by Lily Luchesi
Danny looked between the two men with incredulity on his face. He remembered Vincent in that alleyway, telling him to ask Angelica what was in those shakes he was drinking. And he had asked her, but he remembered that he had not actually asked her: he had made an assumption of “is it a steroid,” and it gave her an easy way to lie her way out of what was going to be a very uncomfortable situation.
He wanted to be mad at her for not telling him, but what was the point? He knew, deep down. He could taste the metallic twang of it, buried beneath layers of fruit. He always had. It was his mind willing him to believe whatever lie Angelica fed him, because he didn’t want to face the truth at that time. It was his own fault. Angelica had seen an easy way out of dealing with it, and she took it. In his CPD career, he had been guilty of doing the same damn thing.
He smirked to himself at his line of thinking. Were this a TV show, his calm and understanding reaction would have been considered good character development. Had this been a year ago, he would have flipped his shit upon hearing this little fact. Now he was not only able to understand why Angelica had lied, he was also able to appreciate that she had done so, so that he was not disturbed by it.
“Um, mate, I think you broke him.” Mark’s voice broke through his reverie.
Danny laughed. “No, no. I’m fine, oddly enough. I guess, deep down, I always knew what was really in this shit.” He put the empty glass down on the table.
Brighton laughed with him and clapped him on the shoulder. “Nice way to take this news. When this one found out, he fainted!” Mark blushed so dark, he looked like a tomato. Brighton ignored him and looked straight at Danny with those disconcerting eyes of his. Danny had his mind barrier up, but he felt Brighton probing.
“She only lied because she loves you. She didn’t want to traumatize you any further,” he said quietly.
Mark stood up. “I had better let her know that the shit has, surprisingly, not hit the fan. Excuse me.” He bent down for a kiss from Brighton before leaving the room.
Brighton continued as if Mark had not spoken or left the room. “Her love for you is a big motivator in her deception. I am guilty of doing the same thing for Mark, and you know this. Sometimes you have to shield the ones you love from what will hurt them in any way necessary.”
Danny smiled. “The two of you are so alike. It’s hard to believe you were born two centuries apart. At least you never pushed Mark away, though.” He stood up, stretching his muscles. “Now, what do you say we work on my mental barriers so this doesn’t happen again?”
Brighton pulled his chair closer to Danny’s and said, “Let’s do this.”
Chapter Ten
Three months later
The call came in after sunset, at 8:24 P.M. Rogue vampires, hanging out around the Harlem Irving Plaza mall. Agents were on scene, but there were more vamps than anticipated.
“Damnit,” Danny muttered as he got his weapons. “I knew that neighborhood had gotten pretty bad, but I didn’t think it was that bad!” The mall was closed now. They closed at eight on Sundays. The vamps had probably posed as Goth teens if they were young enough when they had been turned to be inconspicuous as they picked out tired shoppers to feed on.
He was glad traffic was light. As it was, it would be over ten minutes before he got there, and those ten minutes could prove fatal for the agents already on the scene. How many vampires were in the nest? How strong were they? He wished he’d thought to ask.
When he finally arrived he parked the Caddie haphazardly and he heard the scuffle long before he saw it. It echoed through the nearly empty underground parking garage. He pulled his gun in one hand and a large butcher knife in the other, his shoes echoing on the concrete.
There were seven vamps, all of them as he had expected: young and playing at emo to get on the good side of humans to feed from. Right then, four of them were attacking one person on the floor.
One agent? They sent one agent for seven vamps? No…wait, there were ten vamps! He spotted three headless, decomposed vampire corpses in the distance. As he stood there, one of the four vamps fell away, screaming in pain. Holy water dripped from its eyes, blinding it. Blood leaked from its abdomen. Its nest paid no attention. Danny pulled his gun and shot at each of the standing vamps, wounding them enough where they couldn’t attack him right away as he attacked the other vamps.
A gun went off, hitting a vamp, but it didn’t slow it down. One rolled away to avoid the gunshot and Danny saw that the agent who was still holding their own against a large nest was—who else— Angelica Cross.
He got a headshot at one vamp and a bullet in the arm of another, letting Angie be able to get up and roll out of the fray for a moment.
“Vamp on vamp violence—have the darkened streets of Chicago gotten this bad?” he joked as she got to her feet. “You haven’t been in the field in months.”
“Fuck off, Mancini,” she replied, swiftly grabbing her sword from under a car. “I was restless. Thought some bloodshed might do me good.”
He had a retort, but thought better of it given their current situation. “What’s the plan?”
She leaned forward and decapitated another vamp. “If it has fangs and no PID badge, kill it.” Her gun went off, missing another vamp. This one’s mouth was covered in blood, and Danny noticed a barely healed bite mark on Angie. It had fed on her!
“It bit you?” he asked, alarmed.
She nodded. “Drinking vampire blood can increase humans’ and vampires’ strength. Watch it.” Turning, her dance-like movements still graceful despite her injuries, she sliced a large arc in the stomach of a different vamp. As it gasped, Danny finished it off with a clean slice to the neck.
They turned to get the remaining two vamps Danny had wounded. As Danny went to slice at one, he felt a weight thunk itself on his back and he had to struggle to remain upright. The vamp that had ingested Angie’s blood was on him, its batlike claws trying to cut through the thick fabric of Danny’s coat, suit jacket, and shirt.
Angie didn’t notice his struggle, as she had two vamps to grapple with who had fed from the vein recently. Lineage beat blood, as she’d mentioned before, but she would still have a hard time of it. With the exception of demons, vampires were the hardest monsters to defeat.
Danny felt the claws start to bite skin, and he had no way to get the thing off of his back. He was thankful the holy water that spilled onto his skin when he’d just blessed his blades kept the thing from biting him at the moment.
He moaned as the claws got him further in his skin, kneeling and trying one last maneuver. He bent quickly, gripping the vamp’s arm and using all the strength he possessed to flip it over him like a sack of potatoes.
He grunted, the pain burning his back, going for his knife, but he needn’t have bothered: the quick blade of Angelica’s sword beat him to it, sending the head flying somewhere in the distance. He heard it hit a windshield and a car alarm began to blare.
“I was supposed to help you, not the other way around,” he said, wincing at the stinging pain.
“Never mind who helped whom. Take off your coat and jacket, now,” Angelica said, bending down behind him.
“It’s just a few scratches,” he protested, but he took the articles off, barely able to move his arms, because the back muscles stretched beneath the wounds.
“Shit, Danny, how do you always get yourself into these fucking messes?” she asked. “Hold still and don’t move more than you already have. The throw you made could’ve ripped your skin open!” He heard her grunt and smelled that odd scent of vampire blood: a mix of the typical iron and copper with stale hamburger. Dead blood.
“I think I get myself into them when I’m with you,” he replied.
“Nonsense. You were kidnapped when you worked with Camille, shot three different times, and bitten by a rabid raccoon…God only knows how the Hell that happened. I read your dossier before I recruited you.” He heard the smile in her voice, the first smile she’d given since she ha
d been turned.
He felt cool liquid trickling over the wounds, and the skin itched and moved on its own, healing itself. This was the first time he had been conscious when she had healed him with her blood and he found the physical sensation a cross between very disturbing and somehow more personal and erotic than sex.
His skin stopped crawling and he heard her sigh. “Good as new. Not even a scar.” She stood and walked before him, holding her hand out to help him up. He took her hand— cold as always —and she lifted him without effort, as if he weighed no more than a child. He put his torn and bloody jacket back on, mourning the loss of his expensive London Fog coat. I’ll have to ask Brighton where to get a Belstaff, he thought humorously.
Angelica was a little scratched up, but she was fine. No signs that she had been attacked by an angry nest moments ago. Her eyes were red. He wondered if it had been the fight or smelling his blood that did it. She looked pale. He also wondered when the last time she’d fed properly was.
“We did good,” he commented. “Like when we first started working together.”
She looked over at him, her face as unreadable as it had been when he first met her. Had it really been over a year now? “We need to file a report and close the case.”
She walked by him and he did something that anyone but him would’ve been killed for: he grabbed her arm to stop her. “No.”
She arched her eyebrows. “No? What’s with you?”
“Number one, you’re the director. You need to file a report to show yourself?” Danny asked. “Number two, I have willingly put myself through emotional and physical Hell since the moment we met. If I’m being honest, I don’t think you should get to shut me out for months like I don’t matter. Maybe I don’t matter to you anymore, Angelica, but you have always mattered to me. And I deserve to be let inside that twisted head of yours.” He realized how he was talking to a two-hundred-year-old vampire and wondered if this was how he finally met his God.
The red reappeared in her eyes and he heard a subtle hiss in her throat. Her muscles were tense; he could feel them through her thick leather jacket. She snatched her arm back and said, “Don’t you ever tell me what I can and cannot do. My mind is my own and if I don’t let you in, it’s for a damn good reason, Danny. I do not owe you anything.”
“Yeah, I got that for the first few months, but we’ve got a demon witch on our ass and Hell’s Lieutenant backing her. This is no time for your secretive bullshit! It’s gone on long enough. If you don’t care about me anymore, fine. You should care about the success of this case, however. And keeping secrets from me, never talking to me, is counterproductive to our goal,” he said.
“Will you quit saying that?” she said, her eyes starting to drip blood. For a second he was worried she was hurt, till he remembered that vampires cry and sweat blood.
“Saying what, exactly?” he asked.
“That I don’t care! Who told you I didn’t care about you? I know I never said that, so who was it? Tell me so I can rip their skin off,” she said.
“Your actions told me that! You said you needed time after you found out you were fully turned and I respected you enough to give you time and space. You never came back to me,” he explained.
She crossed her arms in a defensive stance. “I do what I do because I care, you stubborn asshole! Do you think it’s easy for me to stay away from you when I have loved you for over a century? To know that, even though we found each other again we might never be able to be together, even as friends or colleagues?”
He stepped forward and she took a compensating step back. “Tell me why. You say we can’t be together, but you won’t say why. If you think I can’t love you now that you turned, you need to know that I don’t care about that. Except for this new paranoia you’ve been entertaining, you’re still the same Angie I fell in love with in 1909. Still the same one I fell in love with a year ago.”
“What were your parents like, Danny?” she asked suddenly, surprising him.
“What does that have to do with anything?” he wondered.
“Just tell me. It’s relevant.”
He thought. “Well, Dad was a big shot lawyer. Mom owned half of the waterfront properties along Lake Michigan. Dad was serious and kind of a hard-ass. He didn’t like that I became a cop. Mom was kind, but she was also a perfectionist which drove me a little crazy.”
“And you inherited her kindness and attention for detail. You have your father’s hardness when you’re in the field,” she said. “You weren’t taught to be that way: it was built in your blood. It’s what makes you the man I love.
“My mother was benevolent, and valued life. She saw humans as living, breathing creatures, not simply a food source, despite her never once being a human. I received that value for human life from her and started the PID.
“My father was a violent human—a hunter, with no regard for life. When he was turned, that violence escalated into madness. I also have that in me. You’ve seen it come out before. Now that I’m completely blooded, the humanity I had is slowly going away. Just like when my father lost his humanity, I am afraid that I will lose control and kill the one that I love.”
She sat on the hood of Danny’s car, looking down at her boots. “I could easily rip you apart right now and not break a sweat. I don’t want to, but it’s in me. Just now, touching, and smelling your blood…I could feel that lust bubbling to the surface, that desperate need to consume life. One second more and you could have been just another corpse in the morgue.”
Danny was listening to her with a growing realization inside of him. She cared too much. She thought she was evil because her father had been evil. He wasn’t sure he had the words to tell her how wrong she was.
“Angie, listen to me: do you still feel love?” he asked. “Compassion? Sympathy? Empathy?”
“Yes…” she said slowly. “All four. Why are you asking me that?”
“You’re a great agent and fighter, but you never once went through the training that real cops or FBI agents have to. Do you know the signs of a sociopath? Your father was one—vampire or not, he had sociopathic tendencies bordering on insanity. So do you know how to identify a true, unfeeling killer? A real life Hannibal Lecter?” he asked.
She scoffed, looking offended. “Of course I do! I went to college…six times. Psychology was my first degree and the one I find most useful.”
“Then tell me—do you have sociopathic tendencies? Are you a coldblooded killer?” he asked.
“Two different questions. I am a coldblooded killer. I have never once felt remorse for anyone that has died by my hand,” she told him.
“They were all paranormal creatures? No humans?” he asked.
She paused to think. “Except for demon-possessed humans, yes, they were all paranormal. I told you before, I killed one human when I was twenty, out of desperation.”
Danny placed his hands on the car on either side of her, trapping her there. She was beautiful, even with the blood dripping from her eyes and staining her skin. She was more than beautiful. He was unashamed to admit that she was his everything.
“You are nothing like Vincent,” he said, his voice low. “What you inherited from him was your lust for battle, and you talent. Nothing more. All of us, everyone, are many things. Products of our lineage, our environment, our circumstances…but most of all we are products of who we made ourselves to be.
“You are Angelica Cross. FBI director. Hunter. Leader. Hero. And you are all of that because of who you made yourself to be. No one else can take credit for the woman you have become.”
He imagined that Angelica had been speechless very few times in her long life, but this was one of those times, as she gazed up at him with surprise written on her face. “I’m no hero,” she said quietly.
He cupped her face in his hand. “Yes, you are. My hero.” And before she could say anything else, he bent down and captured her lips with his own, silencing any other misgivings she had. He heard her whimper (real
ly, Angelica even knew how to whimper?) and she put her arms around his neck, pulling him closer.
“Damn whoever called you and told you to come here tonight,” she said.
“It was Bart,” Danny replied.
“I’m going to fire him.”
He chuckled against her neck. “Really? I think he deserves a promotion.” He moved back and said, “Please come back with me. I have blackout curtains in every room of the house, so you’re safe from the sun there, I promise.”
He saw her hesitating, weighing the options. “Danny, you know—”
“That you feed when you fuck. I get it by now, Angie. I trust you. You won’t hurt me.”
She laughed, still sounding tearful. “How vulgar, Mancini.” He moved away, and held the door to his car open for her. “You know I can get us there in about ten seconds, right?” She slid into the leather seat.
“Yeah, you might be faster, but there is no way I’m leaving my baby here overnight,” he said, starting the engine.
When they pulled up to his house, he was forced to wait while Angelica did a demon check around the place, making sure they would not be attacked. All seemed clear, and it was all Danny could do to not rip her clothes off in the front hallway.
He held her flat against the wall in his room, moonlight illuminating her skin. Or, rather, she let him hold her captive. He never forgot about her superior strength and always admired how she let him have control at times. She trusted he wouldn’t kill her, even though he could, and she let her pride down enough to allow him to have the upper hand every so often. He knew that those things did not come easy for her, and he loved her even more for her small sacrifices.
“I am yours, Angelica. Don’t you ever forget that.”
***
Danny was dozing, his lashes sharp against his skin. Angelica, of course, could not sleep while the moon was up, despite the late hour. She sat up in bed and watched him breathe. The bites she’d left on his skin were garish. She’d have to heal them, or else he would draw very strange glances when he was out and about. He liked wearing the marks, he’d said, to show the world that he was hers.
