Twilight People, a blade fanfic

TITLE: Twilight People

AUTHOR: Mari

EMAIL:

RATING: R. This one's not for the kidlets.

DISCLAIMER: None of these characters are mine. If a porn flick were to appear wherein something of this nature happened, however, you can bet that I would buy it.

PAIRING: Blade/Frost

SPOILERS: First 'Blade' movie only. No spoilers for 'Blade II' or for the comics here.

SUMMARY: When you got right down to it, Blade planned to have the time of his life.

Twilight People

In the end, there was only enough EDTA in the lab to fill two of the ampules. Blade the filled the remaining ten with a clear, labelless liquid that Karen had shoved next to the EDTA on the refrigerator shelf that she had commandeered for her work. If Blade remembered correctly, it was the same bottle that had caused a whispered conversation with Whistler and a series of sidelong looks, but things had been moving too quickly after that for Blade to ask. He would only have to hope that the good doctor knew her poisons. Truth be told, Blade found that the idea of a little hand-to-hand with the fucking bloodsuckers didn't trouble him at all. Not with Whistler's final shot echoing on continuous, sick loop in his head.

When you got right down to it, Blade planned to have the time of his life.

---

"Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill." Blade tasted the vengeance on his tongue as he threw out the line, found it to be sweeter than he had expected. He flicked the final vial into the air, spun, and kicked. He hypodermic struck Deacon directly between the eyes, as crimson as the blood that he stole daily. Frost staggered back, knees buckling. His eyes faded back into their old cooler, only slighter bluer than icebergs or corpses, and the expression in them held horrors. Blade couldn't say that he minded the show.

The sound of Frost's knees hitting the stone floor was the loudest sound in the expectant, adrenaline-soaked hush that fell across the temple. His mouth worked without sound, and the only red that remained on Frost's body was the blood that leaked around the needles and began to spill freely from his mouth, tainted life fleeing the vessel. Frost's hands curled into claws and he made a sound at last: a high, whistling noise that may have been an attempt at a scream, before he slowly tumbled forward. He didn't move again.

Blade hefted his sword and felt the smooth weight of it, more intimate to him than a lover's skin, and eager to taste the blood that it had been forged for. The metal all but quivered in his grip.

Blade swung the sword over his head, ready to bring it back down on the vulnerable flesh of Deacon's neck…and hesitated. He tilted his head upwards, to the balcony where Karen stared down at him with wide eyes. A thousand separate emotions ran across her face. One of them was almost certainly fear. Blade thought that another might even have been pride. Whatever they were, it seemed terribly important to Blade that Karen not see him do this, and alternately terrifying that one person's opinion could come to mean so much in so short a time.

Blade curled his lips into a snarl too reminiscent of the things that he hunted for strict comfort and lifted his arm over his head. The sword made a forlorn sighing noise as Blade slid it back into its sheath. The disappointment was alleviated, however, as Blade drew back his foot and buried it as far as it would go into Frost's side. The crack of breaking ribs echoed and reechoed throughout the temple. Frost didn't so much as twitch.

"Dead," Blade muttered, and turned away towards the surface.

---

The sun was rising as Blade climbed out of the temple of the Blood God, extending a hand backwards to help Karen up the final two steps. Its rich, buttery warmth seeped into Blade's skin. The vampire blood drying there flaked off and fell to the ground like snow as, even dead, all things vampire screamed when they were brought into the light. Though his expression remained as impassive as ever, Blade turned his face towards the newborn sun, drinking it in. It made him feel alive. It made him feel human.

Karen emerged from the darkness behind him, narrowing her eyes and bringing her hand up to shield her face from the brilliant glare balancing on the edge of the horizon. Within minutes she had readjusted and was able to drop her arm back to her side. Karen was a creature of the daylight. Any further trips that she made into the hunting ground that the city became after dark were going to be accidental and purely temporary.

Blade processed all of this information with flicker/shut speed, there and gone again in less time than it took to blink. Karen was of the day; he was not. Not remorse, no pity. It just was.

For the first time in a very long time, Blade found that these thoughts caused him no pain. In fact, he would be hard-pressed to tell if he was feeling any emotion at all.

The wind blew Karen's hair away from her face and her lovely, dark eyes as she said, "I need to get back to the lab if I'm going to cure you."

Blade paused, weighing his next words. Twilight: able to influence events in the night as well as the day. "It's not over. You keep your cure. There's a war going on, and I have a job to do. You want to help me, make me a better serum."

---

In the remains of the temple, waxen flesh spasmed and took on a roseate hue that it had not known for many decades-the flush of blood being forced down atrophied veins. Frost jerked, gagged, and rolled over just in time to prevent himself from choking on the blood-drenched vomit that shot past his lips. He was able to raise himself a few inches above the mess by bracing his hands against the stone as he heaved. Over and over again, his body rejected the blood that he had consumed that day. It didn't end until Frost's ribs throbbed, his esophagus burned, and he gasped with the weak, mewling cries of a newborn.

---

The smell of corpses lingered through the factory long after Blade had dealt with Whistler's body by leaving it at the New York City Morgue. They traveled light and most often into locales where it was safer to hide behind a legend, but by going through Whistler's personal effects Blade was able to find a wallet with a driver's license and a picture of two smiling little girls. The picture Blade kept, the license he left on Whistler. Without any family surviving to come forward and claim the body, Whistler would be put into a nameless, faceless pauper's grave. It was the best that Blade could do; it was not enough. When he went hunting that night, the vampires paid for every ounce of his frustration.

They paid in blood and in bone and in grief that Blade would never allow to be spoken into the waiting air, where it could be swallowed up and used against him. Blade made them bleed with his sword, with his stakes, and finally with his fists when exhaustion wasn't giving him the blankness that he wanted. It was guilty, sweetly bloody, and not nearly so satisfying as he had hoped. With Frost's influence gone the vampires were fleeing the city like packs of rabid dogs, fleeing from Blade's vengeance. Those that remained were the old, the stupid. The arrogant. Blade didn't spare a one of them. By the time the sun was teasing the horizon his arms were drenched with clotting blood and coated with a silk-fine ash that, set against his dark skin, made him look like a dying vampire in the seconds before it crumbled. It occurred to Blade that he was wearing the trophies of his victims, and his lips shifted into what might have been considered a smile as he slid the sword back into its scabbard.

At the sound of the applause, he immediately drew it out again.

---

He was here. Of course he was here; hadn't every nerve in Deacon's body screamed and begged and cried until he had started towards Blade's old hunting grounds in search of the source of his misery, purely to save what was left of his sanity? So he was here, and looking good from what Deacon could see: all that muscle beaded with blood or sweat or, knowing Blade's penchant for gratuitous violence, a mixture of both, carrying himself in a manner that was Japanese samurai blended with Indian tiger. Blade was certainly looking done the worse for wear after his excursion into the temple of the Blood God. Miles better than Deacon himself was doing, and he felt his lip curl before he could stop it. At the very least, the temple could have shown a sense of poetic justice and fallen in on him.

The expression on Blade's face was tense. If Deacon didn't know better, he would even go so far as to say that old Tall, Dark, and Handsome was feeling a bit anxious. Deacon could sympathize with him, if he were so inclined; he was feeling more than a touch anxious himself since La Magra had failed.

Deacon wasn't so inclined.

The shadows seemed to make a whispering noise as Deacon stepped out of them, as if the very fabric of the universe was trying to tell him that it was a mistake. He paid it no mind. Deacon didn't think that this was a mistake. He, he Iknew/I that it was a mistake. That didn't stop it from happening. Like a pair of trains placed onto the same track, he and Blade were destined to collide against one another again and again and again.

Deacon's palms made a ringing sound as they came together, almost forlorn in the oddly serene silence that otherwise dominated the alley. Blade whirled towards the sound, his hand coming up to rest on the hilt of the sword that he had sheathed only seconds before. One good look at Deacon, walking towards him and bathed in the predawn glow, and he withdrew the sword entirely. It made a faint whistling noise as it greeted the air.

"Frost," Blade intoned in that subhuman growl of hi, not seeming shocked in the least to see the enemy that he had gone to considerable effort to slice and dice like a julienne fry the day before up and about now. Man of few words. With a weapon like that to rely on, Deacon could see why.

Deacon himself, however, was not so well equipped, nor was he possessed of quite the same resilience that he had been able to claim before. Words were his only weapon. Luckily for Deacon, they were also the ones in which he had always been the most proficient.

Deacon held up his hands and took a hurried step back as Blade approached with that damned pig-sticker in hand, stumbling over his own feet and saving himself from a hard knock to the ass by virtue of luck alone. Bitterness rose in Deacon's throat, sharp and thick as truck-stop coffee, and he ignored it only by a quick gathering of his will. He could continue with his steady mental breakdown later if he wanted to-and a part of Deacon very much wanted to-but there were more pressing matters to attend to at the moment. Like living to see his first unfiltered sunrise in over fifty years as it arced over the horizon, unwelcome and unwanted but dazzling all the same. Deacon blinked and, even though his nerves screamed that it was the stupidest and most dangerous thing that he could do, turned his eyes away from Blade, unable to look at the fiery miracle rising between the buildings behind him. With half a century of accustoming themselves to darkness and no protective shield of plastic or shady trees standing between them and the light, Deacon's eyes watered and stung.

Thirty-six hours before the sunlight would have killed him. This day it was the only thing that saved his life. Rather than the liquid pain of a sword parting flesh, Deacon was treated to the grittier, more immediate sensation of being slammed back against a brick wall, so hard that the skin along his shoulders abraded under the impact and he could feel blood running down his back like an angel's torn wings. Deacon's skull collided with the brick sharply enough to make his head ring and his knees go roughly the consistency of Twinkie filling, but Blade's fingers curled into the front of his shirt and kept him on his feet. Sentimental guy, that Blade. The whole situation was bringing back more memories than Deacon had ever planned to allow back in. He drew a shaky breath.

Blade, attributing the breath to anger or, more likely, fear, parted his lips into what only an optimist with about a joint and a half too many in his system could have called a smile. At some point between closing the distance that separated him from Deacon and then hurling him into the wall, Blade had sheathed the sword and drawn one of his deceptively fragile-looking silver stakes to replace it. He shoved the stake against the delicate hollow beneath Deacon's chin, right at the place where his head first made contact with his neck. How very phallic of him. The tip was sharp enough to send a rivulet of crimson running down Deacon's Adam's apple to disappear beneath the collar of his shirt. Deacon's mouth watered and his stomach turned as one motion.

"What the fuck is this?" Blade growled, his voice low and rumbling, the barest hint of a tremble marring that perfect arrogance. So it was unnerving him to see the sunlight falling across Deacon's face?"

'Well, good for you, old buddy,' Deacon felt like saying. 'You're feeling about one-tenth of what it's doing to me, so excuse me if I don't welcome you to my world just yet. If you do get here, though, the strait jackets are on the table to your left, and we Ido/I hope that you enjoy your stay." His lips parted and let out a sound that was kissing cousins to pure, undiluted hysteria.

"Having a little trouble putting the pieces together, Blade?" he jeered, hearing the panic that soaked his voice and hating it with every molecule of his body. Wherever the badass vampire had gone, it was a long, long way from this alley. "I'll give you some help, since you seem to be trying awfully hard." Oh, he was begging somebody to hit him, and Blade looked about three seconds away from doing just that. "That bitch of a doctor made a cure for vampires that were turned rather than born. You shot me full of a fuckload of it. Ergo, my triumphant return to the human race." Deacon began to laugh again; the sound of it was a hell of a lot closer to hysteria than cousins. He was standing right on top of it, blossoming insanity leaking through for all the world to see. Blade released him and stepped back a pace, looking about as surprised as he was capable of. "Isn't that the funniest thing that you've ever heard of?" Without Blade's fingers twining through his shirt and keeping him on this feet, Deacon's knees began to buckle. He braced his hands on them in order to stay on his feet, hanging his head down between his thighs until the blood pounded in his head. A wire-thin trail of saliva slid to the ground. And still Deacon laughed. "Isn't that a Iscream/I?"

Blade reversed the stake in his hand and, without saying a word, brought it around in a short, sharp arc. It impacted Deacon's cheek hard enough to put a hairline fracture into his cheekbone and send him over the edge into sudden, surprisingly welcome blackness.

---

Well. Ow.

The rotten-tooth pounding in the side of Deacon's face and the back of his head would suggest that Blade hadn't killed him, though anything else ventured into the realm of speculation. His stomach did a slow forward roll and he was possessed by an excruciating second of the full-body rictus that occurs only when a person is about to be violently and no doubt colorfully ill. The belief, sly and illogical though it was, that maybe the cure/curse had been a temporary measure, that things were going to restore themselves to their rightful order of their own accord, undid the cynical locks on Deacon's brain and slithered in to make itself right at home. When the nausea passed with no physiological pyrotechnics he felt something very close to despair.

"Wakey, wakey, Sunshine." And if that wasn't exactly the voice that Deacon wanted to hear, then God or whomever else was running the show had decided that today was the perfect day to royally fuck up Deacon's happy place. Oh. Wait. "You're about to miss the bus."

Deacon raised his middle finger in the direction of the voice and heard Blade make an impatient shifting noise in response. It made him more than a little aware of the fact that he was at ground level and hardly in the position to defend himself if Blade should start feeling testy. Deacon rolled over, groaning as his stomach threatened to break the tentative truce that it had achieved with the rest of his body. When things resettled, more from the fact that he hadn't eaten and thus had nothing of substance to lose than any return to homeostasis, he raised his hand and probed with ginger fingers at the damage that Blade had done to his cheek. It was hot and swollen to the touch, practically vibrating with pain. Anything more than the most air-light of contacts made the world swing alarmingly from side to side, but nothing shifted beneath his explorations. Deacon rocked back onto his haunches and glared at Blade. It took a second or two for the other man to come into focus; fuck.

"I think you gave me a concussion."

Blade showed him a dead man's smile, and Deacon began to rethink the wisdom of seeking Blade out once he had come to. But-Blade was the source, of everything. Of Deacon's obsession with finding a way to blend the best of the vampire and human worlds, of his brief stint into godhood. Of the sorry state that he found himself in now. They had been connected for decades before either one of them had known about it.

When put that way, Deacon supposed that it was damned depressing.

"You were hysterical," Blade said. "What kind of person would I be if I didn't help?"

"Yeah, a prince among me." Deacon brought his hand up to his eyes to shield them from the sun's glare. Christ, it must be nearly noon. Had Blade left him in the sunlight that long just to see what would happen? The thought had barely formed in Deacon's mind before he knew that it was exactly what Blade had done. He was going to have one hell of a sunburn.

Blade's voice was cold enough to invite snow as he said, "Get up."

Deacon lifted his head. "More complicated proposition that you would think," he said. "That tends to happen when-"

Either human eyes were even shittier than Deacon remembered or Blade had been stocking up on his Wheaties over the past day, because there was no way that he had moved so quickly before. Deacon's eyes could barely follow him as he closed the distance between them. Lucky Deacon, there was no way that he would remain unaware of the fingers like vices closing about his upper arm, jerking him to his feet so fast that it felt as though have of him had been left behind on the pavement. Deacon staggered sideways into Blade's bulk and was given a brief, hard shake, like a dog that is best kept on a short leash. "Hey-" The gun that Blade forced beneath Deacon's chin killed the protest before it could fully exit Deacon's throat. Felt, in fact, as though it was going to cut his trachea in two if Blade pushed it against his skin any harder.

"Now, you listen to me," Blade growled. Deacon was listening. Deacon was listening very hard. It seemed that a terrible shift in the balance of power had taken place since Deacon made his oh-so-glorious return to the human race. If Blade was wise, he would keep a tight grip on that gun. "There's a bullet in here that's aching to say hello to the top of your skull, see what kind of mess it can make on the way up there. Most of the time my weapons and I are in pretty good agreement, but I've found that even the lowest life form can have its uses." Deacon made a small sound, the beginnings of an argument. Blade forced the gun's muzzle against the underside of his chin hard enough to shut him up and guarantee that there would be a bruise as dark as sin later on, if Deacon lived to see later on. The look in Blade's eyes would have made most betting men shake their heads and walk away.

Blade continued as if Deacon hadn't tried to interrupt. "From what I've heard, you've amassed quite a fortune through those clubs of yours. I run an expensive operation, and there's a lot of equipment to replace since your boys got through with their fun." The minute jab to Deacon's skin said that it wasn't the equipment that Blade was thinking of. "You want to keep on with your new approach to healthy living, you'll share the wealth." He eased the gun away enough for Deacon to speak and maybe even breathe. The proximity was still close enough to discourage misbehavior and, judging by the awkward tilt of Deacon's head, he knew it.

It took Deacon three tries to get his jaw working again. The first sound that emerged when he did was an unhealthy laugh. The dangerous glitter in Blade's eyes only made his smile widen., "You think it's going to be that easy?" Deacon asked. "Think again, sweetness. I'm not the only one that wanted your head on a pike. Every fucking vampire in the country would love to be known as the one that takes you down. Even more now that the myth of invincibility has been popped." The reference to Whistler was a mistake as soon as it was out of his mouth.

'Blaze' was the only word that could accurately describe what Blade's eyes did then, though Deacon would later jump through every mental hurdle necessary to convince himself that he had been seeing things. Human eyes simply did not do that; then, Blade was not exactly human. The look was enough to convince Deacon that their roles had been reversed even further and that he was looking into the face of the devil himself, an angel gone so mad on power and pain that he cut down the righteous and unrighteous alike. It took most of the defiance out of Deacon like water running from the cracks in a leaky dam. Not all, but enough to make him reconsider the survival potential involved in baiting the man who carried enough weapons to make a green beret seem ill-equipped.

Blade seized Deacon's jaw with one hand. Fuck, thumb digging right into his cheekbone, and the waves of pain that radiated out from the injury were enough to make the world fade in and out like the reception on a cheap television set. He sagged and felt Blade force the gun back into the hollow of his throat, in exactly the position that the stake had been held before. The man had a fetish.

They were face to face, bare millimeters separating warm breath from sweaty skin. Deacon could have kissed Blade if he had wanted to, if he hadn't thought that doing so would have resulted in a little epilepsy of the trigger finger. Though the view was a long stone's throw from bad, Deacon wished that he had room to squirm away, put enough space between them for reason to reassert itself. Blade was in a killing mood; he threw off rage like heat.

"I'm in the mood for a challenge," Blade gritted, every inch the weapon made flesh. The hand on Deacon's jaw eased off, fastened itself around his bicep before he could get a true feeling of relief going.

Deacon bit the inside of his mouth until he tasted blood, still hot and copper-sweet, as Blade pulled him forward. 'Keep your hand on that gun,' he thought in Blade's direction. 'Keep it tight. There are a few things that humans can still do as well as vampires, and I think that blowing your head off is one of them. It might even be more fun this way.'

"Does anyone else know that you've lost your fangs?" Blade asked, his tone clipped short. As long as the murderous rage was being shared equally between the two of them.

Deacon exhaled his breath on a disbelieving wheeze and Blade glanced back at him. "Are you kidding me?" Blade's expression barely had to change before Deacon amended, "Of course not. You're physically incapable of it. No, no knows. Vampire society…it's like a wolf pack. When you're strong, they love you. Anyone you want to fuck, anyone you want to kill, and they're yours with a snap of your fingers. Hell, half the time they'll throw themselves into the sunlight on their own if you ask for it." Blade telegraphed disgust through every line in his body as Deacon's tone became nostalgic. Boo-hoo for him. "But at the slightest sign of weakness, bam, it's all over. They'll eat you alive and save your skeleton as a tribute to give to the next big thing. It's better that they think I'm dead."

Blade was shaking his head. "'Wolves' is giving you too much credit," he said. "You're a pack of rats, feeding on anything too slow or stupid to move out of your way."

"Still throwing yourself in with the humans, Blade?" It was impossible to keep the sneer out of his voice. Deacon didn't even try. "They're mindless idiots, wandering around deliberately ignorant of the world that really exists around them. Walking steaks. That's all."

Blade swung on him, releasing Deacon's arm long enough to curl his hand into a fist. Deacon, fearful of further blows to his face, caught himself cringing back and added that to the list of crimes that Blade would pay for as soon as he got the chance. A flicker of…something passed over Blade's face, and he dropped his hand back to his side.

"Welcome to the cattle yard," Blade said instead, refastening his hand to Deacon's arm and propelling them both forward. They emerged onto the street and Blade slid the gun back beneath the cover of his duster before it could cause a panic; even in New York, some things didn't fly. A battered about the edges hardcase being pulled down the street by a larger, angrier hardcase passed the acceptability test, but barely. Eyebrows were raised and comments were made behind hands, but no one pelted down the sidewalk screaming for a policeman. Oh, yeah. That human race that Blade was so determined to defend was a swell bunch of folks.

Blade had parked his car several blocks away before he had begun his hunting at the beginning of the night. By some miracle of luck or the heebie-jeebie vibe that Blade threw off like smoke wherever he went, the vehicle was still there and relatively unmolested. Blade pulled a flyer from the windshield and threw it to the side as he shoved Deacon towards the passenger door. Deacon had a brief tug of war with himself in which he considered bolting, realized that his chances of making it more than three steps before being beaten to a pulp were so small as to be laughable, and slid inside the car. Blade, opening the driver's door, flicked a speculative look over him. Probably disappointed that he was missing out on a chance to do some pulp beating.

After a couple of hours of asphalt hospitality, Deacon's bruises cooed as they came into contact with the leather seats. He had known that Blade had to have a hedonist streak in tucked in there somewhere. No one could be that damned uptight twenty-four hours a day without imploding all over themselves. Deacon tilted his head back and closed his eyes as he listened to Blade start the car. The engine roared like a tiger greeting its master as it came to life and Blade made a small sound of approval. Definitely a hedonist.

"So." Deacon opened his eyes and was amazed at his lack of any defining emotion. "Do you actually have a plan, or is this just an excuse to slice and dice vampires?"

Blade gave him that disturbing smile again, the one that made him resemble a mental patient off his medication. "Thought you would be pleased." He threw the car into reverse, forcing his way into traffic. Horns blared and the New York salute was given. "I'm bringing you back from the dead."

---

Her name was Kathy, and she was twenty-four. Blonde, pretty, the kind of receptionist who could brew the perfect pot of coffee in the break room and give the perfect blowjob in the bathroom. Her boss told her that she was going places. Kathy pretended to believe him, while she told herself that the first time he tried to fuck her she was going to take his left nut.

Kathy was busy, distracted by the surge of business Mondays always brought along with them (and why there were people who thought that screaming at the receptionist for ten minutes was going to relieve them of their financial woes Kathy was never going to understand, but there were a few nuts in that bunch that she would like to liberate as well). She didn't notice the two men who entered the bank's lobby immediately, and when she did it was only with a vague surface knowledge. Kathy flashed them a 'be with you in a minute' smile over the top of her computer and went back to dealing with the playboy who was determined to hold her personally responsible for the fact that Daddy's money had finally been cut off. It took her several more seconds to absorb the fact that A) one of the men had had the living shit beaten out of him sometime in the very recent past, B) the other man was holding a gun, and C) her boss's increasingly insistent advances were going to be the least of her problems today.

Kathy lowered the phone, cutting the playboy off mid-tirade. The barrel of the gun pointed at her looked as big as a bowling ball, and the angry man on the other end of it was even bigger. "Oh, God," she whimpered. "Please don't shoot me."

"I think he's more likely to shoot me." The battered man was sounding far more composed than Kathy was managing. She clung to his voice, a lifeline, and recognition slammed into her with the force of a small but nonetheless enthusiastic train. "Mr. Frost! We were told that you were dead!" Her voice rose into a yelp on the last word and heads swiveled towards the sound. Gasps and a few frightened screams rang out as people caught sight of the gun. The man holding it swore.

"Reports of my demise," Mr. Frost said, wincing as his captor tightened the grip that he was maintaining on his arm. "Listen-" He glanced at the nameplate on her desk. "-Kathy, my friend Blade here-" Kathy gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth as Blade glowered at her. "Yeah, him. He's in a bit of a financial jam and I'd like to help him out, swell guy that I am. I trust that none of my funds have been transferred?"

"N-no," Kathy managed. Her spine began to rebuild itself, inch by ice-cold inch. The fucking Daywalker, in her bank. Kathy's hand began to creep towards the discreet button set into the underside of her desk.

And the gun that had been a healthy distance away was inches from her face in less time than it had taken her to breathe. Kathy gasped and pushed herself back from the desk, distancing herself from the panic button as well as the gun. "I don't think you want to do that," Blade told her in a low, level voice. The lobby had miraculously emptied itself of people. Kathy was willing to bet her Manolos that there were a lot of panic buttons being hit in the building at that moment. "I don't think that it's a wise decision at all, do you?" Blade caressed her cheek with the gun barrel and Kathy shook her head, giving herself a good whack in the face as a result.

"Hey," Mr. Frost protested.

"Just meat, remember?" Blade never took his eyes off of Kathy's face. She darted frightened eyes over his should and saw a line appearing between Mr. Frost's eyebrows. He didn't speak again. Blade called her name in a soft voice, sounding more gentle than Kathy would have thought possible. She liked it better when he was mean; that, at least, was level ground.

"Push your chair back up to the computer," Blade told her, backing away so that she could, "and put your hands on the keyboard." Kathy did as she was told, noting that her hands were shaking so badly that her charm bracelet, a gift from her boss's dick via her last bonus, was making a constant rattling sound. She really hoped that someone shot Blade. "How much money is in Frost's account?"

Kathy typed in the commands without feeling them, amazed that she could still speak the computer's language at all. Terror was causing a chittering noise like insects to roll through her head. The computer froze for a moment and Kathy made a low, moaning sound, but then the account came up. "Just under three million."

Blade glanced over his shoulder at Frost. "You're a wealthy man."

"Lucrative business," Mr. Frost replied. He was staring at Kathy, and there was a message written in his eyes.

For the barest of seconds, Blade's attention was divided between the two of them. Kathy, never a woman to let an opportunity pass her by, lunged. The barrel of the gun felt cool and solid against her hand and just for a moment Kathy thought, 'Hey, I'm going to do this!' before Blade felt the pressure and whirled back around. His face was a mask of towering fury.

Blade struck her with his open hand and Kathy's head snapped to the side. Mr. Frost jerked forward as if he would like to intervene, but halted himself at the last second. The line between his eyes was deeper than ever.

Blade seized Kathy's wrist with his unencumbered hand, wrenching it away from his gun and then bending it backwards until the tendons creaked. Kathy cried out softly, biting the inside of her mouth to muffle the sound before it could escape too far, and cradled her arm to her expensive blouse as soon as she was released. It not longer felt nearly expensive enough; no bonus was big enough to pay for being put through this. The part of Kathy's mind that had not been completely possessed by fear began to draft her letter of resignation.

The pretense of kindness had been stripped away from Blade's voice as he asked, "Are your bosses vampires, Kathy?"

She nodded and raised her hand to swipe at the tears that had begun to creep in humiliating little trails down her cheeks. Blade jerked the muzzle of the gun at her; Kathy's hand found its way back into her lap. "Yes. Most of them."

"Keeping a human at the front desk as window dressing," Blade mused, his voice growing lower and angrier by the syllable. Kathy would have scooted her chair back if she had dared. "Your bosses aren't going to be too happy with you when three million dollars walks out the door, are they?"

Kathy paled further at the thought, nearly to the point of translucency. It might be better if Blade shot her. "No," she whispered.

Blade parted his lips into a cold smile. "Then I guess you're in some trouble, aren't you? Empty the account."

This was the guy who thought he was better than the vampires? From where Kathy sat they were one and the same. "Just Mr. Frost's?" she asked, her fingers whirring over the keys even though half her brain was screaming that making such quick moves around the Daywalker didn't number among the brightest ideas ever brought forth into creation. He reminded Kathy of an ex that she had had back in college, one doing way more meth than was smart: like there were cracks creeping along the exterior and fathoms of dark water and rotting ice waiting beneath to swallow the unwary whole. All Kathy knew was that she didn't want to be standing on the middle of that ice when it shattered. Her fingers moved at a rate that was guaranteed to give her arthritis before she was thirty. If Kathy lived to see that hallowed day, she would gladly kiss every gnarled knuckle.

It had been over five minutes since Blade and Mr. Frost had walked into the lobby and thoroughly wrecked her day. Where the fuck was security, Kathy thought, pulling their dicks?

Blade pulled his gaze off Kathy and cast it back towards Mr. Frost, though Mr. Frost had not made any move that Kathy could see. He barely seemed to be aware of any of them, in fact. The line between Mr. Frost's eyes had grown so deep that it was going to give him wrinkles if he didn't watch it, vampire regenerative powers or not, and his eyes were distant. Kathy was Iso/I glad that one of them was able to daydream.

"Just his," Blade replied finally, and Kathy's eyebrows shot up before she remembered that it was smarter to be terrified.

Mr. Frost, apparently, was sharing her thought. He came back to the present long enough to cast Blade a half-surprised, half-scathing look before his attention was pulled away by the somber ding of the elevator door opening. Mr. Frost went the color of wet cement beneath the patchwork of purple and green that marked up the side of his face. "Uh, Blade-"

Blade heard the ding at the same time that Mr. Frost did, and he was ready. He whirled to the side, every bit as light and quick as a sword, and left Kathy with an unobstructed view of the security team that had just poured out. 'Oh, thank Ch-'

La Magra was already being entered into the archives as a failure and a fool's errand; there was no reason for anyone in vampire society to want Blade for more than an interesting conversation piece when his head was placed on a stick. The guards that poured from the elevator began firing the moment they caught sight of him. Blade, expecting the hail, spun away in time to avoid the lion's share. A few bullets cut though Blade's duster, pinging off the Kevlar underneath with dull, disappointed sounds. The rest of them found their way into Kathy.

She was hurled back form her office chair, skirt riding up as she fell so that the cream-colored thighs that her superiors so coveted were exposed. There wasn't much left to covet any longer as bullets slammed into the retreating flesh, shattering bone and sending arterial blood spraying across her computer terminal.

'What?' Kathy thought in a disjointed, distracted way before the blood loss took her. 'What?'

The last sounds that Kathy heard were the booms of gunfire; the last sight that she saw was the bland, tastefully vaulted ceiling.

---

"Uh, Blade-" Deacon didn't know why he was bothering with a warning, but he figured that he could understand the deep dread that spread along his limbs just fine. A wolf pack, fierce and quick to turn on the weak, the fallen. Good for you if you dreamed big, but if you also failed big? So long, old hoss, and you were lucky if all they did was kill you. Rebellious upstarts who did not know their place need not apply.

Deacon shouldn't have bothered. Blade was spinning away from the danger even as the elevator doors opened, sparks flying off the back of his duster as bullets ricocheted against his armor. Nice to know that one of them was invincible. Deacon took several hasty, scrambling steps back, putting himself out of range. In the end unnecessary. Just as it had been-just as it was-for Deacon, the vampire's couldn't take their eyes off Blade. The receptionist took most of the bullets, her body jerking like a marionette whose strings were held by an impatient child before sliding out of sight. Deacon waited for the coppery smell of blood to hit his nostrils and send saliva flooding into his mouth. When none came he felt something very close to grief.

"The Daywalker!" one member of the security team yelled. "Man, it's the fucking Daywalker!" Deacon's lips turned up. With troops like that, it was a wonder that vampire society was able to keep itself secret from three year-olds, let alone the majority of the human race.

Not that this particular idiot was going to be much of a concern to the ruling clans after today, as Blade's hand ducked up and fastened itself around the hilt of his sword as if he were greeting an old friend. Two quick movements, up and out, and the vampire who was so small on brains and so big on mouth found himself separated from a body part that he couldn't live without. The disembodied head gaped gruesomely about the room for several seconds before it burst into cinder.

And the fight was on.

The security force weren't all as stupid as the one, which explained how they had managed to stay in business for so long without the building collapsing down around them. And Blade, for all that he gathered legend around himself like a shroud, was only one man. One of the vampires swung himself into a roundhouse kick, by some miracle of luck and defiance of physics managing to avoid having his leg cut off at the knee by Blade's sword. His boot struck Blade in the face, knocking the other man's head to the side and sending a cracking sound echoing through the room as Blade's teeth came together. Blade was able to retain his grip on his sword, but he lost the gun. It skittered across the surface of Kathy's desk and disappeared.

Blade shook his head, throwing off the blow, and went after the vampire who had delivered it. The ruby gleam of blood dotted the edge of his mouth, noticeable only when he twisted just so beneath the lights. The vampire lost both his arms to Blade's sword before he died, and the explosion of ash was incredible to see. It wasn't enough to entirely convince the others that retreat might be a sound decision, but there was a certain hesitation to their steps after two of their number had been reduced to fitting in ashtrays in under ten seconds. One more notch to the legend.

Watching Blade fight and for once not being on the receiving end, Deacon had the leisure to see Blade move and appreciate him for what he was: a highly tuned, smooth running machine designed for the sole purpose of killing. Stripped of all unnecessary fat or flesh, Blade was more mercury than man when he was in motion, whirling, striking, and cutting with the grace of the weapon that he had been named for. It was no wonder that he was desperate to hang onto everything that made him human; watching him made it clear that he had little enough as it was.

A bullet whined by Deacon's neck, so close that he could feel the heat hear the whistle. He jumped and spun, one hand clamping protectively, uselessly to his throat. A second bullet flew by, further than the first and still way too close for comfort. He swore and ducked. Well. The wolf pack analogy was proving to be an apt one faster than he had anticipated.

Deacon turned, searching for the source of the shots. No small proposition, that, in a lobby bristling with firearms. Any business that dealt with vampires kept a large security force on site for such Blade-inspired melees; it was the reason that Deacon had chosen it. He had never imagined that there would come a day when all of that hostile attention was turned onto him. It was a hell of a world when you could go from golden boy to target practice in three easy steps.

Deacon's would-be assassin didn't make himself difficult to pick out, by virtue of being the only human in the room outside of Deacon himself and the only one not focused wholly on Blade. Deacon felt his lips part into a grin that for once didn't feel hysterical or forced. It felt pretty damned good, actually, once you got down into the nuts and bolts of it.

The grin couldn't have done much to reassure Deacon's would-be killer, but he settled into his job with a professionalism that showed Deacon why he was considered good enough to work on a team of vampires. The third shot would have been deadly if Deacon had not seen the minute tick in the gun's muzzle and jerked to the side; a line of fire opened up his arm as the bullet grazed by all the same. He spun for the protective cover of Kathy's desk and ran for it, feeling the further whistle of gunfire as it split the air around his body. Deacon really hoped that the idiot made a mistake and managed to hit one of the vampires fighting around him. It would take care of Deacon's problem altogether and provide one hell of a fun show besides.

Cracked ribs and bruised bodies were not well-conducive to diving, but Deacon's options were making up a short list. A cry that he could not muffle in time flew past his lips, black spots danced before his eyes, and it was with white-knuckled fingers that he held onto consciousness. Deacon's arm struck flesh, still obscenely warm and only just beginning to develop the waxen, unmistakably Icorpse/I look across her skin, and he recoiled. The bullets had left Kathy's face untouched, so that she stared up at the ceiling with blank green eyes. She scarcely had a hair out of place, and her makeup was unmarred save for a single scarlet trail that broke up the uniformity of her lipstick and trickled down her chin. She was Barbie waiting for her Ken and wondering where her life had gone wrong.

Deacon turned away from the corpse for reasons that he could not name and, more to the point, did not want to, fumbling around her until his hand encountered the cool, lethal weight of the gun. He checked for the safety, was unsurprised to see that the gun didn't have one. A fine craftsman, that Whistler.

Popping back over the desk caused nearly as many bruises to scream as dropping behind it had. Deacon spat out a string of obscenities that would have made a mill worker proud even as he felt his lips quirking into a smile. It felt good, the sensation of having a weapon in his hand again, of being a weapon again. Fuck this humanity shit, the real power in the universe rested with the predators. That was the rule of fucking nature.

And speaking of nature, someone's life expectancy had run its course. The human had given Deacon up either as a lost cause or simply too inconsequential to bother with any further and had joined the rest of the room in focusing on Blade. Blade, for his part, was returning the favor, cutting through vampires like a scythe through ripened wheat.

Deacon drew a bead on the shitty little human, curled his finger around the trigger. The man never saw it coming.

Deacon didn't shoot.

A malfunction occurred somewhere between Deacon's brain and his hand, and the trigger didn't budge. Deacon allowed the gun's muzzle to drift downwards by a few inches, feeling confused and lost. The boom of gunfire and the delicate swoosh of Blade's sword faded into background noises devoid of context or meaning. "I'm not Ilike/I them," Deacon growled at last, raising the gun again. His aim was steady; his finger jerked the trigger back on command.

A stray bullet impacted the human's throat a spare second before Deacon's had the chance to, tearing flesh into a hole large enough to put a child's fist through. The blood droplets hung suspended in the air like jewels for a moment before they rained down onto the marble, faint pattering sounds that Deacon thought might drive him insane. His bullet entered the other man's skull as he was falling, tearing away his right eyebrow and rendering the orb beneath it into a pulpy, unrecognizable mess. Its owner was far beyond caring.

Deacon's arm jerked to the left, found the vampire who had fired the first shot, and pulled the trigger. Silver-filled hollow points. The explosion of ash was magnificent.

Blade's gun made a clanging noise as it struck the marble countertop running along the front of Kathy's desk, drowning out the gunfire for one brief moment. Deacon stared at his hand as if it belonged to someone else and had grafted itself onto his hand without his knowledge or consent. He took a shaky step back.

Deacon's foot tread down on Kathy's spine, slender and fragile and warm somehow even through the sole of his boot, and at the sound of breaking bone he came close to leaping out of his skin.

Welcome to the cattle yard.

---

The damned fool was going to get them both killed. Blade watched Frost from the corner of his eye as he fought, saw the first shot, the second, and the stunned look that followed. More than deer in the headlights, it was the look of the deer that for the longest time had believed itself to be the driver of the car and was only now learning the awful truth.

Blade stabbed an approaching vampire with one of his stakes, then used the palm of his hand to drive it the rest of the way through. The vampire died with a gasp and a shriek, and Blade caught the stake before it struck the ground. He repeated the process once, twice; the money was no longer the issue nearly so much as getting out alive was, if he could even claim that it had been about the money to begin with. The bank had a great many secrets it would like to keep hidden from the general public, meaning that it also had a great many people who were willing to kill to keep those secrets. Blade had only himself. Though every blow connected and brought the sound of bruising flesh and breaking bone to Blade's ears, a symphony, it was time to go.

But not without everything that he had come with.

Blade drove his foot into a vampire's neck hard enough to snap his spine like stale spaghetti. The vermin dropped to the floor, head tilted at an unnatural angle, and Blade dropped along with him to finish the job. He rose with ash clinging to the sweat on his skin.

With no one quite daring to approach after that, Blade placed one hand on the receptionist's desk and vaulted over, doing a last minute scramble in mid-air to avoid landing on the body on the other side. Not that she had it within her to care; the woman was as dead as she could be before the onset of rigor mortis. Blade, however, liked to respect the ones who had died honest deaths when he could.

Frost had reclaimed Blade's gun, but was allowing it to dangle precariously from his slack fingers. Blade swooped it up, feeling the sticky-slick warmth that coated the handle. It was going to be a bitch to clean it.

"Hers," Frost said, sounding as if the words were being radioed to him from a broadcaster far away. "It was lying in it." His expression was tight and disturbed, a computer that was trying to reboot itself but continually finding a flaw within the system.

Blade nodded and, for one of only a handful of times in his life, found himself hesitating. It would be quicker to travel without Frost. It would be more just to kill him outright or leave him for the vampires to do it.

The smell of blood was heavy to the point of nausea and police sirens began to make themselves heard from several blocks away. Things had gone very badly for the bank today; unless the security team could provide a body or two that was not one of their own it was likely that somebody was going to die. Blade told himself that it was only because he didn't want to make things easier on the vermin that he wrapped his fingers back around Frost's bicep, where he imagined their were grooves being worn into the flesh.

"Get moving," Blade growled into Frost's ear. The computer, at long last receiving a command that he could make sense of, nodded shakily and stepped over the cooling corpse. Frost stumbled a little as he rounded the corner of the desk and had to brace his hand against the marble to save himself, a very human move. Blade followed at a close distance, trying to cover all of the remaining vampires at once. There was a shift of pride within his chest when he counted the number and realized that there had been twice that many before.

The leeches hesitated to attack again. Once the word of their failure reached the upper echelons of the bank board, some of them were going to die. If they attacked they were all dust in the wind. Pragmatism above honor every time.

Blade kept an eye on Frost until he made it out the door unmolested, not knowing why he watched and troubled by the fact. He worked off the indecision by spinning on the remaining vampires and firing several shots. Head, heart, head without a single miss, and the warm sunshine kissed his face as he stepped into it.

Frost hadn't tried to run. It occurred to Blade that Frost's brand new pulse had to have rendered his options pretty limited by this point. His worst enemy was now his best hope, and Blade hoped that Frost was appreciating the irony as much as he was.

"Nice exit," Frost said. Blade pictured a snake with its venom sacs removed, trying desperately to prove that its bite was still dangerous. Some of the color had come back into Frost's face, but his complexion was still mostly that of unfired clay.

"Seemed appropriate." The sirens were much closer now, close enough to make Blade aware of how little time they had to stop and chat. The initial gunshots had frightened most people away, but New York resilience and human curiosity was calling them back. "Get to the car."

If Frost wanted gone, this was his chance. The streets were too crowded and the police too close for Blade to force Frost anywhere that he didn't want to go. There was always the option of killing Frost outright, which held no small amount of appeal, but Blade found that his hand wasn't calling out for the sword like it had before. It was not a thought that he felt comfortable analyzing.

Frost turned towards the place where the car had been parked without another word, and the question became moot.

Frost slid into the passenger seat, folded his arms over his chest, and closed his eyes. The circles beneath them were as dark as secrets, the deep color of plums ready to be pulled down from the tree. His pulse was beating visibly and erratically in his throat.

Blade twisted the key in the ignition, listening as the big engine greeted him with a roar before he pulled away from the curb. Neither one of them spoke.

---

Blade's skin itched and he was all too aware of the beat-beat-beat of the blood moving through his veins by the time he pulled the car up to the curb at Kam's. The shop was still open, as he had known it would be. After all, Blade was the prize customer. Frost, eyes still closed and to all appearances trying to appear as if any world other than the one on the backs of his lids did not exist, was left in the car.

Kam was looking over the books when Blade entered. He glanced up as the bell above the door jingled, gave a brief, seemingly unconcerned nod, and went back to making notations in his ledger. His fingers were clenching the pen hard enough to turn his knuckles the color of sand. "Hey, man. Figured I'd see you sooner than this."

Kam would spot a lie on him the way that some men could spot spare change on the sidewalk. Blade didn't bother to try. "Been seeing how long I could go."

Kam shook his head. "Dangerous. You fly off the edge, ain't no telling what it'll take to bring you back."

"Not your problem, is it?" It was nearly a shout, harsher than Blade intended. Had there's been any other kind of friendship, the words would have demanded apology.

Kam gave him a look. "Nope," he said. Not until you come after the rest of us." He turned and began pulling bottles off of the shelves. "I got some new stuff," he said over his shoulder. "Tell Whistler when he makes your serum-"

"I'm making the serum now."

Kam froze, turned. His eyes were both sympathetic and wary. "I'm sorry, man."

Blade shook his head. "Borrowed time." He reached into his coat and pulled out a roll of bills.

Kam started when he saw the amount, but squashed the protest before it could get moving too far. "The new stuff's strong," he said instead. "Only mix half as much the first time, see how your body takes it before you try more. It should cut down on the burn."

"Thanks." Blade laid the bills down on the counter and realized that Kam was no longer watching him. Turning, he followed the other man's gaze until it terminated with Frost's profile, outlined through the window of the car.

"That who I think it is?" Kam asked in a low, strained voice. "Are you crazy?"

"Nope." Blade threw an extra bill down on the pile. "Nothing more than a stray."

Kam shook his head. "You Iare/I nuts. It's your ass."

"That, too." Blade gathered up the bottles. "I'll see you in a few days."

"Do me a favor," Kam said as he collected the money. "Leave the stray behind."

Frost slitted his eyes open when Blade entered the car but otherwise did not move. His body was taut, snugged tight against the passenger door. In all likelihood he was expecting Blade to shoot him, and when Blade searched his mind he could find no rational reason not to. Frost had spent the last several decades happily spilling enough blood to make the most lenient jury in the nation vote to stick the needle in his arm. He was a monster, a mother-killer, a wolf feasting among the sheep.

A new human, a neutralized threat, a maybe-asset.

Blade swore and threw the car into gear violently enough to make something under the hood scream. Frost tensed to the edge of flinching, and Blade wondered why he was still there, what he hoped to gain.

"So what comes next?" Frost asked, staring out the windshield.

"Hell," Blade grunted, "I haven't killed you yet. Go from there."

---

The last time that Deacon had been in Blade's factory, he had sworn that he wouldn't be back unless it was as a victor or a pile of ash. Being force-fed his humanity added a very new dimension of the equation. The car's engine made soft noises, cooling, as Deacon stepped from the passenger seat, craning his head to take it in as if he were seeing it all for the first time. It was dimmer than he remembered, the sounds muted and the smell practically nonexistent. A hint of cigarette smoke, a touch of gasoline, when two days before he had been able to inhale blood and sweat and fury/fear, well-kept leather and the sharp, deadly tang of silver. If this was the blessing of the human race, living their entire lives as if they were walking underwater, then they could have it back.

Blade slid from the driver's seat and slammed the door behind him, not speaking to Deacon and barely looking at him. The Daywalker in a detached state was in its own way worse than when he was merely homicidal. Deacon had at least been able to read that man, to gauge the direction of his attacks and through that knowledge influence their outcome. This Blade had no emotional hooks for Deacon to slip his fingers into and find purchase with, not even rage, and as a result Deacon was left drifting.

For want of anything better to do he followed Blade through the factory, past machinery that he didn't recognize and doubted if Blade could name. From wolf to puppy on a string; it was great. Deacon told himself that it was a temporary measure, born of necessity and the odd fact that Blade no longer seemed enthusiastic about ripping him apart with his bare hands, and he was so tired. It was enough. Deacon would make it enough.

Blade ignored Deacon entirely, going instead to one of the lab tables that Karen had left behind and unloading his purchases. Silver, essence of garlic, more bottles full of ingredients that Deacon could not pronounce, and he realized with a faint surprise that Blade was preparing his serum. Every vampire in the world would pay dearly for a run-down of what went into that little concoction. Enough to turn Deacon, restore him to what he had been? Probably not, and he forced his mind onto tracks with less madness hiding along them.

"Where will they go?"

What? Deacon pulled his eyes back from where they had been roaming about the factory with a tourist's interest, realizing too late that he had asked the question out loud.

"The vampires," Blade elaborated, just a shade of his old menace curling starlight-cold through his voice. So good to know that they were back on familiar footing. The ice beneath Deacon's feet felt thinner by the second. "The ones that are rushing out of the city-" Blade's upper lip curled. "-like rats. Where will they run to?" His voice didn't sound like a threat as he asked. Deacon wasn't sure what he heard in it: curiosity, testiness, a little wariness. The ice made a creaking noise.

Deacon shrugged and realized that he hadn't given the idea any thought. "Europe and Asia, most likely. The American council's gone. With them out of the picture, there goes the vampires' protection. If you've scared them badly enough, they'll head for home. The old countries." Blade nodded as if receiving confirmation of something that he had already known. If that was the case, then why ask at all? Deacon turned away, comparing his mental map of before with the one that his mind was assembling now and finding the new to be immeasurably wanting. He glanced towards the chair where Quinn had left Whistler's body. There were still faint bloodstains on the floor. Deacon averted his eyes quickly, for reasons that he didn't like and couldn't name. The world tilted for a moment, not because of any concussion.

Blade was watching him when Deacon had regained his equilibrium enough to turn back, his eyes hooded and unreadable. Deacon lifted his chin a notch and refused to look away again as the other man drove the needle full of serum into his neck. Blade clenched his fingers around the edge of the table until his knuckles turned creamy-pale, and as Deacon watched Blade bowed his head in the way that no vampire would ever be able to make him. Those broad shoulders shook hard enough to make the table quiver and send the bottles scattered across its surface to rattling ominously, but Blade himself did not make a sound. Deacon watched without comment, feeling like a scientist sitting down to an experiment and viewing it with neither cruelty nor compassion.

Small beads of sweat were standing out across Blade's forehead by the time it was over, and Deacon found that he could not look away from them as he asked, "Does it hurt?" No one was more surprised than he to hear the lack of acid in his voice, or the corresponding lack in Blade's as he answered.

"Always. Not like it used to." Blade began to put the instruments away with a surgeon's care that was so unlike his usual heavy-handed violence as to belong to a different person.

"Why do it?" The second question was out of Deacon's mouth before he could catch it and douse it with vitriol, one more thing taken from him to swirl away into the void.

Blade flicked a look over him, dark and measuring. Whatever he saw in Deacon's face wasn't enough to make the violence bleed away from him entirely, but it held it in check. "Something to hold onto."

Deacon nodded as if he understood, caught himself wishing in a desperate moment that he did. Blade had been human for longer than Deacon had; maybe there was an allure to it that he had been separated from for so long that his brain refused to go back it, like a dog gone so homicidally feral that no amount of kindness or pleading was ever going to bring it back to the leash. More was the pity for Deacon, because he was slowly coming to the realization, as bone deep as cancer and every bit as insidious, that this was the end of the line as far as his forays into vampirism were concerned. He was completely, irreversibly human, that big old wheel of karma turned full circle at last, and somebody Upstairs had to be getting a giggle or ten out of the ass-kicking that it was giving him. The world tilted again. Deacon gripped the edge of the table to steady himself, stepped closer to Blade without realizing it, and so missed the dangerous, speculative look that Blade cast over him upon his approach.

Something to hold onto. Something that could be simplified and intuited, tasted and seen and touched, and Deacon still didn't understand, but he thought that with a little work he could fake it. Deacon inclined his head until his mouth caught Blade's, parting shock-slackened lips with his own. Vampire aggression caught inside the body of a human, gasoline begging for a match or at least a bullet, and you didn't get much simpler or more primal than that. Deacon wasn't sure which reaction he was going for, reciprocation or violence, but one way or another the uncertainty that buzzed and tore at him was going to stop.

Which made it perfectly fitting that Blade gave him neither, not immediately. He took one surprised breath of air and Deacon braced himself, nearly jumping out of his skin when the most that happened was Blade placing his hand onto the nape of Deacon's neck. Big hand, firm and oddly gentle in a way that didn't do the bad-ass reputation any justice. Neither did the curious, wary look in Blade's eyes as he pulled back, searching Deacon's face. Deacon didn't know what Blade was looking for there and didn't particularly care. This was territory that he knew. This was territory that he knew. He leaned in again.

Blade neither halted Deacon nor encouraged him, standing like a marble statue that had somehow been gifted with thought as Deacon parted his lips further, slid his tongue inside. Warmer than stone, though. So much warmer. It had been an age since Deacon had felt heat like that, the steady thump-thump of a human heart through deceptively fragile skin. Deacon flicked his tongue against Blade's palette and got the faintest of moaning sighs in return.

Blade reacted finally, a sound that was half-oath and half-growl tumbling from his mouth and rumbling against Deacon's lips. In the unnatural silence that reigned over the factory it sounded like the purr of a cat, and Deacon felt his mouth part into a grin that made him look more than a touch crazed. Luckily for him, Blade didn't seem to be too interested in his mental state. He parted Deacon's lips, lighting every nerve in his mouth on fire with a concentration and near-arrogance that made Deacon want to laugh and swear both. It had been a long time, but at some point Blade had been good at this. Desperation went to obsession went to lust in less time than it took Deacon to draw in a full breath, and they were standing closely enough to one another for him to feel that he was not the only one.

Blade cupped Deacon's face with his palm, tracing his thumb over the purple and green bruise that marked his wounded cheek, so vivid that it felt alive. Deacon hissed and turned his face away, but Blade was gentle, skating his fingers across the flesh in a touch so light that Deacon might have imagined it. It didn't fit the image of Blade as deadly avenging angel that Deacon had held in his mind for so long, jangled discordantly against the balance that he was trying to find again, wasn't what he wanted.

Deacon bit down on Blade's lower lip hard enough to draw blood, heat and salty-sweetness that he licked away before he could stop himself. Blade started beneath his mouth, following it up with a growl and what might have even been a smile. He broke contact with their mouths but allowed their foreheads to keep touching, Deacon's sweat mingling with his.

"Like that, huh?" Blade asked, his voice pitched so low that it scarcely sounded human.

"Like that," Deacon agreed, arching his neck and moaning like a whore as Blade's blunt teeth marked up the side of his neck, as his hand found the front of Deacon's jeans and made sure his attention didn't wander.

They made it to the bed eventually.

---

It was sunlight falling in insistent rays through the dirty windowpanes that woke Deacon. He squinted and raised his palm to shield his eyes, unsurprised to find himself in the bed alone. It wasn't large enough to sleep two comfortably, and Blade had probably felt the need to absolve himself of his sins by killing something after they had finished doing those things which were definitely not sleeping.

Deacon rolled and stretched, feeling the tug of wounded muscles from equal parts injury and exertion. The gnawing, buzzing feeling of insects settling into his brain was still there, greatly muted: shock rather than impending insanity. Deacon could almost pretend that it was a radio that someone had forgotten to turn off, tuned to a station so long gone that all it picked up any longer was static. Moldering equipment, air going quietly stale in a sound booth, now there was an image that he need to wake up to.

Deacon swore low enough for only himself to hear as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. Waves of startled gooseflesh crawled up his arms and legs as his bare feet made contact with the cement floor. So sex hadn't cured him of all his ills. Gee, now there was a lesson that hadn't been repeated about eighty billion times throughout the course of human history.

The bathroom had seen better decades, but the water that poured out of the showerhead was hot and there seemed to be an endless supply of it. Deacon stood beneath the spray until the room was filled with thick detective-novel fog and the outline of his body had grown soft and indistinct. He rested his forehead against the damp tile and felt the water striking against his back, easing out knots of physical and mental tension both. The buzzing was drowned out by the sound of the water, and for that Deacon was grateful.

The steam parted for him as he stepped beck into the bedroom like doors opening before a king. Deacon snorted. It would a hell of a long time before he was the king of anything again.

Deacon pulled his clothes back on and stumbled from the bedroom, pushing his damp hair out of his eyes. He needed to eat, he needed sleep that didn't paint a horror movie across the inside of his eyelids, he needed the entire fucking world to stop spinning long enough for him to figure out which way was up again. Barring any of that, he went outside.

The sun was close to its zenith when Deacon walked out the doors, so large and bright that to look at it for too long was to invite retinal damage. He gave it his best shot, anyway, squinting and blinking until dangerous circles burst before his eyes and hung there even after he had looked away. 'All for this,' Deacon thought. Fro this deadly, unapproachable light Blade was willing to fight, kill, die. It didn't make any sense, and Deacon didn't know which was worse: the fact that he didn't understand it or the fact that at some point he might.

Deacon took a seat amongst the assorted detritus that littered the outside or the warehouse, bracing his back against a long-deceased piece of machinery. The sun warmed his face and busily began the business of turning yesterday's burn into a tan. Another couple of days and the whey-pale tone of his skin, one of the last physical signs that marked him as having once been a vampire, would be gone.

'Fuck, I'm going to be just like them,' Deacon thought, leaning his head back against the metal corpse and closing his eyes. It wasn't as depressing a thought as it had been twenty-four hours before, and that in and of itself was depressing.

The hum of a care engine approached the factory. Behold, the return of the triumphant hero. Deacon kept his eyes closed, arms clasped loosely around his bent knees, and listened to the crunch of gravel as Blade parked the car and got out. And now the world could begin returning to its natural orbit. Deacon wondered which one of them would strike the other first.

The faint noise of rocks beneath Blade's boots betrayed his approach; nevertheless, Deacon nearly missed the object that was thrown at him. He caught it inches before it would have struck him in the face, opening his eyes and staring down at the folds of down-filled fabric. A heavy parka, meant for the tundra, North Dakota, other places where no sane human being would ever want to set foot. If there was a unifying connection here, Deacon wasn't making it. A line appeared between his eyes as he looked up at Blade. "The fuck is this for?"

Blade's expression didn't change, but now Deacon knew that it could, and the realization gave him a strange sense of power. "Russia," Blade said.

End