Michaela are nowhere to be seen.
“You must find it rather taxing,” Hal says to initiate a conversation, “to handle a new recruit.” In his experience, conversation often helps to keep distracted if one concentrates on the words and not the partner.
Regus glances up briefly, a content smile flashing on his lips.
“Not at all.”
“You are happy then, I take it.”
“Oh yes.” His smile grows wider and becomes sort of dreamy, but at the same time his eyes sparkle with unwonted acumen. “What I’m saying, Hal, is there’s no need for you to go on a guilt trip about it. I recruited her, right? And we’re both the better for it, eh? I mean, the sex is-.”
“Is she killing?” Hal cuts him off.
Regus drops his eyes. “I’m not saying she never does. But she’s not a monster. We’re trying. We really are. So don’t worry about it.”
It’s easier said than done. Hal cannot but wonder where she is now. He doesn’t think Michaela will drain anyone dry in broad daylight, but he would still prefer to keep an eye on her. The younger you are, the less self-control you possess. He would have appreciated her potential back when he was still a drinker; now it only makes him feel more pity and wariness towards her.
“In case you want to know what I’ve found,” says Regus, “it’s not much. But I did find a name. More like a moniker really, but you never know.” He sustains a dramatic pause, which Hal reacts to with a glare of exasperation, and adds: “It’s Mr Rook.”
“Mr Rook?”
“From what I can tell, it must be the leader of those men you saw in the club.”
An unremarkable-looking Englishman of average height, brisk, efficient, clearly well accustomed to working below the radar. Hal knows the type but he has never heard so much as a whisper of this particular person. That is alarming in its own right. There are few things an Old One would happen to be unaware of, and potential enemies or allies of their race are usually not those things.
Hal murmurs a quick excuse and heads for the door. Even as he walks up to it, he has no idea where he plans to go when he has stepped outside. Either the café, or the warehouse.
“I was surprised, you know,” Regus calls after him. “To see that upstart Cutler still hanging about. Griffin didn’t think too highly of him.” Something mischievous twinkles in his eyes. “Didn’t think too highly of me either. Look where it got him.”
Hal nearly throws the door open and winces as sunlight hits his eyes. The warehouse it is.
* * *
On his way to Cutler’s Hal muses upon Regus’s words. Griffin was indeed little inclined to pay heed to young recruits regardless of their talent, just as he thought very little of their race’s history and folklore. Griffin was a military man to the bone, but if he could at least command respect, Fergus, his brief successor, appeared to be hardly more than a brutish mercenary. People like Cutler and Regus would never prosper under such leaders.
Hal does not trust either of them. Cutler, with his unwavering, puppy-like devotion, used to be so easy to predict. He used to worship his three deities: Hal, blood, and ambition, mostly in this particular order, - and he was an open book to Hal. Part of him laments the passing of those simpler times.
He walks into the warehouse and starts saying: “Cutler, I have news of-,” and stops dead as he sees two bodies on the bed. One of them is undeniably Cutler. He raises his head quickly and stares at Hal, blinking owlishly with still sleepy eyes. The other body is female, and Hal clenches his teeth, bracing himself for the worst: a corpse. But there is no smell of blood, and as the woman stirs and meets his bewildered look, he recognizes Michaela.
“Awkward,” she mumbles, collecting her scattered clothes rapidly and trying to cover herself rather unsuccessfully. Hal spins around on his heels and marches outside decidedly, thinking: Definitely the new Ivan and Daisy.
Five minutes later, a disheveled and oddly guilty-looking Cutler is standing before him by the warehouse door. Silence is getting thicker, accumulating more and more awkward implications.
“You slept with Michaela,” Hal says finally. He still can’t fathom it.
“You said I could never have sex again,” Cutler blurts out. “I panicked! Anyway, I believe the experience was beneficial for both of us.” He grins, not without pride, and lowers his voice. “She’s writing a poem about it as we speak.”
“I can’t believe you!” Hal mutters indignantly. He cannot understand what has got him so worked up. He sincerely hopes that should Regus find out about this, he and Michaela will take their drama elsewhere.
“Easy for you to say,” Cutler fires off. “You may be able to live like common people, but some of us want an opportunity to call someone about the fucking cockroaches on the wall!”
“What?” Must be another pop reference that Hal doesn’t know - and doesn’t care to understand. It makes him angry.
Cutler rolls his eyes theatrically. “Oh, forget it!” That shouldn’t be too hard. Hal whirls off, and Cutler yells after him: “Go on then! Running away is kind of your thing these days, isn’t it?”
* * *
“So, this Mr Rook,” Alex says in the evening when they are half-watching the latest installment of the film saga about sparkling vampires. “What do you think his story is?”
She has been marathoning these mind-numbingly maudlin films lately, laughing at them like they are comedies. She says: Once you have lived with a real vampire, you can never take any fiction seriously.
Hal glues his eyes to the telly and cannot bring himself to look away. He finds that he doesn’t really understand what is going on. It’s a little like watching a plane crash in slow motion. Exactly what he needs right now.
“I can only imagine what state we might find my body in,” Alex continues. “If we ever do, that is. But there’s really no way to make it look presentable for my family now, is there?”
“May I ask you a personal question?” Hal interrupts. She gives a nonchalant shrug. “What do you think of sex?”
Alex raises her eyebrows in surprise and releases a curt, shocked giggle.
“That it’s something I’m never gonna have with you,” she says. He looks away from the film couple and watches her face change slowly in realization. “Or at all.” She fixes her eyes on the screen, a sour expression on her face. “You know what this film lacks? Ghosts! That’s discrimination right there.”
Hal tilts his head back and lays it on the back of the sofa, watching the ceiling as Alex keeps providing her running commentary on the film. Maybe if he doesn’t move an inch, he will melt away into the soft upholstery. Agitation crackles inside him. He finds himself glancing at the window every now and then, counting down the seconds until some distant, indefinite event.
* * *
He isn’t sure why he goes to see Cutler again. He is drawn to the warehouse like it’s a living thing. Just standing on the doorstep makes his body tingle like it did when Cutler offered him his first glass of blood in over half a century.
Cutler looks up from his laptop, eyes a little wide, still uncertain where they stand. The morning confrontation is not at all forgotten, but Hal couldn’t care less about it at the moment.
“Oh, good,” says Cutler, sensing it. “You’re here. Maybe you can finally explain what you wanted to share this morning. I can’t get a damn word out of our highly distinguished chronicler.”
Silently, Hal closes the distance between them and slams Cutler into the wall, pressing his body full-length against Cutler’s. Nick’s eyes grow wider. Hal’s name slips out of his mouth in a half-smothered whisper. Hal mashes their lips together, biting at his mouth. Shell-shocked, Cutler arches his back half-consciously. The heat and the friction between them are almost too hard to bear.
Hal’s hands roam up and down Cutler’s body none too gently. He claws at the layers of clothing separating them and tugs at Cutler’s jacket, ripping the sleeve at the shoulder seam without much consideration. Quick on the uptake, Cutler struggles with Hal’s impeccably buttoned up clothes, wrestling control of the kiss away from Hal.
Hal pulls away, releases his fangs and sinks them into Cutler’s shoulder, tearing through the dirty-white cotton of his shirt. Blackness pools in Nick’s eyes. He spits like a wounded cat and goes for Hal’s neck.
Blood fills Hal’s mouth. He drinks in swift, painful gulps, almost choking on it, and it burns toxic on the inside, even if it’s the thin and insipid blood of a fellow immortal. Cutler tilts his head back with a low, guttural sigh. His face mirrors Hal’s, bloodstained fangs and empty dark eyes. He moans: “Hal,” making it sound like a prayer. Hal strokes him through the fabric of his trousers, and Nick thrusts eagerly into his hand.
Hal kisses him again. He grinds their bodies together, dazed, drifting on the faint borderline between pleasure and excruciating thirst. Every sound Cutler makes, every shaky gasp, every groan drowned out by another kiss - everything resonates within Hal, sharpening his motions. Cutler licks the bitemark on his neck, and Hal fails to contain a moan. Encouraged by this, Cutler bites him again and drinks a few greedy sips. He digs his fingers unwittingly into Hal’s burnt shoulder. Hal bucks his hips, letting Cutler unfasten his trousers and slip his hand in deftly. The contact of skin to skin is almost enough to bring Hal over the edge. The litany of ragged sighs rings out in his ears. The release is swift, almost painful, fueled by the intoxicating flavour of blood.
Hal sags against Nick, his body betraying him for a moment. The impact of his impulsiveness dawns on him as the daze begins to dispel. He sinks onto the floor, too drained to be properly angry with himself or Cutler.
Fifty-five years of perfect self-control gone down the drain in a blink of an eye just because some impertinent brat from his past gives him a glass of blood to drink. Then he dies and just as Hal is about done mourning him, he has the gall to reappear and start his own bloody redemption campaign, which, Hal has to say, does not seem to be running as it should.
Hal looks around, trying to concentrate. Cutler says something, but his words are lost on Hal. He cannot listen to him now. His blood still burns hot in Hal’s mouth.
He is about to get up when his gaze lingers on a few dark stains under the table. They are tiny, just a few dry dots in the dust, but he would recognize them anywhere. Cutler follows the direction of his look.
“That is not… exactly what you think,” he stutters.
“I think it’s blood,” Hal says. “I think it’s human. What is the ‘not exactly’ part?”
He staggers up. Cutler follows him, looking anxious.
“It’s medical,” he chatters. “From a bloodbag. No one died! I don’t see the problem-.”
Hal spins around to face him. Fury fountains inside him.
“The problem is you can’t survive off that blood! It’s all or nothing. That blood has no substance but it’s strong enough to hold power over you so that all you can think about is feeding. You won’t stop. It’s only a matter of time before you go back to killing.”
He is shaking uncontrollably, teeth chattering, words coming out slurred and clipped. He can barely speak past the lump of horror and disgust in his throat. The coppery taste in his mouth becomes more pronounced. He brings his hand up to his face, gripped by sudden nauseating terror. Cutler drank human blood and he drank Cutler’s. He touches his teeth, as if to wipe off the blood, but he is already contaminated. He can feel it coursing through him, settling down inside him like a time bomb ready to go off. Shock gives way to repulsion mingled with horror.
“Hal, if you’d just let me explain-,” Cutler starts saying.
No. No explanations. No more. They are done.
* * *
Candle flame flickers on the wicks. They have candles for each of them: Annie, Eve, George and Nina, Mitchell, MacNair, Leo and Pearl. They don’t talk about it; they just set up eight candles and light them, and Alex makes tea, and Hal finally crawls out of his barricaded bedroom.
They raise their cups (“For Eve who brought us together,” “For Annie who made us a family”) and they talk and they laugh. Alex shares a couple of droll stories about her slapdash brothers. Tom recollects MacNair’s version of Beauty and the Beast, in which the girl kissed the werewolf, got the curse and they lived happily ever after under the full moon. Hal remembers how he prompted Leo poetry to read to Pearl and that was a mixed success.
It’s not a wake and it’s not a memorial service. But it is what Tom wanted and all three of them needed.
Hal has spent days locked in his room trying to forget the way Cutler’s blood tasted on his tongue. He hasn’t thought about Cutler for what seems like centuries. It is better that way. Sharing his rehab with someone was a mistake. It’s not like they have group therapy for such addictions.
Cutting Cutler out of his life was strangely easy. Hal never expected him to give up so easily but if Cutler tried to see him, he is not aware of that. Maybe things are finally getting better. No more interruptions. No more getting sidetracked. The cycle will finally be broken.
Inspired with hopes for the future, Hal nearly jumps on the sofa when he hears Alex drop Cutler’s name in conversation. He catches it out of context and blinks rapidly, struggling to pick up the thread of a story.
“What did you say? About Cutler?”
Breath hitches in his throat. He expects the worst. Cutler’s killing again. Cutler’s dead. Between the two, he wouldn’t know which one is the worst.
“Well, he’s gone,” Alex reiterates impatiently. “He left two days ago to follow up on a new lead from Regus.”
“Didn’t you know?” Tom cuts in.
Hal looks at them, shell-shocked. He should be happy that he is finally rid of Cutler. He should be happy to be the only vampire in Barry. Yet all he feels is cold, dull surprise. Why would Cutler leave without saying goodbye? Why would he leave at all?
“Did he say when he planned to come back?”
“No,” Alex shrugs indifferently. “He left a phone number though. Just in case.”
Hal nods curtly but later that night he goes back to pull a card from under the phone and he dials the number, which he half-expects to be fake. Cutler picks up a few moments later.
“What are you doing?” Hal fires off in a steely voice.
“Eating.” Cutler’s voice sounds distant, and there is a strange buzzing at the background like he is on a boat or something. “Don’t freak out. It’s nothing two-legged or even remotely intelligent.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I told Alex, didn’t I? I’m going to find Mr Rook.” Hal be damned if that’s not a slight tinge of pride in the bastard’s voice. “I have reasons to believe those men want me as much as you lot want them, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”
“What the hell are you thinking?” Hal exclaims. “This is a potentially dangerous group of people that even I, in all my five hundred years, have never even heard of. You can’t just show up on their doorstep and politely ask them to give Alex’s body back. What kind of a hare-brained enterprise is that?”
There is a quick noise as if Cutler moves the phone into the other hand.
“Aw, you’re worried about me,” he teases. “I’m touched.”
They are both silent for a moment. Hal winds the phone cable around his wrist half-consciously. Cutler sighs and says:
“Look, Hal, this cold turkey thing isn’t working for me.” He sounds different. More serious. Grown up, somehow. “I’m not giving up but I have to take it slow. Baby steps.” He pauses. “Hal, I will come back. I’ll have results. And then you’ll see me.”
Something about this phrasing unsettles Hal. But I see you, he wants to say. He listens to the silence that reigns after Cutler hangs up, and whispers:
“Good luck.”
April 4-17, 2012