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Dabi was better acquainted with vampire stories than most. Naturally, his family had instilled the generational hatred and fear of vampires that most wolf packs had in common. Do not invite anyone past the threshold of the house—and just in case you do, walk them by the big mirror in the entryway. Do not trust anyone you meet once the sun has gone down. Any potential friends must first be vetted by Enji Todoroki himself at the designated Mediterranean restaurant—in patio seating, at noon, over a full meal of garlic-heavy dishes.
Then, when Dabi graduated from Todoroki to homeless and packless dysfunctional anomaly, he’d started his study of vampires in earnest.
One bite from a vampire—if you survived it—could cure any disease or injury.
It was a niche area of interest. People preferred to whisper about different things: bodies drained of blood, the telltale signs of a vampire looking to feed, the werewolves who hunted them. It wasn’t often that someone was bitten by a vampire and lived to talk about it.
But two days ago, Toga had shuffled into their hideout, pouting,
“Dabiiii,” she’d whined as she flopped over an armrest of the ugly patterned sofa he’d been reclining on. “We met a vampire, but he wouldn’t turn me.”
Dabi shot upright before his good sense caught up with him with a reminder to play it cool. He closed his eyes and leaned back into the couch. “A vampire?”
“Yes,” she said, and he’d opened his eyes back up to watch her drip from the sofa to sit on the floor with her knees up to her chest. “And he gave Jin what he wanted, but wouldn’t do it for me!”
And then Twice had walked in, bouncy and bright and beaming, all traces of his scar completely erased.
After finishing out the second half of the moon cycle, Dabi followed their directions to a small nightclub in Fukuoka. As he stood in the rain glaring at the hours posted outside, he berated himself for coming on a weeknight without even checking online first. He didn’t have the money to camp out in a hotel until the club opened two nights from now. The lights were on inside, a warm yellow that made him feel like he was looking into the window of someone’s home, but it was empty. He stood under the little awning to shield himself from the rain. It was useless because the rain wasn’t coming from above, it was coming from the side, the wind blowing it straight at him. His hands and arms were still raw and covered in gauze from the recent full moon, and the rain had seeped all the way through them to drip out down his hands contaminated with red. The bandages started to feel awful as they stick in all his little cracks and creases, so he tore them away and left them in the storm drain. In frustration, he kicked the door, cursed when it hurt his aching bones, then hunched over his phone to shield it from the rain and check the bus schedule. His cold fingers wouldn’t activate the touch screen, and he turned to swing another kick at the door when he was startled by someone on the other side of the glass and almost dropped his phone.
The door opened a crack. “Want to come in from the rain?”
Dabi looked at the man whose head was framed in the door opening. Vampire? his brain asked automatically, as his eyes looked for the telltale signs, but he hadn’t seen a vampire since his first failed hunt at thirteen. The man had effortlessly tousled blond hair, normal-looking canines, and an easy smile. His eyes were a peculiar gold, but vampirism didn’t change eye color, so he must have been born with them.
No vampire wings, no strange nostril flaring at the blood dripping from Dabi’s hands, no sickly grayness from going too long without blood or drinking up an STI. Just a guy in stylish sneakers, jewel-red earrings, a paisley jacket zipped all the way up to his chin, and a black server’s apron. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a vampire—only that if he was, he knew how to hide it.
“So? Do you want to come in?”
A gust of wind drenched him in a new sheet of rain. “Yes, please,” he said and took the door handle as he considered—would that have counted as an invitation, if he were a vampire? It was a yes or no question, not a “please come in,” but accompanied with the cracked-open door, maybe. Dabi was not a vampire, so it didn’t matter and he entered without issue.
“We’re closed today,” the man pointed out as he gestured to Dabi to sit at one of the empty VIP tables. “Just thought I’d let you know.” He rummaged behind the bar then came back to throw a hand towel at Dabi.
“Thanks,” Dabi said flatly. He used the towel to dry his hair. “I noticed.” His jacket was soaked through, but he didn’t take it off, just dabbed at it with the towel.
“You can hang out here for now. Need me to call you an Uber?”
“No. I’m wondering if you could help me out, actually—I’m looking for Hawks.”
The blond man raised an eyebrow. “Hawks? You’ve heard of him, the doctor?” He looked Dabi up and down, and Dabi stared back at him. He was sure he looked like he needed a doctor—his skin was sloppily held together with lines of staples where it had ripped open during his last transformation, around his neck to snake down his shirt, the scabbing ridges along his jaw, the blood he was probably dripping onto the floor.
“Yeah,” he said, and leaned back to kick his feet up on the table.
The man sat in the adjacent chair. “I don’t know much about him,” he admitted. “But maybe I could help? My name’s Takami, by the way.”
Dabi slouched down and closed his eyes. “Doubt you could help me,” he said. Then, “I’m Dabi.”
“Okay, then,” Takami said. “I won’t tell you how to contact Hawks, then, if that’s what you want.”
Dabi opened his eyes. “No, I meant, like, you’re not a doctor. You’re a… “
“Bisexual,” Takami replied with an annoying smile.
Dabi rolled his eyes. “Congratulations. Even less useful to me.” Then he decided not to be so rude to the one person who might be able to help him. ”Hah, just kidding. Will you tell me about Hawks?”
Takami leaned forward like he was about to tell Dabi a secret. “Well, he only comes out at night, you see. Bit of a homebody because he needs an explicit invitation to enter any dwelling. Not a big fan of most foods with garli—”
“I know he’s a vampire,” Dabi said. Obviously. He wouldn’t have gone through the trouble for a regular back-alley doctor—Takami didn’t know this, but he already had one back home with the league. “Why else do you think I’m here?”
“He vants to suck your blood!” Takami grinned and made claws out of his hands. “Glad we got that out of the way, then. What’s got you so miserable you’d go willingly looking for a vampire?”
Rather than answer, Dabi tilted his head. “Nosy, aren’t we?”
Takami gestured to Dabi with a hand and pulled an exaggerated grimace. “I mean, I can’t help but be curious. The shiny bits are, what’s the word… eye-catching?”
“Thanks.”
Dabi realized he was still holding the towel Takami had lent him, but it was soaked through and useless to him now. Takami must have read his thoughts, or maybe just tracked his line of sight, because he reached out a hand to take it. He left with a “be right back” and returned with a fluffy bath towel that he tossed over Dabi’s head. Dabi tugged it off to see Takami sitting himself back in a chair, feet on the table but with bent knees and a leaning-forward posture to rest his arms on them. The pose pulled his jeans up to show his crisp sneakers.
“I lied. Sorry,” Takami said with a sigh, leaning his head to the side to rest it on his arms. A curl of hair flopped into his face, and he didn’t bother pushing it out of the way. “I actually do know much about Hawks. I may look like just a club employee, but I moonlight as Hawks’s scheduling assistant.” He said the words like he was admitting to an exciting secret.
“How daring,” Dabi said in the dullest tone he could flatten his voice into. “You must get such a thrill from your,” he paused to raise his eyebrows scornfully, “secret double life.”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” Takami replied, and pulled his feet down from the table with a thud. “But, I actually do need you to explain what’s up with you, or Hawks won’t see you.” Dabi narrowed his eyes. “He only sees people he feels really bad for,” Takami explained. “Something about their pain making the blood extra delicious?—Kidding! No, it’s just that it’s a lot of trouble to go through, so Hawks is picky.”
Maybe Dabi should have been more worried, but he remembered Twice, happy and calm and scarless for the first time since Dabi had known him. And if there was ever anyone who inspired pity, it was Twice, so Dabi geared himself up to channel Jin’s old patheticness as he called up his prepared story. He found himself unable to topple his pride like that in front of Takami’s golden gaze. Instead, he kept his voice even and met Takami’s eyes as he trotted out the explanation that omitted his vampire hunter Todoroki heritage and werewolf problems.
“I have a genetic condition.”
It was not a very good explanation.
He sat straighter under Takami’s scrutiny and took off his jacket to roll up his sleeves and show where the skin split along his arms.
Takami snorted. “What’s the genetic condition, leprosy?”
“Is this bad enough for Hawks?” Dabi asked.
After a few more seconds to consider Dabi’s arms, Takami stood and motioned for him to follow. Dabi left the towel behind and followed Takami to the back and up a creaky set of stairs. The stairwell was cold and the light harsh, the eerie sounds of rain and wind much louder here.
“So,” Takami threw over his shoulder. “I’m actually Hawks, and I’m leading you to my vampire lair.”
Dabi paused with his foot on the next step and squinted up at Takami. He wasn’t really convinced, but was still taken off guard by the idea. Was there really any difference between following a vampire and following a human to meet one? And then it hit him—after ten years, this was it, wasn’t it? His heart started pounding faster, and he tried not to get his hopes up in case the whole thing was a trap or a lie—but what about Twice, then?—no, he needed to still be on his guard. A werewolf, a vampire. But hopefully not a werewolf for much longer.
Takami was looking at him expectantly. “Okay,” Dabi said, and Takami laughed.
They stopped at the first landing, the floor right above the nightclub, and Takami punched in the code to let them in.
It was immediately more pleasant than the stairwell. Lights flicked on the color of daylight, washing the room in a nice warmth, and the rain faded to a soft rhythm. The room was carpeted and had a sofa, a coffee table, and a basket of blankets. Further back, the carpet was replaced by tile, a kitchen counter, and cabinets, and in the far wall, there was a window with the curtains open displaying the blur of streetlights in the rain. “You live here?”
He shouldn’t have been so surprised. The Todorokis, the strongest werewolf pack in all of Japan, didn’t live in the woods; they lived in their minimalist-modern-traditional house in a quiet neighborhood. Of course vampires didn’t all live in caves or seedy dens of criminality or whatever it was. And it made a certain kind of sense that a vampire would live over a club. To the non-supernatural, it would be horribly loud when they were trying to sleep. To a vampire—well.
“You could say that.” Takami nudged off his shoes, and Dabi did the same with his soaked-through boots. Takami plodded onto the carpet, but Dabi didn’t follow with his wet socks. “Meaning, yes, I do live here. Go ahead and come on in. You can use the shower before we, you know.” He smiled wryly. “Before I bring out the fangs.”
Dabi took him up on the shower. He had to peel his clothes out of the sticky, scabbing wounds on his chest and back, and the water didn’t get as hot as he would have liked, but he felt much better afterward. Takami—Hawks?—had left dry clothes for him. A pair of boxers, a t-shirt so old it had been worn soft, a big hoodie, and sweatpants that were slightly too small and made it only halfway down his ankles. Vampire clothes, clinging to his werewolf scabs. It almost gave him a thrill, remembering how his father had relentlessly and mercilessly drafted his children into vampire hunting. Touya, who was supposed to be the ideal hunter, his prime creation, wearing vampire clothes. Vampire underwear, even. After taking a vampire shower. About to get bitten by a vampire. He felt almost giddy and walked out of the bathroom with a smile on his face.
Takami was reclined on the couch and scrolling on his phone. “Good shower, I take it?” he asked when he saw Dabi, and waggled his eyebrows.
“The best,” Dabi said with a wink, grin still on his face.
Takami crossed his legs to make room for Dabi on the couch. “Have a seat,” he said, still scrolling, “and I’ll explain how this works.” He didn’t wait, and dove straight into his explanation. “I’ll bite you. Then you have to make it through the length of a full night without tasting human blood, about eightish hours. You make it out, and you’re healed.” He finally put his phone down and met Dabi’s eyes. “It will be the most painful thing you ever experience.”
Dabi huffed a laugh. “I can—”
“No,” Takami cut him off. “I’m serious. Whatever you’ve got going on looks awful, but this will be worse. I’m turning you into a true vampire. For a few hours, you’ll be immortal, and powerful, and needing to drink blood so bad it can literally drive you insane. You’ll hurt yourself trying to feed.”
Dabi didn’t say that it sounded very manageable compared to his brand of full moon transformation, his skin stretching until new muscle pushed its way through, the altered bone structure pushing against his organs and soft parts until they bruised from the pressure. And the worst part of all—he ended up with nothing to show for it. Most werewolves transformed in under 30 seconds, then they were agile, and strong, and enhanced, and when it was all over, everything folded back up nice and compact with a nice knit of unbroken skin over the top like nothing ever happened.
Touya’s initial transformation took three slow days, then immediately after, another three slow days as everything moved back as much as it could. It never healed completely, and he walked around most of the time feeling like a failed experiment. Had been treated like one, too.
So, yes. Manageable.
Takami kept talking. “I can’t describe it. But think of the worst thing you’ve experienced, and multiply it by at least four. That’s the tradeoff for vampire healing. It’s a species survival thing—your mind becomes frenzied at the same time your body becomes much stronger, and that way, you’re more likely to taste blood that first night so the change becomes permanent. I’m not going to let you drink blood, obviously. But you’re going to hate me for it.” Takami smiled brightly. “And then, as soon as that’s over, you go back to normal, but with your ‘genetic condition’ gone.”
“Do it,” Dabi said. “Now.”
“You don’t want to, uh, steel yourself?”
“No. I’ll get it over with.”
Takami stood and crouched down a little over Dabi, still sitting on the couch. “Aww, who’s a brave boy?” Then he turned to open the cushioned ottoman and pulled out iron chains and manacles. “Makes this easier,” he said apologetically. “I’m gonna have you sit on the floor.”
Dabi sat, and Takami wrapped him in the chains so his arms were flat to his torso, then clasped the manacles around his ankles that stuck out past the hems of the vampire sweatpants. It occurred to Dabi, then, that Takami could easily kill him just then—drain his blood in minutes, with Dabi unable to move. He remembered his father spitting fire after hunts. A pack of vampires who robbed a hospital for its blood and stopped to feed on patients along the way. A criminal and his girlfriend who used their young son as a bloodbag, and when they saw the werewolves, they bit and turned him too in an attempt to make Enji Todoroki kill him and live with the guilt. Vampires were monsters. Takami was a vampire, and Dabi was completely at his mercy. The thought was surprisingly unalarming, very much overwhelmed by the more pervasive sentiment of just get on with it!
Takami opened an alcohol wipe and swiped it over the front of Dabi’s neck on both sides of his throat. He held a thumb against Dabi’s thudding pulse and paused. “You’re a werewolf? Are you sure you want me to do this? I… you hate vampires, right? And when it’s over, you’ll just be human, so—”
“Stop taking so long!” Dabi felt the vibration of his voice against Takami’s thumb, and then after a flash of red, felt the bite.
Just a bite, on his neck, just a bite—then shooting pain that radiated down his legs and arms to the tips of his fingers and toes. His nerves felt too short for his limbs, they were shrinking, pulling themselves taut. He needed to crunch into a ball, relieve some of the tension, but the metal chains aborted the movement. He thrashed against them and felt them creak with his newfound strength. He just needed to make himself smaller so his ligaments didn’t snap themselves by pulling so tight on his bones, and he needed blood, he needed to leave his arms behind in the chains so he could escape, for blood, he’d rip them off—
And then the real pain hit, and stayed.
—-
Afterward, normalcy crashed and found him, still chained on the floor, panting and sweating and clammy. Kind fingers brushed back and forth over his forehead for a millisecond, then they were gone, and his head was lifted off a pillow as he was pushed into a sitting position.
A person appeared in his line of sight, blurry at the edges—ah, that was right. The vampire, Takami. He spoke as he unwound the chains, but the first few sentences came ringing and fuzzy to Dabi’s ears. “It’s over. You can use the shower again, and I ran your clothes through the wash. I also have some human food downstairs in the club.”
“Thanks,” Dabi mumbled, and staggered his way to the bathroom. He sat on the cold tiles for a minute as his vision sharpened and the ringing left from his ears.
Then he stood up and started crying.
He could stand up without pain. He shed the vampire clothes and bid them farewell, almost sad to see them go, and suppressed a gasp when he saw his own chest in the mirror. The deep slashes were gone, the perpetual bruising, the staples holding him together. The only marks on his body were four scabbed pinpricks on his neck where Takami’s teeth had gone in.Almost disbelieving, he stretched his arms over his head and leaned from side to side.
The shower this time was almost a holy experience as Dabi used his hands to glide soap over his smooth skin and paused to hold his fingers on his face just to feel the softness of his lower eyelids. He ended with a splash of cold water to chase away the hot feeling his tears had left behind. When was the last time he’d even been able to cry?
He felt like a stranger to his own clothes as he walked back out.
Takami was there again, sprawled on the couch again, scrolling on his phone again. It took all Dabi had not to run over to hug him. Dabi wasn’t a hugger. Never had been. Nobody to hug—not Spinner, not Toga, definitely not Twice. But maybe, all those years ago, Touya had been a hugger. He didn’t remember.
Instead, he cleared his throat, and when Takami made room on the couch, he sat down.
“Time for the post-op,” Takami said, not letting Dabi speak. “You’re healed. But you’re not immortal, and you’re not invincible. If you get injured, it won’t magically stitch itself up, so be careful. And most vampires are not like me. They will drain you in an instant, especially now that you’re not a big bad werewolf, so don’t go looking for any vampires again.”
Dabi grinned. “Sure. And thank you. And… what day is it?”
Takami’s expression softened, and he smiled. It was radiant, and it made Dabi’s eyes well up again. “It’s six in the morning, the day after you showed up at my club. I threw all your staples in the trash, by the way. They all just popped out of you. It was disgusting.” Then Takami’s smile twisted just slightly into something bitter. “Look. I have a favor to ask you.” He looked at his hands. Dabi looked at them too and watched as he splayed his fingers out then let them go still. He winced. “Can I drink some of your blood? Just an ounce.”
“You drink blood?” Dabi asked, surprised. For some reason, he was disappointed. He’d expected Takami to be different.
Takami pointed a finger at himself. “Vampire,” he said and laughed with a little creak in his voice.
“Yeah, but…”
“Nice vampires are not a thing,” Takami explained. “Common myth. If we don’t drink human blood, we die. Animal blood doesn’t cut it, and it makes us very sick. And we can look in mirrors.”
As someone better acquainted with vampire stories than most, Dabi was shocked that he hadn’t known that. His whole childhood, he’d been told that his legacy was hunting the vampires that chose to drink human blood. That if they’d just chosen to drink animal blood, the werewolves wouldn’t need to step in. What else was untrue?
“How old are you?” Dabi demanded.
“Twenty-three,” Takami said.
“And… how long have you been twenty-three?”
“Almost a year. My birthday’s next month.”
“And how long have you been a vampire?”
Takami rested his head against the cushions, looking tired again and a little gray, but smiling. “We do age,” he said. “But most that I’ve seen slow down or stop around fifty or sixty.”
He didn’t answer Dabi’s question, but maybe that wasn’t a polite thing to press a vampire on, like asking a werewolf about what happened to their clothes when they transformed. Instead, he paused a moment. The curtains were drawn tightly closed now that the sun would come up soon. Takami was paler than he had been earlier; his skin looked almost translucent now with blue veins fighting to break the surface. He had changed into lounge pants and a long sleeved t-shirt with a neckline that displayed the scars of teeth marks on Takami’s neck, complete with white bursts around them where the person’s mouth had clamped down and tried to rip his skin away.
“Ah,” Takami said, noticing where his eyes had landed. “Don’t worry, yours won’t scar. Only the bad ones do—I take pride in my work.” He slouched further into the cushions. “You’re not a werewolf anymore, so I don’t have to be on my guard,” he explained, as if being tired needed an explanation. “Sleepy. It’s my bedtime. So you can leave if you’d like. Club’s open Thursday through Sunday, come back and say hi.”
“Weren’t you going to drink my blood?”
Hawks scowled. “Not if you didn’t want me to, so I let it drop.”
“Is that why you look sick?” Dabi asked. He was an expert on good health, apparently, now that he wasn’t oozing out of canyons in his skin. “You haven’t had enough blood?”
“I look sick? You walked in last night held together with staples. And only barely.”
“Don’t want any blood then? I was about to volunteer.”
Hawks pushed himself up onto his elbows. “Are you sure?”
In just the past day, Dabi had followed a vampire home to spend the night in his apartment, worn a vampire’s underwear, let a vampire wrap him in chains, and then let himself be turned. “It won’t be like the last bite, will it?”
“No,” Takami said, and let his eyes drift up to gaze at the ceiling. “Feeding is different than turning. Won’t change you. Wouldn’t hurt you unless I was rough with the bite or drank too much, which is really unpleasant, so I won’t. And you’re well-built,” he said, looking over Dabi appreciatively, “and probably the literal healthiest person in the world right now, so you’d recover quickly.”
Dabi felt himself flush. The vampire thought he could handle a little blood loss, oh wow, didn’t he feel special. It didn’t help when Takami pushed himself up from the couch and slowly unfurled wings that hadn’t been there before. His teeth caught the light, and Dabi saw that his canines had turned into sharp points. Dabi’s breath came faster.
“You’re sure?” Takami asked again, and Dabi stepped forward to meet him.
“Yeah, I can stick around for a little.”
Again, Takami brought out an alcohol wipe. Again, he felt Dabi’s heartbeat with his thumb. Dabi met his eyes in anticipation, waiting for teeth on his skin. They would scrape over the pulse point before carefully dipping in, then a dribble of blood would come out, and Takami would trace along it with his tongue before slowly closing his mouth over—
Takami grinned. “I vant to suck your blood.”
Dabi turned his head to the side and jerked his neck away from Takami’s hand. “Nope. You ruined it. Changed my mind.”
—
But Dabi was lying; he hadn’t actually changed his mind. In fact, even after Takami bit him, he only became more convinced to stick around.