Archive of Our Own

David learned very quickly that there were different kinds of hunger.

Vampire hunger he understood, even if he hated the way it could hollow him out until every heartbeat in a crowded room became unbearable. He hated how quickly thought collapsed into instinct when he went too long without feeding, and he hated most of all that Max had been the one to teach him what that hunger meant and how to satisfy it. But he understood it. Blood made the ache go away, blood made him stronger, and there was a simplicity to it that David had eventually learned to live with

Then Max had changed his body again, and apparently David got to start from the beginning.

He had fed twice since waking up, enough that vampire hunger couldn’t explain the restless ache building beneath his ribs. It wasn’t painful, exactly, although David didn’t trust that distinction anymore. Sometimes something hurt because he was injured, sometimes because he was healing, and now apparently sometimes because parts of his body were different and he didn’t yet understand what they wanted from him. The feeling had been there since he woke, not quite hunger and not quite thirst, an insistent pull that made him want to move even though he had nowhere in particular to go.

David sat on the edge of the bed with his shirt bunched beneath his arms, staring down at his ribs. The oil lamp on the bedside table threw enough light across his skin to catch the scales in shifting flashes, blue from one angle, green from another, violet along the edges, almost black where they disappeared around his side. They weren’t everywhere, which somehow made them worse. Most of his skin was still his: pale stomach, familiar ribs, old marks and scars. Then there were patches of something that belonged on a fish, or perhaps on a monster, and David wasn’t particularly interested in deciding which description bothered him less.

He ran one fingertip carefully along the edge of a scale and stopped before his nail could catch beneath it. He knew better than to go against the grain now, even if he didn’t particularly like knowing it, and after another moment he pulled his shirt down to cover them. There was nobody in the bedroom to see, but hiding them made him feel marginally less exposed. A closed door and a layer of fabric were about the only privacy he had left in this house.

Max had sent him upstairs with instructions to rest, spoken lightly enough that another person might have mistaken them for concern. David knew the difference. He had tried leaving the room an hour ago and made it halfway down the hall before the sire bond turned his own body against him, his legs simply refusing to carry him any farther. He had stood there furious and motionless until he’d finally given up and gone back to his bedroom, because apparently sitting on the edge of his bed wanting to crawl out of his own skin qualified as resting.

The house should have been quiet at this hour, but David was beginning to suspect he might never experience quiet again.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, immediately discovering that taking away one sense only made the other worse. Sound rushed forward to fill the darkness behind his eyelids. The clock downstairs was the worst of it, an old thing that had been part of Max’s house for as long as David could remember and that he had barely noticed until tonight. Now he could hear every tiny movement inside it: metal catching against metal, the mechanism straining forward, something clicking and releasing before each tick struck through his skull with maddening precision.

Around it came the sounds of the house itself. Wood shifted as the night cooled. Wind pressed against the western wall and found a narrow gap beneath one of the downstairs windows. An insect battered itself repeatedly against glass somewhere below him, and David could hear the frantic movement of its wings every time it struck. Something smaller still scratched beneath the floorboards two rooms away, stopped long enough for David to hope it had gone, then started again.

The pipes were worse because he had never thought about them making noise at all. David had known there was water inside the walls, obviously; he wasn’t an idiot, and he understood how a house worked. Knowing there were pipes hidden behind plaster and actually hearing water sitting inside them were entirely different things. If he concentrated, he could follow their path through the house, tracing one beneath the floor before it climbed toward the room beside his.

Then Max opened a tap downstairs, and the sudden rush of water through the wall made David recoil hard enough that his shoulder struck the headboard. “Fuck!” he snapped, lowering his hands as the water abruptly stopped again. For several seconds he sat perfectly still, listening to the clock, the wind, the insect, the thing beneath the floorboards and the enormous constant roar of the ocean beneath all of them.

Then he heard Max moving downstairs.

A glass touched wood. Footsteps crossed the room beneath him, unhurried as ever, and David’s gaze followed Max’s invisible path across the floor without him meaning to. The footsteps stopped, fabric shifted, and a moment later David heard the unmistakable whisper of a page turning.

Max was reading a fucking book.

Of everything happening inside David’s body, that might have been the thing that finally offended him beyond reason. He was sitting upstairs in a body he barely recognized because of something Max had done to him, and Max was downstairs reading as though this were an ordinary evening. Another page turned while David glared at the floorboards, and he had the absurd urge to stomp hard enough to bring the ceiling down on him.

Then David heard Max breathe, and every other thought disappeared.

He held completely still, unsure at first what he was hearing. Neither of them needed to breathe anymore, but old habits survived death in strange ways, and Max still drew breath when he was relaxed or speaking. David had never paid much attention to it before. Now he could hear each quiet inhale through the floor, and beneath it was something even stranger: a heartbeat, slow and faint and wrong in all the ways David had long since learned were normal for their kind.

David stopped breathing himself so he could hear it better.

There it was again.

He had spent years learning the difference between human and vampire bodies. He knew Max’s heart didn’t beat the way a living man’s did, knew his own didn’t either, but he had never expected to hear the sluggish movement of blood inside Max’s body while sitting in another room. David got off the bed and crossed to the far wall, putting as much distance as the bedroom allowed between himself and the spot directly above Max.

The heartbeat followed him.

“Stop listening,” David muttered to himself as he crossed to the window, but that was the problem. He didn’t know how. Hearing had never required effort; you either heard something or you didn’t. Nobody had ever needed to teach him how not to hear the person sitting beside him, and there was no muscle David could relax, no eyelid he could lower over his ears.

He grabbed a spare cloth from the dresser, tore two strips from it and twisted them tightly before shoving them into his ears. The clock became slightly quieter, which gave him approximately half a second of hope before Max turned another page downstairs and David heard it perfectly well. His heartbeat was still there too, faint but unmistakable beneath everything else.

“Wonderful,” David said as he pulled the cloth out and threw it across the room. His own voice sounded strange enough that he immediately wished he’d kept his mouth shut, but even that couldn’t distract him for long from the one sound that overwhelmed all the others.

The ocean. Everywhere.

Max’s house had always been close to the water. He liked the isolation of the cliffs, the distance from neighbors and the uninterrupted view of the Pacific from windows he could only properly enjoy after sunset. David had never thought much about it beyond appreciating the salt in the air and the steady sound of the surf when he was trying to sleep. Now every wave seemed to break inside his skull. He could hear water forcing itself into cracks in the cliffs below, stones rolling beneath the retreating surf and foam collapsing across the beach. If he concentrated, he could separate one wave from the next; if he concentrated harder, he could hear things moving somewhere inside the water.

David stopped concentrating immediately.

“No,” he said, more sharply than he’d intended, and flinched at the sound of his own voice. It was his, of course it was his, and he knew his own voice better than he knew almost anything, but there was something underneath it now, a vibration that didn’t belong there. The word had been quiet, barely more than something muttered to himself, yet another sound had traveled beneath it, so low he felt it more than heard it. The flame in the oil lamp trembled in response.

David stared at the flame before experimentally saying, “Fuck.” That sounded more normal, although mostly normal had apparently become a meaningful distinction in his life, and he hated that almost as much as everything else.

He started pacing, though there wasn’t enough space for it to accomplish much beyond carrying him from one side of the bedroom to the other. The room was nice. Of course it was nice; Max’s entire house was nice. Heavy furniture, expensive fabrics, polished wood, paintings Max had collected from places David had never seen. Max liked beautiful things, and immortality had given him more than enough time to surround himself with them.

David had things here too. Clothes hung in the wardrobe, books were stacked beside the bed, and a jacket had been slung over the back of a chair for months because Max hated when he left it there and David had therefore made a point of never moving it. There were boots beneath the bed and a silver ring in the dresser, little pieces of a life accumulated one object at a time. He had lived here long enough to know which floorboard outside Max’s room creaked, which window rattled when storms came in from the west and which cabinet door downstairs had to be lifted slightly before it would close.

None of that made the house his.

His fingers found the hem of his shirt again, a habit he’d apparently developed in the span of a single night. He kept touching the scales through the fabric as if he needed to check that they were still there, or perhaps hoping that one of these times his hand would find ordinary skin beneath the cloth. Finally irritated with himself, David pulled the shirt over his head and threw it onto the bed.

The scales looked brighter than they had before, and after a moment David realized it wasn’t the lamp making them look that way. He stepped closer to the light anyway, turning his side toward it as blue slid into green and violet shimmered over his ribs before disappearing into something darker. He’d seen them catch light before, but this wasn’t reflection. The color seemed to be coming faintly from underneath them, responding to something inside him.

A wave struck the cliffs, and the scales flashed.

David went still long enough for another wave to roll in. Another shimmer passed across his ribs, faint but unmistakable, and when he stepped away from the window the color dulled. “No fucking way,” he murmured, moving closer again and watching them brighten. “What the fuck?”

His voice did the thing again. This time the lamp flame visibly leaned as though a breeze had passed through the room, and David’s head snapped toward it. He watched until the flame slowly straightened, then laughed because apparently the alternative was going downstairs and smashing Max’s face into one of his expensive tables.

The laugh caught strangely in his altered throat and became something richer on the way out. Another frequency slipped beneath it so perfectly that David felt the vibration in his teeth, and his amusement vanished as quickly as it had come. He swallowed experimentally and pressed his fingertips against his throat, but nothing felt different from the outside. No swelling, no unfamiliar structure, no scar. If he hadn’t heard himself, he might have believed nothing had changed at all.

Slowly, cautiously, David hummed one note and immediately stopped when the sound filled the bedroom. He glanced toward the door and listened, but Max hadn’t moved downstairs; another page turned, maddeningly ordinary, and David waited a few seconds before trying again.

There it was.

David had always been able to sing. That wasn’t arrogance; it was simply true. He knew how a note should feel when it sat properly in his chest, knew where to place it when he wanted it brighter or darker, knew how to control breath he technically no longer needed so precisely that an audience never had to know the difference between a living singer and a dead one. This wasn’t any of that. The note leaving his mouth was the one he’d chosen, but underneath it were other things he hadn’t, harmonics curling around the sound as though another throat were singing from inside his own.

He changed pitch and the hidden sound followed him. Higher or lower made no difference, nor did forcing his voice rougher and then deliberately softening it; whatever lived beneath the sound changed with him every time, not copying his voice so much as becoming whatever his voice needed around it.

David was so focused on listening that it took him several seconds to notice his ribs. The scales were glowing again, blue-green light moving beneath them in time with the note, and when he abruptly stopped humming the color faded.

“Oh, come on,” David muttered. He stared at his side for a moment before humming again and watching the scales brighten, then stopped and watched them darken. Another note brought the light back. “That’s fucking ridiculous.”

Spoken words did nothing, apparently, or at least nothing he could see. Humming made them glow. Singing the same note made them brighter, and after several repetitions a tiny smile began pulling at one corner of David’s mouth despite everything.

The moment he noticed himself enjoying it, the smile disappeared.

David yanked his shirt back over his head and stood there with both hands still caught in the fabric, jaw clenched. He didn’t want to enjoy this. The thought came so quickly and with such certainty that shame followed before he’d even fully experienced the amusement.

Max had done this.

That fact seemed to sit beneath every discovery, waiting to poison it. David could make the scales light up when he sang, except Max had put the scales there. David could hear individual sounds buried beneath the ocean, except Max had changed something that made him hear them. His voice had become something extraordinary, but that too traced back to Max. His ears, his teeth, his fucking skin. Every new thing he found seemed to lead back to the same person.

David pulled his shirt down hard enough that one of the seams protested.

He couldn’t think like that. If he did, there wouldn’t be anything left of him.

The realization sent his gaze toward the mirror across the room. It was a beautiful thing, tall enough to show a person nearly from head to toe, its dark wooden frame carved into elaborate shapes David had never paid enough attention to identify. Max had probably told him where it came from at some point; Max always knew where things came from.

David stood in front of it and found the bedroom staring back. The bed was visible behind him, sheets disturbed where he’d been sitting, the torn pieces of cloth lay abandoned on the floor, and the lamp burned steadily on the table. The curtains shifted slightly in the breeze slipping through some tiny gap in the old window.

There was nobody standing in the middle of the room.

David had known there wouldn’t be. He’d known for years, and usually the absence didn’t bother him anymore. For the first time since becoming a vampire, though, it genuinely infuriated him.

“Oh, now you’re fucking useless,” he told the mirror as he raised one hand to his ear. Nothing happened in the glass. No hand appeared, no blond hair shifted aside, and no face looked back at him while he traced the upper edge with his fingers.

It wasn’t dramatically different, but the shape had changed. The top tapered farther than it had before, enough that when he touched it he knew immediately that this wasn’t the ear he’d had a few nights ago. David turned his head instinctively, trying to catch the profile in the mirror before remembering there was no profile to catch.

“Right. Of course,” he muttered, turning the other direction anyway because apparently death hadn’t cured him of occasionally being an idiot. The mirror remained empty, and David leaned closer until his face should have been inches from its own reflection.
He could see the wall behind his head with perfect clarity.

David touched his cheek, then his jaw, nose and brow. Everything seemed to be where it belonged. He pushed his hair behind one ear and traced the point again, trying to build an image from touch alone. How obvious was it? That question had been bothering him almost from the moment he discovered the change. He could feel the difference, but feeling it didn’t tell him what another person would see. Maybe he looked nearly the same unless someone paid attention. Maybe the ears changed the shape of his entire face.

David turned sideways one more time, irrationally hoping the mirror might change its mind. When it didn’t, he gave the empty glass an irritated look it couldn’t reflect and said, “Fuck you too.”

At least the scales were easier. David could see the ones along his ribs and sides simply by looking down, as well as the few creeping higher across his chest, but he had no idea what was happening where his eyes couldn’t reach. He pulled his shirt off again and twisted one arm behind his back, running his fingertips carefully over his skin until they caught against something hard near his spine.

He stopped, then felt higher.

There were more.

“How many of you are back there?” David asked, already knowing the mirror wasn’t going to be particularly helpful on that front either. He tried counting by touch, lost track, started again and finally gave up when he realized he wasn’t entirely sure why the number mattered. Six scales or sixty, they were there.

His teeth were next. David bared them at the mirror before remembering, yet again, that the mirror had no intention of participating, so he ran his tongue over them instead. His vampire fangs were familiar; those had been strange once too, and David could remember spending hours after his turning touching them with his tongue and repeatedly cutting himself because he hadn’t understood how sharp they’d become.

These were different. His fangs hadn’t changed, at least not enough for him to notice, but several of his other teeth felt sharper now, their edges subtly wrong beneath his tongue. Not enough to turn his mouth into some grotesque maw, but David knew his own teeth, and these weren’t the ones he’d had before. He pressed his thumb carefully against one until the edge bit into his skin, then pulled away before he could actually draw blood.

“Good to know,” he said, flexing his thumb as he stared at the empty mirror. That left his eyes, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about those.

They still worked. Better than before, perhaps, although darkness had never been much of an obstacle after becoming a vampire. But David didn’t know whether they looked different, and the question bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

Max had looked at them.

The memory arrived before David could stop it, no more than a fragment: fingers against his jaw, his face tilted toward the light, Max studying him with an attention David had once mistaken for affection much more often than he did now. David jerked his chin away from a hand that wasn’t there and stepped back from the mirror.

“No,” he said, and the word rolled strangely through the bedroom. Whatever else had happened that night could stay wherever David had shoved it for a few more hours.

The ocean crashed below the cliffs, and the restless pull beneath his ribs returned strongly enough to make him turn toward the window.

There it was again, want.

David knew want. He knew what it felt like to see someone across a room and want their blood, knew attraction and curiosity and the vicious little spark of wanting something specifically because someone told him he couldn’t have it. This wasn’t any of those. It was bodily, deeper than conscious thought. Every wave struck the cliffs and something beneath David’s ribs answered. His skin felt too tight, the scales beneath his shirt prickled, and his mouth felt dry despite the blood he’d already had.

When he closed his eyes, he could imagine cold saltwater closing over his head with such impossible clarity that for one dizzy second he could almost feel himself beneath it.

His vampire instincts recoiled just as violently. Moving water meant danger. David knew what water in motion could do to their kind, knew it with the same instinctive certainty that warned him away from sunlight even before he felt its heat.

Unfortunately, the ocean’s defining characteristic was that it never fucking stopped moving.

David laughed quietly and rubbed one hand over his face. “Very funny.” He wasn’t sure whether he was talking to Max, God, the universe or his own body, and he supposed all four could take the complaint.

He crossed to the window and rested one hand against the curtain. The fabric was heavy, thick enough to keep the room safe when daylight eventually came, and David could already hear the water clearly through it. Opening the curtain wouldn’t change that, but he pulled it aside anyway.

Night stretched beyond the glass, moonlight scattered across the Pacific below the cliffs. David had looked at this view hundreds of times and never seen it like this. The ocean seemed impossibly large now, not because he’d forgotten its size but because some new part of him understood that size differently. He could hear layers within the surf that had once been a single sound, smell salt through the closed window and somehow follow the movement of the tide without knowing what sense was telling him where the water would go next.

The scales beneath his shirt prickled insistently.

David hesitated before opening the window.

Salt air rushed into the room, and he inhaled without thinking. The change was so immediate that his fingers tightened around the windowsill. The ache beneath his ribs didn’t gradually ease or soften as he breathed in the ocean air; it simply stopped, leaving David suddenly aware of the absence of something that had been clawing at him for hours.

For the first time since waking, his body became quiet. His skin stopped feeling too tight, and even the overwhelming sound of the ocean seemed to reorganize itself into something his mind could understand. David leaned closer to the open window and stared down at the Pacific moving endlessly against the shore.

Every vampire instinct he possessed warned him away from it, while everything new inside him wanted to go home.

The thought arrived so naturally that David recoiled from the window. “No. Absolutely fucking not,” he told himself, though the ocean continued moving below as though it hadn’t heard him.

He didn’t have a home in the water. He had never lived there, never slept beneath those waves or hunted in them or done whatever the hell a creature with scales and a voice like his was apparently supposed to do with an ocean. He didn’t have memories of saltwater filling his lungs or of diving beneath the surface. The Pacific wasn’t his home any more than Max’s house was.

His body didn’t seem interested in the distinction.
David looked down and realized the scales were glowing faintly through the thin fabric of his shirt. He pulled the material up and watched moonlight spill across his ribs, the colors answering it beautifully.
There was no other word for them, and David hated that.

Blue melted into green, then violet, then something so dark it almost disappeared against the shadows between his ribs. The colors shifted whenever he moved, and each wave below sent another faint shimmer across them. David touched one carefully and found it cool beneath his fingertip.
He wanted to hate them. Part of him did hate them, but that wasn’t completely true, and somehow admitting that felt like a betrayal.

The scales were beautiful.

His new hearing was incredible too when it wasn’t overwhelming him. He could separate sounds that should have been indistinguishable and hear things farther away than any vampire had a right to hear. Even his altered voice was beautiful, and that was the one that hurt most to admit.

David had liked singing before Max.

That mattered.

He had sung before he’d ever heard Max’s name, before fangs and blood and sire bonds and immortality had rearranged the boundaries of his life. There were memories attached to his voice that Max had never touched, moments that belonged to a version of David Max had never known.

Now even that voice sounded different.

David leaned against the windowsill and listened to the ocean for a while without trying to understand it. Eventually he picked one wave out of the endless noise and followed it. He listened as it rose somewhere beyond his sight, traveled toward shore, broke against the cliffs and scattered itself across stone before retreating.

Then he chose another.

And another.

Something unexpected happened after the fourth or fifth. The clock downstairs hadn’t actually stopped ticking, but David no longer heard it unless he deliberately reached for the sound. The insect disappeared next, followed by the pipes and the tiny creature beneath the floorboards. He wasn’t shutting them out exactly. He was choosing not to hold them in the center of his attention.

Max was harder.

David could still hear the occasional turn of a page downstairs, still find the slow heartbeat if he let his attention drift toward it, but he focused on the ocean again. Wave, stone, foam, wind. For several seconds Max disappeared too, and a startled laugh escaped David before he could stop it.

His scales brightened.

This time he didn’t immediately recoil from the sight.

David glanced toward the bedroom door, listening long enough to establish that Max hadn’t moved. Then he hummed, softly enough that a human downstairs never would have heard him, and watched the light beneath his scales grow stronger.

He tried another note. The color shifted.

Curiosity stirred despite his determination to resent every second of this.

David hummed a familiar melody, something old enough that he could follow it without thinking. No words, just the tune, and he let the strange second resonance rise beneath his voice rather than forcing it down. The room changed almost imperceptibly around him. The ocean seemed closer, the lamp flame leaned, and even the curtain shifted toward him despite the breeze coming through the window in the opposite direction.

David stopped singing and watched everything settle.

He waited, then tried the same note again with less feeling behind it. The flame trembled but didn’t lean this time, and David frowned as he repeated it, concentrating only on pitch. The effect was weaker.
“That is interesting,” he murmured before immediately scowling at himself for finding any of this interesting. Unfortunately, curiosity was a difficult thing to kill, even in a vampire.

David tried again, this time letting himself think about the ocean pulling at him. The scales flashed brightly and the curtain stirred. When he stopped, everything went still again.

“Oh,” David whispered, staring at the fabric. He hated that he wanted to do it again almost as much as he hated that he was already doing it.
For the first time since waking, though, this was something he was choosing.

That mattered too.

David stood at the open window for another minute arguing with himself before irritation finally won over fear. “Fuck it,” he said, and then he sang.
Not loudly. He didn’t need to.

He took the melody he’d been humming and let it continue, experimenting with the strange resonance beneath his voice instead of trying to suppress it. The first few notes felt wrong because he fought them instinctively, so David forced himself to relax and let the second sound open beneath the first.
His breath caught.

For one instant his voice became something enormous, not louder but bigger, filling the bedroom without overwhelming it. It wrapped itself around the melody and returned to David through his new hearing with impossible clarity. He could hear every tiny imperfection and every place the second resonance smoothed it away, could feel the sound vibrating through his chest while the scales along his ribs glowed beneath his shirt.

David sang another phrase.
Then another.

By the third, he was smiling.

It wasn’t the sharp smile he’d been giving himself all night whenever he found something absurd enough to laugh at. It wasn’t the expression he wore when he wanted Max to think nothing bothered him. David simply liked the sound.

The realization hurt, but this time he didn’t stop immediately.

He finished the phrase first.

Only then did the song fade, leaving David standing beside the window with one hand resting against the sill. Guilt arrived almost immediately, the same ugly thought that liking his own voice meant Max had won something. That finding the scales beautiful meant he’d wanted them. That curiosity could somehow become consent given too late.

David’s fingers tightened around the wood.

No.

He refused that.

He didn’t know what this body was yet. He didn’t know what parts of it would stay or whether there were other changes waiting for him to discover. He didn’t know what the ocean wanted from him, why his scales answered his voice or what exactly happened inside his throat every time that second resonance appeared.

But Max didn’t get to decide what David’s feelings about any of it meant.

David could hate what had happened and still like singing. He could hate what had happened and think the scales were beautiful. He could hate what had happened and want to know what else his body could do. Those things could exist together, even if he wasn’t entirely sure he believed that yet.

“David?”

Max’s voice floated up from downstairs, and David’s shoulders tightened as the moment shattered. He didn’t need Max to raise his voice or come to the foot of the stairs. David could hear him perfectly from here, along with the book closing in his hands and the subtle shift of fabric as Max stood.

David remained beside the open window for several seconds, listening to the ocean move below him while Max waited downstairs. There were two different pulls on him now, one coming from the water and another from the man who had made himself the center of David’s existence long before David understood how difficult escaping that gravity would be.

“David?” Max called again, and this time there was something else beneath his voice. Not impatience exactly, but authority, just enough of it that the sire bond stirred inside David.

He closed his eyes. “Coming.”

The word left him carrying that strange new resonance, filling the bedroom more completely than a single word should. Downstairs, Max went very still.

David heard that too.

His eyes opened, and despite himself, a little spark of satisfaction went through him. Interesting. Max could hear something different as well.

David looked down at the scales beneath his palm and waited until their faint glow disappeared before closing the window. He drew the heavy curtain across the ocean, pulled his shirt properly into place and crossed the room while the mirror showed nothing but an empty bedroom moving around an invisible presence.

Max was waiting downstairs.

David took his time getting there.

Every stair had a slightly different sound beneath his feet now, each board groaning according to its age and the way his weight settled across it. Max stood in the parlor beside his chair, one hand resting on the closed book he’d left on the table, and his gaze found David immediately.

David hated how quickly he started trying to work out what Max was looking at. His ears, perhaps, or his eyes. Maybe his throat. Could Max see the scales through his shirt? David stopped at the bottom of the stairs and crossed his arms before Max’s attention could make him feel any more exposed.

“You called,” he said, leaning one shoulder against the wall. Max studied him for another moment before asking how he felt, and David stared at him long enough that the question nearly became funny. “You dragged me downstairs for that?”

“I asked you a question,” Max replied, his tone maddeningly calm. When David said he was deciding how many lies the question deserved, something almost amused moved across Max’s face. “Are you tired? Hungry?”

“I’ve fed,” David said, but Max pointed out that wasn’t what he’d asked. David’s jaw tightened because there it was again, the question he hadn’t been able to answer upstairs. “I don’t know.”

Max’s attention sharpened immediately, and David regretted giving him anything honest. “What do you mean, you don’t know?” he asked, taking a step closer.

“I mean exactly what I fucking said.” David shoved his hands into his pockets and resisted the urge to look toward the windows. “I don’t know.”

Max said his name in that particular way that made repetition feel like an obligation. “David. Try.”

David laughed without humor. “You want me to describe every strange fucking thing my body has done tonight?” When Max answered yes without hesitation, David nearly laughed again. Of course he did. Not Are you frightened? Not Does it hurt? Just describe it, as though David were a puzzle placed in front of him for examination.

Still, some ugly part of David wanted Max to understand that none of this was fascinating from the inside. “I can hear your clock from upstairs. I can hear the pipes, and there’s something living under your floor that is driving me fucking insane. I can hear you turning pages from my bedroom.”

Max’s expression changed, interest sharpening across his face. David almost stopped there, but spite made him continue. “I can hear your heart too.”

That got him. Max’s eyebrows lifted, and his heartbeat immediately changed enough that David could hear the difference. “Can you?” he asked. “How clearly?”

“Clearly enough that I know it speeds up when I tell you something you find interesting.” David smiled without warmth when Max didn’t answer immediately. The next beat came slightly faster. “Like that.”

Max’s gaze narrowed, and the satisfaction David got from it was petty enough to be delightful. It disappeared when Max stepped toward him, though, because David stepped back on instinct.

Both of them noticed.

Max stopped, but after a moment he lifted one hand toward David’s head. David knew exactly where it was going before Max got anywhere near him, and he jerked his head away. “Don’t,” he said, the word carrying enough force that something strange flickered beneath it.

Max’s hand remained suspended between them. “I only want to look at your ear,” he said, as though that somehow made reaching for David without asking less irritating.

“You have eyes. Use them from there,” David answered, holding his ground even when Max said his name again.

For several seconds neither moved. David could hear Max’s heartbeat beneath the silence, could hear the ocean beyond the walls and the clock continuing its maddening little march in the next room.

Eventually Max lowered his hand.

The relief that went through David was so intense that it made him angry all over again.

Max turned toward a decanter on the table instead, and the liquid he poured into a glass was dark enough that there was no mistaking it for wine. He held it out to David, who stared at the offering rather than taking it.

“I told you, I’ve fed,” David said, and Max reminded him that he’d also said he didn’t know whether he was hungry. David took the glass mostly because refusing would turn this into something larger, and blood hit his nose immediately enough to make his fangs ache.

That sensation was familiar. Good.

David drank. The first swallow quieted the small vampire hunger Max’s offer had awakened, and the second tasted just as good. By the time the glass was empty he felt warmer and stronger, the way he always did after feeding, but the restless ache beneath his ribs remained.

He lowered the glass and found Max watching him. “No. That’s not it.”

“What does it feel like?” Max asked, and David told him it felt like none of his fucking business. Max only waited, apparently having decided patience would be more effective than pushing.

David hated when he was right.

“Like I want something,” he finally admitted. When Max asked what, David shrugged. “I don’t know.”
That wasn’t entirely true anymore.

The ocean crashed outside.

David’s eyes betrayed him.

Max followed his gaze toward the windows and then looked back at him. “The water?” he asked, and David said nothing, which was answer enough.
Max’s expression changed in a way David couldn’t read. It wasn’t concern, and David had learned better than to mistake curiosity for concern. “I wouldn’t recommend testing that yet.”

David laughed, and the sound came out layered enough that Max’s attention immediately snapped to his throat. David saw it happen and stopped, suddenly feeling exposed again.

“Does that hurt?” Max asked, and the question surprised David enough that he answered honestly.
“No. It just sounds different.” He swallowed and resisted the urge to cover his throat with one hand. “Everything sounds different.”

“Sing something for me.”

David stared at him.

“No.”

Max’s expression barely changed, but David’s body tensed anyway. For one terrible second he waited for pressure, for the sire bond to seize his throat because Max had decided sing was no longer a request.

Nothing happened.

Max only watched him.

David hated that he was grateful.

“I’ve been trying it upstairs,” he admitted eventually, and when Max asked what he’d discovered, David almost told him about the lamp. The answer was already on his tongue before he stopped himself.
Something about that belonged to him.

Maybe that was stupid. Max would probably discover it eventually. He already knew David’s voice wasn’t normal anymore, and there was no guarantee David could keep anything about himself secret while living under the same roof.

Still, the lamp was his.

The scales brightening when he hummed were his.
That moment beside the window when he’d sung because he wanted to was his.

David shrugged. “Sounds prettier.”

Max smiled.

David immediately wished he’d chosen another word.

“I’m glad,” Max said, and David’s stomach turned so sharply that the response came out before he thought about it.

“Don’t do that.” When Max asked what he meant, David tightened his arms across his chest. “Don’t act like you gave me a fucking present.”

The smile disappeared.

Max watched him for a long moment before saying, “You don’t like them.”

“The scales?” David asked, though they both knew Max meant more than that. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

“All of it,” Max clarified, his gaze moving over David with an attention that made his skin crawl. “They’re unusual, certainly, but beautiful.”

David thought of moonlight turning the scales blue and violet beneath his own hand. He had thought the same thing upstairs, and the word had felt different when it belonged to him.

Now Max had touched it.

“They’re mine,” David said.

Max tilted his head, and David realized only after speaking that he hadn’t known he was going to say it. The thought had simply arrived fully formed.

“The scales, the ears, my voice, whatever the fuck else is different that I haven’t found yet.” David straightened and held Max’s gaze. “They’re mine.”
Something unreadable passed across Max’s face. “Of course they are,” he said, and David didn’t believe him.

Maybe Max didn’t understand what David meant. Maybe David didn’t completely understand it either, but he knew enough to set the empty glass down harder than necessary and ask if he could go back upstairs.

“You don’t need my permission,” Max told him.
David stared at him.

Max held his gaze.

Very deliberately, David turned toward the stairs and began climbing. He made it three steps before Max said his name, and his foot stopped before he could decide whether he wanted it to.

“Don’t go outside tonight,” Max said.

The command settled into David’s bones without needing to hurt. He knew exactly what would happen if he tried the front door now. He could want to leave, could walk toward it, might even get his hand on the knob if Max hadn’t put enough force behind the order, but he wouldn’t cross the threshold.
David looked back over his shoulder. “You were saying something about permission?”

Max’s expression tightened.

David went upstairs before he could answer.
His bedroom felt smaller when he returned, though nothing inside it had changed. David shut the door and stood with one hand resting against the wood while downstairs Max returned to his chair. The book opened again, and after a few seconds another page turned.

David crossed the room and opened the window and the ocean rushed back in. He sat on the floor beneath the window with his back against the wall and his knees drawn loosely in front of him. From here he couldn’t see much of the Pacific unless he tilted his head, but he could hear it, and tonight that was more than enough.

David focused on one wave.

Stone, foam, wind. Another wave followed, then another, and slowly the rest of the world began retreating to the edges of his attention. The clock disappeared. The pipes disappeared. Max’s book became nothing more than a sound David knew he could find if he wanted it.

Eventually even Max’s heartbeat slipped away.
David sat there until the strange ache beneath his ribs softened and tried not to think too hard about why being close to the ocean made him feel better. He still didn’t know what his body wanted. He didn’t know whether the water would welcome him or tear him apart, how many scales were hidden where he couldn’t see them, what his ears looked like, whether his eyes had changed or what exactly happened inside his throat every time that second voice appeared.

He didn’t even know what he was supposed to call himself anymore. Vampire still fit, but it didn’t fit all the way.

David looked down at his hands and flexed his fingers. Those, at least, looked exactly as he remembered them, and he turned them over beneath the moonlight before letting them settle on his knees.

“Small victories,” he murmured, listening to the strange resonance beneath the words. Instead of recoiling from it this time, David let himself hear it.

Then he smiled.

Max had asked him to sing downstairs.

David had said no.

So David sang now.

Quietly, for himself, he found the melody he’d abandoned earlier and let it slip into the room. This time he didn’t fight the second voice when it rose beneath the first. He let it curl around the notes and allowed himself to feel the strange vibration in his chest and throat, allowed the scales beneath his shirt to begin glowing even though nobody was there to admire them.

Especially because nobody was there to admire them.

The melody lasted only a few minutes. David wasn’t ready for more than that, and for once he decided that not being ready was enough reason to stop. He didn’t need Max to tell him when to begin or end. He didn’t need to understand what his voice could do tonight.

But he finished the song.

When the last note faded, the ocean was still there, moving endlessly beyond the open window, and David was still sitting beneath it.

He could hate what had been done to him and still want to know himself afterward. He could hate the hand that changed him without promising to hate every changed piece of himself forever. Maybe someday those ideas would feel like facts instead of arguments he was desperately trying to win against his own mind, but tonight he didn’t need to get that far.

His fingertips found the scales along his ribs through the fabric of his shirt. David hesitated before slipping his hand underneath, resting his palm directly against them and feeling the tiny cool plates beneath his skin.

They were strange. They frightened him. He still didn’t know what else they could do, and he had no idea whether there would be more of them when he woke tomorrow.

But they were his.

Downstairs, Max turned another page, and David heard it clearly.

This time, he chose to listen to the ocean instead.