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Patton hummed to himself as he stuffed a few jars into his bag. Logan was busy searching through the news, trying to find the perfect spot. He mumbled to himself a bit as Patton zipped his bag close and walked over to his side. Logan glanced at him for a moment, before pointing to an alleyway he had pulled up on Google Maps.
“There have been a lot of suspected drug deals and muggings occuring around this area. Would you like to hunt there tonight?” Patton nodded cheerily. The two left their apartment, using their more human disguises and inconspicuous clothing to mask their intentions. They didn’t take their car, instead opting to walk there, in hopes that it would draw a bit less attention to themselves. While Patton still stayed his bubbly self, the two still managed to keep a low profile, having done this their whole lives and understanding how the humans around them worked.
Virgil locked up his flower shop with his heart pounding in his chest. He just had to work near that alleyway, did he? He was too scared to walk and too awkward to run to his car, which his dumb self had decided to park near that alleyway; what was he thinking when he decided to do that?
Now here he was, walking down a street illuminated by the streetlights and passing cars, marching down to the largest center of crime near his shop. If this didn’t give him a panic attack, he would start to believe in God again.
All he could hear was his shaky breathing and pounding heart as he finally made it to his car. He unlocked the door, relieved that he’d be able to get home and see Janus again while he was still alive.
“Help.” Virgil’s whole body froze, his mind beginning to feel fuzzy. “Please, help.” His body was numb, he didn’t know what he was doing. The voice was as smooth as silk, seeming to travel through the air and tickle his ears. The person was asking for help. Virgil should help them.
He turned around and stumbled slowly into the alleyway. The voice had stopped, but Virgil desperately wanted it to come back. He looked around confused. As the voice began to fade from his mind, his situation became clearer. Panic gripped his heart, and he turned to run.
Then someone smacked into him, seeming to have fallen from the sky. The person pinned him down at his wrists, a knee digging into Virgil’s stomach.
Virgil heard the creature inhale sharply, before feeling an unbelievable pain course through his upper arm. He tried to scream but the creature simply slapped a hand over his mouth, opting to pin his arms down with one hand instead. Virgil continued to try to scream, tears falling down his cheeks, the only thoughts going through his mind being It hurts! It hurts, make it stop! Please stop!
“Logan...wait a minute, stop for a sec.” Virgil heard distantly a voice that sounded similar to the one he had heard before, albeit much less alluring. He tried to look at the person, but his vision was too blurry from the tears and pain. He took a few more shaky breaths, before closing his eyes, and welcoming the darkness.
The only person capable of snapping Logan out of his feral kill-mode was Patton. The moment Patton told him to stop, he pulled away from the human’s arm, warm blood still dripping from his face, his eyes still glowing a bright blue in the darkness. Patton wasn’t looking him in the eyes, though. Instead he stared at the human’s wrists, then Logan’s hands.
Logan looked at his hands as well, seeing clear white skin in place of where his pure black soulmarks had been. His mind seemed to freeze completely, unsure if what he was seeing was real.
He blinked, looking down at the human again. A human as a soulmate; how...upsetting. He couldn’t help but be reminded of the period in time where he had thought Patton was a human. But this time he knew for absolute certainty; he did indeed have a human for a soulmate, not another vampire in disguise.
His soulmate’s eyes were shut and his breathing shallow. Chances are he would die in the next hour if left unattended, which Logan couldn’t help but feel guilty over.
Patton seemed to realize the same thing, whimpering to himself and crouching next to the human, instinctively checking his pulse to see if he was still alive enough to be saved. He flinched with surprise when the black markings left his fingers, but brushed it off quickly.
“I brought some bandages. If we cover the wound we might be able to give him more time, right? At least enough to get him to a hospital or something?” Patton was already pulling out his phone and dialing 911.
“Patton, if we take him to the hospital we’ll be found out.” Logan reached over and grabbed Patton’s bag, pulling out the bandages and expertly wrapping the injury. “Let’s take him to our apartment. It may not be as good as a hospital, but we will likely still be able to heal the wound.”
Logan carefully picked the human up, hesitating for a moment before taking his keys and handing them to Patton. With that, they ran out of the alleyway, got in the human’s car, and drove off.
The first thing Virgil noticed when he woke up was that his arm was throbbing with a dull pain. He groaned, opening his eyes. Literally hovering over him was a pale guy with bright red eyes, staring down at him with a curious expression. Virgil stared back for a moment, his mind processing the fact that this guy was just floating in mid air above him .
“Oh, you’re awake!” His voice made reality crash down around him. Adrenaline shot through Virgil’s system, and before he knew it, he had kicked the guy in the balls, leapt over the couch he had been lying on, and was booking it to the nearest exit he could find.
He had almost made it to the window, fully prepared to leap out from whatever story he was on, when it was slammed shut and he was tackled to the ground. Huh, this feels familiar. A quiet voice at the back of his mind said. Oh shit, wait.
His arm seemed to throb even more as he tried to pull away from whoever was holding him. “Please, try to calm down. We are not going to hurt you. Anymore, at least.” Virgil struggled for a bit longer, before realizing the pointlessness of it, and eventually giving up. The creature that had attacked him let go, glowing blue eyes watching his every move.
“What do you want with me?” Virgil asked in as steady a tone he could manage, his voice still cracking a bit, much to his embarrassment. The red-eyed guy, who had apparently fallen out of the air and had been squirming on the ground and whimpering to himself, stood up, his face still grimacing with pain as he walked over to sit in front of Virgil.
“This might be weird and hard to believe, but just bare with us, okay?” Virgil nodded, his fear having slowly begun to fade. Admittedly, most of his fear had been from the surprise and shock of it all, not the fact that some sort of supernatural creature had attacked and tried to eat him. You start dating a naga that tried to suffocate and eat you, and all of a sudden the world becomes a bit less terrifying.
“Okay, so well, uhh...” The red-eyed guy cleared his throat nervously. Virgil looked down, watching himself as he cracked his knuckles in order to avoid having to look either of them in the eyes. That’s when he noticed the black missing from his wrists.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me.” The two supernatural beings seemed to perk up in confusion at that. Virgil simply groaned and allowed himself to fall back onto the ground again. “Well, that makes 3 out of 4 soulmates that I’ve met while they’re trying to kill me. The last one better be like some sort of eldritch abomination with like thousands of deaths and cultists under their belt.” He snapped, turning to his blue-eyed soulmate. “Cthulhu. He’d better be our last soulmate or what is the universe even doing this for?” His soulmate simply stared at him with the confusion of a thousand men.
“I...I’m not sure if I understand what you’re talking about.” He stuttered out slowly. Virgil sighed, standing up and stretching as if he wasn’t still in the presence of someone who had nearly killed him.
“Let’s just start over, alright? I’ve gone through the whole soulmate tried to kill me thing with Janus and I like to think it ended out pretty well. So, I’m Virgil.”
“Janus? I’m assuming that’s one of our other soulmates?”
“Yup. He’s a naga, tried to suffocate me to death, and now we’re dating. Shit happens.” His red-eyed soulmate blinked up at him, seeming to try and figure out if he was joking or not, before jumping to his feet and sticking out his hand.
“Well, then I’m Patton, and this is Logan! I’m a vampire, he’s a ghoul, so we have to...you know.” Patton winced, his eyes drifting to Virgil’s bandaged up shoulder. “I’m sorry for luring you into the alleyway. I should’ve just waited for someone else to come by, but we had been sitting there for two hours and no one had come in, so we started to get desperate, and—”
“We’re terribly sorry. Myself especially; I should have registered the fact that my soulmarks had faded away and acted accordingly, rather than ignore it and continue to feed off you.” Logan spoke.
“It’s no big deal.” Virgil replied, looking over the bandages. While they were bloody, they weren’t nearly as bloody as he had expected them to be. “This is gonna heal though, right?”
“Oh of course. If you don’t mind...would you be alright with staying with us until it heals?” Virgil was about to say yes, but then remembered just how clingy and touch-starved Janus was.
“Actually, could we move this to my place? You could meet Janus, that’d be cool.”
They were greeted by Janus wrapping his tail around Virgil’s whole body and silently crying into his shoulder as he mumbled about how he definitely wasn’t worried when Virgil didn’t come home last night.
Patton cooed, giving Janus a smile and instinctively wiping away his tears. The black smudge under Janus’s eye disappeared, along with the mark on Patton’s thumb.
After Janus had calmed down, he proceeded to try and get everyone to forget what they had just seen in the only way he knew how: flirting. And since he had realized Logan was the last soulmate present he had yet to touch, he grabbed him by the shirt collar, pulling him in close and wrapping an arm around his neck. He felt the mark on his inner arm fade, smiling slyly to Logan as he watched his cheeks begin to grow grey and warm with blush.
They then went to watch a movie together, deciding to spend some time getting to know each other before anything else. Now there was just one soulmate left, somewhere in the world.