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HJ doesn’t make LaVonte sign a contract when he turns him.
They’re on coke, because of course they’re on coke, and they’re also on the Golden Gate Bridge, miles and miles above rushing water. That wouldn’t mean anything to LaVonte, not yet. HJ just likes the sick feeling it gives him, knowing he can’t cross it. Likes that pushback. Something he can’t control.
He’s patient about it – so patient. Hundreds of years of patience. Eventually, humanity will carve out some new route, or dam upstream, and HJ will have this too.
“It doesn’t piss you off? LaVonte asks, high-strung already, and HJ realizes he’s said it out loud. Whatever. Who fucking cares. HJ will have it. HJ will have everything. Doesn’t matter if he’s Herbert-Jean the fortieth.
He pitches a rock over the side of the bridge. Maybe it’ll hit a small animal on the way down. “Not particularly.”
“Right,” LaVonte props himself up on his arms. Knobbly thing. Past the edge of forty, and still so goddamn sharp. Pissy, too. His elbows press against his knees, digging in, but not enough to crease the suit, as if HJ wouldn’t buy him a new one. “You have all the time in the world.”
HJ’s told him at this point, obviously, about the vampiric nature of his back alley deals. Knew he’d take it in stride. The man’s always been hungry – for good food, a nice suit. Anything that lets him come across as a put-together businessman. HJ likes power for what it gives him, that thrall over other people. Cut the deal because it gets you a night with the Congressman’s sister. Sell the stock because it’s funny to watch them crumble. Make the millions because it gets you dinner, and silk, and the ability to watch men squirm.
LaVonte wants power for the sake of it.
Growing up in the early 1900s was… what it was. HJ was always clever, and always rich, and always white. He was never going to worry about having. The concern was what he could do with it.
Power is a foregone conclusion for LaVonte, too, but not in the methodological way that HJ has accumulated it. He seeks. He innovates. He finds a vampire in the back of a crowded hall and hands him a card, quick and sharp as anything. And HJ hasn’t bitten him once.
He’s thought about it. Idly. LaVonte is clever, and lithe, but he’s no supernatural creature. HJ has perfected the art of talking people into something that is technically in their best interest, but still lets him come out on top. But then LaVonte might stop looking at him the way that he does. Like they’re in it together.
It’s funny, is what it is, except that it isn’t. Small little thing. He still shivers when the breeze blows, so so slightly, and he isn’t even repressing it for HJ’s sake, to project toughness. It’s all for himself. The man would shut down his bodily functions if he could.
He doesn’t actually think LaVonte is small, either. Or irrelevant. Usually he would. But LaVonte believes they’re on even footing, and because he does not fucking quit, so does HJ.
He’s been HJ for so long. Longer than he ever went by Herbert-Jean. But Herbert-Jean wants, suddenly, darkly, in a way that runs deeper than bloodlust, or the slow and creeping way he overtakes his prey. LaVonte takes an idea and runs with it. The businessman in him is starting to like that.
“You want everything so quickly.” HJ realizes, abruptly, that he’s been scratching at the plating at the end of his scepter. Sometimes he winds up running his nails over his skin instead. It’s sort of irritating for that habit to change. His skin will regrow in time. But so will the money. Maybe it evens out.
Turns out doing coke by running water makes him contemplative. Mental note to never do it again.
LaVonte raises an eyebrow. “Relative to…?”
“Ha! Exactly,” HJ’s nose is itchy, since when was his nose itchy? “If you had hundreds of years. If you stay the same forever. I wonder if you’d still want things instantaneously.”
“Anyone that stops wanting things as quickly and efficiently as possible is either a fool or a settler.” LaVonte replies. His hair is wet and dark, and so are his eyes, deep, luminous ones, that inspire devotion from the people that surround him, that are sucked into his vision. HJ could comb the entire city and still not find anyone else with those eyes, not with LaVonte’s cruelty behind them. “Have you started to settle?”
Obviously not, HJ thinks. Look at you.
Lack of response doesn’t deter a good businessman. LaVonte presses onward, his shirt scraping against his neck as he leans closer. Professional grade ironing. “The people of this place have settled, but I haven’t. Where there is stagnation, there is the need for overhaul. It doesn’t matter if they haven’t realized it yet. There is work to be done. All the better if they don’t know. No one is in our way.”
“You could do this forever, couldn’t you,” HJ asks, except it’s not a question.
They’ve been up here once before. Just once. A deal had gone sour a few months ago, with some old businessman, one of the Evans’. They’d made their proposal, paid off the appropriate people, and prepared for victory, but LaVonte had somehow known better, had leaned in toward the end and told him this man isn’t going to shake our hands. And he hadn’t. Not willingly. HJ had leaned companionably on the arm of his chair, and offered to get him a drink, and when the old man declined, LaVonte had clapped him on the shoulder and ducked around him. He’d entered the man’s personal space, just enough to make his physical presence known, and when the seniormost Evans lifted a hand to push himself back from the table, LaVonte cut in for one brisk, perfunctory pump of the arm.
HJ had told him it was excellent work, and thought that to be the end of it.
Later that night, LaVonte didn’t show up for their brainstorming session. HJ went looking for him, skewed further toward curiosity and irritation than concern, and had found him by the edge of the bridge, limbs so stiff it was as if he was a living corpse in the throes of rigor mortis.
He’d talked him down, then, which was something he hadn’t done for anyone else before or since. Made him brainstorm right there on the bridge. Snap the fuck out of it. That guy was nothing. Dead in five years. And before that happens, we get to take him for everything he has, and ruin his family. You’re going to waste time with melodramatic bullshit? Do it off the clock.
HJ took him to the bridge tonight to… see what he’d do. Evans wasn’t dead yet – that would be too soon – but they’d bought and subsequently gutted his main company, which had to be an unpleasant kind of little death. The cocaine was to celebrate, but it was also an everyday occasion, which meant HJ should make this special, somehow, so. Bridge it was.
LaVonte doesn’t have to answer, but the man never met a silence he couldn’t fill. “There’s nothing else to do.”
HJ stands. He can feel the slight difference in stability that had he been human might have caused him to fall, to wobble. Instead, he is perfectly still as he extends a hand down to LaVonte, who is already shifting his weight to rise. It’s a crisp clasp, palm to palm. Grab, then let go.
HJ doesn’t let go.
“Yes?” LaVonte eyes where their hands are still connected.
He’s right to be wary – primarily because HJ is a predator, and could hear the blood rushing through his veins if he was hungrier, but also because he is usually loud and slightly obnoxious, all part of his devil-may-care charisma, and tonight he has been lacking. The goal is to play it up, make LaVonte want it. Even if he recognizes the classic supply-and-demand angle.
That’s it, that slight speeding of the pulse. HJ pulls him in, just a bit, ducks his head. He’s never had trouble with looking dangerous, even from below. “It would be a shame to let all this ambition go to waste.”
Start simple. With the obvious. LaVonte already thinks that.
“This town,” HJ continues, intent, “is so busy that it doesn’t realize it’s tired. These people go about their day-to-day, unaware of the real mechanics of their lives. It’s small-minded, is what it is. They can’t see what we see.”
Nodding from LaVonte. Excellent. Tightening the hand. Reciprocation. All of this instantaneous as the other man speaks.
“We don’t need to wake them up,” LaVonte agrees. “They can stay asleep, for all I care.”
“They will sleep forever.” HJ drops his fangs. He tugs again, and LaVonte – hard stance, stiff limbed man – gently sways forward. Heady power rushes through him at that: simple submission. The kind you only allow because you know someone sees you as their equal. God, it’s all so melodramatic. He loves it.
“You will never sleep again.”
There is still no softness to LaVonte, bar the natural layer of skin on his neck as he bares it. “Do it.”
“Verbal contract,” HJ warns, and when LaVonte doesn’t correct him, just shakes his hand, there is no more resisting. For either of them.
It is not a soundless affair. LaVonte breathes, slowly and steadily, until his lungs can’t continue their rhythm. He makes these cut off noises in the back of his throat, then, and HJ lowers him to the ground without dislodging his fangs. This is for business, not pleasure, so HJ is even more careful than normal to avoid unneeded punctures, to drink at a rate that won’t cause too much pain.
There is still pain, naturally. HJ is still a creature draining his lifeforce, even if it’s to make him better, stronger, forever. LaVonte probably wouldn’t have wanted it painlessly. That’s how you know you’re getting somewhere, he’d said once. HJ couldn’t understand it. He didn’t do pain, not anymore. But LaVonte felt things so deeply – his desire for power, the highs and lows of corporate life, the women that he found along the way. HJ, by comparison, existed in a neutral state of intrigue and boredom.
He feels it now, though, tongue lapping at LaVonte’s neck. It’s over. It’s beginning.
There’s a small knife hidden in the base of his scepter specifically for moments like this. Unhurried, leisurely, HJ removes the weapon and makes an incision in his arm. He peels LaVonte’s bottom lip back and lets his blood trickle into his mouth. Just a few drops.
HJ wants him to wake up hungry.
LaVonte’s eyes flickering under the lids, roving, is all the warning he gets before he’s pinned against the bridge, a full reversal of their positions. LaVonte has an arm across his chest, preventing him from using his hands to shove him off. He can feel knees on either side of his hips, boxing him in. In reciprocation, a nod to their earlier show of trust, HJ lets himself go slack.
“Mr. Worthy,” he drawls, all bravado, “Are you ready to start work?”
He’s not. Of course he’s not. HJ has designed the situation to prevent him from thinking clearly, just for a moment, just to let this hunger be the first memory of his new life. LaVonte snarls, and spit flies from his mouth, with HJ’s blood mixed in. He barely has time to think about how that feels on his face before Lavonte is licking a broad stripe up his cheek.
Reroute. Offer your arm. “A bit too hungry, then.”
While he’s distracted, HJ fumbles for his pocket, where he’s stashed a small vial of blood mixed with wine. Once he came out of the natural feeding frenzy, LaVonte would surely appreciate a nod to his refined palate.
“You might not remember this tomorrow,” HJ muses, eyeing LaVonte’s pupils as he comes up for air, “but you and I are going to be spectacular. Drink the blood of Caine, scorch anyone in our way. Fight to the death. Be interesting, and powerful, and then destroy everything.”
“What, on the Golden Gate Bridge?” There. Back to himself. A little wry, a little hoarse, but fundamentally a man that has died and become greater. LaVonte wipes his mouth and flashes HJ a grin.
“Yes,” HJ sits up. “Wherever you want.”
LaVonte takes the wine-blood mix when HJ offers it, swishes it in its little glass container like he’s a sommelier, even though HJ knows he isn’t. So relaxed.
They should take a class. Learn all that bullshit. HJ watches for tremors, for confusion, even anger like so many others that are turned as a surprise. There is nothing. He is continuously impressed with the man’s unflappable persona, but even this, he can recognize, is a stretch. This is not the behaviour of a man that thought his night was going to go any differently.
HJ realizes, with that same sick feeling that the running water gave him, that he’s been set up.
Jesus. He’s going to sleep with a stake in his coffin, and hope LaVonte comes in anyway.