Make those villains pay.
Vincent’s challenge had been lingering in Shane’s mind, bobbing in and out like a tide along the shore. With it, it brought a determination for the inverse: to give back to the people those villains had hurt. Villains like Vitalis-Barron, but also Frederick Maul, and the entire city who’d made their vampiric population scrounge for blood in the shadows. Vengeance alone wasn’t justice—even if Vitalis-Barron certainly had to be stopped. But there were things beyond their destruction that needed doing, and Shane was in the perfect position to step into one of them now, because, as it turned out, the vampire who’d worked at the pharmaceutical company until recently was the same one who ran Jose’s Blood Bank.
A softly glowing blood available sign sat in the building’s large, tinted and curtained front window, two little fangs poking from the bottoms of the os.
They’d called ahead, to be sure that ex-Vitalis-Barron scientist Dr. Clementine Hughes would be there, but as Andres was about to hang up, Shane had taken the phone on impulse. “Do you have a phlebotomist in at that time?” he’d asked, ignoring his sudden instinct to tuck his arm in close. “I’d like to donate again.”
He was ready—ready to give back to the vampires of San Salud who’d already lost so many of their own. He had plenty of blood to spare, his glucose levels managed well enough that losing some wouldn’t bother him, especially with Andres’s venom to pick him back up. It was just a little needle prick.
The crook of Shane’s arm still tingled uncomfortably as he skirted past the line of vampires waiting inside the blood bank. He tried to focus on the pressure of Andres’s hand against his back, on his nearness. His protection. Nobody here would dream of trying to take Shane’s blood without his permission, but if they did, he had someone ready to fight for him.
The phlebotomist met them at the front counter, escorting them both to a secluded donation chair in the farthest end of the large, portioned-off room. The arched wood ceiling crested over them and a display case of unusual salt and pepper shakers separated them from the next chair over. Shane’s nerves roiled as he sat down. The phlebotomist crossed the room to collect supplies, and Shane focused on the eccentric display, comically rating the shakers in his head. Two stars for originality, two for creatively coordinating the salt versus the pepper, one for whether they reminded him of needles or blood bags. The air tasted a little stale. What the hell was taking the phlebotomist so long? She couldn’t possibly have that many supplies to collect. It wasn’t like they intended to bleed him dry.
Shane found himself tugging at his shirt collar, then running his fingers through the ends of his hair.
Andres hadn’t bothered to put on his contacts that morning, and he watched Shane from behind his glass’s sleek, boxy rims with a worried look. “Are you all right, my swan?”
“I’m fine,” Shane responded automatically.
The lie didn’t seem to placate his vampire. “You know,” Andres said, gently, “they will want to access your veins somehow.”
Shane huffed, like that would clear the tightness that was building in his lungs. “I’ve done this before, yes.” He dragged his arms down, forming an ex of protection across his chest. He had asked for this. He was ready. Besides, the best way to keep riding was to get back on the metaphorical horse, wasn’t it?
Andres looked like he was prepared to argue, but in the end he only pressed a kiss into Shane’s hair. “May I?” he asked, touching Shane’s hands with all the tenderness in the world.
The affection melted Shane, dimming the buzz of anxiety beneath his skin. “Please,” he whispered.
Andres pressed his lips to one of Shane’s knuckles before gripping gently onto his wrist. “Give me yourself, pet.”
The demand felt like the sun’s warmth, a stable, eternal heat that bloomed from the center of Shane’s chest. He let Andres unfurl one of his arms, felt more than saw the pressure of his vampire’s fingers drawing up his skin. His insides still squirmed as Andres’s thumb pressed into the soft inner vein of his elbow, but he focused on Andres’s face, on his ever possessive and protective presence. I’m yours, Shane thought.
And like they were connected, Andres murmured it, “You’re mine.”
Shane leaned back in his chair, one arm still folded against his chest, and dwelled on the sensation of Andres tracing up and down his vein. When the motion shifted upward and a gloved hand took the place of his vampire’s fingertips, tightening the tourniquet and applying the sanitation wipe, Shane kept focusing on Andres’s touch. He could do this. He was ready.
He just wouldn’t look.
So he kept his eyes closed and thought of his vampire. He could not quite pretend the prick of the needle was anything but cold metal. A fresh flash of panic rolled through him, quelled only by Andres’s voice, his breath hot on Shane’s ear. “You’re safe.”
A few more seconds, and the worst part was over. Now just came the waiting.
This was good. The blood he was giving now was life-sustaining, and he would not think of Maul’s needle, or the feeling of his goons’ fangs sinking into his skin, or the slow panic of his consciousness slipping—slipping—slipping.
Shane made the mistake of opening his eyes, trying to find Andres’s face again. Instead his gaze latched onto the machine his donated blood was rocking in, the sterile plastic and the slowly filling red. His mind went to another room, another night, the bags beside him filling and filling and filling, switched out again and again as he struggled and cried and eventually succumbed to the blackness.
“Shane,” Andres murmured, worry in his voice. It latched onto Shane, grimy fangs lodging deep into his flesh. His very existence in this reality seemed to spin. And still his blood was pouring out of him, too much too fast. Like last time.
“Andres,” Shane choked. His eyes were open—he’d opened them, he swore—but half his vision was dark spots like the world had been hollowed out, like his chest, like his veins. He suffocated on it, barely forcing out the words. “I can’t—”
He’d hardly moved his lips when the catheter slipped free of his arm, a warm pressure replacing it. His vision slowly returned in flickers and crackles, the room coming back into focus around the phlebotomist dropping the used donation supplies into a red bin and Andres at his side, both hands gripping Shane’s arm and a bead of red on his lips from where he must have quickly licked the wound closed instead of letting it be bandaged.
Both of them were speaking to him, gentle but worried.
“You’re safe, Shane. Look at me, I’ve got you. You’re safe here.”
“How are you feeling? I’m going to lift the footrest and lean the chair back, all right? You’re done now, just rest.”
Shane felt numb, empty, tight and terrible. His world shifted again as his chair moved, and his senses returned in a proper flood. He gasped in air with a shudder, forcing himself to breathe out slowly. The panic didn’t abate entirely, still tingling beneath his skin, his arms tight to his chest again, but the clearer his head grew, the more he could feel a very rational shame sinking in. He managed to force his gaze to his donated blood, hoping perhaps the whole ordeal had taken longer than he’d realized, but the bag had only filled a tenth of the way. It was barely enough to feed a small vampire for a day, and certainly less than Andres was drinking from Shane in a single bite. Not nearly enough to knock him out, even if they’d taken it directly from the vein in his neck.
The darkness had been all in his head.
Shane dragged in a breath, tearing his gaze away. “I didn’t finish.”
“That’s fine, it happens sometimes,” the phlebotomist reassured him, smiling. “We don’t want anyone to force themselves into a position that makes them uncomfortable or unsafe. Just relax for now. I’m going to get you juice and a snack—does that sound all right?”
“Yes, thank you,” Shane said, vacantly, briefly cataloging the insulin he’d need to take to adjust for her offer, though in his head he was still reeling too much to do the math.
He’d thought he was ready for this. He should have been ready. Trembles raced up and down his arms and through his rib cage and it took him a moment to realize what they were: shivers. He tucked his arms all the closer.
“Is it cold in here?” he asked Andres.
Andres responded by stripping off his jacket, draping it over Shane. “If that’s not enough, I’m sure they have blankets.”
“No, I think this is fine,” Shane replied, weakly. Maybe it wasn’t, but it smelled like Andres, softly floral, and it lay like a shield over his arms. A protection Shane shouldn’t have needed still, a whole month after Maul’s assault. “Fuck.”
“Shane?” Andres sounded so scared and soft, and he knelt before Shane, a hand securely on Shane’s leg. “You’re safe. Everything’s fine.”
“I know,” Shane snapped. “But that’s the problem. I’m safe. I’m the fucking safest I could possibly be, and I still couldn’t put up with a tiny needle prick and a little blood loss I’d have thought nothing of a couple months ago. It’s pathetic.”
“I don’t think that’s how this works? I’m certainly no therapist, but it does seem to me that your reactions are perfectly normal. You can’t brute-force your body to accept something that’s hurt it in the past.”
“You did.” Shane hadn’t meant it like that, or perhaps just hadn’t meant to say it out loud, and he felt a bit rude once he had. His own failures had nothing to do with Andres’s ability to keep going after the traumatic event that had radically altered the rest of his life. Shane tried to soften his voice, smiling weakly. “I mean, you got over it, didn’t you? You started working directly for Maul after he had you turned. And here I can’t even engage with something that’s barely related to him.”
Andres looked confused for a moment. Confused, or… vacant. But then he blinked and his shoulders bobbed upward. He ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe I’m the one who’s not normal.”
The whole reaction certainly hit Shane as a bit irregular, though perhaps not in the way Andres meant it. It made him feel even worse than before. “I’m sorry. However you handled that trauma after doesn’t make it any less potent in the moment.”
“You could offer that advice to yourself, too,” Andres replied, giving him a weak smile. “You have every right to be hurt. Maul is…” He swallowed and removed his other hand from Shane’s thigh to run it through his hair as well. Partway through the motion, he seemed to rethink it, slowly reaching to fiddle with Shane’s hair instead. The touch appeared to calm him the same way it did Shane. “He’s a bastard. He’s been cruel to far more people than me. Crueler to them, I know. I have a special use to him, so he lets me do what I want, rents me my house, even listens to me sometimes. He never really tried to kill me.” Andres shrugged. “So it’s fine. I’m fine. But you don’t have to be.”
Fineseemed the wrong word, wrong in ways Shane couldn’t quite pinpoint, but that thought was derailed as the phlebotomist returned with a cup of juice and a collection of individually wrapped cookies and snack bars. She was followed by a golden-haired vampire dressed in a wool vest and slacks, a black turtleneck underneath. He wore a contemplative look with it, like he should have been stashed in the back of some dusty library musing on the meaning of life, or teaching Shakespeare to a room of posh graduate students instead of running a blood bank.
Shane felt his cheeks heat as the vampire approached, and he was suddenly conscious of how tightly he was holding his arms, still buried beneath Andres’s jacket. He couldn’t seem to let go, though. “I’m sorry. I’d donated before, I thought I’d be fine.”
“It’s all right, truly. That you were willing to try means more to us than the result.” The owner—Clementine—didn’t smile, but he seemed so sincere that it relaxed Shane. The gentle expression didn’t diminish as his gaze fixed on Andres, but his brow lifted. “Oh.”
Andres made a short, bemused noise. “First my work, now yours.”
“We just can’t get away from blood?” The other vampire suggested, as though he wasn’t sure whether it was a joke or not.
“I take it your romantic dilemma sorted itself out?”
Clementine smiled in response. “And yours?”
Andres drew a hand through the stray lock around Shane’s face, smirking. “Turns out, he remembered me after all.”
Whatever they were on about seemed amusing, but Shane could ask his vampire about it later. “Vitalis-Barron?” Shane suggested, trying to shift the topic.
“Right.” Clementine nodded. “So you’re taking down my old boss together?” He smiled properly then, his fangs out. “How can I be of service?”
Their conversation turned into a three-hour analysis of Vitalis-Barron’s security, layout, and employee population—in which it became clear that their security was extreme, their layout annoying, and their employees varied between those who knew the full scope of their villainy and the far larger set, who were only vaguely aware that some samples they received had come from vampires, but not that they might be taken under duress. Sometime around 2 a.m., Clementine’s boyfriend appeared with a pizza, and an hour after that their flagrant flirtatious touching, which would have put the couples in the dark corners of the Starlight Club to shame, had grown to the point that Shane and Andres excused themselves.
From there, the planning progressed to a text thread, where the remaining pieces came together little by little.
Dr. Clementine Hughes
On second thought, your best bet is probably to go after Anthony. He’s a bastard and a sociopath, but he also had the knowledge to fool Vitalis-Barron for years, and still—somehow—hasn’t been fired. I believe I am currently the only person from there who knows he’s been stealing from them, but I’ve decided to keep that information to myself because he still supplies a few nonhumans with medications they can find nowhere else, if only for his own selfish reasons. He’s loyal to nothing but the science, so he might not even need much convincing to help you.
He hasn’t missed this party since I started, so I imagine he’ll be there again. I don’t have any more specifics than that though, unfortunately. I’ve always avoided the biannual galas like the plague.
“We’re really doing this,” Andres muttered.
Shane glanced at them across the kitchen, catching their gaze for half a second as his vampire finished the dishes. He’d come to Andres’s house for once: a place that was, so far as Shane had seen, just as tidy as he’d imagined. He was dying to explore the upstairs—and one particular room in it, his mind still haunted by the image Andres had given Maul nearly a month ago. Shane didn’t care to be passed out or literally chained, but he burned at the thought of being laid bare and defenseless in Andres’s bed, whimpering and trembling beneath his vampire’s whims. If his vampire would make the next move already.
Shane had been imagining it all week—turning those musings into the best series of orgasms he’d ever had, in the bathtub, under the sheets, twice at his desk and even once in the kitchen. Yet Andres still had not tried to do more with him than kiss and nip, their mouth always agonizingly above his collarbone. Shane was about to be very annoyed, and an un-submissive level of demanding, if it continued.
At least he’d had enough else to occupy him, trying to track down the relatives and friends of those who Vitalis-Barron had kidnapped without putting himself in Maul’s line of sight. He’d uncovered little enough in the beginning, but the more he searched—and the more of his assigned clickbait articles he ignored—the more he found situations where the murdered individual had people looking for them. He reached out to those he could, though he tried not to press them too hard, to turn up any more grief than he had to. Vitalis-Barron had caused enough pain without Shane adding salt to the wound.
As he worked, he kept coming back to the one oddity among the many, many names—one so-called patient of Vitalis-Barron whose identifier was left blank. They had no defining specifications—Dr. Blood had signed the patient’s consent form herself. The study listed for them had only the signifiers VR Study. Shane had found ten other vampires enrolled in it, all entering it around the same time, and marked as dead in quick succession after. The mystery patient had no death date, though, vanishing along with the VR Study.
It was so odd—and like the special project Dr. Blood had tried to recruit Clementine onto, it could have been nothing. Or it could have been so much more.
Andres snapped Shane out of his mental wandering with a soft touch to his shoulder. “I should start on your ensemble for Vitalis-Barron’s knock-off Met Gala today.” They looked almost embarrassed. “What are you most into? I’m sorry I never asked when I designed the first outfit. You could be a suit guy, for all I’d know.”
“I hate suits on myself, so you’re safe.”
It was the great tragedy of Shane’s transmasculine life. They just weren’t his style, even after transitioning. But then he’d donned the costume Andres had made him for the Starlight Club and felt like the world had aligned for him, letting him be suddenly perfectly beautiful and still perfectly a man; every aesthetic he’d wanted while yearning over Howl from the Ghibli movie and a dozen other beautiful animated boys, while no less the pinnacle of his version of masculinity.
“I love the flowing aspects of my Starlight Club outfit, and the sheer fabric, and the sparkles. I’m not into true dresses, but things that mimic the swirl of a dress when you spin? That’s a ten out of ten on the list of mundane things that feel weirdly like magic.” It was topped only by the very specific sensation he got from walking one foot after the other in the wind with his arms out, and the pressure of Andres’s fangs when they were just about to prick into his neck.
Andres was staring at that neck now. “And for skin? How much do you feel comfortable showing?”
“It depends on the setting. For the gala, I’d prefer more layers than I wore to the Starlight Club.”
“Of course. Work and play are different situations…” Their voice dropped into a growl as they spoke, and they scooted closer, dipping down enough that their lips brushed the top of Shane’s ear as they added, “When you’re attending my pleasure, though, I get to show off however much of your skin I desire.”
The shudder that rolled through Shane was so ecstatic it felt like its own kind of orgasm. “As you say, my love.”
That seemed to please his vampire immensely, Andres’s fingers coming to drag teasingly along Shane’s sides. They settled against his scars, the thin ridges tingling beneath the fabric. “What about these? Do you want them exposed or hidden?”
The timid ecstasy of being touched there, not with hesitation but with affection and desire, tightened in the back of Shane’s throat. It wasn’t as though his past partners—the few he’d had since his transition—were anything but courteous with him. But they’d remained at an arm’s length, people who Shane might, possibly, let touch him, but would never have laid beside his bed as he slept, never have thought of his needs first or treated him like he was something to be treasured. Some of them had fucked him, but not once had they made love.
None of them had made who he was feel like a treasure.
“Exposed,” Shane replied, “but only when I’m with you.”
“Oh,” they said, and Shane thought it was a sound of understanding; of more than that—of recognition. A single trans person was a victim. A group of them was an army. Together, they could conquer, if not the world, then at least the anxiety the world had instilled in them.
One of Andres’s hands slipped back down, sliding curiously under Shane’s shirt. Shane felt as though his heart stopped, the world slowing to those five points of contact, fingertips drawing gently along his skin. It wasn’t like they hadn’t touched before, but Andres had never been this bold with him—this possessive—tracing each rib like they owned it. Shane relaxed under the pressure. He leaned back against his vampire’s chest, letting Andres feel each tremble that ran through him.
Lingering in the sensation, having Andres experience it with him, felt so right, and safe, and beautiful. Now, if only Andres would push him just a little farther… if Shane could get that meandering hand to reach between his legs…
Instead, his vampire did the second-best thing.
“You know what else I get to do with your skin whenever I want?” Andres pressed their mouth to Shane’s ear, letting one fang scrape harmlessly along the lobe.
Shane braced himself on the countertop, focusing on the feel of his palms on the cold granite to stop himself from fingering his own clit through his jean fabric. Oh—god, he’d have to tell Andres to order him to keep his hands off himself once they finally made it that far—he could already hear the growled commands in his head: don’t touch yourself until I tell you to. Don’t come unless I say.
Just the thought had him pressed up against the edge, a hungry pounding between his legs, the tender flesh around his slit hot and swollen and his clit greedy for pressure.
With their free hand, Andres fiddled with the collar of Shane’s shirt, tracing the spot where his collarbones met. “What do I want from you, my pet?”
“All of me,” Shane breathed.
“Then give it to me.”
Shane did, closing his eyes and tipping his head back against Andres’s shoulder. His whole neck felt unprotected, his exposed throat a fragile thing that could be torn through with a single rip. Andres traced the path of Shane’s trachea, a soft pressure against him as he swallowed.
“Thank you, my magnificent little swan,” they murmured, lush and hot on Shane’s neck. The shivery delight of those words were still sinking in when Andres bit down.
A delicious pain sliced through Shane’s mind, like hitting the head of his clit rough and fast, held down by the hips and pushed through it to the peak. The crest of the venom burst made him gasp, a whimpered sound that turned quickly to a moan. He could see only stars, bright and twinkling between his lashes, and feel the hold of his vampire’s strong arms.
That they could do this while sitting in the kitchen, on a quiet, normal evening between work, and it could feel this fucking good—last month, Shane would not have been able to imagine it. He allowed himself a little smirk, basking in the joy of that, before the yearning caught back up with him.
He kept himself steady, curling his toes around the barstool’s footrest. The little pleading moan he gave when Andres bit down harder was nearly feverish, escaping him before he’d even realized he was making it. His vampire shuddered against him in response. Andres’s hand slipped down, thumb hooking into the belt of Shane’s jeans.
Oh, god.
A chime clattered through the house, so loud and unexpected that it took Shane a split second to recognize it as a doorbell. Andres sputtered, yanking their fangs out with such speed that it widened the little pin-pricks, a pulse of pain making its hazy presence beneath the venom still coursing through Shane’s body. Blood slid in dual rivulets along Shane’s shoulder and dripped off his vampire’s chin.
“Fuck, sorry,” Andres muttered, quickly licking the wound shut as they pulled out their phone. They swiped a few times, and their expression darkened. They turned the screen towards Shane.
From the doorbell camera, the person’s form was blurred and twisted, but Shane would have recognized him anywhere. Frederick Maul had come to call.