Shane dreamed of him again that night: his vampire.
His. That was how Shane had been referring to the mysterious fanged stranger who’d kissed him at Vitalis-Barron Pharmaceutical’s masquerade gala. His, like that single press of lips made Shane entitled. It had felt that way at the time, like a declaration.
A claiming.
Shane swore he could still conjure the vampire’s touch as they’d danced beneath the shimmering chandeliers, and the prick of the vampire’s fangs on his finger. And that kiss... Shane’s vampire had paused his flight from security just long enough to steal it before vanishing back into the night, turning himself from a glorious monster into a sentimental memory.
And Shane couldn’t stop remembering.
It had been five months since that fateful October night, but his lips tingled even now, curled in the bed that he hadn’t shared with anyone in years. If he focused on that sensation, maybe he could fade into the dream again, the hazy realm of sleep letting his fantasies run wild.
But Shane had a vampire he actually knew, who’d agreed to send him the location of her black market blood dealer later today. It had taken a week of buttering her up, promising extensively that he wouldn’t say who’d given him the scoop—and that, yes, yes, he was taking his own life into his hands, he knew how dangerous it was to go tromping through a vampire’s lair, even a temporary one, especially with the recent uptick in aggression the local hunters were displaying. But he wouldn’t be tromping, exactly. He just wanted an interview, and it wasn’t like they’d kill him for asking questions. He couldn’t chicken out now; this was the make-or-break point of his War on Blood article.
Shane rubbed his eyes, scowling at the clock.
1:07 pm.
Before his mysterious gala vampire had crawled into his dreams and made a home there, he would never have been caught in bed past noon on a workday. But who was counting, really? No one. Mostly because there was no one in his life right now who knew him well enough to notice.
He rolled out of bed, clumsily kicking off the sheet, which seemed determined to cling to his calf. One glance at his glucose monitoring app confirmed that he’d slept in longer than he should have.
“Gross,” he grumbled, and opened his bedside table, only to remember that he’d used up his last cartridge. The new ones were in the fridge. “Extra gross.”
He slumped his way toward the bathroom.
The trek should not have been so hard, considering the abysmally small square footage of his studio apartment. As he forced his way across, he compulsively rated everything he passed: the desk chair and coffee table hit the middle of the list, as necessary furnishings that were not yet entirely overridden by dishes and clothes, but the laundry basket that had tipped over at some point last week was a zero out of ten, and the pile of stuff in the corner got negative points. He’d been meaning to donate it for so long that any day now it might acquire sentience. The whole trek felt like a quest, complete with the near-death experience of his cat trying to maul his leg. The skinny black fiend shrieked and dove back under the couch after.
“I’m docking a whole star for that, you nasty trash gremlin,” Shane called after her, and made a mental note to pick up more treats that weekend.
And then clean.
He had been meaning to clean—wanting things to be clean, if for no other reason than that he knew he worked better in a tidy environment—it just never seemed to get done. There was always something slightly more important. Like his groaning bladder.
The toilet paper had run out, but he stretched for the last tissue in the box by the sink and quickly washed his hands after. He gave the dirty-blonde stubble around his mouth a little glare and untangled the waves of his hair with his fingers before banishing most of it to a high ponytail. A shower was probably in order later. In all fairness, a shower had been in order two days ago but who was counting? Again: no one.
Still, it was a good thing his Shane Rates Stuff series didn’t include past, present, and future selves…
At least this self had a proper article to write.
The bathroom door caught on the jacket he’d draped over its handle. He pulled it loose, but something else came free, a few of its white feathers fluttering slowly to the ground. His mask from the gala.
Another feather broke off as he ran a finger over it, and he boosted one knee onto the bathroom counter to delicately loop its tie over the edge of his mirror. It hung gracefully, gently swaying back and forth against the glass.
The rest of his costume for the Vitalis-Barron gala had been a last-minute compilation of a white shawl over white clothing. He hadn’t thought much of it as he’d donned it—he’d arrived at that gala expecting a dull night of dragging gossip from the rich attendees as he drearily snapped their pictures for ChatterDash’s online celebrity column—but one smile from his vampire had changed that.
“Cygnus, is it?”Shane’s vampire had mused, the heat in his gaze so strong, even behind his mask of blood-red whirls, that Shane could remember it long after the other few details he’d seen of his vampire’s face had slipped from his mind. His vampire’s perfect Dracula costume should have given him away then and there, yet the confidence with which he wore it swept over Shane. “You’re certainly lovely enough to be placed among the stars.”
Shane had felt like a prize then, a beautiful thing crowned in constellations and hunted across the night sky. He extended his hand toward the hanging mask and gave the little bow he should have offered back when his vampire asked him to dance. The encircling of his vampire’s arms then had been a wonder and a comfort, his mouth so near. Now that Shane knew real fangs had hidden within it, the memory sent a lovely shudder up his spine.
He pressed his fingers to his own lips, watching the way they parted in the mirror and wondering if his vampire had felt that same parting as they kissed, the same soft gust of his breath. Whether his vampire might still remember it.
Even if Shane had been forgotten, he regretted nothing. It had brought him here, after all, to his vampire fixation and his first prestigious, paid article since college.
Moving to his kitchenette, he worked out his insulin with far less attention than he knew he should have, over-estimating to keep from having to poke himself again immediately after he ate. He jabbed his pen into a pinch of his stomach skin. His body was made for needles, he’d told his endocrinologist early into his transition. When he couldn’t remember a time in his life before diabetes, it kind of had to be. The prick made him think of fangs though, graced by smirking lips beneath a dark half-mask.
Grabbing the last everything bagel and a full glass of water, he plopped down at his desk. His brain wanted nothing more than to drown in his War on Blood article. It wasn’t technically an article yet, just a chaotic outline of notes and questions, and he had nothing useful to do with them without that blood dealer interview.
But he’d gotten this far on determination and courage, and he would make it the rest of the way or die trying.
Since his first real encounter with one of the most stigmatized and sexualized nonhumans that night at the gala, he’d been slowly working himself into the hidden sub-community of vampires that existed within San Salud’s inner city. It had taken months of searching just to determine what exactly he was looking for in the first place, but the last few weeks he’d gone all in, running down rumors that took him into back allies and odd little sex and magic shops, frequenting the new vampire-centered blood bank in Ala Santa, and even paying a visit to a freelance metal-worker who accepted commissions from nonhumans. The backyard smith had refused to tell Shane anything beyond “my customers’ privacy is a sacred thing” and “maybe you should leave now” and “if you don’t get out you’ll be learning a hell of a lot more about vampires real soon.”
Learning a hell of a lot more about vampires was one of Shane’s only two hobbies—all right, yes, obsessions—but he was fairly sure the smith would have just called the cops.
Fuck though, if this lead panned out and he could meet the blood dealer who illegally supplied most of San Salud’s vampires, that would throw his investigation wide open. For the article, of course. Not because maybe, possibly, if he hung around vampire haunts long enough, he might run back into his vampire.
His vampire.
It had taken the whole night to reveal that the monster was more than a mask—that he, in fact, was his mask, a fanged creature of the night in the flesh. He’d taken Shane’s breath away, catching him in the darkness, a baring of fangs and a prick of a finger so unlike those he’d grown accustomed to over a life of glucose monitoring.
“You’re not planning to eat me, are you?”
“I admit that would be very nice, if you were offering,” his vampire had replied, and then, as though he could see the way Shane’s fear and intrigue fought, “Do you think me a monster?”
“Aren’t you?”Shane had taunted. “Cornering swans in the dark.”
But as alluring as his vampire was, he was far from the only one sneaking through the shadowed corners of the city.
If Shane did well with his article, the Star might hire him full time, and he could be the journalist for vampire-related topics. Topics like the cause for the decreasing vampire population in San Salud and why a random board member from Vitalis-Barron Pharmaceutical had admitted to her part in it. Shane could find no evidence linking her to anything shadier than a typical country club, but the more he got his name out there, the more doors he could break down in search of the skeletons within. He had already wormed onto the media list for Vitalis-Barron’s Met Gala-inspired party that took place in a little over a month, hoping that a few well-placed questions to the right people might earn him a lead, or else a beautiful criminal preparing to sink in his fangs.
As things stood though, it was still ChatterDash’s excruciating fluff bits that provided Shane’s insurance, which knocked the price of his insulin down enough that it would have almost been reasonable, were it an occasional lavish splurge and not the unending cost of the thing literally keeping him alive. He turned to the meme-littered column of regurgitated celebrity gossip he’d been assigned the morning prior, trying to pretend it wasn’t the tenth one he’d churned out that week. At least back when they’d been paying him for his rating lists, he could slip in some thoughtful commentary here and there.
His mind was nearly sludge by the time his laptop’s chat app started dinging.
Nat20
San Salud.
LARP.
Con.
Of course it was Nat—no one else on his list had talked to him in months. Apparently there was only one way to make friends as a neurodivergent adult: you both had a socially unacceptable obsession with vampires and were just lonely enough to talk about them with a near stranger at a comic shop. Even if Nat’s obsession was based in trauma, while Shane’s was… less complicated.
Shane-anigans
Explanation please.
Nat1
Are you coming to LARPcon or not?
Shane-anigans
I’ve already planned a Shane Rates Things for it :)
Nat1
Loser /affectionate
Though not the “official” tone indicator for affection—that, Shane was pretty sure, was a shorter /aff—Nat’s spelled out versions made it easier for them both to create and decipher what they needed in the moment.
Nat1
Though tbf the only other person I know who’s into anything nerdy is my cousin and they’re a miserable overachiever who will drop a grand on a cosplay to make everyone else look bad.
Honestly THAT’S more pathetic than any video content you could make.
Shane-anigans
So now I know just how much I mean to you. /jokes
What about your scientist boyfriend? I thought you’d said you were going to invite him?
Nat1
Idk tbh. He’s been acting weird since I got myself fired. Like, overprotective weird. Which, yes, fine, leading up to that I let my grief get the better of me in a bad way, scared off the few people I thought were my friends and dragged my coworkers into a stupid confrontation I knew deep down was misdirected, ate an unfortunate amount of ice cream, that whole drill. But still it’s some shoddy energy to try bringing to an event that’s meant to be fun.
Also, and sorry if this is tmi, but I think he’s still sad that the guy he’s been thirsting over at work got laid off for being a vamp.
Like babe, he wasn’t into you??? I don’t understand why he’s so hung up. I mean just go fuck a cute blonde with fangs and get it out of your system already it’s annoying.
(He could also be fucking me, I’m RIGHT HERE, but no, he’s got to be protective and mopey instead.)
I swear one of these days I’m going to catch a pretty vampire twink and deliver him right to my bf’s doorstep.
There was a lot to unpack there, starting with, oh em gee, Nat was telling him personal details about her relationship, which was definitely a Stage Two friendship thing to do, and ending with the fact that he’d just used oh em gee in his head like it was a reasonable expression. He had to take a break from those damn ChatterDash columns.
Nat1
(Sorry did I scare you off.)
Shane-anigans
(No no, I was just getting some typing in on this vapid excuse for a ChatterDash article.)
This sounds like quite the conundrum with QUITE the solution, especially for you.
Are you sure you’d be ready to let another vampire get that close?
Shane didn’t know the details of Nat’s past—it seemed rude to poke at an open wound—but she’d admitted soon after they’d met that much of what she’d learned about vampires had come from her mentor, who’d done some kind of security and investigative work that put him in contact with them regularly. He’d been murdered five months ago, by a vampire with a record of forcing his fangs on sleeping victims. It had clearly fucked Nat up a bit, including instilling some ideas in her head that weren’t particularly kind to vampires as a community. But if they had been put there by an external force, then Shane wanted to believe that with some guidance, she could move past them. This seemed like a good sign: her fear and bitterness wearing off enough that she wasn’t acting like any vampire on the street might become the next murderer.
Nat1
Probably not, but I’m trying to be more open. I know, in my head, that not all vampires are like the one who killed my mentor. (And let’s be real here, I’ve kind of let my anger over that consume me to such an unhealthy degree that I had to get fired and meet you to realize it.)
But it’s still hard, you know? I’ve been so obsessed with protecting myself against them, that I forgot it’s not just about the fangs, it’s about what they do with those fangs. Literally but also, like, metaphorically.
Shane doubted Nat would approve of the way his own vampire used his fangs.
It had been luck that Shane saw that use happen, peering through the glass of the balcony door into the room where his vampire had cornered one of the Vitalis-Barron board members at the end of the night.
“You are the monsters,”he’d growled, “wearing our faces at your ghoulish party while your company feasts on our flesh.”
When she’d admitted to it—admitted her people were abducting vampires off the streets of San Salud—Shane’s vampire had sunk his fangs into her neck, drinking from her until she’d collapsed. That had scared Shane. It scared him so thoroughly that when his vampire turned toward him beyond the glass door—toward his only exit—Shane had wrapped both hands around the outside knob.
“Is this where Phaethon dies?”his vampire had asked, casting himself as the lover that the swan constellation, Cygnus, mourned for. And Shane had known that if it were true, his grief would indeed throw him into the stars in one way or another.
So he’d opened the door.
He’d set his vampire loose.
And as his vampire had run into the night, the valiant monster had turned back once, pressing his lips so gently to Shane’s. Though Shane’s right mind had warred against it, his heart had yearned in that moment to be swept off his feet and whisked away like the old lore. Which was ridiculous—he knew how those biased stories ended, and it was not with happily ever after.
But he swore he could still feel his vampire’s kiss lingering like starlight on his lips, and if he left all rational thought behind, he could believe the ultimate mythical tragedy would be worth another chance at that.
Shane swallowed and tried to roll away the tingling of his lips. It was the middle of the day now—or the middle of his day, at least, even if the night had technically already fallen—and he certainly didn’t need those fantasies wrecking him yet. God, he needed a distraction or else he was going to spiral from this, end up curled on his floor with a box of gingersnaps as big as his head, hunting through pictures from the gala for a glimpse of his vampire in the background, for confirmation that he was real and any clue he could follow back to him again, even just a glimpse of the mouth Shane could eternally feel pressed to his own but couldn’t quite picture in his mind any longer. He knew from experience that the backlash of that would decimate his mental health, and when the lead he was hoping for came in tonight, he needed every bit of his brain functional.
That meant turning his attention to special interest number two. He swore he had a half-outlined Shane Rates Things for the Fishnettery’s aesthetic somewhere around here. And there was always half a chance that if he hung around the place enough he’d find a cute person to fantasize about in his vampire’s place.
Shane turned in his ChatterDash articles for the day, and with a much-needed shower and a less hurriedly calculated dose of insulin, he headed out into the night.