Shane swore he was dreaming again.
He could smell his vampire’s floral perfume and feel the delightful tingle of his kiss, as sure and strong as if it had happened that night. The warmth that pressed against Shane’s side and fitted under his head rose and fell in slow, relaxing motions. Shane drew his fingers over silky clothes and found skin. He snuggled deeper.
As the haze of sleep began to dissipate, warm sunlight peeking through his eyelids, it didn’t take his vampire’s presence with it. The realization settled on him like a sigh, soft and sweet. Exactly how his life was meant to be.
They were together now: he and Andres.
They wanted the same things. Wanted to make space for both their shared kink and an equal and honest relationship. Wanted to turn the weird obsessive thing they’d started with into a lasting, healthy love. That was far more magnificent than anything Shane could have gotten out of a predator taking him from behind in the night… especially since he was pretty sure Andres would oblige that fantasy too, if Shane asked.
He grinned against his vampire’s shoulder, and finally cracked his eyes open. They both lay on the floor, tangled in half of Shane’s sheet and an old blanket. Morning light streamed across the mattress and cascaded over the coffee table that butted up against their other side, catching on Andres’s hair and drawing a golden line across his face. He was so beautiful like that, sun-kissed and sleeping. But as Shane watched, he spotted the pinched areas of Andres’s expression.
With a pained groan that sounded a little like a no, Andres rolled away from the sun. A shiver trembled through him, and he settled again, Shane in his arms and his body tense. He felt… warm. Warm like a fever.
Oh god.
The sun.
Fuck.
Shane scrambled out of his vampire’s arms, diving across the bed for the blinds. He slammed them closed with such force that something in their cords snapped. The apartment’s other window was smaller, looking out into the tight alley where the light barely reached, but he closed that one too before hurrying to Andres’s side.
Andres, who still hadn’t woken.
Oh god.
“Andres?” Shane brushed back his vampire’s hair, his heart pounding so hard he could barely hear his own voice. “My love, please.”
Shane shook him, panic fueling the motion.
In a blink, he was shoved against the coffee table, pain roaring through his back for the second time in twelve hours. Andres crouched before him, and while their legs were still tangled, he seemed so far away suddenly, his eyes wide and his chest heaving, fangs out. As his gaze settled properly on Shane, he cursed.
“I’m sorry. I forget my… my strength,” he muttered and reached out a hand to Shane.
As Shane slipped his fingers into his, Andres flinched. Another little shudder went through him. Shane shifted closer. “Is it the sun? I didn’t think to close the blinds until just now. I’m a terrible boyfriend.”
“It’s fine.” Slowly, Andres straightened himself, pulling his body up to sit on the edge of the bed. He looked unsteady but when Shane reached to help him, he battered the offer away. “I mean it, I’m fine. I’ve had far worse.”
You don’t look fine, Shane wanted to say.
Andres must have picked up on his hesitation, because he smiled weakly. “I have a little pain, but look, no shaking.” He held out his hand as though to demonstrate. “The aches have always been the worst part for me, but that’s easy to work through.”
“Blood helps, doesn’t it?” Shane asked. “I feel great, if you want to feed?”
“Maybe after your breakfast and insulin.”
“That will be fifteen minutes.”
This time the quirk of Andres’s lips looked more genuine. “I’m not dying, pet. And some food would do me good, too.”
Shane grumbled all the way to the kitchen, but exactly sixteen and a half minutes later, he sat in Andres’s lap, nibbling on a toaster waffle while his vampire lapped at his neck. It felt so normal that it caught in his chest, like just existing in that quiet domesticity was filling a place in his heart he hadn’t realized had been empty. There were sexual pieces of their relationship that he’d missed in previous ones—and the way Andres could so casually slide fangs into Shane’s neck first thing in the morning and trace the skin along the lip of his pajama pants in between bites of breakfast were certainly doing things for him—but he’d missed this too, this comfort. Not being made to feel like he needed to tone down who he was or quietly conduct his insulin routines out of sight. Hell, Andres would probably help him with his testosterone too.
And it wasn’t that his vampire withheld all judgment—they were certainly side eyeing the general clutter Shane had let pile back up over the weeks—but it was as if each objectionable part of Shane only made Andres care for him more.
The blood must have helped, or perhaps Andres truly was as fine as they claimed, because as soon as Shane had finished eating, they licked his bite closed and pressed a red kiss to his temple, and, to Shane’s delight, his vampire set about cleaning the apartment. Andres ignored the sunlight that still slipped in from between the closed blinds and save for an occasional wince that could have been about anything, and a momentary meltdown over a spider they forced Shane to remove from the premises while they hovered on tiptoes at a distance, they did seem fine.
Fine enough to start ordering Shane around.
Andres pointed to the pile of old stuff in the corner. “Why is this still here?”
“I was going to take it to the thrift shop down the street, but it just looked so sad at the thought of leaving me…”
“You’re outrageous,” Andres grumbled, pressing their lips to Shane’s hair. They picked up the entire load in one arm and headed for the door.
“Andres, the sun.”
“It’ll be five minutes,” they replied, already twisting the handle.
“Andres!” Shane scolded. “I’m perfectly capable of taking it out.”
“All right.” But Andres didn’t move from the door, staring Shane down like a predator on the hunt.
Shane groaned. He maneuvered to them, hopping over the cat’s toys and a stack of unread books and a pile of trash Andres had collected, and accepted the over-full donations box. “Fuck you.”
Andres kissed him properly, slipping one fang into Shane’s lip just enough to deliver a blissful dose of venom that tingled like a caress between Shane’s legs. They whispered against Shane’s mouth after, “I’ll do your laundry.”
“Fuck me,” Shane responded.
Andres grinned, gripping his chin possessively. “Oh, don’t worry, my pet. I fully plan on taking over every little piece of you in time.”
Somehow Shane made it to the thrift shop and back. When he returned, Andres was in the building’s basement, doing Shane’s laundry, so he started on one of the five useless clickbait articles he was supposed to finish that day, in between checking his phone for messages from Tara or their contact. Two-thirty in the afternoon, and still nothing.
“Aren’t you worried?” he asked when Andres returned.
They shrugged. “It’s only been sixteen hours. Give it another three. Then I’ll be worried.”
But Shane couldn’t maintain that kind of calm. Between what Andres had told him of the vampires’ valiant escape the night before, and Shane’s stand with the humans, they figured the Starlight Club had come out with limited casualties—limited being an unfortunately non-zero number. But that didn’t mean nothing else had followed the vampires home. And now more than ever, Tara’s contacts should have been willing to speak up. They had no guarantees, though.
He tried to remind himself that even if this fell through, they still had the Vitalis-Barron spring gala coming up—the Met-inspired one. But the more they knew before attending, the better that night was bound to go. And if anything was going to change long term, they’d need all the help they could get.
With his thoughts constantly swarming back to Vitalis-Barron, Shane finally gave up the clickbait in favor of his vampire article, transcribing Tara’s interview and bulking up his outline, sifting through the records of everyone he’d spoken to over the last few months to connect the dots and back up Tara’s pain and fear and hope. He shot Andres questions in between, to no avail.
“What did you think of the Starlight Club?”
“You can figure that out yourself, pet.”
“How does having a safe space for vampires to express themselves as vampires affect the overall community?”
“No comment.”
“Does the secrecy necessary for the Starlight Club’s survival detract from its advantages?”
“Shane, please.” He looked up from the shelf he was re-organizing. Had there always been this much space in Shane’s apartment? Andres was clearly some kind of dimensional wizard, with a side of cat-whisperer, The Heathen having curled up at his feet any time he stopped moving for more than three minutes. He had gone entirely still now, his expression dark. “You know what I think? That secrecy is paramount. That the more the human society knows about this, the harder it will be for us to hold onto it. It’s one of the few good things we have. If they were on the lookout for the Starlight Club—god forbid, if they knew where it would be and when it would be there—they would come for us, like Vitalis-Barron is already doing. Maybe they wouldn’t bring weapons, not at first. Maybe they’d just bring their hate, their insults, their statements of death. But words don’t stay words for long.”
“We have words too.”
“And who will listen?”
“I will,” he insisted. “And others like me.”
A tragic twist came into Andres’s lips. “I’m afraid there is no one else quite like you, pet.”
Shane didn’t know how to object to that. He leaned his forehead into a hand. “Well, how do you feel about Maul monopolizing the blood trade in this city in order to rip off his own community?”
“Don’t ask me that,” Andres snapped. “You’re human—you don’t get to ask me that.”
The growl in his voice caught Shane off guard, sending a chill along his skin and lifting his hairs like he was a prey-thing. He was a prey-thing. But then Andres’s brow tightened and guilt overwhelmed his features.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I know.” Shane smiled. “And I get that this is not entirely my place. It’s why I’m asking questions. You know, you’re not the only one whose life has been treated as expendable? My rights—rights to who I am as a trans man and the substance that keeps me alive as a diabetic—are also treated like things to be granted and taken away on the whims of governments and corporations and religions. And that doesn’t make it appropriate for me to probe into your community’s pain; I have my own privileges. But I know what I’ve experienced, and I want to know what you have too, because maybe we can be stronger together, if we understand each other.”
Andres looked down at the drawer. His fingers moved, sifting through the same three objects he’d been failing to sort since they started this discussion. “Maul ripping off the vampiric community hurts,” he whispered. “It kills me to know that there are vampires going hungry because of him, and it kills me even more because he wouldn’t be able to do this at all if our larger, human-populated society didn’t maintain the system he works under. The system I work under, too. But what else am I supposed to do?” He looked at Shane then, pleading.
Considering how many half-written clickbait articles he had to finish by tonight in order to keep his health insurance, Shane thought he understood that. But he didn’t have an answer for it. He asked instead, “What else do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you leave his business? If there was a better place, or a better way, would you risk it all to reach that?” Shane asked. Andres’s nails dug into the pack of expired batteries he was sorting, and it made Shane’s heart hurt as though it were the center of his own chest that his vampire gripped. Gently, he added, “It’s not just this city’s impoverished vampires he’s hurt, but you too.”
Andres dropped the items in his hands, running his fingers through his hair in a motion so rushed it looked painful. He shook his head. “No more than anyone else who works for him. Less, even.”
Somehow, Shane didn’t think that was true.
The text finally came at nine-seventeen that night.
Unknown Number
Hey, Tara said you wanted to talk to my fiancé and I? There’s not a lot we can tell you, but if you want to meet up, I can probably arrange that. Wesley works until six on weekdays, so maybe after his dinner? We can grab some horchata? That’s safer than coming to our place. Let me know what you think.
By the way this is Vincent Barnes.
The black heart he sent after his final message made Shane like him instantly. They scheduled a meeting for the following night, and Andres went home to feed his cat and work on a few of the upcoming blood acquisition plans he’d promised Maul he’d get to. Shane almost volunteered to come with him, but the chaos he’d put his body through was finally taking a toll, and he still had a thousand words he was supposed to write about a product he was pretty sure was not made to massage bananas. He opted for a lingering kiss at the door instead, with promises that Andres would grab dinner with him before their meeting with Vincent and Wesley.
The bruises along his back hurt as he settled into his desk chair.
He’d startled Andres. That was all.
After his vampire had taken such care never to grab him with more than the lightest of touches, never to push or twist, even the prick of his fangs always coming with a rush of venom, the shoving wasn’t like him. It had to have been an accident. Just an accident that had happened twice in twelve hours…