Ordinary Vampire WIP
Edward Franks sniffled miserably. When he’d run, he hadn’t expected the sleeting rain and he hadn’t been prepared for the freezing chill of the wind as it whipped through the flimsy shirt and jeans he’d managed to steal.
The icy snow soaked him as he ran blindly through the forest that surrounded the mansion. He could tolerate the cold and the wet as long as his reserves held out, however, and since he’d been on restriction before he’d escaped, his reserves were practically nonexistent. Thursday, sadistic bastard that he was, had seen to it that Edward wouldn’t be strong enough to even think of protesting.
Except that Edward had, and he’d found the strength to run. Pissing off Thursday was the only bright spot in the whole situation, really.
The trek to the furthest edge of the forest took half a day. He made sure to choose routes that weren’t along any marked trail, and he made sure to trail through as much water as possible on the assumption that Thursday would use dogs. If the dogs caught his scent, there wouldn’t be much of anything that he could do escape a second time, Thursday would see to that. Bad enough that he’d had to dig through a couple of layers of skin to pull out the GPS chip Thursday had implanted in the back of his neck.
Edward certainly wasn’t going to give the man a second chance to do the same.
That in mind, Edward hunkered down for a few hours, hiding in the hollow of a huge rotted out tree until dusk descended. He scrambled out and made his way towards the small dirt road that he knew bordered the furthest edges of the woods.
Thankfully, it was empty. Sniffling, Edward idly wiped his nose on his sleeve and stumbled along into the edge of it, intent on getting as far from here as he could during the twilight hours.
His right arm hung like dead weight at his side, and his left leg was heavier than lead as he pulled himself forward. He’d been sickly enough in the past to realize that he was getting sicker by the minute. He bare feet were numb, and he could barely feel the toes on his right foot anymore. Without his abilities, the freezing rain whipped through him and he couldn’t keep himself from shivering violently.
On the plus side, he wasn’t entirely human anymore, so it would take a great deal more than this to kill him. The huge downside being, of course, that if he were human he wouldn’t have been in this position in the first place.
The lights coming towards him in the distance registered first, but he was too exhausted and too numb to immediately recognize them for what they were. Added to that, his new eye hadn’t quite acclimated to the rest of his body yet, and he was having trouble processing what he saw out of it.
In any case, he was only barely able to scramble out of the way as the lights slowed to a stop beside him. Since the lights were attached to an ancient looking truck, Edward tried to scramble away. However, staring directly into the headlights had left him sneezing repetitively and stumbling blindly back towards the forest. Yelping as someone grabbed the back of his collar to pull him toward the truck, Edward balled up a fist and swung blindly with his left arm.
His fist bounced harmlessly off a broad shoulder.
“What the hell?” the deep, rough voice attached to the shoulder barked at him. “Are you all right?”
Blinking, Edward looked up long enough to register that someone around his own age was staring down at him in confused amazement. An old tattered cowboy hat was jammed down on the fellow’s head, but Edward thought he saw straw blond hair peaking out from under the brim in spite of the fact that the stranger’s skin was several shades darker than his own. His eyes, unlike Thursday’s deep red ones, were pale and reflected eerily in the moonlight. He, of course, was wearing the warmest looking jacket that Edward had ever seen.
Lucky bastard. Edward would give his left arm for a jacket right about now.
But that was not the point right now, and Edward jerked back, stumbling. The stranger let go of his collar just long enough to grab his neck instead, forcefully steering him back toward the truck.
It felt like one of the cauterizing irons Thursday used so often on his body, and he jerked hard enough to wrench himself out of the stranger’s grasp.
“Are you crazy? You’re freezing,” the stranger stated the obvious. “What the hell is a kid like you doing wandering out here without a jacket on, anyway? Didn’t anyone ever teach you common sense? C’mon, I’ll take you home and then your parents can straighten you out. Of all the idiotic things to do,” the stranger shook his head before grabbing Edward’s real arm and pulling him towards the truck. “These aren’t the safest woods, you know.”
Edward stumbled forward calmly for a few steps before the situation registered in the tired recesses of his brain. Pulling back, he tried to struggle away. “I’m not going back there,” he murmured, his vocal cords, for once, not failing him completely in spite of the cold.
“Your lips are blue, kid. You can’t stay here,” the stranger bit back, adamantly, pulling him again towards the truck. “I don’t know you, so I’m not gonna call you stupid right off the bat. But I gotta tell you, walking around in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter barefoot is not good for you. I’m not going to let you kill yourself out here in some fit of whatever. You don’t want to go home? Fine. We’ll go to mine and you can figure it out from there. But I’ll be damned if I leave you to freeze to death on this road. There isn’t another house around for miles. We are, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere.”
“Why do you even care?” Edward shot back as all his weak efforts to shake free failed miserably. His vocal cords were beginning to misfire and he heard a faint mechanical squeak. “You don’t know me and I don’t know you.” There was a soft hum of the robotic, but Edward doubted it could be heard over the rustling of the northern winds.
“Jacob. There, you know me, now get in the damned truck before our balls freeze off,” Jacob growled, pulling him forward. Struggling, Edward’s foot caught slightly, sending him stumbling. That in itself wouldn’t have been so bad except he was so damned cold, and the metal of his arm and leg were doing nothing to alleviate the numb tingling sensations that were traveling up his other limbs.
He sneezed again, and the world took on a grey haze. Figuring that the new eye was failing him, Edward tried to get his feet back under him, but the world only turned topsy-turvy again, and he fell forward, everything turning black.
~*****~
Jacob swore, diving as the kid pitched forward. To tell the truth, he was surprised the waif of a brat had managed to last as long as he did given that the closest house had to be at least forty miles down the road. Jacob himself wouldn’t have even been out this far if it weren’t for the fact that the night before this had been the full moon.
Benny was going to have conniptions when he brought this stray home.
Really though, there was no help for it. Scooping the brat up, he winced as he tried stumbling back to the truck. For someone who looked like a stiff breeze would knock him over, the kid weighed a damn ton. Stuffing him less than gently into the passenger seat, Jacob quickly shucked out of his jacket and wrapped it around the boy’s wet, ice cold shoulders.
Walking around to the other side of the truck, he quickly hopped in, shutting the door and restarting the engine. Warm air blasted at them through the vents and Jacob smiled contently. As beastly as Benny claimed he could be at times, Jacob still enjoyed his creature comforts. He was not a big fan of the cold, and he sincerely doubted he ever would be.
Benny, on the other hand, would have been blissfully happy if he’d been born in Antarctica. Bastard set their thermostat somewhere in the region of the eighth ring of hell and then bitched about energy costs when Jacob saw fit to adjust it so that the inside of the house was at least as warm as the outside this winter.
Penny pincher that he was, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what Benny was going to think of an extra mouth to feed. Heaven knew he’d griped at Jacob incessantly to cut back on red meat and eat more-cheaper-vegetables. As if Benny was one to talk.
Still, the kid was unique looking. That at least, would get him in Benny’s good graces. The thin long sleeved shirt and threadbare jeans did nothing to keep out the arctic cold, but they accentuated the brat’s slender frame, small hips and broad shoulders. He was a couple of inches shorter than Jacob, but he seemed a great deal younger, what with the bewildered way he’d been looking at Jacob and Jacob’s truck.
He had elfin features, and Jacob half suspected that if he reached over to push back the slightly wavy jet black hair, he’d find ears with pointed tips. That, Benny would love. Bastard had too much affection for the role playing world, all things considered.
The kid’s eyes had been brown, maybe even black as it had been hard to tell in the moonlight, but there had been something off about the one. In a way, it had reminded Jacob of a lazy eye, but it had focused on him in concert with the other one too many times for that simple explanation to make sense.
Brat didn’t smell exactly right, either, but that didn’t always mean anything. Lots of people didn’t smell right. And for a good reason. It was best to wait and see before judging. After all, Benny had smelled seven shades of wrong, and look where the two of them had ended up.
Navigating the rough back roads that led to the weird little town he’d learned to call home in the last five years, Jacob put it out of his mind. Best to use the time to figure out how to convince Benny that another freeloader was just what he needed.
~*****~
“Oh my god, you blood sucking prima donna, get over it already,” Jacob grumbled, leaning against the table that Ben had bought with his own hard earned money. Scowling, Ben tried to remind himself why it was that he hadn’t killed the damn idiot yet.
It couldn’t be the cowlick as it always made Jacob’s straight hair flip up crazily in front. And it certainly wasn’t Jacob’s love of anything that contained sugar or artificial flavor as it made his idiocy triple in strength. Above all, it certainly was not all the action figures that Jacob left scattered around the house like forgotten dog toys-even if on occasion, they seemed to be dioramas of his favorite Shakespearean plays.
“You can’t just pick up every bloody stray you find on the side of the road,” he tried explaining rationally. Honestly, he was all for helping the underdog, but picking up people in the middle of nowhere could be dangerous to one’s well being. “One of them is bound to bite you one of these days.” Jacob shot him a dubious look which only further irritated him. Did the man have no self preservation skills? “What if he’s an undercover reporter from the big city?”
“Then I think he’s at the wrong house as the incubi down the street are a great deal more out of the closet than you are,” Jacob shot back, rolling his eyes.
The incubi were a menace to society, but that was beside the point. Why couldn’t Jacob have dropped the sick brat off with them? Ten days of being smothered and the kid would have hit the ground running to get the hell away from their bizarre little town.
“Fine,” Ben ground out between his teeth, “then what if he’s an axe murderer?”
‘Then, yummy, free meal for you.” Jacob grinned unrepentantly.
“How is it that I haven’t strangled you before this point?” Ben narrowed his eyes, invading Jacob’s personal space. As always after a full moon, Jacob had the earthy aroma of crushed leaves, pine needles and dirt. He wasn’t sure what was worse; that Jacob smelled like dirt or that the smell of dirt on Jacob was a turn on. Jacob leaned forward, slouching slightly since he was taller than Ben, and rested his arms on Ben’s shoulders leaving their noses practically touching.
“I pay half the rent and am the only soul in three counties who will put up with your ornery ass,” Jacob said with a self satisfied smirk growing on his face, revealing a dimple. It was the amusement in the prick’s blue eyes that made Ben roll his eyes and push Jacob away.
“Mangy mutt,” he muttered, running a hand through his own auburn hair. “What the hell are we supposed to do with him? Do you even know his name?” Jacob’s guilty expression spoke volumes. “You don’t even know his name?!”
Okay, the anger was back. Honestly, how Jacob had made it to the glorious age he had was a mystery. Of course, since Ben had been the one to rescue him from a silver bullet five years back, he supposed he had a part in protecting Jacob from the world. And vice versa.
“It didn’t exactly come up before the kid fainted,” Jacob shrugged carelessly.
“Edward,” the kid in question coughed. “And I’m not a kid.”
Whirling around, Ben gave the brat the once over now that he was awake. Something was off with his voice. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on what it was that sounded wrong, but something was. He was still laid out on the couch; his cheeks were flushed with fever and sweat made his black hair damp. At least that meant that the kid wouldn’t be up to attempting axe murder anytime soon.
“So, if you’re not a kid, then how old are you?” Ben crossed his arms over his chest. What he’d really wanted? A quiet night of Jacob recuperating and a cheesy movie marathon. Half frozen mystery elf boys had not been a part of what he’d planned on dealing with tonight.
“Twenty.” Edward stared straight at him. Which was fine until his right eye went wandering, giving Ben the willies. If Edward’s head started rotating on a three hundred and sixty degree axis, Ben was going to kill Jacob. “Where am I?”
“In my house, freeloading,” Ben grumbled, ignoring the way Jacob jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow.
“Are you feeling any better?” Jacob breezed past Ben, sitting on the ottoman beside the couch and pushing back Edward’s bangs to feel the pasty skin of his forehead. Resisting the urge to smack Jacob upside his big dumb head, Ben sighed and sat down next to him.
Edward shrugged awkwardly. “I’m fine.”
“Right. In that knocking on death’s door kind of way,” Ben snorted, jabbing Jacob in the ribs this time before Jacob could jab him first.
“I don’t have to take this,” the runt started, trying to get up out of bed, but only managing to sit up halfway before he started panting from the exertion. His right eye went off in a wild direction, and Ben made a face.
“You’re exhausted,” Jacob told him firmly, pushing him back down on the couch. “Benny’s just doesn’t like strangers.”
“That makes two of us,” Edward told him warily.