To Catch a Monster {Fic Post}
Jun. 1st, 2012 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
afterandalasiaSet a thief to catch a thief, the saying goes. It isn’t that old, in the way of things; perhaps three hundred years, perhaps four. There are some things that are far older.
The problem is, you see, that there are many dark things that walk the earth. Things that feed upon humans, directly or indirectly, that make men mad and tortured, that would destroy this world if given the change.
There are many monsters in this world.
Set a thief to catch a thief.
To catch a monster. . .
Of course, not everyone thinks of us as monsters. Most people don’t even know that we exist, or think that we are just something made up by Hollywood. Those who do know of our existence usually remember us as people, and therefore don’t believe that we are monsters at all.
I wish that I could agree with them.
The Latin word monstrum means something outside the natural order, nothing more; the English word became more negative over time. And, if nothing else, we’re certainly outside the natural order.
Sadly, this never did manage to exclude me from having to deal with the problems of the real world. Being a monster doesn’t get you out of the need to eat, to sleep, and most importantly to have money to allow you to do those first two things. It just brings with it the extra problems that come when your metabolism could outstrip a train and you end up – way, way too often – tangled in the affairs of other monsters.
You wouldn’t know it to look at me. After all, I looked just like most of the other workers taking advantage of our twenty-minute lunch break on the California farm to scarf down food, water, and cigarette smoke. We were all pretty much dressed the same – t-shirts and cargo pants, dust-caked boots and slightly more varied hats – and we weren’t talking much. Mostly we just sat there, in companionable silence, smoking shitty roll-up cigarettes and mentally calculating how little money we were going to get for this day’s work.
What day was this?, you might ask. Hell, it was most of the summer, as far as I could tell.
I liked not talking to them. I liked quiet in the outside world as much as I liked the quiet in my own head, and believe me when I say that since splitting off from the pack, I really appreciated having my head to myself. I liked being in the sun, the heat, far away from Forks in Washington fucking State and its perpetual clouds, and I didn’t mind the job too much. I’d gotten used to being almost entirely around guys long ago, and at least these ones didn’t see me as a freak. Anomaly, maybe, but not a total freak of nature.
And, possibly my favourite part, none of them really give a damn about me. I’d be impressed if they even recognised the name Leah Clearwater, let alone knew who it belonged to. They didn’t care about me, and I didn’t have to care about them, at least not during the daylight hours. Even at night, it’s nothing personal; I take my pay, kick off to the heap of junk that I call a car, and ponder whether tonight was going to be a night where I had to take on another goddamn bloodsucker.
I should probably admit straight out that I love my car more than it might seem sometimes. It’s trawled back and forth across the country with me, been with me longer than most humans I know by this point, and I can’t count the number of nights that I’ve slept in it. An olive-green eighties Chevy with manual transmission and windows might not be everyone’s idea of a sweet ride, but Jacob used to say that listening to me trying to start the grumbling thing in the morning was like hearing an old married couple having a bickering session. I didn’t dignify him with an answer.
The weather was good, and I have always been an outdoors sort. I found a quiet stretch of road for the evening and sat in the back with a camp stove to make dinner. It’s amazing what you can cook on one of those things if you put in some effort, and after the last couple of years I knew more than enough dishes that I could cook over one gas flame and store in the car. This particular evening involved ploughing through a huge bowl of spicy rice ‘n’ veg, a recipe I’d picked up in Texas and scaled up to match my appetite.
A normal sort of day, and not just for me. I’m willing to bet that most people, looking at the life I live, wouldn’t call me a monster. Drifter, perhaps. Nomad, if they were feeling nice, or hobo if they weren’t. All I can say to that is: well, duh. This far south, at least when the sun is shining, I got most days off to play at being human.
I turned on the radio and watched the sun set, the stars rise. The heat was unusual, even if it had been breaking three digits, but there was an edge to the air that I didn’t much care for: a heaviness, and something that made me feel as if the hairs on the back of my arms were standing on end. I didn’t like it, and even if there weren’t any clouds in the sky yet I didn’t doubt that there would be soon. It put a dampener on my mood as I crawled back into the cab and kicked back for the night, wondering already how much complaining I could get away with and not look weird.
After all, I didn’t hate the clouds because they bought out the rain.
I woke up with a crick in my neck and a guy knocking on my window. He was shading his eyes with one hand, and I didn’t think it was going to be too wild a guess that he was just another migrant worker looking for a lift or a job. I gave him the finger; he did the same and stalked off. It wasn’t like I was going to get any less awake, however, so with a groan I sat up and ran one hand through my hair. Could probably do with getting that cut again, as well.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said as I caught sight of the clouds starting to gather in the sky. I knew what that was going to mean.
You’d think that the bloodsuckers would be smart enough not to come to the sunniest city in the country, but there you go. Apparently they just don’t fucking learn; something about being stuck in the same state as when they were changed. The night and the clouds always bought them out, and I could guess already that today wasn’t going to be any different.
It was annoying that I was going to have to miss a day’s work – ‘no day, no pay’ – but there would be plenty of people wanting to replace me, so it wasn’t like the farm would go short. They’d probably take me back again, but if not then somewhere else would. One of few advantages. I rolled down the windows and hit the streets, waiting for that tell-tale smell of vampire to hit me in return. Jacob just used to complain about how sweet it was; to me, at least, it smelt almost like rotting flesh. Not that I realised it straight away – when you’re nineteen, you don’t have that many opportunities to come across rotting flesh, after all – but after a while in the world of vampires and werewolves you find out what it smells like. It was unmistakeable, right from the first moment, and it never quite went away again.
High summer in the middle of the city, and I was stuck in a car with no working AC, cruising around the cloud-shadowed streets and waiting for the smell of fucking vampire to spring out at me. Not exactly my favourite way of passing the time, even with the biggest and spiciest burrito I could get my hands on to help it along.
I was starting to think that it was a waste of time, as the hands of the clock crept past midday and the rumbles of thunder started in the distance, when one of the gusts of wind that came through my car window sent my hackles rising, my hands tightening on the steering wheel. Ripe bloodsucker, directly upwind.
I parked up in a place that looked like it was fairly unlikely I’d get my car stolen, then kicked my feet into sandals, took off my bra from under my top, and grabbed a sports bag from under the front seats before exiting the car, locking it, and hiding the keys under the chassis. There were spare clothes in the bag, but an ill-timed fursplode and I could lose my keys for hours. That was the last thing that I needed when I was probably about to take apart another blood-drunk vampire who was out on a cloudy day in search of a snack.
I swung the bag over my shoulder and started following the scent, ignoring the way that my stomach twisted violently with each fresh wave that I caught. The further north I went, the stronger it became until it made me wonder how humans couldn’t smell it as well – how I had not been able to smell it before I first shifted. Tracking the sent took longer than I expected, and I thought about going back for the car, but before I could make up my mind, my other senses started to kick into gear as well. The vampire was here.
I found myself outside a foreclosed house with an overgrown lawn and curtains drawn behind the windows. It made sense; I’d never gone in for hiding in abandoned houses myself, but they probably worked well for a leech in need of a sunshade. At least it meant that this was going to be out of sight, as well.
There were things that you could allow yourself to think about, and things that you couldn’t. That this had once been someone’s house fell into the latter category; for now, I was more relieved that it didn’t belong to anyone currently. When I opened the door, the cool damp air of the inside hit me like a wave, and I gagged, covering my face with my arm. That sweet, putrefying smell was stronger inside, with two notes together like actual dead human flesh and vampire. No surprise there, either.
I didn’t do the cop thing, shouting out, trying to draw attention to myself. I closed the door as quietly as I could, letting it click back into place, although if the vampire was paying attention at all then they already knew I was there.
Of course, they might not have been paying attention.
"I'm... I"m not really sure I should still be here..."
A voice caught my attention from below my feet: male, without that tinkling sound that vampires always get after they turn, human. I couldn’t help but feel my lips curl, the growl rising in my throat before I held it back. The wolf deep inside was already growling, straining beneath my mind: danger danger human danger threat protect save PROTECT. Or perhaps it wasn’t that deep down anymore.
There was a reply, but one which I couldn’t make out the words of, low and musical. It had vampire written all over it. The man started talking again, nervously, as if he was trying to politely extricate himself from an unwanted conversation. I half took it in, my mind skimming for any important words, trigger words which meant the danger was becoming more immediate, as I walked round to the kitchen, feeling the cooler air around the door back there which meant that it led to the basement.
The door handle looked damaged, at least to the unknowing eye; I could see that it had been crumpled slightly beneath an over-strong grip. Yeah, my kind and I can do that as well, but I doubted it was one of us. As far as I knew, none of the others had even left La Push for more than a vacation at a time, and it sure as hell hadn’t been me in this house.
I turned the handle; just as the vampire voice below – female, soothing, hypnotic – continued. “That’s right, there’s no danger here, none at all…”
She trailed off, and I didn’t know whether it was because of the man’s continuing silence or because my scent was probably starting to get stronger, wolfier. Still the wolf in my head, as much a desire as a voice: danger cold one COLD ONE protect human fight protect– I wrapped one hand tightly around the bannister as I picked my way down the stairs, darkened at first then pooled with light as I reached the lower levels.
Having super-senses doesn’t mean that you actually use them, of course. I jumped down the last half a dozen stairs, landing with a sandalled flap, and was already poised to spring as the woman finally caught on to me and turned with a feral snarl.
The man – the human protect save danger – was backed up against the wall, an expression of very faint fear on his face as if he could not remember why he was supposed to be scared. I pegged him for a tourist – slight sunburn on his cheeks, the sort of shirt that you wore on holiday and not at home – in a fraction of a second, barely sparing a glance away from the vampire.
She looked older than some of the vampires I’d met before, maybe in her thirties, but she had that same almost otherworldly beauty about her if you weren’t paying attention. Her face was uniformly, smoothly pale, features made even by vampirism, sleek dark hair past her shoulders, her posture graceful and poised. Her whole point was to be beautiful, to put humans at their ease and draw them in.
I was having none of it.
For an instant, she continued snarling, red eyes narrowed at me, then without appearing to move she was back to standing upright, smiling like a hostess and tilting her head just slightly to the side to examine me. “Well,” she said, “good gracious. You appear to be lost, my dear… there’s nothing to see here…”
Bad danger cold one danger look-
I wondered whether she usually had some particular power over humans, or whether this was just another attempt at the usual vampire magnetism. We both walked forwards, slowly, matching our paces and never breaking eye contact. I didn’t even worry about the man; if the vampire was looking at me, then he was safe.
It felt like a game of chicken; she stopped first, when we were only a yard or so apart. Her eyes bored into mine, as I let the bag slip from my shoulder to the floor, stepped out of my sandals. My heart rate was starting to accelerate, body feeling as if my skin was a little too hot, a little too tight.
She breathed in deeply, taking in a full lungful of my scent; hot, Bella had called it once, scorching and sharp. This time, it earnt a look of disgust, one that turned to shock when I couldn’t hold back my smile any longer.
“What are you?” she asked, voice perfect southern-belle horror.
“I’m Leah Clearwater,” I replied. “And I’m about to fuck up your day.”
Then I punched her.
Even in my normal shape, my speed makes me a fair match for bloodsuckers, and my fist connected with her face before she had even managed to start the next question. Her nose crunched underneath my knuckles, with a sound like cracking eggshell and a stab of pain as the skin on my knuckles split for a moment.
To do her credit, she barely flinched; instead, with a banshee howl, she made to pounce on me, arms outstretched. I could see her hands reaching for my neck, the fury in her eyes, but I braced my feet against the floor and reached in to her, her hands passing me as one of my forearms struck her in the neck. My other hand grabbed her forearm and twisted, pulling one arm up behind her back and tightening my hold on her throat as I slammed her against the wall.
It hurt my arm as well, and I drew it out from around her neck before banging her head against the wall once, twice, a third time, leaving a dent in the wall and earning another outraged cry. Then with a fierce twist of her arm, she wrenched free from my hold and threw me to the floor, clear across the room. I heard ribs crack, but forced myself back to my feet even as black patches swirled in my vision. Everything would heal soon enough.
She didn’t jump on me again straight away, but held back, watching warily as she started to walk in a circle, heading towards the human again. He was still looking at us with horror and had not moved an inch.
I made to step forward, and she blurred, moving back in the other direction and making me spin to orientate myself to her again.
“Fuck it,” I said finally. There was only so far I could get in human form anyway.
Fur time.
It had become easier to phase over time – to fursplode, as my brother so charmingly put it. The brain stands still and the body handles the rearranging, and quicker than the human eye can see the human is gone and the wolf is in their place.
Cold one danger hunt threat protect threat danger fight KILL–
Louder, that voice, that devil on my shoulder. I growled, long and low, tensing to spring even as the vampire’s shock overwhelmed her. She staggered back a step, one hand going to her mouth in an expression so human that it surprised even me, then recovered herself and drew back to a combat position.
“Werewolf,” she said, disdain dripping from her voice.
Shapeshifter, technically, but close enough.
I covered the distance between us in one leap, hitting her bodily but nails-first and feeling chips of her fly off from wherever my nails found some purchase. She slapped me – no, not quite a slap, that is the wrong word for a vampire palm rattling all of the bones in your skull, vampire fingers scratching at the skin beneath your fur. A flash of pain ran down the left side of my face, and I responded with a barking sound before sinking my teeth into the line of her jaw.
Vampires aren’t like humans, in just about any way that I have found. Their skin hides flesh that has changed, become rock – and not just muscles, but the structures of the body that used to run beneath. They might have some sort of digestive system to process blood, sensory organs, nails and teeth and hair, but what need does a creature of rock have for bones?
My teeth sank through her cheek and chin, scooping out a section. The taste of rotting flesh flooded my senses and I spat out the chunk in disgust, even as she screamed and reached up for her face again. No blood, just sheared white flesh, like cutting through a block of plastic. I pinned her shoulder down with one paw, her hand with the other, exposing her arm beneath me. The other hand balled in my fur and tried to pull me off, but even as she sank her teeth into my leg I bit into her arm, almost clean through in one strike, and dragged hard enough to snap off the rest even as she threw me aside.
Burning, icy pain started pulsing through my right leg, pouring out from the venom in the wound. It wouldn’t kill me, wouldn’t turn me, but it felt as if someone was boring into me with a red-hot poker, sending the rest of my leg almost numb. She tried to grab for her arm again, but I pounced on it, kicking it to the far side of the room, then spun behind her and bore her to the ground one last time.
This time my teeth went into her neck. It was more of a struggle, but finally her head rolled off and away, and the thrashings of her body stilled.
I stepped back, panting, then phased back to human form again. My right forearm bore an ugly red wound, distorted by the phase until it was almost a row of tooth marks rather than a semi-circle; it felt cold against my heated skin, and my fingers hardly twitched as I tried to move them. I curled it into my chest with a groan, then remembered where I was and turned to face the human that was still backed up in the corner.
He looked from me to the headless, torn-apart body, and back again. “Oh dear,” he said in a shaking voice.
“Something like that,” I replied. “Hang on.” Crossing back to the sports bag, I grabbed the loose dress inside and slipped it on over my head, then slipped my feet back into my shoes. Clothes tend to help with looking human, and even if I had long since gotten used to guys seeing me naked, I doubted that this man was going to be too comfortable with that. Turning back, I grimaced faintly, wondering how the hell I was going to explain the situation. “This…” I gestured to myself, and to the pieces of vampire, “is kind of a long story, okay? Just stay put for a minute, and then we’ll get out of here, and I swear I’ll explain.
“I am dying to hear the explanation for this,” he said, fervently and with an utterly inappropriate choice of words.
Now that I didn’t have to worry about someone’s throat getting torn out, I could look at him properly – he was probably about my father’s age, with hair that was more salt than pepper, dressed nicely but still striking me as more of a tourist than a resident. I pointed out the crumpled straw hat on the floor next to him. “That yours?”
“What?” He looked round, as if remembering, then bent down and reached out with a shaking hand to scoop it up. “Ah, yes. I dropped it when…” Another look at the body.
“They have that effect,” I replied. I grabbed the roll of garbage bags from the sports tote, and started bagging up the smaller pieces of vampire that I had chewed off along the way. The head went into a separate bag, the arm in a third, and then I looked at the rest thoughtfully for a moment before moving in to rip off the legs and place them in separate bags as well.
“Oh God,” said the man. I glanced up to see him looking queasy and holding onto the wall.
“Go sit on the stairs,” I said, pointing. He started to walk past me, taking a very wide berth. “I promise, I’ll explain this too.”
He nodded, then hurried over to the steps, as I continued portioning up the vampire, bagging up the pieces, and packing them into the sports tote. I’d found that one could easily hold a moderately-sized corpse, provided I packed it right.
Once upon a time, I’d caught myself thinking sentences like that and been horrified. Now I was getting used to it.
By the time that I finished the job, collected the larger pieces of the clothes I had shredded, and zipped up the sports bag, my right arm was starting to shake and sweat was beading on my forehead. It was easier to handle these things wolfed out, with more body mass to spread the venom, but that wasn’t really an option in the middle of a big city and with a pulled-apart vampire to deal with. I slung the bag over my shoulder, with a grunt that was more to do with the way that the rocks hit my back than the weight, and walked round to find the man I had rescued sitting at the foot of the stairs with his head in his hands.
I hesitated. I’m not good with freak-outs, and this looked like a very reasonable time to be freaking out indeed. He glanced up between his hands, caught sight of me, and scrambled to his feet. Sunburn aside, he was almost ashen, and was clinging tightly to the bannister. “What are you?” he asked. “A werewolf?”
The same words as the vampire. That made me wince a bit, though I could see why he was asking. “I’m human,” I reassured him. “I just… can do some things, you know. To protect people. That’s one of them. And please, can I explain this properly? Like, not in a basement of a house with this great big bag over my shoulder? Seriously, I won’t hurt you.”
It might sound strange, but I wasn’t in the habit of saving humans. I rarely catch a vampire in the middle of something – they don’t really spend that much time hunting, after all. So normally I’m either taking care of it privately, or clearing up human bodies as well. It might have been more pleasant to actually know that I had saved someone’s life, but it was as awkward as hell.
He looked at me like I’d suggested walking into the dragon’s lair. I couldn’t really blame him for that, either.
“Look,” I said. “I need to finish dealing with… this. I promise you that I don’t want to hurt you, I’m not going to hurt you.” I didn’t add that I could have done that already if I had wanted to. That sort of thing tends to sound creepy. “I just saved your life, okay? I’m here to protect you, and I could walk off now, but I’d rather explain to you what you just saw before I kick you back out into the world.”
I don’t have a high tolerance for bullshit; I get that from my mother. Entirely my own is my tendency to get frustrated with people so easily, which was about where I was right then. When I’d first wolfed out, I wanted to know why – to be fair, I still do – and now I was offering this guy an explanation for everything, and he wasn’t biting. Plus I had a vampire over my shoulder, every nerve in my body was screaming about the reek of it, and I’ve never been much of a fan of going commando.
“Okay,” he said finally. His voice was still a little shaky, but he seemed a bit more together. “I’ll come with you.”
I gestured for him to go upstairs, then followed, making sure that I closed the doors behind us. The smell of death – real death, not just bloodsucker – had been weak enough that I was fairly sure there were no bodies on the premises, that it had just been a convenient hidey-hole and the vampire must have been disposing of the evidence elsewhere.
We walked almost in silence back to my car, where I slung the sports bag in the back, grabbed my keys from under the chassis and pulled some underwear on beneath my dress before getting in. The man seemed nervous, and I gestured impatiently for him to join me.
“My name’s Julian,” he said once he was inside. “Julian Annable.”
Fuck, I’d been away from people too long. I’d fallen out of the habit of using names, or at least of caring about them. “Leah Clearwater,” I replied, letting my hands rest on the steering wheel for a moment. “And I’m sorry that you saw what happened today. I really am. I… try to be more discreet about things.”
“What did happen today?” he asked. Both of us were just sitting in the Chevy, staring straight ahead down the narrow alleyway that led onto a quiet street. Avoiding each other’s gazes at all cost.
“You got taken by a vampire, she was probably going to kill you, but you got saved by a shapeshifting human.”
There was a long, pregnant pause. “Tabernac,” Julian said finally.
“Something like that.” I drew myself together, turned the key in the ignition, and hit the clutch to shift into first gear. The Chevy growled into life. “Come on, I need to get somewhere outside the city so I can set a bonfire. I’ll give you the long version on the way.”
I started from scratch. Once I was done making rude gestures at the pedestrians meandering all over the road and was on the highway, of course. Cruising makes holding conversations a hell of a lot easier.
I started with, “vampires are real.” Seeing as Julian didn’t immediately return to his freak-out stage there and then, I figured this made a pretty good start. “They’re not like what you see in the movies, but they are real. They’re strong, fast, immortal, attractive, and they reproduce by biting. There are two main things that pop culture gets wrong: first, they aren’t made of flesh like us, and they don’t turn into dust. They’re a sort of… living stone, or something. And second, they don’t die in the sun, they don’t even get weaker like the original Dracula stories. But they are… well, highly visible, let’s leave it at that. So the smart ones don’t go out in the sunlight.”
I risked a glance. Aside from one hand gripping the inside handle on the door, he was doing pretty well so far. Vampire mythology in a nutshell was actually one of the easier parts of the story, especially with that little bit of fear in everyone’s mind that remembers vampires, even when they’re supposed to not believe in them. The little voice that is afraid of the dark depths of caves and moonless nights. The little voice in my head which was silenced when the wolf took over.
Bad thing dark danger cold one bad thing cold thing dead thing dead DANGER DEAD KILL–
“They drink human blood,” I said. “They don’t have to, they can survive on animals. There are some who do and they are…”
I groped around for a suitable word that didn’t reveal too much of my true feelings.
“Safer. They’re still vampires, but as long as they don’t harm people, I’m not going to harm them. You with me so far?”
“Yes.” I was expecting a weaker voice, but Julian’s reply was firm. He was nodding, as well, as if something was falling into place.
“Vampires are supposed to be secret. They have laws among themselves to stay secret, and they enforce them.” Badly, when it came to the Cullens, I thought privately. But they had laws all the same. “But they’re quite happy to have false rumours going round, garlic and holy water and a lack of reflections. It makes them less likely to be caught. But remember, they’re still eating humans. They’re still dangerous.
“That’s where I come in.” I licked my dry lips. My right arm was truly throbbing now, reddish streaks going almost from elbow to wrist. I might have to find somewhere to sleep it off for a day or two if it got any worse. For now, I resolved not to shift gear and kept both hands firmly on the wheel.
“My ancestors weren’t happy with the thought of being treated like prey. They made a deal with the spirits, and a group of them became hunters strong enough to take on the vampires and protect their own. They cleared out the area, went on living, and as long as there were no vampires there was no need for wolves. It’s only when vampires moved back into the area that we started firing up again, a new generation to protect people.”
That hadn’t been as clear, and I knew it. I pulled a face at my own blathering, but Julian remained thoughtfully quiet, staring straight ahead. Dear lord, let him not have a breakdown over this or something. I’d have to drop him off at a hospital, but I really wasn’t sure how I could do that without risking too much. Take him back to Forks and Dr. Cullen, perhaps? That was probably even worse.
“So you are a werewolf,” was all he said.
“You… could probably think of me as one. There were other werewolves in Europe, real werewolves. We call ourselves shifters to distinguish between us and them, and because when we get older we can stop phasing and go back to being human. Plus we have nothing to do with the full moon.”
“Actually, a lot of the original werewolf myths from Europe aren’t lunar,” he said. There was the faintest giddy note in his voice as he finally let go of the door handle and ran one hand through his hair. “The original myths involved people, usually men, choosing to change into a wolf by ritual or being forced to do so because of a curse. It’s only more modern culture that has linked them to the moon.”
I was at an honest loss for what to say. Of all the reactions, I could never have expected that, and I blinked in surprise before managing to gather myself and give a reply that wasn’t on the script I’d worked on in my head. “That’s a new one.”
“I’m an anthropologist. I specialise in beliefs in magic and the supernatural.”
“Please tell me that you weren’t deliberately vampire hunting.”
He gave a weak chuckle, but at least it was a chuckle. “I was just on vacation in the sun.”
“Well, stick to the sunlight in future and you should fare better. Like I said, the smart ones don’t go out in it. And the stupid ones don’t live too long.”
I heard him give a deep breath, almost a sigh. “So… vampires are real, werewolves are real, and werewolves protect humans from vampires.”
“Mostly the shifters stick to their home soil and keep their own families and friends safe,” I said. “But yes, that’s pretty much the gist.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Shifters or vampires?” I asked, but it probably counted as rhetorical bearing in mind I didn’t give him a chance to stop. “Vampires… I have no idea. Maybe a handful per million people, but even that’s pulling figures out of my ass. But probably thousands, the world over. As for us, there were eighteen of us when I left. There might be a couple more now, if some of the younger boys have reached the right age.”
“Not the best numbers,” he observed.
“Well, even without me it’s three packs to protect a few thousand people. It works out. And even most vampires don’t know that we exist, so it gives me the upper hand.” I shook my head. “How the hell are you taking this so calmly? If somebody had said this to me four or five years ago, I would have been climbing out the car window to get away from the lunatic.”
“Partially because a strange-looking woman hypnotised me into following her into a basement and then I was saved by another young woman who can change into a wolf,” said Julian. I had to give him that one. He propped his elbow on the sill of the open window as if in response to my comment about climbing out, sighed, and spoke more softly for a second time. “And partially because, when I was younger, my sister went missing. She was always a troubled kid, talking about… strange things. But then one day, she just disappeared. Never seen again.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. An idiot in a van undertook me and I resisted the temptation to blare the horn at him. Julian had gone back to staring at the horizon again, and I shifted in my seat as I tried to think of something more to say. “And you think…”
“She used to talk about beings that glittered like diamonds in the sunlight,” he said. My blood ran cold. “I never knew whether they were real or not. But if you’re saying that there are things other than humans out there…”
My hands had tightened on the wheel until it felt almost as if it was going to snap beneath my fingers, and I made myself loosen my grip even as the edges of my vision seemed to develop a red haze. I didn’t trust myself to speak, eyes fixed sternly on the car in front of my, and Julian must have noticed from the way that he turned cautiously towards me. I could just see him in my peripheral vision, the tension that had been seeping away coming back again. Considering I felt as if I was on the verge of fursploding again, I couldn’t blame him for that either.
“I said that vampires didn’t go out in the sun,” I said through gritted teeth. “And it’s because they fucking sparkle. Your sister knew about vampires.”
“Sparkling vampires.”
I had to give him points for the deadpan. Even I had to admit that it sounded like some ridiculous joke.
“Yes, sparkling vampires. I’m guessing that they’d rather have people think they burst into flames than that they sparkle. And I can see why.” The highway was still rolling beneath us, and we were a way beyond the city now, but I didn’t want to stop just yet. Despite the hunger, perhaps because of it; hunger and anger braiding themselves together and building up through me. I swallowed, but couldn’t drag my thoughts away. “Where are you from? Your accent’s all over the place.”
“Canada,” he said. “Originally. I lived in Britain for a while, then America, before I moved back again.”
“You were in Canada when your sister went missing? Where?”
“Quebec. Quebec City, in fact.” Finally, he seemed to catch on to what I was saying, and turned to me with a shocked expression. “But it was almost thirty years ago! There’s nothing to say that they’d be there now!”
“Vampires are generally nomadic,” I said, speaking like I was reciting words from a textbook. In truth, I’d just thought about them for so long, gone through so much of my own head, that I probably could have written the textbook. “But the further north you go, the less they move around. Less sunlight, more cloud cover, more excuses to be indoors all of the time. They don’t have to move around so much. There’s a chance they could still be there.”
“And what good would it do, after thirty years?” he said softly.
The words bought me up short, all but sobered me. My skin still felt hot, tight, like I was on the verge of phasing, but the world came back into focus as I took deep breaths and told myself that it wouldn’t be worth racing thousands of miles after a thirty-years-gone bloodsucker.
Get a grip, Leah.
The worst part was that I didn’t know why the thoughts were in my head. Why the wolf wanted so badly to kill fight danger fight cold one kill threat teeth kill burn. Usually after I’d dealt with one vampire all that I wanted to do was crawl under a duvet and sleep for a couple of days, sick of the fact that no matter how many I did deal with, there would always more to replace them. But I hadn’t even finished with this one and I was already keyed up to fight again. No, I corrected myself, keyed up to get revenge.
I wanted revenge. I wanted vampire-flesh tearing beneath my nails and my teeth, and I wanted it to be the vampire that had killed Julian’s sister. And so help me, with so many vampires in the world to worry about, I did not know why.
It was like my world was starting to tilt. Before now, I had been moving along a plane, free to move around, but suddenly I had hit the brow of a hill and was moving down a slope. It might have been gentle for now – perhaps I could have gone against it if I had worked hard enough – but it was there and it was constraining and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. For now I could get angry and concerned out of the mess in my head. I was working on the rest.
“I need to head down to the beach,” I said, “see if I can find a fire pit that isn’t in use. The only way to really kill vampires is to burn them, and I don’t want to risk running into the local police while I do.”
We fell into silence once again, this one less uncomfortable than before, though I could still feel the tension in my muscles and the way that my hands kept tight hold of the steering wheel.
“This isn’t a conversation I ever thought that I’d have,” said Julian after a short while, not so much quietly as directed away from me. Unsure whether to reply, I kept my mouth shut and my eyes on the road. “I spent years thinking about what happened to my sister, and now… you have all of the answers in one go.” He rubbed his chin, something haunted in his eyes, then shook himself slightly and looked over to me again. “Are you going to need a doctor for that arm or something?”
The throbbing seemed to become stronger when I thought of it, and I clenched my jaw for a moment as from the corner of my eyes I had to acknowledge, again, the streaks of red beneath the tan of my skin, the swelling around the bite marks. “I’ll be okay,” I said. “There’s no way I could explain it to a doctor, and I’ve had it happen before. We’re built to fight vampires, after all; one little bite isn’t going to kill me.”
“There’s a risk of infection from any open cut,” he said, more firmly. “And you can hardly go walking around with a bite mark on your arm.”
“Shit,” I said with a tight laugh. “Now you sound like my father.”
There had been one occasion before now when I had thought of vampires as being individuals enough to hate them more than their peers. The Cullens may have killed fewer people, but for me they would always be the ones that killed my father. I didn’t buy the story we were told on the Reservation, the story that one or two vampires passing through had ‘activated’ us. There were so many vampires in the world that if that were the case, we would never have stopped being wolves. My money was on the Cullens, living on our land and crossing paths with our people. I had considered returning to La Push once they got caught out not aging and had to move on once again.
It didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt to say it, but I figured that perhaps that was why the wolf was so loud in my head, baying for blood in the name of protection.
“You’re not much like my daughter,” he replied, and I voiced the addition that might have been hidden in his words.
“Thank God. I’m not sure what the world would do with more like me.”
I explained the rest of my story as we made our way down to the coast. How my generation had started to turn to shifters after a long time without the need for us, how it had spread and picked out apparently all of us with blood, how I was the only female. We had started as one pack, I said, then as there became more of us, it reached the point that it was too complicated to contain us all. The split into three packs had happened after I left, after I had given in and chosen to go solo. I didn’t tell him about the telepathy, didn’t add what happened with Sam and Emily, but made it clear enough that I was happier on my own.
It had been three years ago that I left, I told him; I had slowly made my way down the West Coast, with occasional forays inland. On average, I probably ran into a vampire every four to six weeks, and the one currently stinking out the pickup was number twenty-seven. I kept a record: dates, places, how I had found out about them. Julian asked all of the sorts of questions that I had, four years ago, when there hadn’t been answers. For our origin, I offered him our legends; for our fight with vampires, I didn’t have so much to say. They killed our families, our friends, the people around us – it would have been stranger if there was not bad blood between us.
We reached the beach a little after midday, when there were some people around but not too many. When you had the choice to visit the coast whenever you wished, you could pick the best days, and it was threatening to rain as I parked up. In Washington, we wouldn’t have cared, but in California they did. The same went for remembering to get a goddamn permit before I hit the beach; culture shock in less than the length of the country.
I built the bonfire mostly out of wood which I had ready in the back of the Chevy, throwing on some pieces of driftwood for the look of authenticity in case anyone came walking past. The pieces of vampire were buried amidst it, barely visible as glimpses of white. The hands and head, the most recognisable, went right in the centre.
A healthy splash of gas and a couple of matches later, it was alight. Disarmingly easy, I suppose. For a while after that we sat on the sand, looked out over the grey-blue choppy waves, and watched the fire burn down more quickly than a normal bonfire would have done. A celebratory beer would have been appropriate, I thought, but wishes don’t get, as my father would say. It was more Julian that I was celebrating than the actual vampire; the latter was a job, a messy and distasteful one at that, but directly saving a human was not something that I had done before. It made it seem a little more worthwhile.
“Is there more that you want to know?” I asked eventually, as the bonfire settled to a steady, wood-fire look which probably meant that the vampire flesh was done burning. “Anything more that I can say?”
Julian gave a sigh that was half-laugh. “I’m an anthropologist, my dear, I want to know everything. But I don’t think there’s anything more that I need to know.”
“Fair point.”
I watched a group of kids some way down the beach, hoping that their game of Frisbee wasn’t going to bring them to close. They seemed to be a safe distance off for now. The wind coming inland bought with it a fresh salt smell that made me think of home, and comfort and pain twanged together in my chest. “I’m sorry, again, that you got caught up in this shit.”
“It wasn’t you that did that,” he replied. “It was… that other one. You got me out of the mess instead. And then explained things to me.”
“I’m afraid my world has more questions than answers.” I was used to that, by now, but the injustice of it still rankled sometimes. For everything that I thought I had figured out in the last few years, new questions sprang up in its wake. Sort of like the hydra, I thought – except that this time the solution wasn’t simply fire.
Though fire did help.
I was staring out to sea as I spoke, watching the ripples of waves on the never-still grey surface. I’d always found the sea calming, ever more so recently. It was probably one of the reasons that I didn’t want to leave the coastal states. A shadow on the sea looked like rain; I was just trying to gauge whether it was when a hand came to rest on my arm. I looked round sharply to see Julian watching me tenderly, thankfully. “You gave me the most important answer,” he said. “One I’d waited a long time before.”
I smiled, albeit crookedly. It had been a while since I’d managed a full smile for anyone. “Thanks. Mostly I do what I do to… stop that happening.”
“You do what’s right,” he said.
“I think it’s nearly burnt through,” I said, rather than reply to his words. I picked up a long piece of driftwood that I had laid aside and used it to prod at some of the remaining pieces of wood. They crumbled to ashes.
“I wish I knew why those things are so flammable, but I’m glad of it.”
In a pinch, I could burn a vampire piece by piece in a normal fire. A bonfire was just quicker, and felt more right, than shovelling handfuls of vampire into a fireplace in a foreclosed house or some steel drum in the dark corner of an alley.
“I should probably drop you back off in the city. No need to add kidnapping to my list for the day.”
I’d figured a long time ago that trespass didn’t really matter, as long as I didn’t get caught. I was running through a different landscape, one that had different laws and different rights of access. I just needed to keep it out of the sight of the local law enforcement. I needed Julian to know, however, that I was going to return him to his everyday life and not expect him to run off and fight vampires with me or something similarly ridiculous. Only it didn’t feel ridiculous when the urge to protect him was still burgeoning in my head, and the wolf snarled in the back of my mind to not let him go.
“Are you in a hotel?” I continued, speaking over the wolf to silence it.
“I’m staying with my daughter, actually,” he replied, and I winced. Please say that she hadn’t noticed that he was gone. “She’s out with her friends today. I said that I’d occupy myself in the city.”
“Fuck.”
“Well, I’ve certainly been occupied,” he said, and this time I laughed with him. “Really, it’s fine. She isn’t expecting me at a set time. And Leah–”
I wasn’t expecting him to use my name, and it made me turn where I sat like a summoned pet. In my mind, I tried to claw back along my path, back up that slope.
“Thank you. For everything. I owe you my life – and my peace of mind.”
I couldn’t even find words to respond. I nodded dumbly, feeling a faint smile finally on my lips, then got to my feet and held out one hand to help him up. “Come on,” I said, effort though it was. “Let’s get you back.”
My arm was already hurting less by the time that we hit the highway back, and thunder boomed overhead as the storm finally broke. The rain went from a light speckling to torrential downpour in a drastically short time, and I could see other drivers pulling off into rest-stops rather than drive in it. I put my windshield wipers on full and kept going, mostly just amused that the rain cleared the roads for me.
This time it was Julian’s turn to talk. He was Québécois, he said, though he had lived for many years elsewhere. His sister Deborah had been only fifteen months older than him, and their younger brother had been some years behind. She had always been a troubled child, he said – distant, obsessed with ghosts and monsters. Only Julian had even wanted to believe her, and even he found it difficult to do so. Then one day, when she was seventeen and Julian sixteen, Deborah had disappeared without a trace. For years they had searched; his parents had never really given up. Even Julian, though he had gone on to study and then teach, had never quite escaped. His subject was anthropology; his speciality, magic and the supernatural.
He talked about werewolves for a while: the dominant European mythos that werewolves were cursed or evil men who chose to transform into wolves to hunt down human victims; the more Slavic belief that werewolves and vampires were variations on the same creature; the very different Native American folklore about benevolent shape shifters. It was interesting, even if the most surprising thing that he said was that it was Hollywood who had made the link to the moon famous.
I’d figured that a full moon always made vampire hunting easier, seeing as our night vision wasn’t quite as good as theirs. You lived and learnt.
The worst of the storm had passed by the time that we got back to the city, and Julian directed me through the streets to his daughter’s townhouse. It was a nicer part of town than I was used to being in: the sort of area where people would notice if someone went missing, or if someone acted strangely. Not a vampire’s hunting ground – ergo not my hunting ground.
I parked up outside and looked round, feeling a pang of envy. I understood why Jacob and Sam and Quil and all of the others had wanted to stay in Forks: they could settle down, have families there. Hunting vampires would last forever, and if I became too good at it was only going to become more dangerous. Perhaps one day I’d end up facing down the Volturi themselves. Strangely enough, the idea had never really frightened me; at least this part of my life I had chosen.
“You can’t tell her what really happened,” I said, before Julian could reach for the door handle. I turned off the engine and let the car fall silence again. “Vampires, werewolves. It’s not just for the good of vampires that they hide away: it’s dangerous for humans to know, as well.”
“The law-makers you talked about?” I nodded in response. “I understand. Come on, I’ll tell her something else.”
He had indicated for me to come with him, but an unfamiliar reticence came over me and I shook my head, holding up both hands. “Woah, no. Sorry. I don’t do guest appearances.”
Julian gave me a faintly exasperated look, like my father always used to when I was trying to wear a boy’s school uniform or sulking because Sam wasn’t letting me play basketball with him. I knew he didn’t realise how much that one look was making me shake in my seat, but it hit me all the same.
“You saved my life,” he said again. “This isn’t the part where you just vanish off into the distance. Please, at least let me introduce you to Sonia.”
I glanced down at the dress and sandals that I was wearing, and concluded that I was probably just about fit to be seen. “One moment,” I opted for, holding up a finger, then rifled under my seat for a hairbrush. My hair was bobbed; most people were surprised as the neatness, but when your haircut as a human affected your entire body hair as a wolf, you learnt fast enough to take care of it. There was a purse under my chair as well, and I threw in my phone, wallet and car keys before climbing out of the car and nodding for Julian to lead on.
It wasn’t even as if I had wanted to run off so quickly; that was just how things worked. I fell into place behind him like an awkward shadow as he made his way up to the front door and rang the bell; it must have not been a long stay, if he didn’t have his own keys.
I heard the playful thud of footsteps running down the stairs, then the door was pulled open and a wave of fresh, light perfume-scent hit me. My body reacted with a sneeze, and I was already mortified as I looked up again at the woman throwing her arms around Julian’s neck.
“Dad! When you didn’t answer your phone I was worried!”
Julian laughed and patted her shoulder. “I’m fine, Sonia. Just been on a bit of an adventure. Ended up in a bit of a rough area, and some chap had me cornered in an alley, when this young lady – Sonia, this is Leah – came and scared him off.”
My impression of Sonia had been a blur of energy and movement, a fresh fragrance in the air, and a mass of gold-highlighted brown waves of hair. As her father pointed her out to me, however, she turned to face me.
Our eyes locked.
The world lurched giddily as I looked into her eyes, green-flecked brown ringed in thick dark lashes. Somewhere in the distance, Julian was still talking; a heavy warmth was filling my body with every instant that I looked at Sonia. I wanted to scour out every inch of evil in the world to protect her, wanted to carve the earth to her desires. My heart glowed, soared, pounded in my chest, and if there was something in the world that was stopping her from doing the same then it was me who had to fix it.
“So,” said Sonia, “it’s you that I have to thank for keeping my father safe today, then?”
She had faint spots of pink in her cheeks, like she had run downstairs at the sound of the door, terrified that something had happened to Julian. A slight smudge of ink was just visible on her jawline, and it took every ounce of control I had not to reach out and wipe it away.
Since the moment I had phased, I had lived in Sam’s head, in Quil’s, in Jacob’s. I’d told myself a thousand times that I was ready for whatever my wolf nature might have planned out for me in the future. I had not known that the echoes that reverberated through the pack were only one-tenth, one one-hundredth, of the feeling, that moment, when the world falls together.
“They don’t belong to themselves anymore,” Jacob had said, back when he had looked at the imprints and their wolves with pity, before he had fallen to his knees before the perfection of this world.
I don’t care, I answered him now, across the years and miles, if I can belong to her.
I imprinted, and for the first time in four years the world turned the right way on its axis.
“Looks like it,” I managed to reply, my tongue feeling clumsy in my mouth. Still I was looking at her, my eyes locked on hers, drinking in every second that she offered me her presence. It didn’t seem to be unsettling her, at least not yet. “I’m Leah Clearwater.”
“Well… thank you, Leah,” she replied. There was something in her eyes as she watched me. I wanted to tell her everything, even what I hadn’t told Julian, take her back to Forks where the pack could protect her and I could be anything, everything she needed.
Needed. I knew humans better than to think that they needed the life that I lived. I still claimed to be one, after all.
“It’s nothing,” I said. I swallowed, and forced the words to continue even as they tore across my chest. “Look, I’m sorry, but I really should be going.”
“What? No!” Sonia reached out as if to take my arm, and I shied back. I knew what her touch would do, what it would make me do. And I knew what she needed. “Please, just stay a while!”
“Really.” I backed down the steps. There was a lump in my throat, but I could do it, I had to. “I’m just passing through, I really need to get going if I’m going to get there by nightfall…”
Julian wasn’t speaking, just looking at me curiously, though whether it was my behaviour or the lies that were leaving my mouth I didn’t have the time to guess. Sonia looked away for a moment to grab something from behind the door, and it gave me a moment with, once again, only me in my head. I grabbed the instant before it escaped, clung to the thought that arose in it. Clung to the word need. She passed me something, pressing it into my hand before I could pull away, and I glanced down at the rectangle of white card.
“If you’re ever passing through again,” she said, this time a little more quietly.
One last time, I raised my eyes to hers, and held an infinite moment of her gaze. “Yeah,” I said. “That sounds good.”
For her, I smiled. She smiled back. And the moment was perfect, until fat drops of rain began to fall again and she jumped back inside, pulling her father with her, and I fled down the steps and back to my truck again. My hands were shaking so much that I could barely open the door, but then I managed to climb in, and caught sight of them both waving at me from the doorstep as I started to drive on once again.
When you imprint, your world moves. It isn’t gravity that holds you down, it’s her. You become whatever the imprint needs. We all understood that.
But I hoped that I understood more. The word need is the important one: nobody needs to have my world, my life, forced upon them because the wolf inside me decides that I am meant for them. I had given Julian back: that was what Sonia needed. And maybe in one year, or two, or five, I would be just ‘passing through’ the city, and I would get in touch, and we could talk. Perhaps we could go for coffee, or catch a movie. Date. And then perhaps we would fall in love, if that was what was right, and if I was what Sonia needed.
Sometimes what people need is nothing at all.
I wrestled the Chevy into gear and started driving. There was enough money in my wallet to buy a fresh tank of gas if I ran out, and I had a few days’ of food. Time to find another city, find another vampire, and get back to work.
The tears in my eyes blurred my vision more than the rain on the windshield, but I blinked them away as, finally, I smiled to myself once again. Maybe, just maybe, there would be an end to this after all.
But until then, there were vampires, and I was a shapeshifter. Somewhere in the world, there was something for me to do, something that would keep the wolf in my head quiet that bit longer, and give me a little more time of being myself.
I slipped Sonia’s card, with her number and address, into my purse, then turned the radio up loud. There was still plenty of the day left, after all, and I had plenty now to fill it.
