Under the Dark
» Rating: NC-17
» Classification(s): Supernatural, Mystery, Suspense, Romance, Action/Adventure
» Summary: Spock might be Riverside's first ever vampire, but forgive Deputy Kirk for not being overly enthusiastic about it.

Chapter Six – I Am Not There, I Do Not Sleep

Jim was sitting alone on the front steps when Scotty and Nyota pulled up, something peppy and loud playing over the radio before the engine was cut. He watched bleakly as Scotty strode around to the passenger door and pulled it open with a gallant bow. Nyota laughed, and when he offered his arm with a flourish she took it.

"Eh, no shotgun?" the Scotman joked as they came closer. "Well, Da, I've brought th' lass home safe an' sound, no hanky-panky t'all."

Nyota, who knew him better, saw his face and was brought up short. "Jim?"

"… Don't go inside."

How could he tell her? How could he say those words, knowing they'd devastate her? She'd looked so happy, getting out of the car, happier than he's seen her in a long, long time. It wasn't fair.

She stepped up to the stairs and put her hand on his cheek, tilting his head up to hers. "What's wrong? Did something happen?"

He was saved from answering by the approaching wail of a siren, and then another rising to join it. Flashing lights appeared at the end of the drive.

Nyota looked back, then down again at him, eyes wide. "Jim, please, what happened?"

"It's Winona," he forced out, and then two cruisers and an ambulance roared into the clearing, spraying gravel everywhere as they crowded around Scotty's old Chevy.

It got a bit chaotic after that. As people entered the house Giotto herded Jim and Nyota back about twenty feet and made vague noises about going to the station, against which Scotty argued fiercely. Jim sat with Nyota on a wooden bench his father had built, her hand squeezing like a vise around his.

"Your boyfriend's a bit like an angry badger," he murmured, as Scotty shouted Giotto down with, "An' ye can shove it up yer arse and keep it there!"

She smiled, a miserable wobbling thing. "He'd be happy you think so."

Scotty stomped back to them, indignant rage in the mulish set of his jaw and the tensed line of his shoulders. "I've been given permission from mister Grand High Pooba t'leave and take Nyota with me, but he says you're stayin', Jim. I'm sorry."

Nyota took a deep, shuddering breath. "I'm not leaving, not if he has to stay."

"Ny." Jim turned to her, their hands still linked. "Please. It would take a huge weight off my shoulders to know you were safe." And far, far away from here.

"I'm not some delicate flower," she said waspishly, though her voice broke over the last word. "And what about you? You can't tell me you're alright."

"I'll deal," he said, and took her muttered "Men!" as a matter of course.

Between the two of them they wore her down, and Scotty's battered truck edged its way carefully out the tangle of emergency vehicles just as a black towncar pulled into the drive. Komack climbed out of the driver's seat and frowned after them, pointing at the retreating taillights when Giotto trotted up to greet him and saying something inaudible from where Jim sat.

Someone draped a blanket over his shoulders, and he looked up into Chapel's softly sympathetic eyes. "'M not cold," he protested.

"Just as a precaution, okay?" she coaxed, tucking the ends more firmly around his body. "Can't have you keeling over from shock."

Her hand rested on his arm for a bit longer than necessary. "I'm sorry for your loss," the EMT said gently.

Unexpectedly, it made his eyes sting, and he nodded. "Thank y—"

"Mr. Kirk!" Komack called, walking up the curved garden path towards them. "Another day, another crime scene, I see."

"Cunt," Chapel said under her breath, and when Jim shot her a startled look she gave him a firm pat on the shoulder and a discrete thumbs-up.

Komack's eyes were bright and sharp, his smile almost gleeful. "I think you'd agree, Mr. Kirk, that discovering two murders in as many weeks makes you incredibly unlucky or somehow involved. I'll be very interested to hear your explanation."

Jim stared up at him. "Agent," he said, as evenly as he could. "I came home to find my mother dead on the kitchen floor. I don't have an explanation, although I would very much like to find one."

Komack made a show of pulling out a pad and pen, flipping it open to a fresh page. "Then why don't you start from the top, and we'll see if we can't figure something out?"

He made as if to sit down on the bench beside him, and Jim shot to his feet, grief and anger turning over in his stomach like roiling pitch. "How about you go fuck yourself, you soulless bastard?"

Komack had the gall to look amused. "There's really no need for language like that. I just want to know what happened."

"In that case," Sulu said as he stepped up to them, "You can request access to our report when it's filed. The sheriff's office will be doing the questioning."

Komack gave him a condescending smile. "Deputy, I'm sure you recall that the FBI has been granted jurisdiction—"

"And I'm sure you're aware that until this murder is proven to be connected to those currently under investigation, the FBI has jack all jurisdiction," Sulu returned. "Sir."

The agent was frowning now. "Of course they're connected."

"Based on what evidence?" Sulu asked.

It slowly seemed to dawn on Komack that he did not, in fact, have a procedural leg to stand on. He blustered, "Of course, this early in the investigation—"

"Exactly, sir," Sulu said pleasantly, beckoning for Jim to rise and follow. "Now if you'll excuse us?"

He led Jim further away from the house, towards a squad car— their squad car, Jim noted dully. Good old number 941.

Sulu sat him in the back and leaned against the open door, sighing heavily. "Jim—"

"Just take the statement," he said tiredly, wrapping the blanket around himself again. Funny, he did feel a bit cold. "Need to give it sometime. The sooner the better, I guess."

"Okay," Sulu said quietly. "Okay. But we can stop at any point, alright?"

"Yeah."

"Okay." Sulu took a deep breath, then found a pad and pen. He began, "Mr. Kirk, if you'll describe to me what you saw when you arrived home this evening..."

The formality helped. It made things seem more distant and unreal, like they'd happened to someone else entirely. He told the story of another Jim, who had walked in his front door and found his mother sprawled out over the linoleum with her neck quite visibly broken, blood seeping out of her mouth and eyes wide in eternal surprise.

He left out Spock, and his telling Spock to disappear before the police arrived. The vampire had only half-obeyed him. He was still lurking somewhere nearby; Jim could feel it if he let himself, a slight tug like the pull of a loadstone on his consciousness. Somewhere to the south, towards the Grayson farm, Spock watched and waited.

"— said there were signs of a struggle?"

"Hmm?" Jim refocused on Sulu's voice with effort. "Yes. A chair was broken and a drawer pulled out. The one she keeps—kept her service pistol in."

Jim glanced back toward the house, just at the moment when the paramedics emerged carrying a covered figure. Something hard and painful rose up in his throat.

"We can stop," Sulu offered again, and this time Jim gave a choppy nod.

"Yeah. I, uh. Shit," he said, letting his head fall in his hands. "I need to call Sam and Aurelan."

"Jim, I'm so sorry," Sulu said, and behind his fingers Jim's eyes went hot and achy.

"Thanks," he said gruffly. "It's just… can I get a minute?"

There was a crunch of gravel as Sulu stepped back. "Stay where I can see you?"

"Fine. Sure."

He didn't, though. It was too easy to wait until Sulu's attention was elsewhere, and slip out of the blanket and the backseat. Number 941 was parked close to the edge of the property, where Bob Wesley's sweet corn had grown chest-high in the constant rain. Jim walked away, and no one noticed or stopped him.

Storm-dark had turned to true dark, and it was mostly by feel that Jim found Spock, sitting on the crumbling stone wall around the graveyard. He put a hand out towards a lighter patch of dark in the night, and felt almost pathetically grateful when fingers tangled with his, and pulled him in.

Spock's collar was cool under Jim's forehead, his arms tight and sure around Jim's body as they gathered him close. It felt unspeakably good to be held; he could cry his damn eyes out if he wanted, and Spock wouldn't give a shit. The thought steadied him, and slowly the shaking stopped and his breath evened out.

The vampire was… crooning, for lack of a better word, low and sweet like Jim was a child or a wounded animal. The syllables slipped around each other, not English, not anything Jim had every heard before. Without opening his eyes or lifting his head, he asked, "What's that mean?"

Spock smoothed a hand up Jim's back, and translated. "'You are safe. I am here. Nothing will harm you while I watch over you.'"

That was… nice. It was a bit much— after all, Jim was a grown man, a sheriff's deputy with combat training and an ever-expanding gun collection.

But he didn't feel like a grown man, now. He felt orphaned, and small, and scared. Spock was a reassuring solidity under his hands, and here in the black of night, he could take that comfort without shame.

"God, Spock…" he whispered. "What hell is going on? Gaila, and my mom, and Janice and Marlena… what do they have in common, besides me? Who would… is someone trying to get to me? Is this my fault?"

Spock was silent for a moment. "It is possible," he allowed finally. "But unlikely. From what I understand, it is more probably a type of hate crime and your involvement coincidental."

Jim looked up, to where Spock's face would be if he could see it. "Hate crime?"

"Against those who associate with— vampires." The pause was tiny, but there, and Jim wondered why. "Tonight represents a significant deviation from the established modus operandi, but this may be explained if we assume that the intended target of the attack was not in fact your mother, but Nyota."

"Oh my God," Jim said blankly. It made perfect sense, but Jim prayed fervently to whatever God was listening that the same thought never occurred to Ny. It would kill her.

"Oh my God," he said a little louder, pushing against Spock's grip. "She's still in danger. I have to warn her."

The arms around him refused to shift. "She remains in less danger than you."

Jim stopped, looking up at the spot where Spock's face would be. "What? What're you talking about?"

"I am saying, James, that Mr. Scott is not an inconsequential protector and that many people are now aware that you and I associate as well."

Jim gaped at him. "Okay, first, I am not a woman, and second, Scotty is a barkeeper with a gourmet sandwich addiction. How is that bodyguard material?"

"That is not my secret to tell," Spock said levelly. "And I am concerned that the perpetrator of these murders may see you as an easier and desirable substitute, when he is unable to reach Nyota."

"But—"

"Stay," the vampire murmured. "Stay here with me, until the dawn. Only do that, and I will find the one who took your mother from you. I swear it."

Jim wanted to struggle, to argue. But Spock's voice had dipped back into that hypnotic lower register and when he repeated, "I swear it," the harmonics stroked over Jim like a lover's lingering caress. His body went slowly limp in Spock's embrace, and the vampire guided his head back to his shoulder.

"Until dawn," Jim said drowsily, his eyes sliding closed.

He felt Spock nod. "While I am here, they dare not come."

And before Jim could ask who he meant, he was falling into the yawning maw of dark, dreamless sleep.

"But, murder?" Sam sounded out the word like it was in a foreign tongue. "In Riverside?"

Jim sipped his tar-black coffee and gave a grim smile. "We've got our very own serial killer. Betcha Kalona can't top that."

They sat opposite each other in the hotel room's tiny kitchenette, Sam fresh from a four-hour drive and Jim still trying to shake off the lingering effects of Spock's mind-whammy. He'd woken up on a bare mattress at the Grayson place, now smelling more like sawdust and fresh paint than rot and mildew. His gun was sitting on the floor next to him, with a small handwritten note laid over it. In a thin spidery hand, Spock had printed Do nothing rash.

Obviously, he was coming to understand Jim very well.

Aurelan walked back into room from putting her two oldest to bed, her eyes bleary and red. "Well, that's done," she said unsteadily. "Georgie was a little fussy from the car, but Peter's been asleep the entire time. I don't even think he realizes we're not at home." Tommy, the baby, had stayed home with Aurelan's mother.

She came up to the table and Sam put an easy arm around her, hugging her to him for a moment. She leaned down and kissed the top of his head.

"I'm not sure when we'll be able to have the funeral," Jim said. "The house hasn't been cleared yet. It might be days."

"We'll be here, Jim," Sam said. "As long as it takes."

It took five days. There honestly wasn't much of a mess, but the bill the county CTS decon team sent was enormous anyway. Jim handed over his checkbook, and Aurlean took it and paid them. God bless her, she arranged and paid for everything: the coffin, the mortuary space, the headstone, the gravesite.

Going back to the house wasn't as bad as he'd thought. The kitchen floor was a little cleaner than it had been, and he'd had to take a few steadying breaths when he found Winona's heels in the living room, like she'd kicked them off on her way in. But Jim was good, doing great, until someone at the wake tossed away a container of Black and Lumpy to make way for one of the hundreds casseroles, Jello molds and sandwich platters people had brought to the house. He found it in the garbage can, and stopped and stared.

Nyota found him an hour later, sitting crosslegged on his bed and spooning up little chunks. "She was such a horrible cook," he mumbled, head bowed and resting on her shoulder as she rocked him. "I mean, seriously, I can't even tell what this is."

"I know, baby, I know," she said.

He gave a strangled laugh. "Don't call me baby, you feminist pig."

Spock disappeared.

Day by day, the Grayson house looked less and less derelict and more like a home, the porch torn down and built up, the drive paved, the plywood replaced by black glass. Spock wasn't there to see it happen, didn't come when Jim swallowed his pride and called out to him, and Jim didn't know what the hell to think. Even his dreams were free of Spock.

A part of him felt stupidly desperate to see the vampire, to hear his voice again. The urge was strong enough that he wondered if Spock had deliberately bent something in him, or if this quiet longing was another bullet point in the long list of vampire blood side effects.

It didn't help that the atmosphere in the county was, in a word, tense. After Winona's death, anti-vampire sentiment was running at an all-time high, and prominent vampires and vampire establishments all over southwestern Iowa were being mobbed and picketed, even bombed. Fangtasia, he read in the paper, was closed indefinitely.

A few more days went by, and Jim started imagining in lurid detail what might have happened to him. Drained by junkies, like Nancy Crater; euthanized by federal marshals under orders from Komack; driven out into the sun by one of the hundreds of vigilante groups that had sprung up in the last month.

He asked Nyota if she knew anything and instantly regretted it when her face crumpled; worries shared were worries doubled, and she'd hardly needed another thing to be upset about.

Jim waited. He worked on the Harley's body until it gleamed, got himself banned from Scotty's for the sake of his liver and whatever dignity he had left. He built potato guns with George III and endured Aurelan's strident disapproval. He wrote emails to distant cousins and great-aunts inviting them to the funeral, and received almost no response. Not that he'd expected much.

Jim waited. Spock didn't come.

"Riverside and Iowa City," Chekov recited, wiping at his sweaty forehead. "Bloomington. Lexington."

"Kingsport," Sulu added, down to a wifebeater and pants with the cuffs rolled up. He flipped rapidly through the records. "Before that, possibly Chattanooga."

"Almost in a straight line, east to west," Jim murmured, tracing the points with a fingertip. The three of them sat at a battered folding table in Jim's suffocatingly hot garage, heads in close together as they stared at the incident map the two deputies had spirited out of Komack's temporary offices. Even with the doors open for circulation, the corrugated tin walls made the garage into an oven. Sulu looked fine, if a bit sticky, but Chekov was gradually wilting like a snowdrop in a furnace.

"I've got another few possible in Atlanta, but these are just missing persons reports that fit the victim type," Sulu said, picking up another stack. "It does explain why Morrow's got such a hard-on for Doc McCoy."

"Why? Because he used to live in Atlanta?"

Sulu folded the pages back and held the stack up for Jim and Chekov to squint at. A black and white photocopy of a news clipping proclaimed, "HOTSHOT LAWYER MISSING IN ACTION".

"'More delays in the Delouise corruption trial. Attorney Jocelyn Treadway, sleeping with the fishes?'" Jim read aloud. Jocelyn. He'd forgotten. "That's right. They still haven't found her?"

"Missing since late April," Chekov, in charge of case notes, confirmed.

"Morrow had to have thrown this in his face," Jim mused, thinking back to the night Gaila was attacked.

"Yeah, but Leonard?" Sulu looked skeptical. "I'd believe Scotty before I'd believe the doc did it."

Jim smile came out a bit like a grimace, but it was more than he'd managed in days. "Apparently Scotty's some kind of secret badass, so maybe you're right."

Sulu snorted, just as Chekov started listing to the side. "Hui," he sighed, eyes rolling back in his head as he fell.

"Pasha!"

Thus, the meeting of the resistance ended with their youngest freedom fighter carried into the house in a dead faint, and left nothing but an uneasy feeling in the pit of Jim's stomach.

He woke up early on the day of the funeral, and listened for a long time to the sounds of birdsong and Nyota and Aurelan talking in the kitchen. George the Third was up and demanding Frosted Sugaroos, and was Aurelan explaining patiently that this house didn't have Frosted Sugaroos but that if he was good, they might get some from the store later. In the meantime, why didn't he have some eggs?

Jim slipped out the door without speaking to anyone, and went to visit Gaila.

The doctors were now hinting heavily that she might never wake up, body too traumatized and brain deprived of blood too long. It hurt, but in an oddly detached way. A man could only take so much before he stopped feeling the blows, and he was grateful for it. Even glad.

Jim bought her fresh flowers from the gift shop and took the stairs, twelve flights up. He walked around the corner to her hallway and met Komack coming from the other direction. The agent gave him a nod and a friendly smile, and Jim barely resisted the urge to smash the glass vase in his face.

Bones was sitting at Gaila's bedside, in almost the same exact position he'd been in the last time Jim visited, but his face was red with temper and his hand a white-knuckled fist around the bed's guardrail. A nurse puttered quietly in the corner, and while he made small talk and waited for her to leave it eventually occurred to him that she wouldn't leave, not while they were still there. The sidelong glances she cast their way were equal parts suspicion and fear, her finger poised over the emergency call button the entire time Jim was in the room.

"Komack 'let it slip' that I'm a person of interest in the investigation," Bones said later in the elevator, tired and bitter. "Christ, Jim, I'm two steps away from suspension myself, on grounds of nothing but rumors. This town is ready to blow."

He made Bones come home with him, stopping only to pick up Jo from daycare, and fed them both huge plates of forty kinds of funereal casserole. Jo wasn't a baby anymore but it was hard to tell how much she understood, dressed in black satin and sitting quietly in her father's lap.

In at four, they went to the church. The service was short, the organist the same warbling soprano that had sung at all Riverside funerals since time immemorial. Jim was a pallbearer, along with Bones and Sulu, and Bob Wesley's boys. They carried the casket out to the hearse to the baroque strains of "On Eagles Wings" and drove the half-mile to the city cemetery, where Captain Winona Kirk of the U.S. Navy was buried in dress uniform, next to her husband. The government had wanted to bury him at Arlington, but they'd had to settle for erecting a life-sized statue. Here, he shared a headstone bedecked with stone roses with his wife of five short years.

It was a warm, blustery day, black dresses flapping in the wind like crow wings. The entire town turned out for the procession; social events were hard to come by in Riverside and murder was exciting from a distance. The priest, an ancient tortoise of a man, wheezed his way through a brief eulogy, and friends and community leaders came to the podium to speak about what a wonderful woman she's been, how kind, how loving. Komack and Morrow were sitting two seats behind Jim.

Nyota came up to speak, unfolding a piece of paper and smoothing it out on the pulpit with a trembling hand. "Winona Kirk was an amazing woman," she began, and for the first few sentences she managed to hold it together. Jim's heart sank as her words grew halting, her face slowly crumpling. C'mon, Ny, he thought. You can do this.

But whatever else she was hearing was enough to drown out his reassurance. She burst out, "You're all horrible! It wasn't like that at all! I— I can't take this anymore!"

After the funeral he and Scotty found her behind an evergreen hedge, sitting on a marble bench with her legs drawn up to her chest. "I hate this place," she said, watching damp-eyed and balefully as the procession of townspeople wound away from the churchyard.

The rest of the afternoon passed in series of illuminated moments and blank black patches, like a strobe light: Bones settling Jo in the guest bedroom and falling asleep on the Laz-e-Boy; Nyota, her mascara a lost cause, pulling Scotty away with her upstairs; Sam and Aurelan sitting in the den with their boys and watching cartoon after cartoon after cartoon.

Jim was content to sit alone on veranda's old porch swing, looking out at the rivers and taking long sips of lemonade, listening to the heavy drone of cicadas and ignoring the way his dress shirt stuck to his sweaty skin. He blinked, and it was night and Aurelan was asking him if he wanted any dinner. He shook his head, but sometime later a porkchop drowning in gravy showed up at his elbow anyway.

He waited for Spock, and fell back into a restless doze.

Some indeterminable time later, his eyes opened and he stared out into the dark yard with the unsettling certainty that he was being watched.

The crops were laid close to the house here, the edge of the field a bare twenty feet from where he sat. The fitful wind made rippling waves of the tassels and leaves. He let his eyes slip out of focus, taking in everything and nothing, until the rolling shadows coalesced into a slim human figure.

Jim didn't quite gasp, but his hand shook as he lifted Tiberius' shotgun, filled with silver shavings, from the floor beside him and settled it across his knees. His voice had gone rough as he slept, so his quiet "Hello?" emerged as a croak.

Silence.

He cleared his throat and tried again, louder. "Hello?"

Nothing.

"I know you're there," he said, raising the gun to his shoulder. "I can see you."

He couldn't be sure, not when he had to fight to keep his eyes on a black-on-black shadow barely distinguishable from the night around it, but he thought the figure sketched a mocking salute before melting back into the corn.

Unnerved, Jim slowly rose and began to edge towards the door to the kitchen, shotgun still trained on the spot.

"Get inside," a voice hissed, and Jim swung the barrel up and fired without thinking. The shot went wide as the shotgun was batted aside and a man loomed suddenly over him.

"Stonn," Jim realized belatedly, and the vampire's eyes narrowed.

"That name is not for you to use, thrall."

Jim swallowed hard, but asked, "What's going on? Was that you, out there?"

Stonn ignored him. "I am not so enamored of you as Sarek's childe, and have no pressing concern for your safety. I will not warn you again. Get inside."

"What's going on?" Jim pressed doggedly. "Why are you here? Where's Spock?"

But Stonn was no longer paying him any attention, head turned towards the fields and body poised for flight. "Inside," he ordered a final time, and Jim was suddenly alone. Nothing but his pounding heart and spent shell casing indicated Stonn had been there at all.

"Jesus," he whispered, and crept closer to the edge of the veranda, torn. Go inside? Go after the vampire?

"Jim?"

This time Jim did jump, spinning towards Bones' voice with the shotgun up and his finger on the trigger. The man eyed him warily from inside the screen door, still dressed in black slacks and a horribly wrinkled collared shirt.

"Shit, Bones, don't scare me like that," he panted, relaxing his deathgrip on the shotgun and letting it fall to his side. "I coulda killed you."

"I heard a shot," Bones said, and nudged the screen open with his shoulder. God bless him, but he'd gotten the Sig Sauer Jim kept in the top drawer of the gun cabinet and held it up, braced in a clumsy three-point stance and aiming in the vague direction of the moonlit crops. "You okay?"

"I'm fine, give me that," Jim snapped, grabbing for the pistol. Christ, he'd loaded it. "I told you not to touch my guns until you got some training in." Jim thought he'd have known better.

While Jim popped out the magazine and checked the cylinder for bullets, Bones was still looking out over his shoulder into the dark yard. "Was that… Spock?"

He sounded strange, tone striving for conversational but failing by a wide, wide margin. Jim glanced up at him, guardedly; the man's face was pinched with worry and… something else. Something darker.

Komack smiled more broadly, sly and malicious. "Tell me, are you aware of the circumstances under which he regained custody of his daughter?"

Sulu folded the pages back and held the stack up for Jim and Chekov to squint at. A black and white photocopy of a news clipping proclaimed, "HOTSHOT LAWYER MISSING IN ACTION".

"No," Jim answered slowly. "Sorry. Thought I saw something, and overreacted."

Bones' expression cleared, and he stepped back to let Jim into the kitchen. "Thank God for that, then."

They moved into the dimly-lit room together, Bones continuing on towards the hall while Jim made very sure the door and screen were latched and locked. He wasn't sure what had just happened, with Stonn or with Bones, but it was the latter who was making his mind churn now. He didn't like where his thoughts were leading him.

"Hey, Bones?"

"Hm?" Bones looked at him questioningly.

"They accuse you of murder, too?"

With some effort, Jim shook it off. Not a chance. Not Bones.

He offered Bones a tired smile, and clapped a hand to his shoulder. "Just, let me get the air mattress out, alright? That chair is murder on the back."

Less than three hours later, Nyota burst into Jim's room wearing one of his old football jerseys and very little else, trailed by the massive stray dog from Scotty's. Jesus, Mary and Holy Joseph, in better light the thing looked even bigger.

"Jim! Get up!"

"What the everloving fuck?" he managed as he let her pull him upright and into the hallway, cringing away from the monster canine as it trotted alongside them. "What the hell is that thing even doing in my house?"

She shoved him into den, where the television was on and showed a roiling cloud of dense black smoke framed by bloody red flames. Firetrucks dwarfed by the blaze sprayed tiny streams of water at the base, but the fire only seemed to rage higher.

"—unknown if many survived," the announcer was saying. "Police pulled several people from the building earlier, but we've been told it's now too dangerous to attempt rescue of others who may trapped inside."

"That's Fangtasia," Nyota said in agony. "Someone put gasoline at all the exits."

Jim just stared at her, not quite making the connection between the burning bar and Nyota's horrified face. "Why would anyone be there? Wasn't it closed?"

"The vampires who run it and their human servants have rooms in the basement," she said, and he knew that wasn't public knowledge. "Spock's brother is the owner. Spock might be—"

"Put some pants on and get in the car," he ordered. "You hold down the fort, Fido."

The dog let out a resounding bark in response, and Jim gave it a startled look before skirting around it to run for his bedroom.

He grabbed a shirt and pants, stuffed his feet into sneakers, and at the last second, felt around in his dresser for the joke badge that read "Bikini Inspector" in a ribbon across the shield, a favor from Finnegan's bachelor party.

Jim and Nyota ran out into the yard, and the dog arranged himself in front of the door, stern and upright as a stalwart tin soldier.

Author's Note:

No one really new, but there are a few people I forgot to point out before: Janice Rand, the first murder victim, was Captain Kirk's yeoman in the original series. Marlena Moreau, the second murder victim, was the 'captain's woman' in the mirrorverse (TOS episode Mirror, Mirror). Robert Wesley , the Kirks' neighbor, was a Starfleet captain and later a governor of the planet Mantilles.