Chapter Text
Neil didn’t know how long he’d been running, but he knew he couldn’t keep it up forever. The familiar burn of hunger was creeping its way up his throat, and he glanced around at the trees in search of prey. If he didn’t placate the hunger soon, he’d leave a trail of bodies in his wake.
It had only happened once before, but it had brought his pursuers down upon him like ants to a bee’s corpse. He’d had to hack down three of them with a knife and his fingernails before fleeing the remaining four. They’d managed to slice across his torso, and he’d cut himself on a barbed wire fence as he ran, wasted blood running down his arms. He’d spent three days in a cave after that, waiting for his body to heal. At least he’d been well enough fed to recover.
This time he couldn’t repeat that mistake. He slowed, listening to the forest for any sound of vampires approaching. He was the fastest vampire he knew of, but that didn’t mean he was safe. Not by a long shot.
He wasn’t overly fond of this part of the country, preferring the endless expanses of the south, but the northwest was better for vampires and a safe distance from Baltimore. It was rarely sunny here, and whilst he might not burn in the sun, the darkness gave him an advantage over his prey.
As if summoned by his thought, a trudging deer hunter rustled some of the rotting autumn leaves in the distance. The nearby forests were riddled with such creatures, and if he’d been truly weak, he might have gone for one, but he preferred to drink from humans. He needed to be as strong as possible when he was on the run, and that meant hunting humans.
He crept up on the man, who was scanning his surroundings for his quarry. He didn’t see Neil, silently moving between low-hanging branches to approach from behind. The wind seemed to die for a second, and the two of them froze, their dance suspended for a moment. As the wind picked up, driving leaves into the air and shaking the balding branches, Neil leapt forward, seizing the man from behind. He dug his fangs into his throat before his prey could so much as make a sound.
It was always a slightly euphoric experience, iron searing his throat as the blood began to flow through his veins once more, driving the languor from his limbs. The man’s pulse was soft and fast, his mortal heart working overtime to drive the right amount of blood around his body, all for Neil to siphon it away. Neil wanted to stand there forever, drain the blood out of the man until his exsanguinated corpse lay on the decomposing leaves. That would be too conspicuous though, so he tore his fangs from the man’s neck, licked the wounds closed, and turned the man to face him.
He was limp in Neil’s arms, barely able to support the weight of his own head. Neil probably should have taken slightly less, but he’d still make it home alive.
‘Forget you saw me, forget about the bite, go home and go to bed early,’ Neil commanded, watching the man’s eyes go blank.
He would cause no further trouble, so Neil left him leaning against a tree and dashed off into the forest, everything clearer than before.
It wasn’t long before he arrived at his destination, a little wooden cabin located a few kilometres out of Forks, Washington. He’d stayed here once before, nigh on a century ago, and predicted that he’d be able to avoid his father’s men finding him for couple of months. The cabin was safe, and if he could attend school and work part time, it would give him a minute sense of stability, before he ran once more.
The cottage was as dingy as he remembered, with no one caring enough to install lights or electricity, and, since his last visit, the roof had begun to cave in. Still, he didn’t need to keep warm, and part of it was sheltered from the elements.
He enrolled himself at the local high school under another assumed name, another set of forged papers. This time he was Neil Joston. He’d picked up the last name as he travelled through California a while ago, stashing it away in the back of his mind. He’d decided it would raise no attention here, and Neil didn’t sound half bad with it.
He settled in for the night, listening to the howls and chirps of the animals in the forest. He mightn’t need sleep, but he had no desire to be outside, preferring to savour the meagre hours he had to relax before he had to face the human citizens of Forks.
Neil rose with the dawning day, digging a different faded shirt out of his bag. He would have to find a laundromat in town to give everything a wash, but this would do just fine for today. He refolded everything in his bag and checked that the binder was safe at the bottom before slinging it over his shoulder and wrenching open the swollen wood of the front door. Fortunately, the rusty hinges held and he wouldn’t have to do any impromptu carpentry.
Wandering through the forest, listening to the singing birds, Neil sincerely hoped that he would be able to stay in this town. It wasn’t anything exciting, like the parties of Vegas or the bustle of New York, but it was a form of peace that Neil hadn’t had in five years (much longer than that, if he allowed himself to dwell on the thought for more than a passing moment). He couldn’t quite bring himself to relax, to lower his tensed shoulders and stop glancing over his shoulder every few paces, and he doubted he ever could, but perhaps it would be easier here.
Neil should have known that such ease would not last.
The school itself was nothing special, the exact sort one might expect in the middle of a small town. A few of the buildings had been stuck up sometime in the post-war period, and a scattering of portables had been grafted on to cater for the slowly growing population. There were a few basketball courts and a patchy baseball diamond, but that was about it. He’d attended far worse, that was for sure.
The principal was nice, if a little bumbling. He handed Neil a boring looking class timetable, filled out with all the subjects that Neil had picked up as he and his mother had raced around the country. Fortunately, living for a century had meant that even if he’d only caught a little of each year, he’d repeated them all enough times to pass with relative ease. School was more of a cover than anything, and it gave him the opportunity to see real people, to practice pretending to fit in. He received directions to his locker and his first classroom, and, with that, he was ready for his first day at Forks High.
The illusion of peace and safety was shattered in his first class of the day. It was biology, which Neil had only taken for a laugh. Human anatomy lessons were rather irrelevant to him, as were animals and plants, but something about the idea of scientific study fascinated him. It also came in useful when one was draining them of blood, easier to aim for an artery. He might have been trained in such things since infancy, but it was good to keep the knowledge fresh.
He ended up seated next to a blond boy who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. What he lacked in height, he made up for in attitude, ignoring Neil completely. Neil would usually have found this sort of thing deeply useful, but he could feel the blond boy’s eyes flicking over towards him every so often, as if he were suspicious. Most people found a new kid sitting next to them to be fascinating and would attempt to make small talk, giving him a chance to work on the finer details of his fabricated backstory. It was one of his favourite aspects of moving around, a meagre chance to exercise creativity. He’d tried to exercise his individuality with his hair colour once, dying it green in the early nineties. His mother had promptly demanded that he dye it back, as it was all too conspicuous, and, after a short argument, he did.
‘You must be Neil Josten, welcome to the class. If you need any help catching up on material you’ve missed, you can come speak to me or ask Andrew,’ their teacher, a greying woman who’d probably taught this class for the past fifty years, said. ‘He’s excellent at biology.’
She gestured to Neil’s seatmate, who looked impassively at the front of the class. It was a good thing Neil had spent well over half a century relearning high-school biology, because he was quite sure he’d be getting no assistance from his stoic seatmate. He quashed a speck of irritation down. It really didn’t matter that he was being disregarded. It was better this way.
He took a few notes as the teacher talked, trying to avoid looking totally uninterested. They were discussing plants today, and he really couldn’t care less. He couldn’t claim that side of nature to be of much interest to him, and almost cracked a smile when the bell rang, allowing him to escape biology and the blond boy, who had not made so much as a sound during the lesson. He also didn’t smell a lot, and whilst Neil really didn’t want to spend too much time dwelling on the scent of his classmates, it was an excellent indicator that something was afoot, and Neil had been forced to rely on his instincts for long enough that he knew to trust himself on this. It was undeniably suspicious, and Neil was beginning to question whether Forks was quite as free of the supernatural as he had anticipated.
English did nothing to disabuse him of this notion. The only spare seat was next to a girl with blonde hair, the ends dyed in various pastel colours. She was the opposite of Andrew in every way, except that, like him, Neil doubted her humanity, although that could have just been an aspect of her overly cheery personality.
‘I’m Renee, it’s lovely to meet you.’ She extended a small hand but withdrew it when Neil made no move to reciprocate. ‘We’re studying Frankenstein today. If you haven’t read it, you’re most welcome to my notes.’
‘I’ve read it.’
To be perfectly honest, Neil had read it sometime around the turn of the century. He figured he’d recall enough to make something up for the exam.
‘Well, if you ever need any help, I’m more than happy to do what I can.’
Neil nodded his acquiescence whilst silently swearing he would never go to her for help. Quite aside from being far too cheerful, something was telling him to beware. Not everyone was what they seemed in this sleepy town, and he would be wise to watch his back.
The class was a rather dry hour’s discussion on something deep about the morality of making a monster, most of which Neil only half paid attention to, distracted by the near-constant scratch of Renee’s pen on paper. By the time the bell rang, he was starting to develop a headache (he wasn’t sure vampires were supposed to get those, so it mightn’t have been quite the same thing as the human version, but it wasn’t pleasant).
‘You’re welcome to join my friends and I for lunch, if you want,’ Renee offered as she packed her things neatly into her bag, which was just as vividly coloured as her hair.
‘I’ll be ok.’
‘The offer still stands.’
Neil nodded his head, figuring it would be too impolite for him to brush off the offer completely. It wasn’t as though he was going to eat anything anyway, so he wandered around behind one of the buildings and pulled a cigarette from his pocket. He didn’t smoke a great deal, not that it would make much of a mess of his lungs anymore, given that he was dead, but on days like this he’d hide himself behind a building and breathe in the smoke. It probably wasn’t a great tone to set on his first day at the school, but at the rate things were going, he’d be on the other side of the country by Thursday.
‘How’s about you hand over one of those cigarettes?’ One of the boys from Neil’s biology class had rounded the corner, looking for a smoke and a bit of trouble. He was flanked by a brunet with enough muscle to play rugby, and a dark-haired boy who wasn’t in bio or English. He’d sat next to none of them and hadn’t the foggiest clue what their names were.
Neil didn’t much want to give a cigarette away to such a demanding kid, but he also didn’t want this escalating into a fight. Either he won and showed how strong he was, or he lost and then turned up tomorrow completely healed from whatever injures they bestowed upon him. Neither was good for keeping under the radar.
‘Ask nicely, and I will.’
It was as close to a balance as Neil could strike, even as his words seemed to rile his companion up.
‘I don’t think I will.’
The boy pushed himself away from the wall, his cronies standing behind him with their arms crossed. It was almost cinematic in its juvenile synchroneity, the symmetry resembling something that one would see rehearsed in a play. Neil had to bite back a laugh.
‘I’d rather not fight.’
Neil pushed himself away from the wall, crushed the stub of the cigarette beneath the heel of his bashed-up runners, and turned to go.
His reflexes were good enough that he could meet an attack, but, when the leader of the three attempted a punch, his hand was stopped before it could reach Neil.
‘Go punch someone with whom you’re already acquainted, the gossip will be more interesting.’
It was the blond boy, Andrew, from bio. Despite their inequality in height (Neil wasn’t tall, but even he was taller than Andrew), Andrew’s gaze seemed to pin Neil’s would-be attackers to the spot. Neil wasn’t quite sure whether this was a compliment or an insult, but it meant that he’d caught Andrew’s attention, and whilst he found Andrew fascinating, Neil wanted attention about as much as he wanted to be staked through the heart. When it came to him, those two things weren’t so very far apart.
‘Go,’ Andrew commanded, and he didn’t need to repeat himself. The three boys skulked back around the building, leaving Neil with Andrew.
‘If you’d accepted Renee’s invite to lunch, then I wouldn’t have had to come searching for you.’
‘I could have handled that myself.’ Neil protested, crossing his arms as he stared back at Andrew, refusing to give an inch.
‘As you amply demonstrated.’
‘If you’re quite done with gloating, I’m leaving.’ Neil made to turn away, but looked back as Andrew spoke.
‘I’m not coming to fish you out of trouble again.’
‘It won’t be necessary.’
Neil didn’t need help, certainly not from a strange man behind the maths building.
The rest of the day passed slowly. Neil found himself in another class with Renee, who cheerfully re-extended her olive branch, despite Neil’s insistent denial. She passed him a sheet of notes at the end of class, carefully headed and underlined in glitter pen.
‘There’s the homework for our classes together. You’ll only get in trouble if you don’t do it, and you don’t seem to like attention.’
Neil stifled a grimace at her accurate assessment of his character. He would prefer to be the one knowing that the one known, and he was missing a great deal of what would be necessary to understand Renee’s character, or Andrew’s, for that matter.
The bell tolled the end of the school day, and Neil watched his classmates climb into a series of cars. Most of them were old pieces of scrap metal, fortunate to have a barely working engine and four wheels. There was one noticeable exception to this, a shining Maserati parked between a rust red ute and a beat-up old grey station wagon. He shouldn’t have been at all surprised to find Andrew climbing in behind the wheel.
A boy who must have been around the same age, with dark hair, climbed into the passenger seat, despite a displeased look from Andrew. Renee and a boy who looked almost identical to Andrew, but who held himself entirely differently, climbed into the back. Andrew flicked his eyes up at the rear view and met Neil’s eyes. He didn’t have the time to disguise his gaze, and Andrew raised an eyebrow before driving out of the carpark faster than Neil could respond.
The walk home was not unpleasant. He probably could have run it, but there was little point to that, and it would only use more energy. He’d need to feed again in a day of so, but he didn’t want to go stirring up trouble as soon as he got here; it was better to leave feeding until he was better settled. Then, he would find a club or a party where he could sneak around a dark corner and have a taste from someone. He’d rather like to do it to the cigarette boys, but he’d learned a long time ago never to feed in hate (or lust, but that was hardly applicable here, or ever) as it made things more difficult to control. And a lack of control made everything more complicated.
He swung past the general store, picking up a single notebook and a couple of black plastic pens. They’d be good enough for getting his homework done but would do nothing to attract attention to him.
Neil spent his afternoon doing his homework and rereading the copy of Frankenstein he’d picked up from the school library. His time wasn’t particularly limited, and since he was taking a break from running, he ought to revel in staying in one place. At some point he’d need to find himself a job, but in order to be hired he’d need to ingratiate himself to the locals through attending the school, then forge a resume and a couple of references. He didn’t have a phone, so that part of it was a little tricky, but he’d work something out.