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‘Waking up’ is the wrong way to describe it. Even though Michael’s pretty sure he was just asleep, in the middle of some confused dream he was just realising must be a dream, passed out gratefully in bed at his grandpa’s house. After sundown, for once. That’s still taking a little getting used to, but like – in a good way.
But that’s beside the point. Michael doesn’t wake up. He’s just – asleep, and then he’s not.
And he’s not asleep with someone else’s hand pumping his dick and a searing, strangely exhilarating pain in his neck.
In the moment of confused panic that follows, as Michael scrambles to push his way free from whatever this is and figure out what the hell’s going on and also force his far-too-interested dick to get with the program, a couple of other unpleasant minor revelations occur to him in quick succession. Revelation one: there’s an uncomfortably familiar strange sharpness to his vision, an uncomfortably familiar weight in his gums. Revelation two: there’s a terrifyingly familiar ember of hunger smouldering in his core.
And revelation three: the person he’s just shoved off of him, who’s shaking his head and saying, “Oh, you want to play hard to get now, Michael?” through a fanged, inhuman grin, is supposed to be dead.
“Stay away from me!” Michael half-shouts, half-gasps, scrambling backwards on his ass until his shoulders smack against rock. There must be something in his voice, in his face, in the way he flings an arm out in front of himself, because David stops in his tracks, that exaggerated brow furrowing in something that, on a human face, Michael might almost call concern.
When he asks, “Michael?” his eyes are back to that unnerving blue.
“Don’t touch me,” Michael spits. “I killed you once. I can do it again.”
David holds up both hands, palms out, like a surrender.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Michael,” he says, lightly. But his stare is sharp. “Who is it you think I am?”
“Wh- goddamnit, David, I’m not falling for any more of your stupid mind games!” Michael whips his head around, not willing to take his eyes off of David for a second but also needing to know where he is, what’s happening. One quick glance, though, confirms Michael’s worst fears – it’s not a part of it that he’s seen before, but this has to be the sunken hotel. The flicker of firelight on stone, the smell of salt and iron and smoke and rot, is burned into Michael’s brain. “What is this? I killed your brothers, so now you’re going to force me to take their place?”
“Killed…?” David starts to take a step forward. Michael shrinks back against the stone behind him, pressing his back into the rocky wall to help push himself to his feet, and David stops, again. “Michael, you haven’t killed anyone.”
The grin he flashes is toothy, knifelike. “Not anyone we care about, anyway.”
A hollow cold starts to sink into the marrow of Michael’s bones.
But – this is David. He lies like he – well, breathes might be a poor choice of words. He lies, anyway. Mostly by omission, but still. He can’t actually mean – Michael isn’t – he hasn’t –
David takes advantage of Michael’s horrified confusion to advance a few steps. Michael surprises them both by leaning forward and letting out a snarl that rumbles through his chest, baring what he can feel are fangs at David, who freezes in place. He’s frowning, now, a hard-eyed stare that Michael’s somehow certain is failing to completely cover over genuine worry.
“Do up your fly,” David says, at last, flatly. “Then we can talk -”
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” Michael snaps, but he does yank his zipper up.
He notices, bizarrely, that there’s no fabric between himself and the denim of his jeans. It’s not the strangest thing about all of this – where would he even start – but it pings a tiny alarm bell of wrong in the back of his mind. Why isn’t he wearing any underwear? “What did you do to my family?”
David actually has the stones to sound exasperated when he sighs out, “Nothing. Michael, why would I want to do anything to your family?”
“I don’t know! Revenge!”
“For what?”
It’s Michael’s turn to stare, dumbfounded, at David like he’s not making any sense. It’s dawning on him – very slowly – that David’s not lying. Michael’s not sure how he knows, how he can just tell, but – that confusion is real.
“We killed you,” he manages, at last. “Sam and the Frogs and Grandpa and I – they staked Marko, we blew up Dwayne, I think Paul got a holy water bath, and Max got impaled by a fencepost. You really don’t remember?”
David’s grin is very white and very insincere in the dim firelight. “You missed one, Michael.”
Michael opens his mouth to explain how he killed David, to David, and stops.
“And none of that happened,” David says, holding out both hands like he’s trying to calm a skittish horse, talk down a man standing on a ledge. He starts forward, slowly, inching steadily and smoothly toward Michael with every word. His voice is low and hypnotic, the way it had been that first night. When he’d tricked Michael into drinking blood. “I don’t know why you think it did, but it didn’t. I’m still here. You can see that, can’t you, Michael? Dwayne and Paul and Marko, too, they’re just outside. They’re fine. They’re safe. We’re safe. You didn’t kill any of us.”
He's so gentle, so calm, so matter-of-fact. So reassuring, as he tries to reassure Michael of exactly the wrong thing. It’s fucking perverse that somehow, it seems to be working anyway. Despite himself, despite how every word paints a picture of a nightmare somehow come to life, Michael can feel the panic starting to ebb, to go dull around the edges. Can feel the tension starting to ease out of his shoulders, his spine.
Like part of him is actually relieved they’re not dead.
While Michael was busily freaking out about how much he’s not freaking out, David’s somehow gotten close enough to touch. His bare palm cupping Michael’s jaw is – strangely grounding, in a way that Michael doesn’t like at all, chasing the last wisps of the fog of panic out of Michael’s head and leaving only a razor-edged clarity. David’s glacial gaze is unexpectedly serious, and he doesn’t take it from Michael’s face as he calls, “Boys?”
The single word was too quiet for the others to possibly have heard, if they were outside of this chamber of the maze of caves under the cliff. And yet, there’s a piercing, pulsating whine and a fluttering gust of wind that Michael remembers from the bonfire, from the attack on his grandpa’s house, and a moment later, the chamber is uncomfortably crowded. There’s a friendly chaos of meaningless noise rising around him, familiar voices asking what’s wrong, what’s going on, what’s the matter with Mikey. Hands and arms jostling him around, slapping his back, wrapping around him, pulling him off his feet and against somebody’s chest or into somebody’s side, ruffling his hair, scruffing the back of his neck –
The manhandling isn’t the worst part. The worst part is how – how comfortable the manhandling feels. How easy. How natural. How right.
How every touch settles something inside of Michael that he hadn’t even realised was unsettled.
It’s that realisation as much as anything that scares him back up onto his feet, makes him push his way through the suddenly claustrophobic crush in the small space. Makes him break from the roughhousing-slash-cuddling for the cracked arch that forms the doorway. It’s harder than he anticipates – not because of the others trying to stop him, shaking off their grips is almost too easy, like they’re not even unnaturally, inhumanly strong at all. It’s more, just –
He doesn’t want to. Part of Michael doesn’t really want them all to stop touching him, teasing him, smothering him with playful physical affection. Wants to let them keep reassuring him without words that they’re there, they’re whole, they’re all together. He doesn’t want to pull away.
And that scares him almost more than anything else that’s happened tonight.
“Stop it. Stop it -”
David’s poker face, as ever, is perfect. But Michael can hear the worry in his words. “Michael, what -”
But Michael’s had enough.
They’re fully closed in, down here, far away from the elements, the air still and stagnant and heavy with an oddly homey earthy, vegetable scent. But the wind still comes up out of nowhere in an instant, catching Michael and scooping him up off his feet as easily and weightlessly as a kite.
It carries him careening headfirst and backwards through the caves, until he shoots out and up into the fresh salt air of an early, early morning.
…
Flying, it turns out, is just like riding a motorbike. You never really forget how.
The sky outside, Michael’s a little astonished to discover, isn’t black. Instead, it’s a rich, impossibly deep, velvet blue, shading to royal purple around the horizon, popping with stars like the bulbs whose lights race up and down the curves of the Boardwalk’s wooden roller coaster. It’s so – not bright, exactly, but so much less dark than he was expecting that he flinches reflexively as he rises over the edge of the cliff, throwing up an arm to protect his eyes.
But they don’t need protecting. The sun is nowhere to be seen, and somehow Michael knows it’ll be more than an hour yet before it shows its face in the east, where the deep jewel tones of the night sky are already starting to shade into peachy orange and seafoam green. He’s awake, alert, bristling with energy, and he’s got time to kill before sunrise.
Michael doesn’t want to look at where that knowledge comes from too closely.
It takes him until he’s quietly, carefully easing open Sam’s window, brushing aside the garland of – garlic? - Sam’s hung in front of it, to realise that almost none of what Michael’s wearing are actually his clothes. Although, to be fair to him, he’s had a few slightly bigger things on his mind recently.
But this isn’t Michael’s sleeveless, stonewashed black tee shirt. The leather jacket looks and feels a lot like the one he bought himself down on the Boardwalk, but it didn’t have studded, safety-pinned lapels or thick lengths of silver chain decorating the shoulders like epaulettes when he’d bought it. Or when he went to sleep last night. And the heavy black motorcycle boots that clomp down onto Sam’s bedroom floor despite Michael’s best efforts to be quiet, making him wince, are definitely not his.
What the hell is going on?
The faintest sighing breath of wind wafts sea salt into the stink of Italian food permeating the room, and gently ruffles the hair sticking up above Sam’s displaced sleep mask as Michael drifts over to the bed, carefully keeping the soles of the clodhoppers he’s wearing an inch or so above the rug. Doesn’t want to wake Sam up by stomping around like Frankenstein’s monster and freak him out. If he screams, their mom will be in here before Michael can say ‘soprano’. And the last thing he needs right now is his mom flipping out.
It’s unsettling how easy it is, pulling gravity on and off like a jacket on a spring day. How easy it is to decide where he wants to go and just – be there, without any of the flailing helplessness of the first night he’d flown into this room. And even though Michael had been starting to get the hang of being airborne under his own steam, before Grandpa’s grand entrance had knocked a fencepost through Max and the bloodlust out of Michael, he knows there’s no way he could’ve pulled off this drifting trick before. Now? Now, he barely even has to think about it. It’s practically second nature.
Not anyone we care about, anyway.
Michael sets his jaw, deliberately doesn’t think about it, and crouches down beside where his brother’s peacefully slumbering head is resting on his pillow with his arm tucked up underneath it. Michael only hesitates a moment, feeling more than hearing the steady subsonic throb of Sam’s heartbeat, before reaching out to shake Sam’s shoulder with one hand and press the other gently over Sam’s mouth. His whisper sounds hoarse to his own ears. “Sam? Sammy, wake up. I need your help.”
Sam wakes up with a start, and a shout that’s muffled in the hand Michael’s holding over his mouth. Michael just has time to mentally congratulate himself for thinking ahead before Sam’s hand comes out from under his pillow, holding a water pistol.
And fires it.
Point-blank into Michael’s face.
The next thing Michael knows, other than pain, every light in the room is burning into his eyes. Sam’s standing on his bed brandishing the water pistol in both hands and hollering, and there are fast, frightened footsteps pounding along the hallway towards Sam’s door. Their mom is yelling Sam’s name as she slams the door wide open, letting the hallway lights blaze in too. But the moment her eyes find Michael – when had he gotten across the room, backed into this corner by the window? Wasn’t he just over by Sam’s bed? – her mouth flaps once in disbelief, and she goes completely still and silent.
Michael ducks his head a little lower, spreads his hands where they’re clutching at his face a little wider, crawlingly aware it’s not going to hide the sizzling, steaming mess Sam’s – god damn holy water pistol, what a stupid trick to walk into – made of his face. That it’s not going to hide the red-gold gleam he knows must be showing in the eye that peeks between his fingers to see the look on his mother’s face, the scowl on his grandpa’s as the old man comes charging in with – is that a crossbow?
“Lucy,” Grandpa says, pushing in past Sam and Michael’s mom and putting himself squarely between her and Michael, “take Sam downstairs, would you?”
“Dad? What on Earth -”
“Downstairs, Lucy.”
“What is the matter with everybody tonight?” Sam and Michael’s mom bursts out, pushing at her dad’s arm and forcing him to lower the crossbow – when had he raised it? – as she hurries around him. “Michael, what – where have you been? We’ve all been worried sick – are you hurt? What is going on?”
“Mom, stay back! Stay away from him!” Sam’s yodeling from the bed, reaching new vocal altitudes in his panic. “He’s not Michael anymore, he’s one of them! He’s a vampire!”
“A vampire? Sam, really. I knew I shouldn’t have let you stay up reading those comic books.”
“Listen to the boy, Lucy,” Grandpa says, one gimlet eye staring down the crossbow at Michael, who forces himself to take and let out a long, deep breath. “He knows what he’s talking about.”
“Oh, Dad. Now is not the time for your jokes.”
Michael squeezes his eyes shut, willing the strange sharpness out of them, the blue back in. Willing the weight in his gums to lighten, the exaggerated ridges of his brow, his cheekbones, to fade under his fingertips. It’s strange, feeling them retreat but knowing they haven’t really gone anywhere. He could swear he can feel those monstrous features still lurking just beneath his skin.
There’s nothing he can do about the Freddy Krueger face, unfortunately. But at least maybe Sam and his grandpa will be less likely to shoot on sight if they don’t think Michael’s immediately about to go for the nearest throat.
Which he’s not. He’s not. Even if the room is loud with racing heartbeats and there’s a whisper of awareness in the back of his mind that it’d make the mess that is his face right now feel so much better.
“He’s not joking, Mom,” Michael manages, in a growling rasp that hurts his throat. His cheek and nose and eyelids and forehead are still burning in a million tiny places, like he’d been slicing hot peppers and rubbed his hands all over his face without remembering he’d just dragged sandpaper over it moments before. But the pain’s fading enough, at least, that he can speak, and sound halfway human doing it. “They’re right.”
“Oh, not you too -”
Michael’s mom’s words die in her throat as Michael slowly, carefully, lowers his hands from his face. He wonders just how bad it looks. He wonders if she can see bone.
“I thought we got them all,” he says, to Sam’s distrustful glare and raised water pistol, to the business end of his grandpa’s crossbow. “The last thing I remember, we’d killed all of them and Max, and I was human. I don’t know what happened. I – you have to help me, I don’t know who else to ask.”
The point of the crossbow bolt doesn’t so much as waver. And Sam’s scowl deepens. But the water pistol he’s holding dips. “Max? Like Mom’s Max?”
“What – someone killed Max? No, that can’t – I saw him just last night -”
“He passed all the tests,” Sam snaps, jabbing the muzzle of the water pistol at Michael, who tries and fails not to flinch. “You’re a lying, shit-sucking -”
“Tests? What tests?”
“I invited him in,” Michael admits, miserably. “Before the dinner. I had no idea, he asked -”
“You did what?” Grandpa thunders, sounding furious, but the sharp note of fear on the garlicky air is suddenly much stronger. “Damn fool boy, don’t you know -”
“That inviting them in renders you powerless against them? Yeah, I know that now!”
“Would someone! Please! Tell me what! Is going! On!”
The silence that falls in the wake of Sam and Michael’s mom’s outburst is ever so slightly tinged with embarrassment, with guilt. Michael glances over at Sam, catching his brother’s eyes, and finds no sympathy there.
It’s his grandpa, though, who finally heaves a deep sigh and lowers the crossbow. Who says, casual as though he’s discussing the weather, “Lucy, your boy’s a vampire.”
Michael’s mom squeezes her hands into fists at her sides and her eyes shut for a long second, letting out a slow breath between her pursed lips.
When she opens her eyes, it’s to lock them with Michael’s. One eyebrow arches in a silent question.
Michael swallows around a suddenly dry throat. He raises his head to nod –
Michael.
It’s the strangest thing Michael’s ever felt. The most indescribable. It takes him a moment to recognise that it’s the same as the eerie déjà-vu sense the boys, David, had sometimes given him, the same feeling he’d gotten that night they’d turned up at the house and scared Sam with their bikes. Like he’d heard someone breathe his name directly in his ear in a crowded room, but when he’d turned to look, no one was there. It’s the same, but – just – more. So, so much more.
It feels like everything and nothing, all at once. Like the gathering electric charge in the air before a lightning strike, humming and inevitable. Like every cell in Michael’s body has suddenly become magnetized and are all straining toward their opposite pole, somewhere out beyond the house. Like somehow David was suddenly standing just behind Michael, toes against his heels, hands gripping his shoulders, lips silently forming the shape of Michael’s name against his ear –
And then took a step forward.
“I, uh,” Michael thinks he manages to say, sounding stunned even to himself. Every hair on his body is standing on end. “I have to go.”
He means it more sincerely – and more literally – than he’s ever meant it before. It’s not a choice.
He has to go.
Now.
“Wh- no, young man,” his mom is starting, hurrying across the room toward him, but Michael’s not entirely sure if he’s moving or if the universe is moving around him. His back is to the open window, a few cloves of garlanded garlic gently knocking against the back of his head, and then the wind is cushioning his rise through the cool, damp early-morning air up towards the magnificently glowing sky. The house, his mother leaning her head and shoulders out the window to look up after him, get smaller and smaller as they fall away below him.
Michael only starts to feel like he’s settling back into his own body and mind as his rise slows and an arm wraps around his shoulders. Somehow, he doesn’t even need to look to know it’s David, even before the voice in his ear. “Time to go.”
“Why -” Michael starts, anger flaring in his chest as he whirls toward David, but David’s grinning unconcerned inches from his face and the anger falters, dies.
“You weren’t paying much attention to the sun, were you, Michael?”
Michael bites down on a retort, looking around.
The rich colour of the sky overhead is entirely transformed. From dark, royal jewel tones, the whole sky’s lightened to a Mediterranean palette, the purest, clearest aqua blue that Michael’s ever seen in his life. He has to squint when he tries to look east, towards the riot of vibrant reds and oranges and purples and pinks glaring a little paler, a little harsher, advancing a little farther across the dome of the sky, with every passing second. The blazing stars have been all but completely washed out, and there’s the faintest haze of snowblind white just starting to rime the horizon.
“Cutting it pretty fine,” David says, like he’s not looking at the kind of sunrise that would’ve made any of those famous old painters Michael can’t name off the top of his head bite right through his brush and swear off the pale imitation of pigments forever. “You don’t want to see what happens if we hang around here for five more minutes. But I’ll admit it’s worth it, every once in a while.”
His voice takes on an edge when he starts to pull away and Michael doesn’t immediately follow. “Michael. You don’t want to see what happens if we hang around here for five more minutes.”
“What? Oh.” Michael lets himself be pulled away, tearing his watering eyes from the glowing easterly sky. He’s not sure if he’s imagining a trace of uncertainty, of honest fear, under David’s commanding words. Like David’s not sure Michael doesn’t want to stay out here until he’s nothing but ashes.
For a moment, Michael’s not so sure of it himself.
But. Max is somehow still alive, still dating his mom. Whatever else – Michael can’t let Max’s plans for his family come to fruition.
Everything else, he can figure out once he knows they’re safe.
“What changed tonight, Michael?” David asks, with deliberate carelessness, as their feet meet with the hotel’s rocky floor. He doesn’t look in Michael’s direction as he says it. “Since you’ve been with us, you haven’t mentioned your family once.”
There’s a bitter taste on the back of Michael’s tongue. He swallows it down with a little difficulty. “Yeah, well…” The memory of suddenly finding himself awake, and how he’d found himself, bursts in vivid Technicolour across his mind, and the words snap out of him like a curse. “Maybe the honeymoon’s over.”
David still doesn’t look at him. His impassive expression gives nothing away.
There’s an unfortunately-familiar heaviness dragging at Michael as he and David cross the sunken hotel’s ‘lobby’ on foot. It’s the same as the daylight exhaustion that had been his near-constant companion for the short time he’d known David and the boys. Just, like with the silent call that David had used to summon him earlier, somehow – more. Michael can feel parts of his brain shutting down with every step, thoughts moving slow as glaciers, the weight of sunlight pressing him irresistibly down into the warm welcoming dark behind his eyelids.
He's barely aware enough of his surroundings to notice the twitch of a hanging curtain, the dissonance in the sleepy, comfortable atmosphere hanging over the caves. The pair of dark eyes boring into his back.
When Michael turns to look, Star turns, too, jerking her face away like making eye contact might burn her. She pulls her shawl around herself as she turns over, putting her back to them, and words that feel like they came from another lifetime seep up out between the floorboards of Michael’s mind. I was hoping you’d help Laddie and me.
The pang of guilt that strikes Michael is sudden and sharp enough to jolt him momentarily almost back awake. But – he did. He did help her get free, get her humanity back. He has no idea how or why they’ve ended up – here – instead.
Since you’ve been with us, you haven’t mentioned your family once.
It hits Michael, for the first time, like a blinding flash of the obvious, to wonder whether David messed with his head. If that explains it all. If David had made Michael think he’d fought the boys and Max, the same way he’d once made Michael think he was eating maggots. If – if, maybe, when Michael thought he was killing David –
“She’s still not speaking to you,” David says, conversationally, stopped a few paces ahead to look back and watch Michael watching Star. “Don’t waste your time worrying about Star, Michael. She’ll be fine in the sunlight. We won’t.”
Michael thinks, in that moment, he won’t be able to stop worrying. And not just about Star. Maybe David could trick Michael into making his first kill thinking he was buying his freedom instead of sealing his fate. Maybe – maybe David could make Michael believe that, that – fuck if he knows, that Michael’s been having weirdly kinky sex with Star or something. But then, wouldn’t David have been less surprised, less confused, when Michael suddenly snapped out of it? And why would Michael suddenly snap out of it now? His family had acted like he’d been missing for more than a day or so, too…
Michael thinks he’ll be up all day, worrying. Thinks the horror – and the hunger – will keep him awake.
It turns out, he severely underestimated the power the sun has over him.
Michael’s barely aware of himself, feeling clumsy and unacquainted with his own body by the time David helps get him settled somewhere close and warm and dark, surrounded on all sides by the others and that homey, earthy, vegetable smell he’d noticed before. There’s a ripple of relief that rustles through the quiet dark as Michael makes himself comfortable, a ripple of relief that leaps from David to Dwayne to Marko to Paul and earths itself at last in Michael.
His last conscious thought is more of a feeling, just a sudden, surprising gratitude, a bone-deep sense of rightness as the horizon outside flares with gold and the last of the lights in his mind shut off.
…
Michael’s looking in a mirror.
Except – except, for some reason, he hadn’t expected to have – he’d have expected this to be different, somehow. From the look of shock on his reflection’s face, so had he. If Michael could think of why this is so strange, what he was expecting instead, maybe this wouldn’t unsettle him so much. But he can’t, and that makes it worse.
His reflection’s hand comes up, to pat his cheek, push his hair back behind one ear, yank up his top lip with a thumb. Michael can feel himself doing the same, leaning toward the reflection to investigate his bicuspids. But he doesn’t seem to be able to move, otherwise. For one long, disorienting moment, he’s not sure which side of the glass he’s on.
He can’t even direct where his gaze goes. And his reflection seems fascinated – or maybe horrified, or maybe both – by the sight of himself. But Michael tries, in his peripheral vision, to work out where his reflection is standing. What’s behind him.
Those look like the tiles of the bathroom he shares with Sam. The one in his grandpa’s house.
The next time Michael sees his reflection, it’s in pieces. Kaleidoscope flashes of darkness and firelight, glitter and grime. It takes him far more of the strange flickers than he’d like to admit before he realises what he’s looking at – the distorted echo of his own face in the spinning faces of the broken CDs that hang over the fountain, out in the ‘lobby’. His reflection is in the sunken hotel.
And, he thinks, based on the flashes of background he catches, coming closer and closer to where Michael and the boys are all sleeping –
…
This time, Michael does wake up.
It’s still not ‘waking up’ like he’s used to, though. He knows he was asleep – well, something resembling it, anyway. But there’s no bleary moment of gradual processing, rising gently out of the cobwebs of dreaming, trying to reorient himself in reality while part of him’s still stubbornly clinging to sleep. There’s just void, and then awareness. He’s asleep, and then he’s awake, with almost nothing in between.
Also, something about the world is wrong.
It takes Michael a long moment to understand that what’s wrong with the world is that it’s upside down.
It takes him another long moment to understand that the world isn’t upside down. He is.
“Evening, Michael.”
Michael raises his head, following the sound of David’s voice. They’re alone, the other three having clearly found something better to do, and David’s standing leaning against a wall below, smoking a cigarette like he doesn’t have a care in the world. The smoke coils lazily up toward Michael, wreathing his head in its particular dark, bitter scent.
Michael shuts his eyes for a moment, letting the despair wash over and through him and away again like the tide. It’s not like he really expected to wake up warm and contented in his own bed in a late-morning sunbeam, with the traces of last night evaporating into a bad dream around him. But it would’ve been nice.
“You’re looking better,” David says, and Michael frowns at him, confused. David taps two gloved fingers against his own cheek, just below his eye, and Michael raises a hand to feel his own face. The skin is smooth under his fingers, unblemished. The damage from the holy water is gone like it had never been there.
“Did I really fall asleep like this last -” Michael starts, and then remembers. “Uh, morning?”
David flashes a grin up at him. “Comfy, isn’t it?”
“How do I get down?”
Something dark flickers across David’s face, momentarily eclipsing his smile. “You know how, Michael. Just let go.”
“Let…?”
But awareness is already dawning even as the words start to come out of Michael’s mouth. Those are the heavy motorcycle boots he was wearing the morning before – fuck, it’s weird wrapping his head around talking about a nocturnal schedule – down against the wall by where David’s standing. His feet are bare in the cool salt air, metal rough against the pads of his toes, and if he just gives those toes a flex –
For a second, Michael thinks he’s going headfirst into the sand below. And then something – he doesn’t even intentionally jackknife in midair, not entirely, he means to move but he doesn’t really have any kind of a plan for how –
And then his feet are sinking into the rough, rocky sand covering the cave floor, and the world is rightside up again.
David’s watching him with a smirk. He’s doing a good job of hiding his lingering worry. But not a perfect one. “Catlike.”
“Shut up,” Michael shoots back automatically, collecting the motorcycle boots that aren’t his and brushing sand from his soles. He loses himself briefly in horrified contemplation of the way his toes seem to be jointed, the painless but faintly nauseating way those joints shift under his skin. The better to hang upside down from, my dear, apparently. Though as soon as he gives them a flex, they’re back to normal just like nothing ever happened. Apparently, his face isn’t the only part of him that changes.
“Feeling more like yourself tonight, Michael?”
Michael pulls on the motorcycle boots, leaning heavily against the wall for balance and leaving his back to David to avoid answering. It strikes Michael, as the thought crosses his mind, just how stupid that is. Turning his back on a predator like David. And yet – he hadn’t even considered it could be dangerous, until he’d realised he’d already done it.
Somehow, despite everything, he’s comfortable with David. That edge of uneasiness, of threat, that Michael’s always felt in David’s presence is just gone like it was never there. The closest thing he feels is just…awareness, a faint but constant background sense of where David is in relation to him. And a little shivery thrill when that sense tells him David’s close and coming closer.
“Depends on which self you had in mind,” Michael says, nonsensically, the fragments of his dream coming back to him out of nowhere. The feeling of being trapped in his own reflection.
Into David’s flat look, he says, “I just had weird dreams.”
Michael’s not expecting that to be the thing that makes David look at him like he’s about to spontaneously combust. “What?”
For once, there’s no hint of teasing, of mocking knowingness, in David’s voice. “Michael, we don’t dream.”
Michael waits a moment, in case David’s about to break into a shit-eating grin. But the moment drags on, and the seriousness in David’s piercing eyes doesn’t get any less deathly.
“So what the hell was that, then?” Michael asks, at last, and David frowns at the rock just past Michael’s left shoulder.
“Something else.”
“David,” Michael says, and tries not to shrink, not to give in to the strange desire to preen, under the sudden force of David’s undivided attention. “Have you been messing with my head? Did you make me think I was killing you, just to trick me into making my first kill?”
The switchblade of a smile that crosses David’s face doesn’t meet his eyes. “Now, where would be the fun in that?”
“You really didn’t?”
“I really didn’t, Michael.”
Michael nods. He shouldn’t believe David, probably, but – but, for some reason, he does. “Then something really strange is going on.”
David doesn’t have to come out and say no shit, Michael. He conveys it impressively clearly with just his eyes.
Apparently it’s not just David who Michael suddenly has a sixth sense for. Or maybe the boys are just noisy. But Michael’s already certain, even before the wind sets him down in the ‘lobby’, that he’ll find all three of the others there. Paul’s nagging over Marko’s shoulder about being careful with the transistor radio Marko’s got the back off of, worrying over it like it’s a pet Marko’s doing open-heart surgery on, and Dwayne has his boots up on the fountain’s broken rim, his nose in a dog-eared paperback with a naked woman sitting in a pentagram on its cover, looking faintly amused by whatever’s on the pages.
Three pairs of eyes flash over to Michael as his feet find the ground, and then turn away again. But there’s something a little too conscious in the way Paul flicks Marko’s ear, complaining that if he breaks the tunes then Marko’s going to have to be the one to find them a new rock box, the way Marko snipes back about how many radios and stereos have already been Paul’s victims. The way everyone carefully avoids eye contact. Like they’re trying not to set Michael off again.
That suspicion is confirmed when Dwayne says, casually, without taking his eyes off his page, “So, Michael’s joining us again tonight?”
“Yeah, Mikey,” Paul agrees, looking up like now that somebody else has breached the subject, it’s safe to make eye contact again. “What was with you? Haven’t seen you act that squirrelly since you were still half, dude.”
“Look who’s talking,” Marko teases, and Paul gives the back of his head a shove, forcing his face toward the open guts of the radio.
“About that,” Michael says.
David smoothly takes over for him before he’s had a chance to decide what he wants to say next. “It seems Michael remembers the way things went down…differently than we do.” He claps a hand to Michael’s shoulder as he steps past him, one quick, rough squeeze that Michael can’t decipher the intent behind. Reassurance, or threat?
“What?” Paul asks, squinting, but Marko’s beaming like a kid on Christmas for some reason.
“Like amnesia? I’ve always wanted to see somebody get amnesia in real life.” His grin turns wicked, and he glances up at David for a moment before continuing, with the most innocent bat of his eyes, “Did Davey get a little too rough with you and bang your head while you were -”
“It’s not amnesia,” Michael interrupts. It’s a strange sensation, feeling like he should be blushing, like his face would be hot right now if his blood was. Judging by the wicked smirks that none of the others are trying particularly hard to hide, he gets the feeling they can all tell, anyway. “I can remember everything. It just seems like I remember it…different.”
He realises, a moment after the words leave his mouth, that he’s basically just echoed word-for-word what David said.
“What’s to remember?” Dwayne offers, flipping over a page in the book he’s barely taken his eyes off of since David and Michael got there. “Michael followed Star like a lost puppy straight to us, lost a race to David, took the blood, took a few days to turn, and then we took him out for dinner.” There’s the faintest twist of a grin shadowing his lips as he drawls out the last part.
“And David’s been hogging him ever since,” Marko adds, with an exaggerated pout.
David seems to be fascinated with adjusting one of his gloves, but a self-satisfied smirk gives him away. It fades a little, though, as he says, “That’s not how Michael remembers it.”
This time, four pairs of eyes fix on Michael.
Michael considers telling them that he and his family had killed them all.
For some reason, it’s suddenly taking a lot of concentration and effort to swallow.
“That night you, uh,” he tries, and then has to swallow again. “ ‘Took me out for dinner’. When was that?”
The boys exchange blank looks. Michael has to wonder, suddenly, whether they even know. Whether immortality, eternal youth, endless nights of vicious, hedonistic fun, all start blurring together after a while. Whether they even can put time into a human frame of reference, anymore.
“A week ago.”
Michael’s head snaps up, looking across the cavernous space. Half-hidden behind a gently wafting scrap of filmy lace curtain, Star’s dark eyes pin and penetrate him like a stake.
Michael’s words come out hushed without his really meaning for them to. “Was it – was it the night after we -”
Star’s eyes drop abruptly to her lap. Michael swallows the rest of the sentence.
“Was it at the bonfire?” he asks the others, instead. “When I -”
He can’t say it.
David – maybe to Michael’s gratitude, maybe to his horror – says it for him. “Killed?”
Michael can’t meet his eyes as he nods.
He can feel Star’s attention on him, suddenly, prickling over his skin in a way that sort of makes him want to claw it off.
“Yes, Michael,” David says, and if Star’s undivided attention is pins and needles, David’s is swords and arrows. “That’s the night you made your first kill.”
“Yeah, and you were a natural!” Paul crows, apparently oblivious to the mood hanging chilly in the cave’s stale salt air. “Specially for a guy who took so long to warm up to it. You really seemed to be enjoying yourself once you got into the swing of things -”
“But I didn’t,” Michael argues, trying to tell himself that the lurch in his stomach is nausea and not hunger. “I didn’t. I fell out of that stupid tree and you assholes taunted me about it and then I went home and -”
He bites down on the rest of that thought, abruptly switching gears. “Did any of you ever see Back to the Future?”
This time, there’s an echo of judgment to accompany the blank looks.
“Forget it. Doesn’t matter. It just – it kind of feels like the end of the movie. Where they changed the past, and now everything’s different in the present, but the one guy still remembers how it was before they changed it…?”
“What are you suggesting, Michael?” David says, sinuous, like it’s a question laced with threat. But Michael can hear a thread of genuine curiosity in it, too.
“Yeah, dude. Seriously?” Marko asks, quirking an eyebrow. “Time travel?”
“Says the vampire,” Michael shoots back.
Marko shrugs, with a raise of both eyebrows and a bob of his head, like he can’t argue with that.
“I don’t know if it’s time travel, or if I’m losing my mind, or what,” Michael continues. “But something’s wrong. And – and I had weird dreams, last night. Yesterday.”
That gets about the same response out of the others as it had out of David. Paul snorts out a disbelieving laugh, Marko squints at Michael like he’s not sure Michael’s all there, and Dwayne puts down his book.
“Dreams,” he says, somehow making it sound like the stupidest thing he’s ever heard in his life. Death. Whatever. Only a quick flick of his eyes up to David betrays even a hint of uncertainty.
“Dreams,” David agrees, like he finds it just as absurd, dropping into that dumb wheelchair like it’s a throne. “Michael’s going to have to elaborate on that one. Aren’t you, Michael.”
Michael looks over to Star, just in case help might come from that quarter. But she’s not looking back at him. Laddie’s come running in from somewhere, and she doesn’t seem to have any attention to spare for anyone but him.
“I don’t know what they are, if they’re not dreams,” Michael starts, slowly. “I was asleep. And then it was like – like I was seeing myself in a mirror. Only I was the reflection.”
From the blank looks the others are exchanging, Michael thinks they’ve got as much idea of what that means as he does.
And even after almost an hour of Michael answering awkward questions and the boys batting around possible explanations, they still haven’t managed to come up with any ideas. Other than Michael’s time travel theory, which he really only brought up in the first place to describe the problem with his memories, anyway.
The lump in his throat is almost choking Michael before he really registers it’s there.
It’s just – he saw what was left of these guys, once his family and Sam’s friends were done with them. They’re dead. Michael knows they’re dead. He helped make them that way. They were going to hurt his family. They were trying to make him into something he’s not. (He’s not. This – this is temporary. This has to be temporary.)
But…for however short a time, they were also his friends. And Michael hadn’t realised how much he’s missed this, just casually shooting the shit over some imaginary, impossible hypothetical problem, or teasing each other over nothing, or scuffling like a pack of puppies before they learn how not to play rough. Michael hadn’t realised how much he’s missed this.
Missed them.
That’s a dangerous thought to be having.
They don’t come up with any brilliant theories, though. And it doesn’t take long before the boys start getting bored. Or, at least, restless.
Michael wants to be annoyed about that, but he can feel it, too. Not quite an itch, but a deep, unsettled feeling that stirs up an unpleasant energy under his skin, making it impossible to hold still. Pacing, fidgeting, don’t seem to help at all. Michael needs to move. He needs out of this claustrophobic cave. He needs –
It strikes him what the feeling really is at the same time as Paul complains, “Fuck this. I’m starving.”
“Yeah. Mysteries are a lot easier to solve on a full stomach,” Marko chirps, before Michael can object, can protest. “Mikey’s looking a little peckish, too. Aren’t you, Mikey?”
“No!” Michael says automatically, a little too fast, a little too sharp. Star’s gaze snaps up to him, piercing him through even as the other four turn varying degrees of suspicion in his direction. Michael forces himself to swallow, and tries again. “No, but I could use some fresh air.”
That seems to have the same effect as a school dismissal bell. In a burst of howling wind and a raucous clatter of whoops and cheers, Paul and Marko are gone. Dwayne pauses only long enough to sweep Laddie up with him before he follows. The joy, the lightness, of flight soars in Michael’s chest, too, but he hangs back, knowing now what’s waiting for him in the brilliant dark outside.
The thing is, he wants to fly in that magnificent sky again. He wants to move, fast as he can, as far as he can. Wants to push his body to its limits. To let loose, to feel the wind snatch the breath out of his mouth and scour every thought out of his head, like pushing his bike up to the top third of its speedometer but better. He wants to be up there, in that cloud of rapidly-fading laughter, with the others. He wants it, suddenly, so badly it aches in his ribs and the back of his throat.
It's another dangerous thought. If Michael stops trying to resist, if he lets himself take what he wants –
Then next time, it’s going to be a whole lot harder to stop himself.
And Michael can’t forget what else he wants.
It takes him a long moment of struggling with himself, before he realises. He’s not the only one hanging back.
“Star,” David says, like an invitation wrapped around a warning. He doesn’t take his eyes off of Michael, though. “Coming with us?”
Star doesn’t answer. She’s studying Michael like he’s a complicated math problem, her dark eyes narrowed but – Michael thinks, he wants to think – not in anger, this time.
“Star,” David says, wrenching his gaze away from Michael’s face.
Star turns to meet his stare, her eyes flashing sullen fire. But she rises from her bower and drifts, like a sleepwalker, over to join them.
David opens an arm to enfold her possessively into his side. The smile he turns toward Michael is triumphant, almost a little smug, despite the way Star’s turned her face away from them both.
There’s been enough going on, enough to be horrified and confused by. Michael hasn’t really had a chance to think about how he found himself, when he suddenly found himself awake. About what he and David had obviously been doing, just before he’d come to his senses. About how David’s reactions, and the others’ words, seem to imply that that hadn’t been the first time.
But it all comes roaring suddenly to the forefront of Michael’s mind, watching the way David’s gloating over Star. Like they’re right back to where they were when they first met, like David’s enjoying watching Michael seethe in impotent jealousy.
And suddenly, a few things that hadn’t made sense to Michael before all fall into place.
Suddenly, inexplicably, he feels almost sorry for David.
Michael’s not sure what he’s going to say, but it feels like he should say something. “David -”
David doesn’t let Michael finish the thought. His voice is sharp, clipped, despite his acting like he barely even notices Michael’s existence. “Whatever you might remember, Michael, you are still one of us. And you will need to feed.”
It takes Michael several agonising seconds before he can force himself to admit the truth. “I know.”
David’s sudden smile is razor-sharp, toothy, and mirthless.
“Just – not tonight. Give me a chance to figure this out first.”
“Don’t know what there is to figure out, Michael.” David’s smile turns brittle and sneering, his eyes like chips of ice. “You are one of us. And you always will be.”
Michael doesn’t know what to say to that.
Especially since part of him is afraid it’s true.
…
David doesn’t leave Michael alone with Star.
It takes Michael a little while to realise that that’s what he’s doing. That he isn’t just hovering around Michael, trying to keep Michael from trying to run away again or trying to get Michael to slip and eat somebody – although Michael has no doubt those are also thoughts on David’s mind. But when Dwayne turns up with Laddie in tow, drawing Star’s attention and pulling her away from David’s orbit, is the first time David gives Michael any room to breathe.
“Come grab a bite with me, Michael?” he offers, with that shit-eating grin, as Star follows Laddie toward the Red Baron ride, letting him tug her along by the wrist. Dwayne follows along behind the two of them like a shadow.
“You go ahead,” Michael mutters, disgusted with David for treating this like one big joke. Disgusted with himself for being tempted.
“Sure?” David’s grin is sharp, sudden, and gone again in an instant. “If this really is some kind of time travel situation, if all you have to do is fix whatever went wrong and go right back to your nice, normal life, then whatever you do in this timeline doesn’t really count. Does it, Michael? And haven’t you wondered what it’s like?”
The shadow of a smile that lingers on his face tells Michael that David’s not really asking. That he already knows the answer.
Michael has to shut his eyes. To remind himself not to take a deep breath. “I don’t think you get freebies on murder, David.”
David shrugs with apparently perfect unconcern. “Suit yourself.” He turns on one heel, spurs jangling.
Michael thinks that’s going to be it, but David pauses, rummaging in the pockets of his enormous black overcoat. He turns back, and Michael braces for whatever casual cruelty’s about to come out of his mouth.
But David doesn’t say a word. Just tosses Michael something that Michael catches on reflex, then turns and walks away.
Michael looks down.
David’s tossed him a half-empty pack of cigarettes.
It’s hot out, tonight, any cool wind blowing off the ocean melting in the face of the crowd. And if Michael’d thought the night sky was overwhelming, it’s got nothing on the Boardwalk. Everywhere he goes, everywhere he turns, there’s a new assault on his senses. Too loud, too bright, too hot, too smelly. Too packed to every corner with the throbbing, teeming throng of humanity.
He scares off the first person he tries to ask for a light. Michael’s not surprised. He can’t tell without a reflection, of course, but he’s sure he must look like some kind of junkie, jonesing for a fix.
It’s not so far from the truth.
The nicotine, thankfully, helps take the edge off the hunger, the smell of burning tobacco muting the hot salt sweat scent of living bodies. Michael finds himself feeling weirdly grateful to David, as he lights a second cigarette off the dying ember of the first and leans back against one of the pier’s huge pilings. There’s no way David hadn’t known a cigarette would help, when he’d tossed Michael the pack. No way that this wasn’t what he’d intended. It’s almost…nice of him.
Unless he’d meant for Michael to snap and eat whoever he had to get close enough to to ask for a light. Which maybe sounds more like David.
In the relatively lonely quiet under the pier, Michael’s aware of someone coming up behind him long before they reach him. The nearly-irresistible throb of a heartbeat, though, is fainter and slower than he thinks it should be, the blood cool and sluggish in the veins, and however he knows it, Michael knows it’s Star before she speaks.
“Took me forever to shake them.” Her footsteps crunch to a stop in the sand, and she leans one shoulder against the piling beside where Michael’s back is already pressed to it. “Were you telling the truth?”
“About what?”
When Michael looks over, Star’s not looking at him. Her dark eyes are fixed out on the black expanse of the water. “You know what.”
Michael does know what. “I didn’t kill, Star. You have to believe me. I don’t know what happened, what’s going on, but – I didn’t.”
Star turns a long, cool look onto him, sweeping her gaze up and down. Michael’s suddenly, uncomfortably aware of the cigarette burning down between his fingers, of the clothes that aren’t his, of the other, fanged face just beneath the skin of his own like the fingers in a curled fist.
“I know,” he admits. “I can’t explain it. But I swear. We fought them. We won. We were human again.”
There’s a hunger in Star’s dark eyes that puts the one gnawing at Michael’s insides to shame. Her voice isn’t loud, but so intense that it startles Michael a little anyway. “How?”
There’s another crunch of sand underfoot, from up near the base of the pier. Michael doesn’t have to look to know who’s coming.
“Go to the comic book shop on the Boardwalk,” he tells Star, dropping his voice, trying to hurry the words out as quickly as he can. “When it’s daylight, when we’re all sleeping. Get the two kids who work there to take you to my brother and my grandpa. Tell them what’s going on, that you need their help.” He thinks about that for a moment, and adds, “Maybe don’t tell them what you are until you’ve talked to my brother, though.”
“When it’s daylight? Michael, I don’t know if I can -” Star starts, but Michael’s not finished.
“You have to. I don’t know any other way to help you. And you can’t let David know I told you, Star. Promise.”
Star looks back over her shoulder, tugging her flimsy wrap a little tighter around herself. Obviously just noticing they’ve got company.
“All right,” she says, at last. “All right.”
The steady crunch of boots in sand is growing nearer, now, that little thrill of anticipation zinging through Michael. He’s not quite done with Star, though. Maybe they’re out of time, but he leans his head closer to hers anyway. “Do you really hate me for it?”
Star’s eyes drop down to the sand her bare toes are buried in. “I’ve been resisting for so long, Michael. I thought you would help me.” She curls her toes, shifting the sand. Michael wonders if it’s just his imagination, or if he really catches a glimpse of clawed nails, too-long joints, before the sand buries them again. “You barely held out for a week.”
“You didn’t exactly warn me what I had to look out for,” Michael argues, and a hand claps him on the nape of his neck with an iron grip.
There’s a smug smile audible in David’s voice even before Michael turns around. “Now, now. Don’t tell me the lovebirds are fighting.”
“Trouble in paradise, Mikey?” Paul echoes mockingly, as he slings an arm around Star’s shoulders. She shrinks away from him, shooting him a glare, and nearly backs into Dwayne, coming up behind her with Laddie perched on his shoulders.
“Oh, Mikey’s got trouble in paradise, all right,” Marko agrees, with a knowing smirk and a glance between Michael and David who, almost in response, wrenches Michael back from the piling – and from Star.
“Had your fill of fresh air, Michael?” David asks, in a tone that tells Michael there’s a right and a wrong answer. David doesn’t bother waiting for him to give either, though. “We’re going home.”
…
This time, Michael gets a good head-on look at his reflection, head to toe, in the full-length mirror at the foot of his grandfather’s stairs as he and his reflection both thump down them. The mirror-Michael’s decked himself out all in black, and he’s wearing the leather jacket Michael had bought for himself on the Boardwalk. The leather jacket Michael’d thrown into the back of his closet after the night they fought Max and the boys, and hasn’t touched since.
There’s no sound that Michael can hear, so he’s not sure why his reflection suddenly turns his head, a contemptuous sneer flickering across his features. But a second or so later, his gaze turns back toward the mirror, dragging Michael’s with it, as his mom steps in between the reflection and the mirror. Michael can’t hear anything, but it looks like they’re arguing.
It ends abruptly when the mirror-Michael shakes his head, shaking Michael’s with it, and stomps out of the rectangle of the reflection, carrying Michael helplessly along after him. Away from the mirror, and into an ocean of endless, formless darkness.
…
“I have a theory,” Star says.
“Please, indulge us,” David replies, with fake magnanimousness, from where he’s slouched in state in that stupid wheelchair. Marko stifles a snicker behind one leather biker glove.
Star doesn’t laugh. She’s watching Michael with a look that seems to demand he read her mind and figure out what she’s really saying.
Michael thinks he can. He doesn’t think ‘her’ theory is really hers at all.
And he’s proven right when the next words that come out of her mouth are pure comic book geekery. They’ve got Sam’s fingerprints all over them. “There were two ways things could have gone, that night at the bonfire. You either killed, or you didn’t. What if, somehow, that created two timelines? Two alternate realities, existing side by side?”
“And somehow, Mikey’s in the wrong one?” Dwayne asks, raising an eyebrow. Michael’s really starting to wonder when they all collectively agreed to call him Mikey.
Marko rolls his eyes. “How is that any different from time travel?”
Michael has to wonder if Star’s just repeating what Sam and his dorky friends had said. “Because no one had to travel in time. Somehow, Michael’s remembering the wrong timeline.”
“Or we’ve got the wrong Mikey,” Paul laughs. But from the way Dwayne’s brow furrows, he’s seriously considering it.
“Maybe,” he allows. “Maybe that’s what’s going on with these ‘dreams’ he’s been having. Physics isn’t gonna let a body move between dimensions, but if it was just a mind?”
There’s a moment of silence as everyone looks at him, Paul’s mouth forming around a silent ‘whoa’.
Dwayne shrugs.
There’s a conspicuous silence from the wheelchair David’s collapsed into, one leg slung over an armrest like he hasn’t got a care in the world. When Michael looks over, he’s studying Michael with narrowed eyes, like he’s trying to solve a complicated riddle. But when he notices Michael’s eyes on him, that almost stern expression twists into a smirk.
“What do you think, Michael?” he asks, lazily, like a cat pretending to groom itself to get its prey’s guard down. “Are you in the wrong reality?”
It’s another question that feels like it has a right and a wrong answer. But Michael doesn’t know what either of them are.
So he doesn’t give one.
“If I am,” he asks, instead, “then does that mean…the me who should be here, is there?”
The smirk slides slowly off of David’s face. Michael doesn’t think he looks angry, exactly. Just like he’s thinking hard about a new and unexpected piece of information.
And Michael catches David giving him that look more and more, as the night wears on. As the others get bored of trying to solve Michael’s mystery and filter off, one by one, to work on bikes or torment beachgoers or chase a giggling Laddie through the caves.
At first, Michael doesn’t pay David too much attention. He’s too caught up in the awful realisation he’s had. If what he’d said earlier is right – if he’s here, and the Michael who’d jumped in to David and the boys’ bullshit with both feet is there, in a world where all his shiny new powers are stripped away and all his new best friends are dead, and Michael’s family helped kill them…if his family don’t realise that it isn’t their Michael walking around in that leather jacket Michael can’t bear to lay eyes on anymore, giving Michael’s mom attitude, eating at their family’s table, sleeping in Michael’s room, prowling Michael’s grandpa’s house while everyone else is innocently and defenselessly asleep…if they don’t realise that he might be watching and listening to every word they say, and silently, secretly plotting his revenge…
If Michael’s family don’t know…
They all think it’s over. That they’re safe. But they’re not. They’re still in danger because of Max, because of the boys, because of David.
They’re still in danger because of Michael.
Michael’s caught up enough in that awful thought that David actually manages to startle him, when he all but whispers into Michael’s ear. “Mind wandering, Michael?”
Michael starts, whirling to find himself suddenly face-to-face with David’s shit-eating smirk. Although the wide-eyed seriousness he puts on as soon as Michael meets his eyes is every bit as mocking. “Taking a stroll back to your home dimension, maybe?”
Michael lets his eyes sink shut in exasperation. It’s strange how just being a little irritated or surprised can make him so much more aware of the face behind his face, how thin his veneer of humanity is stretched. “I don’t know what’s going on, David. I’m just trying to figure it out, same as you.”
There’s an edge in David’s snapped-out response. Is Michael imagining a flash of fang when he curls his lip? “No, Michael. Not the same as me at all. I’m not the one who suddenly got cold feet. I’m not the one wishing I’d killed my own brothers. I’m not the one trying to deny what I am -”
“This isn’t what I am.”
David doesn’t say anything, just raises both his eyebrows like Michael’s just proved his point.
And maybe Michael has. But he doesn’t want to think about it. It seems like, with David, he just keeps walking blindly straight into traps.
So, this time, he tries a novel approach, and just asks. “What do you want from me, David.”
“What do I want from you, Michael?” David shakes his head, gently, like he’s both chiding a particularly stupid student and laughing to himself at the same time. “I think I should be asking you that question. Don’t you? After I’ve given you everything you could possibly want? Freedom, friendship, eternal youth…” His face cracks in a mischievous grin as he adds, offhandedly, “The best sex you’ve ever had in your life…”
Michael’s been trying not to think about that. Michael’s been trying to blot it out of his memory. Once again, he’s certain that if he had the blood flow for it, he’d be blushing. “That wasn’t me.”
David’s grin only gets more sharklike. “Wasn’t it, Michael?”
When Michael sets his jaw, refusing to be drawn into whatever this is, David nods, like that’s what he expected. “Oh, yes. I forgot for a moment. That was the other Michael. The one who looks exactly like you, talks exactly like you, and acts exactly like you – oh, except for an unfortunate tendency to suck blood.”
His grin is downright wicked, his gleaming blue eyes fixed on Michael’s when he adds, “And c-”
Michael grabs him by the lapels of his stupid overcoat and slams him up against the rocky wall before he can finish the word.
Unfortunately, this does not wipe the smirk off of David’s face the way Michael had hoped it would. If anything, that smirk just gets wider. More self-satisfied.
“That wasn’t me,” Michael repeats. Insists.
David’s voice is still smug as ever, even when it’s a little breathless. “Of course it wasn’t.”
Belatedly, it dawns on Michael what kind of position he’s put them both in. How close his face is, now, to David’s, how close their chests are to touching. How his body is caging David’s up against the wall. And, even though Michael had been the one, in the end, to throw David to his doom, he remembers how closely matched they’d been in that final struggle. How much dirtier David had fought.
David wouldn’t have let Michael pin him unless he wanted to be pinned.
Michael drops the lapels of David’s coat as if they’ve burned him, taking two quick steps back. It’s too close in here. He can’t breathe. “You’re a monster.”
David’s smile curdles. “And what does that make you, Michael?”
Michael doesn’t have an answer for that.
“What do you want from me, Michael,” David asks, soft, silken, dangerous, as he closes the two steps Michael put in between them like the nothing that they are. This time, Michael, refusing to be intimidated, holds his ground. “Do you want me to be a monster? Someone you can hold yourself up against to show how human you are in comparison?”
Their noses are nearly brushing, his piercing blue stare close enough for Michael to count every pale lash when David says, low and quiet, almost like a lover, “Something you don’t have to feel guilty when you kill?”
The snarl that boils up from somewhere deep in Michael’s chest takes him by surprise. He only realises his vision’s shifted when he slams David back against the wall again, the sharp shape of fangs crowding his mouth.
Michael doesn’t want this. He never wanted this. Nobody asked him if he wanted to become an immortal, bloodthirsty creature of the night. (He doesn’t let himself think about how things might have gone if they had.) He wants to go home, to reality, where he’s himself again, where the day is saved and everyone he loves is safe and whole and happy, and his body and its reactions are his own again, and there’s nothing monstrous lurking just underneath his skin, and the sunlight feels like a loving touch, and even mowing Grandpa’s endless lawn under that sun’s baking heat or pushing himself through a punishing workout, sweat pouring down his back, muscles aching, breath rasping in his lungs, pulse hammering in his ears, feels wholesome and heady and good. He wants this sick, warped hunger out of him. For good.
But when the skin of David’s throat tears easily open under Michael’s fangs and the bright taste of blood bursts against his tongue, for a minute or two, maybe Michael forgets that.
“That’s it,” David croons, triumphantly, one hand coming up to tangle gloved, possessive fingers in Michael’s hair, holding his head in place. He didn’t need to bother. Michael couldn’t pull away now if he tried. “Knew you were hungry.”
Michael, with his mouth full, can’t deny it and doesn’t even try.
He barely remembers that first night he’d spent in these caverns, after David had dared him to race out here. It’s all a dreamy red haze. But Michael remembers the bottle, the way its cool glass lip had felt against his own when he raised it to his mouth and took that first, fateful swig. He remembers the taste.
He could say it’s the same taste. The same way he could say that his little Kawasaki and David’s gleaming Triumph are both motorbikes. There’s no point pretending one isn’t better.
David’s skin is cool, under Michael’s lips, like he’s been out in the night air a little too long. But the way his muscles tense and flex, the give of his flesh under Michael’s teeth, is alive and urgent. It adds something to the richness of the blood pouring into Michael’s mouth in a way that Michael can’t describe or explain, and doesn’t want to try to.
He resists, when David finally pulls him off, clenching his fingers in Michael’s hair near the scalp and gently, then not-so-gently, forcing Michael’s head back and holding it there. David’s stare is unreadable and blue as a flame. Michael can’t tell if that’s fury lighting his eyes, or…something else.
When he grips Michael’s jaw and presses his lips against Michael’s, demanding but with the give of flesh, cool but so, so alive, this time, Michael doesn’t resist.
And Michael doesn’t resist when David manoeuvres him backwards into the shallow alcove lined with blankets and pillows where he’d once spent the night with Star, what feels like a lifetime ago. He doesn’t try to stop David’s tongue from working busily against his jaw, his throat, neatly and precisely capturing every stray drop and rivulet of blood that Michael’s made a mess of himself with. He doesn’t even try to push David off of him when that cool, busy tongue laps at his lips, plunges into his mouth. The taste of blood is caught between them, deep and rich and savoury, and Michael lets himself savour it.
He only starts to come to his senses when David purrs into his ear, while gloved fingers inch up along the line of his hip beneath his shirt, “Are you going to stop trying to starve yourself now?”
Michael smacks his hand away, and tries not to notice the look of hurt that flashes across David’s face, there and gone so quickly Michael isn’t entirely sure he didn’t imagine it. “You’re dead. I told you. I killed you.”
A gloved hand cups Michael through his jeans, and a jolt shoots through him, his hips jerking forward into the pressure before he can think. “Do I feel dead to you, Michael?”
Michael grabs David’s wrist, not quite able to bring himself to force his hand away, but holding it still. “Why are you doing this? It’s not me you want. You want your Michael back. Right? The one who doesn’t care if, who he kills? The one who’ll do this with you?”
David’s watching him like a cat with a mouse between its paws. Like Michael’s dead the moment his struggles stop being interesting. “You seem to be doing this with me, Michael.”
Michael takes a deep breath, and struggles. “You had to trick me, though. You had to force me.” David’s eyes darken in anger, and Michael swallows, hard. “You want me to want this. All of it. Don’t you?”
David could be a marble statue, a gargoyle perched on the roof of some Gothic cathedral, frozen in stony silence.
“You’ve got to help me, David. That’s how you get him back. Help me get back to myself.” Michael realises he’s begging. There doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. “There’s no point trying to tempt me. I told you. I’m human again, and I can’t go back now even if I wanted to. We killed you. You’re all already dead.”
For whatever reason, those are the words that make David finally start to thaw. “No point trying to tempt you?”
A crooked smile cracks across the glacial landscape of his face, the same kind of grin that’s emblazoned across Michael’s memories of him and yet, somehow, also a grin Michael’s never quite seen him wear before.
“You say you killed me, Michael. Maybe I just want to haunt you a little.”
And with those enigmatic words, he pushes himself up, turns his back, and walks away.
Leaving Michael with blood on his face, the taste of David on his tongue, and the sinking certainty that, this time, he’s gotten himself into the kind of mess where no one else is going to be able to swoop in and help save him.