The pain was made real only when it finally split, casting Andres from a hellish realm of nightmares into a tattered body in a bed, aching all the way through his bones. His head pounded and his thoughts moved slowly, tugged in and out of the darkness. They had coalesced finally on one image: his Shane, bleeding. Dying.
But then Shane had been there, holding him, whispering to him, so alive that Andres could do nothing but cry into his shoulder with relief. They were together, and they’d made it through. This time, Phaethon and Cygnus both lived. Andres managed to hold that thought as he drifted back off, falling into a sleep that felt, for once, restful.
When he woke again, his head a little clearer and his stomach growling softly, he managed to prop himself up on his pillows while Shane went for food. It was loud downstairs, but he recognized at least two of the voices as Maddox and Valentine. How long had they been here?
The thought of them in his house while he recovered brought a wave of nausea and anxiety, so like his reactions to being reached for that he had to force himself to breathe and sit with the feeling, turning it over from all directions. These people—the caring, jovial people who’d come to show their support—had power over him, he realized; power he hadn’t given them, an inherent authority that came from staying in his house while he hovered between life and death.
Shane had taken that power too, donned it like a piece of his own soul.
Andres felt himself recoil from that as well, and he gave the reaction the hugest, ugliest middle finger he could. Shane was incredible. What he’d done for Andres—what everyone who’d come through his doors as he’d lain helpless had done for him—was born of love. There had been people in Andres’s past whom he should have let himself yank back from, yank straight out of their lives the moment he could, but they were not these people.
These were people who would be gentle with him.
Shane returned with a plate of tortilla casserole, setting it on Andres’s nightstand and climbing onto the bed like he knew just how much he belonged there. “How are you feeling?”
“As though I’ve been turned into a vampire all over again.” Andres’s voice came out so hoarse that he had to clear it in the middle. “I don’t think I know my own body anymore.” It was like a void had opened between the shell of his skin and the hollow of his soul, empty nerves and a deep ache that wasn’t exactly pain, but it wasn’t not pain either, a liminal thing that screamed constantly in the back of his mind. But he was alive, and Shane was sitting with him, facing him, their thighs pressed together and Shane’s hand on his knee, stroking so tenderly that it made Andres almost feel like he existed.
Shane looked concerned, but his smile was still bright, overflowing with love. “We can relearn your body together.”
It could have been a statement of lust, but instead there was a sweetness to it, so soft and romantic that it filled Andres with a warmth like the sunshine of Shane’s blood-scent. He fiddled with the sleeve of Shane’s shirt, tracing his fingers along the back of Shane’s hand. “When I have the strength again…”
The little smirk that twisted into Shane’s lips was delicious, somehow both submissive and insistent all at once. “Your physical prowess is not what makes me yours. Besides, you need only command me to please you, and I’ll obey.”
That was deliberately sensual, but beneath the careful words, Andres could see what else Shane was offering him: to relax and have his needs tended to, even if he couldn’t reciprocate or take control. And as much as he loved the control, the dominance, the way Shane would shudder under his touch and whimper for him, he thought he might grow to love this too.
“I know you will, pet,” he whispered. His hands were still unsteady, but he managed to trail his fingers over Shane’s jaw and onto his throat, following his vein not for the need of blood—he could feel how utterly sated Shane had kept Andres while he was unconscious—but because he could.
As his fingers drew over Shane’s neck though, they caught a faint ridge he hadn’t expected. Andres leaned in curiously, trying to get close enough that his terrible vision righted itself, but as he did, Shane pulled back.
He pressed his palm to the place Andres had touched.
“Shane? What’s wrong?” Andres asked the question, but his mind had already caught up, reason supplying him with the only logical answer. It settled like a weight in his stomach.
His little swan made a sound, pained and frustrated. “I know you won’t love me less—I know that. I just…” Shane’s voice broke, and when it returned, there was a broken longing in it that Andres hadn’t expected. “If I were to be marked in this way, it should have been your fangs.”
“Oh, love,” Andres whispered. For all the pain he’d undergone over the last hours—days? He wasn’t sure—Andres thought the feeling in his chest right then was worse. He lifted his hand once more, not reaching, just holding it out as best he could with the weakness still plaguing his muscles. “Can I see?”
Quietly, Shane handed him his glasses. The hazy edges of the room turned sharp, Shane’s freckles and lashes popping back into existence from the blur of his face, and there, where Andres’s fingers had brushed, lay the small, raised line of a ragged, improperly healed bitemark. Gently, he drew aside the collar of the shirt Shane had borrowed from him, pushing it over his shoulder as he traced scar after scar, a constellation of tragedies that wound their way down Shane’s arm, spanning neck to wrist on either side.
Andres could almost smell the scent of the blood that had dripped from each rushed and ragged bite, not the bright and bold sunshine but a terrified void of fear and misery. The crust of that red life had been washed clean now, and what wounds had remained after Andres’s hasty job at closing the bigger ones were knit into soft pink lines.
“This is my fault.” The words caught in Andres’s chest like a knife. “I should have healed them better. If I hadn’t been so sloppy—”
“You were dying,” Shane interrupted him, the blunt power in his words enough that it seemed he might rewrite the past. “We were both dying, and you still saved me. I’d rather have the scars and you, than even conceive of losing the person I love most in all the world.”
The person Shane loved most: that was Andres, absurdly and beautifully. “I love you, too,” Andres replied. He ran his hands along the small lines. So many of them. “You know, I think they are mine, and not because I feel guilty—though I do, and I imagine I will for a while. They’re my marks because you’re my partner. You were there for me and I was there for you. When you see them, when you touch them, let them remind you of how much you’re worth to me.”
The softness of Shane’s smile was a delicacy. His brow knotted, though, and he hesitated before reaching for Andres’s neck, slow and open-palmed.
At first Andres thought the reluctance was simply giving him space in case his body felt the need for it, but with the way Shane focused, the precision with which his fingers brushed skin, the sorrow of the motion...
Shane’s thumb rolled over a line of flesh that felt wrong under the pressure, then a second just below it. “Is this how much I’m worth to you as well?”
Andres’s blood went cold. He found the spot on instinct, two scars, thin and long, as the memory of Maul’s fangs tore back through him. They hadn’t pierced him properly—hadn’t bitten into him to inflict their venom—but that hadn’t stopped the damage from being done. Shane’s hand came over his, though, skin on skin, and Andres closed his eyes, focusing on the present. And, just a little, the look on Shane’s face as he’d held the stake in Maul’s back. Andres smiled. “This is the reminder that I have a partner who would kill for me.”
Shane gave the smallest, sharpest laugh. “God, I did that, didn’t I?” He shook his head. “I don’t condone the death penalty, but he deserved it.”
“He really did.”
Without him, the black-market blood trade would likely descend into chaos, those more loyal to the money than the community all fighting among themselves to become the new Maul. Whether the vampires who came out on top would have the infrastructure to support the giant customer base that Maul had lorded over was another question, and one that would need solving sooner than later. Which meant Andres would have to do it.
He was done with Maul, but he wasn’t done with the blood trade—no vampire ever truly was.
That would have to wait until he could get out of bed, though.
“I think I’ll give that casserole a try now?” His stomach made a sound in agreement.
Shane helped him sit up a little straighter. Once he seemed sure that Andres was capable of eating, he dipped across the room to pull a set of papers off the dresser. “Oh, one more thing, while you eat.” His cheeks brightened as he handed the little stack over. “It needs a final edit, but I… I hope you’re not too disappointed. I couldn’t just leave it at Vitalis-Barron. It needed the whole story.”
Andres’s stomach twisted as his gaze swept over the title: The War on Blood. Beneath it read, Vitalis-Barron, the Black-Market, and the Artificial Scarcity of Life. It was so much more than he’d said he was comfortable with Shane publishing, than he’d believed would do the vampiric community any good.
As Andres skimmed the first page, Shane kept speaking. “Some pointed internet searches show that Vitalis-Barron has been undermining attempts to create vampire blood donation charities and biting centers for years now. It has the direct effect of driving hungry vampires to volunteer for research in the hopes of getting blood or money out of it, while conveniently adding fuel to the system that keeps them trapped in cycles of illegal dealings and poverty. The horror of the black-market blood trade was Maul’s fault, but it was their fault too, and all of ours. The world needs to know it. And, we conveniently get ten pages on how exactly Vitalis-Barron has been utilizing their power over the vampire community.”
The more Andres read of it, the more he realized: it wasn’t about Vitalis-Barron at all. It was about their victims; their pain and desperation, their personhood, their strength. Between the quotes from Tara were those from friends and family and lovers—both human and vampire—who’d lost someone to Vitalis-Barron’s labs. It shouted the names of the murdered like they would go down in history. And then—only then—did it come for Vitalis-Barron, and it came hard.
By the end, Andres had set his food to the side and given up wiping back his tears, fat, salty drops splattering the paper.
“Is it…?” Shane’s voice quavered and cut out.
“It’s perfect.” With what little strength he had, Andres pulled Shane close.
His partner melted into him, laughing, and then he was kissing Andres, not the quiet, obedient kisses of their role play or the soft, lingering workday ones, but something altogether different and magnificent, a force of affection and desperation to be reckoned with. Andres returned the kiss, weaker but with just as much longing, opening himself up to Shane and letting the taste and feel fill him to bursting. Even the tang of his tears seemed right in that moment, a perfect, beautiful thing shared between their lips and hanging in their common breath.
As Shane finally pulled away, Andres smiled. “I mean it, you did an incredible job. Of course you did.”
“It wasn’t just me, though. I had all the vampires read it—even Vincent left notes in a copy I emailed. I had to be sure it was telling the right story.”
Andres kissed him again. It was slower, sweeter this time, and he heeded his worn body’s urging to relax by settling back into the pillows after. He eyed the rest of his food but didn’t reach for it. “Natalie…?” He hadn’t wanted to ask. Between his choppy, pained memories, he thought he already knew.
Shane shook his head. “There was nothing when the police went looking. Anthony hasn’t seen her. They probably…”
He seemed unable to find the strength to finish that thought, and Andres didn’t push him. Maybe once he had a therapist to help him process. Perhaps the Starlight Club knew someone.
“She loved you,” Shane added, looking utterly miserable.
Andres squeezed his hand. “I had been a terrible cousin to her in recent years. I’m glad she had you for a bit.”
That seemed all there was to say, at least for now. Shane pressed his lips to Andres’s fingers and set both his hand and his plate into his lap. “Now finish eating. And rest. I have a final edit to do, but when I’m done… I could pick up my collar from the apartment, and then you could lay there like you own my world and guide my head between your legs, and order my mouth to good use?”
“Well, now I certainly won’t be resting,” Andres grumbled and smirked.
Shane sent out the article and received an immediate offer for a permanent position at The Star—not the ordinary way these things flowed, Andres learned, but Shane’s exposé was far from ordinary. Then they just had to wait.
Most of the vampires came back for that evening, everyone alight with anticipation for the morning’s release. It was still an odd feeling to have so many people in his home, so many hands constantly trying to help him around, bring him things, dote on him like he was about to die instead of steadily recovering. The middle-aged Starlight polycule were the worst about it, forcing their love on him like they’d realized his own parental relationships were abysmal and were determined to make up for it.
It was odd, watching them together—odd in a beautiful way, their relationships so deep and complex that Andres thought they could spend years in his living room and he still wouldn’t fully grasp it.
It seemed Maddox was Valentine’s human in a far softer sense than Andres had first imagined, their relationship composed of lingering touches and cuddles. That, too, was so different than the sharp, aggressive thing Maddox had with his other vampiric spouse, Diego. He approached their relationship like a man prepared to cut out his own heart for his lover at a moment’s notice, yet still one who knew every curve and edge of their love and used it to keep them both safe. When he was gone, Diego and Valentine bickered like an old married couple whose attraction had vanished to leave a deep platonic love behind. The three came together to interweave their affection perfectly, a vibrant family unit so tight it seemed destined.
Andres could see hints of himself and Shane in all three relationships, and places where they were in the process of becoming their own thing. And he loved it. He and Shane had started with their obsession and turned that into love, and with time, they could keep growing it. They could be old together, and this fiercely into each other, and this deep and knowledgeable of who the other was.
They had so much to look forward to.
And with the release of Shane’s article, they could both hope the future they were entering would be a little brighter in other ways as well.