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Shane Hollander felt it the moment that Scott Hunter rolled into town, like the tension of a rubber band primed to snap or the slow build of a storm just over the horizon. The feeling coalesced into something tangible the moment that Hunter stepped foot through the gates of Shane’s cemetery; all the hairs on the back of Shane’s neck stood to point, gooseflesh prickling over his forearms.
He had not known that Scott Hunter was coming. He didn’t know him, really - knew of him, or more specifically of the organisation that he represented, but Scott Hunter was a stranger. A stranger, trespassing on the ancient land that Shane had sworn to defend all those years ago, when Theriault’s blood had still been slick, cold with the terror that had killed him. It was because Shane was custodian of that land that he felt Hunter’s arrival, the disturbance that it caused rippling out through the cemetery as a whole, the land opening up in its curiosity to meet Hunter. It recognised something in him, and it passed that recognition across to Shane.
Down the road, through the rows and rows of gravestones and markers and crypts, Shane stalked forward, keeping one cautious hand in his jacket pocket. The silver blade folded away within it was never any use - more ceremonial, than anything - but it comforted Shane to have, just in case. Just in case what he was never entirely sure, because - in his line of work - he had a more effective arsenal to defend himself against all types of ghouls and whatever was going bump in that particular night. But that didn’t help against humans. And Shane really didn’t know what type of person Scott Hunter was, to provoke such a reaction from the whole world around him.
But he looked normal, was the first thing Shane thought as he finally laid eyes on the man, who was waiting for him only a few feet into the boundaries of the cemetery, hands in his pockets and looking like every American boy next-door. He was good looking - in a very human sort of way, with an open and approachable smile and eyes that shone through the darkness of the night when he saw Shane. Still, Shane thought. Still, the man was dangerous - every muscular line of his body screamed so, the way that tension coiled through him, as though he was primed for action at a moment’s notice. That, and the crossbow that was slung over his shoulder.
“Shane Hollander?” he asked, when Shane was right in front of him, and held out a hand to shake.
Shane shook it, tightening his grip, wondering how many things Scott might have killed with his. “Guilty,” he said.
“My name is Scott Hunter,” said the man, and he was still smiling, almost unnervingly so, as he slipped a business card into Shane’s hand. Shane read it as Scott Hunter continued. “I work for the Guild. Hunting division.”
“Hunter,” Shane remarked dryly. “Convenient.”
“My dad had a sense of humour, apparently. Hazard of the job.”
“Dare I ask what the Guild want with my cemetery?”
Helplessly, Scott spread his hands out before him. “What do the Guild ever want?”
Shane, in fact, did not know what the Guild ever wanted. He’d heard of them but was realizing now, in that moment, that he had never actually had dealings with them. He’d seen the letters that they had sent Theriault, when Shane had been Theriault’s apprentice, and had heard the hushed phone calls that Theriault had fielded from them one every three months. After Theriault had died and Shane had taken over from him… Well, the letters from the Guild had stopped, and the old, antique wall phone that Theriault had used only for their calls had remained as silent as the grave.
“The Guild are an old organisation,” Theriault had told Shane, on the one occasion that Shane had worked up the nerve to ask. “Came across from England when the colonies were founded, when witch hunting was still a thing. It probably started because of the witches, though no records rightly agree on that matter, but it kept going because of the other things that cross the border into this world.”
“And you work for the Guild?” Shane had asked, not quite able to comprehend the scale of the thing.
“Part of the Custodian department. We guard the places in this world where the barrier between this one and the next grow thin, where things can creep over and in. There’s other departments - Archivists, Liaisons (who work with the uninitiated, those who don’t know about the Other Worlds), Educators, and Hunters.”
“And where are they?”
“Everywhere. The Guild exists everywhere. Nowhere is untouched by it, though their influence remains invisible. Probably you’ll never meet them.”
“Why not? Shouldn’t we meet, I don’t know, the Hunters at least? If the cemetery is full of things that we don’t want getting out into the world, shouldn’t they be here?”
Theriault had looked, then, at Shane like he was a child, like he was naive and foolish and didn’t properly understand how the world had worked. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he still didn’t.
“The world is a big place,” Theriault had said, when the bitterest sting of his disappointment in Shane had abated just enough to let him answer. “A big place full of many terrible things. There are not enough Hunters in the world to fight it all - not enough, and a high turnover for the role. Therefore, we are all called to help them, when we can. Anything in this graveyard can be killed by anyone that knows its true name. I could kill it. So could you. A Hunter would kill it better, but in the end, it would still just be dead.” And then he had added, almost like an after thought, “pray you never meet a Hunter. They only come for the worst of all the terrible things. You wouldn’t survive what they do.”
Shane thought of this as he looked at Scott, real and there in front of him. He wondered what it meant that Scott was there, now. Behind them, the graveyard was silent except for the quiet rustling of the wind through the grass and dead leaves. It had been silent for a very long time. Shane had made sure of it; he was good at what he did.
“I don’t know,” said Shane, voice lined with steel, “what does the Guild want?”
Scott’s smile dropped just a little, a tiny crack in his veneer of friendliness. There was nothing… unfriendly underneath, only the hard confidence of someone who had been sent there to do a job and knew that they were good at achieving it no matter the cost.
“Firstly, René Theriault. The Guild wants to know why he dropped contact.”
“Dead,” Shane answered succinctly. “Years ago, now. Demon."
“And the demon?”
“Also gone.”
Scott nodded. “Tidy end. You’re sworn to this graveyard?”
“Theriault apprenticed me,” Shane replied. “I took the first vows a few years after I began, and then the second vows after he died.”
“Sorry for your loss,” Scott murmured, looking almost sincere about it. “The Guild will want you to, er, fill out some falls. Admin stuff, you know? Just so we can make sure everything’s running as it should.”
“I can do that,” said Shane.
“Second thing,” said Scott, “is just a quick cleanse of the graveyard."
And Shane… Shane didn’t really know what to think.
“A cleanse?” he said, unable to stop the alarm from seeping into his voice.
“A regular thing,” Scott assured him, like the routine was the problem. “We do one ever quarter of a century. We know that you’ll be looking after this place best you can, but a cleanse just keeps things ticking. It’s like a clean slate, and gives you time to recover and face the next wave of people.”
“And what does a cleanse entail?”
“It only takes a night, most of the time. It’s just about weeding whatever has managed to keep itself going this far.” Scott was still smiling. He was still looking at Shane as though he was expecting Shane to find this helpful. “We can get it done tomorrow night and then we’ll be out of your hair.”
“Tomorrow,” Shane repeated. His hands clenched into fists at his side. Sickness, sharp and acrid like bile, roiled through his stomach, knotting it. With gritted teeth, he drew his lips up into a smile that more resembled a grimace than anything. “How about dinner first? Eight, at the diner just down the road from here? To run over… things.”
“Sounds good,” said Scott, and laughed. “I gotta say, kid, you’re more refreshing than a lot of the older Custodians. A real breath of fresh air. I’m looking forward to working with you, and looking forward to dinner. I brought my partner with me, if that’s okay?”
“Are they a Hunter too?” Shane asked, swallowing another spike of alarm.
What was worse than one Hunter? Two, probably.
“No,” said Scott. “He’s my boyfriend.”
Shane nodded. “The more the merrier.”
“Tomorrow then,” said Scott.
Shane watched him as he walked away - looking for all the world like a normal man, no secrets or skeletons in the closet, affable and friendly and good. But he walked like a predator, and like he was assured of hs own strength. And when he stepped out of the graveyard, Shane could have sworn that the world around him let out a gusty sigh of relief. Scott clambered into the driver’s seat of a dark red cadillac, vintage, and pulled away. Shane waited until the darkness swallowed him, then a beat more.
He started to run.
In the years that he had worked in the graveyard, Shane had familiarised himself with all of it - all the rows and roads, graves and crypts, the little back roads that were for access but functioned just as well as a short cut. He’d committed it all to memory, and then had made sure that he could walk them in his sleep. All this meant that he knew the route to Ilya Rozanov’s gravestone like he knew the back of his own hand.
Ilya was already waiting for him, lounging across the base of his grave like it was a chaise lounge and he a swooning Victorian bride. Grave dirt clung to his golden curls and was smeared across his pale skin, though it was clear that he had made a token effort to sweep as much of it away as possible. Shane found the effort endearing, almost. He was finding, recently, that a lot of the stuff that Ilya did endeared him to Shane, without reason or explanation. Certainly, Shane felt more endearment than he should towards a centuries old vampire - and Ilya seemed keen to back up his point, snapping his fangs at Shane when he saw his approach, almost playful except for the fact that he could not help but be unnerving. A consequence of death.
“My Shanya,” he crooned, reaching out for Shane with an imperious hand. Shane stepped closer, letting Ilya’s arm snake around his waist. “You are late.”
“I got held up with a visitor.” Shane was unable to keep the tension from his voice; he knew that Ilya would hear it.
“An important one,” Ilya surmised. “I felt it.”
He waggled his eyebrows. Shane rolled his eyes. He wasn’t one hundred percent certain of the extent of whatever vampiric abilities Ilya possessed but he was certain that Ilya had made a game of pretending that they were greater than they were, just to see if he could unsettle Shane.
“A Hunter, from the Guild.”
“Pshaw.” Ilya wafted a hand around. “The Guild? They are still a thing? Pshaw.”
“They are. And coming to kill you, apparently.”
Ilya’s arched an unimpressed eyebrow. “Me specifically? Flattering.”
“Anything in this graveyard,” Shane corrected. “The Hunter called it the cleanse. He said it happens every quarter of a century.”
“It has been a lot longer since a Hunter stepped foot here. Why else did he come?”
“Theriault.”
Scoffing, Ilya replied, “of course. Theriault was the best of their organisation.”
“You didn’t think much of him,” Shane pointed out.
“And I think less of the Guild. I am much older than it. It will outlive too.”
“Scott Hunter seemed confident.”
At that, Ilya paused to look at him, his dark eyes inscrutable as they scanned Shane up and down. Whatever he saw on Shane’s face changed something. His own face seemed to soften, just slightly, and the rip that he had on Shane was loosened. Not enough to let go of him, but it was no longer as possessive as it had been. Shane could almost pretend that it was supposed to be comforting.
“You are worried for me,” he concluded, though he did not seem to know what to do with the thought.
“Maybe I don’t want you dead,” Shane countered. “Fuck, Rozanov, I’ve known you for years now. Has that thought never crossed your mind? That maybe I like having you around?”
“I am already dead,” said Ilya, but his voice was almost gentle.
Shane glowered at him. Ilya held up both his hands in a gesture of peaceable surrender.
“When will the cleanse happen?”
“Tomorrow,” Shane answered promptly. “I’m meeting him at eight to run over things, and then…”
Shane trailed away but gestured expansively at the graveyard. There was a strange lump in his throat, choking away his words. For so long, this graveyard had been Shane’s. There was an equilibrium that existed between him and it and all the residents now, honed and cultivated through years of blood, sweat and tears. All of it threatened to be lost now. If Scott Hunter slaughtered his way through the denizens of the graveyard, the mostly harmless things that kept the worse things from truly blossoming, then Shane didn’t know what it would be like to try and exist alongside it. He didn’t want to find out. He wished that Scott Hunter had never came in the first place.
“Let me feed,” Ilya said, “and stretch my legs. By the time eight comes, I will go back into my coffin, lay low for a few days. I am old. I can wait out Scott Hunter.”
Ilya did not like to be confined to his coffin. He liked his independence, his freedom, the power that his age granted him.
“You’d do that for me?” Shane asked, feeling touched, unable to explain how much it all meant to him.
Ilya threw his head back in a glittering laugh. “Of course I would,” he said, and the worst part of it all was that Shane could tell that he meant it.
Shane thought of Ilya often - about his deft hands and golden curls and the way that he kissed Shane as though he was thinking about swallowing Shane hole. He was thinking about Ilya as he sidled into the diner the next night, already scanning the tables for Scott Hunter’s familiar face. Scott was not there; Shane had made it before him, except -
“Mister Shane!” said Luca Haas, one of the wait staff who Shane had become very familiar with over years of nighttime coffee runs and morning omelettes. He was a blond, doe-eyed kid who was (somehow) acquainted with Ilya, though Shane was certain that Luca was unaware of what Ilya was.
It was easy to muster a smile for Luca, even with the writhing nerves in his stomach. “Luca,” he said. “Slow night?”
“Pointy, Young and Bergy have been in,” Luca replied - which meant that it had been a slow night, so the daft group of boys that Luca ran with had taken the opportunity to stake out their usual table and be nuisances. “And there’s a guy waiting at the corner table for you.”
Shane frowned, looking over. It was not Scott Hunter. Shane didn’t recognise him - somewhat slighter and shorter than Scott, with cropped dark hair and a friendly face that seemed to be full of humour where Scott’s was serious. Scott’s partner, he realised - not a Hunter, but a companion. Scott had mentioned that the other man would be joining them, but that did not answer the question of where Scott was. And that was what Shane was mostly concerned about - if he played his cards right, he wondered if there was something that he could do to stop it all. Stop the cleanse, stop Scott Hunter, stop the possibility that something would go wrong and Ilya would slip out from between his fingers forever.
The first step was ingratiating himself with Hunter and his partner.
With a last nod at Luca, who seemed a little concerned as he stared after Shane making his way across the room, he slid into the seat opposite Scott Hunter’s partner, who startled, as though he was not expecting Shane at all.
But, contrary to that, he said, “you must be Shane Hollander.”
Shane nodded, looking him up and down. “I am.”
The man smiled. Shane could almost pretend that they were friends meeting for a harmless catch up.
“My name’s Kip Grady,” he said. “I’m Scott’s boyfriend.”
“Nice to meet you,” Shane murmured. He wondered how much Kip Grady knew, if he understood why his boyfriend had dragged him to Ottawa, if he was aware of the existence of all those terrible things that made their home in the night -
“I’m like Giles,” said Kip, abruptly.
“What?”
“I can see you looking, wondering what I’m doing here. I’m like Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I don’t do much of the fighting. I’m like moral support, mostly, and also research. I’m a history grad.”
“And there’s a lot of overlap with the paranormal in your degree?”
“More than you’d think.”
Shane snorted. “Is that how you met Scott? Researching some historical demon?”
“A smoothie shop, actually,” said Kip, smiling. “I used to work there. The vampires, demons and ghouls were all just a massive coincidence.”
Shane snorted, amused despite himself. “Pretty odd coincidence.”
On the table top, Kip spread out his hands. What can you do? the gesture seemed to ask.
“I’m more curious how you end up running a haunted graveyard.”
Dryly, Shane said, “gap year.”
Shane had never been considered particularly funny - bitchy, Luca liked to call him, though he meant this as a complimentary thing - but Kip laughed like he was.
“Where is your boyfriend anyway?” Shane said - trying to keep it teasing, keeping it light. If they liked him, they were more likely to listen to him. If they listened -
“Oh,” Kip said, blinking, as if Scott’s absence had only just occurred to him. “He thought he’d go and check out the site before tonight. He likes to check out a place before he, you know.”
Kip, looking mostly as if he was making a very crude gesture with his hand, mimicked the motion of a stake. Shane watched him, something cold dripping down his spine, and saw Ilya. Ilya, on the end of Kip’s imaginary stake, crumbling away into dust and ashes.
His mouth was dry, and his throat tight with dread. “What?”
Kip looked confused at the horror in Shane’s voice. “What is it?” he asked. “Is something wrong?”
Shane did not bother with replying. There were no words for what he wanted to say - to scream, as if it could exorcise the bitter surge of terror that had rose up in him. He was on his feet in an instant, weaving through the tables, uncaring of the chairs that clattered out of his way when he knocked into them. Luca called after him, voice tight with worry, but Shane did not stop to hear what it was he was saying. Out the door. Across the carpark. Down the street. His feet beat against the cracked pavement, forcing him faster and faster, his arms pumping.
The distance to the cemetery had never felt longer. It was maybe only a five minute walk from the diner, which was precisely why Shane had chosen it, but that time felt as though it was stretching into an eternity. All that Shane knew was that every second dragging by was another second when Shane had assured Ilya that he would be safe, with Scott Hunter distracted - and another second where Scott was actually in the graveyard, armed to kill things like Ilya Rozanov.
Every beat of his heart, timed with the pounding rush of blood roaring in his ears, seemed to scream too late! too late!
Shane knew that he wouldn’t make it in time. He knew that he would make it there and Ilya would be discovered already. Still, he was going to try. He’d be damned and Ilya dead if he didn’t.
The familiar path to Ilya’s seems like a curse now. The way is well worn and signposted in this mind, and he cannot help but wonder if Scott Hunter had been able to follow it just as easily.
Because there, stood at the foot of Ilya’s grave -
Shane saw it, a moment before it happened -
“No!” he cried, and watched as Scott Hunter brought the stake slamming home.
Ilya seemed surprised that the blow had landed. He staggered back a few steps, fetching up against the side of his own grave as his legs buckled out from underneath him. He sunk to his knees, looking up - looking up at Scott, who was poised like an avenging angel above him, another weapon in hand. Ilya made no move to defend himself. His face, always pale, was wan and drawn, contorted in a rictus of pain. His hands pressed against his abdomen, and there Shane saw the protruding hilt of Scott’s stake.
Not his heart. Not his heart. Shane’s relief was a dizzying thing. Not his heart, which would send Ilya crumbling away to nothing but ashes. Not his heart. No, his stomach. A pain, the agony clearly crippling, but not a fatal blow - not like the one that Scott was winding up to deal.
“STOP!” Shane yelled.
Scott reeled around, stake held aloft. His eyes widened when he saw Shane charging towards him, arms coming up defensively, as if he was expecting Shane to spear into him, to try and tackle him to the ground.
Shane did not bother with any of that.
He slid across the grass, tumbling to his knees, and flung his arms out wide. A shield, keeping Scott away from Ilya. If Scott wanted to deal the final blow, he would have to move Shane first. And Shane was not planning on going anywhere.
“Shanya, no,” said Ilya, little more than a breathy groan of pain. Weakly, with fingers that lacked any strength to grip with, he pawed at Shane’s back, trying to move him aside. “Shane, please, move.”
“You’re defending the vampire,” Scott said. He looked bewildered, staring down at Shane and Ilya, like he was trying to make sense of something that was fundamentally wrong. “Shane. You need to move. It needs to die.”
“I won’t let you hurt him.”
“Shane,” said Ilya. “I’m not worth it.”
“You’ll need to kill me to kill him,” said Shane stubbornly.
Ilya did not bother arguing back. Just made a wordless noise of dissent, renewing his attempts to push Shane away. Scott’s eyes roved restlessly between the two of them.
“This is not your duty as a Custodian,” he said at last. “Shane, you have to understand -”
“I won’t understand anything. You aren’t going to hurt him, not while I’m here. He’s good. He’s good and he helps and I love him. Please.”
“It’s not worth it,” Ilya muttered, and started repeating it over and over like a litany.
“I’ve known Ilya for years,” Shane said. “I know him.”
“It begs for your life,” Scott said, almost wonderingly. “It - he - Shane, I need you to understand, please…”
“I said I won’t. I don’t care what you think. I care what I know. Ilya wouldn’t hurt me.”
“I would never,” Ilya said, managing to inject some conviction into his pain-threaded voice.
Slowly, almost as if in a daze, Scott’s grip loosened from around the second stake. It dropped, with a dull, damp thud, to the grass. Shane tried not to let the relief show so nakedly on his face, but he knew, from the furrow of Scott’s brows, that it was clearly a losing game.
“I left Kip at the diner,” Shane told him. “I’d go find him, if I were you. Find him and leave town. Don’t come back.”
“The Guild -”
“I don’t care,” said Shane firmly. “The Guild can say what they want. I won’t let you harm anything that walks in his graveyard. It’s mine. Turn around. Walk away.”
Scott swallowed. He stooped, picking up the stake. And then he left. No fanfare, no epic climactic moment. Just… left, almost as though he had never been there at all. As though Shane could have dreamt him, if not for Ilya behind him and the seeping wound that wept black blood and ash from his stomach.
“Shanya,” Ilya gasped, but whatever else he might have said was bitten off by a gasp of pain as Shane flattened him out and lowered him across his lap, hands smoothing as soothingly as he could manage through Ilya’s golden curls.
“Don’t say anything,” Shane said, tugging out the length of hawthorne wood that would slowly but surely be poisoning Ilya’s undead body. “Just drink.”
He pressed the skin of the inside of his wrist to Ilya’s teeth.
“Drink,” he urged. “I trust you.”
Then Ilya’s teeth pressed into his flesh. It felt, in a strange way, like coming home.