Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was someone new in the office. 

She was sitting ten feet away in her cubicle. Standing from his, Colin could make out just the top of her head - brown hair, a bit frizzy. He mimed sipping his mug of room-temperature coffee. He gained no sustenance from actually drinking it, but he did enjoy the feel of the mug in his hand. He was never quite sure what to do with his hands when they were empty. 

A new person in the office meant a new person to learn. Most humans could be drained through similar means, like through quoting long-winded online articles, or dropping the dullest of trivia facts he knew. But each human was unique and had their own specific pet peeves they just couldn't stand . Once Colin learned what those pet peeves were there was no hope for them. Draining someone in a way only they could be drained was far more satisfying than through simple everyday annoyances. Not that he didn’t bother everyone in the standard ways, too.

Valerie in accounting couldn't stand sentences that ended in prepositions. Or saying something like “he could care less” when he actually couldn’t. Or using the word “literally” in a figurative sense. A total grammar nazi, Valerie was. So Colin intentionally riddled his speech with errors when he spoke to her, hoping she would try to correct him, so he could ignore the correction and piss her off further. Once while on his morning rounds, Valerie had tried correcting him again. 

He’d told her, “Val, I literally could care less what you’re talking about.”

He was pretty sure he saw a small blood vessel pop in her right eye at that one. Her rage that day was burning, moving through increasingly rapid arcs through the air directed straight at him. The energy tasted spicy and hot. He’d had to close his eyes when it happened, as he couldn't help the blue glow emanating from them. 

George in HR had been a tough cookie to crack, until Colin discovered his aversion to sound. Chewing, burping, sniffing, coughing. Even uneven breathing disturbed him. Colin always tapped his fingers against his mug when he spoke to him. George would try to pretend it didn’t bother him and smile through the frustration, but Colin could feel his discomfort wrap around him like a cold blanket made of burrs. Itchy and spiked. 

Colin thought George might have misophonia, an intense dislike of sound, which he meticulously researched one day so he would have something to drone on about the next time they talked. That conversation exhausted George, leaving him slumped over tiredly on his desk before Colin had even gotten halfway through his explanation. But George had also bought noise-canceling headphones after that day, so he must have retained at least a little. 

Colin had no knowledge of this new girl except that she was in payroll, had brown frizzy hair, and was Biff’s replacement. Biff, the guy he and Evie had drained into a coma. He was still asleep as far as Colin knew, but it had been eight weeks and the payroll department had waited long enough for him to wake up. Colin hadn’t noticed his absence and had easily forgotten him. But now he was replaced, and Colin could suddenly remember how Biff preciously guarded his personal space, was bored to tears specifically by history trivia, and that his greatest joy in life was looking after his cat, Chestnut. Colin idly wondered who the cat would go to now and if they could possibly love it as much as Biff had. He doubted it. He’d felt how strong that love was, that soft and warm and nebulous energy. It tasted gross. 

Colin decided to do some reconnaissance and get to the bottom of what might bother the new girl. And find out what she looked like. And find out her name. That should probably be number one on the list, actually. 

The beige-sweater-clad energy vampire began his trek around the office, his faithful mug in hand as he slowly visited each cubicle. First he spoke with Dana, then Joe, then Fran - who he always referred to as “Flan” much to her annoyance, then Paige, then Rob, and so on. He greeted each with something equally banal like “how’s it hanging” or “catch the game last night?” He never knew to which game he was referring, but somehow they always did, and they never wanted to talk about it. He asked each of them about the new girl, but none of them seemed to know anything more about her than her name. It was Joan.

Eventually he reached the water cooler, which happened to be the perfect spot to observe the new hire. It was directly behind Kim and Lyle’s cubicles, so he could stand behind the short, gray wall they shared and look over it at Joan’s desk. He imagined he must look similar to his roommates like this - peeking over a wall to eye his prey, hiding in a dark corner of the office. 

Joan, the frizzy-haired woman in payroll, was familiarizing herself with her cubicle. She opened each drawer, looked through each folder, and meticulously explored everything Biff left behind. She looked over his sticky notes, slowly taking them down and stacking them on top of one another on the desk. She began consolidating their information onto a separate sheet of paper, which she pinned to the soft fabric of her cubicle wall, over the coffee stain left on it. Colin had gotten too close to Biff once, causing him to panic and throw the mug, spilling coffee all over the floor, desk, and walls. His embarrassment that day was potent. 

After finishing her notes, her head suddenly spiked up, and he sensed a moment of remembrance from her. A sharp, short, and bright kind of feeling. She pulled her bag into her lap and dug inside until she pulled out a small plastic orchid with pink flowers. She set it on the side of her desk, tilting its leaves toward the sunlight as if it could actually benefit from the light. She smiled a little, then looked at the small picture frame she had placed the orchid next to. It was a photo of Chestnut. Joan lifted the photo closer to her face, pursed her pale lips into a sad frown, considered it, and nodded once to herself. She placed the photo back where it was next to her orchid.

For a few moments she sat idly in her chair, spinning it slightly on the balls of her heels. She looked over her desk, her computer, her orchid, and Chestnut. Then she sighed a deep sigh, leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes. Colin sensed her attempts to right herself - center herself in the space, adjust to the environment she would now be spending forty hours a week at. He snorted, and pretended to sip his mug again. If humans were actually any good at controlling their own emotions, he’d have starved in a week. 

He could sense boredom from her, a thick, rich energy that oozed into the air. She’d been here, what, two hours? She was already bored? Usually there was a little excitement, at least, that came with starting a new job. Or nervousness, too. But there was neither. Just a deep boredom, and, strangely, a deep appreciation for something he couldn't identify. He was seven feet away. If he was closer, he might be able to find out. 

He may not have understood why she was feeling so bored, but that wouldn’t stop him from draining it anyway. He pulled a bit of that bored feeling away from her, like spooning a dollop of molasses. It tasted soft and familiar. He saw her relax a little more into her chair, fatigue from the mild draining.

Then, with a sudden sharp spike of lucid awareness, she opened her eyes and stared straight at him. 

“Shit!”

He quickly ducked, spilling a bit of his now-cold coffee on the gray carpet. Unfortunately, Valerie from accounting had been passing by and saw everything. She cocked a brow at him in question. He could sense pity from her - a hollow, pointed kind of energy. It was bitter. He didn’t know how emotional vampires could acquire such a taste for it. 

He was still ducking. “Heyyyy, Valerie. What are you up to?”

She rolled her eyes and walked away. Her annoyance tasted much better than her pity.

After waiting a few minutes, staring at the bubbles that occasionally floated up in the cooler, Colin slowly began straightening out to peek over the wall again. In the time he’d been hiding, she’d apparently set herself to whatever task she was meant to be doing once she’d settled in. She’d spread countless papers along the desk and was referring back to them as she worked on her computer. Seeing that she was clearly deep in the middle of her work, Colin decided this was the perfect time to introduce himself. It’d probably be more awkward, now that she’d seen him spying on her. Awkwardness had a tangy, uneven quality to it that he never grew tired of. 

He walked over and tapped “shave and a haircut” on her desk until she looked up. Derek, who worked in the cubicle next to hers, gave him an annoyed side eye. Derek couldn’t stand any kind of distraction from his work, especially if Colin was the one attempting to be distracting. 

Colin held out his clammy hand to Joan. “Hey, newbie. I’m Colin Robinson, I work in … well, I work.”

She stared at his hand for a moment and shook it, cringing a bit at how limp his handshake was. He was the master of the weak handshake. 

“I’m Joan. Joan Jordan.” 

He shook her hand three seconds longer than was customary, then nodded his acknowledgement. After waiting an awkward beat, he said, “Mondays, huh?”

For a moment she only stared at him with wide gray eyes. He sensed two puzzle pieces click together in her mind as she looked him up and down. She smirked, just the tiniest bit.

“It’s Wednesday.”

He sipped his mug, actually drinking a bit this time. Coffee tasted remarkably similar to pride. “Kind of weird to start work on a Wednesday.”

Her smirk widened. “Kind of weird to forget what day it is.”

He shrugged his shoulders. It didn’t surprise him that he forgot the day. They all ran together, mostly. He woke up, went to work, drained his colleagues, went home, drained his roommates, then went to bed. And so it went on for years. Hell, most of the time his roommates couldn’t even keep track of the year, so he was doing pretty good, in his opinion.

“Well, y’know, I’m on office time. I believe it was in May of 1905 that Albert Einstein said that ‘time is relative,’ a scientific revelation that…”

He proceeded to give a very long-winded explanation of the Theory of Relativity, diving deep into the science of it all. But she wasn’t bored. On the contrary, her boredom seemed to lift the longer he went on. Her eyes twinkled with amusement, like she was in on a joke he didn’t understand. His voice tapered off when he realized scientific facts weren’t the way to annoy her. 

She rested her weight on one side of her chair. “Why’d you stop? I didn’t understand much of it, but you looked like you had more to say.”

She wanted to laugh at him, he could feel it. Her delight was airy but sour. Like a lemon-scented cloud. He thought he might actually prefer pity to this. 

“You … you didn’t interrupt me.”

The twinkling in her eyes began to fade. Her amusement dwindled until it was replaced by some other feeling. He felt … sympathy, from her. Sympathy! Directed at him. That was new. It felt like - well, he didn’t know what it felt like. He didn’t have a metaphor on hand for that one. It was foreign.

“Did you want me to?” 

“No, no. I mean, yes, but …” His head bobbed with indecision. He needed to switch tactics. 

He gestured to the plastic orchid on her desk with his mug, spilling a bit of coffee on her paperwork. “So. Can’t handle a real orchid, huh?” 

It was rare for him to resort to blatant insults. It was artless, and the feelings evoked weren’t usually very layered or tasty, either. Not compared to the slowly built up rage he could inspire in a person. Why eat a McDonald’s Big Mac when you could have grass-fed dry-aged beef?

Joan pulled out a tissue from her bag and started dabbing the paper. “No, I can, I just didn’t expect to get any decent light in here. At my last job there weren’t any windows at all. The cubicle walls were a lot taller, too”

She looked up at him from the corner of her eye, a tiny smile forming. “Even standing up, you couldn't look over them.”

He blanked. So she really did catch him spying. He thought that would make things awkward, but here she was, unbothered and teasing him about it. Where was her anger? And why the hell did she feel like laughing? She didn’t think he looked funny, did she? He looked perfectly average. He was pretty sure he was designed to. 

Clearly he needed to retreat and regroup. Lick his wounds a little, maybe. 

He cleared his throat and started to turn to go. “Well, uh, don’t let me take up any more of your time. Wouldn’t be a good look, on your first day.” 

Joan gestured vaguely to her desk. “Exactly, it’s my first day. I think they’ll extend me a little grace.”

She looked at him expectantly, like she actually wanted him to continue for his own sake. As if she knew that he was disappointed his attempts to drain her had failed. 

“No, no, I’ve talked enough.” He held up a hand, shielding her from him. He had to get out of here. “I’ll get out of your hair.” Your stupid, frizzy hair. 

He started heading toward the water cooler. He gripped his mug a little harder. 

“Don’t be a stranger, Colin.” 

He fled. 

He quickly passed the water cooler and kept walking until he reached his desk, slumping in his chair when he finally reached it. If he got looks from everyone else as he sped past them he didn’t notice.

There was something off about Joan. The last time he’d struggled to drain a new employee, it was Evie, an emotional vampire. Joan clearly wasn’t that. The closest she’d gotten to dropping a pathetic anecdote about herself was that comment she made about her old job, but she didn’t seem to be fishing for pity like Evie did. And Evie definitely never felt sympathy. 

That was what stumped him the most. It wasn’t unheard of for some humans to be more resistant to draining. Usually they were insanely positive people with empty heads and, consequently, empty hearts. Or they were already so dead inside they didn’t have any energy left to give. But no one, human or not, had ever felt sympathy for him before. Because why would they? Looking at his half-dead reflection in the monitor on his desk, he knew there was nothing about him worth feeling sad over. 

He shook his head a little. No, he may not understand Joan now, but someday he would. He had all the time in the world to do it (well, he had until the end of her natural life), so there was no point tying himself in knots over it. Over the years he’d learned every unique quirk of the people in this office - someday she wouldn’t be the exception. 

Looking over his cubicle wall again, staring at the back of her head, he felt a surge of confidence well within him. He was an energy vampire and he would not be bested by some little human woman in payroll. He would come back tomorrow and make her feel exactly as frustrated and annoyed as he did right now. 

His eyes glowed as a plan began to take shape in his mind.

Chapter Text

Just like blood vampires and humans, energy vampires were capable of sleep. Most did, to conserve energy. But Colin rarely slept for a full night, as sleeping through the night meant less time spent with his nocturnal roommates. He always had to drain them to compensate, but he thought that was a small price to pay for roomie time.

Tonight was different. He still didn’t sleep, but instead of hanging out with his roommates, he spent the night locked up in his room plotting potential ways of getting under Joan’s skin. He typed up a list of every possible way he could remember draining someone, ranking them in order of how universally annoying they were. Then, in true energy vampire fashion, he converted that list into a series of graphs and charts, forming categories such as Outdated Pop Culture References, Backhanded Compliments, and Unfortunate Body Odors. 

Some of the most consistently annoying things to do, according to his charts, were Interrupting Others and Incorrectly Correcting others . Negatively Commenting On Appearance was also high up on his list, but he still wasn’t sure he wanted to resort to blatant insults, not if there were potentially better ways of draining her. Especially since the last time he’d insulted her, she’d taken it in stride. He decided to save that method as a last resort. 

There were plenty of other promising ways of bothering her, like through Awkward Handshakes and Grating Voice Impressions, but he struggled to predict what might actually get through to her. He knew she was capable of being bored - he’d felt it initially before he’d introduced himself. If her job could bore her, then he could certainly figure out how to do it, right? Or at least rankle her a little?

His alarm went off. It was time to go to work.

Colin slowly trudged up the stairs to the first floor, leaning heavily against the wall. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d stayed up all night without draining anyone, but he knew he didn't want to repeat it. He felt about as exhausted as everyone else did when he drained them. He definitely didn’t envy the feeling.

Opening the door to the first floor, he was greeted with the sight of Guillermo mopping up a dark puddle of blood in the entryway. Guillermo looked up at Colin, then paused, emitting a smidge of concern. 

He frowned. “Geez, you okay? You don’t look so good.”

Colin’s reflection wasn’t totally consistent with how he appeared to the rest of the world. His reflection’s skin was more pallid and mottled, much like a corpse. Unless he took a photo of himself, he could never be totally confident of how he looked to the rest of the world on a given day. He wondered what about his appearance today made Guillermo feel so concerned.

“I’ve never felt better. Can’t say the same for this guy, though.”

Colin walked through the puddle, kicking a bit of viscera onto Guillermo’s shoes. Seemed like one of his roommates had gotten a bit carried away last night. He continued walking through the puddle all the way to the front door, tracking bloody footprints all the way. 

Guillermo’s concern for Colin evaporated. He was not amused. “Oh, come on, really?”

Colin chuckled as he left, draining Guillermo’s exasperation before he shut the door. It perked him up a bit, enough to at least walk to the bus stop without stumbling. When the bus arrived, he made awkward small talk with the driver as he always did, then did the same with the rest of the bus’s inhabitants. He loudly commented on the buildings they passed by, the purpose of each, when they were built, who built them, what architectural styles they embodied. Colin droned on and on until he noticed the bus driver’s eyes start to droop. He didn’t need to get in a horrible bus accident before getting to work - how could he possibly implement his plot to annoy Joan then?

Eventually the bus reached his stop. The familiar boredom of the bus’s other occupants energized him as he stepped off and headed to his office building. Generally, to enter a building, vampires needed an invitation. While energy vampires were the exception to most vampire rules (needing blood to live, walking in the sun, sensitivity to crucifixes), needing permission to enter a building was not one of them.

But Colin had been “working” here for years. The people within viewed him as one of their own. Just as he didn’t need permission to enter his own home, he didn’t need permission to enter this building, either. Every time he stepped through the entrance to his office building without having to ask for an invitation, it reaffirmed that he was a welcome, if annoying, addition to his office environment.

When he finally reached the office, he immediately scanned the room for Joan. He knew it was unlikely she’d be here yet, as few people ever arrived this early, but he found himself anxious to see her anyway. He’d spent all night plotting against her - he was impatient to put his plan into action. 

To his relief, there she was, typing away on her computer. All of the desks surrounding her’s were empty. She looked focused on whatever it was she was doing, her body leaned forward and her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. He wasn’t entirely sure what all of payroll’s responsibilities were, but he knew Biff’s absence must have caused a mountain of work to accumulate. With no one around and her clearly in a bad position to be interrupted, this was the perfect time to talk to her. 

His feet moved faster than his mind, and he was already at her desk before he’d even realized he’d started moving. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, clicked her mouse, then looked up at him with a small smile.

“Sorry, just had to save my work. What’s up, Colin?”

She looked at him with tired eyes, the early morning sun revealing heavy bags underneath them. She also seemed to have a small little wrinkle between her eyebrows, like a perpetual worried crease. He hadn’t noticed these details before, but today he was determined to pay better attention to her. He needed a more complete picture of who she was to better cater his behavior toward her. 

He also noticed some strangle little scars dotting the junction where the left side of her neck met her torso, small bumped pinpricks that looked anything but natural. Her hair must have been covering them up yesterday. 

“I just wanted to…” His hands fluttered uselessly in the air. He suddenly realized that in his haste to greet her, he’d forgotten to grab his mug from the break room. It was rare for him not to be holding something - a mug, a briefcase, a book. This was a bad start. What had he planned on saying to her, again? “... check on how your first day went?”

He couldn’t remember what he originally meant to say, but that definitely wasn’t it. Her expression didn’t change, but he knew she felt a bit of surprise. He guessed she didn’t expect the sudden friendliness from him, either. 

“It was fine!” she said, “A little dull, but better than being overwhelmed isn’t it?”

He glanced at the tall stacks of papers on her desk. She should be overwhelmed, he knew, but she wasn’t. He sensed no stress from her, instead there was a disinterested calm which most office workers developed at some point. But there was also a deep confidence in her he usually only found in other vampires - like she was stronger than the tasks (and the world) before her. 

“I guess it is. I’m not sure everyone else here would agree with you. Most of them can’t stand the slow-pace.”

He’d spent all night categorizing everything he could possibly do to annoy her and here he was not doing any of it. What was wrong with him?

She paused. “Everyone else isn’t here.” 

Something … strange suddenly brewed inside her. She leaned forward. “What do you think? Do you like to take things slow, too?”

He froze. His mouth dropped open, but he couldn’t seem to close it. Flirty Repartee was not anywhere in his 53-page boredom manifesto. She looked at him expectantly, lips trembling with the urge to laugh. Goddammit, she was teasing him again. 

His hands wrung together as he finally gained control of his mouth again. “Y-yes?”

She giggled and leaned back in her seat, that strange little emotion he was too scared to name fading away. He felt like he could breathe again. “Then I’m in good company. We can stop and appreciate the little things, can’t we?”

She thought he was good company? 

Before he could respond, Derek walked past him to take his seat. He shot them a cynical look as he went. Derek was a bit of a snob when it came to unnecessary office chatter. It made him an easy target for draining. A little too easy, actually. There was hardly any sport in annoying someone who was constantly looking for reasons to be annoyed.

Joan looked past Colin’s shoulder at the stream of people slowly filtering in. “Guess work’s officially starting now. Thanks for checking in on me, Colin. I should probably get back to it. ”

She cracked her knuckles to emphasize her point, then turned back toward her computer. But this gave him an idea, and whatever had stopped him from unleashing his full energy-vampire ways on her before that moment were gone. 

Colin used one hand to adjust his glasses, the other holding a finger up. He’d found something to Incorrectly Correct her about. 

“Y’know, excessive knuckle-cracking can lead to arthritis. If you care at all about your hands, you wouldn’t crack ‘em. Arthritis can be absolutely debilitating.”

She turned back toward him, crossing her arms. “That’s just a myth, you know. Do you have any evidence of it?”

He grinned. She’d taken the bait. The last time someone had taken the bait it was Ted, and it was over whether or not it was safe to use cotton swabs to clean out your ears. That argument had lasted days, leaving Ted slumped over his desk with little energy left. With any luck, the same would happen to Joan. 

“I’ve got plenty of sources, which I’d be happy to send you in an email. But I think it’s also just common sense - that cracking sound can’t be good, can it?”

Joan closed her eyes then slowly rolled her head in a circle, causing her neck to make a loud crack. For a brief moment, he was granted a better view of the small round scars on her neck. There were more of them than he’d originally thought. 

“I don’t know. Sounds pretty good to me. Feels pretty good, too. You think I’m going to get neck arthritis now, too?”

He shrugged. “You never know. It might feel good now, but how will it feel in your sixties with all that searing pain in your fingers and neck?”

“I guess I’ll find out, if I ever even make it to sixty.”

“What?”

“What?”

There was an awkward beat of silence as he tried to process what he thought she just said. She recovered faster than he did.

“Look, you send me those sources and I guarantee I’ll find a competing, more reputable source for each one you give me. I’ve been cracking my fingers for years and nothing’s happened - and nothing’s going to happen, because you’re wrong. I’ll prove it.”

This wasn’t going how he’d planned. Even Ted wasn’t this passionate about the q-tip debate. Instead of being drained by this ridiculous argument, she was gaining momentum. It was time to invoke the other promising category of annoyance he had planned - Interrupting People.

“Can you really be sure there’s no harm in doing it? Scientific findings are constantly changing and I doubt you actually know what causes the cracking sound in your knuckles.”

“I may not kno-”

He continued on. “I mean, you’re acting like you’re such an expert but you haven’t once started to explain why there’s nothing wrong with it, not biologically.”

She huffed. “Sure, but you haven’t-”

“I don’t claim to be an expert in stuff like this, since I’m not so prideful as to make grand sweeping declarations about things I don’t understand.”

She gaped. “But you-”

He continued talking over her, prattling on and on as he felt her irritation grow. It was working! If he just kept it up a little longer, he was sure she’d burst, and he could drain the wonderful, red-hot energy he called anger. 

And then, out of nowhere, her aggravation disappeared. It felt like she’d poured a cold bucket of water over herself, cooling down the temper he’d ignited. She abruptly turned back to her computer without even acknowledging him. She began typing again, slowly continuing the work he’d interrupted her from doing. Colin’s voice tapered off as he realized she was intentionally ignoring him. And successfully doing it! He’d meant to frustrate her, but she didn’t feel frustrated with him anymore. She didn’t feel anything toward him at all. It was like she’d blocked him out entirely. He felt cold. 

He stopped his rant, concerned. “Joan? Are you-”

And all of a sudden she swiveled back, her freezing energy cracking into something warm and humbling. It was like staring straight into the sun. Fiery, beautiful, and much, much bigger than him. Draining it would probably give him acid reflux, he bet. 

Her smile was piercing. “I’m fine. That’s what you were going to ask, right? If I was alright? I wouldn’t know, though, if that’s what you meant, since I interrupted you. It’s not fun, is it? Having a conversation you’re not a part of? Being shut out?”

He blinked a few times, mouth turned down into a flabbergasted frown. There was no trace of the outrage he’d just inspired in her. Somehow, she’d managed to will those feelings away. How could she do this? Manage her emotions so expertly? 

She tilted her head a little, still smiling. “Well?”

Fuck it. Time to bring out the big guns: Negative Comments on Appearance.

He leaned down to her level, looked straight into her eyes with a glare, and growled out …

“Your hair … is frizzy.”

That was a lot lamer than he meant it to be.

She blinked, unimpressed. “At least I have hair.”

He stood up to his full height, fighting the urge to let out a classic energy vampire hiss. Every attempt he made to bother her she’d treated as a challenge - and she’d won every single time. He hadn’t been this frustrated since Evie had shown up and proven herself to be undrainable. Hell, even Evie hadn’t angered him this much. At least she had been another vampire. But Joan was human, and had no reason to be this good at sidestepping him. Every time Colin switched between friendly and frustrating, Joan followed, matching his energy in time. 

His anger got the best of him. Raising his voice, he said, “Look, you-”

“Good god, can you two just shut up and work?” Derek interjected, his face scrunched up in anger. 

Joan suddenly became sheepish. “Sorry, we didn’t mean to bother you.”

“Speak for yourself,” Colin muttered, throwing his hands up and walking away. It wouldn’t do any good to yell at her. She’d probably find some way of turning that around on him too, knowing her. 

He walked to the break room and grabbed his mug, grateful to have something back in his hands again. His mug didn’t give him snarky backtalk and weirdly radiant smiles. His mug didn’t have any energy at all.

Still angry after his disastrous conversation with Joan, Colin frustratedly spent the rest of the workday ruthlessly draining his colleagues. He interrupted every conversation. He coughed without covering his mouth. He moved everything in Kim’s cubicle one inch to the right so she’d think she’d lost her mind. He took a few bites out of Joe’s BLT sandwich he’d been looking forward to at lunch, even though to an energy vampire it tasted about as good as literal shit. 

He took advantage of every opportunity to annoy someone as he could and by the end of the day, everyone in the office looked more like zombies than humans, except for the one human who’d somehow managed to be undrainable. 

Joan noticed his obnoxious behavior, of course, sparing him the occasional glance, but she didn’t seem to be bothered by it. She ignored when he loudly sharpened his pencil. She conspiratorially pretended not to notice him shifting all of Kim’s stuff. She had looked at him with concern when he intentionally tripped over himself and took Derek down with him, but as soon as they’d scrambled to their feet she’d gone back to work, a small smile gracing her lips. 

She wasn’t bothered by him. Even worse, she was entertained by him. That energy bubbled out of her like the fizz in something carbonated. He didn’t drain it; he feared it would give him indigestion. It seemed most of the things she felt he didn’t feel comfortable draining. 

When the workday ended, everyone slowly began pulling themselves out of their chairs, some slapping themselves in an attempt to wake up. Colin wasn’t sure if he left them enough energy to drive home, but he wasn’t going to dwell on it. With little energy left in the office to drain, Colin left and headed to the elevators. He pressed the button for the ground floor. Just as the doors were about to close, Joan ran through, barely managing to get through in time. 

The elevator doors closed. Joan moved to stand next to him, clutching her purse tightly. He saw their blurry reflections in the elevator doors.

“I’m sorry I made fun of your, uh … baldness. That was inappropriate. I was going to apologize earlier, but you seemed busy.”

Busy terrorizing the office, sure. 

Not knowing what to say, he stayed silent. His body was buzzing with the energy he drained. His skin felt too tight, his head too hot. 

"You did start it, though,” she added. 

Well, that was true. 

He clenched and unclenched his fingers. Anything to relieve the pressure inside him. He couldn’t focus on trying to drain her. He didn’t even know where to start.

In such close proximity, in such a small space, she filled up the room. She was everywhere. Inescapable.

When the elevator doors opened he rushed out, trying desperately to burn some of the energy he’d taken. He’d drained too much. Felt too much. It was uncomfortable.

Just as he opened the door to the building to leave, he heard Joan call out to him, “Colin?”

He turned back. There was that crease between her eyebrows again. She felt… sad. Regretful. Like she’d overstepped. 

“Are we… are you okay? I know I upset you. I don’t want us to get off on the wrong foot. I know I can be… well, a lot sometimes, and I don’t mean to tease you as much as I do, it just kind of felt like you could give as good as you got, you know? I didn’t have any friends at my last job and I just thought…”

She exhaled deeply. She seemed older at that moment. Her ponytail had come undone a bit, like she’d been running her fingers against it. A few strands of brown hair loosely framed her face. She looked as tired as he’d felt that morning.

“If I’m too much, just let me know.”

She was. She was too much. She took up everything. Her emotions were complex and fluid and totally unattainable. And his skin was still too tight and he needed to relieve some energy now or he wasn’t sure what was going to happen. 

If he’d been in his right mind, and not pumped full of more energy than he knew what to do with, he probably would have said something rude or mildly frustrating, but instead he found himself telling her, “No. You’re not too much. You’re …” 

The energy brimming in his veins started leaking out and he knew what he needed to say if he wanted to make it home without his head bursting from all of the pressure. 

“You’re just enough.”

As foreign as the words felt on his tongue, saying them had helped. A good portion of the energy bouncing around inside him had burned off and his head felt less fuzzy, but it still felt wrong to say. It sounded too much like a pick-me-up, like something Guillermo might say to Nandor when he went into one of his stormy moods. It was the same kind of awkwardly sympathetic thing he’d said when he’d first met Evie, when he hadn’t known what she was and on reflex said a few comforting words as she told her sob stories. It was not something an energy vampire should say.

And yet he’d said it, and there she was, beaming one of those ridiculous smiles, surrounded by some of the softest, sweetest energy he’d ever had the misfortune of experiencing. Energy wasn’t visible, but if it were, he imagined Joan would be outlined in blinding yellow light right now. Like some strange, frizzy-haired angel. He may not have been a blood vampire and had no qualms with religious symbols, but even he cringed at the comparison.

She adjusted the purse on her shoulder, trying and failing to tamp down her smile. “Well. I’m glad we sorted that out.” 

She walked past him and opened the door, holding it open for him. He walked out, heading toward the bus stop, wanting to get away from this unusual encounter as soon as he could. It seemed like all of his interactions with her ended with him running away.

Just as he was about to turn the corner, he heard her yell, “See you tomorrow, Colin!”

He didn’t turn back. His uncharacteristically kind words had made his current condition more bearable, but his body still practically hummed with all of the energy he’d drained, so when he walked it was with a long stride and quick steps. He reached the bus stop much sooner than he normally did. With all that excess energy and nothing to do with it, he paced and fidgeted until the bus arrived.

When the bus rolled up he practically jumped onto it. Normally he would spend a minute making unbearable small talk with the driver to hold up his route, but today he was eager to return home. And, frankly, he was afraid if he drained anymore he might burst. He could feel the bus driver’s relief as he passed by without a word. Colin rushed to his seat and anxiously bobbed his leg, mind whirring as the events of the caught up to him.

She couldn’t be human. She just couldn’t be. No human could be that difficult to drain without either being completely dead inside or a complete idiot. And she was neither. So clearly, she was something else.

Except she wasn’t. She felt human. She didn’t have a cold wall around her, like other energy vampires did (like Evie did…). He couldn’t figure out what her deal was. 

He glanced at his corpse-like reflection in the bus window’s mirror. He didn’t really know what his deal was, either.

With a deep sigh, he leaned back in his seat and looked up at the metal roof. No, he didn’t understand her. He was starting to think he might never understand her. But maybe that was okay. Maybe … maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, for there to be someone he couldn’t drain. 

I didn’t have any friends at my last job and I just thought…

Maybe it wouldn’t kill him to have a friend.

Then I’m in good company. We can stop and appreciate the little things, can’t we?

A friend who liked his company. 

Don’t be a stranger, Colin.

Maybe he wouldn’t be.

The bus stopped. Just as he stepped off, body slightly more in equilibrium, his phone dinged with a notification. He checked his phone and saw he had received an email.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: > [email protected]

To: > [email protected]

Feel free to respond with your own sources, but I think we both know who’s going to win.

Sincerely, your friend,

Joan

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Attached to the email were seven sources, all disproving the link between knuckle-cracking and arthritis, three of which were peer-reviewed. The oldest source was less than ten years old, and the most recent was from last year.

.

.

.

God dammit. 

Chapter Text

With more energy than he knew what to do with, Colin resigned himself to staying up the entire night again. Since he had more than enough energy to survive, Colin was free to spend the night with his roommates without needing to drain them. It was a rare opportunity to bond. 

Unfortunately, Colin’s mind was too preoccupied to take advantage of that opportunity. Normally he’d interject with some random dull fact of the world or become needlessly contrarian, but tonight he merely sat in his favorite chair in the living room, leg bobbing anxiously as he silently considered the strange couple of days he’d had.

The others didn’t seem to notice his out-of-character silence. Guillermo was busy dusting the shelves and knick-knacks while Nandor was busy watching Guillermo dust said shelves and knick-knacks. Nandor stood in the corner “supervising” him, claiming that he needed to make sure Guillermo didn’t knock something over or miss a spot. How Nandor could make so many excuses to watch Guillermo and still not realize his own feelings was a mystery to Colin. 

Laszlo was sitting on the couch with Nadja, Nadja stretched out across it with one of her hands in his. Laszlo was painting her nails a deep shade of black. He made a show of blowing on the nail polish as it dried, surreptitiously winking at her. She giggled in response, lifting her other hand to cover her mouth.

The amount of love currently festering in the room felt like it would be enough to drown him. He was grateful his roommates got along so well, truly, but everything seemed too … content. Especially when he felt so twisted up inside.

Laszlo kissed Nadja’s hand, eliciting another giggle from her. Then he lifted his head from her and finally noticed Colin’s leg quickly bouncing up and down.

“Colin Robinson, what the hell are you doing with your leg? Is this some new form of draining you’re trying? Because it’s not working.”

He huffed a breath. “No, it’s just… nevermind, forget it.” He stood up and made to walk out, but Laszlo wasn’t having it.

“I hate to say it, but maybe you’re losing your touch! You haven’t tried to drain any of us all night. Come to think of it, you weren’t anywhere to be found last night, either!”

Huh. So he did notice. It would have been touching, if Colin wasn’t in such a shit mood for company.

“Yeah. And you looked pretty rough this morning, too,” Guillermo added unhelpfully. 

Colin glared at Guillermo for a moment before he realized he was suddenly the center of attention. Normally this would be a wonderful opportunity to drain them, but his skin still itched and his muscles were restless. Nadja and Laszlo shared a concerned look with each other.

“I’m not losing my touch, I just stayed up last night without draining and I drained too much today! It’s not important and it’s not anybody’s business .”

Laszlo held up his hands in surrender. “ Easy, Colin Robinson. We don’t care what you do or don’t you - I could give a monkey’s tit what nonsense you got up to last night, but if you’d like to tell us, we’re all ears.”

Nadja nodded in agreement, pulling one of Laszlo’s hands into her lap. “Yes, Colin Robinson, we are merely curious about your unusual behavior! It is strange for you to be… well, strange.”

Nandor coughed into his clenched fist. “And I am as well. Curious, I mean.”

After waiting a few beats, Colin heaved a sigh and returned to his seat. His hands gripped the armrests as his body sunk deeper into the chair.

“There’s a new girl at work.”

There was a very long pause as they waited for him to continue. He did not.

Then Colin sensed a spark of understanding appear in Laszlo’s mind. A shit-eating grin spread across his face.  “Ah, I see, you dirty motherfucker! You’ve been sexing this new girl at work! Hence the sleepless night and your shit appearance this morning!”

Nadja clapped her hands together. “Colin Robinson, I didn’t know you had an interest in taking a human lover! It that why you’ve got the jittery jitters? Has your new lady shaken you so?”

Colin’s face twisted with confusion and irritation. “What? No. I haven’t- what?”

Guillermo chuckled from his dusty corner, feather duster still in hand. “C’mon guys, this is Colin Robinson we’re talking about. Clearly that’s not what’s going on.” He looked back at Colin. “It’s not, right?”

“No! She just started work yesterday! ”

“Wouldn’t stop me,” Laszlo muttered. 

Colin threw his hands up, “She and I are just friends. ”

It became immediately clear to Colin that that was the wrong thing to say. His roommates all quickly looked at each other with equally shocked expressions as the magnitude of what he just said began to sink in. They filled the room with a heavy cloud of their disbelief, which invaded his lungs unpleasantly.

Nadja leaned toward him. “You have made a … friend, Colin Robinson? A human one? Not like that little energy vampire you worked with?”

Colin went stiff. He felt exposed. Like they were energy vampires too, and they could all sense what he was feeling. Not that he was even sure what that was.

“Yeah, she’s human.” He swallowed. “She’s really weird for a human, though.” 

He sat up straighter. The truth began spilling from his lips in a rush. “I’ve been trying to drain her, but it’s like she’s got this-this thing about her that won’t let me! I’ll say something boring, or irritating, and then she just laughs! Or teases me or ignores me or… or flirts with me! Like she knows I won’t know what to do with it!”

Then he was out of his chair, pacing the room, hands moving wildly. “Everything I threw at her she threw back. Made fun of her hair and she made fun of my not having any. Talked over her and she stopped talking to me. And then she apologized! Apologized to me! For being too much. Well, she is! She is too much! She’s too much and I still can’t drain any of her! ”

His pacing stopped. He breathed heavily, suddenly feeling very, very tired. He’d finally exerted the energy he’d drained earlier, but he didn’t feel relief. Just a restless agitation. 

Nandor decided to pipe up. “ Sheesh. Drama queen much, ey, Guillermo?” 

Guillermo gave a nervous obligatory chuckle. He recovered quickly though, and looked at Colin with something more sincere. A bittersweet energy, somewhere between pity and sympathy. “Colin… isn’t having a new friend a good thing?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. “I guess?”

“Yes, Guillermo is right,” Nandor declared, “you should not look at the gift in the horse’s mouth, Colin Robinson. It’s terribly rude . ”

The others nodded. The disbelief they’d felt earlier had quickly faded. Whatever surprise they felt at hearing that Colin had found a new friend was gone, replaced with the calm resignation only centuries-old vampires could achieve. It was a passive energy they radiated most days which he found to be extremely comforting. Colin began to feel more at ease than he had in days. 

Guillermo set aside the feather duster and took a seat. “And it’s probably not impossible to drain her anyway, Colin. Everybody’s got something that bothers them . Remember when… who was it, George? Yeah, George, remember when his first week you had a hard time draining him as much as everybody else?” Colin slowly nodded. “But you were patient, and you experimented, and you figured out what got to him! I’m sure it’ll be the same this time.”

“Yes, Colin Robinson, if anybody can bore this poor girl then it would be you,” Nadja supplied. 

He shrugged noncommittally, but in truth his confidence was bolstered a bit. “Maybe. But every time I get close to draining her she dodges it somehow. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Guillermo considered Colin’s words with a serious expression. He opened his mouth to respond, but Laszlo cleared his throat and interrupted. “Perhaps we could go back to what you were saying before? Did you say this human woman flirted with you, Colin Robinson?”

Colin didn’t like the smirk growing on his face. “ … yes. Once, as a joke.”

Nadja looked skeptical. “Are you sure she was flirting and not, I don’t know, trying to sneeze? In my experience males tend to be piss-poor at reading womanly signals. Vampire men or otherwise.”

“Ignore her, Colin Robinson, she knows not of what she speaks!” Laszlo exclaimed. Nadja rolled her eyes. “If you say this lady from work tried to seduce you, I’m sure she did!”

“I don’t think that’s what Colin’s saying, Laszlo,” Guillermo gently said. “Sometimes human women flirt with guys, even if they don’t really mean it. Back at Panera all my coworkers were girls and they always flirted with me even though they pretty much knew I was-”

He froze. He stuttered through a breathy, nervous laugh. “Kn-Knew I was too dedicated to my job to ever date! Yup, too busy. Ha ha.”

Nandor nodded solemnly, oblivious. “Yes, making the Panera bread is a very demanding, but noble occupation. Almost as noble as being my familiar.”

Nadja snorted. Nandor glared a bit and asked what was so funny about what he just said. Nadja said it was probably more noble to be a loaf of Panera bread than it was to be his familiar. And so began a lengthy argument about the merits of bread vs the merits of being the familiar of the great Nandor the Relentless. 

With the conversation about Joan having suddenly ended, Colin considered just sitting back and draining the energy being produced from the argument playing out in front of him. But it had been a long day and a long night, and the thought of lying down in bed and shutting himself off was a lot more appealing than it usually was. 

He quietly retreated from the room and made his way to the basement. He felt a little better, having burnt off his restless energy and received genuine words of support from his immortal roommates. 

Just as he turned the knob to his bedroom door, a dark smoke cloud poofed into existence beside him. The cloud dissipated almost immediately, leaving Laszlo in its place. He leaned closer, lips pulled tightly into a smirk. 

“I didn’t want to say this in front of the others at the risk of putting you in an uncomfortable position, but if you are ever in need of advice on wooing the gentler sex, Colin Robinson, I’m your man! I have centuries of experience for you to draw upon should you want it!”

“Uh… thanks, I guess.”

His smirk transformed into something more genuine. “No thanks necessary! I wish I had a tutor such as myself when I first delved into the world of seduction. Would have saved me from suffering the many rejections I had before meeting my lovely lady-wife, Nadja.”

Colin quirked a brow, momentarily forgetting his desire to turn in for the night.

“You got rejected? A lot?”  It didn’t necessarily surprise Colin - he’d witnessed Laszlo get turned down even now quite frequently - but he was surprised to hear him admit it. 

Laszlo nodded. “Don’t tell Nadja I said this, but she’s right - womanly signals can be difficult to read. Mortal women especially! Vampire women will gladly tell you to fuck off if you’re not their type, or hiss if you really can’t take a hint. Mortal women aren’t nearly so expressive. Or violent.”

Colin shrugged. “Like I said earlier, her flirting was just a joke. And I know that because her signals aren’t hard to read. I’m an energy vampire. Everything she feels, I read loud and clear.”

Laszlo blanked. Some kind of small epiphany shot off inside his brain like a lone firework. “Hell, that’s right! You have quite the advantage, Colin Robinson. I can only imagine how easy seduction would be had I the ability to read the feelings of every man or woman I pursue.”

He rubbed his fingers together thoughtfully. Colin wasn’t sure how he felt about the turn this conversation was taking. “Say, Colin Robinson, the next time we’re out about town, perhaps you could read the room for me? Pick my next target, tell me how receptive they may be to my attentions?”

“Yeah, totally. I’d be happy to do that for you.”

Colin grinned. How much chaos could ensue if he gave him bad advice? How many times could he choose the least receptive person in the room before Laszlo caught on? How much rejection could he drain before Laszlo gave up?

Laszlo clapped Colin on the back. “Wonderful! I’m sure this will be a very successful partnership. With my expertise and your empathic abilities, we’ll be an unstoppable, irresistible force!”

He gave Colin a once-over. “Well, I will be irresistible. You only need to be so to your human woman from work.”

“Again, I’m not trying to date her. But thanks, anyway.”

Laszlo shook his head. “As Nandor said, don’t look this gift horse in its mouth. Even flirtations beginning as jokes can turn to something more. Love will sneak up on you in the night like a vampiress through a bedroom window. And when that vampiress bites your neck you better believe there is no hope of thwarting the transformation that will overtake you.”

He stepped back. “I really don’t care what you choose to do. Seduce her, don’t seduce her, doesn’t affect me one bit. But think on my words tonight, Colin Robinson. I’ll leave you to do… whatever it is you do in there. Bat!”

And then he was gone, flying through the maze of halls that was their home.  

It was several minutes before Colin entered his bedroom. He stood in the empty hall, slowly digesting Laszlo's words, as he suggested. It was ridiculous, of course, everything he’d said. Flowery words of  devotion and love meant little to an energy vampire. He’d never been human - never had that pesky desire to procreate like humans did. He’d always assumed the reason vampires bothered shacking up together was because they’d started off human, still holding on to their evolutionary purpose even after death. He had dated Evie, but out of a mutual interest to drain and feed. When that relationship no longer fulfilled its purpose, he broke it off. So what use would there be in pursuing a human?

He shook his head. Why was he even entertaining these thoughts? Laszlo was getting to him. 

Colin finally entered his room and breathed a deep sigh as he shut the door. He sat on the edge of his bed then lay down, staring at the gray cracks in his ceiling. Slowly, his eyes began to shut. He didn’t know how long it was before he actually fell asleep, but he did know that the sound of the alarm waking him up was one of the most unpleasant things he’d ever heard.

-

Colin slowly trudged into the office. Despite his roommates’ faith in him, he had little hope he’d drain Joan today. He considered avoiding her and just draining everyone else, like he did everyday before she showed up.

But the second he saw her face, lit up by the cold light of the morning sun, determination welled within him. He would figure her out. And he would drain her. And she’d slump over her desk and take a much needed nap, if the bags under her eyes and work on her desk were any indication.

Joan had arrived at the office early again. She was working diligently on whatever it was payroll workers did, when George from HR walked over. She looked up at him and immediately seemed to deflate a bit. She idly turned her chair side to side as George began speaking, her mouth pressed into a thin line. Colin couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but even from this distance he could sense she was - holy hell, she was bored!

Excitement buzzed in his veins. Was this it? Would he finally learn how to drain her?

Eager to find out what exactly George was doing to make her look so painfully bored, Colin slunk around the cubicles surrounding them, attempting to eavesdrop on their conversation without alerting them to his presence. He could catch most of the conversation, if you could even call it that. It seemed George was doing all of the talking. 

“-but yeah, there’s definitely an adjustment period. Since Biff’s … unfortunate situation, we’ve been pretty behind so we’re looking to hit the ground running. If there’s anything that can be done to better support you as you acclimate, definitely communicate that with Val. She’s a really, uh, great department head, all the department heads are actually…”

Okay, standard work talk. As the HR rep, George must have been checking in on her at the end of her first week. And it was practically boring Joan to tears. Her boredom was rich and smooth like a drizzle of melted chocolate. Colin knew he should drain her, and he wanted to, but some proud part of him wanted the satisfaction of boring her himself. 

George continued to prattle on. Joan started looking around the office listlessly, her boredom so obvious you didn’t need to be an energy vampire to sense it. Her eyes eventually locked with Colin’s. She perked up a little, then looked back at George. Then to Colin. Then to George again. Was she … trying to tell him something? He could read feelings not minds.

Confused but intrigued, Colin left and stopped by his own cubicle. He sensed a spike of disappointment coming from Joan’s direction as he walked away. Weird. Colin quickly grabbed his mug off his desk, which still had cold coffee in it from the previous day. Mug now in hand, Colin stalked toward them with confidence. He began tapping his fingers against his mug, George prickling at the sound of it. Colin smirked. 

“You HR types waste no time breaking in the newbies, huh?”

George frowned. “We were just talking about how Joan was adjusting. She’s replacing Biff. Have you two met yet?”

Joan piped up, exuding a strange sort of excitement. “We have, actually. He was very welcoming!”

Both men looked at her with disbelief. She wore an easy smile, her boredom dissipating back into amusement, like she was winning a game only she knew the rules to. 

“Well,” George said, “that’s … good. I’m glad you’re making such an effort, Colin.” 

Colin didn’t know what to do with the sudden praise, even if it was spoken with a good degree of skepticism. So instead he fell back on what he knew, and he started slurping his cold coffee as loudly as he could. George grimaced then quickly excused himself.

Once George was out of earshot, Joan swiveled toward Colin, beaming. “Thank you for that, he just kept talking and repeating himself and there wasn’t a point to any of it . I guess he wanted to seem welcoming and supportive, but…”

She shrugged, letting the end of her sentence hang in the air. Colin nodded along mindlessly as he tried to figure out what the hell George did so differently to bore her. Long scientific descriptions and discussions of knuckle-cracking didn’t bore her, but basic work talk did? 

“Eh, he won’t seem so ‘welcoming’ when he calls you into his office for quote unquote ‘making everyone uncomfortable with your excessive unsolicited facts about proper dental hygiene, Colin.’”

She laughed. She actually laughed. He didn’t even know he was making a joke. It was true that George did call him into his office after he’d decided to warn half his coworkers against the use of whitening strips to correct coffee-stained teeth, which most people here had. Not him, though. He wondered if he drank enough coffee if his teeth would actually stain. He was impervious to fire, to weapons, to… well, anything. But what would coffee do? He didn’t know all of the energy vampire rules.

“Passionate about dental health, are you?” She cocked a brow, grinning.

“Y’know, everyone else could stand to be a little more concerned with their teeth. Proper dental care is essential to the wellness of the entire body. Studies show that gum disease is associated with other more serious illnesses like heart disease.”

She chuckled again. He had no idea what she found so funny about that. “I’ll keep that in mind the next time I floss.”

He didn’t understand this. He was unaccustomed to conversations flowing as easily as they did with her. It was disconcerting, honestly. So Colin decided now was the time to make an attempt to bore her. George did it through work-related chit chat. He could handle that. 

He gestured to the piles of papers on her desk. “They’re starting you off with a lot pretty fast, huh? I’m not surprised, it seems like people are always drowning in work here. The burnout is real. And with the company’s, frankly, draconian time off policy it’s not like it’s going to get any better. Have they given you a copy of the employee handbook yet? I have a couple copies, if you need to borrow one. There’s a lot of useful information in there about benefits, absences, code of conduct…”

He could feel it. She was getting bored. The smile she wore so frequently was gone, replaced by that same flat expression she had earlier that morning. Her boredom tasted all the better for how hard-won it was. She started blinking slower and slower as he pulled her energy away from her. Who knew the answer was so simple? So obvious? She was bored by anything work-related. No wonder he couldn’t drain her before. Their previous conversations seemed to veer off in directions he couldn’t anticipate. But now he knew her weakness and he wouldn’t lose track this time.

Colin smugly continued explaining the company culture, idly moving his mug back and forth so the coffee within spun into a small vortex. Just as he began diving into the company’s ethics policies, it all went to hell. 

She jolted in her chair, suddenly inhaling a quick breath. Her eyes flashed with determination as defiance grew around an undercurrent of boredom. Somehow, she was attempting to … resist the draining. The boredom remained undrained, a spike of spitefulness preventing him from accessing it. The sudden change from boredom to whatever this was slammed into him with the same physicality as a truck running him over. He dropped his mug, which hit the corner of her desk and cracked in two, spilling days-old coffee onto the gray carpet. 

Whatever spell had come over her broke as soon as the mug did.  She bent down and picked up the pieces, holding them up for him to see. The stubborn look in her eye disappeared as they both surveyed the damage.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you! I was just trying to wake myself up, I didn’t mean to… oh, I feel terrible.”

And she did, he could feel it. She was broadcasting lots of strange, unfamiliar emotions, like regret and guilt and concern for him. He’d have drained her of it, but he was too preoccupied with what had just occurred. She had resisted him! He hadn’t even known that was possible. He’d finally figured out how to bore her, and she’d gone and stumbled into a way to sidestep him again. He should have been more frustrated, but mostly he was just confused.

While Colin tried to digest what just happened, Joan frantically pressed the two pieces of the mug back together, trying to line up the edges. She fretted over the broken mug far more than she should have, muttering more apologies. 

Looking up at him a little helplessly, she said, “The edges didn’t break as clean as I hoped. They won’t stick together as well as they should. I’m not sure glue can fix this one.”

“It’s-it’s fine, don’t worry about it.” Much like on her first day, he began backing away. “Just keep it, for all I care.”

He turned away and quickly headed for the breakroom, ignoring the concern Joan radiated toward him. He seated himself in a corner away from the other employees serving themselves coffee. His hand rapped an uneven rhythm against the table as his thoughts ran away from him. 

This wasn’t like when she chose not to be offended by his insults. This wasn’t like when she calmed herself down and shut him out. This was a total rejection of what he was. She hadn’t found a way to dispel her boredom this time - she’d just found a way to dispel him.

And he was terrified.

Chapter Text

Colin bobbed his head to the techno-club music blaring from the speakers, his movements painfully off-beat. Feelings of lust, excitement, and thirst emanated from the crowd of vampires, mixing together into one large cloud of emotion. He closed his eyes and soaked it in, like taking a long drag from a cigarette.

He couldn’t remember the name of the club he was in. Nadja said it belonged to someone named “Simon the Devious.” According to her, he was a crucial part of the plan to appease the Baron. Personally, Colin had no interest in catering to the whims of the archaic eunuch currently squatting in their attic, but he could taste his friends’ fear in the air and understood their desperation. Fear was a pulsing thing, blurred around the edges and cold. It was nauseating.

Across the way Colin spotted Nandor, which was easy, considering how much taller he was than most of the crowd. He seemed to be chatting with an attractive female vampire, either flirting with her, trying to expand their domain, or both. 

He interrupted their tête-à-tête with horse facts, specifically about farriers. Of course Nandor knew what a farrier was, he loved horses - which was why it was perfect to needle him with. 

“Why don’t you go and mingle somewhere else, Colin Robinson?”

“Oh, I don't think so. Uh, my stomach's feeling a little iffy. Gas. So, I think I'll just stick with you tonight.”

It wasn’t even really a lie. His stomach did feel shaky. Over the past couple days his roommates' fears and worries had seeped into most of the house, infecting all the surfaces with a dizzying anxiety. He was grateful to be out of the house, even if their worries did follow them. 

He’d never admit it out loud, but his own fears were contributing to the atmosphere of the house, too. Too much had happened with Joan for him to have fully recovered. He would have to face her at work tomorrow. She’d probably find some new, terrible way of disturbing him, like she had every other day they talked. The thought of it made his stomach flip unpleasantly. 

Colin mentally shook himself. He wasn’t here to dwell; he was here to forget. 

Just as he was about to launch into another conversation about horses and shoes for said horses, he was suddenly pulled away. Over the din of club music he heard Laszlo’s voice.

“All right, Colin Robinson, which lucky creature am I taking with me to that utility close over there?”

For a moment, Colin didn’t understand what he was talking about, but then he remembered their conversation in the hallway a couple of days ago. Apparently Laszlo had been serious about enlisting Colin as his empathic wingman. 

He smirked, more than happy to humor him. He clicked his tongue and scouted the crowd. There was a surprising number of vampires who would be receptive to Lazlo’s advances and an even more shocking amount of them were actually attractive. But that’s not what he was looking for.

He continued to scan the crowd, searching for his mark. There. Leaning against a limestone pillar was a particularly gnarly looking vampire. His proportions were off. His chest was short and thick, while his arms extended far past his knees, all the way to his ankles. His nostrils were stretched into long slits against his face and his eyes were completely black, as if his pupils had engulfed the whites of his eyes. 

Colin guessed his look was probably intentional. He must have been forcing himself to remain mid-transformation to his bat form. Sounded painful. The vibes he could sense from him were unpleasant - a pointed aura of anger and disgust. With himself? With the world? Hard to tell from this distance. Not that it mattered. This guy was perfect.

“Over there. The guy by the pillar. He’s single and lookin’ to mingle.”

Laszlo followed his eyes, arching his brow. “Are you sure? He seems a little…” He shook his hand in the air. “Absolutely fucking terrifying.”

Colin held back a grin. “I’m sure. He may literally look like a bat out of hell, but I promise on the inside he’s just desperate for some loving. That’s a wild ride you want to take, mi amigo.”

Laszlo looked skeptical. 

Colin glanced at the monstrous, pulsating hat sitting on Laszlo’s head. Laszlo had insisted on wearing his hat made of witch skin to the club. It wouldn’t have been a problem, if it wasn’t also totally cursed. “Plus, with that witch’s hat, who could refuse?”

Swelling with sudden confidence, Laszlo said, “A fine point! And you are an energy vampire. I defer to your wisdom. Bat!”

And off he went, weaving through the crowd as a bat until he reached his unwitting target. Colin leaned back against the counter of the bar behind him, settling in to watch the show. The woman sitting on the stool next to him leaned away as he got too close. He glanced at her. 

She was flirting with the bartender, her eyes gleaming red. She was far thinner than a human could possibly be and he couldn’t be sure, but he swore he saw something leathery - wings? - rustling under her dress. Was she a succubus? A harpy? He didn’t know. By all accounts, she looked absolutely nothing like Joan. But there were wrinkles between her brows and her lips were pale, and he found himself thinking back to the coworker he was desperately trying to forget about.

He took another swig of the drunken energy around him and turned his attention back to Laszlo. Laszlo had transformed back from his bat form and bowed to the grotesque vampire towering over him. The larger vampire snarled. Undeterred, Laszlo began to … Colin squinted to verify he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. Yup, Laszlo was miming sexual acts. 

The bat-creature snarled, gripped Laszlo’s throat, lifted him into the air and threw him halfway across the club. Laszlo landed somewhere into the crowd, causing some of the dancing vampires to disperse. Colin flinched at the thud. 

One creature, a banshee, screeched at Laszlo’s impact. Her teeth were sharp and thin as pins, and her bony figure seemed to stretch vertically as she screamed. Everyone around Colin covered their ears and shouted at her, but he was still, contemplating the particular brown of her thinning hair and the murky gray of her eyes, so different and yet so reminiscent of Joan.  

Laszlo picked himself back up and dusted himself off. “Oh, quiet, you squawking gib-face.”

The banshee hissed and retreated as the crowd began to coalesce once again. Laszlo approached Colin, wearing a flat expression. He exuded disappointment - but, surprisingly, none of it was directed at Colin. 

“It would seem that I am not up to the challenge of wooing your chosen target. I apologize, Colin Robinson. I am sure it is very disheartening to see an experienced seducer such as myself fail in these matters. Especially when you so carefully chose who I should pursue! But do not give up hope, for I am sure that with enough time and observation, you may learn how to secure that human woman from work.”

Colin smiled thinly. He hadn’t told any of the others about what had happened with Joan. He worried that talking about the issue would make it even more real. 

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, stomach roiling with the sudden mention of her . “How about we go see what Nadja’s up to?”

For just a moment, it felt like Laszlo was going to push the issue. Colin clenched his hands repeatedly as he prepared for the impending probing. But instead, Laszlo merely nodded his head and led the way. Maybe he saw the fear in Colin’s eyes and knew better than to continue the conversation, or maybe he just didn’t give enough of a fuck to question him further. Colin was grateful regardless. 

It was only a few minutes after finding Nadja that everything went to shit. 

-

Colin, Nadja, and Laszlo stood on the sidewalk outside the burning nightclub, watching the smoke consume the night sky. Laszlo felt the top of his head, already missing the pulsing presence of his witch hat.

Dozens of bats flew out of the blown-out windows in a frenzy, some already on fire. What once was a cloud of drunken lust and excitement had become a storm of terror and pain. The storm of emotion drenched Colin to the point that he practically dripped with their fear. He shivered.

Nadja eyed Colin. “What are you shivering for? Energy vampires do not get cold. Especially not next to giant nightclub-sized flames!”

“I’m soggy.”

Nadja scoffed. She was upset that her attempt to expand their domain had failed. Not to mention she was still irritated at Laszlo for insisting on bringing the witch’s hat. On top of it all, she was struggling to manage the growing fear of what the Baron would do to them when they inevitably failed at conquering the New World. 

The negotiations with Simon had gone about as well as Laszlo’s seduction attempt. Simon had lived up to his namesake - deviously luring them to the club to secure Laszlo’s cursed witch hat. Why those two were so obsessed with it, he didn’t understand. While the hat was cursed, there was nothing about it which compelled people to wear it. Simon and Laszlo’s fascination with it was totally their own.

That fascination with the hat proved to be Simon’s downfall. The moment he put it on, he’d managed to set the place ablaze, as well as all hope of securing Manhattan for the Baron. 

A fire truck pulled up next to them blaring its sirens. Firefighters began piling out, immediately getting to work on managing the raging flames. One firefighter separated from the group and approached them. He was tall and had an authoritative air about him. 

“You need to vacate the area. It’s not safe here.”

Nadja leveled a glare at him. She raised her hand, waving it in circles a few inches from his face. His face went slack as the hypnosis began to take effect. “You will fuck off and do your job. Leave us. Now.”

He jerked his head in a violent nod. “Understood. Fucking off now.”

And so he did, walking off and shouting orders at the other firefighters. Nadja was the most skilled in hypnotism - whether it was due to her natural inclination to dominate others or simply centuries of experience, Colin didn’t know, but he found it impressive nonetheless.  

Energy vampires were capable of hypnotizing humans, but it expended an absurd amount of energy and there was little use for it. You could only hypnotize action, not feeling, and feeling was an energy vampire’s sole currency. Not to mention it was fucking difficult. With little need to practice it, most energy vampires could barely compel a human to-

A sudden god-awful crunch interrupted his thoughts. They all turned around and saw the unfortunate source of the sound. Across the street was an old taco truck, the roof of it dented severely. On the ground was a broken Guillermo, radiating the most physical pain Colin had ever felt come from a person, and that was including his roommates’ victims. Usually their deaths were quick - Guillermo seemed to be taking his time.

Wondering how the hell Guillermo had fallen from the sky, Colin looked up and saw what he assumed was Nandor’s silhouette. He was awkwardly hovering in the air, ever so slowly floating down. As he got closer and closer to the ground, Colin could sense the growing guilt and dread he was feeling.

Just as some of the firefighters began running to Guillermo’s aid, Laszlo muttered, “Well, there goes another familiar.”

Nandor’s feet finally touched the ground a few yards from Guillermo. Horrified at the sight of Guillermo’s body being swarmed by concerned firefighters, he took a step closer, but thought better of it and stepped back. The fear of what might become of Guillermo was suffocating him, Colin knew. For one brief moment, he pitied him. But then the odd feeling passed, and he continued to silently watch the sad scene before him.

-

Like with most things, Laszlo had been wrong about Guillermo’s fate. Miraculously, Guillermo had survived the fall and was currently lying unconscious in a hospital bed. All four of them - Colin, Laszlo, Nadja, and Nandor - were circled around him.

Nandor frowned. “If you think about it, it’s really his fault. Wanting to fly like a vampire - psh. Silly human.”

None of them said anything. Nadja was still trying to quell her fear of the Baron, Laszlo was lamenting the loss of his hat, and Colin … well, Colin didn’t have a stake in any of this. He was just along for the ride and the company. 

A nurse walked in, pressing buttons on machines Colin couldn’t identify. She was overworked and anxious. Her stress pulsated in the air unevenly. He would have drained it (stress tasted acidic and juicy, like a citrus fruit), but he thought it probably wouldn’t be wise to drain the woman currently looking after Guillermo.

The nurse had long blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Her face was wrinkled and there were white streaks in her hair. Whether she was as old as she looked or the stress had aged her, he couldn’t tell. Her eyes were green, but most importantly, there were dark bags under her eyes. Just like Joan.

Colin sighed. He’d thought he’d left those kinds of thoughts behind in the club, hopefully burned up into nothing but ash. But no, they seemed to have followed him here, destined to pester him until he saw her tomorrow. 

Laszlo bumped Colin’s shoulder with his. “How about we leave these two sad heaps here and head back home before the sun rises and flambés us?”

“Yes, time to go. Get well, Gizmo,” Nadja said noncommittally as she already made her way to the door.

Colin followed them both out. Nandor stayed behind, not even acknowledging their exit. On their way out, Lazlo discovered Simon the Devious’ room. Apparently he’d been found in the rubble. On the foot of his bed was Laszlo’s beloved witch’s hat. The moment he put it on, Nadja and Laszlo began arguing about what should be done with it. Nadja suggested a ceremonial burning, which Laszlo loudly rejected. Why would anyone want to burn such a unique, magnificent headpiece?

Colin was content to drain the frustrated energy from both of them for a while, but eventually grew bored of the taste. There was still an undercurrent of fear within them anyway, the Baron’s threats still on their minds. It made the energy from their bickering taste a little off, like sipping from an expired milk carton. 

He left the room and made his way through the hospital, intending to call a cab when he reached the entrance. He peeked into some of the rooms as he went. There were lots of interesting energies to sample in each one. There was dread, there was suspicion, there was hope. He tasted a little of each and savored them all, but didn’t consume much. He imagined this must be what a wine tasting was like for humans.

One peculiar room had no energy in it. Colin assumed the room was empty, but when he looked inside he froze. There was a comatose man on a bed hooked up to machines, much like Guillermo was. And Colin recognized him.

He wanted to walk on and ignore the familiar man, but his feet disagreed with him. He walked in, pulled up a chair next to the bed, and sat down. He awkwardly looked around the room, tapping his shoes against the linoleum floor. It wasn’t often that Colin felt self-conscious, but this was one of those rare moments where he didn’t know what to do with himself. By nature, an energy vampire’s existence hinged on having a captive audience to bore, annoy, and/or bother. Isolation was uncomfortable at best, emaciating at worst. With a task or a goal it was bearable, but here he was, alone, in a sad little room with no goal, in the company of no one but the shell of an old coworker. 

Colin cleared his throat. He tapped his foot. He patted his hands against his knees. There was no reason to be here. He couldn’t drain what was effectively a living corpse. 

But some inexplicable thing kept him planted there, staring at the steady rise and fall of the chest of the man lying in bed, once known as Biff, only a few weeks ago.

He cleared his throat again and knocked a few times on Biff’s forehead. “Anybody home?”

No answer.

He knocked again. And waited.

Silence.

Colin sighed. He looked around the room again. There were no flowers, or balloons. Not even a card. Colin thought of Biff's cat. Did he even have family to take Chestnut in?

Biff said nothing, so Colin broke the silence. He prattled on and on about history (Biff’s most hated topic of conversation). He talked about the Berlin Wall, Bay of Pigs, the Protestant Reformation. Eventually the one-sided conversation turned from history to work. He talked about how much payroll fell behind after he left. 

“You’ve been replaced, by the way. Took six weeks. Couldn’t wait on you forever. Don’t worry though, she kept your picture of Chestnut. I could probably snag it for you if you wanted.”

Still no response. The monitors continued beeping steadily. Colin thought about Guillermo a few floors up, stuck in bed, being watched over by the vampire who put him there. His stomach rolled unpleasantly. He didn’t like the similarities. 

“This isn’t usually what happens. We try not to drain people to death. Or to a coma, in your case. It was more Evie’s fault anyway, she really shouldn’t have come into the men’s restroom. But don’t worry about your replacement, that’s never going to happen to her. ‘Cause guess what? She’s drain-proof! Yeah, bet you wish you had that power, huh?”

He smacked Biff’s arm like he would a friend. “Can you believe that? Totally Colin-Robinson proof.”

He swallowed the lump in his throat. “It’s kind of terrifying actually. Don’t tell my roommates I said that, though. If they knew I was scared of a human I’d never hear the end of it. Oh, yeah, I’m not human by the way. Bet that would have shocked you if you were awake. Shock is actually pretty fun to drain. We energy vampires consider it a delicacy.”

There was still no answer. He couldn’t stand it. “Okay, so maybe this is kind of my fault. I mean, not just my fault, but it is a lot of it. So my bad, I guess.”

After a few minutes more of agonizing silence, he slapped his knees and moved to stand. The uncomfortable atmosphere of the room was too much to handle. Vampires and guilt didn’t mix. Not that he would admit to feeling any sort of guilt.

As he turned to leave he looked one more time at Biff. It’d be easy to pretend he was only sleeping, that he’d wake up any moment, go back to work, take his job back, and send Joan packing. Then Colin wouldn’t have to face her and nothing would have to change. 

He left the room and continued his journey home. He took a cab, alone, his mind filled with thoughts of what tomorrow might bring. Maybe Joan replacing him was fate or some form of karmic justice. What was a more fitting punishment for draining Biff than sending someone incapable of ending up like him? If the universe really was starting to punish vampires for their crimes against humans, then he and his roommates were royally fucked.

Chapter Text

Colin seriously considered calling out sick that morning. He’d never done it before, but he’d also never dreaded coming into work before, either. The office was supposed to be a second home to him, the hunting grounds he’d spent the last four years making his own. With the way things were going with Joan, he was pretty sure she’d be doing the hunting if he came in today.

His hand started to reach for his phone, ready to dial George’s number and fake a wet cough. Maybe throw some violent sneezes in there, a sniffle or two for good measure, if George would even let him get that far before marking him as absent and ending the call. 

Colin pulled his hand back. It was incredibly tempting to call out, but in the end it would just be delaying the inevitable. He didn’t want to spend another day tying himself into knots, wondering how another confrontation with Joan would end up. She’d already resisted boredom, then she’d resisted draining. Fuck, would she drain him next? He wasn’t even sure that was possible, not even by other energy vampires, but it wouldn’t surprise him anymore if she found a way. 

He made his way to work as he kept trying - and failing - to keep his panicked thoughts at bay. He didn’t register the moment he got on the bus or the moment he got off. It was only when the elevator doors to his floor opened that he found himself wrenched back to the present.

He tentatively stepped out and made his way to his desk, repeatedly checking over his shoulder to prevent a potential jumpscare from Joan. It was completely unnecessary, as she was probably already at her desk working, like every morning. He’d be able to sense her energy anyway if she got close. He’d spent enough time analyzing her that he’d be able to recognize it in a heartbeat. 

When he finally made it to his cubicle, he set down his briefcase on his desk. Or at least, that’s what he would have done, if there wasn’t something currently occupying it.

Sitting on his desk rather innocuously was a small paper bag with confetti on it. There was blue tissue paper coming out of the top and a tag on it with a note written in neat handwriting. It read:

“To: Colin

From: Joan

Sorry about Friday, hope you like it!”

There was a smiley face drawn next to his name. 

Fighting the urge to turn tail and run, he peeked over his cubicle wall and spotted Joan at her desk. She typed away, oblivious to his spying. 

He tentatively sat down and picked up the bag. He shook it a little and heard nothing but the rustling of paper tissue. He reached into it and pulled out a white mug. It looked exactly like his old one, except printed across it were the words “World’s Okayest Coworker.” 

For a moment Colin blanked, but then something seemed to short circuit pleasantly inside his brain. It was a gift. She’d given him a gift. The last gift he could remember receiving was a Nickelback CD on his last birthday from Guillermo. He’d never received a gift outside of a special occasion, which were few and far between.

Before he could think better of it, he cradled the mug in his hands and soaked in its energy. People always left residual energy around them, in the air, on the walls, on whatever they touched. It was never enough to drain and usually not even worth examining, but Colin felt a great urge to give this mug a closer look.

The mug felt like Joan - warm, bright, patient, sympathetic. To a human these descriptors might sound ridiculous, but they were so limited in how they viewed the world. They couldn't perceive the small pieces of themselves they left behind. Colin was grateful he wasn’t human, because what a shame it would be not to notice the piece of Joan here.

The fear that had been plaguing him all weekend quickly faded away, the mug’s muted, calming energy somehow pushing all that aside. It was normally an impossibility for Colin to enjoy cheerful energies, but the mug’s energy was just diluted enough for him to appreciate it. 

He set the mug back down on his desk, a wide grin on his face. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Joan making her way toward him. His face fell, but not before she saw his smile. He could tell she’d noticed because he’d sensed a spike of satisfaction and giddiness when she saw him, which had soured a little when he’d frowned. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.

She stopped in front of him with an easy but exhausted smile on her face. He noted the bags under her eyes; they were deeper than they were on Friday. She broadcasted so many emotions - eagerness, to see what he’d have to say about her gift; exhaustion, from doing what, he didn’t know; and something secret, something hidden, something he couldn’t seem to pin down, no matter how much he squinted. 

“So,” she began, her voice not betraying any of the exhaustion he sensed in her, “What do you think?”

She gestured to the mug. “I felt bad about breaking your other one so I thought it’d only be fair to replace it. And when I was shopping I thought this one screamed ‘Colin!’ so I had to get it.”

“It’s, uh…” 

She looked at him expectantly. She probably was expecting a “thank you” or “you didn’t have to do that” but unfortunately, Colin was an energy vampire and “thank you” wasn’t in his typical vocabulary.

“It’s … fine.”

Her smile remained, but he could feel her enthusiasm dip dramatically. Colin could’ve sworn the mug looked at him with disappointment.

“It’s okay if you don’t like it. I can always trade it in for a plain one, like the one you had before. I won’t be offended.”

She started to reach for the mug, but Colin was quick. He snatched it back, clutching it protectively against his chest. 

“No, no! It’s good. This one is good.”

Joan laughed, and god, the muted feelings of joy in the mug were nothing compared to the real deal. He scooted back further into his cubicle. Joy was unpleasant. It was airy, but rich, and horribly migraine-inducing. It left frustrating little spots in his vision. He awkwardly tried to blink them away as Joan leaned against his desk.

“I’m glad you like it, then. I really did feel bad about startling you! That wasn’t my intention.”

He rubbed at his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Then what was your intention?” he said, more focused on the stupid colored circles floating in his eyes than her.

Joan’s eyes went wide, not that he could see it. “Well, I was trying to, uh… wake up. I was getting a little tired.”

Bored, she meant. She was getting a little bored. He stopped rubbing at his eyes as his vision finally cleared. “What, you don’t find me reciting the employee handbook riveting?”

She laughed again, but this time he was prepared. He braced for the onslaught of her sudden happiness, and weathered it well. There weren’t any spots this time, only a vague ache in his head he was sure would go away as soon as he drained someone actually capable of it.

“Unfortunately, no, I don’t. I don’t think there’s anybody out there more passionate about the employee handbook than you, Colin, even George. Your eyes practically lit up when you talked about it.”

Colin played back Friday’s events in his mind. Had his eyes glowed then? He couldn’t always help it, and didn’t always know he was doing it, either. But she couldn’t have noticed, could she? Energy vampires were like a big blind spot to humans - even when they revealed their supernatural tendencies, humans didn’t ever seem to take notice. They were always too caught up in their own pathetic little worlds to perceive the insane things happening around them. 

No, she couldn’t have noticed. She wouldn’t be so casual about it if she had.

“What can I say, I’m a passionate guy,” he said, using the driest tone he could.

Joan laughed again. It was getting a lot easier to tolerate. 

She glanced up at the clock on the wall. “As fun as this is, I should probably head back to my desk. I’m sure you’ve noticed the piles of paperwork over there. Got to whittle that down somehow.” She shrugged. “See you later, Colin.”

She turned to go, but before she could, Colin heard himself saying “what time do you normally go to lunch?”

She paused. “About 12:30. Why?”

He strummed his fingers against his new mug. “Could I … maybe … join you?” Colin had looked away as he said it, worried the brightness of her energy would blind him.

She didn’t respond at first, like she was at a loss, but it only took a moment for her shock to turn to delight.

“Of course!” she chirped, “The lunch room is always dead, so it’ll be nice to have someone there. I think everybody else eats in their cars.”

They did. Years ago, Colin used to prowl the lunchroom on people’s breaks and drain them as they ate. Sometimes they’d fall asleep in the middle of their meals. The break room was pretty much his territory alone after that. 

When Joan finally walked away, Colin slumped in his chair. Tired, but … relieved. 

Sometime during his short conversation with Joan it had finally become apparent what strategy he needed to use in dealing with her. He’d tried boring her - which had backfired spectacularly multiple times . He could quit and find a new office to drain, but that would mean wasting all the time he’d spent here learning everyone’s quirks and weak points. He could try avoiding her, but that was inconvenient. And he wouldn’t ever admit it, but… he didn’t really want to avoid her forever. Not after receiving one of the only gifts he’d ever received. 

This was the only interaction he’d had with her that didn’t end in her revealing some terrible new way of resisting him. It was also the only interaction he’d had where he hadn’t tried draining her.

Which meant he really only had one option left: accept the situation for what it was, and adapt. Instead of trying to get the better of her, which he was convinced at this point was impossible, he’d have to find a way to fit her into his routine. Treat her like … a friend, like she’d been treating him.

While energy vampires were most comfortable with an established routine, they were used to adapting to their environments. They had to be. Blood vampires could live for centuries, never changing, feeding on the blood of new generations of humans every year, but energy vampires had to be clever. The human world was always changing, which meant newer ways of draining people had to be invented. To stagnate meant to starve, and Colin refused to fade away into nothing. 

So he’d have to change. Big deal. A decade ago he’d taught himself how to drain through trolling on the internet, and what a steep learning curve he’d had then. If he could figure that out, then he was sure he could get accustomed to Joan’s positive emotions and not cringe internally everytime she smiled. 

He leaned back in his chair, mentally preparing himself for the lunch he’d signed himself up for. He mimed drinking from his empty mug, sipping some of its gentle, harmonic energy. 

Hmm. Tasted a lot better than coffee.

-

It occurred to Colin far too late that eating lunch with someone meant eating lunch . 

As Joan pulled her lunch bag from the office fridge and sat down at one of the tables, Colin realized it’d probably be very strange to share lunch with her without actually eating anything. Ordinarily he would view this as an excellent opportunity to make things awkward, but he was trying something new, so falling into old habits wasn’t an option. 

Colin went to the fridge and dug out some leftover pizza from a past party - birthday? Retirement? He couldn’t remember - and placed it on a plate. It looked entirely unappetizing, as all human food did. He knew what it tasted like to humans, as he’d experienced it second-hand anytime someone ate it around him, but he still couldn’t see what was so great about a triangular slab of cheese and bread.

Joan had brought a sandwich from home and was patiently waiting for him to sit before taking a bite. He sat down in front of her and set his plate. She looked down at his meal with a soft sense of surprise, but said nothing about it, and began to eat.

He stared at the pizza with thinly veiled disgust. When he was finally able to summon the will to take a bite into the cold slice, he shuddered. It tasted like - well, there were no emotions to compare this to. Any emotion tasted better than this.

Joan was not oblivious to Colin’s discomfort. Her sympathy slowly wrapped itself around him in a gentle vice, if there was such a thing. 

“I didn’t know you ate. Lunch, I mean. Last week I never saw you eat.”

She noticed? “Oh, I did, you just didn’t see it.”

She pursed her lips. “Right.”

Colin finally managed to swallow the bite of pizza, gritting his teeth with the effort. 

“Oh, Colin..,” she sighed quietly. Joan’s sympathy squeezed a little tighter.

He was about to brave another bite when she interrupted him. “That pizza looks a little … off. It might be best to trash it, just to stay on the safe side. And maybe don’t eat anything for the rest of lunch, so your stomach can settle.”

Oh, thank god. “You might be right. Excessive moisture in a closed environment - say, a heavily used office refrigerator - can induce mold growth.”

“Yes, exactly, trash that. Now.”

He smiled and threw the slice into the trash. Or, he tried, and it bounced off the rim and landed cheese-down onto the floor. He couldn’t tell if he’d biffed it on purpose or if that was just his energy vampire nature choosing to ruin a good moment.

“See, I meant to do that.”

She tried suppressing her smile, but it was about as effective as trying to block sunlight with cellophane. “Of course, just like when you tripped over Derek and pulled him down with you.”

He got up and put the pizza in the trash, ignoring the slightly yellow stain on the floor. He chuckled, “Yeah, except that was actually on purpose.”

She nearly choked on her next bite as she laughed. “I knew it!”

He took his seat again. The break room was small, so Joan’s feelings of amusement filled the room to the brim. It was frustrating, being surrounded by unappetizing energy with no way of draining it, but it was better than trying to drain it and failing. 

They fell into silence for a little while, Colin trying to manage existing in the atmosphere of the room while Joan ate her meal. There was no awkwardness to it, unfortunately, as Joan seemed to be content to just sit quietly together. Colin listened to the sounds of printers and phone calls outside the break room. It was familiar, and it grounded him in this strange new territory he found himself exploring.

“So,” she began casually, finally breaking the frustratingly comfortable silence, “What exactly do you do here? I’ve been wondering, so I was looking at everyone’s titles and you don’t seem to have one.”

No one had ever asked him that question before. He’d shown up one day four years ago and just kept showing up until they added him to the payroll. No one questioned what he did because none of them could get far enough in a conversation with him to ask without getting drowsy.

“I work. You know, sending emails, applying what they tell us to in the meetings, keeping our stats up.”

“Anything more specific than that?”

He took a very long, obnoxious slurp from his empty mug. He smacked his lips afterwards. “Yeah, I can get more specific.”

He didn’t. He said nothing more and just continued to sip from his mug. Joan shook her head a little and chuckled. “I’m not going to get a straight answer from you, am I?”

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

She threw her hands in the air. “Fine, don’t tell me. I’ll just keep pretending you’re doing what I like to think you’re doing.”

“And what’s that?”

She grinned a shit-eating grin. Her energy bent a little around the edges - she was being coy. “That you get paid to walk around and distract people. You purposely jam the copier, move the stuff on people’s desks, and trip over people to give yourself something to do. All on the clock, of course.”

His eyes widened a little, uncomfortable with how accurate her description was. He reminded himself of why he was here, sitting across this strange human in this strange situation - to work around her, not fight her. The break room was still his territory. There was nothing to panic about. 

He decided to match her energy. “Am I that obvious?”

“Just a little.” She took the last bite of her sandwich and began cleaning up her side of the table. “At my last job there was a guy like that. I’m pretty sure he did actually just get paid to walk around and be annoying. You remind me a lot of him, actually.” Her eyes widened and she floundered for a moment. “Not that you’re annoying! But you and him dress similarly and he never seemed to spend any time at his desk, going around and chatting people up. They always seemed dead after they talked to him.”

Another energy vampire, most likely. Most offices had one. He wondered if she’d caused as much trouble for that energy vampire as she had for him. Or had the other one found a way to drain her? What if the issue hadn’t been Joan this whole time, but with him?

“And what about you? Did he make you feel, uh, dead?” He danced around the word “drained,” not sure why he suddenly didn’t feel comfortable using it.

She tilted her head and studied him for a moment. She seemed to sense the importance of the question to him, so she took her time formulating the answer. The air around her got heavier. “No. I never did. He didn’t talk to me much, actually, not after my first few days there. I think he avoided me. He seemed … relieved, when I put in my two weeks.”

So it was her, then. That made him feel a little better. If she’d gotten the best of another energy vampire somewhere out there, then it proved he wasn’t inadequate - she was just abnormal. 

She’d grown a little somber at the mention of her old coworker being pleased she was gone. There were no more twists in her energy. It was all straightened out now and sunk in all directions, like ink dropped in water. This was refreshing. There were no disgustingly sweet sensations he had to ward against. 

The mug in his hands still held a bit of Joan in it, the happier version. Despite how much more comfortable it was for Colin now, it seemed wrong for the brightest energy in the room to come from an inanimate object instead of the living woman in front of him. 

“His loss, then.”

And just like that, the lovely morose cloud around her dissipated. He tensed up as a wave of appreciation washed over him. He started to regret cheering her up.

“Thank you.” She tapped her fingers against the table. “You’re actually not much like him, now that I think about it. He wasn’t funny at all.”

“You think I’m funny?”

Colin wasn’t sure what universe Joan could have come from if she thought he was funny, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t appreciate the compliment. The few times he’d attempted to use humor to drain his roommates had been complete failures. Well, not complete failures. They did find his jokes so unbearably unfunny that he was able to drain quite a bit of annoyance from them.

“Colin, I watched you move everything on Kim’s desk just enough for her to notice a change and not suspect someone had gone in and moved everything. She spent the rest of the day talking about fault lines and tectonic plates and how there could have been a minor earthquake that was just powerful enough to slightly move objects without disrupting everything else. That is hilarious.”

He laughed a little. He remembered Kim’s ridiculous earthquake theory. She’d had a very crazed, jittery energy about her then. It had been satisfying to drain, but not very filling. Burned itself out too quickly.

“Oh, yeah. Kim’s always been paranoid. I ‘borrowed’ her stapler once without telling her about it and she came up with this elaborate theory involving the janitor and a blackmarket office supply ring. HR had to get involved.”

Joan laughed loudly, the sound bouncing off the walls. He flinched, but still felt a sense of satisfaction at having made her laugh. 

The rest of lunch was pleasant - well, as pleasant as it could be for him. He shared more stories of him bothering the rest of the office, the strategies he used and how he came to develop them. Joan just listened, chuckling at each story with genuine amusement. The room was practically bursting with her energy - hazy and light and warm; the air was so thick it felt like his lungs were weighing him down. 

Colin thought it might be worth it, though. He’d never had an audience interested in him this long before. Not a conscious one, anyway. He was willing to tolerate the oppressive positivity in the room just to experience the novelty of having a pleasant conversation with a friend. She seemed genuinely entertained by his stories and his lengthy descriptions of the best ways to annoy everyone else in the office. There was no pity or a feigned sense of interest to be polite. She really did think he was funny!

Occasionally some of the other coworkers would pass by the breakroom or filter in to get some coffee. Each time, they seemed to do a double take when they saw Colin and Joan sitting together and hastily made their exit. Sometimes the subject of one of his stories would enter and Colin would quickly stop talking, Joan conspiratorially giggling as they both waited for them to leave. It was strange. He’d never strayed so far out of his comfort zone before and while the whole thing was deeply unnerving, it was a little thrilling, too. How many energy vampires could say they’d made a friend of one of their prey? And a human one, no less? How many of them could say anyone liked them? 

An alarm on her phone went off, abruptly interrupting Colin. Joan said it meant her lunch was over, so she packed away her things, thanked him for his stories, and went to the door to leave. Colin hadn’t realized he’d been talking that long. For the first time in his life, he’d lost track of the time. Even more strange, he was disappointed for it to be over.

She paused in the doorway and turned back. Soft swirls of … something, danced around her. He squinted, trying to identify what emotion the fuzzy tendrils could be. Appreciation? Congeniality? He was not well-versed in reading positive emotions. Why would he ever need to be?

“Just so you know, you’re always welcome to have lunch with me, Colin.”

The thought of having to eat more human food for the privilege of maintaining their friendship made his mouth dry up. As interesting as it had been, he could not do it again. 

“I’m actually not a big lunch eater. Plenty of sources say that intermittent fasting is a very effective weight loss strategy.”

He expected disappointment from her. Instead, those soft swirly things around her straightened out and hardened. Ah, he knew that one, that was determination. 

“I respect that. You’re still welcome to join, whether you eat or not.” 

That wasn’t all she wanted to say. He saw her bite the inside of her cheek. She was conflicted, trying to decide whether or not to voice whatever it was on the tip of her tongue.

Ultimately the determination beat the doubt. “I’d prefer if you kept having lunch with me. Last week it was so boring just sitting here in silence for an hour. I would love to have a lunch buddy, especially you.”

A lunch buddy. She wanted him - him! Especially him! - to be her lunch buddy, not to eat lunch, no, just so she wouldn’t be bored.

The total insanity of it, of asking an energy vampire of all creatures to quell her boredom, tipped him over the edge. He laughed harder than he could ever remember laughing, shutting his eyes as they unwillingly began to glow. 

As he laughed, he sensed awkwardness from her for once. Rejection. Embarrassment.

It was tempting. So tempting to try to drain it, just one last time. He’d caught her off guard - maybe this time he’d succeed and she wouldn’t block him out. He’d slip in quietly, drain just a little, so she wouldn’t notice, and run off knowing he’d finally had some small victory over her.

He opened his eyes, the glow having faded. Joan looked unbalanced, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Waiting for his answer. Expecting a no. Her energy was smoky - wispy, even. Self-doubt and embarrassment cloaked her fully, her earlier determination nowhere to be found.

He sighed. He’d gotten this far with his new plan for peace - he wasn’t going to abandon it now on an impulsive whim. Not when the mug in his hand hummed so pleasantly when he said, “Sorry, uh, yes - yes I’d like to keep having lunch with you, too.”

The dark cloak around her fell away with her relief. “Good. What was so funny, though?”

He shrugged. “Nothing, it’s just - if you told anyone else in this office you wanted me to be your ‘lunch buddy’ they’d think you’re crazy. Or a masochist.”

She considered him for a moment, a sad smile playing across her pale lips. “Their loss, then.”

She left the break room, taking most of her energy with her. Colin exhaled and tried not to dwell on her parting words. He’d said that same thing to her in an uncharacteristic attempt to comfort her. Was she trying to do the same for him? He shook his head. No, that was ridiculous. What could he possibly need comforting for? He was fine.

He’d have to go back to the office soon and start draining his other coworkers because by this point he was practically starving. For now though he was just going to sit, decompress, and think about how unexpectedly … nice his day had turned out. He’d come in initially expecting the worst, but here he was, unscathed with a new mug to call his own. He turned his mug in his hands, reading the words printed on it again. “World’s Okayest Coworker.” He looked at Joan’s empty seat. There was a hazy outline of her, a quickly fading remnant of her energy. He held the mug a little tighter. 

Actually, yes, he did feel okay.

Chapter Text

Colin turned another page of the newspaper. He’d read through it all already and had made note of any current events he thought might be worth remembering. Now he was just flipping the pages every few minutes to give the appearance of reading. His roommates were none the wiser, going about their usual business in the sitting room as he analyzed every emotion they felt.

It had been a few weeks since his first lunch with Joan. They’d had lunch together every day since and he was quite content with this new routine he’d established. She’d vent about how much work she was being assigned and what a nightmare it was trying to tackle the growing mountain of papers on her desk. Apparently payroll had been in the middle of switching systems when Biff left and there’d been quite a bit of data loss during the change. The recovery was time-consuming, and while he could tell she should have been more worried, she wasn’t. A little bit frustrated maybe, but not overwhelmed or upset. He wondered what it would take to set her off-balance. 

Since they’d been having lunch, it’d been getting much easier to endure her sun-shiney emotions, but there were times he still struggled to read her. He realized that if he was going to accept her for what she was, then he was going to have to gain a better understanding of pleasant emotions. He could recognize the basic ones like joy, love, and delighted surprise. Other, more complex emotions such as gratitude, loyalty, and inquisitiveness (to name a few) were harder for him to identify without some context clues to draw on. 

He’d taken to studying his roommates whenever they felt something positive. Tonight he studied Guillermo first, who was sitting on an ottoman in the corner of the room vigorously trying to get blood stains out of one of Nandor’s shirts with a Tide stick. Nandor was out tonight, probably hunting. Before Nandor left, Guillermo had asked him where he was going but he had simply said “vampire things. You wouldn’t understand, since… you know… you are not a vampire.” Guillermo had deflated like a slashed tire. The disappointment was delicious, if a little boring. Guillermo was often disappointed and Colin was growing tired of the taste. 

He stared at Guillermo and the air surrounding him intently, searching for any possible positive emotion. It wasn’t easy. There was a mountain of disappointment, frustration, despair.  All his emotions were all twisted and bundled up together like a ball of knotted wires. Untangling it was really annoying, but Colin kept at it, and before he knew it he’d reached the center of Guillermo’s awful, convoluted knot of negativity. Inside it there was something… warm. And bright. And shiny. It was unwavering and dense, but somehow brittle, too? It tasted like something that was left in the oven a little too long and had become burnt around the edges. After some thought, Colin eventually identified it as adoration. Obsession. Infatuation. Passion. It didn’t take being an energy vampire to figure out who all of that was directed toward.

Colin scoffed, then coughed a little to cover it. He’d assumed Guillermo had feelings for Nandor long before having confirmation of it. Why else would he stick with Nandor so long, despite the awful treatment familiars always received? Why else would he look after him through all his depressive spells? Most familiars did house chores, lured in victims, and not much beyond that. 

Colin turned his attention away from Guillermo, feeling proud for having successfully identified some complex positive emotions. His body rejected it, his stomach aching. He ignored it. He was going to have to build a tolerance to this if he wanted to keep having lunch with Joan.

He focused on Laszlo, who was softly playing a meandering tune on the piano. There was a lot of positive emotion there to read, most of it simple but strong. The most prominent one was a deep, abiding love for Nadja. It hovered around him in a hazy cloud, mixed with a healthy dose of lust and attraction. 

There was also something that kept appearing and disappearing so quickly that Colin struggled to discern it. It came in short, rhythmic bursts, floating in and out like a twinkling star. It was a few moments before Colin realized the bursts aligned perfectly with the melody Laszlo was improvising. Inspiration! That’s what it was. 

Eventually the little bursts of inspiration stopped appearing as Laszlo began playing a song he announced he had written decades prior. It was slow, melancholic, and it sounded remarkably familiar. 

Laszlo began singing.

“ I heard a man made a bulb in seventy nine

Working late, intent at turning it on bright

If it blew, didn't stop him trying to get it right- ”

“Wait, is that Video Killed the Radio Star?” Guillermo interrupted. 

Laszlo’s gaze didn’t stray from the piano keys as he continued playing. “I don’t know what that is so kindly shut the fuck up.”

He continued singing.

“ He took the credit for your gaslit city streets

Rewritten by machine on electricity

And now I understand the problems you can see

Oh oh

I met your children

Oh oh

What did you tell them?

Edison killed the lamplighters

Edison killed the lamplighters- ”

“Okay, yeah, that is definitely Video Killed the Radio Star.”

Laszlo slammed the keys and turned to face Guillermo. “All right, what is this thing that makes you think it’s acceptable to interrupt my elegy about how Thomas Edison’s invention tragically ended the lamplighter profession? It was a heavy blow for all their families, people starved!”

Guillermo nervously looked to Colin for support. He held the newspaper up higher and pretended they didn’t make eye contact.

Seeing that Colin would be no help, Guillermo cleared his throat and summoned up some courage. It was faint, but there.

“You know? ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’? It was a famous song from, like, the 80s.”

Laszlo scoffed. “You need to check your ears because this is a Cravensworth original! I once knew a retired lamplighter by the name of Charles Umbridge and he revealed to me all the lesser-known troubles wrought by the invention of the lightbulb, which inspired me to write the song you just interrupted.”

Guillermo looked like he wanted to fight him on it, maybe play the song for him, but decided it’d be more trouble than it was worth. His courage disappeared.

“Okay, then I guess I was wrong,” he said as he went back to scrubbing Nandor’s shirt.

Laszlo huffed with exasperation. “You’re damn right you’re wrong. Contradicting a vampire!” 

Laszlo shook his head and began playing a different song on the piano, something a little discordant. Irritation clouded his positive emotions, even the brief bursts of inspiration, making them more difficult to study independently. Colin spent a few more minutes trying to examine them but gave up as his own exhaustion finally hit him. Positive emotions were tiring.

He folded up his newspaper and set it on the arm of his chair. He’d done enough emotion-studying tonight anyway. He left the room without a word and headed to his room. They didn’t acknowledge him, Laszlo too focused on his song and Guillermo too focused on the bloodstain. A clap of thunder sounded as he crawled into bed. 

-

It had started sprinkling outside by the time Colin reached the office. The sky was dark and ominous, making the office look even more gray and washed out than it normally did. His coworkers moved listlessly, as if they could sense the impending storm and already dreaded it.

He basked in the malaise as he checked his email. Rainy days were usually slow days, and slow days meant there’d be plenty of boredom to harvest. It’d take very little effort on his part to drain his colleagues today.

He’d been about to “accidentally” forward a spam email to the entire office when Val briskly walked past his desk with a hostile energy about her. He’d been savoring the lethargic atmosphere so much her brief presence actually startled him.

It took him a few seconds, but he recognized that energy she had - she always felt it when she was about to ream someone out. He usually drained the embarrassment and shame afterward from whichever poor soul she verbally assaulted. It was convenient not having to do the dirty work.

Silently getting up from his desk, he stepped behind her and maintained enough distance that she wouldn’t notice. He quickly hid behind the water cooler as Val suddenly stopped. He peaked around to see who Val had decided to target this time and grimaced as he saw. It was Joan. Of course it had to be Joan.

Sensing the foreboding presence beside her, Joan swiveled her chair to face her and bristled immediately. Val must have had an especially severe look on her face. Colin couldn’t see it as she had her back turned to him, but he could imagine it easily. 

Val said something to Joan that Colin, tragically, could not hear. He could still see their energies from here, though. He flinched as he saw Joan was practically getting pelted with Val’s frenzied energies, her stress and insecurity coming down in large hail-like spikes. Val gestured to the paperwork on Joan’s desk. Ah. That’s what it was about. She’d noticed the backlog.

Joe suddenly appeared next to Colin and filled his bottle with water. He followed Colin’s gaze to Val. He grimaced.

“Val’s going in on the new girl, huh?”

He glanced at Joe. “Uh, yeah.” 

“It’s a shame,” he continued, “I fucked up my direct deposit after I changed banks and she was really nice about helping me fix it. Way nicer than she needed to be.”

Colin gave Joe a look that one might give a fly incessantly buzzing near your ear, then turned back. 

Joe didn’t take the hint. “Looks like Joan’s taking it pretty well, though.”

To an outside observer, yes, it looked like she was taking it well. Her face was blank, almost bored looking. But Colin knew better. He saw a great surge of defiance roar to life around her. It moved restlessly, desperately seeking to smother Val, but something suddenly pulled it back. Joan tensed up, then all the defiance and anger she felt folded in on itself, compacted and contained in a thick wall separating the two of them. She’d tamped it all down, somehow. Made a barrier.

Joan said something he couldn’t hear as she finally responded to Val’s reprimand. Her face still looked blank and disaffected, but it was genuine this time. She was as unbothered by Val’s attempts to demean her as she was by all of his own previous attempts to annoy her. It gratified him to see someone else become subject to one of Joan’s strange emotional powers. At least this time he was just a spectator.

Whatever Joan said to Val was not well-received. Val spit back a retort, her anger spiraling in Joan’s direction, but with a wall between them, any emotional attack against her made no contact. She’d sheltered herself. Colin had never seen anything like it. 

That’s not to say he’d never seen a human manipulate their own emotions before. Some humans, on a subconscious level, were capable of using their own energy as a weapon and inflicting it on others. It was never done with any sort of sophistication, as humans had little control or awareness of their own feelings, but it did happen. Val herself weaponized her anger quite often, especially when she wanted to undermine a subordinate. 

But he had never seen a human use their emotions defensively. At least not with any success. Her wall was impenetrable, built on bricks of contempt and rebellion. Any attack on it bounced back. It didn’t so much as shudder, even as Val’s frustration turned to rage. 

Joe stepped closer. “Woah. I have never seen Val look that pissed before. What do you think she said to her?”

Joan said something else, a slight twist to her lips. She was trying not to smirk. Val must have noticed because she stormed off afterward in the direction of Greg’s office, briefly glaring at Colin and Joe as she walked past. Joe scurried away. 

He headed toward Joan, trying and failing to wipe the grin off his face. Joan saw him and - incredibly - the wall she’d built crumbled, beams of pleasant energies bursting through it and annihilating every last bit of anger and righteous indignation. He squinted at the brightness.

Before Colin could even get a word out, Joan had placed her hand on his arm, grinning conspiratorially. “I think Val’s still watching me from George’s office, but I promise I’ll tell you everything at lunch.”

He looked at her hand on his arm and froze. He swallowed once and tried to find his words.

She noticed him tense and pulled her hand away. A few puffs of embarrassment appeared. She felt like she’d overstepped her bounds again.

Finally able to move again, he looked over at George’s office and sure enough, through the glass window he could see Val, emphatically gesturing in their direction as she spoke with him. She was right, they couldn’t talk now.

Still, though. He couldn’t just leave it at this. 

He bent down and leaned in closer, disrupting the small clouds of embarrassment. “Okay, but you should know that Val can’t stand bad grammar. Just in case you want to make her even angrier.”

She beamed. He didn’t wince at the brightness of her smile, not even a little. “I’ll keep that in mind, for all intensive purposes.”

He chuckled, then made his way back to his desk, basking in the trail of irritation Val had left behind. It tasted like defeat.

-

Lunchtime couldn’t seem to come soon enough. He swore it seemed like time was actually moving slower than it normally did just to spite him. He tried boring the other workers to pass the time, but his heart wasn’t in it. They were already so lethargic from the rainy-day atmosphere that trying to drain them any more felt almost greedy. 

Nothing new had happened with Val since the confrontation with Joan. After half an hour in George’s office she’d finally left it and retreated to hers, still cloaked in anger. It had been hours since then and she’d yet to emerge. George hadn’t come out of his office yet, either, so it was anyone’s guess what the consequences for inciting Val’s rage might be.

A rumble of thunder sounded just as 12:30 hit. He rushed to the break room and sat in the same chair he always did. His foot tapped impatiently as he waited for Joan to arrive. It was weird, being excited about something that didn’t involve draining someone. A good weird, he thought. Like her.

He felt her come in before he saw her. The temperature of the room suddenly went up and the air grew dense. He took a few deep breaths as she grabbed her lunch from the fridge and took her seat in front of him.

She laid her hands flat on the table. “Okay,” she said, “you ready?”

He leaned back in his chair and took a dry sip from his mug. “I guess.”

She rolled her eyes. “I appreciate the enthusiasm.”

He grinned against his mug. She started unpacking her lunch and rolled up her sleeves, which revealed a large number of band-aids covering her right arm. 

“I was working on running my reports when Val came up and immediately started complaining about the work on my desk. There wasn’t even any small talk, she just went straight into how I ‘wasn’t meeting deadlines’ and if it continued like this she’d have to ‘reevaluate my role in the company.’ 

“So I told her very clearly that I was working as fast as one person possibly could under the circumstances and she was welcome to let me go if she thought she could find a better fit. Which she can’t, of course, because I’m good at what I do and anybody else would have taken one look at that ridiculous pile of work on my desk and ran.

“And then she said something about how maybe if I ‘had a better work ethic none of this would be an issue.’ So I told her I would love to know what I could do to improve my work ethic and if she could please put it in writing and include the part where she said my job was at risk if I didn’t comply. That sent her over the edge and she walked off..” 

Joan shrugged and took a bite of her meal. “I don’t know why mid-level managers always feel like they have to make power plays. I mean, it’s an office job . It’s not like we’re dealing with life and death here. ”

Throughout her story he’d sensed nothing but calm from her. She was only telling him all this because he wanted to know. 

He swirled his mug, trying to put on a disaffected air. “But doesn’t it bother you being talked to like that? Didn’t it make you feel angry? Or humiliated?”

She snorted. “Humiliated? No. Why would I ever let her make me feel humiliated?”

She took another bite. “I was kind of angry at first, sure. Anyone would be if someone came at them that hard for no reason, but there’s no point letting yourself get worked up over somebody who wouldn’t care if you died tomorrow, you know? It’s just a job. I can always get another one.”

He imagined Joan packing her things and leaving, putting her plastic orchid back in her purse and never coming back again. Taking down all her sticky notes. Setting Chestnut’s photo face down. It bothered him how much that thought bothered him.

“Not that I plan on leaving anytime soon,” she hurriedly said. “But if Val were to actually make good on her threats, I wouldn’t let it bother me.”

And there it was, the crux of everything. She “wouldn’t let it bother her.” But how? How could a person consciously manage their own emotions, let alone in the face of an emotionally charged situation? She talked about it so casually that he wondered if she had any idea how impressive it really was.

“You’re actually the first person in this office to ever stand up to her. I don’t think anybody else here could just choose not to be upset about it.”

She hummed. “Then it was a long time coming, I guess.” She cocked her head. “You never stood up to her? You seemed to me like you wouldn’t let her bother you, either.”

“Besides purposely using bad grammar around her, not really. She doesn’t discipline me, though. I’ve pissed her off enough that she tries to keep her interactions with me to a minimum.”

She smiled. “That’s a good strategy, actually. You think if I drop the word ‘ain’t’ into my vocabulary the next time I see her she’ll have an aneurysm?”

“We can hope.”

She laughed. It still strained his eyes when he looked at the blinding glow she had whenever she laughed, but there were no spots in his vision and his head wasn’t pounding.

He tried to turn the conversation back to the confrontation with Val before they inevitably got sidetracked. “Still, I don’t think I understand how you can handle someone insulting you to your face and just… taking it. How do you not care?”

“Well, for one, I didn’t just take it, I called her bluff. And secondly…”

Her eyes dimmed. He couldn’t read thoughts, of course, but he could tell she was reliving a memory. “It wasn’t always that easy. I actually used to be really sensitive to stuff like that. But then I just - I decided - see, something happened and-”

She circled her hands in the air uselessly.  There was something else there - something secret and dark and locked away. She wanted to tell him, but she didn’t want him to know. 

She sighed. “Basically, in college I had a friend who turned out to be… not really a friend at all. After that I didn’t see any point in letting somebody get under my skin. Especially not someone who didn’t have my best interests at heart.”

It was killing him not to pry. He could tell that whatever story this was held the secret to her drain-resistant powers. But he could sense how tentatively she’d shared this information with him. If he kept pushing for more now she could block him out again and he still remembered just how unpleasant that had been the first time. He’d be patient, and he’d wait, and he’d eventually gain enough of her trust that she might tell him the rest of this story and he could finally have the answers he was so desperate for. 

As difficult as it was, he changed the subject. “That was a double negative. If Val had heard that she would have stroked out.”

Joan’s shoulders sunk in relief. She appreciated the subject change. “Don’t you mean would of? ”

He snorted, but didn’t comment. She finished her lunch in silence as he studied each little emotion of hers he could identify. There was a hollow and brittle vulnerability. There was gratitude, which swelled with warmth like a hot air balloon. There was still some left over spite from her conversation with Val, but just as she said, there were no longer any traces of anger. There was a sadness, too, at having mentioned her old friend, but that was quickly relegating itself to the background. Overall there was mostly just light - an easy calmness she wrapped herself in like a blanket. He wondered if she’d be surprised to know she did that. 

When she finally finished her meal, he looked at the clock and noticed they had much more time left than he’d expected. He’d even have enough time to start another conversation.

“Hey, Joan?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you know that Edison’s invention of the lightbulb actually destroyed the lamplighting business?”

“No, I did not.” She leaned forward. “Tell me more.”

-

It was pouring outside by the time he clocked out. The sky was incredibly dark and thunder came every few minutes. Colin grabbed his umbrella and headed for the elevators, wishing he’d brought a rain jacket or something. He wouldn’t get sick, but that still didn’t mean he enjoyed getting rained on.

Joan stepped up next to him, a red polka-dotted umbrella in her hand. The elevator had already filled up by the time they got there, so they waited for the next one. Normally Colin would try to squeeze his way in and create as much discomfort as possible, but Joan probably wouldn’t appreciate getting left behind and skipping a snack wouldn’t kill him, anyway.

“George called me into his office after lunch to hear my side of things, in case you were curious. He didn’t have much to say about it, but I don’t think anything’s going to come of this.”

Sounded about right. Nothing ever changed here. The same meetings, same arguments, same useless emails. It was comforting. Familiar.

He scratched at his cheek. “Probably not. She’ll fume for a while but she’ll eventually find some new favorite to single out and you won’t have to worry about it.”

The elevator door opened and they stepped inside. “Not that you’d worry anyway,” he said as he pressed the button for the ground floor.

She smiled, then itched at the bandages under her sleeve. She tried to be discreet about it, but he noticed.

“What happened?” he asked casually, nodding his head toward her arm.

“Oh, you know, bug bites.”

The air wavered. She was lying. 

“Really?”

“Yeah, I went for a walk and got totally eaten alive.”

Somehow that was true, but also… not. He raised a brow and stared at her, his skepticism palpable. She looked away after a few moments and fiddled with her sleeve. He turned back toward the elevator doors. She’d called herself his friend, once, in an email. Friends let friends have secrets, right?

Hell, he was an energy vampire. Not even human. Whatever she felt like she had to hide couldn’t compare.

The elevator doors opened and they stepped out. Just as they reached the front doors there was a violent clap of thunder and a few streaks of lightning appeared.

“It’s getting pretty bad out there,” she said. She looked at him, then outside, then at him again. “You take the bus, right?”

“Yup. Experts say that riding the bus can greatly reduce your carbon footprint.”

She made an expression that made it clear she didn’t believe for a second that he cared about his carbon footprint. He mostly rode the bus for the social aspect. Driving alone could mean driving hungry. Not to mention he didn’t have a license, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.

“What do experts say the risk of getting struck by lightning is while waiting for the bus?”

“Less than one in a million.”

She shook her head. “I don’t like those odds.”

She stepped outside, opened her umbrella, then gestured toward the parking lot. “C’mon, I’m driving you home. It’s too scary out here to wait for the bus.”

He always took the bus home. Always. She’d already disrupted his old routine in the office - this was too much. He held up his hands. “N-No, no - it’s fine, you don’t have to do that.” 

More thunder began rumbling ominously. She rolled her eyes. “See, that’s the universe telling you to take the offer.”

She started slowly walking away and motioned for him to follow, but he didn’t move. He was tired of change. Sure, not all of it was bad - he really liked having lunch with Joan - but it was exhausting trying to keep up with her. He felt drained.

There was another rumble of thunder, as if God himself was laughing at the irony of it. He looked up at the sky and glared. Joan’s car chirped as she unlocked it. She looked back at him, waiting. Her patience and welcoming energy lazily swam toward him, twisting in a way he interpreted as coaxing him to come. He sighed and acquiesced. 

As soon as he sat in the car, claustrophobia set in. She was excited that he’d accepted her offer and her aura was overwhelming. There was no escape in here - nothing but light and warmth. It felt like he was sitting inside of the sun. It didn’t matter how much of a tolerance he’d built over the past few weeks. This was far too much too soon. He groaned.

Joan frowned. “Colin?”

He rubbed at his head with his palm. It was pounding. “Could you crack a window?”

She did, then turned the air conditioning on to full blast. It helped a little.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just get car sick easily.”

“We haven’t started moving.”

“Really easily.”

Her confusion coupled with her concern dimmed her energy. He took a few deep breaths, trying to soak in the discomfort she felt without draining her. The atmosphere of the car was bearable now so he didn’t feel like he was going to puke anymore, thankfully. He wasn’t totally sure he was capable of vomiting but he really did not want to find out.

When he finally felt like himself again, he said nonchalantly, “Okay, let’s get going.”

“You’re sure? I don’t want you to get sick.”

“Just keep worrying about it and I won’t.”

Instead of questioning what that possibly could have meant, she handed her phone over to him to type his address into her gps app. He did and then they were on their way. She drove slowly and went easy on the turns for his benefit most likely. He kept his face close to the window and breathed as much fresh air as he could. He still wasn’t comfortable, but it was getting easier as they continued their ride.

She saw him leaning away from her against the window. “Sorry if I came off as pushy earlier. I didn’t think you could get carsick and it seemed wrong to let you sit in the rain when I could just drive you.”

“It’s fine.”

“I meant what I said a few weeks ago. If I’m too much, tell me. I can back off.”

It was a tempting offer. But … no. As much as his head ached and his stomach turned, he wasn’t going to let one bout of “car sickness” get the better of him and this weird little friendship they were developing. 

“Really, you’re fine. I’m just … not used to having a work friend.”

“That’s a shame. You make a great lunch buddy.”

He laughed weakly. They finally pulled up to his house. 

Joan’s eyes widened when she saw it. “ This is your house?” 

“Yup, that’s mi casa.”

She kept staring. He’d expected her to be a little impressed at its size, but instead she felt… dread. Fear, too. Her cheeks were flushed and her breathing quickened. There was a sense of urgency within her, but what she was so urgent to do, he couldn’t puzzle out.

 “Are you okay?” 

She swallowed. “I’m fine.” She wasn’t. “It’s just not what I was expecting. I imagined your house being a lot more understated. Not some giant, spooky Victorian mansion.”

“It’s Edwardian, actually.”

“Sorry, a giant, spooky, Edwardian mansion.”

“It’s a lot less spooky on the inside.” That wasn’t true. If anything, it was spookier. Despite Guillermo’s best efforts, dust and dried blood caked most of the walls and floors. 

She didn’t know that though, so he didn’t understand where the hell her fear was coming from. She wasn’t scared of Val, but she was scared of his house? It could maybe be classified as a little creepy, sure, especially in this weather, but she wasn’t just uncomfortable. She was genuinely afraid. 

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like how much his roommates’ fear of the Baron plagued the house and he definitely didn’t like the taste of her fear now. He rolled up his window and unlocked the passenger door, ready to leave. If he left now then she could go home. Hopefully the distance would make her feel like herself again and there wouldn’t be any trace of fear when she came into work tomorrow.

“I think I’m gonna head inside now. Thanks for the ride.” 

“Of course. Anytime. See you tomorrow, Colin.”

Despite how scared she was, he could tell she actually meant it. He stepped out of the car, opened his umbrella, and walked to his front door. He looked up at his house before he stepped inside. It wasn’t really that scary, was it?

Guillermo was sweeping the foyer when he entered. He checked his watch. “You’re home early.”

“I got a ride.”

Guillermo grinned. “Oh yeah? From who?” he asked.

“You know who,” he groaned. 

He’d told his roommates one day that he’d taken to having lunch with Joan. They were mostly apathetic to this development, but still vaguely supportive. Except for Laszlo, who’d assumed “having lunch” was just a euphemism for other activities and was immensely proud. Colin had initially tried correcting him but gave up when it became clear there was no convincing him that their relationship was strictly platonic. Colin tried savoring Laszlo’s pride, anyway. 

Colin walked past Guillermo, intending to go to his room to decompress before his roommates woke up, but he paused a moment.

“Guillermo, is this house scary to humans?”

He paused his sweeping. “Maybe kind of ominous but not scary. Why?”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing, just thought I’d ask.”

Guillermo could tell it was more than “nothing” but it wasn’t his place to ask, so he didn’t. Colin went to his room, sat on his bed, and stared at the wall for a while. He thought about what Joan’s house might look like. Or apartment, since he didn’t actually know what kind of place Joan lived in. He imagined she kept a lot of plants. She seemed the nurturing type. Maybe she even had a cat, one that looked like Chestnut. The walls were a warm cream color and the drapes were polka-dotted. She had a welcome mat in front of her door. 

He looked at his gray walls, his filing cabinet, and the sterile mirror and sink in the corner. Sometimes he wondered what it’d be like to host a human here. How would Joan fit in? Even in his imagination she seemed out of place, too cheery for the dingy basement he lived in.

He laid down. His head still pulsed painfully. Despite how fearful and uncomfortable she’d been by the end of the ride, he was still reeling from being so surrounded by her glowing, excited emotions. She was like … well, she was like a lightbulb. An obnoxiously bright one. So bright she could light up a whole street on her own. And he was a lamplighter, and someday she was going to kill him.

Except no, because dying was a stupid thing humans like Charles Umbridge did because they couldn’t adapt and he was better than that. He was going to come out of this stronger and more prepared for whatever Joan threw at him. He’d just gone through the worst of it and come out fine - nauseous and achy, but fine. 

If I’m too much, tell me. I’ll back off.

He didn’t want her to back off. He liked his mug and their lunches and how she cared enough about his well being to drive him home, even though he didn’t think even lightning could hurt him. As gross as her kindness was, not experiencing it was worse. He let out a shaky breath. 

Maybe he wasn’t a lamplighter at all. Maybe he was a moth.

Chapter Text

If pressed, Colin would admit that he was far more sentimental than the average energy vampire. It wasn’t uncommon for energy vampires to ingratiate themselves within a group of humans or  blood vampires, but it was rare for one to actually enjoy their company as more than a food source. Colin did view his roommates as more than food; they were ridiculous most of the time and never failed to get into trouble, but they had been his closest friends over the past century and he truly valued their time together.

Which is why he was now at the animal control center with Nandor, ready to free Laszlo from whatever cage he’d gotten himself locked up in. Even after Nandor’s explanation of what happened, he wasn’t sure how Laszlo had managed to get taken by the animal control workers in his bat form, but it was entertaining, nonetheless. This was what friends did. They hung out together and got each other out of jams. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d rescued him from anything, but he wasn’t as prone to ridiculousness as they were. 

Even with nearly complete access to their feelings, he still couldn’t tell how they viewed him. They weren’t quite sure, either. Some days the camaraderie was apparent - like that night in the sitting room, when he’d blown his top about Joan. They’d just sat there with a patience only centuries of living could cultivate and offered words of encouragement. It was rare for him to be the center of attention, and even rarer for his roommates not to mind it. Looking back, maybe it should have disgusted him how understanding they were. Energy vampires thrived on irritation, not inspiration. But he was a sentimental vampire, and he still thought about that night and how nice it was to be reassured by his friends. 

Some days his roommates seemed to almost hate him. Well, not hate. That was too strong a word. Dislike. They disliked his intentionally poor attempts at humor, his awkward timing, and his incessant need to drone on and on and on and on… He couldn’t blame them for it, of course. It would be unrealistic to expect the people he drained to always enjoy his company. Or at all.

He remembered Joan’s gray eyes staring into him as she said, “ ... I’m in good company. We can stop and appreciate the little things, can’t we?” 

Well, there were exceptions to every rule. Some people - one person - seemed determined to enjoy him.

Most days his roommates were indifferent to him. They tolerated his presence with some fuss, but he was always welcome on their adventures and their quiet nights inside whenever he chose to join them. He “came with the house,” after all. It would be rude to blatantly reject the person whose house you were squatting in. Maybe he should have minded the fact that, at least initially, he was only allowed to join the group out of their own sense of obligation, but he didn’t. He was lucky to have kept this friend group this long. 

Typically, when an energy vampire was able to land a few roommates to drain, they overdid it. They would be too tempted by how easy and accessible it was and drain their roommates for all they were worth. Their roommates - either human or vampire - would leave since there would be no reason to tolerate such a parasitic relationship. But Colin was sentimental, and these were the first friends he’d ever made, and he was careful. He drained only a little from each conversation. Just enough to keep himself sated. He enjoyed draining them (Nadja’s exasperation was especially delicious), but he wasn’t a glutton and he wouldn’t let his hunger ruin a good thing. All of the self-control he exerted when he spent time with Joan was proof enough of that.

Maybe if Laszlo had a little more self-control like him, or, even better, more sense , then he wouldn’t be in this mess. That’s not to say that Colin was unhappy with this development. He knew that once Nadja inevitably found out about this she would lord it over Laszlo’s head for the next few decades or so. He could already taste her frustration, but that couldn’t happen until they’d gotten him out of here.

He and Nandor were at the front doors of the animal control center. An invisible wall prevented them from entering. Neither of them bothered getting closer. Every vampire at some point in their life would inevitably try breaching the invisible wall that stood in every uninviting doorway. Any attempt to do it would come with an awful, cold sensation that shuddered through the rest of the body. NOT WELCOME , it said. 

“Can we come in?” he and Nandor asked in unison. 

The worker at the front desk looked at them, no doubt wondering why they bothered asking the question. “Yeah, come in.”

Colin felt the invisible wall dissipate. They both meandered inside and tried to affect a casual air. Neither of them were good at it. Nandor was too out of place and Colin was too, well, him. He looked at the bulletin board on the wall, most of it littered with missing pet posters. 

He pointed at one of the missing dog posters. “Isn't this the one that you ate last week?” he asked Nandor.

The utter offense Nandor felt was gratifying. “I didn't. I wouldn't .”

Before Colin could tease him anymore, another animal control worker walked in. “They’re not happy tonight, Bobby,” she said.

The other worker - Bobby - looked up. “Yeah, what's up?”

“I brought in a bat. A little fella, you gotta see this guy. Look at his face.” She pulled out her phone and showed him a picture as she chuckled. 

Bobby smiled. “This guy looks like a little English guy.”

“Yeah, he's a little British chap. Wait, wait, wait, let me blow him up there. You see something?”

Bobby’s jaw dropped comically. “No way. That is a bat's erect penis on that screen.” 

Colin and Nandor shared a knowing look. “Laszlo,” they said.

The two workers continued chattering about Laszlo. Colin heard them say something about giving him a rabies shot. He wasn’t sure what a rabies shot would do to a vampire, but it probably wouldn’t be good to find out.

Nandor approached the two with his hand outstretched, waving it around in what Colin assumed was an attempt at hypnosis. 

Bobby and whatever-her-name-was ignored him, too engrossed in their own conversation about bats to notice him. Colin only paid attention to a few snippets of what they were saying. He heard “... more bats coming in lately” and “... wasn’t hurt like the others.” He thought he heard one of them mutter “wings completely torn through.”

After a few seconds, Nandor dropped his arm in defeat.

“I don't think that worked,” Colin supplied matter-of-factly. 

“I know.”

“Not so hot at hypnotism, huh?” 

He could feel Nandor’s irritation growing, swelled up and ready to blow. “I'm fine at hypnotism; it's just you can't hypnotize a subject that doesn't want to do something that you want them to do.”

Just one more push and it’d send him over the edge.  “If the only time you can hypnotize someone is when you have them do something they want to do, then it's not really hypnotism, is it?”

Nandor lost it. He hissed, irritation having turned into outright anger. Instinct took over and Colin faced the challenge, hissing back as he drained Nandor’s fiery energy.

The two humans finally noticed them. It was a little hard to ignore two hissing men in the lobby. 

“Wait a minute, can we help you guys?”

Colin snapped out of it.  This was the human world. Humans did not hiss at people. Well, not the sane ones. 

He casually replied, “Uh, yeah. We're actually looking for a lost pet.” 

They didn’t mention the strange hissing, but they were disconcerted now. From the look in their eyes it seemed they thought that he and Nandor needed that rabies shot more than Laszlo did. The air was permeated with their apprehension. It was prickly and a little bit spicy, which paired well with Nandor’s aggravation.

“What kind of pet is it?”

“A normal one,” Nandor piped up, “Like, a bat.” 

“Oh, now, bats are illegal,” the woman said, even more on edge now than she was before.

Colin stepped in. “He said ‘cat,’ ma'am.” Good save.

She was still a little skeptical, but didn’t call him out. “Well, if you have any sort of missing animal, then you just need to fill out the required paperwork, and then we'll go have a look in the back for you.”

“Fine.” It was more than fine. Paperwork was practically the lifeblood of an energy vampire. It was common for energy vampires to choose careers centered around paperwork - DMV workers, tax preparers, mortgage brokers. Sweet, sweet bureaucracy. 

Colin spent the next ten minutes filling out forms. There was no point to it, obviously, as they couldn’t very well request to see a bat, but he filled out the forms with nonsense anyway. He pestered Bobby with questions about all the different kinds of paperwork they had. His eyes started to droop and Colin thought that maybe if he got him and the other lady unconscious, then they could just go back there and grab Laszlo themselves.

Nandor had been pacing the entire time Colin filled out paperwork and asked his questions. He had little patience for Colin’s draining attempts on a good day, and today was not a good day. Eventually Nandor ran out of the room without an explanation. Colin thought he sensed a flash of inspiration from him - an idea - so he gave Bobby a break and followed Nandor out. 

When he came out he couldn’t find Nandor at first. He spun in a circle and saw no one, but then sensed Nandor’s energy above him. He looked up and saw Nandor floating near the top of the building, scouring for a window. He watched on with little interest. He never understood the appeal of flying. Energy vampires could do it, but it expended a stupid amount of energy. There were hardly ever any occasions in an energy vampire's life that would justify flying, or doing anything that might expend energy rather than drain it.

Eventually, Nandor found an unlocked window. He briefly cheered at his own success and slipped inside. There were some frantic scuffling sounds from inside, then Nandor came back out, holding a bat delicately in his hands as he gently floated down to Colin.

“Laszlo, you are free now!” he announced with an almost childlike glee. “So be free!”

And then he threw the bat high into the air, but it made no attempt to fly. It just landed rather pathetically onto the asphalt with a small thud. It twitched a few moments in pain, then laid still. 

Colin bent down to examine it just as Guillermo finally made his way to them on his bike. Colin had forgotten he’d been making his way to them. He was panting. “What happened?”

“Laszlo is being a lazy asshole!” Nandor said as he gestured to the bat on the ground, but Colin sensed the concern laced beneath the insult.

Colin pushed the bat on its side. It was still living, but its painful wheezes made it clear it’d be better to put this thing out of its misery. It didn’t look anything like Laszlo - its fur was more brown than black, and it was a lot longer than Laszlo was. The bat’s body was a mess, puncture wounds covering it nearly head to toe. 

Colin clicked his tongue. “Yeah, I don’t think this is Laszlo. Look at him, he was already way more fucked up than Laszlo was.”

“Oh,” Guillermo breathed. “That’s sad, but good, right? Laszlo’s still up there?”

They all looked back up at the open window. Nandor held himself a little higher, chest puffed up a little. Colin saw another burst of inspiration erupt around him. 

“I have another idea,” he announced. And then in a quick flash of black smoke, he turned into a dog and ran back toward animal control. 

Guillermo looked at Colin, exhausted defeat written on his face. “This was, like, the third animal shelter I went to. And now Nandor’s a dog.”

Nandor scratched at the entrance doors of animal control until one of the workers let him in, who immediately put a leash around his neck. It was anyone’s guess what Nandor’s ultimate plan could have been, because it looked like he’d gotten himself captured on purpose. But that couldn’t be the plan, could it? That would be so insanely stupid, far beneath the “great” Nandor the Relentless.

Colin shrugged. “You’re the one who wanted to be a familiar. The job’s not supposed to be all puppies and rainbows.”

Guillermo’s hands clenched. “No, I wanted to be a vampire. Instead it’s all-” He threw his hands up. “-vampire dogs and sick bats!”

Guillermo rummaged around in his pockets until he pulled out his phone. “Fuck it, I’m calling Nadja. In the whole time it took me to get here you still haven’t rescued Laszlo.”

“In my defense, I wasn’t trying very hard.” 

Guillermo called Nadja, aggressively dialing each button on his flip phone. He quickly explained the situation to Nadja as Colin made his way back inside, ignoring the pathetic whimpering from the little bat on the ground. In less than an hour, Nadja had arrived, who immediately hypnotized Bobby for the door code and freed Laszlo from his animal prison. She freed Nandor too, who had apparently gotten himself captured intentionally.

Nadja’s anger was seething, radiating from her like heat off a stove. Colin was sure Laszlo was going to get burned, but with a few apologies and whispered promises from him, Nadja’s anger had simmered down to a detached acceptance of the man she’d married. Colin was disappointed she hadn’t maintained her anger, at least long enough for him to drain some of it, but Guillermo’s frustration at his master was a fine substitute. He fed well tonight. 

Once Laszlo and Nandor were freed - and the former had made his apologies - they all made their way out. They made it home before dawn, as they always did. 

The little bat they’d left behind was not so lucky. They had no way of knowing it, but the next morning its body was nowhere to be found - merely a small clump of burning ash left in its place as night turned to day. 

-

“So how was your weekend?”

They were in the breakroom. The rest of the room was empty, save for him and Joan. Occasionally other workers would filter in to grab coffee, but they kept their time there short. Avoiding him, he supposed. 

Joan was leaning against the counter sipping her coffee as she waited for his answer.

He shrugged. “Same old, same old.”  His weekends were typically filled with ridiculous misadventures with his roommates and last night hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary, so it wasn’t really a lie. He wondered how she’d react if he told her the truth - that he’d been at animal control trying to rescue his vampire roommate. Oh yeah, he had vampire roommates. And he was a vampire, too.

He’d been having more thoughts like that lately. Of what it might be like if he told her. It was ridiculous; his roommates must have been wearing off on him. He and Joan were work friends, sure, or “lunch buddies” as she would say. That didn’t mean she was interested in the more personal aspects of his life. There would be nothing to gain if she knew. And that’s assuming she would believe him or, even more amazingly, wasn’t horrified at it. 

When Guillermo had first become Nandor’s familiar and moved in, Colin had introduced himself and given a very long-winded explanation of what an energy vampire was. Guillermo hadn’t taken him seriously.

“Okay, but, it’s not like an energy vampire is an actual vampire. They’re just people that are really draining to be around. I mean, look at you, I’m supposed to think you’re a vampire?” 

Colin didn’t appreciate being doubted. He was just as much of a vampire as the bloodsuckers he lived with. Hell, they couldn’t even walk out in the sun without getting fried, so in his opinion he was a vampire and then some. So he continued to explain how energy vampires operated for the next ten minutes, draining Guillermo of his boredom until his legs gave out under him. Guillermo never questioned his status as a vampire ever again.

So if, for some unfathomable reason, Colin decided he’d tell Joan the truth about what he was, he knew how it’d go. 

He’d do it on one of their lunches, that way she’d already be sitting down. “I’ve got to tell you something important.” He’d pause. Then when he finally found his voice he’d say, “I’m an energy vampire.”

He could imagine her doubtful expression easily. “Maybe to the rest of the office, but not to me.”

“No, I mean I’m literally a vampire. I drain people’s energy.”

“Then how come you don’t drain me?”

“I don’t know. You’re different. I’ve tried to, but I can’t.”

And then she’d probably just smile as she always seemed to be doing and say, “Then I guess you’re not much of an energy vampire, hmm?”

Then maybe he’d do something drastic, like make his eyes glow or show her his reflection. Really make her look at it, at that half-dead looking thing that greeted him in the mirror every morning. She’d have to believe after that. 

Then she’d panic. Or freeze. Because supernatural creatures are not supposed to be real and they are not supposed to go to work everyday like they’re normal and they are especially not supposed to become someone’s “lunch buddy.” And he’d have ruined everything for… what, exactly? Why in the world would he ever tell her?

There was that furrow between her eyebrows again. He didn’t like it. “Colin? Where’d you go?” 

Right. How was his weekend? Same old, same old. “Sorry. How was yours?”

She shrugged and set down her mug. “It was fine. Went to the gym, worked out a little. Read some books.”

He sensed she wasn’t being entirely truthful again. Her energy wobbled when she’d said she went to the gym, but stilled when she said she worked out and read books. She’d been telling a lot more half-truths lately, but he didn’t mind it. Humans told half-truths and white lies all the time. Hell, he’d done it when she’d asked about his weekend, too.

“What did you read?” he asked as he took a sip from his mug. He frowned. The coffee tasted like coffee. Nothing more. Usually when he drank from the cup Joan had given him, coffee tasted like her. It was supposed to taste warm and mildly cheerful, but now it just tasted like shit. The mug must have lost its essence. Humans left pieces of themselves everywhere, but that didn’t mean those pieces stuck around. All energy faded away eventually. 

“Oh, uh, I read…” She watched him scrunch his nose up at his coffee. “What is it? You look like you sucked on a lemon.”

“Nothing. The coffee doesn’t taste right.”

“Hmm. It tastes fine to me.”

He wanted the mug to be a piece of her again, instead of this plain inanimate thing in his hand. All she’d have to do is hold it awhile. Maybe he could switch their mugs at some point and she’d end up drinking from his. They looked the same, the only difference being the text his had on one side, so it wouldn’t be too hard to accomplish.

He’d already had a half-formulated plan on switching their mugs before their other coworkers started filing into the break room. Kim had a sheet cake with her, Joe had streamers, and Mary had a plastic tablecloth in her hand.

Joan looked to Colin for an explanation. “What’s happening?” He shrugged.

Joe snorted. “See, I told you nobody reads the office newsletter but you, Kim.”

Kim huffed. “It is Rob’s birthday today and we’re throwing a little party for him. You’re welcome to join. Even though you didn’t contribute to the birthday fund.” She muttered the last part. 

Joan started helping the others decorate the room. Or rather, she tried. Kim and Mary, for reasons he could not discern seemed … bothered by her presence. Joan offered to help Mary lay out the tablecloth, but Mary rejected the offer, saying “No, no, I’m fine, thank you.” She kept her distance from Joan, even as she struggled to lay out the whole tablecloth by herself. Something similar happened with Kim. Joan started laying out paper plates and napkins and Kim kept stepping away from her, maintaining at least a few feet of distance at all times. Colin didn’t sense an intentional desire to push her away, but they were doing it, nonetheless. Only Joe seemed to welcome her, letting her help put up the streamers with him around the room. Colin was baffled. 

Not baffled enough to stop him from dumping his mug of coffee, refilling it with the fresh stuff, and switching their mugs, though. 

The rest of the office started filling up the room. Once everyone was in, George gave a little speech, complimenting Rob’s work, saying how much he was appreciated, etc, etc. The second George stopped talking, a line began forming for the cake. Colin cut to the front of the line, which pissed off Rob and everyone behind him deliciously. 

He cut himself a corner slice and set it on a plate. He didn’t intend to actually eat the cake, of course, but it was the perfect excuse to obnoxiously chew as loud as he could. He turned to get out of the line, but saw Joan, tragically standing at the end of it. The people in front of her were also maintaining their distance from her. Colin cut out another slice and set it on a separate plate.

“You can’t get seconds before everyone else gets one, Colin,” Rob said.

“No, just grabbing one for Joan,” he responded, not sure why he felt like justifying himself.

Rob rolled his eyes. “Of course, gotta take care of your work wife.” He scoffed and went to cut himself a slice as Colin blanked.

Work wife. He said work wife . Is that what she was? Did everybody else think that?

He thought about their lunches, their email chains, the rides home she sometimes gave him when the weather was bad. They left the building together every day side by side. She always sat next to him during the office meetings. They’d even started spending breaks together too, like just before the party started. Rob had noticed? Had the others? Is that why they all kept their distance from her? Her association with him?

He looked at her, patiently standing at the end of the line, unbothered. Their eyes met and she smiled, a halo of glowing warmth softly circling around her.

Shit, Rob was right.

Colin swallowed the lump in his throat and walked over to her, handing her the plate with the corner piece.

“Oh!” She lit up. “Thank you. Do you want to eat these here or at your desk?”

She hadn’t even asked if he wanted them to eat together. She’d just assumed he did. Of course she did. He was her work husband, apparently.

“My, uh, my desk.”

She nodded and made her way out of the crowded breakroom. She stopped to grab her mug of coffee first. To his satisfaction, she grabbed the wrong one. 

He went ahead and grabbed her actual mug, the one she left behind, intending to swap the mugs again later. It felt how he knew it would - warm and welcoming. But he didn’t want to keep her mug; he wanted his gift to be the one with her energy wrapped up in it.

When he reached his cubicle, Joan was there, leaning against his desk as she ate her slice of cake. He took his seat and set his own plate down. There was no point to him having the cake now. There was no one else around him but Joan. No one to annoy with his aggressive chewing. 

“Do they usually throw birthday parties here or is Rob a special case?”

He leaned back in his chair, settling his hands across his stomach. “Depends on the person. Usually if you’ve been here at least a year they throw one for you, unless you really don’t want it, like Derek. Although I remember Kim got real upset when they didn’t throw her a party. She’d only been here a month.”

Joan drank coffee from her mug - his mug . The text on it was facing away from her, so she remained oblivious. “Seems kind of silly to care so much about an office party. Do they usually throw one for you?”

He blinked once. “I… I don’t think they know when my birthday is, actually.” 

She frowned and there it was again, that sympathy she always seemed to hold for him. It infected the air between them. “Well, when is it? I’ll tell Kim to add it to the newsletter.”

He imagined his coworkers being forced to throw a birthday party for him, completely at his mercy. “October 21st.” 

She nodded once and set down her mug. The mug’s text now faced her. “Okay, I’ll remember that and get Kim - oh, shit, I think this is your mug, actually.”

He feigned mild surprise. “Whoops.”

“Here, I can dump this and clean it out,” she said as she went to grab the mug.

“Don’t worry about it, just give it back when you’re done. We’ll swap back,” he said, lifting his mug - her mug - into the air.

“You’re sure?”

He nodded. She smiled and started eating her cake again. Even without holding it, he could tell his plan had worked - his gift was now practically teeming with her energy. It buzzed pleasantly, like it was almost … happy to have been graced with her presence again. Not like his coworkers, who seemed put off by her. Was that really his fault? Guilt by association?

“Joan …,” he started, “I was talking to Rob earlier and he said something kind of weird.”

One of her brows raised in interest as she finished off her slice. 

“He called you my, uh- well, it’s kind of funny, actually - he called you my, my work wife. ”

She didn’t say anything, waiting for him to continue, but he had nothing more to say. He expected her to laugh or cringe, but it never happened. 

“Oh, is that it?” She set down her empty plate. “I don’t see what’s so weird about that. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

It was stupid how glad he was to hear her finally say it out loud. He tried to tamp that down. He was an energy vampire, for god’s sake, he was not supposed to get this excited about a human calling him a friend, regardless of how miraculous it was. 

“Well, yeah, but …” 

She kept staring into him, her perplexed emotions popping around him. She genuinely didn’t grasp the magnitude of what had happened here. How could she? She didn’t know what he was. How unnatural it was for someone like him to have a work friend, let alone a work wife . There was that urge again, to tell her the truth about him. Just to make her understand how strange this all was. He bit his tongue. 

“... but you’ve never had a work wife before, and you’re uncomfortable?” she finished. Her eyes widened. “Wait, you’re not in a relationship, are you? Because if you are I completely understand and I can tell Rob and everyone else to knock it off-”

“No, no,” he hurriedly corrected, “I just thought you might not like it.”

“Oh.” Suddenly her eyes refused to meet his. He saw bashfulness creep around her. It was tingly and fuzzy and not something he’d ever seen on her before. “... I do, though.”

“O-Oh,” he shakily said. “Uh, good. No need to harass Rob, then. Not that I’d stop you if you wanted to do that anyway.”

She laughed a little, the bashfulness dissipating. He considered bringing up the fact that everyone in the office - save Joe, for some reason - seemed to be uncomfortable being near her. Did she know that was his fault? Did he even want her to make that connection?

He chose not to say anything. He knew it would ruin the moment and the floating cloud of her happiness would disappear. It was strange - he still didn’t like seeing her happiness, not straight on - but it was far better than the alternative. Her sadness was always a bummer. 

She started eyeing his untouched slice of cake. He waited for her to ask for it, but she never did. He pushed the plate toward her. “I’m not hungry. You take it.”

She didn’t fight him on it like he expected her to. She smiled and took the cake gladly. “Still ‘fasting,’ huh?” 

“Yup.” With her, he practically was. He gained no energy from being with her. On the contrary, it was exhausting having conversations with someone he couldn’t (and wouldn’t) drain. 

It still felt worth it, though. Because as much as he didn’t want to admit it, he really was a sentimental vampire. A normal energy vampire would not make a friend they couldn’t drain, or have a preferred mug simply because it felt like someone else, or freely offer a slice of cake to someone since they had no use for it. 

He’d seen other, more normal energy vampires stagnate. They grew too comfortable in their chosen careers or living situations and were complacent. So satisfied and unwilling to try anything new, they’d lose touch with the times and their ability to drain at all. Then they’d fade away into nothing, starved to death. 

That would never be him. He’d kept his roommates for decades - an energy vampire record - and could always drain them whenever he needed. He switched jobs every five years or so, just to be sure he wasn’t getting too dependent on one group of people to drain. He was better than normal. He was adaptable.

And so was she. He’d learned a lot about her since they’d first met. She switched jobs every year or so, never content to stay in one place for too long. Every week she seemed to come in with new injuries (bandaids on her arms, a limp in her step, bruises on her collarbone), but she never acknowledged it or let it affect her mood. She had lots of different hobbies: researching history, collecting and selling antiques, and looking after her plants.  She only kept low-maintenance plants, saying she didn’t have the time for anything more serious than that. Always ready to pack up and leave.

He didn’t like thinking about her leaving, so he didn’t. Instead he offered to get her another cup of coffee - in the correct mug, this time - and made his way to the breakroom. He took a detour to her desk and slipped Biff’s picture of Chestnut in his back pocket. He doubted she’d miss it. He knew a better place to put it, anyway. 

Chapter Text

It was sunny outside today. Colin was working on his drawing of his roommates, trying to decide which background color would be most appropriate for his strange little crew. The sun’s glare on the monitor was affecting the colors, so he drew the blinds closed. Most of the rest of the office - the ones lucky enough to be seated next to a window - had drawn their blinds closed, as well. The office never looked right when the sun was out, painted in overpowering yellows and oranges. It clashed with the light grays of the cubicle walls and the mud brown of the carpet. 

When Colin peeked around his desk and looked down the corridor of cubicles, he saw nothing but the grays and muted blues he usually did, with one exception. One cubicle was lit up, a block of intense yellow light shining out of it. Someone hadn’t closed their blinds.

He looked at the carpet, analyzing this person’s silhouette cast against it. He noted the frizziness of the hair, snorted, and went back to his drawing. Of course it was her. He couldn’t imagine someone like her, all smiles and warm feelings and understanding, drawing the blinds. 

Well - she wasn’t all warm feelings. There was that darkness he sensed she carried with her, tucked away neatly behind everything else. It slipped through occasionally, when she told her half-truths about what she’d done over the weekend or how she’d managed to gain another injury of some sort. Or whenever she gave him a ride home and had to brave looking at the “spooky” Edwardian mansion he called home.

He’d invited her in once, when the weather was dangerous and she’d graciously offered to drive him home like he knew she would. He’d checked the weather the week before, knew the storm was coming, and had Guillermo deep clean the foyer, sitting room, and wherever else he thought she might be interested in going. “No traces of blood, viscera, or any other bodily fluids,” he’d told him. “I want this place spotless. No spooky shit.”

Guillermo had smiled in that half exasperated/half defeated way he did and told him that just wasn’t possible. Decades of blood and gore had seeped into the carpets, the walls, the floorboards. If he wanted a clean house he never should have invited vampires to live with him.

Then Laszlo had walked in. He asked what the hell they were talking about and Guillermo explained, pointing at all the stains riddled across the floors. Laszlo had listened, feigning disinterest, but Colin sensed a growing suspicion within him. He looked at Colin, one eyebrow raised. Colin thought he saw a small smirk on his face, but it was gone before he could be sure it was there in the first place. 

Laszlo barked at Guillermo to do as Colin Robinson asked, and would you clean out my and Nadja’s coffins while you’re at it, they’re getting dusty. Then he’d clapped Colin on the back, whispered in his ear that he knew he had it in him, then left. 

Out of a fearful respect for Laszlo, Guillermo had gone to work. He muttered things like “not your freakin’ familiar” and “maybe if you weren’t so messy…,” going silent whenever Laszlo or one of the other blood vampires got within earshot. He didn’t bother censoring himself for Colin. Guillermo knew he didn’t care. 

When he’d finished, the place looked… better. Guillermo had been right, of course, you could never fully rid the place of its stains, but it was a great improvement. The cobwebs were gone along with the spiders that made them. Many of the stains had been covered by strategic rug placement and whatever “spooky” stuff was left was much less noticeable. Yes, it was much more human-friendly.

They had been sitting in her car parked outside his house when he’d invited her in, something modern and slow playing on the radio. 

He’d tried to be casual about it. “Uh, you want to come inside for a bit? The storm’s still pretty bad to be driving in. We could wait it out. Forty-seven percent of weather-related crashes happen during rain.”

Her eyes looked through him and straight at the house. She’d attempted to smile politely, but her knuckles had gone white on the steering wheel and her jaw was clenched. He turned his head and looked at his house, trying to see whatever awful thing it was she must be seeing to make her feel so frightened. He saw nothing but a house that was perhaps a little imposing and some inappropriately shaped topiaries in front of it.

“I appreciate it, but I think I’ll be okay. It’s not that long a drive back to my place.”

He hated it. Hated the fear, the rejection, all of it. He didn’t want her to be afraid of his house - he was an energy vampire and he was always adapting in a changing world and the only constants were his house and his friends, and he’d had the house a lot longer than the friends. There had never been an invisible wall in his house’s doorway because it was his and he was always welcome. He wanted her to feel welcome, too. Not this nausea-inducing fear. He was sick of everyone around him being afraid. Literally, he felt ill. He couldn’t stop his friends from fearing the Baron, but he’d hoped he could at least make her feel more at ease than they did. 

Joan looked at expectantly. He’d been quiet too long. He was supposed to have stepped out of the car by now, but he hadn’t and now the vibes were awkward. That was nice, at least.

She forced her fingers to relax from their death grip. She tried evening out her breathing, too, but that intense, scrabbling urgency was still coiled around her. 

“Maybe another time,” she gently said. Her energy wobbled like it always did when she lied. He kind of wished he couldn’t notice it.

“Yeah, maybe another time. My place is pretty dirty, anyway.”

He pulled the inner door handle and made to leave. She smiled a little, that worried crease between her brows making an appearance again. “Gotta sweep the cobwebs, huh?”

He chuckled hollowly. “Yeah, something like that.”And then he’d gone in, looked at the newly-cleaned foyer, and kicked at one of the rugs until the corner flipped and revealed a dark red stain spread across the hardwood. He considered it for a few minutes, standing silently in the foyer with an empty briefcase in his hand. Then he just sighed, kicked the corner of the rug back over, and went to bed. 

That had been a few weeks ago. There had not been any bad weather since then, not enough to warrant getting a ride home, thankfully. Lots of cloudy days, but no rain. Today was the first day in a long time that the sun had come out totally unobscured. The forecast said it was going to be nothing but sun for the next week or so. He’d have to warn his roommates to be extra careful around the boarded-up windows, just to be safe.

Colin had finally settled on choosing a tan color for the background of his drawing when he overheard laughter coming from Joan’s cubicle. He peeked his head around again and saw Joe standing beside her desk making conversation. He held one of his hands up to his eyes to block out the sun. He motioned toward the window with his other hand - the blinds, probably. He made a “close” motion. The sunlight streaming into her cubicle dimmed a little. She must have closed the blinds a little. 

He dropped his hand and said something, then there was more laughter. Colin considered moving in closer and eavesdropping from behind the water cooler. And then he thought that that was a lot of effort when he knew he could just ask Joan about it on their break, so he went back to his drawing. He occasionally heard their laughter from across the room, trying to ignore it as best he could.

Eventually Joe left, passing Colin on his way back to his desk. He nodded once at Colin, an easy smile on his face as a dim excitement swept around him in lazy circles. Colin chanced one more glance at Joan’s cubicle and noticed that it had returned to its original brightness. She’d fully opened the blinds the moment Joe left. He huffed a laugh.

When break time rolled around, Joan walked to his desk, pulling a chair from a nearby unclaimed cubicle and setting it across from him. Sometimes they took their break at his desk, usually when Joan wasn’t in the mood to grab coffee. Occasionally the break room would be too full and Joan would suggest leaving, but everyone usually dispersed at their arrival and it wasn’t an issue.

Colin mindlessly clicked his mouse on nothing. “What were you and Joe-”

“Are you going to Charlie’s tonight?”

Surprised, he turned toward her. A brief burst of bashful energy appeared. She hadn’t meant to interrupt him.

“What?”

She huffed. “So they didn’t tell you either, huh?”

There it was yet again, that easy sympathy she felt for him. And some for herself, too. She felt camaraderie with him - a commonality she found comforting. Colin didn’t get it, but it was nice to see, anyway.

She swiveled her chair a little. “Charlie’s. It’s a bar not far from the freeway. Everyone’s going out for drinks after work. Joe just invited me. You want to come?”

He’d never been invited to drinks after work before. He knew his coworkers usually went out for drinks every couple months or so, but he’d never been able to figure out which bar it was they went to. They were usually very careful to not mention any specific details about their plans around him, not since he’d crashed a trivia night they attended once. So much delicious frustration when he got every answer correct. Nobody liked a know-it-all. Especially not one that insisted on expanding upon every answer with more useless facts.

Joan leaned a little closer, a gentle smile tugging at her lips. “I can drive. I’ll take it slow on the corners, too, so you don’t get carsick.”

Right. His “carsickness.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten “carsick” with her. His latest rides with her had been pleasant up until the end, when she inevitably panicked at the sight of his house. He was still miles away from learning to enjoy her cheerful energies, if that was even possible, but he could manage a close proximity with her easily now. 

“You always take it slow on the corners,” he finally responded. 

A blip of self-doubt appeared around her. “So… is that a no, or …?”

He blinked. “Oh, yeah, obviously I’m going. I’ve heard Derek’s a happy drunk. I wouldn’t want to miss that.”

She laughed. “Derek? Well, I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Then she glanced at his monitor and the warm energy she always wore around her fell away. In its place was something darker. Colder. That same darkness he saw whenever she drove him home, whenever she lied. A pit formed in Colin’s stomach. He struggled to identify the emotions, they flicked by so quickly. Revulsion? Resentment? Under normal circumstances these would be pleasant to drain, but coming from Joan this was disturbing. Where was her joy? Where was the bright aura he’d finally grown accustomed to?

Then she exhaled and all that darkness collapsed into itself, seemingly smothered by the light energy she usually had. It was intentional. She was willing the darkness away.

She still smiled, but there was a hard edge to it. “Who are they?”

He hesitated to answer, practically struck dumb. “My, uh, my roommates. That’s Laszlo, Nadja, Nandor, and, y’know, me.”

She nodded a bit, eyes wide. She stared at the drawing longer than he felt comfortable with. “Well, it’s a lovely picture. It’ll be great framed.”

Now he was even more confused. He could sense her hatred for the picture plain as day, simmering beneath the surface, but the air didn’t waver. There was no lie in her words. She really did think it was lovely. She also hated it.

Not quite sure how to interpret any of this, Colin simply thanked her. He deleted the tab with his drawing on it and slowly her cheerful demeanor reemerged, but she wasn’t there in the moment anymore. Her thoughts were somewhere else, tiptoeing around that darkness she usually kept locked away. 

When the break ended and she walked back to her desk, bathed in sunlight, Colin had a terrible feeling that something had irreparably changed. That camaraderie she’d felt with him only a few minutes earlier had been damaged, strained by some force he couldn’t even begin to grasp. 

He hoped she’d feel like herself again at Charlie’s.

-

Lunch had been quiet. She still smiled politely as they talked, but it was a great effort on her part to make it seem natural. Maybe if he hadn’t been an energy vampire, then he’d have been fooled, but he could see just how conflicted she really was. There was some shame, some apprehension, and a growing panic that threatened to engulf her. Her energy was all spikes and hard edges, even though she was desperately trying to stamp it down. He’d never seen her struggle to control her emotions like this before. He didn’t know she was even capable of losing control like this.

By the time the workday ended and she was driving them to the bar, she had not managed to recover any of her earlier brightness. If anything, it was worse. There was a tense energy in the air, tinged with something sour and bitter. He rolled down his window but it did nothing to help the bad taste in his mouth. When they’d finally reached the bar he couldn’t get out of the car fast enough.

Joan walked into the bar, taking her cloud of uneasy energy with her. Colin followed behind at a distance. Ropes of hostility moved around her in awkward jerks. He was so distracted by the odd, out-of-place emotion that he ran straight into the invisible wall blocking the entrance.

His bones rattled as a voice in him silently screamed, “ NOT WELCOME NOT WELCOME NOT WELCOME- ”

He jumped back with a yelp. It had been a very, very long time since he’d made the mistake of walking someplace he hadn't been invited into first. The cold shock of it made his teeth chatter as he struggled to pull himself together. He fucking hated that wall.

Joan was startled when she heard his small cry. She turned around and stood there in the entrance stock still, trying to assess what had just happened. He expected her to ask about it, but she made a strange expression he struggled deciphering instead. It was a mix of disappointment and sympathy. 

Her voice was flat. “Come on in, Colin.”

The wall disappeared, but he still hesitated at the doorway before walking in. Logically he knew the entrance was safe now, but his bones still remembered what had just happened, and his feet weren’t cooperating with him. Joan started walking deeper inside. She gestured with her head to follow behind. Braving the doorway, he complied, relieved to walk through with no issue. He brushed his hand against the doorjamb, reassuring himself that he was invited. He was welcome.

When they were finally inside, they were greeted with the sight of a very full bar. A surprising amount of their coworkers had actually shown up, either already seated with their drinks or mingling by the bar counter. Derek and Kim were in a corner together, something conspiratorial in the air surrounding them. Even from here Colin could tell the rumor had been true - Derek really was happier tipsy than sober.

Joe was already seated at a table. He had a half-empty beer bottle next to him. He beckoned them over once he saw them. When Joan took her seat next to him, bright blips of gratitude started flitting around him. They circled around him dizzyingly fast. Colin felt nauseous.

Joan smiled politely at him in greeting, but there wasn’t the same warmth there as there usually was. Her mind was still elsewhere - contemplating deep dark thoughts Colin had no hope of discerning. Joe frowned. Even him, the least perceptive person in the office, had somehow noticed Joan’s drastic dip in enthusiasm. His happy little blips started to disappear. Well, at least there was some silver lining to Joan’s attitude.

Joe began picking at his paper coaster, forming a small pile of paper scraps. “Have either of you been here before?”

Joan shook her head, eyes absently surveying the room.

“Nope,” Colin said, popping the ‘p’ sound, trying to ignore the dejected emotions of the woman next to him. “But maybe that’s for the best. Their sign out front said they got a B rating on their health inspection and most of those ratings are inflated to start. I’ve always considered being a health inspector as an alternative career path. The job security is good and the attention to detail required…”

And then Colin babbled on, watching with satisfaction as Joe’s eyes began to droop. This felt right. This was normal. This was something he could focus on, because if he kept having to look at the terrifying mess that was Joan’s emotions then he wasn’t sure how he’d be able to survive a whole night in her company. He couldn’t identify half the things she was feeling, even though he was an expert at identifying negative emotions. He didn’t dare give it a closer look, either. He had the sense that doing that would be akin to sticking your hand in a hornet’s nest. 

Now, ordinarily, whenever Colin was trying to drain someone and Joan happened to be present, she’d either quietly laugh at the situation at hand, or intervene, bringing life back into the conversation before letting him carry on with whatever boring thing he’d decided to drone on about. She never seemed to care too much that he liked bothering people. She never questioned why he did it, just accepted it as one of his “quirks” and moved on. Sometimes she liked hearing his strategies for annoying specific people. Those times were his favorite, when he could share his whole purpose in life with someone without being met with disdain. 

But tonight was different. It seemed like the more Colin talked the more the dark cloud around her grew. She watched as Joe blinked slower and slower, leaning deeper into his chair as Colin began explaining the many health and safety protocols one must understand to become a health inspector. Panic overtook her, and she turned toward Colin, eyes wide. For one fleeting moment it felt like they were back in her car sitting outside his house. There was that awful, desperate urgency he could never pin down the source of. She was seeing something terrible again. Except tonight she wasn’t looking at his house. She was just looking at him.

Then shame welled up within her, threatening to spill over. She shifted her gaze toward the bartender and let out a breath. “ God, I need a drink.” 

She quickly retreated to the bar. Some of their coworkers - Rob, Susan, and Mary - stepped aside once they saw her. Somehow even here in this crowded space, people were managing to avoid her. 

“Is she okay?” Joe asked as he shook himself awake. 

“I don’t know,” Colin said, eyes still trained on Joan. After a few moments of helplessly waving her arm, she’d finally managed to get the bartender’s attention. “She’s been in a bad mood.”

“Bad mood” didn’t come close to describing it. It was like she was tying herself into knots and then meticulously untangling herself, just to tie herself into more knots again. The only person he could remember seeing work themselves up this bad before was Guillermo. 

Joe nodded sagely, blinking hard. “She was fine this morning when we’d talked.”

“I don’t know what happened. One minute she’s laughing, and then she’s looking at me like I just killed her dog.”

“What’d you do? Start talking about ‘proper dental hygiene’ again? You probably offended her.”

He shook his head. “No, I’ve tried offending her before, and it doesn’t work. It happened when-”

Colin went silent as Joan headed back toward their table. She had a drink in hand, something fruity and colorful, a contrast to the black mood she was in. It wouldn’t cure the great ball of anxiety threatening to tear her apart, but he sensed it had softened some of her edges as she took her seat. 

“What are we talking about?”

“Expense reports,” Colin said.

She didn’t believe him, but she still playfully turned her nose up in distaste. He saw a glimpse of her for a moment, not the depressed copy that had driven him here. “So, when we’re at the office you’ll talk about anything and everything you can possibly think of, but when we’re out at a bar, you want to talk about work?”  

Grateful for a return to their normal teasing, Colin smiled. “You’re right, I shouldn’t be talking about work. How about I talk about the expense reports tomorrow during our scheduled work hours? Or maybe I could recite the employee handbook again?”

“Oh god,” she groaned. Her eyes sparkled with humor. “Are you trying to kill me?”

And then the brief moment of friendliness was already ruined. There was more horror now, and shame, and even - even heartache , of all things. All those feelings looked wrong on her, like an ill-fitting coat. Unflattering and uncomfortable. 

“Joan?” Joe said. “You okay? You look a little pale.”

She closed her eyes and let out a breath. Colin watched with fascination as she once again tried to smother the dark. The anxiousness, the fear, the sinister thing he couldn’t name. It clawed at her with a frenzy as she desperately tried taming it. This was beyond anything he’d ever seen before. She was fighting herself and losing.  

Joe hesitantly reached out a hand, worried by the panicked expression she was making. His hand hovered over Joan’s shoulder as he struggled to decide whether comforting her was appropriate or not. Then he looked over at Colin and pulled his hand back. He jerked his chin toward Joan, shooting Colin with a look of expectation. Ah. He wanted him to do something about this.

Colin didn’t know a single damn thing about comforting, especially when he couldn’t discern what the issue was to start with. It was something to do with his drawing, he knew. That’s what had started it all. 

Joe kept staring at him, looking at him like he had the power to fix this. He didn’t. He didn’t know what he was meant to do here. But she was struggling and Joe was refusing to do anything about it, so against his better judgment, he decided to try.

He steeled himself, then drained some of the fear spiraling around her in misshapen ellipses. He’d never drained fear before, thinking it’d taste awful. And he was right, because this tasted like bile. It was spicy and pointy and it sat wrong, like he’d swallowed some bees or something. The dark emotion he couldn’t name rumbled in the air ominously, seeming to dare him to take a bite of it. He steered clear of it. He quickly moved on to draining some of her anger. It seemed mostly directed at herself and a little at everything else, tinged with frustrated despair. It was bitter and wet and the taste rhymed with grief.

The drain only lasted a few seconds, but it seemed to work. Joan relaxed slightly. The crease between her brows softened and her posture lost some of its rigidity.

Then she stiffened and a beam of defiance appeared, just as he’d expected it would. She blocked him out like she’d always done in the past, and for the first time ever, he was actually glad to be shut out. Her defiance was bright and strong, stronger than all that other awful shit trying to consume her, even the darkest parts of it, the ones that scared him. He didn’t shield his eyes from it; he was proud.

She looked at him with surprise.

“Feel better?” he casually asked.

For a few moments she was silent, then she laughed slightly with disbelief. “You… yes, I do. A little.”

“It it a headache, or…?” Joe asked. He’d managed to create a small mountain of torn up paper from the coasters and was now trying to peel the label off of his beer bottle. 

“No, no. Nothing like that.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Nothing a drink can’t fix.”

To Colin’s lack of surprise, the air wavered with her lie. No drink could fix whatever the hell this was. Even with her recent victory over it, the darkness was coming back. 

He’d expected that. Guillermo frequently lost himself in his anxieties, uncertainties, disappointments, and other negative things Colin never bothered looking closer at. And every time Guillermo conquered it, without fail, it would come back. Sometimes Nandor or one of the other blood vampires would stand too close and something hostile would wake up in Guillermo and he’d excuse himself. Sometimes it happened when he toyed with the cross on the necklace he insisted on wearing. And sometimes it happened when he watched the sunset, which had always confused him. Why would anybody ever get angsty watching a sunset?

Some day, Colin knew Guillermo would explode. He’d been a doormat for ten years and it was going to be a disaster when that bundle of negative energies came undone. Colin was eager for that day to come, but he didn’t want to see that happen to Joan. She wasn’t meant to come apart at the seams like Guillermo inevitably would. 

Joe was eager to move on from the uncomfortable situation. He lifted his bottle to clink with Joan’s glass, but paused when he looked at Colin.  

He frowned. “Colin. Where’s your drink? C’mon, we’re at a bar, you gotta drink with us.”

He didn’t like drinking. The only drinks he could stomach were coffee and water and that was only due to decades of building up a tolerance for them. And even then, he only felt comfortable sipping at them. He’d never been able to work up the courage to take a full gulp. 

“They probably have coffee, too, Colin,” Joan said, the sympathy she usually felt for him returning. It floated uneasily between her anxiety, but it was strong and unwavering. 

“No,” he said, getting up, “I know exactly what I want.”

He had no intentions of actually drinking, but he needed a break from whatever the hell was happening to Joan. He headed toward the bartender and let out a breath, trying to shake off the fear he’d just consumed. Where was it even coming from? What was so disturbing about his drawing that’d send her into a full-blown crisis? It was just him and his roommates. No one else in the office who’d seen it was bothered by it. 

He ordered his drink from the bartender and ignored the judgmental look he got for his choice. He waited patiently, watching Joe and Joan chat on the other side of the room. He saw sympathy from Joe, cords of it tentatively moving against Joan’s erratic feelings. It did nothing to comfort her.

His spying was interrupted when he felt a hand clap onto his shoulder. He turned and to his surprise, there was Derek, holding a drink.

“So,” he said with uncharacteristic cheer, “have you two told HR yet?”

The strangely joyful expression on his face was disconcerting. “What?”

“HR. You’re supposed to register all inner-office relationships with HR. It’s right there in that manual you memorized.”

He didn’t have to ask who he was referring to. “We’re not dating.”

“ Really? Because anytime you two are together, it’s like the rest of us are third wheels.”

“We’re just friends. Wait, is - is that why you all avoid her? Because you think I’m dating her?”

Derek leaned against the counter. “I avoid her just as much as I avoid everybody else. Which isn’t easy, since she works right next to me.”

Colin wasn’t ready to go back to the table and brave the violent storm that was Joan’s emotional state again, so now was as good a time as any to get to the bottom of things. Especially if Derek was in a good enough mood to enlighten him.

“Yeah, but everybody else takes a step back when she’s around like she’s diseased. You keep your head to the ground, so you hear things. What does everybody else think of her?”

He sighed then downed half his drink. “She’s nice. And sweet. But she’s…” He shrugged. “Off. Kind of like you are. That’s why you two stick together, right? You’re both different.”

Colin was an energy vampire - he was inhuman. A predator. A mostly harmless predator in the grand scheme of things, but a predator nonetheless. Joan was human. A human, just like Derek and everyone else in their office. She was not “different.” Not in a way that should have mattered to any of them.

“No. No, we’re friends because…”

He petered off, just as the bartender returned with his drink. Colin absently accepted the drink, fingers strumming against the glass. Why were they friends? 

Derek’s brows raised. “Yeah?”

“... Because she decided we were.”

Derek snorted. “That’s it?”

“No, of course not, there’s more to it than that-” 

Colin stopped himself. It suddenly dawned on him just how ridiculous this conversation was. Why was he talking to Derek about his relationship with Joan? Especially when she was still sitting in the corner, struggling with emotions he could barely comprehend?

“Why am I talking to you? And why do you suddenly give a shit?”

He grinned. “I don’t. But Kim said she’d pay for my next drink if I found out what’s going on between you two. Which is nothing apparently.”

Colin glanced at Kim, who was trying - and failing - to look inconspicuous as she watched them from the back wall. If this was how bar night usually went, with his coworkers nosing into business that wasn’t theirs, then he hadn’t been missing out on anything the last few years.

“Don’t ask me why she cares,” Derek said as he finished his drink. “I think it’s some dumb conspiracy bullshit of hers, like usual. Seriously, though, what the hell are you waiting for? If she ‘decided’ you were friends then she had to have a reason. And she’s not stupid, so it must have been a good reason. She likes you. She picked you. So, what, you don’t like her?”

Colin narrowed his eyes. He did not like being prodded like this. “You really want that drink, don’t you?”

Derek snorted. “I don’t think she’ll hold up her end of the deal if I come back with nothing.”

Colin was about to tell him he was just going to have to pay for his own damn drink and walk away, but instead he said, “I’m not … not interested.”

Derek groaned. “Oh, c’mon man, make up your mind. You dated the most pitiful person I’ve ever met, but this one you’re not sure about?”

Evie. He was talking about Evie. Dating her had been easy. They were both the same kind of animal and nothing ever needed to be explained between them. It’d been nice, being understood, up until their relationship had turned parasitic. In hindsight, he should have seen it coming. She was an emotional vampire - she took and she took and she didn’t do leftovers. And he was, try as he might not to be, a sentimental vampire. He’d been all too comfortable playing chivalrous and letting her take what she needed. What would that look like, if he dated a human? A human who never expected anything from him but friendship?

Colin’s voice was cold. He was upset now, but didn’t know why. “This is different. She’s my friend. Evie wasn’t. ”

Deciding that he was sick of this conversation and the turn it had taken, he walked away. He sensed amusement from Derek as he left, but ignored it and took his seat next to Joan.

Joe laughed. “Is that a Shirley Temple you have there?”

Joan ignored him, leaning closer to Colin. Her terrible cloud of doom and gloom invaded his senses unpleasantly. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so bothered by it, since negative emotions were his bread and butter, but it still tasted wrong on her. 

Joan tried to sound cheerful. “So? Is Derek a happy drunk?” 

They both looked over at Derek, who was talking to Kim now. Colin scoffed. “Yeah, he is. And a really annoying one, too.”

She chuckled. “Got a taste of your own medicine?”

He took a sip from his Shirley Temple and immediately regretted it. He grimaced. “Yeah, and it sucks.”

She laughed again, a full-blown laugh, and it was like sunlight breaking through a storm. He knew this was temporary, that this was just the eye of the storm, but that didn’t make him appreciate it any less. 

“Okay, c’mon, it’s time,” Joe said, raising his bottle. Joan raised her glass and so did Colin, each of them clinking their drinks together. He was tempted to ruin the moment and “accidentally” spill his drink all over Joe, but he wasn’t willing to risk ruining Joan’s short-lived happiness.

The next hour was spent talking. They talked about nothing: office drama, recent movies they’d seen, and whatever else was appropriate to talk about at a bar with your coworkers. Joan would start spiraling deeper into her thoughts and try to play it off, but Colin always noticed. He’d drain her of some of it, and then she’d fight back against him, and her defiance would boost her spirits a bit. And then it’d start again. Spiraling. Draining. Fighting. Repeat. It was exhausting, but Colin didn’t know what else he could do. He desperately wanted to ask her what was wrong, what he could do to help, what he’d done wrong, but Joe was here and he was scared of upsetting her further anyway.

An hour and a half went by. He was starving and there was nothing he could do about it. Anytime he tried to drain Joe, Joan would inexplicably get antsy and he’d have to back off. He was making do with the bits and pieces of emotions he was gleaning from her, but they tasted awful and, even worse, weren’t filling. It was like he was trying to subsist on nothing but burnt crumbs.

He was about to walk over to Derek and Kim and spill his drink on them instead just to get a rise out of them and have a decent meal when his phone pinged. He sighed when he saw the message. 

Vampiric Council Emergency Meeting ASAP (As Soon As Possible): All essential and non-essential members expected to be in attendance. Formal garb not required. 

Normally he was glad to attend a council meeting, which were needlessly dull. He didn’t attend the regular meetings too often, since he didn’t like anything taking him away from roomie time. He was only on the council to start with since the bylaws required a local vampire be a member and energy vampires weren’t exactly known for rocking the boat, so he’d been asked to join. This was the first time he’d actually been disappointed to see he had a meeting to go to because tonight he was with Joan and he still hadn’t figured out how to fix her.

He had to go though. Delay too long and they’d start sending the ravens, which would be very difficult to explain to a room full of drunks.

“Hey, Joan? My, uh - book club is having an emergency meeting and I have to go. Could you drop me off there instead of my house?”

“Your book club is having an emergency meeting,” she repeated, words dripping with disbelief. 

“Yes. We’re reading Little Women and someone skipped ahead to when Beth dies. They’re inconsolable.”

She wanted to laugh, but didn’t. She didn’t ask him what the truth was - because of course she knew that wasn’t the truth - and instead stood and pulled out her car keys.

“Well, Joe, this was nice. Thank you again for inviting us.”

He smiled. “Of course. Sorry you didn’t get invited earlier. I don’t know why everybody’s so weird about you guys.”

Her expression didn’t change, but Colin saw that she felt sad again, hearing that. She looked at Joe’s small pile of shredded paper dejectedly. Colin glared at him. She already felt bad enough before, you idiot.

“It’s fine. It’s not their fault,” she said knowingly as she walked toward the door.

He followed her out. The air had gotten colder since they’d first arrived. They walked to her car in silence, her distress still festering right at the surface. When they reached her car he made a drinking motion with his hand. 

“Are you good to drive?” 

She nodded. “We were there for a while and I didn’t drink much. I’m good now. Where exactly is this ‘book club’ of yours meeting?”

He told her the address and they got in her car. When they finally got going, they didn’t speak for a while. There was nothing to listen to but the sound of the air conditioning whistling and their own thoughts, which, considering the circumstances, was a terrible thing. With nothing to distract her she was losing herself again.

Colin intended to break the silence with something normal, but his instinct to make things awkward got the better of him.

“You hated my drawing, didn’t you?”

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Her tone was even. Careful. “What are you talking about?”

“Earlier, when you saw my drawing of my roommates. You said you liked it, but you’ve been upset ever since.”

She was quiet for a while before she responded. “I don’t hate your drawing. It’s complicated.”

He sighed. “You hate my drawing, you hate my house…” he muttered. 

She stiffened. “I don’t hate-” The air wavered.

“You’re lying.”

She was getting angry now. Good. He preferred her anger to her despair. “How do you know? I didn’t even finish.”

Because the air moves when you lie. “You have a tell.”

“Oh yeah, what’s my tell?”

“You don’t tell somebody what their tell is, you keep that to yourself so you can keep taking advantage of it.”

“Is that what you want to do? Take advantage?” It seemed like she was talking to herself as much as she was to him, the anger turning inward.

“What? No, I just … wanted to know what I did to upset you.”

They arrived. She pulled into the parking lot and turned off the car. She turned toward him, the anger ebbing away into guilt and frustration. She looked so tired. Her skin was washed out and her eyes were dull. 

“It’s not anything you did. But I know too much now and I can’t unknow it and it was easy to pretend before but now I can’t and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this!”

He didn’t say anything. She sounded like him, that day in the sitting room when he’d unloaded on his roommates, overwhelmed and at a crossroads. 

She looked away from him. “It’s too much,” she whispered. 

Of course it’s too much , he thought. You’ve always been too much. That’s why we’re friends. No one else ever has enough of themselves, but you do.

He wanted to tell her. Tell her what he was, that he knew there was something strange haunting her because he could see it, that he’d been trying to cure her of it all night to no avail. He wanted to tell her that he was more strange than whatever this thing tearing her apart was. That if she’d just explain it to him, why she lied so much, why she was so frightened of his house and his drawing and even of him tonight, then he could take it from her, if she’d let him. He’d share the load. 

Before he could stop himself, he started talking. “I know it’s too much. I can feel it. Joan, I’m-”

He went quiet when he realized she wasn’t listening. Her eyes, which had gotten impossibly big, were trained on something behind him. Colin followed her gaze and saw Paul, one of the heads of the vampiric council, walking into the entrance. He’d opted not to wear the ceremonial robes, but he still wore a dark cloak around him. One of his familiars followed him inside. 

“Joan?”

It was like he wasn’t there. She kept staring at the entrance, her face flushed and her breaths coming in quicker. She was frozen to the spot, stiff as a corpse. 

“Joan.”

She looked at him and what he saw behind her eyes frightened him. The horrible, horrible urgency had returned in full force. It was wild and hateful and violent. Something in him clicked and he finally found the word he’d been looking for, the name for that terrible, dark thing in her he couldn’t identify before. The undercurrent to it all. 

Bloodlust.

He’d never seen it on a human before. He’d only ever seen it on his roommates, and it looked different in them. It was understated, a slightly restless emotion that mostly hid in the background of their other emotions. In Joan it was different. It was all-consuming. She seemed more animal than any of them at that moment. An absurd thought appeared from somewhere deep inside him, and it spoke in the same voice he heard at the bar when he’d tried to walk in uninvited.

Predator . 

“Who is that?” she said, her voice lower than he’d ever heard it.

He couldn’t speak. 

“Is he part of your ‘book club’?”

He nodded.

All day she’d been conflicted. Her emotions had been tangled, warring with each other as she desperately tried to reign in what he now knew was bloodlust. The conflict was gone the moment she’d seen Paul. She’d reconciled with herself, made some kind of crucial decision. The fear, the shame, the despair, it had coalesced into one monstrous thing: purpose. 

He frantically pulled at the inner door handle, fully prepared to climb out the window if it didn’t open. “I-I really need to, uh, get to - get to my book club now.” 

 “Colin?”

Deep into the maelstrom of her emotions he saw a small light flickering. He honed in on it, his life preserver in a raging sea. It was tiny, nearly imperceptible, but even still he could recognize it. It was concern. Concern for him.

“How often do you come to these meetings?” she said, her concern growing. The light flickered again. There was doubt now.

“Not often. They meet every Wednesday.” She kept looking at him. “But I only really go to the emergency meetings.”

She was relieved. The light snuffed out.

“Good.”

He finally got the door open. Normally he’d thank her for the ride or say he’d see her tomorrow, but this time he just left without a word. He walked into the building quickly, his hands shaking. He frantically pressed the elevator button down. 

Predator, he thought again. 

One stronger than me.

Chapter Text

Colin was still shaking by the time he’d entered the meeting room, a large room with pillars, candles, and a low-hanging mist no one had ever quite managed to locate the source of. Most of the other vampires had already arrived and were awkwardly waiting for the final members to show up. The slightly uncomfortable energy in the air should have calmed him, but it did little to ease the chill in his bones.

What had happened in the car with Joan - He’d never felt like that before. Helpless. Vulnerable. It was too similar to how his roommates’ victims felt right before they died. He preferred when his roommates went out to hunt. Having to feel their meals’ utter terror through the walls of his house was uncomfortable. It was usually short-lived, since his roommates weren’t ones to prolong the inevitable, but it still left a bad taste in his mouth. 

He still didn’t know where Joan’s feelings had come from. He’d seen glimpses of it from time to time, but he’d never seen it awoken so fully in her before. It’d been like watching a dam break. First there were leaks and cracks in the foundation. She’d plugged the holes as best she could, but the cracks had been getting bigger and the water was coming fast. She’d been getting more and more desperate, frantically trying to keep it contained, and then it all fell apart and burst at once. The moment she’d seen Paul, it’d drowned her, and the Joan he’d known was lost. 

The meeting started just as the last few stragglers arrived. Tilda, the head of the vampiric council, stepped forward. Her energy was always a bit stilted, unwavering, and dense. There was a reason she was the head of them all. No one else’s energies came close to evoking the level of authority hers did. Ordinarily it was intimidating to feel, but right now Colin found it comforting, like an anchor in a raging sea. Something solid to ground him. 

She held her head high. “Thank you all for coming on such short notice. You don’t have a choice, of course, but it’s still much appreciated. Most of you already know why we’re meeting here today, but for those that don’t: we have recently received some rather… alarming reports regarding some of our local vampires.”

She paused, looking around the room. Whether she was pausing for dramatic effect or simply to let the words sit, Colin wasn’t sure. 

“They’re dead,” she said flatly. “Theo the Reckless, Garth the Pontificator, Trevor, Collector of Bones, and far too many others for me to name. All either missing or burnt in their own backyards at daybreak.”

Her words were met with silence. The other council members wore stony expressions, but Colin felt a collective shudder move through the room. 

Tilda continued. “Each of their familiars reported leaving the house to do their chores, or jobs, or whatever other human things they decided to do, and when they returned there were mounds of ash left out in the yard, dressed up in burnt clothing. Their masters. Dead. The boards on their windows were missing as if they’d been pried off. The coffins were broken, some valuables and keepsakes were gone, and the rooms were in worse shape than they left them. Furniture flipped over, broken banisters, things of that nature. One familiar reported her master spontaneously bursting into ash. Apparently she’d thought it’d been a morbid joke at first and dusted what was left of him.”

“What’s doing this?” Danny asked. “Werewolves? Witches?”

“We don’t know,” Tilda said. “After investigation, the wraiths haven’t found any specific leads and the gargoyles have been no help, either. The attacks don’t align with the cycle of the moon and werewolves aren’t known for leaving our corpses out in the daylight. Our truce with them remains until any proof should arise of their involvement.”

Evan crossed her arms. “You said that valuables were missing, right? Why would whatever’s hunting us bother stealing curios? Danny’s suggestion could be right. Witches steal semen; why not whatever else they can get their hands on?”

Colin was well-versed in the ways of witches, due mostly to the fact that Nadja hated them and was always eager to expound upon their perverse ways of living. Sometimes, he’d find a way to bring witches into the conversation just so she would go on one of her long anti-witch speeches Laszlo hated hearing so much.

Glad to actually have a reason to put his knowledge on this to use, Colin spoke. “Witches steal semen for its life-extending properties and to maintain their youth. They don’t need to steal our valuables. They can magic up pretty much anything they need besides semen. It’s interesting actually, see, witches are technically human but-”

“I don’t think the witches would be stupid enough to start a war with us, either,” Brad interrupted. “Coffins have been broken into. It’s hunting us, lurking in the day, ready to break into our homes and drag us out into the light. That’s not witches. That’s a slayer. ”

Everyone stiffened. Colin could have sworn the dust particles in the room froze for a moment, seemingly just as startled by the mention of that word as the rest of them were.

Tilda bared her teeth. “We haven’t seen one of those in decades. There’s no need to incite a panic, Brad, not before we’re sure of what’s truly going on.”

“Oh, come on, what else could it be? Dozens of vampires are missing or dead. And whatever’s doing it is clearly intelligent. It’s doing this in the day and prying boards off of windows. This isn’t some mindless werewolf or a deranged witch, this is premeditated. It's picking us off one house at a time.”

Paul stepped forward. “There aren’t any other supernaturals being targeted, right? Just vampires?”

Tilda nodded, eyes still dangerously locked on Brad’s.

“Then maybe Brad’s right,” Paul said, “We still don’t know what the motive is for all this. If it’s just our kind that’s dying, then it could be a slayer. It’s in their blood, isn’t it?”

Tilda sighed. “I still don’t think we should be entertaining this, but yes, from what I can remember they all came from Helsing. They don’t need to hunt to survive like we do, but their urge to slay is as strong as our urge to feed. It’d be impossible for them to resist it.”

The image of Joan’s gray eyes, usually so friendly and bright, suddenly darkened with thoughts of violence emerged in Colin’s mind. His jaw clenched as he willed the thought away. He didn’t want to think about that. 

Danny growled. “A slayer. How the hell do we even kill one?”

“ Can we kill one?” Evan asked.

Brad snorted. “Of course we can. We’ve got Van Helsing’s dick in a jar somewhere around here. They can die.”

“They die in the usual ways,” Tilda said, her voice loud. “Same as any other human. But the time for theorizing is over. We need to decide what action to take. I propose we set curfews for familiars. No wandering outside in the day, not if something is out there waiting for them to leave. Sending out patrols, too, would be good. Perhaps we can catch whatever this is in the act.”

“How do you expect us to vote on the appropriate action to take if you won’t even admit what’s really the cause of all this?” Brad hissed.

Tilda’s eyes flashed. “Watch your tone. ”

The conversation devolved into hissing between the two, their agitated energies clashing against each other. It wasn’t uncommon for fights to break out amongst the council members, though it was unusual for someone to pick a fight with Tilda. Colin credited it to the awful atmosphere of fear in the room. They were all frightened, worried that whatever was hunting vampires would come for them next, ending their centuries of existence. The fear permeated the air and weighed it down, coating the walls and the floors. There was no escaping it. It was everywhere.

The air was so thick with fear it was getting difficult for Colin to manage his breaths. He clenched and unclenched his hands, wishing he had something to hold. His eyes briefly met Paul’s and suddenly he felt sick. He hastily excused himself and fled to the hall, Tilda and Brad still bickering. 

The stone corridors were dark, lit up with nothing but LED torches. The air was dry and musty, but it was far better than in the meeting room. He paced the floor, listening to the steady rhythm his shoes made against the stone. 

There was too much all at once. There were missing vampires - dead vampires - some bursting into ash with no explanation and others left to burn in the daylight in their own yards. And then there was Joan, the strangest, most terrifying human he’d ever met. He’d seen in her both the brightest and darkest energies he’d ever felt in a human and he couldn’t comprehend how one person could be so contradictory. There was the Baron, too, who was becoming increasingly more insistent and threatening by the night. His roommates were frightened of failing to meet the Baron’s expectations. Joan was frightened of herself. And Colin was frightened by it all. 

He spent the rest of the council meeting pacing the hall. He knew Tilda and the others were unlikely to care about his absence. When the meeting ended and they all left the room in perfect single file they floated right past him. He followed them out, keeping his distance. They were all still paranoid and it was making him nauseous. Colin made a mental note to instruct Guillermo to check the boards on their windows, to make sure there was no chance of them being pried off from the outside. He wouldn’t tell him what it was for - there was already enough panic infecting the house, he didn’t need to pile on even more.

When he left the building he looked to the spot Joan had parked her car before, breathing a sigh of relief when he saw it was empty. Of course it was, but there was still an uneasy feeling in his gut as he called for a taxi. He spent the ride home halfheartedly draining the driver, hoping it’d settle his nervous stomach. It didn’t.

The next Monday when he came into work, he avoided Joan’s cubicle. It was perhaps a bit cowardly, and for all he knew the weekend had softened her, distanced her from whatever it was that was trying to snuff out her goodness from the inside. But he was still afraid, worried he might look in her eyes and see something terrible again, so he went to his desk and hid from whatever dark energies she may have brought with her today. 

He knew she would come and greet him at some point, so he bided his time reading emails, rearranging the office supplies on his desk, and occasionally leaving his cubicle to bother one of his coworkers. He sneezed without covering his mouth, sharpened his pencils obnoxiously loud, and bumped into a pile of paperwork sitting precariously on the edge of Mary’s desk. The papers flew everywhere and Mary sighed, leaning down to pick them up. A resigned disappointment flowed down her shoulders, dripping onto the floor into an even more depressing puddle. She set the papers to rights on the other side of her desk - the side farthest from him.

By the time lunch rolled around, Joan still hadn’t sought him out, not even for their morning break. Deciding that he’d stalled enough, he took a deep breath and headed for her desk. Maybe it would be fine. Maybe what happened in the car that night was a one-off, and that strange feeling she had -

bloodlust

- would be absent. He would sit in the breakroom and she’d talk about her weekend, telling the white lies she always did, maybe sporting some new minor injuries, and he’d pretend not to notice. 

He walked past Derek and saw Joan’s cubicle unoccupied. Had she gone to the breakroom, then? Without him?

“She called out,” Derek said gruffly. 

 “Why?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Colin started to wonder if he’d imagined Derek in the bar, teasing and probing about him and Joan. It would have fascinated him how a little alcohol could transform a person so completely if he wasn’t so concerned about the situation at hand. Joan, the ever-punctual model worker, had called out. She’d never done that before. It could be argued that she should have done it before, like when she had come in with a sprained wrist and she couldn’t type without flinching. Or the day she had stumbled in so tired she could barely make it through lunch without falling asleep at the table. 

So if she’d decided today was the day to call out - the first workday after something awful woke up in her and wouldn’t be put to rest - then something was terribly, terribly wrong.

He headed to the breakroom like he normally would for lunch, trying to ignore the dreadful feeling welling up in him. He’d known that what he’d seen that night in the bar had been bad, but he’d still hoped she’d find a way to rally and walk in that morning with nothing but a smile and an aura of warmth like she usually did. He’d been uneasy before about seeing her today. He hadn’t anticipated just how much more uneasy he’d be if he didn’t see her.

Lunch ended up being a lonely affair. At first he’d tried sitting in the breakroom alone anyway, just to maintain the ritual, but without her there really wasn’t a point to it. He was just sitting in an empty room, his hunger slowly growing and gnawing at him with nothing to distract him from it. It had only been a few minutes before he left the breakroom and began feeding on everyone else. It was the first lunch in weeks he’d spent not starving himself, since Joan wasn’t there chipping away at his energy stores with her presence. It should have satisfied him to finally get to actually drain someone for lunch, but he still found himself wishing she was there instead, hunger be damned.

He spent the rest of the day the same way he always had. He asked too many questions in the midday meeting, stole Derek’s favorite pen, and rearranged the office supply closet so no one could find what they were looking for. It was just like how it’d been before he’d met Joan, except… now there was no one to conspiratorially laugh as he switched the decaf and regular pots of coffee. No one taking the seat next to him in the meetings. No gray eyes lighting up as he said hello. When he peeked over his cubicle wall, he didn’t see a frizzy-haired woman across the way. The emptiness made his chest sore.

Huh. Who knew energy vampires could get lonely?

She was missing the next day, too. 

Upon seeing her cubicle empty again, Colin immediately pivoted toward George’s office. He’d asked him where Joan was, was she sick, did she quit, where was she? 

George had told him she called out sick with the flu and they weren’t sure when she was coming back. Colin found that answer wholly satisfying. There was something much stranger and darker than the flu at play here.

“I’m sure she’ll come back as soon as she feels well enough to, Colin,” he’d said in an annoyingly pitying tone. 

Colin’s upper lip curled. He still found pity to be distasteful, too cloying and sour. He turned away from George and marched back to his own desk. 

She wasn’t really sick. Sure, theoretically she could be telling George the truth, but if she didn’t call out after any of her previous injuries then he doubted something as banal as the flu would stop her from coming in. It was the - 

Just say it, coward, BLOODLUST

- violent urgency he still got shivers thinking about, the thing that made her blood pump faster and her breaths quicker. The all-consuming thing he hadn’t been willing to drain. 

He noticed his leg bobbing and placed his hand on his knee to steady it. Ordinarily, Colin had no trouble keeping a level head. Even on the misadventures he’d frequently get into with his roommates, he’d almost always stayed calm. Energy vampires tended to have passive dispositions. They were immortal, practically invincible (to his knowledge) observers who could just as easily integrate themselves in the human world as the supernatural one. When your entire existence hinges on being frustratingly boring, you become difficult to phase.

Which meant he wasn’t used to panicking like this, not for this long, but for weeks on end his roommates had been plotting, trying to find a way to appease the Baron. At any time the Baron could make good on his threats to kill his roommates, assuming the thing they’d last discussed at the vampiric council meeting didn’t kill them first. And now Joan was gone, the shadow in her having finally consumed her. 

Of course she called out , he thought bitterly, it swallowed her whole. There’s no more Joan left at all. 

There’d been too many changes all at once, that’s what it was. He took pride in his ability to stay calm, to adapt, to rise to the occasion, whatever that occasion may be, but it felt like everything was falling apart now and he couldn’t fix any of it. Not for the first time, he found himself wanting to go back to the status quo, before the Baron took residence in his attic without so much as thank you. He never invited him in. His roommates may have invited him, but he was NOT WELCOME at all.  

Colin looked out over his hunting grounds. He listened to the sounds of idle chatter and the clicking of keyboards. On the other side of the room Val was chewing someone out. Joe was getting a drink from the water cooler. Kim was speeding down the aisles between the cubicles, a box of files in her arms. 

They were constant, at least. 

He leaned back in his chair. He took a deep breath, despite having no need for air. As far as he was concerned, the lungs in his chest were just for show. But it still helped steady him just the tiniest bit. 

Deciding that panicking was useless, he told himself to wait for tomorrow. If she was quitting, then she’d have quit already. She wasn’t like him, she didn’t stall. She had no patience for it. So if she hadn’t quit yet, then that meant she had every intention of coming back. She’d come back, and if she was still buried under all that awful shit she had been the last time he’d seen her, then he’d dig her out. He’d be ready this time. 

Colin spent the rest of the day anxiously draining the office, frequently passing by Joan’s desk, hoping she would magically materialize in her cubicle. He got the sense the rest of his coworkers could tell her absence disturbed him. They kept shooting him wry looks every time he passed by her desk. He ignored them and held his mug a little tighter, letting its echoes of Joan’s energy sink into him. 

Wednesday came and Joan had not.

The sight of her empty cubicle deepened the pit in his stomach. George said she was still sick.

He resigned himself to another day without Joan. He drained the rest of the office like normal, but thoughts of her lurked in the back of his mind. He thought about where she was right now. Was she at home, resting in bed, treating the flu she claimed to have? Or was she still struggling like she had at the bar, head in her hands, inconceivably savage feelings plaguing her mind? 

He’d been thinking a lot about the source of those feelings the past few days. He’d even gone so far as to dedicate some of his time at work googling potential causes. He found nothing. All of his attempts to research possible reasons for abrupt feelings of violence led him to articles concerning psychopathy and other mental illnesses. He knew Joan, though, and of course she wasn’t a psychopath. The sympathy he sensed she felt for him was too genuine. 

Which meant it must be something beyond the typical, and even not so typical, human ailments. It had to be supernatural. 

He’d been heading to the supply closet to get more staples when he’d come to that realization. He stopped in the middle of the room, rolling the thought of it over again, feeling it out. Yes, that seemed right. She was human, of course, but being human didn’t disqualify you from being subjected to supernatural ailments. 

Something supernatural must have taken root in her. It made sense - She was, inexplicably, undrainable to him. Her coworkers were uncomfortable around her, as if she was infected. She had strange, seemingly random contempt for things he couldn’t understand, like his house and his drawing. She always came in wearing bandages or gauze or even a splint, once. And, most bizarrely of all, she didn’t find his company unpleasant.

Was it possession? A curse, maybe? 

An inheritance.

He didn’t know where that last thought came from, but he knew he didn’t want to follow it. The implications of it made him feel a little queasy, so instead he continued his trek to the supply closet, grabbing far more staples than he’d probably ever need. His thoughts drifted into safer territory, like what new sounds he could make to piss off George.

Ultimately he decided on whistling. Colin quietly whistled “Cotton Eyed Joe” the rest of the day, getting louder whenever George was within earshot. He focused on the familiar melody, trying to drown out the voice telling him he might already know the truth about Joan.

When he finally made it back home, the sun was still out. For the past few days, upon arriving home he would circle the house, checking the windows to make sure the wooden planks still held. Guillermo had been checking too, upon his instruction, but Colin found he still couldn’t ease his nerves without checking the windows himself. There’d been no subsequent meetings or updates concerning the thing killing vampires, so he’d keep being cautious for as long as it’d take. 

Everything looked to be how it always had, planks secured, old vines creeping into the woodwork, except… he sensed a great ball of guilt and terror emanating from one of the topiaries.

He slowly stalked toward the frightened topiary, eyes scanning the rest of the backyard. He heard something that sounded like panting coming from the greenery and a rhythmic crinkling sound.  

He walked around it, seeing Guillermo crouched behind it, hyperventilating into a brown paper bag. His panicked aura swelled and deflated with every breath. Colin had seen Guillermo break down countless times, him being a naturally anxious person, but this was on another level.

Colin approached him with his hands in his pockets, playing with a piece of lint. “What’s goin’ on?”

Guillermo looked up at him and began to wring the bag in his hands. He was sweating profusely, voice shaking as he said, “I didn’t - it was an accident, okay? You have to believe that I would never do it on purpose.”

“Okay, sure, now what’d you do?”

He grimaced. “I opened the door and, the Baron, he-”

He started hyperventilating again and brought the bag back to his lips. Colin stiffened. He tried to see if he could still sense the auras of his roommates back in the house, but he sensed nothing. Were they too far to feel, or had the Baron finally given up on them and done as he’d promised should they fail to conquer the New World?

Annoyed and starting to panic, Colin snatched the bag out of Guillermo’s hands. “What are you talking about?”

“The Baron - he was in the foyer. I didn’t think he would be, because it was daytime and everyone’s always asleep then, y’know? I thought he was in the attic. But I’d just come back from getting groceries and I opened the door and he-” Guillermo was near tears by this point. “The sun! It was daytime and I’d opened the door too wide and now…”

Colin didn’t say anything. Guillermo swallowed. His voice sounded small. “He burned up. Just burst into flames, right there. He’s dead, Colin Robinson.”

A few moments passed in silence. Nothing could be heard except the sounds of leaves rustling with the wind and Guillermo’s quick breaths. 

Guillermo rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes, then looked up at Colin. “I’m totally fucked, aren’t I?”

Colin still said nothing.

And then he smiled.

A disbelieving chuckle escaped him. “He’s dead. The Baron’s dead.”

Guillermo slowly nodded, eyebrows knitted with confusion. “Why do you sound happy about it?”

Colin didn’t respond. Dropping Guillermo’s brown paper bag on the ground, he walked away and headed toward the house’s front door, still smiling.

The Baron was dead. One major problem in his life had been solved in the blink of an eye, with nothing but the mistimed opening of a door. Sure, there was still an unidentified monster out there and Joan was MIA, but at least the Baron was out of his hair. Figuratively, that is.

When he walked into the foyer, feeling lighter than he had in months, he saw the Baron’s corpse lying on one of the rugs. It took the form of a large mound of ash, burnt, crumbly limbs making it appear even bulkier. Colin was briefly taken aback. He’d never seen a vampire’s corpse before. There was no blood or gore like there was with humans, but it was still gruesome to look at. Is that what the familiars of the dead vampires had come home to? This is what they saw lying in their yards?

He approached the corpse, bending down to get a closer look with morbid fascination. He scanned the pile of ash for any recognizable features, eventually finding what he thought looked reminiscent of a badly burnt face. It was hard to tell, but Colin thought he could make out the Baron’s high cheekbones. 

“Man, that’s totally embarrassing, isn’t it? Getting done in by a human? And not just a human, a familiar.”

Would there be more dignity in dying at the hands of a slayer?

He heard the sounds of his roommates arguing in the sitting room. When he entered the room he was struck by their distress. It was frantic, scratching at the walls and repeatedly colliding with itself. It tasted sharp and metallic and kind of hurt to taste, like licking a knife. He smacked his lips with distaste. 

“This is your stupid familiar’s fault, Nandor. I knew he was going to fuck us over at some point, I knew it!”

Suppressing a growl, Nandor said, “We wanted to kill the Baron anyway, remember? I don’t see what the big deal is. It was an accident, the Baron’s dead, and now we’ve got what we wanted.”

“The big deal is that your familiar killed a vampire, Nandor. And not just any vampire, the Baron! That’s enough to execute him,” Laszlo said, lying on the sofa. 

A spike of panic shot through Nandor. “What are we talking about, execution? Psh. No one knows what happened, we’ll just hold a funeral in his honor and nobody has to be executed. He can be buried next to the pond. With the froggies and the ducks.”

Nadja hissed with frustration. “If we don’t report what happened and the council finds out, we are dead. ”

“But you heard Laszlo! They’ll kill Guillermo!”

“So?” Nadja screeched.

Colin drained some of their anger, eyes glowing a bit as he did so. Finally noticing his presence, they all turned toward him.

“Oh, hello, Colin Robinson. As you can see, everything has gone to shit,” Laszlo said. 

“Yeah, I saw. I didn’t think the Baron could get any crispier but that pile of dust back there is proving me wrong.” 

Nadja’s hands curled, claw-like. “Now is not the time for jokes! Can you get through this idiot’s skull and make him understand that we have to turn Guillermo over to the council?”

Nandor looked at him, a pleading energy reaching out to him. It made him think of the first time Joan gave him a ride home, when her aura practically pulled at him, coaxing him into following her into the car. 

They probably should turn Guillermo in to the council, Colin thought. Nadja was right. If the council somehow found out they’d known about the Baron’s death and didn’t report it, there would naturally be some questions. They would have a very large target on their back, especially considering how high alert the council was now that there was something out there killing vampires left and right.

Right. There were vampires dying in the daylight, burned up into nothing. Some even burst into ash with no warning.

“Actually… I might have an idea.”

Laszlo sat up, intrigued.

Colin settled into his unofficially assigned seat, crossing his legs. They all looked at him expectantly. He said nothing, just waited and waited and waited …

Nadja huffed.  “Ugh, Colin Robinson, what? What is this idea you have?”

He smiled, savoring Nadja’s impatience. “I heard through the grapevine that a few vampires have recently passed. Spontaneous combustion, or something like that, anyway. Vampires just exploding into dust.” He emphasized his point by wiggling his fingers in the air, imitating the implosion of a dust cloud. “We’ll just say that’s what happened to him. No biggie.”

A few beats passed. “Other vampires are dead?” Laszlo said, voice uncharacteristically quiet.

Colin nodded. Maybe he should have dropped that information with a little more tact, but it was trivial compared to the full truth. There was no way in hell he was telling them about how the other vampires had died. The biggest source of their fear had just died and even now he could start to feel the original essence of the house - calm, detached, boring - return. He wasn’t ruining that atmosphere now with the truth.

Nadja sat down next to Laszlo, hands fisted in her skirt. “Why don’t we know about this sooner? Is it witches? It’s witches, isn’t it, it’s always witches!”

Colin shrugged. “No idea what it is, but as far as the council is concerned, it got us too. Right, Nandor?

Nandor’s eyes were blank for a few moments as he processed Colin’s news. He blinked a few times as he came back to himself. “Right. Yes, the Baron exploded and Guillermo was nowhere near the house when it happened. He was out getting Tide sticks and human groceries.”

“Are we safe?” Nadja wondered aloud. “What’s the cause? What if we blow up into dust?”

“I’m sure the council is working on it,” Colin said. His roommates didn’t know that he was on the council. He preferred it that way. If they knew, he was sure they’d be hounding him for information about the meetings, or expecting him to actually attend them. He didn’t need or want that kind of attention from them

Laszlo slapped his hands on his knees and stood up, smothering his own nerves under a flood of confidence and pure will. Like Colin, he was typically more difficult to phase. “Alright then, it’s decided. Colin, since this was your idea you will tell the council of what's become of the Baron and tonight we will bury him by the pond. Gizmo will dig a plot for the Baron. And Nadja and I will focus on not exploding.”

The rest agreed, though an uneasiness remained in the air. Laszlo and Najda left the room followed by Nandor who shot him one look of appreciation for intervening. Then Colin sat in silence. 

He bided his time reading the newspaper, waiting for night to fall. He focused on the energies of his roommates moving throughout the house. Their fear was quickly fading and the almost bored listlessness that came with being immortal was growing. The Baron was dead; they were free.

When dusk fell, Colin went to the backyard and found Guillermo still having a panic attack behind the topiary. He told him about the plan to lie to the council, threw a shovel into his hands, and told him to get diggin’. Guillermo asked him why he hadn’t told him about the plan sooner, instead of letting him worry himself sick for the last few hours. Colin shrugged. He’d been having a nice night, quietly reading his newspaper as his roommates slowly began to relax. 

The funeral started just as the first stars came out. Guillermo had quickly finished burying the Baron (he had plenty of experience burying bodies) and the others had changed into more elaborate, darker outfits. Colin remained in his standard sweater and khaki pants. They each took turns speaking about the Baron, his influence, and his surprising proficiency in the bedroom.

As the others spoke, Colin heard a rustling sound above him. When he looked up he saw a raven, head tilted down at him. Its eyes had a knowing shine to them. It tapped its claw against the branch it was sitting on then tilted its head back in a beckoning motion. Ah, a council raven. He was being summoned.

It was Wednesday, the day of the week the regular meetings were held. He never attended those, so it was… concerning, that they’d choose to actually summon him for this one. They forgoed texting him, too, and went straight to the ravens. This must be serious, then.

Did they already know what had happened to the Baron, somehow? How could they? It had only happened a few hours ago, and no ravens had shown up before now that could have relayed the information back to them. 

As Nadja began singing a funeral song she knew from her homeland, Colin took a few small steps toward Guillermo. The raven moved from side to side on his branch with impatience. 

Nadja’s warbling voice nearly drowned Colin’s out. “Hey, can you drive me to the business center on Quincy? It’s kind of an emergency.”

Guillermo, hands crossed in front of him in respect, looked confused. “ Now? What about the funeral?”

Nadja’s singing suddenly became unbearably loud as she reached what Colin assumed was the end of the song, except no, she kept going, somehow getting even louder than before. Put off, the raven screeched once and flew off into the night. 

“I don’t think they’ll notice.”

Shrugging, Guillermo pulled his car keys out of his pocket and quietly walked away, Colin following close behind. Guillermo asked him what they were leaving for, but Colin pretended not to hear him. If even his roommates didn’t know he was part of the vampiric council, then there was no way in hell he was telling Guillermo of all people.

The car ride was quiet, awkward, and comforting. Guillermo was still nervous, his anxiety twisting around him in narrow orbitals. It was the same kind of nervousness he always had instead of the pure terror he felt earlier, and Colin was grateful for the return to an emotion he’d always enjoyed draining. 

When they reached the building, Colin quickly left the car and headed for the entrance, hoping that whatever this meeting was about didn’t involve the Baron. He was going to have to lie to them about what happened anyway, but he didn’t think it’d have to happen tonight.

“Wait,” he heard Guillermo cry out, “How long are you going to be?”

He kept walking. “Why? Got anything better to do?”

Then he was in the elevator, shuffling his feet a little nervously as the muzak played. When the doors opened and he made his way through the dusty, stone corridors a rank smell invaded his nose. It was musty and coppery, like an old penny dipped in motor oil. As he was considering what that smell might be, his question was answered as he rounded a corner and nearly tripped over something large on the floor. His hand reached for the wall to steady himself and when he pulled it away it was smeared with something so deeply red it was almost black.

Blood…?

And then he looked down at what he almost tripped on and cried out.

It was Paul, slumped against the wall with a gaping hole right where his heart was supposed to be. His eyes were open, unseeing, and Colin felt cold because he sensed nothing from him. Not a single emotion or blip of feeling. He was gone, even more empty that Biff was lying in that hospital bed. And somehow even more empty than the Baron’s corpse was, which didn’t make much sense, but here was Paul and he was dead and nothing really made any sense at all. 

Was it dignified? Was dying like this better than burning in the sun? 

Colin felt something wet start climbing up his throat, and to his horror, his mouth opened and he retched. 

Well, that answered one question he’d always had. Energy vampires apparently could vomit.

He turned around, ready to run straight toward the elevator, get back in the car, and tell Guillermo to gun it. Just as he took one step forward, the Guide appeared, a few ravens flying off down the corridors with her entrance.

“Come on,” she said, voice shaky as she gently pushed Colin forward, forcing him to step over the corpse. She merely floated above it, her skirts ghosting over Paul’s blank face.

“The meeting can’t start until you’re all there. There is much to discuss,” she said in careful monotone, but her eyes were wide and she was practically pummeling him with her frenzied alarm.

“What the fuck is going-“

“Everything will be discussed in the meeting!” she yelled. He kept silent as she practically dragged him to the meeting room.

She led him down the halls, her eyes trained straight forward into the darkness. Her gaze never strayed, even as they passed more corpses, their blood splattered in arcs across the stone walls. It was mostly various guards, a few servants, but there were some council members among the bodies, too. Evan was dead, as was Kiefer, Danny, and Tom. Each of them had holes in their chests, some of them having scorch marks, too. 

Colin tried to do as the Guide did and school his features, but it was difficult. Sidestepping the bodies of people who were meant to last forever was disturbing, even for him. Not to mention, there was a horribly familiar energy permeating the air. His left hand instinctively closed, as if to grip a mug.

When they finally reached the meeting room, he saw only a handful of the council members. There was Tilda, of course, in the center of the room. She was the stiffest he’d ever seen her, jaw set tight like she was trying not to grind her teeth, but at least she was there instead of out in the hall with a gaping hole in her torso. Brad was there, too, an angry and smug energy beating through him. There were five other vampires present, but Colin had never bothered learning their names. Tilda, Brad, and two of the no-names had blood stains on their robes, some having the same burns that had been on the corpses outside.

The Guide left, saying she would alert what was left of the guards that all council members had arrived. Colin’s stomach dropped when the door closed behind her.

“Well,” Tilda began, foregoing the cold smile she usually had, “Now that we’re all here we can get started.”

Tilda circled the room with her hands clasped tightly behind her back. “Six days ago we held a meeting in which we discussed the disappearances and murders of notable vampires. I say murders because now we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that that is what it was. Murder. Theo the Reckless, Garth the Pontificator, Delilah of Themes, Sir Wil-”

“And the Baron,” Colin interrupted, immediately regretting it as Tilda’s gaze pinned him. He couldn’t help it. Energy vampires were born to have bad timing. 

“Really? The Baron, too?” 

He nodded, nearly swallowing his tongue. “Earlier today. Burst into ash.”

She closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath. “He was a good one, too. A shame.”

She shook her head, refocusing. “We have lost so many of us, so many powerful, influential vampires. Eternal lives cut short by a monster. Before, it only struck during the day, but at tonight’s weekly council meeting, we were attacked. For those of you who weren’t here when it happened, I’m sure you saw the evidence of it out there in the halls.”

One of the others growled a little in confirmation.

“We were able to restrain it before it could kill the rest of us. I’m sure by now you’re all wondering what it is that’s diminished our numbers so greatly.”

“Yes,” Brad hissed smugly. “What could it be?”

Tilda leveled him with a deadpan glare and turned back toward the rest of them. “I thought they were a thing we’d eliminated decades ago, something more myth now than reality... But I was wrong. Because the thing that tried - and nearly succeeded - to wipe the council out of existence tonight, was a slayer.”

Two large vampires (guards, Colin thought) suddenly burst through the heavy wooden doors, dragging a human by the arms with them. The human struggled, trying to plant her feet onto the stone floor, but she found no purchase and kept slipping as they pulled her deeper into the room. She was brought into the center where the light was brightest, illuminating her dirtied, bloodied form. There were bleeding bite marks scattered across her arms and deep purple bruises, some new and some old. 

Her head faced the floor and her tangled hair obscured her face, but Colin could sense the pure rage from her without any expression to confirm it. She was an ocean of savage ferocity, waves of violent need crashing over and over and over so much she must have been drowning in it. He instinctively took a step back because he’d seen this once before and he knew what this was and that just couldn’t be possible, because that meant-

Tilda stepped closer to the woman, nose upturned in disgust. The slayer looked up at her, hate burning in her eyes.

And then he was choking on air, because it was Joan.

Of course it was Joan.

Chapter Text

This was, by far, the creepiest house she had ever seen.

It was huge, for one thing. Three stories high with countless windows on each level, each one boarded up or covered in one way or another. All of the other houses in the neighborhood were modern colonials and only half the height of this monster of a house. Its wood paneling was peeling away or missing entirely in places, revealing what looked like termite and water damage. It had been painted black, or maybe a deep red. It was hard to tell under the starless night sky. The only light there was came from the moon, but it did little to brighten anything. It felt like the house swallowed whatever light shone upon it.

“Joan? C’mon, we’re late.”

She heard him, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t. “This is super fucking creepy, Nick.”

Nick smiled and walked back to her. “I know it’s seen better days, but it’s fine, I promise. All Victorian houses look kind of spooky. This’ll be fun.”

He was still smiling when he placed a hand on her back, seemingly unaffected by the imposing nature of the house behind him. He gently started nudging her toward the front doors. She still didn’t move, feet firmly planted on the dead grass in the front yard. 

“Joan, look at me.”

She did. His eyes were normally brown, but in the darkness of the night they just looked black. Had the house swallowed the light in his eyes, too?

“I get that you’re nervous ‘cause you don’t go to parties, but it’s going to be great. I’ve known these people for years and they’re gonna love you. I can tell.”

He pushed her again, a little firmer this time, and she moved forward a step. “I’ve been to plenty of parties before… just not with strangers and not at weird creepy houses in the middle of the night.”

A lie, not that he needed to know the truth. Why would he need to know that this was the first time she’d been invited to a party since starting college? That everything before now was birthday parties and sleepovers she was sure she’d only been invited to out of pity? No, better she keep that to herself. No point risking him coming to the same realization that everyone else had - that something about her was off-putting, and worth avoiding. She didn’t know what it was. Maybe it was how she carried herself, or how she talked, or the way she laughed, but whatever it was, very few people had a tolerance for it. For her. 

Nick was one of them. She’d met him during orientation and, for some reason, he’d quickly taken a liking to her. They didn’t share any classes together and lived in separate dorms, but whenever he’d see her sitting alone in the dining hall he'd sit with her. Or when they bumped into each other on campus, he’d walk with her awhile, making idle conversation until she reached her destination. When they talked it didn’t feel like he was keeping her company out of pity. She was accustomed to solitude after so many years of being the odd one out, but she couldn’t stand pity. 

She’d had friends before, of course. But they tended to be… well, “unobservant.” Sure, that sounded a lot more diplomatic than “stupid” or “wouldn’t notice a rabid wolf approaching until it’d eaten half their legs.” Nick wasn’t like that, though. He was her friend simply because he wanted to be, not because he was so dull that he couldn’t sense whatever it was about her that made her so unbearable. It was a mystery to her why that was the case, but she wasn’t about to question it and fuck up the closest thing to a real friendship she’d ever had. 

“It’s just a house. A few walls, a fuck ton of windows, and a whole bunch of people you’re going to regret not talking to if you leave right now.”

He waited a few moments and let the words sink in. Joan listened to the sounds of the house. There was a drawn-out creak, the hard knocking of a shutter opening and closing with the wind, and the muffled sounds of the people within. What were they talking about, she wondered? She’d never known what people talked about at things like this. 

Knowing that she didn’t have much of a choice in leaving anyway, seeing as he’d driven her here, she thought about why she’d agreed to come in the first place. She’d wanted a shot at being normal. She wanted to be able to say she went to a party and had a conversation that lasted more than thirty seconds and didn’t end with someone hastily excusing themself. She wanted to be welcome . Nick claimed she’d get along with whoever else he’d invited to be here, so it’d be worth braving the comically sinister mansion, wouldn’t it?

Against her better judgment, she nodded just slightly, nearly imperceptible, but Nick noticed and he gently guided her to the entrance of the house. She let him, but she was still hesitant. With every step closer to the house the feeling that something dreadful was going to happen grew, like she was actually the idiot walking into a rabid wolf’s den and she was going to get eaten.

When Nick opened the front doors, she saw the foyer, lit up with dozens of candles and lamps of varying sizes. There was a gaudy chandelier adorned with crystals and gems hanging precariously above the crowd beneath it. The crowd itself was dense and the room felt cramped, which was impressive considering the size of the house. Most of the guests seemed to be around Joan’s age, red cups in their hand as they laughed at whatever jokes they were telling each other. 

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Nick said over the noise, “but I’m going to make my rounds first, okay?”

She nodded absently, still taking it all in, and then suddenly Nick was gone, having disappeared into the crowd in a blink. She looked around, trying to find him, but she couldn't see over the throng of people. Okay. Shit. She’d assumed he’d take her with him, or she’d tag along anyway, but somehow he was already gone. She considered walking right back out the front door and waiting for him to come back, but she’d already committed to making the most of this and the inside looked much more welcoming than the outside. At least in here she could see. Waiting outside meant subjecting herself to the darkness of night, and she’d prefer not to spend the next hour or so waiting pathetically in the shadows.

Not knowing what to do with herself, she wandered, weaving through the crowd, taking in the house. There were so many different kinds of wallpaper in each room, most of them yellowed with age or peeling, but she could tell they must have been beautiful at some point. There were mahogany dressers, plush furniture, paintings, so many paintings. She felt like she was walking through a poorly maintained museum. 

The crowd parted for her wherever she went, as it always did, but after about ten minutes of wandering aimlessly in this house, alone, she decided she was going to give socializing an honest try. Nick had said these people would like her: it was time to put that to the test. 

She overheard a girl talking about how she might go into HR after graduation, or maybe pivot and limit herself to payroll instead. Joan had been considering the same, but after approaching her and striking up a conversation about it, the girl - Emma, Joan learned - withdrew after only a minute. She excused herself to get a drink, but there was already a drink in her hand. Joan knew she would not be coming back.

It happened again when she tried talking to a guy leaning against a wall, looking at all the paintings surrounding them. Anytime she asked him a question, his answers were blunt, curt, like answering them was a burden. What was he drinking? Beer. What did he think of the house? It’s fine. Who invited him? His friend. 

The moment some other random stranger joined the conversation he lit up, and it was like she’d stopped existing. They introduced themselves to each other and talked about how crazy the vibe of the house was and about how packed and exciting the party turned out to be. Rolling her eyes, Joan walked away. 

It happened over and over again. Almost every attempt to start a conversation was either met with a half-hearted, dismissive response or no response at all. The few who were polite enough to humor her either couldn’t keep it up for long and excused themselves, or were clearly the kind of people who just enjoyed hearing the sound of their own voice, in which case she would be the one to excuse herself.

She told a girl her dress was pretty and asked where she’d gotten it from. She politely said thanks, she thrifted it, then walked away and showed someone else that it had pockets. She asked a guy if he knew what the party was for or who the host was. He pretended not to hear her and took a swig of beer. At one point a girl ran around loudly asking if anyone had a tampon on them she could have, it was an emergency and she’d left her purse at home. Joan said she did and started rummaging in her crossbody purse, but the girl walked right past her, like she was a fucking ghost. At that point Joan gave up. 

She was used to being brushed aside, but this was a little much, even for her. She chalked it up to the sheer amount of people that were here. In a crowd this large she was all too easy to ignore, a big blind spot in everyone’s vision. The people themselves seemed more self-absorbed than the ones she usually associated with, too. She supposed they’d have to be. The only people who’d willingly come into a house as eerie and dark as this one in the middle of the night would have to be either so wrapped up in their own lives they didn’t notice the sinister atmosphere, were stupid, or desperate. Joan considered herself to be part of the third category. 

Nick had been mistaken; these people were not for her, and she was ready to leave. She wouldn’t lie to herself and claim to be the best conversationalist, but she knew she didn’t deserve the universal ostracization she seemed doomed to. They must all be able to see something in her she couldn’t, and they weren't willing to look past it like Nick was. And she couldn’t blame them for it, because she didn’t even know what it was.

Still wondering where the hell Nick could be, she was about to ask someone where the bathrooms were when she was suddenly assaulted with the most foul stench she’d ever experienced. It was so pungent she wondered how nobody around her was gagging. She turned to the first person she saw, an oddly dressed man with skin as pale as the moon. His clothing seemed more appropriate for the eighteenth century than the twenty-first, but she was far more focused on the smell invading her nose.

“Do you smell that?”

He sneered, and Joan noted with some alarm that his eyes seemed to shine a little in the candlelight, the same way a dog’s does in the night. “No.”

She covered her nose, but it had no effect. “Really? It’s-It’s like burnt rubber and sulfur. Like we’re in hell. You really don’t smell that? God, it’s bad.”

He flinched. Hissing, he said, “ Do not use that word!”

She tried to breathe but it was hard because now there was a scratchy sensation deep within her throat, climbing up and up. She felt hot - like there was fire in her blood and the only relief was… what? What was the relief? God, the smell, it was everywhere. She could barely think like this, with something boiling in her veins, begging to get out.

She spoke around the searing lump in her throat. “What word? Hell?”

“The g-word, actually,” she heard Nick say.

Turning around, she’d never been more relieved and annoyed to see him. She wanted to ask him where he’d been, why he’d left her here to fend for herself with these people who somehow had even less of a tolerance for her than most did, but she couldn’t think of anything except the terrible odor and the thrumming urgency it inspired in her veins.

“ Please tell me you smell that. It’s awful, I feel like I’m going to implode.”

He sniffed once and shook his head. “No, I don’t smell anything. Besides the candles, obviously. You ready to meet who I was talking about?” 

He looked at the strange man who’d hissed at her, who seemed much more at ease than he had a moment ago. They shared a look, something secret and knowing, but Joan was too preoccupied to spare another thought for it. She was burning alive, couldn’t he see that?

“I’ll meet whoever you want, just please, get me out of this room.”

Smiling, he grabbed her hand and led her through the crowd, expertly navigating the needlessly complex maze of hallways and staircases. She took a closer look at the crowd as they walked, searching for air that wasn’t tainted with the smell of sulfur. She never found it. There were more people like that pale man in the crowd now, with skin just as washed-out as his and all of them wearing antiquated clothing. Their faces were gaunt, their eyes dark, and she got the same terrible feeling from them as she got from the house. She realized the smell must be coming from them; it was the odd-looking people who were to blame for this tortuous burning inside of her. 

There was also a certain deeper element of wrongness to them, beyond their looks and smell, but what specifically it was she couldn’t say. 

Is that what people thought when they looked at her? 

That she was indescribably wrong? 

Confused, aflame, and growing ever more concerned, she tugged on Nick’s hand. “Who are these people?”

He looked frustrated they stopped, but quickly schooled his features into something more friendly. “No one. They’re just people, like us.”

“ No,” she insisted, “They’re not . Why are they here?”

He shrugged. “To party, same as everyone else. It’s their house.”

That didn’t surprise her. It was natural for a creepy house to harbor even creepier people. They fit right in with the cobwebs and the dust and the termite damage. But that only made her more confused - why would Nick ever think she belonged with these kinds of people?

“Why did you bring me here?” she asked, her voice raw.

He stopped pulling at her hand. He looked through her, and for a second she was worried he’d seen it, the terrible thing about her that made people want to leave. She shouldn’t have asked it, because he was no doubt questioning the same thing now, why did her bring her here, she didn’t belong, she was wrong, she was too much, and he’d made a mistake choosing her as a friend-

And then he smiled so brightly that she pretended not to notice the strain on his face as he said, “Because they were all so excited to meet you.”

She didn’t say anything more as he led her through the house again. Her blood hummed quietly as they passed more of their odd-looking hosts. She had an absurd feeling that it was trying to tell her something important, something she was meant to do, but she couldn’t understand it. It chose to whisper when it should have screamed.

She let Nick lead her, thinking about where she would have been right now if she’d just left like she wanted. She’d be back in her dorm, listening to her roommate drone on about her Orgo homework or some new policy change at her tutoring job. It was always so exhausting talking to Aparna, leaving Joan feeling totally burned out, but that didn’t sound so bad right now. She’d give anything to dull the fierce anticipation brimming through her.

Everyone felt drained talking to Aparna, which is why Joan assumed they’d been assigned to board together in the first place. They were two women, both unbearable in their own ways, who few could tolerate save for each other. If Joan didn’t know any better, she’d think Aparna annoyed people intentionally - she’d caught her smiling a few times when she’d done something particularly frustrating.

She didn’t seem bothered by Joan’s presence, but there was no friendship between them. One night, when Joan had been too in her own head and starved for a real conversation, she had asked her outright if she minded her company. 

Lying on her bed, she’d said, “Do you… do you think I’m different? Like, there’s something off about me?”

Aparna had been making flashcards for her big chemistry test, laying them all over the floor meticulously. It helped her “visualize” everything, she claimed, but Joan suspected she only did it to make it harder to safely move around the room.

Without looking up, still laying her flashcards, Aparna said, “No. You are exactly the same to me as everyone else.”

“And how’s that?”

Her tone was bland, like her. “You are easily shaken by the smallest of things, living life day to day like you have all the time in the world when death is already on the horizon. Content to waste your time chasing meaningless degrees and companionship, you don’t spare a thought for anything outside of your tiny, limited world.”

Aparna looked up. “You are wholly unexceptional.”

Joan sunk deeper into the pillows on her bed, and nodded. “Thank you.”

It wasn’t friendship, no. But Joan would take what she could get.

Now, slowly making her way through this labyrinthine house filled with strange people and an even worse smell, she wanted so desperately to go back. Nevermind the fact that Aparna wasn’t a friend and their relationship was tenuous at best. She was dull and almost unnaturally boring, but spending the night chatting with her seemed a far better alternative to this. She needed out, she needed fresh air, but Nick was taking her deeper into the horde and she wouldn’t have been able to navigate out of here if she tried. 

It was too much. She’d tried to hold on a little longer for him, but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t breathe, her skin felt wrong on her, the pale people kept staring at her, and Nick wasn’t listening to her. There were embers in her lungs and she half-expected smoke to start pouring out of her mouth at any moment.

“Nick, I can’t- I can’t breathe, something’s wrong.”

He didn’t look back. “He’s just up the stairs, c’mon, he’s been waiting to meet you.”

“Who? Why does this matter? It’s like I’m on fire-”  

They stopped in front of a door, this one more ornate than the others. This part of the house was quieter than the rest, the sounds of the party muffled behind the walls. Without ceremony, Nick gripped the gold handle, opened the door, and gestured for her to go inside. Wary, but desperate to escape the smell of death and hellfire, she fled inside the room and took a deep breath. It was still here, the oppressive sensation of burning from the inside out, but less intense.

The room was just as decadent and neglected as the rest of the house, lit by nothing but the fireplace. Sitting in front of the flames in a wing-backed chair was a man. He was pale, too. Tall, much taller than the others. He wore a robe that shone gold in the light of the fire and had a strong jaw, despite his gaunt cheeks. He smiled, and it was too dark to be sure, but Joan could have sworn some of his teeth were sharper than they were supposed to be.  

He stood and the hairs on her arms stood with him. Her skin prickled again, like something was crawling beneath it, ready to burst out if she didn’t take action. She still didn’t know what that action was supposed to be.

“Joan, this is Dimitri. He’s my, uh- he’s sort of like my mentor.”

Dimitri took a bow. “It is a pleasure to meet you. Nicholas has spoken quite highly of you. We’ve been looking forward to your arrival.”

He had a thick accent, but Joan couldn’t quite place where it was from. “Yeah, he told me you’d been waiting. I’m -” She swallowed once, trying to force down the ball of heat trying to suffocate her. “I’m sorry, there’s something in my throat - I’m not sure why you’ve been wanting to meet me?”

He smiled again, wider than before, and that confirmed it. Where there were supposed to be incisors there were canines. 

An inferno raged within her, clawing at her from the inside out, desperate to escape and burn this man till he was nothing but ash. It frightened her, the violent need stirring so impatiently within her. She looked to Nick for reassurance, but he wasn’t looking at her. His gaze was fixed solely on Dimitri.

Dimitri took a step closer. Joan took a step away, but Nick’s hand was on her back again, keeping her in place. 

“Nick?”

Finally, he looked at her. He frowned a little once he registered the genuine distress in her face. The hand on her back fell away, and she took the opportunity to step away from the strange, hulking man with an even stranger look in his eyes. 

“Nicholas…,” Dimitri said in a warning tone.

Nick met his eyes and something silently passed between them. Nick raised a brow in question and Dmitri nodded. All softness in Nick’s face faded away, replaced with something hard and unyielding. Stiffly, he turned away and stepped toward the door.

“There’s still a few people I haven’t caught up with,” he said, his voice a listless monotone. He refused to look at her. “I’ll leave you two here. To talk.”

“Nick-”

“Yes, go liven up the party! Greet Bradonovich for me, would you? It’s been so long since I’ve seen him," Dimitri said with good cheer. He was right in front of her now with a hand on her shoulder, guiding her deeper into the room. Joan suddenly felt the urge to bite his fingers off. 

Nick closed the door behind him, leaving her stranded, alone, in a dark room with a man she didn’t know. A man who was far too eager to meet her, with a frightful expectancy in his gaze. Still reeling from Nick’s utter betrayal, Joan barely resisted as Dmitri pulled her down to sit on the couch beside him. The moment his hand released her she moved to the other end of the couch, leaning as far back as she could. His stench was unbearably reminiscent of death and something in her was rising, ballooning into something terrible and wonderful and she didn’t know what would happen once it popped. 

She needed to get out of the room. She needed to run, escape the burning in her veins, the smell of this man, and flee from this house entirely. She’d made a mistake - there was nothing for her here, no friends to be made. She didn’t know why Nick was so insistent she meet this man, why he abandoned her when he saw how afraid she was, but she didn’t care, she was leaving.

When she got up to leave Dimitri grabbed her hand. His grip was gentle, but firm, except now that burning feeling was climbing up her arm, right where his hand held hers. Didn’t he feel that heat? Shouldn’t it burn him, too?

“Ah, miss, surely you could not leave yet? I was so eager to meet you! Nicholas is very cautious with who he chooses to bring to us, so they never disappoint!”

He inhaled deeply, as if he was savoring the smell in the air, and it made her stomach twist. “No, I can’t imagine you could ever disappoint. He’s never found someone quite like you before.”

She tugged on her hand and after a few seconds of pulling, he smiled and let go. She almost lost her footing then righted herself. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, hoping he might respect her polite diplomacy enough to let her leave without protest, “I’m … flattered, but I’ve been fighting a fever all night and I think it’d be best for me to go home.”

With a shaky, apologetic smile, she turned back toward the door, but he was in front of her again. Joan blinked with surprise. How the hell had he done that? He was just on the couch a second ago and now he was here, but she’d never seen him move. 

Jaw dropped with shock, she looked up at him, meaning to spew more false apologies and excuses to leave, except something had happened to his eyes and she couldn’t move. His pupils were large and growing, and it was only a moment before his eyes were nothing more than two black pits, which somehow seemed to be deepening the longer she looked. The room was getting smaller, the light of the fire was dimming, and soon there was nothing but his eyes, nothing but darkness.

Somewhere in the abyss she heard his voice. It didn’t echo. There were no walls for it to bounce off of. “You are inexperienced in the ways of the world, yes? Never known a friendly touch, or a friend at all, have you?”

She didn’t respond. She had no mouth to do so. Her body was gone, consumed in the darkness, and yet, she felt something. Distantly, as if in a dream, she felt a hand reach up toward her neck… angling it just so… and then something sharp dug into it. A warm wetness flowed down her neck and the voice she’d heard whispering all night, the one that lived in her veins and wanted so desperately to be let out, was finally free. It screamed the same word over and over again, beating in time with her pulse. 

PREDATOR

The darkness collapsed. She came back to herself in pieces, first smelling the sulfur in the air, then feeling the rug beneath her feet, and then seeing the room again, dimly lit but so much brighter than that impossible darkness from before. She felt a sharp pain in her neck and then she could see Dmitri, his face buried there. Panicked, she wrenched herself away from him. He hissed, baring his teeth, and to her horror his mouth was filled with blood. Her blood.

She reached up and felt her neck. “What - what the fuck is this?”

He schooled his features, licked his teeth, and smiled amiably, as if he hadn’t just sunk his teeth into her. 

“You are much stronger than I expected! Do you know, very few can say they have broken free of my thrall. You should, uh, what’s the phrase? Ah, pat yourself on the back .”

His gaze hardened once again. “But do it quickly, because I have waited long enough.”

He took a step closer. She took a step back, frantically looking around the room for a weapon.

“I can smell it on you, miss. Innocence.” 

Another step closer. “So lovely. Untainted.”

Joan kept stepping backward, shaking, until she felt the backs of her knees meet a chair. 

“Never known, never kissed, never loved. The purest of pure.”

She looked at the door. He could move quickly, shockingly quickly, how was she supposed to get there?

“Let me taste-”

He lunged at her, practically flying, and she dodged, hitting the floor with a painful thud. She heard the chair behind her break as he collided with it. She turned around and he was back up again, his face void of any semblance of humanity. 

Joan’s mind was blank, terror taking the place of thought, but the urgent, violent need in her bones spurred her into action. With little conscious awareness of what she was doing, she grabbed one of the splintered chair legs just as he lunged again. She angled it forward as he tackled her to the floor and the pointed end of it pierced his chest, between his ribs and straight through his heart. He groaned, writhing, but Joan shoved it in deeper until she was sure there was nowhere left for it to go. She heard a pained gurgle above her and then nothing, his wet blood slowly oozing out of the wound and onto her hands.

A minute passed before she finally crawled out from under him, struggling to push his weight off of her. Her head was pounding and her neck ached, but the burning sensation in her blood and lungs had finally reduced itself down to a simmer. The room was still, quiet, no sounds save for her panicked breaths and the crackling of the fire. 

She looked at his corpse and the stake she put in his heart, because yes it may have started out tonight as nothing more than the leg of a chair but at this point it was undeniably a stake, and she could have cried at the implications of it. 

Vampire, she thought.

For a moment she rejected the impossible thought, but then that same feeling from before, the one that’d somehow known what to do as he pounced on her, hummed in recognition. It was an impossible thought, yes - it was also devastatingly true. 

She touched her neck again, whimpering as she felt the puncture marks. She hoped to god the movies had it wrong, that a bite from a vampire wasn’t enough and she wouldn’t turn. Just the thought of becoming one was enough to bring her blood back to boiling. She’d walk right into the sunlight if that happened.

Suddenly Joan heard a blood curdling scream from outside the room and she could recall the face of every strange, pale person she’d passed on her way here. Her mouth went dry as she realized that she was trapped here, deep within this house, a house infested with vampires that stank of hell just as much as Dimitri did. 

There was more screaming, and Joan thought of Nick, somewhere out there in the crowd, being preyed upon by his hosts.

He abandoned you. Left you alone with a demon.

She looked at Dimitri again. His robe was drenched in his blood now, turning it from gold to black. Black as his eyes had been, when he’d had her under his thrall. Joan’s head pounded with the reminder of his hypnotic attempt to make her forget herself.

She remembered the moment Nick had decided to leave her here. He and Dimitri had shared a look, something heavy and unsaid resting between them. Joan hadn’t known what it meant then, but she thought she knew now. Hypnotism - what Dimitri had done to her, he’d done to Nick in that moment, compelling him to leave her behind despite her protests.

She let out a breath. Yes, that would explain it. Because why else would he have done it?

The screams continued, getting louder and closer. She wanted to hide, to crawl under one of the couches and wait until sunrise, but that would mean abandoning Nick as he’d been forced to do to her. She’d have to spend the night listening to their screams, waiting for it to end and praying none of the other vampires would come into the room and find her.

No, that wasn’t an option. The feverish urgency roaring to life once again wouldn’t allow it. She was on fire again, skin so hot and filled with pressure that she thought she might combust. It urged her toward the broken chair again and she grabbed its splintered wooden legs. The weight of them in her hands felt good, like they belonged there, just natural extensions of her arms. 

She headed toward the door. She had to find Nick and get them out of here.

When she left the room, it was as if she’d opened the doors to hell itself. People were screaming, running down the hall as fast as they could as vampires flew after them, cackling madly whenever they caught one. There was blood on the walls - human blood, red, not like that black ooze she’d seen come from Dimitri, the ooze that still coated her hands. Human corpses lay lifeless on the floor, and Joan recognized some of them from before, when the party was just a party and not a massacre. She should have felt sick, she should have been screaming with the rest of them, but the bloodlust that had possessed her to grab the stakes and brave the house was all she could feel. 

The man from before, the one who’d hissed at her when she’d asked about the smell, spotted her. He was nearly on her in an instant, but in the last moment, on instinct, she held her two stakes together in a ‘t’ - no, a cross - and he shrieked and recoiled in pain. She propelled herself forward, sticking one of the stakes as deeply into his chest as she could, same as she had with Dimitri. Crying out, his eyes rolled back and he dropped to the floor into a lifeless heap.

And then there was silence. All of the vampires in the hall froze, some in midair, heads turning to look at what she had done. They seemed just as surprised as she was that she was capable of it. 

Some of the humans, noticing the distraction she’d caused, ran away. The vampires either chose to let them leave or didn’t notice, all their attention on her.

They creeped toward her, hesitating, their gaze flicking between the other stake in her hand and the one sticking out of the chest of the vampire beneath her. She retrieved that one, ignoring the squelching sound it made as the blood continued to slowly flow from his chest cavity.

Suddenly they all moved, and with a dexterity and strength she didn’t know she possessed, she launched her stakes at them, felling two of them just as the others descended upon her. She ducked, feeling their capes and dresses swipe across her back as they missed her. She retrieved her stakes from the corpses and turned to face the others, but clouds of black smoke had appeared and burned her eyes. As she tried to blink it away, bats flew out of the clouds, heading straight toward her face. 

She dodged all but one of them, which had embedded its teeth painfully into her arm. She grabbed it, pulled it away, and pierced it. It went limp and she threw the body on the floor, searching for the other bats. They flew with no sense of order or direction, but she still managed to throw a stake and pierce one of them, pinning it to the wall. The other bats screeched at the display and flew off down the halls, too fast for her to follow.

Breathing hard, Joan leaned against the wall. The bloodlust wasn’t fading, but it was more tolerable, having finally got a good taste of what it’d been craving all night. It’d felt good - why did it feel good? - to watch those vampires die by her hand.

Were they even really alive to start?

The god-awful smell was diminishing, thankfully, and it felt like she could breathe again. She looked at her hands, both shocked and grateful that even though she had no idea how it was possible, at least they knew what to do. It had come so naturally, no thought required as she threw her stakes and ducked the vampires’ attacks. There was no fear, no time for it, only an itching to feel her stake run through them again. 

She retrieved her stakes and began quietly padding down the halls, more screams heard somewhere off in a distant part of the house. She saw something blood-covered in her peripheral and she turned toward it, her stakes raised, except it was just a mirror. Her reflection staring back at her with a matching look of shock.

Was… was that really her?

She could barely recognize herself. She doubted her parents would be able to, if they saw her. Her hands were drenched in black blood, and there were splotches of it covering her face and chest. There was a mess of red on her neck, two surprisingly small dots sitting in the center of it. Her eyes were wild, a steely gray, and her expression…

And then she understood. 

The thing everyone saw in her, what made them shy away at her approach, what made her so unpleasant. This was it. This was what they’d been seeing. They’d known. Somehow they’d taken one look at her and they’d known. They saw a-

Predator

-and of course they were afraid. 

She wiped at her cheek, smearing some of the blood. They’d all been right, all along. She was more than off. She was wrong , just like the creatures infesting the house. The vampires may have been hunting them, but she was a hunter, too. And it felt right.

The sound of a growl behind her broke her from her thoughts and she turned, just barely managing to  impale a vampire as its claws sank into her shoulders. She hadn’t seen it coming. Right, vampires. No reflection.

The vampire fell to the ground, clutching her chest, and Joan crouched down to study her face as the life in her eyes faded away. She saw it in her, the wrongness, the same as she’d seen in her own reflection. 

Now there was a choir in her blood, so many voices, ancient voices, coming together. 

Predators, they sang.  

She got up.

None as strong as you.

A cool acceptance washed over her as she stepped over the vampire’s corpse. She ran down the halls, all of her earlier trepidation left behind in the lavish room housing Dimitri’s corpse. She let pure instinct drive her as she worked her way through the house, plunging a stake into any vampire that lunged at her. She ran past the bodies of the humans who hadn’t been as lucky as her and tried to push away thoughts of them, of how they’d been alive an hour ago, how she’d been desperately trying to make conversation with them, how they’d never be able to speak again. Grief could come later, right now she needed to listen to the screaming in her blood because she knew it was the only reason she was still alive and they weren’t.

She killed every vampire she encountered, calling out for Nick as she went, hoping he might follow her voice and lead her out of this maze. The more vampires she killed the more injuries she accumulated, scratches on her chest, bruises, bite marks, and a broken rib (she thought that’s what it was, she heard a crunch as a vampire threw her against a wall and now breathing hurt). She’d always been bad at tolerating paint before, but now the pain was dulled. It barely even registered to her because right now there was a vampire that had decided to turn into a dog and was currently trying to maul her, so there were bigger things to worry about. Once she’d dispatched the vamp-turned-dog, she looked around, trying to see if there were any others nearby waiting to leap from the shadows and kill her.

And then she realized she was pretty sure she’d seen that ugly painting of a sheep before - had she already been this way?

She looked down the hall, noticing the bodies of some of the vampires she’d already slain. She turned around and headed in the other direction, down a staircase she knew she hadn’t walked through before. She continued to navigate the house in this way, using the corpses like breadcrumbs and killing any vampires that obstructed her path. She still hadn’t found Nick yet, but she hadn’t found his body, either, so she was still hopeful he was out there somewhere. He was smart - maybe he’d found a hiding spot, and was waiting until morning. Or, even better, he made it out of the house. But that would mean he’d abandoned her again, and though she felt guilty for feeling it, she kind of hoped he hadn’t. 

The house was quiet now. She didn’t hear anymore screaming, just the normal creaks and bumps that old houses tended to make. She’d lost track of how many vampires she’d killed - twenty? Thirty? 

A few more turns and she found herself back in the foyer. It was littered with human corpses, the floor sticky with blood. She saw the front door, also painted in blood, and it called to her. Freedom. Escape . 

But Nick was still missing.

“Nick!” she called out one final time, hoping that somewhere deep in the house maybe he heard her.

Silence.

And then she heard a creak.

She turned and there he was, standing at the bottom of a staircase. She didn’t know how he’d managed to survive here when it seemed like no one else had, but she was grateful for it and the relief at seeing him again nearly floored her. He was okay. Tonight was a nightmare, she was a nightmare, and people were dead, but at least he wasn’t.

“You killed him,” he said, his voice flat.

“Come on,” she said, motioning for him to follow her, “I know- I know this is bad, but we made it. Let’s-”

“You killed him,” he repeated, and Joan noticed that his shirt was stained black. How had he gotten vampire blood on him, gotten that close to one, and not have a single scratch on him? His face was grim, but other than that he appeared fine. Totally uninjured. 

“You killed my master.”

Confused, she gripped her stakes a little tighter. Something deep within her rumbled in warning. “Your master? ”

Nick walked toward her, stepping over the human corpses without even sparing them a glance. “Years. I sacrificed years of my life for them and you just…”

His steps were getting quicker and he clenched his fists. Joan reached out with one of her hands in a placating gesture, because in his eyes she saw something dark, not like the thing she’d seen in herself, but frightening all the same.

His face contorted with rage. “You fucking ruined it! ”

She stepped back. The hypnosis, that had to be what it was. “They did something to you, Nick, messed with your mind. They’re not human-”

“Of course they aren’t!” he screamed, kicking away one of the corpse’s arms in frustration. “And I was finally going to be one of them!”

Joan’s eyebrows scrunched up. He didn’t seem like he’d been hypnotized. He was too aware of what was happening around him, but he wasn’t making any sense.

“You… you wanted to be a vampire?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

His jaw clenched, but he said nothing.

“I don’t understand.”

He groaned, running his hands through his hair. “Holy shit, you still don’t fucking get it? You’re the sacrifice , Joan! That’s all you were ever supposed to be!”

She blanked. Sacrifice?

She thought about the silent conversation Nick had with Dimitri, the way he ignored all of the pain she was in, how he’d practically pushed her into the house when all she wanted was to go home. Every time she expressed a little doubt he’d reassured her of her place there, that she was welcome, that she’d regret leaving. Her hands started to shake.

Heart breaking, her voice cracked as she said, “You brought me here to kill me?”

“No,” he spit, “I brought you here to let them kill you .”

She gripped her stakes hard enough she was surprised they didn’t splinter further. She wanted to scream, she wanted to push her stakes straight through him, she wanted him to hurt.

She’d thought they were friends, or at least on their way to becoming friends. They’d had such easy conversations. They shared lunch in the dining hall. They’d walk each other back to their respective dorms when their paths crossed. Was all of it in service of this?

She remembered when they’d first met at orientation. The room was crowded, and yet all the seats surrounding her were empty. He’d seen her there, sitting alone, and he’d sat down next to her and started a conversation. He’d asked her so many questions: did she have any family back home? Any friends she’d followed to college? Did she miss anyone? Did anyone miss her?

She’d answered all his questions gladly, thinking nothing of the interrogatory nature of their first meeting. She’d been desperate; he’d been scouting.

“You planned this from the start,” she said quietly. She looked up at him, trying to find a glimpse of the person she’d thought he was, but there was nothing there. Just a man with hate in his eyes, hate for her, as if somehow she was the one to blame in all of this. 

“You have no idea how hard I fucking worked for this. How much shit I let them put me through just for the chance of being like them. You were supposed to be my ticket out of mortality. One taste of you - the most pathetically untouched person to ever exist - and they’d turn me. And I’d be free.”

He glared at her, both accusatory and frightened. “I should’ve known, when I saw how people avoided you. I should’ve known there was a reason. I cannot believe I ever felt sorry for you. You’re a fuckin’- They’re all - fuck, you wiped them all out.”

He made a sound, something that sounded halfway between a whine and a sob. “They’re all dead and I’m the one who brought you here…”

He was breathing hard. He took a step closer, only a few feet away now. Joan halted his approach with one of her stakes, pointing it directly at his heart. He flinched as it poked lightly into his chest, but he didn’t step away. 

His upper lip curled. “You don’t even know what you are, do you?”

She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. There was too much anger, too much hurt, to say anything without falling apart completely. 

Nick leaned closer. A speck of red sprouted from his chest as the stake scratched him.

“You think you’re human?”

She stayed perfectly still, eyes locked on his.

“You’re not. You’re worse than that.”

For a moment, she faltered. No, she couldn’t explain what she’d felt tonight, how she’d known exactly when to duck or dodge or swipe. It felt like she’d been possessed by something much older than herself, something that had been slumbering beneath the surface, waiting for just the right moment to wake up. It was something not quite human…

… but not quite not either. 

“I’m human enough, ” she said, her voice gravelly, but steady. 

She glanced between him and the front door. She wanted to kill him. She wanted to push her stake as deep as it could go and watch the life fade from him as it had for the others. He wanted to be a vampire so bad? Then he could die like one.

But she didn’t move. She couldn’t press the stake any further. He wasn’t a vampire, he was human, and whatever it was in her blood that had driven her forward all night was silent. If she did this, there’d be nothing to guide her and nothing to blame. It’d all be her.

And she couldn’t do it.

She stepped away from him. Lowering her stake, she slowly backed toward the front door. He deserved to die, maybe even more than the vampires did, but she was not going to be the thing that killed him. All she wanted right now was to go home.

“I’m leaving,” she said, “And you’re going to stay right there. And if you move-”

She pointed toward the bodies surrounding him. “You’re joining them.”

He said nothing as she opened the door. She didn’t know if believed her bluff or not, but it didn’t matter, because either way he made no move to pursue her. He stared at her, hatred still burning in his eyes, but he remained silent.

When she stepped outside and shut the door with a heavy thud, a cold wind whipped past her. She shivered. She’d been so hot the rest of the night that the cold felt foreign to her. 

She walked across the yard, abandoning her stakes somewhere in the unkempt grass. Nick had driven her, so she had no transportation, but they were only a couple miles from campus. It was a small college tucked away into the city, surrounded by houses and apartment complexes. 

She walked. The adrenaline that had fueled her was depleted, and now her limbs felt heavy. Every breath was agony, but she kept walking. The few cars that passed her ignored her, and she was thankful. She hoped a cop wouldn’t come across her on their patrol. How could she ever explain her appearance?

How could she ever explain any of it at all? She’d known something was wrong the second she’d seen the house. Everything in her was telling her to run and yet she’d gone in, let the first friendly man she’d ever met pull her inside all because she was so blindingly eager for real companionship. Aparna was right - she was just as narrow-minded as everyone else was, too caught up in her own little pitiful world of loneliness to acknowledge what was right in front of her. 

She’d be dead tonight, if the bloodlust swimming under her skin hadn’t stepped in. She was pretty sure Nick had been full of shit when he said she wasn’t human, but some doubt still wriggled in the back of her mind. She bled red just like any other human, yes, but other humans couldn’t do the things she’d done. 

I can smell it on you, miss. Innocence. 

She wondered if Dimitri would still be able to smell it on her now, had she not pushed a stake through his heart. She doubted it, because she was a predator, a hunter, a -

Slayer?

-and Joan knew she’d never let anything like this happen ever again. 

The bites on her neck stung, pulsing painfully with every step. She swore she could still feel an echo of Dimitri’s teeth breaking through her skin. And she’d just stood there while he did it, lost in the darkness of his eyes, perfectly complacent. 

No, she thought. She’d never let anyone have what she didn’t offer. Not again.

It was forty-five minutes before she’d made it back to her campus, all the while replaying the night's events over and over again. She knew she probably should have gone to the hospital. She’d have to, eventually. She had a broken rib and some of her wounds might need stitches, but at that moment all she wanted was to go home.

It was late and the grounds were empty. There was no one in the halls so she was able to walk to her dorm room with no interruptions. When she opened the door she expected Aparna to be sleeping. She’d planned on sneaking in quietly, slipping into bed, and pretending the night hadn’t happened.

It wasn’t meant to be. Aparna was at her desk, studying chemistry by the light of her bedside lamp. She looked up at Joan as she entered. She didn’t seem all that disturbed by Joan’s appearance, the only indication that she even noticed something was wrong was a slight widening of her eyes. She turned back toward her book, flipping one of the pages. 

“I take it the party didn’t go well?”

Joan felt an absurd chuckle bubble up her throat. “No. It didn’t.”

Aparna hummed. “You need to see a doctor.”

“I know. Tomorrow,” she said as she crawled onto her bed. She was staining the bedsheets, but it didn’t matter. She’d buy new ones.

They coexisted in silence for a few minutes. Aparna didn’t ask what had happened to Joan, and maybe that should have bothered her, that she so obviously didn’t care, but it didn’t. At least Aparna was honest about how little Joan’s wellbeing mattered to her. She wasn’t a friend, but she’d never pretend to be one. 

Trying, and failing, to sleep, she listened to the sound of Aparna taking notes. The scratch of the pencil against the notebook paper was strangely calming. Joan remembered how tired she always got whenever she talked to Aparna, and she wanted that feeling. 

“Could you read out loud?” she asked. 

Aparna looked at her, and it was ridiculous but she looked more surprised by her request than her appearance.

“You hate when I read my textbooks out loud.”

“I know, but right now I’d like to hear it. There’s-”

The tears flowed freely now, but Joan didn’t bother wiping them away.

“There’s too much, and I’d really like to not be anything, right now. Could you, please?”

Aparna said nothing for a few moments, and Joan was afraid that meant she wouldn’t do it, that she didn’t understand what Joan was really asking for, but then she flipped to a different page and cleared her throat. She began reading the driest, most mind-numbingly boring chapter on Chemistry Joan had ever heard. It was awful. It was perfect.

As Aparna read, Joan cried. She cried harder than she had in years. She cried because was used to being ignored, but she was not used to being used, and it hurt. Her neck still ached and Nick’s betrayal still stung and it wasn’t fair. None of it was. It wasn’t fair that she was a great big blind spot to most of humanity, that she’d been born off and wrong and that everyone else could see it the second they glanced at her. It wasn’t fair that the wrongness was the only reason she was alive at all.

Aparna’s voice never wavered, even as Joan’s cries turned to full-blown sobs. Her droning monotone cut through it all, and eventually Joan’s sobbing subsided as her exhaustion finally dragged her under. She sunk deeper into the bed and closed her eyes, fading away into sleep. 

Joan slept dreamlessly, and Aparna was full. 

Chapter Text

Tilda bent forward, lowering her face to meet the slayer on the floor - no, not the slayer - Joan. Joan  - god, it’s Joan what the fuck what the fuck - met her gaze head on. Her pupils were blown out, making her normally flat, gray eyes appear black. Her body seemed to hum, rage vibrating off her and seeping into the air. Tilda’s energy was cold, colder than Colin had ever seen it, and the contrast was dizzying. 

Tilda’s eyes roamed Joan’s bruised form, assessing, before she stood back to her full height again. Joan shifted slightly, not in discomfort, but in agitation. She still hadn’t noticed Colin yet, and he considered slinking back into the shadows to keep it that way.

“I understand this is quite a shock,” Tilda said, addressing the room, “But we’ve convened here to make a decision-”

“Is it a shock, though?” Brad said, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I think someone last meeting said it had to be a slayer killing everybody and you didn’t believe them - oh, wait, I remember now, that was me . I called this shit a mile away.”

Tilda grit her teeth. “Yes, Brad, it would seem you were correct. Gold star for you. Now, we have a decision to make. This slayer-” she gestured with her hand, “Invaded our ancestral home, murdered our peers, and would have killed the most vulnerable of us if we hadn't intercepted in time. We must decide what’s to be done with her - namely, how to dispose of her.”

Colin felt like throwing up again. 

“What do you mean when you say ‘she would have killed the most vulnerable of us?’ You’re not referring to who I think you are, are you?” asked a vampire Colin didn’t know the name of. 

Tilda nodded, her mouth set in a grim line. “She was in the nursery when we cornered and subdued her, standing over his crib with a stake in her hand.”

A collective horrified groan sounded through the room. Joan’s mouth curled into a snarl, but she said nothing. Colin sensed her disgust drip off of her as she turned her head toward the floor, studying the cracks in the stone. He couldn’t decipher what the disgust was directed toward.

Who they were referring to was Henry, the unfortunately young ward of the council. A vampiric toddler - the only one in existence, to Colin’s knowledge - who had been turned by none other than Laszlo. Colin still didn’t know why he did it and never bothered to ask. 

The council had converted one of the storage rooms into a nursery for Henry, stocking the shelves with bottles of blood and whatever toys an eternally young child might want to play with. His existence, while tragic, had brought new life to the council members. They’d cradle him, sing him lullabies, and track down only the best, cleanest blood they could find to feed him. He would never grow up, but the council was determined to pamper him till the end of eternity.

If Joan was caught trying to kill him , the beloved child of the council, then there was no telling what they’d be willing to do to her. 

“What are we waiting for, then?” Brad said, “We kill her. Hell, we could use one of those fucking stakes to do it, just like she’d do to us.”

“She tried to kill Henry. A child! She deserves worse - burning, I say.”

“In my day drawing and quartering was all the rage. I vote we bring that back.”

“What if we just drain her? I’ve never had slayer blood; perhaps it has unique qualities? Maybe it could strengthen us?”

“Or kill us! Who knows what’s running through those Helsing veins? It could be poison to vampires!”

What was left of the council continued on, presenting countless ideas, each one more morbid than the last. Colin barely heard them, still reeling from the fact that Joan was here, deep underground in the vampiric council meeting room, covered in the blood of vampires she’d slain, vampires he’d known.

Reconciling the image of the Joan he knew, the one who wore a smile every time she greeted him at work, with the blood-soaked creature before him was an impossibility. She worked in fucking payroll, she wasn’t supposed to be a vampire slayer. So, clearly, she must be someone else. This was not Joan - this was some monstrous predator who happened to wear her face. 

But, no, this woman’s energy was undeniably familiar, even underneath all the grime. Same frizzy hair, same pale lips, same soul. Her energy was so much darker than he could have ever imagined it capable of, but it moved in the same way Joan’s always did, and he recognized it as hers. 

You were right, Joan. You are too much.

She still wasn’t looking at him, eyes trained on the floor. The two guards who had dragged her in stood on either side of her, ready to subdue her should she decide to make a move. But she didn’t. She just sat there, rage and bloodlust (god, how had he not put it together?) simmering impatiently beneath the surface. There was fear, too, of course there was, but it wasn’t like the fear he’d seen before. Fear was supposed to be a restless emotion, always in movement, seeking but never finding. In Joan it merely sat in the center of her, idly spinning like a ball on a string. A bitter sort of acceptance weighed her down. 

“Crucifixion is classic, isn’t it? We’d have to get the familiars to nail her onto one, of course, but it’d be poetic, wouldn’t it?”

I’m in good company. We can stop and appreciate the little things, can’t we?

“We could bury her alive. Excruciating for her, simple for us.”

You’re always welcome to have lunch with me, Colin.

“We could tear her in half! I remember when I was a new vampire, my friend Dravus and I, one of us would pull the torso, right underneath the arms, and the other would pull the legs until the human tore in two. Whoever ended up with the bigger half had first dibs on the next hunt!”

I can drive. I’ll take it slow on the corners, so you don’t get carsick.

“Can we please stop talking and just kill her already? She’s human, one little snap of the neck and she’s gone.”

Joan still didn’t make any indication she was listening to any of their grisly suggestions. She was prepared, Colin realized. Prepared to die in whatever gruesome way the council decided. 

She finally looked up, glancing at the other vampires with a vague disinterest. Her eyes fell over Colin and he tensed, forcing his hands into his pockets because he still wasn’t sure what to do with them. For one, fleeting moment she didn’t seem to register who he was. Her face was blank, eyes glassy and dark. She paused over each of his features, just as reticent to acknowledge his presence as he was hers, until the pieces clicked and her face lit up with horrified recognition. 

She let out a surprised, strangled huff of air, and he knew she was thinking that he wasn’t supposed to be here. 

He agreed. He was not supposed to be here, smack dab in the middle of a massacre of her making. The soles of his loafers were black with the blood of his peers. His mouth still tasted of the vomit he’d never even been sure he was capable of producing. His favorite human was a whole other beast entirely, one that could (and would, given the chance?) kill him. This was too novel, too unusual, for an energy vampire. Especially a sentimental one. 

His hands twitched, still buried in his pockets, and Joan glanced there. He shifted his feet awkwardly, trying to stifle the sudden bout of fear building within him the longer she looked at him. She noticed that too, and she frowned. She met his eyes again and he flinched. Her energy, all rotating sharp edges and points, stilled. Hurt shuddered through her, disrupting her energy. Something billowy and soft floated between the spikes of bloodlust and hate and Colin struggled to recognize it. It was dense, like a cloud the moment before releasing its rain. 

She sank a little lower to the ground. The guards noticed but did nothing in response. She looked at Colin, pleading, and the soft aura reached toward him, gentle, and when he breathed it in he knew what it was: it was an apology.

She didn’t seem sorry, though. She’d felt no guilt when the council members mentioned the deaths she’d caused. She’d felt no shame when they identified her as a slayer. She’d only felt bad when he’d flinched.

The penny dropped, and Colin pulled his hands out of his pockets. 

She wasn’t sorry for what she’d done at all - she was sorry he was afraid of her. 

We’re friends, aren’t we?

She pulled her energy back, cradling it close against her, and he felt the loss acutely. The hairs on his arms stood up as he became aware of the coldness of the room. She stared at the floor again. The other council members were still discussing what needed to be done with her. At the moment they were debating the pros and cons of decapitation. Brad wanted something more violent - Tilda just wanted this to be over. The others seemed to agree. 

One of the guards reached down, his fingers grazing the back of Joan’s neck as some of the other council members took a step forward.

They were going to kill her.

Don’t be a stranger, Colin.

Before he could stop to reconsider the choice he was making, he said, “... we could keep her alive.” 

His voice cut through and they halted. They all stared at  him, Joan included, and his tone was even, almost bored-sounding, despite everything. “For information. Who knows the next time we’ll have a slayer restrained like this, if ever. I’ve read most of the books in the council library and I’ll tell ya, information on slayers is pretty scarce. It’d be a wasted opportunity to kill her.”

Most of the time Colin saw little benefit to being part of the council, but one major plus was access to the council library. There he had limitless access to dull facts and histories long forgotten by most of vampire-kind. He skimmed most of the chapters concerning slayers, but what he had read was hardly scholarly. Slayers were described as being dangerous, illusive … and that was pretty much it. 

“Hmm,” Tilda said, “That’s not a half-bad idea, actually. We could torture her for information and dispose of her afterward using any one of the methods already proposed here. Good suggestion, Colin Robinson.”

Joan’s eyes widened and Colin was pretty confident she was thinking the same thing he was: Fuck.

“A-Actually, they’ve, uh, they’ve done studies on torture and it doesn’t really work. You can get people to talk, sure, but they’ll say whatever you want to hear to get it to stop. Lots of science behind it, which I’d love to explain, but…”

The air moves when you lie.

“...But I’ve got an even better method - see, I’m an energy vampire, so I can sense changes in emotional states. I can tell if she lies, so we can just, y’know, ask her anything we want and I can tell you if it’s true or not. Like a polygraph. Well, better than a polygraph. There’s actually no evidence, really, to suggest that polygraphs are truly effective-”

“How did you find us, slayer?  Brad asked. “How did you know we’d be meeting today?”

She glanced at Colin with a flash of guilt. Well, not quite guilt - it was tear-shaped like guilt was, with a dip toward the bottom, but it was hollow. 

Is he part of your “book club?”

How often do you come to these meetings?

His eyes widened. It’d been him. He’d told her they meet every Wednesday. And she knew it wasn’t really a book club. And he’d known she knew that it wasn’t a book club but he’d been so scared of her then that he’d just been grateful to leave the car without issue. 

Colin was assaulted with the memory of the corpses out in the corridors, eyes blank, dead. Empty bodies, no emotions to drain. It was his fault - he’d led her here. Why? Because he’d needed a ride, and they were friends. 

They - they were friends, right? It couldn’t have been just for this. The smiles, the inside jokes, all that was real, he sensed it. She didn’t befriend him just to find the council, that’d…

That’d make a lot of sense, actually. More sense than a human finding an energy vampire’s company to be pleasant. 

He was such a fucking idiot. 

Joan’s eyes narrowed as she turned to look at Brad. The bloodlust coalesced once again, but she spoke through it. “I was out hunting and I saw one of you - a vampire with a red cape. He looked important, so I followed him here and saw all of you walk in behind him. I figured it must be some sort of hub for vampires and made my move.”

The air shuddered hard with her lie. Claude, she was talking about Claude. He was one of the dead ones out in the hall.

She looked at Colin. She raised her eyebrows a little and nodded her head, prompting him to speak, waiting for him to confirm she was telling the truth. There was a peculiar energy around her, something warm and insulating. It curled in front of him, like a thin shield. 

She was protecting him. She didn’t have to lie about how she found the council. He could stall all he wanted, but they both knew how impossible it would be for her to make it out of this. She was protecting him anyway.

“Well?” Tilda said.

“True,” Colin said, and Joan’s shoulders ever so slightly slumped with relief. There was still that sad acceptance of her fate hanging around her, but there was gratitude, too. She was grateful he was trying for her, and grateful they believed her lie and he wasn’t going down with her. 

Maybe she hadn’t just gotten close to him to find the council. And even if she had, at this moment, right now, with her head on the proverbial chopping block, did it really matter?

“Fucking Claude,” one of the others muttered. “Always insisted on looking so conspicuous.”

Tilda huffed. “We’ll have to alter our protocol for coming and going from the council headquarters. Make it impossible to track us here.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Slayer, are there others of your kind out there? Anyone else who might pose a threat to us?” 

 “...No. Not that I know of.”

The air wavered a bit. A half-lie. He had no way of knowing which part was true and which wasn’t. 

“Well?” Brad asked, looking at Colin.

“It’s, uhh…”

What would they do to her if they found out there was even a trace of a lie there? 

Joan looked at him, curious. Wondering if he’d sell her out after she refused to do the same to him.

“True. She’s telling the truth.”

She blinked once and said nothing.

“I find that hard to believe,” Tilda said. “Dozens of our kind are dead. Do you claim to be responsible for all of them, slayer? With no outside help?”

Joan’s face didn’t move, but the bloodlust was rising again, clawing at her from the inside out. “You saw first hand tonight what I’m capable of. Your kind is much easier to kill than you think.”

“Mine too?” Colin blurted.

She stared into him. The bloodlust in her simmered, but it was a little quieter now. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t kill energy vampires.”

He released a breath, detecting nothing but truth from her. Ultimately it didn’t really matter. The fact didn’t change anything, she was still a goddamned vampire slayer - but knowing she wasn’t an energy vampire slayer made the truth of what she was a bit more bearable. At least that bloodlust she felt had never been directed at him. He’d have probably shit himself if it had.

“We are not easy to kill!” another vampire suddenly shouted. “You may have caught some of us off guard tonight, slayer, but we lived and died and rose again long before you ever touched your first stake.”

Joan’s voice was low. “Even Henry?”

“Watch yourself,” the vampire growled.

The tension in the air was getting to be unbearable. Emotions weren’t visible - they had no colors, merely texture and shape. But if they did, Colin imagined Joan’s aura would be painted in red. The bloodlust was shifting, rapidly twisting as a righteous anger overtook her.

“Tell me-” she spat, “-why’d you do it? What the hell do you get out of that? Turning a child - a baby - into one of you? ”

“You are in no position to judge us!” screeched another vampire. “Who would turn a child? Who would kill one? An innocent child, resting in his crib?”

Joan grit her teeth, looking like she was in pain. A dense pool of anguish flowed around her. “Who says I would? He’s still alive, isn’t he? No, he’s not alive, he’s undead and that poor kid has all of you to blame.”

“You - you - dammit, why haven’t we killed her yet?”

Brad smiled. “Excellent question! Tilda, I don’t know about you, but I think we’ve heard enough. Let’s kill her. Now.”

Colin tensed. “R-remember what I said before? About keeping her alive? She could be useful-”

“She’s too dangerous to be kept alive,” Tilda said. The mention of Henry had fired her up too and the cold energy that had been cocooned around her all night shattered. The finality in her voice scared him. 

The other vampires must have also heard the definiteness in her tone because they all looked at each other, slowly nodding as the decision was made. They each took a step toward Joan, save Colin. He was frozen, watching on in horror as the others began closing the distance. They walked slowly, with purpose, like a funeral procession. This was the end. No more stalling now. No more straws to grasp at.

Brad reached her first. He gripped the back of her head, tilting it up, exposing her scar-riddled throat. He bared his teeth, and the light in Joan’s eyes went dim. She was calm. Resigned. The taste of it made Colin almost gag. Where - where the fuck was her defiance? The thing that made his eyes burn just looking at it? Made her so damned impossible to drain? 

With this many vampires against her and no weapon to use, there was no hope of survival. And yet, he wanted her to fight anyway. He wanted her to thwart them the same way she’d always thwarted him. Hell, he wanted her to win. She wasn’t meant to die like this, torn apart in a dank stone room isolated from the sun.

Brad licked one of his canines, and Colin felt something in him snap.

“Did I ever tell you guys about the Theory of Relativity?”

They paused, each turning to look at him. Tilda tilted her head. “What?”

“Albert Einstein. Published in 1915. The idea that space and time are relative. Totally transformed the world of physics. It was built upon the ideas of Isaac Newton - everyone here knows who Newton is, right? I think some of you were kicking around before he saw that apple fall. Man, gravity. What a concept, right? Except, I guess, technically our existence spits in the face of it, since, y’know, we can fly whenever we want. What force do you think it is that lets us do that? That’s Newton’s third law of motion - every reaction has an equal and opposite-”

“What are you doing?” Brad asked. His annoyance buzzed in the air, same as the others.

“Uh, I wasn’t done with my sentence, Brad. As I was saying, every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. So when we fly, what exactly are we pushing off of? We’re not rockets, we don’t have propulsion systems. ‘Course, not much of our existence can be explained with science. For you guys, I mean. The whole ‘no reflection’ thing, burning in the sun, getting sick whenever anyone says the ‘g’ word. I mean, what’s up with that? Allergic to a word? That’s like being allergic to the color yellow, or, or the sound of a bell.”

Some of the vampires leaned on each for support as their legs started sinking to the floor. They shook their heads, trying to rid themselves of the drowsy feeling settling into their bones. 

“I bet Newton would have a field day trying to figure out our science. That is, if you all could restrain yourselves long enough to let him. He died a virgin, apparently. Bet you all would have thought he was real tasty. A tasty little, uh, Newton. Fig Newton. You know, Fig Newtons actually weren’t named after Newton? They were named after the town of Newton, Massachusetts. That town wasn’t even named after Newton, either, it was a ‘new towne’ so to speak, so, you know, you can sort of merge the two words together and make the connection yourself. New-towne. Newton. New-towne. Newton. You hear it? Same thing, basically.”

One by one the vampires started dropping, collapsing into unconscious heaps on the floor. Colin’s eyes glowed so hard they stung, bathing his face in a bright blue. Exhausted from the draining, Brad’s arms went limp, and Joan pulled away from him. She looked at Colin in wonder, a hint of a smile passing across her face.

“What are you doing…” Tilda drawled, fighting to keep her eyes open. She gripped Brad’s shoulder, trying to keep herself standing, but a few moments later she collapsed, too. All of the other vampires followed, except for Brad.

Colin’s blood was singing. He felt like combusting, filled to the brim and practically overflowing with how much irritated energy he’d drained. He was a mostly silent participant at the few council meetings he attended, so they had no tolerance for his babbling, not like his roommates did. That was the only explanation he had for being able to drain them all so easily. Or maybe he was just stronger than he thought, when it counted.

Brad took a step toward Colin, stumbling a little. “You - you fucker. Traitorous fucking…”

He took another step. Colin took a step back. Brad followed, nearly tripping with his exhaustion. He blinked hard, sucking in a deep breath of air as he tried to wake himself up. He was getting ever closer to Colin, who kept retreating backward until he felt the wall meet him. 

“I’m gonna tear you limb from limb,” he growled. 

Too fast even for Colin to anticipate, he lunged, teeth bared like a rabid dog. Colin closed his eyes, bracing for the impact, but it never came. Something wet and cold splashed across his face. He tentatively opened his eyes as he wiped at his cheek.

Brad’s mouth hung open in a silent scream as a wooden pole pushed through his chest from behind. His jaw worked furiously as his arms limply swatted at the air. Black blood oozed slowly from the wound in his chest and he fell over, thudding against the floor. Above him stood Joan, holding what looked like the jagged wooden end of a torch. 

She lowered the makeshift stake, watching silently as Colin tried dimming the light in his eyes. Everything was tinged in blue. The outline of Joan’s frizzy, blood-stained hair looked like a bright cyan. 

“I knew your eyes glowed,” she whispered.

Colin blinked his eyes once, hard, and the blue light subsided. “What?”

“Back at work,” she said, voice cracking on the word ‘work.’ “A couple times I thought I saw your eyes glow but it disappeared so fast I couldn’t be sure. I’m- I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to energy vampires.”

Colin didn’t bother responding. He stepped around her, carefully, eying the stake in her hand. He looked at the unconscious bodies of what was left of the council. Then he looked at the growing puddle of blood surrounding Brad and panic gripped him.

“They’re going to kill me.”

Joan’s energy was softer now, gentle. If she wasn’t drenched in blood and holding a stake, he’d have thought she was just regular old Joan, work wife and human friend. “Who is?”

“What do you mean who - them! The council! They’re going to wake up and they’ll remember what I did and - I am so fucked. I can’t even-”

He couldn’t get the rest of the words out. He was breathing too fast and the sheer amount of energy he drained was threatening to tear him apart, pulling at his seams and begging to pour out of him. The edge of his vision went blurry and he kept clenching and unclenching his hands. 

Distantly, he felt a hand on his shoulder. There was that calm energy again - soft. Warm. Disgustingly kind. Joan.

“I can fix this,” she said.

He was shaking. He hated it.

“You can walk away. Walk right out of this room and don’t look back. Go home - I’ll take care of this.”

He bit the inside of his cheek. He wanted to sink into the ground, fall apart, dump all this excess energy, and maybe, in a couple decades or so, after everything had blown over, pull himself together and crawl back up to the surface. 

He shook his head. “It’s not just them. If I’m the only one to walk away from this, there’ll be questions. The Guide, the familiars, whoever’s above the council. All eyes will be on me.”

She tapped her stake against her thigh in thought. “The Guide and the familiars - are they nearby?”

Oh, god, did she plan on killing them, too?

“Why?”

“Because they can vouch for you. Tell them what happened - the council caught me, I got loose, and killed them all. Just, you know, leave out the part where you drained everyone. You managed to slip away because you’re an energy vampire - people always ignore energy vampires. You’re like…”

“... a blind spot.”

She nodded. “Yeah. A blind spot. No one ever wants to acknowledge the energy vampire.”

He thought about the way everyone at work avoided him. Thought about the way everyone at work avoided her, too. “Or the slayer.”

She frowned. “Exactly.”

Behind her, Tilda groaned, clawing at something uselessly in her sleep. The bloodlust in Joan, which had been absent only a moment ago, woke up. It slinked around her, tracing her veins. She let out a breath to steady herself. 

“Just walk away, Colin.”

He swallowed. He saw the resolve in her face, and then, slowly, began to walk toward the door. He ignored the jittery feeling in his bones and the pit in his stomach. The council members were still unconscious, but he swore he could feel their eyes on him, judging, asking him what the hell he was doing.

He left the room, closing the door behind him with an ominous creak. 

The hall was quiet.

He’d head toward the room the familiars typically waited in, that’s what he’d do. He’d see if he could intercept the Guide on his way, wherever she was, and keep her away from the council meeting room long enough for Joan to finish her work and get out. He’d lie like Joan told him to and they would believe him - they’d have to. Because if they didn’t…

No. No, he wouldn’t think about that. 

He began his trek through the corridors in the direction he saw the Guide leave him in, ignoring the squelching sounds as Joan plunged her stake over and over again into the people he’d thought would live forever.

Chapter Text

“So I told the Guide that Joan had started killing the rest of the council and I’d just managed to escape. Didn’t use her name, obviously, but you get what I mean. She believed me - I didn’t detect any suspicion from her at all. Just fear. It’s all I taste anymore, Biff. Everyone is so scared of everything. It makes the air stale, dries my mouth out. I got a mouthwash for it but it doesn’t do anything. I sent a letter to the mouthwash manufacturers but they haven’t responded yet.”

Colin adjusted the small, framed photo of Chestnut by Biff’s bedside. It had been weeks since he’d put it there. Joan had yet to mention its absence from her desk. Ugh, Joan. 

“And I still don’t know what to do with all this - all this fucking energy. I drained so much. It’s like I can feel every pore in my body. And I’m actually - look at my fucking hand. It’s vibrating.”

He held his shaking hand over Biff’s unconscious form. It trembled so quickly the outlines of his fingers blurred. Biff’s monitor beeped once in acknowledgement. Colin gripped the plastic siding of the hospital bed. It cracked under his touch. 

“I could barely keep it together for the Guide. And all those familiars, telling them their masters were probably dead? Knowing that they definitely were ? It was awkward, but in a bad way.”

He shook his arms and hopped quickly from foot to foot, desperate to burn off the energy racing under his skin. He wanted to punch the wall or scream, or throw Biff’s stupid monitor out the window. He looked at the monitor and it beeped twice, as if to beg for mercy. 

Colin huffed. “I helped her. She made me help her. Really, what choice did she leave me? Watch her die? After everything? All the - all the jokes and the lunches and the drives home? What would you have done?”

Silence. No beeps. 

“You’re right, I never should have led her to the council building to start with, but I don’t see how that helps anything.”

Colin began pacing the room. At the speed he was walking, he’d be surprised if he didn’t burn a path in the flooring. “I wasn’t thinking. It was an emergency meeting and I was so used to her driving me home that I didn’t think-”

He stopped, his face somehow becoming even more pale under the fluorescent hospital lights. 

“She drove me home. Which means she knows where I live. Which means she could find the others - Nadja, Laszlo, Nandor. She could-”

His words faded away, burning on his tongue as his breaths quickened. He envisioned Joan, cloaked in light, slinking into his house. He saw her crossing the threshold of the entryway, into the newly cleaned foyer, over the rug hiding that blood stain Guillermo couldn’t get out. She passed through the hallways, past all of Nandor’s knick-knacks and the countless paintings, straight toward their rooms. She’d find them, caught unawares in their coffins with a stake in her hand. She’d drag their corpses out to the backyard, holes in their chests, leaving them to be charred by the sun just as the Baron was. He could see the expression on her face so easily - that same blank look when she’d seen Paul, when she killed Brad, when she - fuck, when she saw his drawing.

His eyes glowed. “God dammit!”

He picked up the chair beside Biff and tore it apart, ripping the wooden armrests from the plastic backing and snapping the seat in two. He threw the chair onto the ground, stomping against the pieces as hard as he could. He felt a burst of energy leave him, relieving some of the pressure, but it wasn’t quite enough. A nurse walking by poked her head in at the noise and Colin froze. She looked at the chair, then at Colin, nervousness twitching off of her in short, uneven pulses. 

“Sir?”

“He did it,” Colin said, pointing at Biff, his hand still shaking.

She looked at his hand, saw the shaking, and her nervousness morphed into pity. “Sir, if you’re going to break hospital property you’ll have to leave.”

“I was just going.”

He sped past her, already pulling out his phone to call a taxi to take him home, hoping he wasn’t too late, that Joan hadn’t decided to do what he feared she would. She saw his drawing a week ago, and he was confident now that she’d known his roommates were vampires because of it. It wasn't like his drawing was exactly subtle - three pale people in old fashioned outfits, of course she knew - It would explain the horrible panic she’d felt the rest of that night, anyway.

… I know too much now and I can’t unknow it and it was easy to pretend before but now I can’t and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this! 

But then  - why hadn’t she done anything about it? She was a slayer, slaying was, quite literally, in her blood. Why wait to kill them?

Maybe she was done waiting. Maybe tonight was the night and she’d been waiting to finish off the council to do it. He couldn’t comprehend why, and the lack of understanding fed into the fear. The excess energy in him burned up quickly with his newfound panic, and now his hands shook for a totally different reason. 

When he left, the air buzzing with his paranoia, the nurse surveyed the damage on the chair. It was unsalvageable - nails were sticking out of the wood and the plastic backing was bent to hell. She gasped when she saw the damage to the floor. The linoleum tile was broken in dozens of places, a large web of cracks spread beneath her feet. 

Drugs, she thought. The shaking of his hands, the strength to do all this, it had to be drugs. Though judging by his look he didn’t seem to be the type.

She looked at the comatose man in the bed. “It’s always the ones you least expect,” she said as she began collecting the pieces of the chair, careful not to touch the exposed nails. 

She was turned away as she worked, missing how Biff’s eyelids fluttered in response. 

The second Colin entered his home he could feel them. Their energies were deep in the house, relaxed, content, asleep. He breathed a sigh of relief and fell back against the door, taking a moment to collect himself. He already knew they were fine, since he’d texted Guillermo asking how things were on the taxi ride home, but he knew he wouldn’t feel at ease until he’d made it back and could feel their energies for himself. 

“Colin? Is that you?” he heard Guillermo call out from what sounded like the dining room.

“Yeah?”

“Can I see you for a minute?”

Under his breath he muttered, “This night’s never going to fucking end.”

He was right, Guillermo was in the dining room. Spread on the table were various collections of antique silverware, pitchers, plates, and bowls. He was polishing them meticulously, despite the pointlessness of the task. No one in the house used dishware except for him. And even then, Guillermo mostly subsisted off of energy bars and microwave meals. 

“What‘d you want?”

Guillermo set down the spoon he was polishing and stared at Colin, his frustration and exasperation pummeling him.

“What’s going on? Why’d we leave the funeral? What was that place you had me drive us to? Why did you come out with black stains on your clothes? And why did you have me drop you off at a hospital afterward? And don’t say it’s not my business. I’m not your familiar, I’m Nandor’s, so I don’t have to drive you anywhere ever again if I don’t want to.”

Colin looked down at his sweater, grimacing when he saw the black streaks of blood on it. He must’ve gotten those when Joan - 

Nope. Don’t think about it.

“If I told you it’d probably bore you to death.”

Guillermo stared at him a moment longer, weighing if it was worth pressing the issue, deciding it wasn’t, then returned to his task. It never mattered how irked Guillermo got, his nerve always wavered at the slightest bit of resistance. “Is it some energy vampire thing?”

“Pretty much.”

“The detour at the hospital too?”

He hesitated, about to just say “yes” and leave the room, but he was a little sick of lies tonight and exhaustion was settling in. He still needed to check the perimeter of the house for any weak points, and keep guard against Joan until he could come up with some sort of plan, but he was tired and scared and tired of being scared and resting a moment wouldn’t hurt. He could recognize Joan’s energy in a heartbeat - if she breached the house, he’d know. 

He took a seat at the dining table. Guillermo’s surprise popped for a moment in the air, then dissipated into indifference. 

Colin grabbed a fork, spinning it idly in his hands. “No, I wanted to go to the hospital to visit somebody.”

Guillermo began wiping down a bowl, frowning when he noticed a chip in the rim. “Oh. Who?”

“You remember that guy I drained into a coma?”

“Yeah?”

“I visit him sometimes,” he said, voice unusually soft.

“Why?”

He shrugged and bent the tines of the fork, making Guillermo cringe.

“I don’t know. Just something to do.”

Guillermo nodded, set aside the bowl, and picked up a plate. They sat in silence for a few minutes, Guillermo tending to the dishware while Colin twisted the fork into unnatural, useless shapes. He knew once he left the room he’d have to get to work patrolling the house, but he was content to live in this temporary bubble of peace for a while longer.

“Don’t you get tired staying up?” he said, filling the silence, “You’re human. You need just as much sleep as we do.”

Guillermo shrugged. “I’m still kind of shaken up about the Baron so I couldn’t sleep. And I like staying up when it’s just me, anyway. Nobody telling me what to do, no shenanigans, no ‘Guillermo do this, do that.’ I can just do my chores in peace.”

“But nobody even uses this silverware.”

A blustery cloud of bashfulness appeared. Guillermo wouldn’t meet his eyes. “No… but my mom would.”

Colin crooked a brow. “Stealing? Pretty sure that goes against the Familiar Code of Ethics.”

He huffed. “Yeah, luring virgins to their deaths is fine but stealing is where a good familiar draws the line. You’re not gonna tell the others, right?”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“Didn’t think so. I get paid, like, nothing, and Mother’s Day is coming up. I figure I’m owed a little and it’s not like they ever notice when things go missing.”

“You don’t have to explain yourself, I really, really don’t care.”

“Do you care about anything?”

Colin’s jaw dropped a little and Guillermo panicked. “That’s not - That came out wrong, I just mean you don’t ever really seem fazed by anything. When I told you the Baron died you laughed. Is that an energy vampire thing?”

He struggled to answer. It was true that energy vampires were one of the more level-headed supernatural creatures. No fits of rage in a full-moon, no berserking at the sight of fire, no uncontrollable lust in the presence of virgin blood. 

But he’d been fazed by a lot tonight, pushed to his absolute limits, and the only thing fending off the panic was the stillness of the room and the ritualistic way Guillermo was cleaning the porcelain plate in his hands. 

He stood up, suddenly uncomfortable. “I’ve got my own chores to do. Don’t let the others see you take the dishware, they’ll kill you. Goodnight.”

He left just as Guillermo tried apologizing, mentally counting every window he’d have to check and how many doors he’d have to lock. It was probably the most pleasant conversation he’d ever had with Guillermo, who he hadn’t even tried draining, which he’d chalk up to his time spent with Joan. She was changing him. He was getting accustomed to hunger, to finding pleasure and respite in an honest conversation with a familiar, even finding comfort in a comatose audience who offered nothing in the way of sustenance. 

He was softening, which was the absolute last thing he needed when the vampire-slayer responsible for it was on the loose, and knew where his friends were. Did he care about anything? Yes, he cared about his friends very much, and for once it actually mattered. 

He spent the rest of the night obsessively turning the knobs on every door, quadruple-checking that he locked everything. He pasted more newspapers on the windows, even the ones fully covered and blacked out, just for the sake of feeling like he was accomplishing something. He paced down the halls, walking past his roommates’ rooms frequently, letting their hazy emotions in sleep soothe him. He avoided Guillermo like the plague, not wanting to explain himself or risk more suspicion. It was a relief when Guillermo finally went to bed. 

Colin considered telling them all the truth when they woke up, or pieces of it. He could tell them a slayer was out there, warn them, but then he’d have to explain how he knew that, which would mean telling them about the council and what happened to its members, which would mean sending them into another blind panic like he was currently in, which would mean- which would mean…

He had to tell them, for their protection. 

He had to keep it secret, for their protection.

By the time daylight had come, he still had yet to decide what to do. He knew he couldn’t tell them he helped the slayer kill the council, but that was the only thing he was sure about. The rest of it he agonized over, his stomach twisting itself into knots. He felt like Guillermo - anxiety-riddled and sick with it.

He passed by his room just as his morning alarm went off. It was time to go to work.

He couldn’t. Abandon his friends? Leave them here exposed before he’d decided what to do about Joan?

But he couldn’t stay in the house forever. He’d have to leave at some point. Which meant he’d have to confront Joan, somehow, eventually. He had no idea where he stood with her - she spared him, covered for him, told him she’d take care of things. But why?

Part of him, the soft, sentimental part, liked to think that she spared him for the same reason he fought so hard to convince the council to let her live. That it was their friendship which was responsible, that it meant as much to her as it did to him. He remembered that cloud of remorse surrounding her as she kneeled on the stone floor of the councilroom. How conflicted she felt the day she saw his drawing. The wonder in her voice when she’d said she knew his eyes glowed. That was real-

But the more cynical, insecure part understood that that was unlikely. It was in her blood to hate him. She probably got close to him to get closer to the council - and it worked spectacularly well for her. She didn’t even have to prompt him to take her there, he did that all on his own. She spared him because she had no reason not to -  slayers don’t kill energy vampires, she said. She spared him because he was no threat to her.

But he knew her secret now - surely, she should have killed him for that reason alone, right? There’d be no reason to keep him around. 

Frustrated by the meandering path his thoughts were taking, out of pure habit, he got dressed for work. He shaved his nonexistent stubble and picked up his briefcase. He looked in the mirror, hoping to find guidance from the sickly man in it, but he also had nothing to say. 

Colin walked to the entry hall, his footsteps sounding impossibly loud against the rug. Staring at the wood grain in the front door, he decided that he would step outside, take a breath of fresh air, feel the sun on his face, and then make his decision. He would either walk to the bus stop and head to work hoping to see Joan, since he had no other way of finding her (texting Guillermo to stay home for the day and watch over the house before he left), or he’d head right back inside, wake up the others, and tell them what happened. He needed out of this house, even for just a moment, and then he’d know. He’d have to.

His grip on his briefcase tightened as he turned the knob, squinting at the brightness of the sun as he stepped outside. He made to walk to the end of the driveway, but stopped, everything in him stilling, the way a rabbit might at the sight of a fox.

Twenty feet away was the familiar silhouette of a woman, leaning against her car, arms crossed in front of her chest. She didn’t move when she saw him, she merely waited, the gravity of her energy driving his feet forward despite his desire to run back into the house. He kept walking, one step, two, three, ten steps until he was face to face with her.

“We need to talk, Colin.”

He looked back at the house, something inside him reaching for it, silently begging his roommates to wake up and prepare for the danger waiting for them at the end of the driveway. He had made the wrong choice. He should not have stepped outside. She was supposed to be at work, not here, not this close to everything he ever cared about.

“They’re in there, aren’t they?”

He said nothing, his tongue feeling fat in his mouth.

“Did you tell them what happened?”

He slowly shook his head, trying to find his words, but his throat was dry and there was too much to say.

“So they don’t know about me?”

Joan’s energies were difficult to distinguish - heavy and dense, yet fluttering with nervousness. It seemed exhausting, holding such a weight. He probed for any signs of bloodlust or ill-intent. There was nothing, save a slight trepidation she felt whenever she glanced at the imposing house behind him.

He stepped to the side to block her view. “They know I have a friend at work. They don’t know what you - well, what you are.”

She looked at his free hand, saw it tremble, and frowned. 

“We shouldn’t talk here, neither of us is comfortable. I could drive us somewhere.”

The thought of sitting in her car, trapped, contained, was unbearable. Nevermind the fact that he didn’t want to talk in the first place. He wanted to duck his head in the sand and wait until everything that happened with the council blew over, but there was a goddamn vampire slayer in his front yard and she wanted to talk. Fine, then. He’d feel her out, try to find a way to convince her to spare his friends and find out why she hadn’t already killed them in the first place. And if he couldn’t convince her … he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. Right now he needed to get her the hell away from his house. He couldn’t risk Guillermo catching sight of her. 

“I’m not getting in your car. Let’s walk.”

She nodded. “Right, car-sickness. It’s your neighborhood. Lead the way.”

He started walking, watching her closely as she managed to keep pace with him, despite the slight limping in her right leg. She was covered in evidence of the events of last night - bandages on her bitten throat, scuffed knees from the stone floor, yellow and purple finger-shaped bruises on her arms. Slayers didn’t have a healing factor, he supposed. 

Neither one of them said a word until they were out of sight of the house. The air felt thick between them, their tense energies grating against each other. He didn’t know why she was nervous. She knew he was no danger to her. 

The weight of the briefcase in his hand was comforting and he thanked god (would god accept thanks from a vampire?) that he brought it. He’d really have no idea what to do with his hands in a situation like this.

She looked around, surveying the neighborhood. “Where are you taking us?”

“A park.”

It was the same park Laszlo typically used for his late-night hunts. There were plenty of secluded benches and tree cover perfect for discreet conversations, but there was also enough foot traffic and visibility that he’d never feel too isolated. He still sensed no hostility from her, but he’d seen first-hand how quickly she could turn, and he’d rather have the safety of the public eye on him if that happened.

When they reached the gates of the park there were a few early morning runners already occupying the grounds. He recognized a few of them and it set him at ease. Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, he would strike up discussions with them as they ran, holding them hostage in a conversation when they wanted nothing more than to continue their early run. 

Colin led Joan through the park to a bench. It had a little distance from the walking paths, but it was still within plain view of anyone passing by. Joan said nothing as they sat down, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap. She was wearing her work clothes and Colin remembered he’d neglected to call off for work. He’d never missed a day before. They probably wouldn't notice.

He was about to set down his briefcase on the ground, but the moment his fingers left the handle he felt exposed. He set the briefcase in his lap instead, laying his hands flat against it, feeling the familiar texture of the brown leather. Joan said nothing about it, but he could taste her puzzlement. It was sweet. 

“Did you really come to my house just to talk?” he said.

Did you come to hurt them?

“I assumed you’d have questions,” she said lightly, “or maybe you’d just want to yell at me.”

“If all my attempts to piss you off in the past didn’t work then I don’t see what good yelling at you would do.”

She grinned a little, but there was sadness behind it. “A lot’s happened since the last time you tried draining me. It might be different now.”

“Still not risking it.”

She made a sound that resembled a laugh, but quickly suffocated it. They fell back into silence. Her aura was tentative, anticipatory, gently reaching toward him then pulling away. She was waiting for him to speak, to start “the talk.” But anytime he tried, he’d think about how badly the conversation could turn, and his mouth would dry up. 

Eventually, after realizing that he wasn’t going to be brave enough to start talking, she did. “I can only imagine what you think of me, after what you’ve seen. I’m guessing, before last night, you’d never even seen vampire blood before, had you?”

He started to feel nauseous as he nodded in confirmation.

“That’s - fuck, I’m so sorry, Colin. I just - I’m sorry.”

Hearing her say sorry - and knowing that she was sorry for all the wrong reasons - loosened his tongue. “You’re not sorry you killed the council, though.”

She opened her mouth like she was going to refute it, but shook her head instead. “No. I’m not. But I am very, very sorry you became a part of it.”

“Well, no worries, then,” he said, voice rising. “It’s no biggie that you killed some of the most important vampires ever - that I walked into a mass graveyard and tripped over a fucking corpse - so long as you didn’t mean for me to see it! Why should I care?”

He continued, laughing a little, and he started sounding deranged, even to himself. “Why should I care that if anyone finds out I helped a slayer, I’m a dead man? That I led her right to them, that’s it’s all my fault? Or that the only real friend I’ve ever had was just using me to get to the council-”

“-You think I only became friends with you to get to the council?” she interrupted, eyes wide. 

“Well, why else would you be friends with me?”

The air hung heavy, dense. She stared at him for a few moments. Her confusion was apparent; it was nothing but scribbles of gassy energy twirling around her head. It eventually dissipated, and she understood.

“Oh, Colin. ”

There it was again, that ridiculous sympathy she only ever seemed to feel for him. There was something else, too, something warm sitting in her chest and he didn’t have the courage to name it. It was trying to suffocate him, so he scooted farther down the bench to avoid it. He ignored the disappointment she felt at the increased distance between them. 

“Will you stop - don’t do that,” he said, his face reddening.

“Do what?”

“That! The - your feelings! Humans aren’t supposed to feel bad for energy vampires! Let alone vampire killers!”

Her lips pursed. “Maybe not, but I do, and I don’t understand why you seem more upset about me caring about you than you do about what happened last night.”

He deflated, voice low. “I just don’t want your pity.”

“I would think an energy vampire of all people would know the difference between pity and empathy.”

Waving his hands in the air, he said, “Pity, empathy, whatever, I don’t want that from you!”

Her energy twisted, the outer layer spiking slightly before she smoothed it out. Even now, as angry as he was with her, he still couldn’t help but be a little impressed at how easily she softened her own edges. 

“Then what do you want from me? I’m here because I want to clear the air with you. Why are you here?”

He thought about his friends back at home, sleeping in their coffins, blissfully unaware of the danger only a few streets away. No one knew he was here, sitting with a slayer, one who knew where he lived and what his friends looked like. 

And just like that, his anger turned to fearful desperation as he remembered what he was really here for. What really mattered. He wasn’t here to get angry; he was here to beg. 

“Because I don’t want you to hurt my friends.”

She was about to say something and the warmth in her chest was getting bigger, but he kept talking, the words tumbling out of him before he could lose his nerve. “Look, I‘ve thought about this a lot - all night, in fact. And I’ve decided that I won’t tell anyone what you really are, I won’t blab to whoever’s higher up than the council. I won’t tell them your name or where you work or anything about you. You can even keep coming to work if you want, I’ll find another job, just please - please - spare my roommates.”

She tried saying something again, her eyes wide, but he couldn’t stop talking. “They’re my friends, or at least, I’m their friend, and they’re all I’ve got now that you - well, now that our whole thing’s gone to shit. I’m the one who drained the council, who lied to the Guide and the familiars and everybody I had to to get you out of there. All I’m asking is that you return the favor. You killed so many influential vampires last night; can’t you just let these three off the hook?”

She said nothing. The tentative energy she’d had disappeared and in its place was - well, a lot. Disappointment, heaps of it piling itself up into a thick column. There was shame, which tasted bitter and wet, and wrapped around it was guilt, which tasted similarly. The warmth was still there too, pulsing erratically. There was anger, but it was buried under all the other muck and didn’t seem to know what it should be directed toward. It was disorganized, lost in the chaos. Surrounding all of it, tying it all up, was hurt. Wave and waves of hurt. 

When she finally did speak, her voice was flat. He didn't know how she managed to pull that off, despite the deluge of emotion weighing her down. “Were you telling the truth, when you said you could sense lies?”

Confused at her lack of an answer, he said, “Yes. It’s something in the air. It moves.”

She nodded, her gaze looking past him. “Then it should be clear to you that what I’m about to say is true. Colin,” she said slowly, like it was painful just to say his name, “I’m not going to hurt your friends. I want to. Badly , but I’ve already decided that I won’t. They’re as safe from me as you are.”

The air was mercifully still. Not a single tremor. Which meant there were no lies, no half-truths like she was prone to telling. She sincerely meant it.

He nearly slumped against the bench with relief. His friends were safe - safe! - and he was too, for whatever reason.  

“Why? Don’t get me wrong, I am - hoo boy, I am relieved - but I don’t understand why. ”

Her brows furrowed, like she genuinely couldn’t comprehend his confusion. “Isn’t it obvious?”

He shook his head.

“It’s you. ”

“I … I don’t get it. What do I have to do with it?”

“Everything! Colin, how can you not - ” She ran her hand down her face, exasperated. Her mask finally broke, and all of the hurt and sympathy and shame showed through. It scared him, but some distant part of himself realized that this may be the first time he was ever seeing the real Joan - more than a human and more than a slayer. 

She looked at him, really looked at him, and for a second he worried maybe she could read energies, too.

“I’m scaring you again, and I’m sorry for that too, but you need to understand. The reason I’m not going after your friends is because I can’t. I tried. I saw that drawing you made of them and I knew what they were, and I had to do something about it. But anytime I’d think about going through with it, I’d get this - this ache in my chest. I’d think about you, and how hard you’d worked on the drawing and how excited you were to show it to me because you cared about them so much. And I’d think about how you’d react once they were gone and…”

Her voice shook. “I agonized over it for days, but as badly as I wanted to, I couldn’t do it. I still can’t, and it kills me. Knowing that they’re still here, hurting people, and only able to do it because I’m too sentimental to do what needs to be done. That’s all on me. And I’m sorry if that’s hard to hear, but it’s the truth. The air’s not going to move. If I had the strength to do it, I would, I just… I just can’t. I’m betraying what I am, and it’s killing me.”

She looked at him, her gray eyes bright and shimmering, pleading that he understand. That he, somehow, forgive. Her bloodlust had been growing during her little speech. It festered unpleasantly, its barbs scratching at all the other emotions, but it was contained, smothered by the warmth growing in the center of her.

The warm, pulsing thing in her chest-

Affection

-was burning him. 

He leaned closer, anyway. It was heady and bubbly and totally new. No one, no friends, not even Evie, had ever felt affection for him this potently. He breathed it in and it seared his lungs but he didn’t care because it meant that somehow, he’d finally managed to get under Joan’s skin. Not in the way he’d originally intended, or in a way he ever thought possible, but he’d done it. Colin Robinson, energy vampire, had managed to charm a slayer into not slaying. 

He reeled as he tasted the affection in the air, tainted with Joan’s shame and guilt. It made it taste chalky, like the candy hearts Kim would put out for Valentine’s. He should have been disgusted by the taste, the old Colin Robinson would have been, but right now he couldn’t really give a damn about what he was supposed to feel because, finally, someone cared about him. And Joan had been right, it wasn’t pity, it was so much more. It was too much but he couldn’t say he minded.

“I’m sentimental, too.” 

She said nothing, anxiously picking at one of her nails, waiting for him to continue. “When I first met you, you infuriated me. No matter what I did, or what trick I pulled, I couldn’t drain you. Nothing I did mattered. I considered avoiding you, or leaving the job altogether. Instead I, I acclimated . You feel all these pleasant emotions, Joan, and to someone like me that’s supposed to be repulsive. It was, at first, for a long time. Anytime you smiled at me it was like staring straight into a lightbulb. And not one of those energy-efficient ones, either, I’m talking 300 watts, at least. Or, god forbid, you’d laugh. It’d give me migraines, and trust me, Excedrin does not work on energy vampires. But I powered through anyway, and it’s all backward now; I don’t like seeing negative emotions on you, it doesn’t fit, and your happiness is… Well, it tastes good , what little of it I can taste without draining it. My palate’s changed. Do you understand?”

She shook her head, eyes wide. They were closer now, her curiosity and hope crawling up his throat with a gentle caress. 

“I’m just saying, I get it. You’re betraying what you are because you’re sentimental. I’m changing what I am for the same reason. It’s confusing and awful, but we’ve both made our choices, and there’s no point beating ourselves up about it.”

She was everywhere: affection, guilt, relief, shame, joy. It pulsed and shivered and dipped low then rose high again. It pulled at him and his arms erupted in goosebumps at the sensation, despite the warmth of his sweater. Her energy - energies, there were so many of them - made him nervous. 

She smiled - and yeah, wow, it was like looking at a lightbulb, or maybe even the sun - and he was surprised to find that he’d missed it. 

Through a laugh, she said, “We’re so fucked, aren’t we?”

Nonchalantly, he said, “Oh, totally. A vampire killer who can’t slay and an energy vampire who can’t drain. We’re quite a defective pair.”

She laughed and he grinned and it was so easy to fall back into the people they used to be. Two work friends, laughing at a private joke no else could ever hope to understand. He could imagine Derek or Val walking past right now, looking at them in that annoyed way they always did, and continuing on.

Of course, they couldn’t actually go back to that. Too many secrets were out in the open, too much had happened. He knew what she looked like covered in blood, and she’d seen him drain a whole room of people at once. They came to this realization simultaneously, and the mood dropped again.

“Last night-,” Joan said, steering the conversation right back into uncomfortable territory, “-you saved me. I should have said it earlier, but thank you . I didn’t even know energy vampires could drain like that, but thank you for doing it.”

Unaccustomed to gratitude, especially for draining, of all things, he said, “I’d be a pretty bad work husband if I didn’t.”

She laughed again, but then her face fell, like she’d just remembered something important. “You know I didn’t just become friends with you to get access to the council, right? You believe me when I say it was a coincidence?”

He scratched at the corner of his briefcase, soothed by the repetitive motion. The bitterness was creeping in again.“It’s a pretty insane coincidence, but yeah, I believe you. It must have felt like you struck gold that night, huh? When I led you right to them?”

She frowned. “No, it didn’t. When you had me drive you there, once I realized what it was … It didn’t feel good; it was just something that had to be taken care of.”

She shrugged, and the casualness of the gesture bothered him.

“Okay, but you still took advantage of it. You still used me.”

All of her energies stilled so quickly that Colin thought he might’ve broken her. Something tore through all of it - empathy, understanding, and a whole new brand of guilt he hadn’t seen from her before. This guilt was deeper, rooted in something else, and he wondered what had happened in her past to cause it. 

“I - I guess I did. Jesus, I’m sorry. I never even thought of it that way. I never wanted to use you. Especially not a friend.”

She broke eye contact, looking straight ahead. He thought she might be looking into a memory, recalling something terrible, and Colin realized he was getting bored of tasting her apologies. It was such a heavy emotion, and he was craving something light. He was still hurt, but there wasn’t much point in continuing to remind her of it, not since she’d already promised to spare his roommates, which was all he’d really been hoping to accomplish from this conversation, anyway. She seemed determined to hurt herself as much as she’d hurt him, and he didn’t like it. 

“Y’know what? Apology accepted. All of them. We’re moving past it. Like I said, we’ve made our choices, and we’re not beating ourselves up about it. There are bigger things to worry about. Like, are you going to go back to work?” 

She blinked a few times, coming back to the present. “That depends on whether or not you still want me there.”

He was floored by her sincerity. “You’d really leave if I wanted you to?”

“I would. You’re my favorite part of that job, anyway. I wouldn’t have a reason to stay if you wanted me gone.”

Ah, there it was. She was getting affectionate again. The air felt hot so he pulled at his collar, but he still savored it all the same. 

God, if his roommates could see him now. How mortified would they be? Thankfully, Joan didn’t seem to notice how he basked in her affection like a lizard in the sun. 

He drummed his fingers against his briefcase, ignoring the way his stomach gnawed at him. He was getting hungrier the longer this conversation went on. He’d skipped breakfast this morning. 

“It was boring without you there. Everybody kept looking at me like I was a kicked puppy. It’s harder to annoy people when they feel bad for you.”

She chuckled. “I can imagine. I’ll come back tomorrow, then, if that’s alright with you. I think I’ve run out of sick days, anyway.”

“You have. In your first year you’re only allocated three sick days. After that, you get five, from there-”

“How much of the handbook do you have memorized?” she said, interrupting him before the boredom could crop up.

“All of it.”

She shook her head, grinning. She looked at him with a fondness that should have disgusted him, but it didn’t. It was as he’d said - he’d grown accustomed to her. Her aura tilted. Laughing, she said, “I missed this.”

Now, what he meant to say was, “I missed this, too.” Somehow, instead, what he said was,“I missed you, too.”

But the way saying it made her eyes light up, he couldn’t really bring himself to correct the mistake.

She didn’t say anything in response, and for a minute or so they just sat in silence, peacefully watching the pigeons pecking for scraps and the leaves floating in the wind. Joan absentmindedly traced her fingers against the scrapes on her knees. Off in the distance, Colin could see one of the morning runners from before. They were getting farther away. He was getting hungrier, he needed to feed, but there was still so much to talk about. 

“I still have a lot of questions, Joan.”

She sighed. “I know. I do, too, now that we can be honest.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I want to keep talking, y’know, ‘clear the air’ like you said, but I’ve gotta eat. I stayed up without draining and I skipped breakfast this morning and it’s just exhausting, talking about all this on an empty stomach.”

“I skipped breakfast too. I wanted to catch you before you left for work.”

He could tell she was hungry. Hunger wasn’t an emotion, but frustration from being hungry was, and he could feel it growing on her, same as him.

“Well…” he said, tentative, “we could go eat somewhere. Keep talking. There’s a diner within walking distance. I hear they have good french toast.”

“But… you don’t eat human food.”

“Not for me, obviously, for you. I can drain the server.”

She seemed amused. “So now we’re graduating from lunch buddies to breakfast buddies, hmm?”

Colin Robinson never would have guessed that a vampire killer could be such a dork. He got the sense she was trying to embarrass him and decided he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. He’d already admitted he missed her, which was embarrassing enough. His pride couldn’t take admitting the thrill he felt at the idea of having breakfast with her in a non-work setting. 

He stood up, briefcase in hand, feeling comfort in having some sort of plan to effectuate. 

“C’mon, I’m starving. Let’s make like a leaf and, uh … I don’t think that’s how that goes, actually.”

She stood up, a hesitant smile on her face, like she was finding it hard to believe it could be this easy to go back to the easygoing camaraderie of before. She had an aura of nervous anticipation, like at any moment the rug was going to be pulled out from under them. He felt the same.

“I know what you meant. Lead the way, Colin.”

And he did, both of them silently agreeing that whatever questions they had for each other could wait until they got there. It made it easy to forget how scared of her he’d been even just an hour ago. The air was lighter now, free of lies and tension and heartache. He could finally just breathe again. 

They walked to the diner in peace, basking in the fact that their strange little friendship had somehow survived the worst of the truth.