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Shane Hollander was not a coffee drinker but he did work a lot of night shifts, which meant that, in time, he had come to appreciate the allure of caffeine and, though he hated to admit it, rely on it. This was how he ended up with a coffee in a paper to-go cup, the warmth of it seeping into the palm of his hands through his gloves, taking small sips every so often as he surveilled the marble headstone in front of him. All was quiet, so far; he leaned back in his camping chair and kicked his feet up atop the stone. There was no one around to protest and Shane was going to take full advantage of that.
Being a graveyard keeper hadn’t really been in Shane’s five year plan - nor had it been in his ten year plan. He’d been eighteen, graduating high school, on the cusp of a promising college education, maybe a hockey scholarship… the part time night work patrolling the local graveyard had just been some part time work to keep him busy, keep him moving. Shane was - highly strung, was how people put it when they wanted to be polite. But he hated being still, and he hated having nothing to do, and everything had been so stressful and uncertain. The graveyard’s antisocial silence had been a welcome reprieve. Shane had loved it, walking in the crisp night air, having an excuse to beg of social plans. And the job had stayed, even when college and dreams of professional hockey had not. And when friends had grown up and moved on, Shane had stayed, had taken over from his boss.
He’d been there ten years now, and would maybe be there ten years more. He knew every secret that the graveyard had to hide and then some. Which was why he knew that no one would mind him using the headstone as a footrest. It was one of the older graves as well - no one left flowers there anymore, nor visited. Probably it had been centuries since anyone had been alive to care, or even to remember the name of its dearly departed inhabitant. Age had worn the letters into an indecipherable blur.
It was one of Shane’s favourite places to sit, and he came almost every week. He was more familiar with this space than he was with the back of his own hand. This was why he did not flinch - not even at the sudden, dull, furious thud that echoed strangely beneath the earth, nor when the ground shuddered and shook, shifting as if it was buckling underneath an invisible weight.
A ringing began in Shane’s ears, high pitched and droning, as the world seemed to warped and narrow to a dizzying focal point.
Box breathing, he reminded himself, pressing a hand against his rapidly tightening chest.
From beneath the earth, there was an unearthly howl. It was an ugly, guttural sound, yet there was something hauntingly enrapturing about it anyway. Shane listed towards it, and then back again, and the noise continued to build and crescendo. There were no words to the shriek - only a throbbing, melancholic weight.
Another thud, and then the rustle of dirt and earth giving way, collapsing in on itself, running like sand from an hour glass. Another thud, and then another, and the shifting of dirt became a tidal wave, disappearing into the shadows, out of which a pale hand, fingers curved as if into claws, emerged. It slammed down and hooked itself into the grass. Then the other hand - clawing, dragging, grasping.
Shane watched as, from the shadows, the sluggish, bedraggled figure of a man emerged. He cut, for a very brief moment, an ominous and looming figure against the pale light of the moon, much taller than Shane, who was still sitting down.
Then he slumped face forward onto the grass, like a beached whale, somehow managing to conveyed every inch of melodrama that he could into one swooning motion.
“Shanyaaaa,” Ilya Rozanov groaned. “Am hungry. Feed me.”
He held out a beckoning, imperious hand.
“What’s the magic word?” prompted Shane.
“Blow me?”
Shane shook his head.
“Let me blow you.”
Shane did not bother responding. There was a long, pregnant pause, and then -
“Please,” said Ilya.
From his bag, Shane produced a thermos, still warm to the touch, and handed it over. Ilya took it eagerly, struggling up into a sitting position as he unscrewed the lid and then reached out to take the straw that Shane was holding out for him. Straw shoved unceremoniously in, Ilya attacked it with a vengeance, puckering his lips around it as he made some truly obnoxious slurping noises, throat bobbing as he gulped it down.
Once, the sight of Ilya feeding would have turned Shane’s stomach.
But he’d known Ilya for ten years now. Shane felt that he was desensitised to almost all of Ilya’s bad habits - from his appalling table manners, to the fact that Shane sometimes caught him with a hand down his pants to scratch at his crotch, to the dirt and muck and coffin dust that was perpetually plastered on Ilya after he clawed himself from his grave. This was Shane’s job, and Shane was very good at what he did.
Of course, he had not known about the Other World when he had taken the job - he would not have believed the old Keeper (a taciturn and unpleasant man called Theriault, who had left the graveyard to Shane after being ravaged to a bloody smear by a revenant a few years ago) had he advertised the job as occasionally dealing with the paranormal. No, Shane probably would have assumed that Theriault was a raving lunatic and walked out there and then. But then, a few months into the work, a fledgling vampire with a thirst for blood - any blood - had sprung from the earth, determined on sating their hunger with Shane, and it had been Ilya who had torn them away and it had been Ilya who had vanished the fledgling to dust (fledglings created without the permission of a Coven leader were cursed to live with a life of a botched, incomplete transformation - it would be a pain simply to exist, and it was a kindness to end that sooner rather than later, before they could cause much more destruction of everything around them) and it had been Ilya who had made sure that Shane was okay and explained everything to him afterwards.
Shane didn’t know how old Ilya was, but he knew that he was old. He didn’t believe Ilya when he said that he had been a lover of Julius Caesar, nor his fantastical tales of fighting in the Trojan War (Ilya had many fantastical tales, and none of them were true), but he thought that he was maybe beginning to know Ilya enough to know when he was genuine and when he wasn’t. The thing was that Ilya was allergic to sincerity and positive human connection (Theriault had loathed him), but he was easily the best part of Shane’s night, and Shane’s favourite graveyard denizen out of the dozens that were under Shane’s purview.
The aim of the job was mostly simple: Shane looked after the graveyard and its inhabitants, and they looked after the border that separated the supernatural from the natural. The problems arose when new denizens (or older denizens waking up for the first time in a long time) decided that they did not want to respect those boundaries. Shane was glad that he lived alone, simply because of the number of nights he came home covered in blood, gore, ichor and ash, amongst other things.
But the nights that Ilya wandered top-side tended to be quieter - because Ilya was old, and powerful, even if he did not admit to this, and the whole graveyard seemed to hush when he was around for fear of upsetting his anger.
It meant that Shane could have a more enjoyable night. And he always enjoyed the nights he got to spend with Ilya.
Finally sated with the blood that Shane had brought him, Ilya pulled himself up into a sitting position. His eyes gleamed in the moonlight, with an unearthly brightness that was not natural in the slightest. Shane told himself that this was not the case - because Shane was simply being stupid and reckless and thoughtless - but he sometimes felt like Ilya’s eyes were the prettiest thing that he had ever had the pleasure of looking at in this world, or any other. He knew, of course, that was the whole point: most denizens from the Other World were unnaturally beautiful. Whether it was because, like Theriault had claimed, the Devil had gifted them his lustre to tempt innocents into temptation and damnation and the sort of danger that ended with dead civilians and one happy and fully fed creature, or because Creatures like Ilya had been lifted from the blemish and wear of time and life, Shane didn’t know. He just knew that Ilya was as beautiful as he was dangerous, with his angelically blond curls and perfectly sculpted face and the sort of body that Shane spent too much time thinking about, either in the shower or when he was supposed to be sleeping.
Shane did know that it was probably too late to put up any much resistance to Ilya’s charms whatsoever. Theriault, before he had died, had made that clear.
But Shane didn’t like to think much about that night.
And he thought that, maybe, Ilya liked his company too.
“What do you have to eat?” Ilya demanded peering at the bag slumped beside Shane’s chair.
Vampires could not digest food. Ilya had tried once, and been so sick that Shane had been worried that he was somehow dying all over again. Now, he lived vicariously through what Shane ate, though he never seemed best pleased with Shane's food choices. He thought it was stupid that Shane was keeping on an athlete’s performance diet, even though Shane had given up hockey years ago. Shane’s argument was, of course, that he sometimes fought Creatures for a living and definitely needed to be in shape for that.
From out of his bag, Shane produced a bar of fudge, and Ilya made a noise of delight at the back of his throat. Then he looked at Shane’s face, placid and perfectly pleasant, and scowled suspiciously. “What is it made out of?”
“Cottage cheese and monkfruit sweetened chocolate chips,” Shane answered promptly.
Ilya yowled like a particularly indignant cat, flopping back onto the grass. “Hollander, you kill me. Am dying again.”
“It’s nice!”
“I never got to eat real fudge,” Ilya said peevishly. “Now, you mock me with fake bullshit. Bird food.”
“It’s perfectly sweet,” Shane said, swallowing the mouthful of fudge in his mouth.
“You are perfectly sweet,” said Ilya, and this was all the warning that Shane had.
Ilya was a blur of motion as he flew from the grass, colliding with Shane with all the force a brutal check against the boards. Shane’s chair tipped over and they were both tumbling onto the grass. The fudge slipped from Shane’s hand and was lost. Shane cried out, involuntarily, and then froze as every inch his body seized in instinctive fear. His throat spasmed, all words drying up, as Ilya very carefully pressed his fangs to the curve of Shane’s neck, right against the skin under which his carotid artery ran.
“Very sweet,” Ilya murmured, tongue flickering out over the skin, and Shane shuddered.
Before the night that Theriault had met his end at the hands of a Revenant more powerful than either he or Shane had known how to prepare for, Theriault had sat Shane down and told him very seriously that - one day - Ilya Rozanov was going kill him. It was inevitable - unless, of course, Shane killed him first, which not a likely thing that Shane would ever achieve, considering how much stronger and faster and better adapted Ilya was than Shane. Shane had listened, at first, because he had always listened to what Theriault told him, because Theriault was older and had so much more experience that Shane could ever imagine having, and then he had argued back. Ilya would not hurt him - Ilya was not like that. He was one of the good ones. He and Shane had a good working relationship. There was respect. Ilya understood the rules of the graveyard and helped enforce them. Shane trusted him.
“You think you’re special to him,” Theriault had scoffed. “You aren’t the first person that he’s done this to."
Shane had not wanted to listen, then, but even if he had, there wouldn’t have been the time to do so. Theriault had been dead that night; Shane had found him in ribbons right at the very edge of the gate between the graveyard and the outside world, so mutilated that he had been unrecognisable. Shane had not known for certain that it had really been him until the DNA results had come back a week later, and by that time, Shane was in charge of the graveyard, scrambling to reestablish order, whilst Ilya finished off the Revenant that had killed Theriault in the first place.
But he thought about it, sometimes - when Ilya kissed his neck, pressing his fangs against the skin there as if he was trying to remind Shane about what he was and what he could do. He thought about the way that Theriault had looked at Shane - like he pitied him, like Shane was a dead thing already, like Shane disgusted him just as much.
Mostly, though, Shane thought about Ilya - a lot, even when he was not at the graveyard. It was probably a problem, but it did not feel like a problem when Shane was insensible to everything except the weight of Ilya pressing down on him and the coldness of his hands as they cradled Shane gently, like he was something precious, and possessively, like he was something worth keeping.
“Kiss me properly,” Shane said, and Ilya shifted, moving to slot his mouth over Shane’s.
Shane thought that he would probably die happy if he died kissing Ilya. He did not know if Ilya was a good kisser in comparison to others (Shane had not kissed many people, but he thought that Ilya surely would be a good kisser in comparison to anyone) but he did know that Ilya knew how to kiss Shane better than anyone else. He knew how to give Shane exactly what Shane was asking for, without words and seemingly instinctively, as if he knew Shane perfectly and down to his very bones.
Ilya’s tongue pressed at the entrance of Shane’s mouth, and Shane parted his lips obligingly. Ilya’s hand trailed down the planes of Shane’ stomach, down and down to rest just over the stretch of denim above his crotch. He pressed the heel of his palm down against it, just enough pressure that Shane was gasping into his mouth, letting Ilya swallow down the slightly needy whimpers that he couldn’t quite keep inside. Heat pooled swiftly in Shane’s stomach, and he found that he needed Ilya with a desperation that would be embarrassing if not for the fact that he knew that Ilya wanted him back just as much, nuzzling into the heat of his body like someone who had been locked out in the cold.
In a way, this was true. Ilya would never again have the life that Shane did to warm him, would forever be locked in the cold embrace of death - and sometimes, Shane wished that he could share his life with Ilya, just so that he could know that Ilya was not cold, unable to get warm, always lacking something.
Shane Hollander had never given much thought to how he would die, but he did not think that this would be a terrible way to go.