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MERCER

In between the pain and the nausea, Mercer could not stop imagining one step further.

Before Rahil’s arrival, he’d simply been missing Kat’s constant migraine-attention—the way she’d curl up next to him the same as she did when they slept at night—but Rahil’s massaging made him feel in ways that no pet possibly could. With every drag of Rahil’s hands, Mercer dreamed of one lower glide, fingers slipping beyond the systematic up and down motion on his neck and sliding into the front of his shirt. Just an inch. Just a taste.

He could want for more, he told himself—but later, when he didn’t have the subtle pounding in his head as a distraction, his layers of fatigue and strain slowly unraveling beneath Rahil’s touch to become a limp, malleable thing willing to do whatever was asked it of for one more moment of relief. One stronger moment, one wider moment, one moment that would put the rest to shame. Though he knew then, alone in the darkness with his right mind awake and alert, his embarrassment was just as likely to get to him as the want.

So, Mercer just idled there, trading his knots of agony for the soothing pressure of Rahil’s touch and imagined one extra inch of contact, over and over and over. A subtle wrapping of fingers over his throat. A little tangling into his hair. A breath on his cheek. A brush of a mouth on his neck—maybe even the fangs. Maybe…

God, he had to stop this.

He was pretty sure that God had stepped out for the moment, though, and left a sock on the knob to Mercer’s brain as they went. At least, he hoped. No divine deity deserved to experience the sheer conflict of nausea, joy, lust, and shame going on in his mind.

As Rahil moved his hands up from Mercer’s neck and into his hair, rubbing such gentle circles against the back of Mercer’s skull that it was all he could do not to moan, he tried desperately to turn his thoughts onto anything else. Anything but Rahil or the pain. Unfortunately, the only other thing that would stick was Lydia.

“Are you dating Ray?”

She’d seemed so utterly neutral about it, like replacing her mother with a strange vampire was normal in her eyes. Expected, even. Mercer still didn’t know how to feel about that—and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know, in case his own feelings affirmed the way his suffering body was relaxing under Rahil’s touch, the length of skin between his jawline and his collarbones growing a bizarre ache like it knew something he didn’t. Besides, regardless of what his daughter thought of Rahil, she was the one who needed Mercer’s attention right now.

“Is Lydia still…?” It came out as a mumble, half-intoxicated by the groan he’d been trying so hard to suppress.

“Let me check,” Rahil whispered.

He kept one hand in Mercer’s hair, though, as he fiddled with his phone in the other. His fingers drew back and forth, a gentle tracing that was certainly no massage, but despite the space it opened for the pain to return, there was a tenderness and a care to it that Mercer craved all the more. He wanted, stupidly, to melt backwards, let Rahil wrap around him. To give in to temptation.

Was it truly the first time in nearly a decade that he’d been taken care of like this, or did it merely feel that way? The space within his ribcage tightened, bright and bittersweet above his unhappy stomach, and he wanted, nearly, to cry, before Rahil broke the moment with a pat to his shoulder.

“She’s still good, yeah,” he said.

Mercer had to pull himself back into form like he was dragging his numb body up the last ten feet of Mount Everest. “Thank you.”

“Of course.” As he spoke, he began massaging Mercer’s scalp once more. If he wasn’t fooling himself, Rahil sounded like he was climbing the exact same peak, and possibly failing. “Anything for you—and Lydia. She’s a good kid.”

“She is,” Mercer managed, trying not to focus too much on the glorious sensation of Rahil’s hands, while still allowing himself to appreciate the relief it was bringing. The headache was only one part of his migraines—paired with nausea, fatigue, vertigo, light sensitivity, a full-body physical discomfort, and occasionally a spotty aura of flickering lights that took up half his vision—but having something cared for was far better than nothing at all, and far better still because it was Rahil’s fingers doing the work. “You’re good with her, too. I can tell by the way she talks about you. Your own kids must have adored you.” Well, he supposed accidentally bringing up dead kids was one way to cut the mood.

Rahil stiffened, fingernails digging in slightly before he seemed to realize what he was doing and loosened again. “Yeah, I, um, I think they hated me, actually.”

Mercer was glad Rahil was behind him because he couldn’t keep the confusion and anger off his face. “Why would you think that?”

He wanted to say, too, that he was sure Rahil was wrong. But he didn’t know enough about Rahil—about that Rahil, anyway, the one from ten or twenty years ago. He could have been the kind of man who was willing to create metals that killed the oppressed, good reasons or not. People made terrible choices, then grew from them.

Mercer was proof of that.

Rahil gave a noncommittal noise. “That story is… a lot. And you have enough pain in your life.” He tapped gently against Mercer’s temple as he said it.

Mercer twisted to catch his gaze, ignoring the vertigo the sudden movement caused. “Weight isn’t a burden if it’s shared between enough people. Please, tell me. I’d like to know.” He lifted the very edge of his lips. “Only if you continue rubbing my head, though.”

“Ha,” Rahil said flatly, but he gave a weak smile, and when Mercer turned back around, Rahil’s hands resumed their original motion. He didn’t speak again for what felt like minutes, but Mercer gave him the space, letting the quiet linger. Finally, Rahil cleared his throat. “Jonah was such a bright and caring kid. He loved everyone—was always the first to offer help, to make someone laugh, to end a fight or find a compromise. But somewhere between Lydia’s age and high school, something changed…”

“Ah,” was all Mercer felt confident saying, but it seemed enough support to prompt Rahil to continue.

“He probably had chronic depression. We—Shefali and I—we didn’t really know what was wrong, though, or what to do about it. Shefali pretended that things were fine so aggressively that it seemed she convinced even Jonah for a while, but I think he was just learning to hide it.” Rahil drew in a sharp breath, and one of his hands left Mercer’s hair for a moment before returning. “He wasn’t really home much, and spent a lot of time by himself when he was. We had an older micro-cemetery a block from our house then, and I’d find him there sometimes with his headphones in, drawing spirals on his skin with markers. They were always so beautiful.”

The twist at the end of the word sank Mercer’s stomach like a pit. As though he could feel all the beauty Rahil had seen in his son turn to ashes—he wanted to hold on to that micro-cemetery moment, to stop the story there. But Mercer was afraid he already knew what the finale had wrought.

“In the end, I just kept pushing him to get help, over and over—fighting him, like that could bring him back.” Rahil’s massaging stopped, the tension in his grip brittle enough that it seemed a strong wind would break him. “I pushed him so hard that I pushed him over the edge.”

“Oh, Rahil.” For all that his head and stomach ached, Mercer’s body barely hurt compared to the thought of what Rahil had been through. He didn’t fight his instincts—didn’t think he could have won if he tried—just reached up to cup one of Rahil’s hands in his. He laced his fingers around Rahil’s and squeezed.

“They say that when someone chooses to leave the world early, that there’s a lot of little things that build up to it, but it’s also one specific moment, when inhibition is too low and life shoves too hard and the opportunity is there.” Rahil sounded as though he was choking, each word forced through a noose. “For him, I was the shove.”

“ Rahil .” His name emerged like a prayer, a plea, and Mercer didn’t care. All he did care about right then was dragging that horrid agony off Rahil, of letting him breathe again. He turned, the cries of his body ignored as he pulled one of his legs onto the bed and gripped Rahil’s face with his other hand. “You could not have known.”

A stain of tears lined either side of Rahil’s cheeks, and his chest heaved like he was suffocating, no air coming forth.

“Your feelings—they’re normal, surely. I know that just the thought of Lydia…” Mercer couldn’t bring himself to even reach the end point; it was too excruciating to consider. A tremble went through him, and however much his mind refused to think the same about his own child’s bad choices, he spoke the truth anyway: “But it was Jonah’s decision.” He tried to be firm, but gentle—be the comfort, the reason, and the stability he’d received from Rahil when he was holding Kat on the kitchen floor, caught in a panic. “Would you have felt better after the same outcome, had you done less instead?”

Rahil didn’t answer that, just looked away. He breathed in, then out, and dragged a hand over his face. Instead of responding, he said, “Matt didn’t handle it well. He was rambunctious at that age, more likely to get into trouble than not, but with Shefali grieving and Jonah gone, I… I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. I let him go his own way.”

Mercer dropped his hands into his lap and gave him a nod to move forward with the story—perhaps this was what he needed. To get it all out there. “What happened?”

“Nothing, for a while. He graduated high school. He went through college, too. But somewhere around there, he started to pick up… ideas: that the reason life had given him pain was because certain people weren’t doing their part, or actively preying on the good and the hardworking. Not certain individuals, mind you, but certain categories of people.” Rahil shrugged after, but the anguish on his face was nothing like dismissal. “Last October I was contacted as next of kin. He’d been killed in what was labeled a freak vampire attack.”

Like Leah , Mercer’s subconscious screamed, but he feared that this was not like Leah at all. Leah was the fluke, as he’d slowly realized over a mound of holy silver. Usually, when vampires killed people, it was either a tragic accident or they had a very, very good reason.

“When I realized he’d been working for Vitalis-Barron, I knew it was more complicated than a mere freak attack.” Rahil smiled in a way that was no smile at all, drained of life and the corpse possessed. “If he was killed while acting on the beliefs he’d been espousing, then I doubt it was the vampire’s fault. But he was still my kid, and I—”

“ Rahil …” Mercer wanted to reach for him again, but the way Rahil held up his hand brought him to a halt.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t tell me there was nothing I could have done. I was his father, and a vampire, and I let him wander so far into the darkness that he became a threat to my own people.”

Mercer didn’t know what to say to make things any better, so he watched as Rahil’s expression bittered further, and felt his heart tear a crack down the middle to match.

“Matt reached out to me last summer. He said he just wanted to get a meal and reconnect, but I...” Rahil shook his head. “I was too afraid of what I’d find.”

“You might have been right. He could have been planning to take you to Vitalis-Barron.”

“Or I might have been wrong.” He stared past Mercer, at nothing and everything. “Matt took his mother’s surname after she died. He adored her. Even if they disagreed on many of the things he and I did, he adored her anyway.”

Mercer still didn’t know what to say, so he went for the only truth that he knew. Breaking past Rahil’s guilt and grief, he wrapped one arm around him, feeling for his bones beneath his skin like he was nothing more than a ghost, and pulling him back to reality. “You are not alone, Rahil,” he said, and hugged him.

Rahil shook. For a moment it was his only movement, those soft, pathetic trembles, but then his arms lifted and he wrapped them so timidly around Mercer’s back that he seemed scared of spooking him. The longer they stayed like that though, the tighter he held on, burying his face in Mercer’s shoulder and sobbing, gentle, soundless sobs. They did nothing for the pain in Mercer’s head, or his stomach, or his heart, but he found he was all right with that.

As Rahil stilled, Mercer broke the silence. “Sometimes I think, what if there was something I could have done to save Leah? What if I had told her to focus more on personal protective devices, so she had some way to fight off the vamp who bit her? Or gone to pick her up that night? There must have been one right turn that I missed along the way.”

Rahil’s hands snaked up to rub at the back of Mercer’s skull once more. His voice sounded weak, but surer, his head still resting on Mercer’s shoulder. “If there was, then it was one choice: one night—a single blind pick of the draw. You didn’t cause that. You were just unlucky.”

It felt wrong to be told so by the person unluckiest of all. In a way, Mercer could see the truth in it, though. He had no control over past mistakes he couldn’t have known would matter at the time. But now he did know. Now he had that choice—to protect and provide, or to let his little girl struggle towards the same fate. He stroked Rahil’s back gently, letting that touch, too, ease some of his discomfort. “I could have found the bastard who bit her, at least.”

He only realized how impolite that might have come off to a vampire after he’d said it, but Rahil only sighed, like the inevitability of the situation saddened him. “I’m sure they would have deserved it.”

His face was so near Mercer’s neck that Mercer could feel the gentle flow of his breath, each word a sensation amidst the pain. His skin tingled. Oh God . He swallowed and focused on the rhythm of his hands up and down Rahil’s back—not too low, not too suggestive. Comfortable. Comforting. They were just being there for each other when the other person needed it.

That was all.

“You know,” he said, softly, “I am aware that most vampire bites are enjoyable events. And that it very rarely leads to a turning.”

“You have to drain most of the blood to reach that point,” Rahil agreed. His hands drew lower, thumbs massaging into the back of Mercer’s neck, before they paused. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to speak so callously—”

“I know what Leah went through. I made sure to know.” Mercer breathed in, then out. He wanted this. He had wanted this all morning, and all night, despite—or because of—the pain, and he was allowed to help a friend, if it was something they both wanted. “What I know of her turning shouldn’t change whether I allow myself to consent to something similar—not that this is similar. This is different. And because it’s different, I shouldn’t hold it to the same prejudice.”

Rahil sounded like he’d swallowed the moon. “It can be very enjoyable.”

“And you’re hungry,” Mercer added. “You are hungry?”

“A bit.” His mouth was so near Mercer’s pulse suddenly that Mercer could feel it in his whole being.

He had to close his eyes to stop it from overwhelming him, to pretend they weren’t so near, and this wasn’t so real. He managed, still, to whisper, “Then all right.”

“You’re sure?” Rahil whispered back.

It felt like a thousand butterflies had been set loose inside Mercer. “Just once. As a thank you,” he lied. It was not a thank you, it was a you’re welcome , and with the way he was yearning, it might just be a you are welcome forever , if only to his blood.

Not his heart—though he was pretty sure Rahil had seen the whole of it while sitting there—and not his body, as much as he would surely relish this moment in his wet dreams, but simply his blood. Mercer could spare that.

“All right,” Rahil murmured.

And he did not sink in his fangs.

Instead, it was his lips, soft and warm, and his hand cupping the other side of Mercer’s neck, and his presence around Mercer like a shelter—a protector—and then, finally, the prick of teeth. Mercer had been imagining a sharp pain, followed by something nice, something tingling and warm, but what he received wasn’t sharp at all, just pressure and pleasure, so gentle that he felt himself leaning into it, pressing his flesh up against Rahil’s teeth.

Rahil moaned. His hand on Mercer’s neck tightened and he worked his mouth in methodical drags that made the sensations cascading through Mercer’s body thrum beautifully, rising and falling like a dance. As he basked in the flow of the venom and the nearness of Rahil’s body, he found himself playing with Rahil’s loose hair, drawing fingers through the long locks and smiling as Rahil shivered beneath his touch.

“You are lovely at this,” Mercer whispered, the agony of his migraine fully obliterated, if only for the moment. “It’s much better than your flirting.”

Rahil pulled his fangs free to mutter, “Oh, fuck off.” But he sounded utterly attentive, like all that terrible teasing had tuned his desires to Mercer’s. He certainly seemed perfectly in sync with Mercer’s wants, Rahil’s body supple as putty, curled against him.

Mercer could feel the prick in his neck beginning to ooze warm blood, but as Rahil leaned back in, he caught the vampire’s jaw in his hand. Gently, Mercer rolled his thumb along Rahil’s lip and traced the long, sharp length of his fang. The tip was still pink, the diluted hue saturating Rahil’s mouth.

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you never feel the need to hide these,” he murmured.

Rahil’s expression deepened into a look of such pride and longing that Mercer moved his finger on instinct, cupping the underside of Rahil’s fang and pressing up until a slight pinch gave way to bliss. Rahil moaned, sucking gently for a long, heavenly moment before Mercer let him drag his tongue over the wound to close it.

“Your neck is still bleeding, babe,” he whispered against the pad of Mercer’s thumb, nuzzling gently.

The term of affection took a moment to register, the tone of it fitting like a missing puzzle piece into the collage of the thousand times Leah had said it. As it clicked into place, Mercer felt himself stiffen. Everything flooded back: nausea, pain, tension, dizziness.

Rahil mirrored the action, both of them still and taut. They felt so close suddenly, so much of Rahil touching so much of Mercer that it made a metallic rush of shame bloom in the back of Mercer’s throat. He didn’t know whether to lean back or to—to—what other option was there?

To say, finish me off, babe ?

The thought made Mercer even more nauseous.

But before he could choose to do anything, Rahil was sliding away from him, one hand rubbing his own neck—the same place where Mercer still bled. “It just came out, I’m sorry.”

Oh God, Mercer hated seeing him like this. He swallowed, trying to find a way to bail without making Rahil feel so damned sad in the process. “No, I—I’m sure you’re used to saying that to the men you bite. I get it.”

That did something worse though, Rahil’s expression sinking into a desperate melancholy. “I…”

One of them shifted—one or both, Mercer didn’t know—and Leah’s notebook toppled off the bed. It flopped open to the last page, spilling out a picture that Leah had tucked inside the back flap: her short red curls a mess from the beach wind, swirling across her cheek as she turned her face into the crook of Mercer’s neck, one hand lifting to block the camera. She never had been a fan of pretentious, staged photos. He’d always joked about taking them and she’d always laughed and hidden, like it was a game to see how blurry and silly she could make things.

He had nearly forgotten that day. Nearly forgotten how happy they’d been.

Rahil’s fingers twitched toward the picture. “That’s… her?”

“Leah, yeah.” Even with her face hidden from the camera, the sight of her, smiling and alive and in love with him, made Mercer feel all the more ashamed, all the more like he’d just done something terrible.

He’d let Rahil call him babe… and then pushed him away for it, denying them both something that was clearly good for them. If Leah could see him now, she’d have punched him in the shoulder and told him to stop breaking hearts already, and that included his own. Maybe he was allowed to have swiped right after all…

But Rahil was already standing, one step back and then the next, his eyes glued to the picture of Mercer’s late wife. He didn’t look like he’d seen the same ghost Mercer had. His had teeth.