The MOMENT I saw this prompt I knew what had to be done, and I’ve been giddily looking forward to it through the first third of the month. Wrote it before falling asleep, and once I’d done the important stuff of the day I sat down to polish it up and post it, and I very much wrote this for ME but I hope it’s enjoyable. It was written with love.
-
“This is the last time I — ”
The color drains from Jack’s face as he struggles to process the horrible tableau before him. The gibbering weeping and wailing that had dragged him back from the promise of sleep — not good sleep, crappy sleep in a too-short bed in a too-big room in a place where the plugs are weird and the hotel does not provide a hair dryer and he had not packed one because it would mean buying an adapter and he would have to do it on his own dime… Well, the gibbering weeping and wailing has a clear cause.
He’d expected it to, but he’d expected it to be bad dreams, travel unease, general foolishness, not…
Teeth.
Blood.
“Oh god…” For a moment he’s lost, for a moment he’s frozen, a solid block of ice carved into an inconsequential man, and his knees are weak but he doesn’t collapse, and his heart goes out of him with his breath and he…
A single sharp sob cuts through the pounding in his head, and then he’s moving forward, an inarticulate scream rising up in his throat, high and desperate. He’s unarmed. It doesn’t matter.
The woman dissolves into mist before his fist can connect, he stops short before he can swing through where her shoulder used to be. He collapses onto the bed and grabs for a handful of coverlet, holds it up to the bleeding wound, the white throat…
Gil whines pitifully as he applies pressure, blood hot and wet through the thin fabric, and he shushes him with little confidence.
“Oh god…” He says again, because he can’t think what else to say. He saw with his own eyes, he saw the blood on her fangs and her fangs in his throat and his blood, someone so terminally pale and scrawny can’t afford to lose any blood, and he’d said, he’d said, he’d said…
The oppressive scent of stargazer lily and the sweetness of decay closes in on the bed now — it was nothing, before, but now it’s beyond cloying, and the white floral bends to the powerful aura of rot, a note that overpowers even the copper-salt tang of spilt blood. Why had he dismissed it so easily before? How had he missed the wrongness and the rot in it?
“See?” Gil asks weakly. Gil clings to the front of his robe and shakes like a chihuahua in a Minnesota winter and Jack can’t hold him still enough.
“Uh-huh. Shh, shh… shh, honey, hold still, you’re bleeding.”
The ‘honey’ slips out, he’s not sure if it’s gently patronizing or all too sincere. He wants Gil to hold still so that he can take care of him, and sometimes when he’s talking to Gil he couldn’t tell the difference between insult and endearment. Most things are a little of each, when they get to bickering over work. Blood has spread fast, wicked through linen and lace, dying the coverlet red. He can feel it wet where it’s clenched in his fist, but it seems slower, less hot.
They make a strange, shuffling procession to the bath, where Jack ruins two and a half towels in the course of trying to get Gil bandaged, and reasonably clean.
He still looks ghoulish, white as the blood-soaked lace used to be, the pajamas that hang loose on his narrow frame stained with it. Pale streaks of watery red where the frantic application of damp towels hadn’t quite cleaned away the awful mess. Eyes too wide and fearful and wet, chin trembling.
“You saw her, too.” His hands twist at the third, only slightly-damp and slightly-bloodstained towel.
“Don’t speak. I did.” Jack nods, because crazy women with fake fangs who break into hotel rooms to attack people might be real in a way he never considered vampires to be, but crazy women can’t turn into mist, and he can’t be crazy, because the wound and the blood, that’s all real. So. Vampire.
“Jack? Can I sleep in your bed?”
There is not enough room for Gil in Jack’s bed. There’s not enough room for Jack in Jack’s bed.
“Yeah, Gil. Yeah, you can.”
