One Must Hide

Interloper

The first warning Robin had of closing time was when the lights on the top floor went out.

She uncurled herself from the uncomfortable wooden booth, stretching limbs stiffened by several hours’ cramped immobility. Most of the books she’d accumulated were layered with bits of paper, scraps of critiques, fragments of argument, but her essay was no nearer completion than it had been when she’d arrived.

Robin loaded the books untidily into her bag as the fluorescent tubes at the far end of the floor began to blink out one by one.  The library opening hours frustrated her.  She’d barely begun to function by ten o’clock.  The longer she lived with the idea of her unusual ancestry, the more she began to understand herself.  She’d always worked best at night.  Unfortunately, playing to that particular strength interfered with her nightlife, but a course essay was a course essay.  She wouldn’t pass her first term if she didn’t get this one right, and that wasn’t a bridge she wanted to burn quite yet.

She finished packing up just as the last lights faded to black.  It seemed to her that she could see better in the dark now, though that might just have been her imagination.  Maybe I’ve just spent too much time in here recently, she thought, as she navigated through the rows of shelves towards the staircase without missing a turning.  Any route became familiar after a while.

Early frost twinkled on the concrete steps of the J B Morrell Library.  It had turned bitter again, and the raw night wind stung her face.  The deep cold of a northern winter was one of the things Robin hadn’t reckoned on when she’d chosen York as her university.  She’d piled a blanket on top of the thin duvet on her bed against the temperature, which helped, but sitting at her computer by the window was still a numbing experience in every sense.

Campus lay still and stark, as if frozen by the intense chill.  Wednesday nights were among the quietest of the week anyway, but as Robin made her way home to James College she didn’t see a soul.  Even the ducks had taken shelter in the sparse reeds that lined the lake like hollow bones stripped of their last shreds of flesh.

But she was being followed.

She couldn’t put her finger on how she knew.  No sound betrayed pursuit; no glimpse from the corner of her eye gave away her tail.  Yet she could feel the subtle pressure of someone’s gaze, like a tiny itch she couldn’t scratch, right between her shoulder-blades.

Robin didn’t stop.  She didn’t even slow down.  She just kept walking, eyes to the front, feeling that tickle of regard follow her down the walkway past Central Hall and across the bridge to the southern shore.  She walked through the James car park, past her car – its blue paint turned almost silver with the frost – and on across the quad.  The harsh light of the C-block kitchen, switched on as always, lit up the darkness.  But Robin ignored it and walked on, down into the shadow of the building, to where she had seen David shed his blood on the ground to leave his mark and his protection five nights ago.

The watching presence didn’t falter.

Robin turned around. “I know you’re there.”

But the soft thump and jingle of a landing still came from behind her.

As Robin turned quickly back again, a tall and lean form coalesced from the shadows. “Nice try,” said Paul.

“I had a feeling it was you,” Robin said.  She felt rather pleased with herself that she’d guessed the identity of her watcher.  It would have taken a very serious vampire to ignore David’s mark, and the Boys were too methodical in their patrols to let one such through.  Dwayne was the very stealthiest of the rank, and Robin had never noticed him shadowing her, though she knew he did.  Marko seldom bothered to conceal himself from her at all.  David sometimes offered hints of his presence and sometimes didn’t, but when he did Robin always knew it was him.

“Did you.” Paul didn’t sound either interested or impressed.  He regarded her with the flat stare Robin had come to expect. “David wants you back at HQ.”

Robin folded her arms. “I told him I’m not available before midnight until I finish this essay.”

“Then bring your books, bring your shit, whatever.  I don’t care.  But he wants you out of here tonight.”

“Sorry,” Robin said shortly.  Paul’s attitude always made her want to dig her heels in. “I never get any work done when I’m with you guys.”

“You want to play it that way?” Paul’s brilliantly blue eyes darkened with his mood. “Fine.  If you won’t come back with me, I have to stay here.”

Robin shrugged. “Whatever makes you happy, Paul.” She stepped past him, resisting the urge to jostle him with her shoulder only because she knew she’d come off worse for it.

She could feel him glowering behind her as she let herself in.  It would have given her a certain amount of satisfaction to shut the door in his face, but he was too quick, following her inside. “I thought you had to be invited in.”

“Yeah, right.” Paul walked up and down the hall corridor a couple of times, and though he seemed uninterested, Robin suspected he’d taken in every detail. “'Never invite a vampire into your house, renders you powerless'.  Bullshit.”

Robin stored the information away for future reference as she led the way upstairs.  Untangling truth from myth had become a nightly challenge.  She could get a certain amount of information out of David, but he was very good at distracting her.  She wondered where he’d gone, and why he’d sent Paul to deal with her tonight.  Perhaps he was just feeling malicious.  Despite the increasing depth of her feelings for him, Robin was under no illusions that the leader of the Lost Boys was all sweetness and light.

“Don’t touch the door handle,” she warned Paul as she unlocked her room.

“What, you think I’m Marko, now?” he asked scornfully.  But Robin noticed that he made a point of not brushing against the silver chain she had left on the door.

Her room wasn’t the disaster area it had once been.  Robin had cleaned it up: moving the furniture back to where it belonged, putting away both clean and dirty clothes, stacking books and binning old papers.  But the dingy, dank little cell still shamed her, and probably reduced her even further in Paul’s eyes, not that she really cared what he thought.

“Are you really going to watch me work for two hours?” she asked, half hoping he’d go away.

Uninvited, Paul flung himself down on Robin’s bed. “I won’t be watching.”

Robin debated objecting, and then gave it up as a bad idea.  There wasn’t anywhere else for him to sit anyway. “Good.”

She heaved the window open to let some air in, then sat down at her desk and retrieved the book she’d been working from when the library closed.

As in Celtic saga, representation of gender roles in Old English narrative may seem quite strange to a modern reader.

Robin reached out and put her hand on her dog-eared copy of Beowulf without lifting her eyes from the page.  She flipped through the pages until she found the reference she wanted, then turned back to the book of criticism and scrawled in the margin. Queen Wealhþeow – uses own resources to pursue political agenda in conflict with husbands’ – relied upon protection of blood kin.

Small clicking sounds from the direction of the bed made her glance over her shoulder.  Paul was flipping through her CD rack.  As Robin watched, he withdrew her copy of London Calling and made an approving sort of noise.

She turned resolutely back to her books and the ongoing challenge of piecing together enough criticism to form an argument.  The subject was supposed to be piety and paganism in Beowulf, but Robin found herself led off on tangents as unrelated themes and motifs caught her imagination.  She leafed through her papers until she found what she’d written on the subject of revenge.  Not very Christian, the scribble noted.  Robin considered it thoughtfully, then consulted her translated copy of Beowulf again, and added, Central theme of Beowulf.  Grendel’s mother kills Æschere in revenge for Grendel’s death.  Monsters exhibit same feelings and emotions as humans.

Robin reread her own words, then swivelled her chair to stare out of the window for a moment.

The last five days had passed in a blur.  But the last five nights were crystal clear in her mind, bright and sharp in every detail.  After that first night of revelations, things had returned to normal, or as normal as they ever could be in the company of vampires.  The Boys arrived after dark to collect her – sometimes all of them, sometimes only some, and sometimes David alone – and they’d stay out until about six o’clock before eventually delivering Robin back to campus.  She was keeping the strangest hours, falling into bed just before dawn, and rousing groggily in the early dusk.  Robin couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to a lecture, and she’d even begun to miss seminars.  But her Old English course essay had a deadline and, reluctantly, Robin had decided to take a firmer stance.

She looked back at her screen, picking up the thread of the argument, and typed three more lines.  She laboriously copied a quote, first out of the original text and then from the translation.  She scanned her notes for something more on Christian imagery and, finding nothing, turned to pick up another book.

And froze.

Paul had come silently to his feet. He stood perfectly still behind her, looking into that indistinct middle distance that only vampires could see.  Any semblance of disinterest or boredom had fled his features; he stood poised, ready, alert to something Robin couldn’t discern.

At length, he crossed to the window, and flung it open with disproportionate ease.  He glanced once at her, and in the glaring electric light Robin could see his eyes beginning to change. “Stay here.  I’ll be back.”

And with impossible grace, Paul vaulted out of the open sash window and out of sight.

The unearthly breeze he left in his wake blasted every piece of paper off Robin’s desk like a flurry of snowflakes.  Robin watched for a moment, in stunned silence, as her carefully collated notes drifted gently to the floor.  Then, finding her voice again, she exclaimed, “You could have closed the bloody window!”

Angrily, she yanked the window shut to close out the cold.  Whatever Paul had noticed, she had no doubt he could deal with it, but the inconvenient manner of his departure aggravated her.  She gathered up her scattered papers and slapped them back onto her desk in an untidy pile, then sat down, glaring at them, thoroughly irritated with the whole situation.

So when the lightbulb, hanging bare and ugly from its wire in the ceiling, began to flicker threateningly, Robin’s temper flared up in inverse proportion.

She looked over her shoulder at the feebly glowing filament in the dusty bulb. “Don’t you dare.”

The light flickered again: off, on, off again.

And stayed off.

Robin mouthed several bad words to herself, and got up, crossing the room to the light switch.  She flicked it up and down a few times without success and then, entirely demotivated, let herself flop down onto her bed in defeat.

After a moment, she registered that the scratchy wool blanket covering her duvet was warm with more than her own body temperature.  Paul.  Robin eased herself half upright.  The most commonplace things sometimes struck her as the most strange.  That the Lost Boys were warm – that their bodies generated heat – fascinated her.  They weren’t the cold and dead creatures of myth, legend or popular fiction.  They breathed and ate, sweated and shivered like normal men – the only difference was that they didn’t need to.  

Well, she amended, not the only difference.  But friends who didn’t breathe would have unnerved her a bit, and friends who didn’t eat wouldn’t have been much fun at all.  Robin been eating better food more regularly in the time she’d known the Boys than she had before she’d met them.  That money was no object to them didn’t hurt, either.  For most of a year, Robin’s spare cash had been earmarked for petrol over food; twice, now, she’d come back to her car to find that someone had topped off the tank.  Yet there was no ostentation to the Boys’ casual wealth: they didn’t flash wads of money, or leave fat tips, and there seemed no kudos attached to whoever ponied up for a round or a meal.  Robin suspected that if she asked one of them for a couple of hundred quid, she’d get it.  The thought left her cold.  The Boys treated money with disdain, an absolute disregard for the value humans put on it; for Robin to show an interest in collecting it beyond what she needed to get by would somehow have lowered her in their opinion.

She knew she was walking a dangerous road: the thin and uncertain boundary between the world she’d grown up knowing and the one the Boys had shown her.  The razor-fine divide cut a precarious path.  But she wasn’t ready to step off it one way or the other: certainly not back into the safe, secure light of day, and not yet, not quite, into the allure of the night-time.  And her negotiation of that slenderest of margins meant she still had to finish that Beowulf course essay – light or no light.   

The cheap springs creaked indignantly as Robin levered herself up off her bed.  She allowed herself a leisurely stretch, noticing as she did that her eyes had almost adjusted to the feeble light from her screen.

And then she noticed that something was still creaking.  Not her bed, but the door...

Robin took an uneasy step back as the Yale lock snicked undone, and the door began to open slowly inwards. “Paul?” she asked aloud, straining to sense the familiar hallmarks of her least favourite Lost Boy. “You know there’s silver on that door, don’t you?”

“I know.”

And despite the harshness in the voice that wasn’t Paul’s, it still sent a familiar and delicious thrill down Robin’s spine to hear it.

David stood framed in the doorway, his head lowered, face in shadow.  Where the light from Robin’s screen touched him, the pale luminescence washed out all traces of colour, painting him in stark shades of black and white, and something about him seemed somehow larger than life.  All hue had fled his eyes, turning them nearly as black as Dwayne’s, and his gaze pinned Robin to the spot. “You had to stay,” he said, his voice still distorted, even slurred. “So stubborn.  My Robin.”

He raised his hand to her face, but the sudden acrid stink broke the spell.  Robin flinched back from David’s touch. “David, your hand!”

Dark welts crossed his fingers: black lines eaten into the skin, smoking and steaming, like acid poured on living flesh.  Robin seized his wrist with both hands. “Jesus, David, what happened?”

David moved further into the light, and though he seemed to be smiling, Robin could see the tears shining on his cheeks. “Your silver couldn’t keep me out.”

“What the hell were you doing touching it?” Robin dragged him over towards the sink; at least, she pulled, and he followed without resisting. “Have you lost your mind?” She turned on the tap and thrust David’s smouldering hand under the water; he stiffened, but didn’t pull away.”You must have had a blow to the head,” Robin said sharply, veiling her unease with anger.  David’s fingers didn’t seem to be steaming any more: she turned off the tap, and found a clean flannel to wrap his hand in. “Bloody idiot!  What were you thinking?”

He looked down at her, and Robin felt her defences crumbling under the intensity of his regard.  She didn’t resist as David bent his head so his lips tickled her ear when he spoke. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Robin let him thread his uninjured fingers through her hair, knowing she was losing, and caring less all the time. “Neither are you.”

David laughed once, deep in his chest, and Robin only had a moment to recognise that it wasn’t a reassuring sound before she felt his teeth graze her neck.  Dizziness washed over her, sweeping her judgment before it.  She turned her head, offering him free access to her throat, and as David took her in his arms, Robin let the tension drain blissfully from her muscles.

And then he bit.

Robin cried out in shock, jolted from her reverie by the sudden sharp pain. “David, don’t!”

The leader of the Lost Boys pulled back from her, suddenly taller, suddenly more real and more imposing than ever, and the shine of his darkened eyes betrayed his inhumanity.  The grip he still maintained on her arm turned abruptly into a shove.  Robin staggered back with the force of it, and the sudden proximity of the bed behind her took on a new significance to her, even more immediate than the pain of David’s bite. “Oh, no,” she whispered, half in horror, half in fascination. “Not like this!”

But David kept advancing, implacable as nightfall, and Robin sprawled back onto her bed, out of options.  She put her hand out in a futile attempt to keep him back.  David caught her wrist and twisted it away, pinning her arm gently but firmly to the bed. “I’m not going to hurt you, Robin,” he said softly. “But you have to be mine.”

Acceptance – willingness, even – broke over Robin like a tide under David’s avid gaze.  Why am I resisting? Isn’t this what I want? She stopped fighting, going limp beneath him, and the recognition of her surrender lit a new fire in David’s eyes. “Good girl,” he murmured, leaning down to kiss her.

That was when the window exploded.

The glass shattered into a million jagged-edged pieces with a titanic crash.  The icy blast that accompanied it dropped the temperature in the room to what felt like freezing.  And Paul barely paused to shake fragments of glass and splinters of window-frame off himself before springing on David with the same force he’d just used on the casement, tearing the leader of the Lost Boys away from Robin and slamming him bodily against the wall. 

Robin froze where she was, too stunned to move or speak, too stunned even to think.  Shards of glass still chimed and tinkled as they tumbled over each other in the frosty wind from the ruined window.  And the two vampires snarled at each other with bared fangs and golden eyes over the grip Paul had on David’s throat, locked in more than a physical battle.

Slowly, slowly, Paul relaxed his grasp.  David curled his lip at his lieutenant in derision or frustration, and then glanced over his shoulder towards Robin.  Paul reacted instantly, tightening his hold, but something had gone out of David.  The amber hue drained from his eyes, and an expression of sick realisation softened the arcane lines of his face. “No,” he said, a soft denial. “No.”

“Get the hell out of here,” Paul said savagely.  He gripped tighter still for a moment, and David flinched as claws bit into his flesh. “Now.”

He let go.  David stepped away, almost weaving where he stood, like a prize fighter out on his feet, his horrified eyes, green again, still fixed on Robin.
Then he turned and dived headfirst through the smashed window, into the night.
Paul stared after him for a long moment, and then let out a long, unnecessary breath.  When he turned towards Robin, his face had shifted almost imperceptibly back to normal. “Are you all right?”

Robin felt suddenly and painfully aware of her location.  She scrambled to sit up. “I...think so.” But she could feel a warm trickle down the side of her neck where David had bitten, and when she put her hand to it and her fingertips came away bloody, she looked up at Paul with mute terror.

The tall Lost Boy leaned down to examine the bite, turning Robin’s head with an unexpectedly gentle touch.  At last, he said, “It looks ugly, but you’ll live.”

“But he bit me,” Robin said faintly. “Doesn’t that mean...?”

“No.” Paul studied the wound a moment longer. “He wasn’t in fang when he did it.  But it’s bad enough for what it is.  Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Robin just sat there on the edge of the bed, staring at the curtains that were blowing sluggishly in the draft from the window, while Paul crunched across the broken glass to the sink.  Somewhere below, she could hear voices raised in alarm, and she wondered when someone would be up to find out what had happened.  There didn’t seem to be an inch of her floor that wasn’t covered in chips of glass; a few chunks had even made it as far as the bed.  Numbly, she picked up a shard from her pillow, just looking at it.

Paul removed the fragment from her hand, tossing it negligently into a corner.”Leave it,” he told her. “And hold still.  This is going to be cold.”

Robin obeyed, but she couldn’t help recoiling with a yelp when Paul applied an icy cold and wet cloth to the side of her neck. “Hold still,” he repeated.

She glanced up at him as he worked to take her mind off the discomfort.  Paul’s features were set in a grim expression, and it slowly dawned on her that he was angry – furious – and containing it only by sheer force of will.

The knock she’d been expecting came at the door, distracting her from the sting of an antiseptic. “Robin!” Gemma’s voice sounded genuinely concerned. “Are you all right?”

Abruptly, Paul turned and yanked open the door, blocking any view of the interior of the room with his own frame. “Go away.  Come back in the morning.” The command in his words was so powerful that Robin felt the backwash of it.  The Lost Boy slammed the door, and Gemma didn’t knock again; not for Paul the subtle coercion of David’s methods.

Paul went to the sink again and came back with a sterile dressing, the sort that came in a sealed paper packet.  Robin wondered where he’d found it, and then remembered the first aid kit Mum had foisted on her – the one she’d never opened herself.  Paul seemed to be very good at finding his way around her possessions.  Funny how, less than half an hour ago, she’d have resented the intrusion.  She heard herself speak without consciously willing it. “He was acting so strangely.”

“Blood high,” Paul said shortly. “Comes to us all.” He secured the dressing in place, just where Robin’s shoulder met her neck. “That’s why he wanted you out of here tonight.  He knew he wasn’t going to be able to control himself.”

Robin frowned, trying to comprehend.  Her brain seemed sluggish. “He sent you to take me away.  Why, if he was planning...”

“He wasn’t.  He just knows what making a kill does to him.” Paul shook his head. “It takes us all differently.  Marko goes ADD.  Dwayne gets the munchies.  David – David just gets horny.”

The thought made Robin feel sick for reasons she couldn’t quite isolate. “Why did you go?” she asked, and realised too late how it sounded.

Paul was silent for a long time before he answered, and when he did, he turned to look Robin straight in the eye. “He lured me away,” he said, biting off the words, as though they offended him. “Because even when his blood’s up he’s smarter than me.”

The disgust in his voice was all directed internally. “Paul...” Robin began, and then stopped. “Paul...thank you.  I don’t know what would have happened if...”

“Yeah, you do.”  Paul screwed up the cloth he’d used to clean the blood from Robin’s injury and threw it at the sink with much more force than it merited. “You know exactly what would have happened, and what’s worse, so do I, because I’ve seen it too many times before with him.”

Robin’s stomach gave a little lurch. “How do you mean?”

The blonde Lost Boy shot her a withering look. “Don’t tell me you think you’re the first girl David’s ever tried to bring in?”

Robin’s face must have betrayed her, because Paul groaned and passed a hand across his eyes. “Oh, Christ, you do, don’t you?”

“No,” she denied, knowing it was too late. “I just thought…” She stopped. “I just thought I was different.”

He gazed at her for a long while, his eyes cool and blue.  Then he shook his head. “Come on, we’re getting out of here.  You probably want to change your sweater.  You have blood on that one.”

Robin stepped gingerly across the glass-littered carpet to the wardrobe.  She pulled her jumper off awkwardly, very conscious of the dressing on her neck, and put on a clean one from the pile.  As she was smoothing it down, she realised that the wound was scarcely troubling her at all. “Why doesn’t it hurt?”

“Why do you think?” 

She looked away, feeling wretched. “I...thanks.”

Paul let out his breath in a great sigh. “It’s not your fault,” he told her, grudgingly. “You’re hardly the first who’s ever fallen for David’s lines.  Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

Robin wasn’t so sure about that. “So what happens to David now?”

The Lost Boy laughed shortly. “Nothing happens.  He’ll go entertain Kae tonight, and tomorrow he’ll be back to his usual smug-ass self.”

The lurch Robin had felt turned into a sick wrench.  She turned hastily away from Paul to take her jacket off the back of the door. “You don’t like him very much, do you?” 

“I like him fine when he’s not screwing with people’s heads.” Paul walked towards the window, then looked back at Robin and held out his hand. “You coming?”

She paused in buttoning shut the front of her coat. “That way?”

Paul raised his eyebrows. “What, you don’t trust me?”

He dared her to say it, challenged her to affront him with doubt.  But as Robin looked back at him, she saw through the hostility and resentment he’d projected from the start, and suddenly she was back in the AV room of Vanbrugh College watching the Lost Boys’ eponymous movie and feeling sick to her soul at the appalling onscreen deaths of the vampires that had become her friends, and sickest of all at Paul’s screaming demise.  Slowly she asked, “Holy water doesn’t really make you melt, does it?”

The hint of a frown puzzled Paul’s brow, and he cocked his head, looking almost interested. “Not generally.”

It was a front, all a front, and how could there ever have been a time that she misunderstood that, misunderstood him...?  Robin gave a start at the inopportune abstraction and looked up into Paul’s bluer than blue eyes.  He was an unlikely rescuer and, with his studded jacket and surplus jewellery and rockstar hair, an even less probable medic.  He was a vampire and a killer.  But she trusted him. 

Without any more hesitation, Robin grabbed his hand. “Let’s go.”

Paul looked down at her, a half smile that didn’t quite seem convinced playing at the corner of his mouth.  His grip seemed stronger than David’s, more assured, less urgent. “So, you’re into The Clash?”

Robin blinked at the change of subject, and glanced at her CD rack, surrounded by bits of broken glass. “I’m…um.  Yeah, are you?”

“You ask me, The Ramones were better.” He smiled, and Robin was struck by the incongruous mental image of the sun coming up. “But it’s a start.”

A vampire metabolised blood fast.  The six or seven pints of an average feed could be soaked up before the victim’s corpse even began to cool, absorbed by every tissue in the vampire’s body without ever reaching his redundant digestive system. 

The side-effects of human blood, though, took longer to burn off.

David’s brain was still on fire when he made a heavy landing outside the farmhouse.  Feeding made him faster, stronger, sharper in every way – almost.  It dulled his reason, blunted his judgement, and made the principles he usually lived by diminish in importance.  On a blood high, he was untroubled by ethics, unclouded by morals, unconcerned with anything but his own elemental needs and desires.  Left to himself, he could maintain that brutally reckless state for a couple of hours; it took something big to snap a vampire out of feeding euphoria.

Something like finding another vampire’s claws in your throat.

He staggered into the house, a clumsy parody of himself, physically still wired, mentally out of synch, and neither quite like anything he’d experienced before.  Thinking about Robin was more than he could safely do: even thinking about thinking about her brought back to mind a vision of her expression, accepting and afraid at once.  The combination inflamed David, maddened him, just as Robin’s contradictory blend of perception and naïveté enthralled him.  He’d known he wouldn’t be able to resist going to her after his kill; that was why he’d sent Paul to take her away.  David bared his teeth to himself at the thought.

Yet Robin had stopped fighting him by the time Paul had made his belated entrance.  Wasn’t that something?  David leaned against the wall, his head swimming, bright with excess energy, trying to order his thoughts.  Success only made him angry.  There was a name for vampires who denied responsibility for their actions when in bloodlust.  She’d quit resisting, yes, but of her own volition or under his?  He didn’t know.  He couldn’t make sense of the details.

He’d kept the presence of mind to stay out of fang.  That much he could claim.  But the trickle of blood he had tasted was shocking in its potency.  David hadn’t planned it that way, and now he wondered if his turbulent energies were connected to having crossed ordinary blood with Robin’s.  He felt puny and invincible by turns, wavering between the two extremes from one moment to the next, and the only experience that even came close to matching it was the moment of his first kill and first feed.  David shuddered away from that memory, and forced himself upright.  The high would wear off eventually; it always did.  He just had to find a way to get through it without injuring himself.

Step by ungraceful step, he stumbled up the stairs, overflowing with the strength, but lacking the coordination to fly in such tight quarters.  The warring forces inside him – physical, emotional, mental – ripped at his composure.  He felt like he was being stripped bare, scoured clean, from the inside out.  Sweat slicked his brow, the human response he still couldn’t control after so many years, still hated after so many years.

David found his way to the bathroom off his bedroom.  He wrenched open the taps in the sink, cupped his hands beneath the flow, dashed cold water in his face - and saw that the silver burn across his right palm had all but healed.

He started to laugh, a jerky, painful sound that reflected the knives in his chest and his gut, a laugh that belied the tears of pain that so humanly betrayed his eyes.

“David?”

His laugh rasped to a halt.  The leader of the Lost Boys turned, almost believing for a moment that it could be her, though his wild senses told him otherwise.

Kae stepped into the confined space with him, her fingers sliding up his forearms, fingernails tracing sharp little paths in his skin. “Does it hurt?” she whispered, drawing his head down to kiss him softly on the lips.  David accepted it passively, too punch-drunk to either recoil or respond, looking down at his frequent lover without really seeing her.

“I said does it hurt,” Kae repeated viciously, and her next kiss was a bite, her fangs nicking David’s lower lip.

It was the stimulus he needed.  David snarled, seizing her arms in a grip he knew would hurt her, lifting her off her feet.  In two steps he had her to his bed, and he flung her down there, finally given an outlet for his rage and pain and frustration.  He threw off his coat, stripped off his shirt, grabbed Kae by a handful of her blouse, and pulled her hard up against him to kiss her, roughly, angrily and not caring if she liked it or not.  But she did like it, and David hated himself even as he took advantage, as Kae’s hungry arms pulled him down to her, using him as he was using her.

He still hated, and still hurt, afterwards; no lassitude could dull his pain, or his disgust.  Kae’s nails had scratched tiny streaks of flame into his chest and back, a fair exchange for the bruises David had gifted her.  But scratches and bruises both would fade long before David’s self-loathing ever did.  Kae reached for him, enticing him back for more, but David rolled away.  He snatched up his jeans from the floor, then his shirt, dressing rapidly and in silence.

“You were thinking of her, weren’t you?”

David glanced over his shoulder at the lesser vampire lying nude on his bed. “Get out.”

“Did the virgin little prick-tease change her mind?” Kae taunted. 

David turned on her, and she reclined provocatively back on the bed, but nothing could have induced him to give in a second time. “Get out now.”  He stared at her. “Don’t make me hurt you for real.”

“But you can,” she whispered. “You can do whatever you like to me, David, anything you want, like she never will.”

“Say that again,” he said, very softly, “and I’ll kill you.”

She recoiled as if struck. “Please,” she said, and for the first time, David could hear fear in her voice. “Please, David, no, you know I didn’t mean it, just let me...”

“Out,” David said for the final time. “Now.”

He watched as Kae fled, shocked tears smudging her face and, no doubt, bitterness fomenting in her heart. Then he let himself crumple to the floor, sick to the point of physical nausea at the devastation he’d let himself create that night, and the restless energies that still boiled and seethed inside him, like silver knives, slicing up his heart.