Work Text:
There's blood on Will's hands. Thick. Staining the tips of his fingers.
The air is thin, and he is dizzy with it, lungs seizing with every attempt at a full breath.
At his feet, Michael lies still.
His chest does not rise or fall.
And on his brother's neck, stained the same way as Will's skin, the two pinpricks where sharp teeth found purchase are no longer visible beneath all the red.
But Will knows the marks were there.
Will knows a vampire was here.
Half-Blood Hill is an unusual place. Posters cover the noticeboard in the town square; there are warnings of the beasts lurking in the woods, reminders of the curfew, and half a dozen notices about missing pets of owners that Will has never met. New papers appear pinned to the corkboard every few weeks, but no one knows who puts them up—they simply appear in the dead of night.
The church bell disappeared several years ago, and yet, still, the peal of tolling bells sounds each Sunday morning for mass. Attendance has dropped, and those who are still lured by the haunting call sit on the pews with their pearls clutched tightly in hand and prayers muttered under their breath. The priest is a flighty man, and his mismatched eyes dart about, never settling. 'Then you will go on your way in safety,' he preaches to his crowd—never mind that no one ever leaves Half-Blood Hill.
Few arrive here, poor souls who have taken the wrong turn on a forgotten country road and gotten caught in the town's web. But no one departs.
Not for lack of trying, Will has walked to the 'You are now leaving Half-Blood Hill…we hope you had a nice stay!' sign impaled in the ground on the outskirts of town, more times than he can count. After Michael…well, it was difficult to stay.
But each time he left: the woods would turn him right back to town, the car he drove would break down, or he'd travel through the night only to wake up back in his bed the next morning.
The people here are aware of the oddities that occur. The shrill howls at night, the headlights that cut through evening fog without even the sound of an engine to accompany them, the local radio channel that glitches every day at 3:33pm. 'RUN!' a voice will warn. 'Run, run, run…' they will say until the clock ticks over to 3:34pm and with a crackle, the regularly scheduled content continues.
Annabeth has a notebook documenting these things, Will knows, she plans to write a book about the strange happenings of Half-Blood Hill. Percy will swim in the river but not the lake; he claims something is lurking beneath the lake's surface, and he goes pale at just the memory of it.
So, Will tells them of the vampire—all the townsfolk he can gather. He cries as he speaks of finding Michael held against the brick wall behind the old DVD rental place that has a perpetual 'Back in 10 minutes' sign taped to the door, a hooded figure with their mouth at his throat. It could have been a cheeky hook-up, is the thing. That was Will's first thought, honestly.
Until he saw the blood.
Until he saw the tears carving rivers into Michael's cheeks.
Until he saw the plain terror on his face.
He tells the townsfolk of holding Michael as his chest fell still after too much blood lost, and of the cloaked figure who fled the scene with inhumane speed when Will showed up.
They call him a liar.
Vampires aren't real, they say with pity in their eyes. As if Will is just a boy, too taken by grief to see reality.
Poor boy, they whisper, making monsters of shadows. As if Will cannot hear them, as if he doesn't know what they say about him.
They call him a liar.
But Will knows the truth.
As it turns out, there is a wealth of information available about vampires.
And very little of it is of any use.
It's all contradictory, for one; accounts of inhumane strength and invulnerability are interspersed with claims that they can be felled by a simple wooden stake. Some say they can turn into bats, sparkle in the sun, and charm a person with just their voice. Will tries to make a list of weaknesses, garlic and silver and stakes, but every source tells him something different, and he doesn't know exactly what to believe.
The internet is spotty in Half-Blood Hill and only accessible via the public computers in the library, and every few moments you'll have a pop-up that asks you to confirm that you're human—no matter what you do, you'll fail it every time. So, Will resorts to books. He starts with the town records, reads back the decades' worth of mysterious deaths in Half-Blood Hill. There's a paper trail of corpses leading back over fifty years, few and far between, but there—deaths ruled as unfortunate accidents or simply documented with 'cause of death unknown'.
It's chilling. To see it all laid out in front of Will and know that the culprit walks among the unsuspecting town still.
"We're closing now."
Will bites back his squeal of fright and blames his racing thoughts for distracting him so much that he does not hear Nico approach. Unbidden, Will finds himself blushing as he always does when Nico is around. They've known each other since Will found himself in Half-Blood Hill two years ago—a flying-doctor responding to a call out of some random country town with his brother as his pilot—and since laying eyes on the other man, Will had been a goner.
"Oh, is it that late already?" Will drags his gaze away to land on his watch and finds that the day has indeed passed. "Sorry, I lost track of time, I guess. I'll put these away."
"What's got you so focused?" Nico asks, following Will into the library stacks.
"Uh…" Will buffers then, because it's one thing for the town to call him crazy and another for his crush to think it. Unfortunately, Will doesn't get the chance to think of a believable lie before Nico snatches a book off the top of Will's pile, lightning swift.
"Dracula," Nico reads the title aloud, raising an eyebrow. Starless eyes flick to the spines of the other books in Will's arms, and the man reads them too. "The Secret History of Vampires; Children of Darkness; The Lore of the Undead: Vampires; Carmilla…"
Nico grows more amused with each title, or perhaps as Will grows more frantic to shelve the books faster, if only so he can turn tail and never show his face around Nico again.
"That's interesting reading material you have there, Solace."
"Yeah, I'm just…researching…" Will winces at the poor deflection.
"Researching vampires?"
At the same time as Will goes to deny it, change the subject, gods do anything except admit that he believes a dark creature is stalking their town, Nico leans across Will and puts a hand over Will's own as he goes to shelf 'Evil Most Dark: Vol. 3'. And goodbye, logical thoughts.
The touch sends Will into a spiral of he's holding my hand, oh gods, he's touching me, what if we kiss? No, he wouldn't do that. I could kiss him, though, his lips look so fucking kissable…
This all, of course, comes to a screeching halt when Nico removes his hand just as easily. "That book doesn't go there."
"There-is-a-vampire-in-the-town," Will blurts out. What. The. Fuck?
He didn't mean to say it, obviously. But Will can't think properly when Nico is standing so close to him—touching his hand—it's too much. The boy is unfairly pretty, a timeless sort of beauty like the actors you see in the cinemas. He's sharp edges juxtaposed with soft curls that coil around his ears and fall in front of his eyes when he tilts his head just so—as he's doing now.
"A vampire here…" Nico says, slowly, tasting each syllable.
Will deflates, shoving the last remaining book into its place and leaning back against the shelf as he buries his head into his hands. "You don't believe me."
"I do."
Will's head shoots up.
"Will you be researching Bigfoot next?" Nico says, the corner of his lip tugging upwards.
"You're teasing me."
"Yes," Nico admits. "Sorry. I just—really, a vampire?"
"Is it so strange?"
They live in a town where mail fills the letterboxes, but there's no post office, and the letters are scrambled beyond readability. Are vampires such an abstract, unbelievable concept? Is it really such a leap in logic?
"I don't know, Solace. It's just a bit unexpected, is all. I'm not saying you're wrong," Nico says. "But do you have proof?"
"I—"
No, he doesn't. Nothing concrete. The coroner—Nico's own father—had ruled Michael's death an unfortunate accident. As though Michael had tripped, fallen, and lost half his blood via two pinpricks in his neck. Of course, Will isn't going to say that. Why should Nico believe Will's account over his own father's judgment?
But the two don't get along all that well; from what Will can tell, the father and son rarely interact. Nico works here in the library as an assistant, and lives in one of the two cheap apartments in the old fire-station by the slaughterhouse on the edge of town, with a newcomer—Hazel—living in the other living space (she's nice enough, Will has found, if a little skittish). While Nico's father, Hades, lives in the old manor on the outskirts of the woods, surrounded by that tall fence, the place looks as menacing as the man himself.
Nico gives him that familiar, concerned look, pitiful and knowing. And Will cannot bear it, not from him. Michael deserves justice, and beyond that, Will is a doctor; he cannot stand by while something is out there killing townspeople. So, he squares his shoulders and admits, "Michael was killed by a vampire. I saw it. He—they—there was so much blood."
He shudders, forcing himself to continue, "I won't let it happen again, I can't. Nico, I need to do this."
"Let's say you're right. What are you going to do against a vampire, Solace? Aren't they like immortal?"
"I don't know. I don't know, but I'm going to figure it out."
Nico frowns, and there's something darker on his face when he looks back in Will's direction.
"Look, I know you miss Michael and that this is obviously very important to you, but—"
"—Don't," Will interrupts. He's heard this speech before; it's what everyone says in whispers behind his back, after all. "I know this is real. I'll prove it to you and everyone else. And I'll kill the monster before it hurts anyone else."
Will feels Nico's eyes on him as Will sees himself out of the library doors. (And he tries not to think about what Nico must think of him now.)
Will is back in the library again the next day. Conveniently, Nico doesn't work Tuesdays (Will knows this by totally normal means and not because he memorised the man's schedule after stalking him), so Will doesn't need to face him again so soon after yesterday.
There's no doubt that Nico thinks Will is a lunatic now, driven mad by grief and plagued by delusions.
Annabeth clearly thinks the same—she's decided to accompany him today, and Will is not naive to her intentions to keep an eye on him. She's probably made a schedule with all his acquaintances, carefully planned out so Will won't be left alone to obsess over 'imaginary dark creatures' every hour of the day. He won't be surprised if Percy turns up at the clinic tomorrow while Will is on shift, claiming some injury or other as an excuse to check in on him.
It's sweet, in a way.
"You don't have to do this," Will says as Annabeth sits down across from him.
She shrugs. "I want to help."
"You don't believe me." He grabs the first book from the top of his latest stack and flicks it open to the contents page.
"Doesn't mean I can't help," she says, "Besides, I don't disregard any theory without doing my own research. So, I've been looking into your claims."
"You have?" Will asks dubiously.
"Mm-hmm, did you know you're not the first person in Half-Blood Hill to report a vampire sighting?"
That has Will's attention. Nowhere in the town records had Will seen vampires explicitly mentioned, but if someone else had seen one too…excitement like champagne bubbles fizzes to life in his gut.
"I was actually around at the time; it was maybe a few months after I took a bus that wound up here. Anyway, this mechanic that worked over in the junkyard—Talos, his name was—he'd been here forever, maybe born here. A normal guy; kind, a little possessive of his tools and kept to himself for the most part, but would help people out and always undercharged."
She takes a book from the stack, drumming her nails on the cover. "Then out of the blue, he starts talking about vampires. Tells the town that he saw one, that there were more living among them—a whole coven lurking in the shadows waiting to kill us all."
Will's mouth is dry, his voice scratchy as he asks, "What happened?"
Grey eyes bore into his, turning molten silver in the light trickling in from the library window. "No one believed him; they told him he was delusional and maddened. Talos was furious when he wasn't taken seriously, and he vowed to prove them wrong. Two weeks later, he killed a girl—she was a year older than me at the time, and I knew her from school. He dragged the body into the town square, stake in her heart and proclaimed he'd killed a vampire."
Annabeth murmurs, "She was only thirteen. They never found any evidence that she was a vampire: Talos' claim that she had fangs was proven false. Nothing supernatural came to light in the autopsy. Hades—her father—was furious, and her brother devastated."
"Hades di Angelo?"
"Bianca was his daughter."
"So, Nico—"
"—was her brother.
And, of course, Will had gone and brought up vampires around him. Had claimed so righteously that he would kill one. He had brought up a piece of the man's past that he likely never wanted to think about again. Oh, Nico would never speak to him again. There's a sinking feeling in his chest that says he has ruined it: whatever could've grown between them if given the time. He had really ruined it, hadn't he?
And what if Will made the same mistakes as Talos? What if he accused the wrong person? What if he tracked the darkness in this town back to its source, plunged a stake in its heart before it killed another person's sibling, and was wrong?
"I couldn't remember much else that happened after that, but I asked around the other day, and apparently, Talos went missing a week later. Some people say they heard him screaming in the woods, long past midnight. I can't claim any such thing, but it is a fact that he never came back to town and his body was never found." Annabeth pins him with a weighty stare. "Don't go down the same path."
"I won't," he promises.
He'll make sure that he's right. But he can't let this go. Not when the town needs saving; it needs help.
She scans his face, searching for the traces of a lie and coming up empty.
"Thank you for telling me and for asking around," Will says.
She smiles softly, then, "Like I said, I want to help. And admittedly, I'm curious, I'm just not sure this is a path you should be looking down. Half-Blood Hill is protective of its secrets—trust me, I've come across many roadblocks in my writing—don't get swept deeper into its web."
"I'll be careful, Annabeth."
She huffs, shaking her head, and there's no humour in her face when she says, "I fear it already has its claws in you."
Will doesn't know what to say to that.
Now that Will is looking for signs, they're all too easy to find.
Namely, the blood bags that mysteriously go missing from the clinic between closing and opening time at least once a fortnight. He has checked the inventory logs, and it's a consistent thing. Dating back to before Will even arrived at Half-Blood Hill, but seemingly no one has reported it.
Asking the nurse—the only other medical professional in town since the last doctor passed away from a heart attack two years earlier—yields no results. She looks at him, confusedly and promptly tells him in that thick Irish accent of hers, "Thought it was you, I did. Wrote it down proper, though, right there in ye book."
Newsflash: it wasn't Will. And seriously, what did she think he was regularly using several pints of blood for?
It confirms Will's hypothesis that this is the work of vampires, though. That seems like a fair conclusion to draw. Are there any other reasons for someone to steal blood?
So, here he is camped out in the office across the hall from the blood-bank fridge, door propped open just a crack so he can watch for an intruder. This is his sixth night doing this: keeping a lookout, listening to the washing machine whirr (he's got it on a long cycle hoping it'll mask the sound of his heartbeat) and falling asleep in little bouts before shaking himself awake once more.
There are bags beneath his eyes, well-earned by a near-week's worth of poor sleep. Aside from them, he's got nothing to show for it. The wooden stake he whittled is unused in his hands, the silver necklace he bought from the jeweller is nothing but an accessory (Piper had asked far too many questions when he paid for the little chain, and Will has no doubts that she reported his shifty behaviour back to the rest of the friend group).
Tired as he is, he doesn't think anything of the creaking of the hall's floorboards—it's an old building, after all, it creaks and groans like a middle-aged mother complaining about her aching back—it's not until a shadow passes by the door that Will realises he isn't alone.
Someone—Something—is here.
The figure is cloaked in a broad trench coat with the hood pulled up, and they're turned away from him so that Will can't make heads or tail of their features. Near silent, they slip into the open storage room.
Will follows after.
There's something to be said about grief, how it clouds the senses and twists the thoughts. Will is not a vengeful person, and lord knows the Fates have given him reason to be: absent father, every challenge to pay his way through med-school, getting stranded in Half-Blood Hill, to name a few. Michael had been his tether to home, the one who knew Will's old friends, his old life—they'd talk about it sometimes, lest they forget what they were forced to leave behind.
Now Michael's gone. Murdered.
He wasn't the first victim either.
Will is Cassandra of Troy remade. The one who sees the fire before it burns and the shadows before they slaughter. They call him insane, a boy who mutters insanities, and they won't hear his cries of warning. The responsibility is on Will—if they will not listen in their naivety, then Will must protect them from it.
'Do no harm' does not apply to monsters, after all.
The vampire has the refrigerator open, the interior light setting the room in an eerie glow.
"That isn't yours," Will says. He's blocking the doorway with his wooden stake in his grasp, praying that the vampire cannot see the shake of his hands.
The figure whips around, hood flying off to reveal the face beneath—eyes wide and staring at him in horror.
Hazel—Levesque, if memory serves—puts her hands up shakily, her gaze dipping to Will's weapon and then back to his face. "I don't mean any harm."
She looks young, around Will's age, if he had to guess, but he supposes that doesn't mean anything when she's immortal—or long-lived (again, his research wasn't clear). He doesn't know her well; they've spoken a few times when they've crossed paths while Will was on his way to work and Hazel was familiarising herself with the town. She seemed nice, but now he suspects it was a facade.
"Tell that to Michael. You killed him, didn't you?"
She whimpers, shoulders curling inwards. "I didn't mean to. I was hungry—"
She has a faint lisp as if her mouth is not used to speaking with her fangs protruding. The sharp teeth gleam in the cold, white LED light of the refrigerator and her golden eyes are made molten.
"So you killed him? He's—he was my brother!"
"—It wasn't supposed to be him. I was trying to get in here! I—I didn't want to hurt anyone, I just came for the blood, and he caught me trying to break in…"
Will had found the two of them in the alley between the clinic and the back of the film rental store. If Michael had been coming to meet Will at the end of his shift, he certainly would have seen Hazel trying to break in through the back door.
"I didn't mean to, I swear. But he got too close, and I was starving and I couldn't…" she has a hand in her hair, tugging at the tight ringlets, panicked. "I didn't mean to."
"You did, though. You'd do it again, too."
She shakes her head frantically at that. Will switches on the main overhead light so he can see her more clearly.
"You would, don't lie," Will says, with a glare. "Right now, you look like you want to eat me."
She does. Her golden gaze keeps dropping to the veins at his neck, and she's breathing heavily as if she is trying to restrain herself. Will spares a single second to feel terrified by the prospect of being seen as food before he rallies, tells himself to pull it together, and lifts his weapon a little higher. He won't die here at the hands of his brother's killer.
"I'm hungry." She looks pointedly at the blood she'd been attempting to steal. At this point, the fridge has begun to beep obnoxiously, upset that they're letting all the cold air out, but neither of them pays it any mind.
Will strides forward, stake still angled to strike if he needs to. "How do I know you won't kill someone else? That's your instinct, isn't it?"
She winces and takes a step backward.
Will follows, now within reach to close the fridge door—blood supply safely still inside.
"Don't—don't come any closer, please," she says, hands outstretched and shaking. "I don't know what I'll do."
Will loathes the sympathy that arises in him. Hazel sounds scared—terrified—not of Will, but of herself.
"I can't let you hurt these people."
Will angles the stake in his hand and tries not to pay heed to every instinct in his body telling him not to do this. There is a war in his mind and in his body: there is Michael's broken body at the forefront of his mind, and there is a scared woman—who seems so very human—in front of him. Dead and undead and alive, their begging blurs together in his head.
His scales of justice tip and teeter, but never settle.
"And I can't let you do that," A familiar voice says, as a hand grips onto Will's shoulder and hauls him backwards and away from Hazel. Will whirls to find Nico, who now stands between the two of them with furrowed brows.
Shit. Will can see that this doesn't look good for him. In fact, this probably looks all too familiar: town crier, with a stake in hand, accusing a young woman of vampirism. Yeah, Nico has seen this play out before.
"I know how this looks—"
"It looks like you've gone a step too far," Nico says, teeth clenched. Cold.
"And—and I know, with what happened to your sister, that this is probably hard to hear. But Hazel is a vampire."
Hazel shuffles awkwardly at that, eyes dropping to the ground.
"I warned you not to come here for a few weeks," Nico says over his shoulder. And it takes Will a moment to realise he is addressing Hazel.
"…I was hungry."
Nico tsks. He opens the refrigerator, stacks a couple of bags of blood into the crook of his elbow and throws another in Hazel's direction. She catches it with impossible speed, snatching it out of the air and tearing through the plastic with annalistic intensity.
Will is reeling. Because Nico knew. He looks entirely unsurprised by any of this. You'd think he'd have been freaking out that his next-door neighbour is a bloodsucking murderer, but the young man is the picture of calm. It doesn't help that even at an hour past midnight, Nico looks impeccable.
"You knew?"
Even as he says it, he knows it's not the right question to ask. He's missing something here…
The town's records had mysterious deaths reported going back decades, but Hazel has only been here since the week of Michael's murder.
The inventory book showed evidence of blood supplies being stolen for years before Will had even arrived in Half-Blood Hill, long before Hazel had ever set foot in town.
"You've almost figured it out." Nico looks to him, eyes twinkling.
Nico, whose father is the coroner who has been ruling all these suspicious deaths as simply accidental.
Nico, whose sister was accused of and killed for being a vampire (and who probably was a vampire).
Nico, who knew exactly where the blood was kept, who showed up randomly in the middle of the night and who just fed a fucking vampire.
"You!" Will staggers back a step, banging his shoulder harshly on one of the storage shelves lining the wall.
Nico shrugs, lips curling into a sly smile that reveals two elongated fangs. "Me."
Will hates that they suit him, hates the stupid part of his brain that alights when Nico smiles in his direction, rejoicing that Nico is even looking at him. Even if he might be eyeing Will up as soon-to-be dinner.
It makes sense now, Will supposes, the supernatural allure of the man.
"Leave Hazel alone, Solace. She didn't mean to hurt anyone."
Will scoffs. "That doesn't bring my brother back."
"I know." And he sounds genuinely sympathetic when he says it. "She's only two weeks turned, a fledgling. She woke up in her own damn grave with no idea what was happening, ended up in Half-Blood Hill of all places, with a new hunger for blood and no impulse control."
No, seriously, fuck his empathy. Will wants to be mad. He wants to be fucking furious. And he is, he is…but he's conflicted too. Will knows what it's like to be dropped into a new place—new rules, new magic—and be forced to make a life of it (without the murderous tendencies).
"She tried to do it the right way—tried to take blood donations freely given so she wouldn't need to hurt anyone."
"You're telling me you don't hurt people?" Will questions Nico, unconvinced.
"I live by the slaughterhouse for a reason; animal blood suits me just fine—though sometimes I'll take something from here if I have a craving for it," Nico admits, "Hazel won't be able to stomach animal blood for a few more months, but she'll adapt then too. No one else needs to get killed."
Silence reigns while Will thinks it over. Frankly, he's outnumbered, trying to stake either of the vampires would only end in Will hurt, dead, or turned.
"This isn't forgiveness," Will says eventually, "…how much blood will you need?"
For perhaps the first time, Will has surprised Nico. He's staring at Will like he's something foreign and fascinating, and Will can't help the warmth he feels at the thought.
He directs the question at Hazel, but the girl looks to Nico immediately, who responds, "Eight pints (three litres) a week."
Admittedly, Will is more than a little intrigued by the caloric intake a vampire must require to live off that amount of blood. It's less than he expected, but he supposes the supernatural speed and strength would mean they expend less energy on menial tasks (like working in a library, apparently). Gods, he's getting off track.
Though Will supposes Nico has always had that effect on him.
"Come by on Sunday evenings and I'll have some waiting for you."
Nico nods, wrapping an arm around Hazel's shoulders and guiding her towards the door. The fledgling offers a meek 'thank you' as she passes Will but he can't bring himself to respond. He might not have killed a vampire as he set out to do, but he was honest when he said this agreement of theirs wasn't forgiveness. Will lost a brother, and his only family in Half-Blood Hill. No matter her circumstances, that had happened by Hazel's hand. He's angry and a part of him always will be, but Will promised to protect the town and he's following through on that.
"But Nico—"
Nico turns back to Will.
"—If I ever catch you making prey of my people here, I'll drive a stake through your heart myself."
The vampire actually smiles at that, "I'd expect nothing less."
"We'll call it a date," Nico calls over his shoulder as he pulls Hazel from the storage room, and a smug smile dawns on the vampire's face at the sight of the blush that instantly flares up on Will's cheeks.