The mask had been a good idea.
The mask, the stealth, the whispering in his little swan’s ear while never quite letting him get a proper look—Andres could feel the way Shane’s body responded to it all, his breath quick and his senses honed. His posture screamed prey-thing, so attuned to the knowledge that Andres was a vampire that he doubted Shane could have mistaken him for the crying fool at the Fishnettery even without half of his face covered.
And, if Andres was honest with himself, he’d been loving every moment of this. The feeling of Shane shuddering against him, his verbal sparring followed by his physical submission, the way he’d let Andres spread out his arm and rub at the defenseless crook he seemed so bent on hiding. And he’d whimpered. His vulnerability quickened something in Andres’s chest.
He vowed to treasure it. To protect it. His little swan was his now, after all.
“So you’ll take my blood whether I agree to this or not?”
Andres would never dare—he’d told Shane there were lines he wouldn’t cross, and that was one of them. Just as he’d never truly consider stealing Shane—his or not—back to his bed and setting him up like a king in chains, even if for the last twelve hours he had been unable to stop picturing it. He’d drawn his fingertips along the base of his beautiful Cygnus’s neck and envisioned how his pet swan might look with a collar, how he might whimper and melt and slowly yield beneath tender kisses.
They were just fantasies.
Andres would never dare. He was not the kind of monster who did such things. Only, it seemed, the kind who thought they were sensual in the first place.
He had already felt the tension return to Shane, like his little swan was feeding off Andres’s own guilt and doubts, when Maul’s familiar orange Mustang rolled into the front of the alley. Andres had always badgered him for driving something so outrageous when their jobs were built on secrecy, but now he thanked the universe for making his boss such a prick, because he recognized the vehicle quickly enough to push Shane into the building before the headlights could turn toward them.
There was no time to get Shane out of the building unnoticed.
“Into the closet, my little swan,” Andres ordered, gentle and hushed but a demand nonetheless.
Shane didn’t immediately move, and Andres pressed a hand to the back of his neck, directing him across the room. It must have been too dark for his human eyes because he fumbled, missing the knob entirely. Andres opened it for him. The small nook smelt of mold and rot, and Shane stiffened against his guiding. Outside, the roar of Maul’s engine shut off, then his headlights.
“Go,” Andres growled as forcefully as he could manage without cruelty.
Shane breathed out and, slowly, stepped into the closet.
Andres rewarded him with a quick kiss on the temple, just a gentle brush of lips as he cupped the back of his Cygnus’s head, and murmured, “Stay quiet. I’ll retrieve you when it’s safe.” When Shane still didn’t respond, Andres tipped his chin up, “Do you understand, pet?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
Andres closed the door on him.
Light spilled from the crack between it and the floor—Shane’s phone screen—and Andres’ heart stuttered. He could be texting his friend to confirm he was safe, or just as easily dialing for help, freeing himself from Andres permanently. Then the closet went dark once more. Everything was quiet; no car engine, no 911 operator, not even the gentle sound of Shane’s breath.
From down the alley came Maul’s footsteps.
Andres felt his skin chill at the sound of Maul’s distinctive stride, and he tugged off his mask, slipping it beneath his jacket and into the back of his waistband like a secret weapon.
Maul’s brow barely rose as he entered, taking in Andres for half a moment before his eyes narrowed. “What brings you here?”
“I was wondering the same of you,” Andres countered. He shifted his voice instinctively, just as dark as the sensual predator who’d slipped in behind his little swan, but with a dry edge in place of the sultry. Still the persona of a vampire, just with a slightly different intent, the feigned dominance hiding any morsel of weakness Maul might chip away at, even as he monitored every word to keep from overstepping to the point of angering his boss. “I thought you were making a point not to bring that flashy monster to a sales spot twice in a row.”
The resurrection of the long-standing argument made Maul huff, but the suspicion didn’t leave his gaze. “Max spotted a human who looked like the blood bag you bought off me last night, and you haven’t been answering your phone.”
Fuck, he’d put Maul’s number on mute to get a few hours of peace last night and clearly hadn’t remembered to turn his notifications back on. At least Maul had decided not to come down on him for it. Andres shrugged. “I was going to poke around his place, see if I can’t stage it to look like he up and left, but he lost his keys somewhere here. I have him contained, though, never fear. Clearly Max can’t tell petite blonds apart.” Petite blonds with scattered freckles and bowed lips and thick lashes, whose waves of hair brushed against his long neck like a veil and soft skin trembled under Andres’s touch.
Dammit, even with Shane tucked out of sight and Maul scowling a few yards away, riling his nerves and frustrating his senses, Andres’s mind still couldn’t let go of his little swan.
He tried to wipe the thoughts aside for later, but Maul’s next question just stirred them into a frenzy instead.
“Contained? You’re sure you locked the cage when you left?”
“Chains are more my style.” Specifically collars, if Andres’s incessant fantasies were to be trusted. “He’s wilted across my bed right now. Probably still half-conscious.” He swore he heard a sound from the closet at that, though Maul seemed not to notice. Still, Andres should probably not have been getting quite so descriptive. He didn’t want to scare Shane into making that 911 call after all.
The fictional display of power must have contented Maul though, because he switched topics. “What progress are you making with the Vitalis-Barron investigation? I thought something would have come of that by now.”
This was worse, somehow. At least salaciously fictionalizing his little swan’s captivity had its perks—mainly that his mind had free rein to imagine just what a life with Shane chained to his bedpost would be like—but he had no interest in sharing how few developments he’d made on the Vitalis-Barron front, especially when a negative update always led to Maul swinging his sights back toward their other competition: the new Jose’s Blood Bank.
Andres settled on a calm but forceful, “I’m working on it.” He had found the name of a vampire rumored to have escaped Vitalis-Barron’s laboratory and the diabolical experiments they’d surely been doing on her there, but try as he might, he couldn’t seem to locate her now.
“Work faster,” Maul grumbled, then, right on cue, “Something has to change soon. If it’s not Vitalis-Barron, then we need to switch our attention to that damn blood bank.”
Andres chose not to respond to that, running a hand through his hair instead. There was only so much he could argue without it pissing them both off, and the more pissed Maul grew, the meaner and less pliable he became, and the harder a time Andres had controlling himself or his emotions in turn. “Well, in the meantime, you feel like helping me hunt for a pair of keys?”
Ever true to form, Maul made a disinterested sound and took a step back. “I have actual business to see to. You can pick locks, so why bother.”
“I can’t pick them closed again. There’s an entire mystery sub-genre called locked door murders for a reason.”
“Right.” Maul clearly didn’t actually care about any of this, and somehow it only made Andres more annoyed and a little nauseated.
I’d like to see you do my part of the job, he wished he could snap.
Instead he straightened his shoulders, chin high and lips in the half-smirk that made his jawline sharp and highlighted his fangs. He was glad suddenly that he hadn’t chosen to wear any of the leather he’d inserted lace cutouts into and that he’d traded his glasses for contacts, despite the odd blur they placed on the edges of his vision. Maul could dismiss him all he wanted, but these days they were clearly equals in strength, if not in power.
Andres bared his teeth. “Have a good night, Maul.”
Maul’s lips peeled back. “You as well.”
He left without another word, the slam of his Mustang’s door followed by the rev of its engine. It sped by in a blur. Only as the sound of it faded into the distance did something ease in Andres’s chest, his frustration fading to a lingering discomfort.
Andres stood there, staring into the darkness of the alley and breathing through his mouth, before he suddenly remembered—Shane.
He forced his mind off Maul and tugged his mask back on, moving toward the closet door. He slowed as he neared, listening. It was cruel not to let Shane out immediately, now that the threat had passed. But a part of him wanted to see: he had told his little swan to stay until he was retrieved. How long would he actually wait? One heartbeat, then another.
Not a sound came from anywhere in the abandoned building, not even the creaks of settling wood or the tiny scurries of mouse feet. The quiet broke Andres’s chest in two. Oh, fuck him. Shane had obeyed; he did not deserve to be tested like this. Andres forced some level of composure onto his expression and opened the door.
His Cygnus stood there, visibly shaking, arms tucked tightly around himself and one hand cupping the side of his neck, fingers drawn across skin like he was protecting himself from a bite. Ah, double fuck. Not only had Andres been talking about chaining Shane to his bed, but he’d been describing it to the vampire who had almost killed him—would have killed him, had Andres not done something dramatic. And here Shane had been, having an anxiety attack alone in the closet.
“He’s gone?” Shane whispered.
“He’s gone.” Andres reached into the small space, and when Shane flinched, he didn’t let it deter him, gently folding a hand around his arm and drawing him out. “But we shouldn’t linger. He’s paying more attention to us than I’d assumed.”
For a moment, Shane’s anxiety seemed to grow, but then it eased out of him instead, the tight pinch of his expression loosening as he released a breath. He didn’t pull away from Andres’s touch. “I could hear you in there,” he said, tipping up his chin. “What do you and Maul want from Vitalis-Barron? How are they connected to the black market blood trade?”
“That is not your business, my little swan.” He hoped that would be the end of it, that Shane might submit to him in this as easily as he had to Andres’s other demands, but he knew, too, that anyone intelligently curious and unwavering enough to catch Andres’s attention and refuse to let it go for so many months wouldn’t leave such a mystery alone.
“This is very much my business!” Shane replied. “If they’re impacting the flow of blood through the city—or the existence of vampires within it—then it’s important to me, and to the work I’m doing.”
That brought Andres up short. He paused just within the entrance, pulling Shane to a halt. Shane was smart enough to understand the black market, stubborn enough to track it down, but when all his other endeavors were gossip columns and quirky rating videos, Andres had just assumed… “You really are writing an article on us?”
“Of course I am!” Shane’s brow tightened, and his tone went stony. “The blood trade, the existence of healthy consensual feedings, even the little vampire charity work that’s been done, has all existed in the dark for so long—”
“No.” Andres felt a kind of panicked hysteria rising in his chest at the mere thought. Danger, his every cell screamed. He fought to morph it into anger, to turn the bladed emotion outward instead of letting it weaken him, but just keeping his voice the dark, sultry version he’d been using throughout the night was growing harder. “The trauma this could cause for the vampiric community… if you draw the humans’ attention to us, to just how much of their blood we’re consuming and how many of us live in their streets, it’s not us they’ll be siding with.”
“You don’t know that,” Shane countered. “This isn’t Schr?dinger’s trust. Vampires need this blood and hiding that fact doesn’t change it. Showing the ways the current system has failed you—maybe that can.”
“Who do you think made this system? You want to air out all our pain, our greatest vulnerabilities, in front of the people who put us here—for them to see how weak we are? You can’t.” Andres fought the urge to run his hands through his hair. “Besides, if Maul realizes what you’re trying to publish, he won’t let it happen. And I won’t be able to protect you.”
“That’s part of the problem.” Shane touched his neck again, his throat bobbing, and his palm slid flat against the skin, protective. A shield. “Maul wanted to profit off my death by selling my blood to destitute vampires who can’t even question where it came from because if they don’t accept what he offers, it’ll be their death, and I’m only alive still because you were forced to buy me like a blood slave.”
Blood slave. Andres had never used that word—would never have dared—even if the image it conjured held a tantalizing beauty: gothic castles and golden collars and utter satisfaction. He tried to feel disgusted at himself, mortified even, but his only emotion was a quickly-growing sense of the conversation slipping away from him. He could feel his breathing quickening, his confidence wavering.
He needed it back, needed, somehow, to regain the power he’d had at the start of their meeting.
Andres reached out, past the flinch that Shane gave, placing his hand over the one Shane had wrapped protectively around his neck. With gentle nudges and tugs, he pulled it away, letting his fingertips trail across his little swan’s pulse as he withdrew. “I bought you because I couldn’t watch you die. I won’t apologize for that, nor for taking what I paid for.”
The intake of breath that trembled out of Shane was nearly as delicious as his blood smelled. He lowered his chin but he did not try to back away. “Don’t you see my point, though? The system that the humans of this city—this whole fucking country and most of the western world with it—have put in place made purchasing me look to Maul like a reasonable option, and means that for you the follow-through is a necessity. Because you can’t afford to buy blood now that you’ve spent your money on me, can you?”
“That’s not strictly true.” Andres had been able to buy a sufficient bagged supply on his current paycheck; the problem would come when his car went out, or he had an accident his increased resilience couldn’t fix, or Maul raised the price of his rent with inflation again, and he had no buffer in his bank account to keep him above water. “Though you’re not wrong either,” he admitted, quieter, a little hollow. It felt too much like the Andres he’d been at the bar—the person he tried so hard to hide from others. He buried that person back down. Without tightening his grip on Shane’s fingers, he tugged at him, teasing him closer.
Shane could have let his arm extend, but instead he stepped forward with a little inhale and a backward lean. “I could pay you back,” he said, weakly.
“Do I act as though this situation burdens me, my little swan?” Andres growled, tender and fierce all at once. “I don’t regret that you’re mine. Your bared neck brings me far more delight than a thousand chilled bags. And,” he added, harsher, “whether you’re indebted to me or not, I will care whether this article you’re trying to write inspires you to keep poking your neck places that will put it in range of Maul’s fangs. He will kill you, Cygnus.”
Shane closed his eyes. “I don’t want that either, but I need to do something.” It sounded so much like a plea, small and helpless and delightful. “If you’re still investigating whatever nefarious plot was happening with Vitalis-Barron back in October, let me help you with that. Please, I can’t just sit here on the edges of all this and pretend it’s okay. I already have a media pass for their onsite gala next month—I can be useful outside of Maul’s domain.”
Andres wanted to give Shane everything in that moment: not just free rein in a world without Maul, but the world itself, every joy and pleasure it had to offer. That was not their reality though, not the reality of any vampire. “I had planned to find a way into that gala when the time came, so I won’t say no to the help, but I doubt there’s anything you could do for me right now. Vampires have been disappearing, and that woman I cornered at the gala is just one cog in a much larger machine that works within Vitalis-Barron. I’m looking for one specific vampire, who vanished almost a year ago and was rescued from within the Vitalis-Barron complex in October. If I can find her, I can find the people who broke her out—people who must know more than I do.”
“Vitalis-Barron is the one abducting vampires?”
“Something like that.”
Shane sighed. “If you tell me the truth, I promise I won’t publish anything recklessly. I’ve seen the ways the media will turn something into a shitshow of needless debates and illogical objections instead of focusing on the real harm that’s happening right before their eyes. I want us to have the best chance of doing what we can from the shadows before then.”
His Cygnus was sincere about that—Andres could tell by the way he said it, each word deliberate and fiery, like he was speaking it to life. And Andres… Andres wanted to trust him.
So he did.
“As far as we can tell, Vitalis-Barron has been experimenting on vampires in secret for a number of decades. They collect their victims in part by offering blood or money or research opportunities to volunteers they know can vanish without causing too much of a stir—which, for vampires, is most of them—and when that isn’t enough, they send their personal hunters out to compensate.”
More and more of those hunters lurked the streets these days, but Andres was just as disgusted and enraged by the research board’s leadership—people like the woman he’d cornered at the gala six months earlier, happy to sit back and reap the benefits of their heinously unethical research without ever dirtying their hands.
“Vitalis-Barron operates under the knowledge that it’s, in the most technical terms, still not illegal to coerce vampires into dangerous scientific testing when all laws around research ethics were written for humans. If we can prove what they’re doing to the public, though, it’s possible for a court case to change that legality—to force them to stop their experiments.” The darkness had turned Andres’s vision monochromatic, and between the tunneling effect of his contacts and the literal blinders of his mask, he wasn’t sure what Shane’s expression meant. “Do you believe me?”
The little huff Shane gave would have been precious, were it not for the genuine annoyance in his expression. “I’m diabetic. I know very well that these big pharmaceutical companies will let people die if it makes them a profit.” He lifted his brow. “So, what have you been doing about it?”
“I can keep singling out Vitalis-Barron employees as I did at their October gala, but confessions given under duress are useless at this point.” He needed to go deeper. To get inside… or find someone who had. “I’ve heard reports of a vampire who escaped from Vitalis-Barron, and while they’re still hiding—and likely don’t know much themself—every rumor includes the detail that someone set them free. It’s a wild goose chase that might lead nowhere, but finding them is the best lead I have right now.”
Shane nodded along, looking more and more grave as Andres explained. “Tell me about this rescued vampire?”
“First name Tara, but I couldn’t get a surname. She’s Black, uses both she and they pronouns”—it made Andres happy just saying it, remembering them and their dual pronouns weren’t alone in the world, though that joy was immediately doused by the knowledge that she might no longer be living in this world at all, if his inability to find her again was any sign—“and last summer she had a very distinctive afro in pastel pink and blue.”
“Tara Williams? They drew cartoons outside the bars sometime in the summer?” Shane’s lips quirked. “They were buying candles at a twenty-four seven magic shop near the boardwalk last week. They refused to let me interview them, but we had a very nice conversation about the effects of lighting on mood. Apparently they do staging and hospitality for a mysterious interactive-style theater event that I assume caters to vampires, likely one that serves blood if they’re so secretive. I never figured out the name or location though.”
Andres just stared at him. “How the hell do you know all that?”
Shane snorted. “I’m not an incompetent investigative journalist, just, it seems, an undesirable one.” He appeared completely oblivious of how magnificent he was, and it left a pang in Andres’s chest. “If you can find this secret club where Tara works, I imagine we can go speak with them.”
We. Andres and his swan—his constellation—tackling this threat together. It felt like a light had been turned on within his rib cage, aiming a high-beam onto an emotion that suddenly seemed an awful lot like loneliness. He wanted to cry. He wanted to break apart like he had at the Fishnettery, but this time not from sadness—not entirely. The sadness was there, but so was relief, hope, fear, desperation.
He boxed in the fluttering of his heart and merely purred a sultry, “Perhaps. We shall see.” He stepped forward and slipped around Shane, angling himself once more over his little swan’s shoulder. “Right now, stay away from other vampires—stay safe. Your attention belongs to no one but me.”
The way Shane shivered beneath his touch was a pure delight.
And perhaps that he enjoyed it should have worried him. But he could feel that guilt later. For the moment, he was going to drink, and drink deep. “And you, my little swan, still owe me a piece of yourself.”