DN -- The Hunt II: The Hybrid
Title: The Hunt
Chapter: 2. The Hybrid
Fandom: Death Note
Pairings: Matt/Mello/Near, Light/L
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,125
Warnings: language, violence, implied sketchiness, (non-sparkly) vampires
Summary: Discovering a new coven is never a good thing, but there's something strange about this one - and that's even worse. The vampires are closing in. The Hunt is on.
Author's Note: Slow update is slow. Busy Tierfal is busy. Exposition emphasis is only temporary. XD
II - THE HYBRID
L’s heart pounded so hard his head spun, but his hands were steady-the gun was trained on the space between those crimson eyes, and he wouldn’t miss.
“Oh, come on,” the voice urged. “Aren’t you curious?”
“Not in the least,” L gritted out, trying to force his finger to curl despite the lie-he needed to blow a hole straight through the skull; it would give him a full minute to race for the stairwell, bar the door from the inside, and sound the alarm; they could evacuate to the church in two minutes flat, and someone would run to the storeroom for a stake-
“I’m not one of them,” the figure said, rising from the thickest darkness, coalescing into a shape that was distinctly humanoid, not that that was enough to substantiate the claim. L kept his finger on the trigger and his eyes on the target.
One step brought the newcomer into the faint yellow light, which betrayed dark hair, pale skin, disheveled clothes, and those ruby vampire’s eyes.
L tightened his grip. “Then what are you?”
“Look,” the young man told him. “I bleed like you.”
Before L could bark at him to keep his white hands in plain sight, the stranger delved into a pocket and retrieved a knife, flicking out the blade. He pricked the pad of his thumb with the tip and took another step forward-L retreated an identical pace, but not before he’d seen a fat drop of blood ooze out and start to dribble down the visitor’s palm, red instead of black. The eyes deceived: this man was no vampire.
Or not quite. He didn’t bleed black, but he healed like them-the self-inflicted injury was disappearing fast.
“I was bitten,” the man explained, and L fought the instinct to flinch at the prospect that his mind was somehow on display. “As a child-I don’t remember it at all. I should’ve been one of them or dead, but, as you can tell, neither’s true. I’m immune. My blood absorbed the virus instead of giving over to it.”
“That’s impossible,” L retorted flatly, centrifuges and tripedal microscopes whirling in the fluorescent back rooms of his mind. He hated the sound of the phrase-it was stupidity articulated in front of a proven impossibility, but it was the best he could do. He knew what the virus did-knew that it simply consumed until the host began to do the same. But this-what if there was some threshold, some critical volume of blood a vampire could extract, too much to Turn, but not enough to drain the victim dry…?
The young man stepped closer, and L stepped back.
“How do you know?” the anomaly asked quietly. “How can we tell what’s logical anymore? Have you heard a peep from the cities’ scientists?” There was a curl of contempt to the words that L wished he didn’t like. “They never went this far-they never even isolated the pathogen, not really. They never figured out how it works backward and rewrites genes, repairs cells-they never even tried to make a vaccine. You know it; you know this whole story, don’t you? You know very well how pleased they were, how excited, when it still seemed like a game. What a clever trick evolution has played-what a charming ace Nature had up her sleeve. And when they saw that it cured nothing, saw no market, saw no money in the petri dishes where it devoured or converted every living cell-well. They stopped. The papers stopped reporting, and the cities forgot. How long do you think it will be before they have to recall?”
“Too long,” L said, and it was the truth. His arms ached; he hadn’t lowered the gun. He pushed the distraction aside, as he had always done.
The young man sighed, not without a slow and idle smile. “Then we’re both freaks, aren’t we?” he asked. “I am; I’m something homeless, in-between. And you believe in the boogeyman.”
“It’s easier to believe in it when you’ve watched it kill,” L remarked.
The dryness earned him a high, merry laugh.
“Well?” the young man prompted, holding out his hands, wrists together, as if they waited for a pair of cuffs. “Take me to your leader.”
L angled his movement, backing over to the stairwell door without letting the gun barrel waver more than an inch. He didn’t know how a hybrid would respond to bullets, and he wasn’t hungry to find out.
“What’s your name?” he asked, turning the knob that pressed against his spine.
The young man smiled again, radiant and faintly mad.
“My name,” he answered, “is Beyond.”
-
Dawn woke Near, even though he’d only drifted off to sleep a few hours before. Nocturnal prey made for nocturnal predators, and one’s circadian rhythms just had to cope.
Today, however, he was glad of his body’s miscalculation-Rester and his team were leaving this morning, and Near had wanted a chance to bid them good luck and goodbye.
He didn’t actually believe in luck, but the phrase was more traditional than “Well, I hope the steep odds fall in your favor, because I’d hate for you to die.”
He did believe in parting on warm terms, which was infinitely better than having regrets at a funeral.
If there even was a funeral. If someone came back with something to bury at all.
Near slipped out from under Matt’s arm and Mello’s leg and stood, rubbing his eyes and trying to crush out the cynicism with the sleepiness. Fumbling his way back into last night’s clothes-and borrowing Matt’s goggles for the hell of it, because they were lying on his shirt-he reflected that he might as well allow himself to hope a little. Rester, Halle, and Gevanni were some of the best and most experienced Hunters they had, and if anyone was likely to return without so much as an infected scratch, it was them.
Trailing his hand along the railing, Near sidled down the stairs, seeking them out.
He found them at the long dining table in the kitchens, laughing quietly but genuinely over their breakfast.
Out here, in the wooded towns, oats were one of the few things they could always get enough of. Mello whined about it to the point of laryngitis, but Near was actually rather fond of oatmeal.
He ladled himself a bowl from the huge communal pot and sat down at the table, which was virtually empty at this hour-probably only the kitchen crew and Rester’s team were even awake, let alone active.
Rester smiled to welcome him as he selected a place. Gevanni noticed the goggles perched in his hair and hid a knowing smile.
“How much distance are you covering today?” Near asked, more to make conversation than because he didn’t remember from their last talk.
“We’re headed to Danis,” Rester replied. “We’ve heard rumors of an outbreak, and we need to know for sure. Best to be ready for the worst. We’re catching the train in Vailiff, and we’ve got permission to sleep in a church in Acerton.”
“That shouldn’t be too bad, then,” Near concluded, of the transportation at least. At this juncture, it was pointless to make predictions about the rest of the trip. He did glance down the table, though-John, another relative vet, was spooning at his food with a characteristic lack of enthusiasm. Near had asked Rester about John McEnroe once-he’d joined up after the vampires had come to his small town in the dead of winter, when the snow had muffled everything until it was too late. They’d shredded his livestock, and then they’d started into the house.
John’s wife had been tending to their newborn, and he’d woken to the screams.
Rester’s voice had lowered, unconsciously perhaps, and run with something like a somber admiration as he’d mentioned the result. John lived every day like a dead man walking, but they’d made him like them without ever getting to his blood-when night fell, he came alive, and when the fight began, he was a demon with a grudge. Nothing stood in the way of his vengeance for long.
Near thought it was somewhat fortunate that he himself had been too young to understand revenge. He didn’t remember much about the attack that had erased his family-he remembered the anxiety before, remembered his mother starting at shadows and his father barring the doors after sunset, but the event itself was nothing but a blur.
The important thing was the fire-the vampires weren’t beasts; they were sentient, if not always terribly smart, and they frequently burned what was left. It marked their territory and destroyed the would-be survivors, as it would have destroyed Near if he hadn’t reached up from the wreckage to be gathered into Rester’s arms.
They’d been vagrants for a few months after that-homeless, with nowhere to retreat. The cities would have tucked them into an alley and left them to die, and other towns were terrified of the contagion. The police had chased them from the slums of the capital when they wouldn’t surrender their weaponry upon making it to “safety,” and the vampires had hounded them when they’d ventured too close to the woods. They dodged from one boundary to the other for nine weeks, fighting nightly over where to run and whether Near would let the others give him their portions of the dwindling food. They slept during the days.
And then there had been the House.
It hadn’t surprised Near, really, how quickly, if still in silence, Rester had regained his faith when he had organization and efficiency on his side against the cruelty of the dark.
Near could still see it in him now-progress was slow, if it was happening at all, but Rester believed. He’d been galvanized, and he still had the lightning in his veins. He had a home now, and a means, and a hope. He had something to fight for, and a unified front to pitch his battles on. He was a soldier, and he was strong.
As Near watched Anthony Rester stand from the table, tugging his cargo jacket into place, he was very, very glad that they had this man in their fight.
Rester smiled as the rest of his troupe took to their feet.
“We should be back next week,” he noted. “Have any plans between now and then, or are you all running the patrols?”
Near drew himself up too for a proper farewell. “Patrols, mostly,” he answered. “I’ll see you next week, then.”
There was some comfort to be had in assurances that might turn into lies.
There was more still in Rester’s tight hug, in Halle’s warm kiss on his cheek, in Gevanni’s disheveling of his goggle-tangled hair, and in John’s soft touch to his shoulder.
Seeing them off to the last tended to make Near depressed. Instead, he went to the church to watch the morning’s light shift upward through the stained glass, pretending not to hear a jeep engine gunning, roaring, and settling to a rumbling growl that faded into nothing as its passengers rode away.
This morning, however, the church wasn’t empty when he arrived.
The figure chained to the altar rail lounged extravagantly in a pool of light, eyes half-closed-but as Near stepped uncertainly closer, he saw that they were unmistakably red.
Near heard his heartbeat skitter in his ears.
The young man looked up at the soft patting of Near’s footsteps on the floor, the sound echoing gently as if to apologize for giving him away. The creature at the altar gazed at him unperturbedly, red eyes set in a heart-shaped face on either side of a sharp, angular nose, their sightline partly obscured by the matted brown hair hanging over them like distended lace. The head tilted slowly, doll-like, to one side, and then the creature cracked a grin.
Near was startled to see straight, round-edged teeth-a human mouth.
He clenched his fists and took one step back. Whatever this thing was, whatever was going on, he wanted no part in it. Not with those eyes crawling on his skin.
“It’s quite all right,” the creature said. It was a smooth voice-calm, pleasant, and a little bit high. Its owner tipped his head towards the adjacent hall, a glance towards which made Near’s knees go jellied with relief-L and Wammy stood just past the threshold, conversing quietly.
If it was safe-if it was under control-if there was no danger, none at all-maybe he did want to know.
Just a few questions. Then he’d go.
Near had always been addicted to knowing things.
He swallowed and moved closer-close enough to see the dust dried on the pale face; close enough to wonder what had made the rents in the shoulders of the rough, woolen shirt; close enough to marvel that the wounds had left only the thinnest of white scars.
“I’m one of you,” the creature assured him, noting the trajectory of his stare. “Just… special. They tried to get me, but my body said ‘No.’” He grinned again, broadly and heartily, and now Near saw the delicate points of his eyeteeth-long enough to look profoundly wrong, but far too short to pierce through skin and puncture veins.
“Why?” Near asked, pausing at the frontmost pew to curl his fingers carefully around the scarred wood of the back.
The young man shrugged, smiling still. “Stranger things have happened,” he declared.
“Not many,” Near replied, inching forward again.
The grin resurfaced, shining in the swelling light.
Near frowned, fingertips skating thoughtfully on the edge of the bench, and raised his other hand to twist it into his hair.
“How much are you of each?” he asked.
Another smile and a languid wink were his reward.
“It’s hard to give percentages,” the creature answered, sounding far from discontented about the fact. “But I have a lot of their talents, and a lot of their faults. I’m faster than you, for instance, but as of now-” He inclined his head towards the crucifix that towered on the wall behind. “-the power of Jesus Christ compels me.”
Near did not think this was very funny.
“Why?” he repeated. “Why do crosses even work?”
Again the bony shoulders lifted and dropped, and Near saw a sliver of the promised preternatural grace.
“I suppose it’s the shape,” the creature said. “Maybe a plain ‘x’ would do just as well. In any case, it does. It bothers me. It’s like a nagging in my mind-like a grinding metal voice saying words that I can’t understand, getting louder and louder until I want to claw it out of my head.” He smiled lazily, eyes half-lidded and warmly gleaming. “For a vampire, I imagine that whisper would be a screaming. It’s torture, purely mental, no evidence, no marks. Too long, and it would drive them insane.”
Near’s scalp tingled as he pulled harder on his hair.
“What about sunlight?” he asked.
The young man stretched both slender arms high over his head, still beaming, the chain swinging as he moved.
“It hurts like hell,” he announced in the same lilting tone-which, to Near, discredited the revelation a bit. “It does,” the creature assured him, as if Near’s doubts had been written on his forehead in calligraphic ink. “I’ll sunburn soon; I’ll be peeling by the evening. Real vampires just burn. I imagine it’s a side effect of the virus-extreme photophobia. Evolution isn’t perfect.” The corners of the red eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Not yet.”
Near shifted. He was too close now-much too close. He could see the rust on the chain links and the grains of dust in the thick black eyelashes, dipping low over irises the color of…
“Why the blood?” he asked.
The creature laughed, a tinkling sound like bells and wind-chimes and breaking glass.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Sunlight hurts like hell, and blood tastes like heaven.”
A shadow fell over them, and Near looked up to find that L, barefoot, had soundlessly approached.
“They need the organic materials,” he murmured, his eyes flitting over the creature’s form, “and they have to get them directly. Their metabolisms are so fast to support their speed and strength-and to allow them to regenerate cells and repair any wound but an oak stake through the center of their circulatory system-that their bodies simply don’t have time to process more complex food.”
He paused, itching at his ankle with the opposite foot.
“It’s heliophobia,” he added. “Photophobia is more general.”
“Pardon me, Professor,” the young man purred, only grinning wider as L fixed him with an incinerating glare.
“Is it true what you said?” L inquired, frostily at best. “Will you be in physical pain if we leave you here?”
“You don’t trust me yet,” the creature inferred, as always seeming deeply satisfied with the condition of things. “That’s good. That’s probably why you’re still alive.”
L angled his head-just a fraction, but in such a way that the message of disinterested dismissal was painstakingly clear.
“In the interests of my joining you in survival,” the young man amended glibly, speaking hastily for the first time since Near had begun to listen, “yes. It hurts. It hurts a lot, and it’s still early now. You can extrapolate the rest.”
L considered, and then he turned to their commander.
“Quillish,” he said, “do we have an umbrella for Beyond?”
The creature smirked. “Oh, yes,” he murmured, white fingers curling and uncurling around the rail. “You’re very good indeed.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Wammy volunteered, joining them, as incongruously striking as ever-glasses clean, mustache straight, rifle straighter still. “L, when was the last time you slept?”
L touched a thumb to his lips, a gesture so familiar that a host of flutters and flickers in Near’s chest immediately calmed.
“A while,” was L’s unenlightening response.
“We’ll keep him in the church,” Wammy promised, “but out of the sun. Get some rest; you’re due back out tonight.” He smiled, gently, at Near. “That means you, too.”
Near would be lying awake for a long time after this conversation-rewinding it, replaying it, rediscovering every nuance he could coax free.
But it did sound nice to curl up in a hollow between Matt’s and Mello’s tangled bodies as he worked it out.
With one last look at the strange being chained to the rail, he scampered off.
In the instant of eye contact, Beyond winked.
[Chapter I] [Chapter III]
Chapter: 2. The Hybrid
Fandom: Death Note
Pairings: Matt/Mello/Near, Light/L
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,125
Warnings: language, violence, implied sketchiness, (non-sparkly) vampires
Summary: Discovering a new coven is never a good thing, but there's something strange about this one - and that's even worse. The vampires are closing in. The Hunt is on.
Author's Note: Slow update is slow. Busy Tierfal is busy. Exposition emphasis is only temporary. XD
II - THE HYBRID
L’s heart pounded so hard his head spun, but his hands were steady-the gun was trained on the space between those crimson eyes, and he wouldn’t miss.
“Oh, come on,” the voice urged. “Aren’t you curious?”
“Not in the least,” L gritted out, trying to force his finger to curl despite the lie-he needed to blow a hole straight through the skull; it would give him a full minute to race for the stairwell, bar the door from the inside, and sound the alarm; they could evacuate to the church in two minutes flat, and someone would run to the storeroom for a stake-
“I’m not one of them,” the figure said, rising from the thickest darkness, coalescing into a shape that was distinctly humanoid, not that that was enough to substantiate the claim. L kept his finger on the trigger and his eyes on the target.
One step brought the newcomer into the faint yellow light, which betrayed dark hair, pale skin, disheveled clothes, and those ruby vampire’s eyes.
L tightened his grip. “Then what are you?”
“Look,” the young man told him. “I bleed like you.”
Before L could bark at him to keep his white hands in plain sight, the stranger delved into a pocket and retrieved a knife, flicking out the blade. He pricked the pad of his thumb with the tip and took another step forward-L retreated an identical pace, but not before he’d seen a fat drop of blood ooze out and start to dribble down the visitor’s palm, red instead of black. The eyes deceived: this man was no vampire.
Or not quite. He didn’t bleed black, but he healed like them-the self-inflicted injury was disappearing fast.
“I was bitten,” the man explained, and L fought the instinct to flinch at the prospect that his mind was somehow on display. “As a child-I don’t remember it at all. I should’ve been one of them or dead, but, as you can tell, neither’s true. I’m immune. My blood absorbed the virus instead of giving over to it.”
“That’s impossible,” L retorted flatly, centrifuges and tripedal microscopes whirling in the fluorescent back rooms of his mind. He hated the sound of the phrase-it was stupidity articulated in front of a proven impossibility, but it was the best he could do. He knew what the virus did-knew that it simply consumed until the host began to do the same. But this-what if there was some threshold, some critical volume of blood a vampire could extract, too much to Turn, but not enough to drain the victim dry…?
The young man stepped closer, and L stepped back.
“How do you know?” the anomaly asked quietly. “How can we tell what’s logical anymore? Have you heard a peep from the cities’ scientists?” There was a curl of contempt to the words that L wished he didn’t like. “They never went this far-they never even isolated the pathogen, not really. They never figured out how it works backward and rewrites genes, repairs cells-they never even tried to make a vaccine. You know it; you know this whole story, don’t you? You know very well how pleased they were, how excited, when it still seemed like a game. What a clever trick evolution has played-what a charming ace Nature had up her sleeve. And when they saw that it cured nothing, saw no market, saw no money in the petri dishes where it devoured or converted every living cell-well. They stopped. The papers stopped reporting, and the cities forgot. How long do you think it will be before they have to recall?”
“Too long,” L said, and it was the truth. His arms ached; he hadn’t lowered the gun. He pushed the distraction aside, as he had always done.
The young man sighed, not without a slow and idle smile. “Then we’re both freaks, aren’t we?” he asked. “I am; I’m something homeless, in-between. And you believe in the boogeyman.”
“It’s easier to believe in it when you’ve watched it kill,” L remarked.
The dryness earned him a high, merry laugh.
“Well?” the young man prompted, holding out his hands, wrists together, as if they waited for a pair of cuffs. “Take me to your leader.”
L angled his movement, backing over to the stairwell door without letting the gun barrel waver more than an inch. He didn’t know how a hybrid would respond to bullets, and he wasn’t hungry to find out.
“What’s your name?” he asked, turning the knob that pressed against his spine.
The young man smiled again, radiant and faintly mad.
“My name,” he answered, “is Beyond.”
-
Dawn woke Near, even though he’d only drifted off to sleep a few hours before. Nocturnal prey made for nocturnal predators, and one’s circadian rhythms just had to cope.
Today, however, he was glad of his body’s miscalculation-Rester and his team were leaving this morning, and Near had wanted a chance to bid them good luck and goodbye.
He didn’t actually believe in luck, but the phrase was more traditional than “Well, I hope the steep odds fall in your favor, because I’d hate for you to die.”
He did believe in parting on warm terms, which was infinitely better than having regrets at a funeral.
If there even was a funeral. If someone came back with something to bury at all.
Near slipped out from under Matt’s arm and Mello’s leg and stood, rubbing his eyes and trying to crush out the cynicism with the sleepiness. Fumbling his way back into last night’s clothes-and borrowing Matt’s goggles for the hell of it, because they were lying on his shirt-he reflected that he might as well allow himself to hope a little. Rester, Halle, and Gevanni were some of the best and most experienced Hunters they had, and if anyone was likely to return without so much as an infected scratch, it was them.
Trailing his hand along the railing, Near sidled down the stairs, seeking them out.
He found them at the long dining table in the kitchens, laughing quietly but genuinely over their breakfast.
Out here, in the wooded towns, oats were one of the few things they could always get enough of. Mello whined about it to the point of laryngitis, but Near was actually rather fond of oatmeal.
He ladled himself a bowl from the huge communal pot and sat down at the table, which was virtually empty at this hour-probably only the kitchen crew and Rester’s team were even awake, let alone active.
Rester smiled to welcome him as he selected a place. Gevanni noticed the goggles perched in his hair and hid a knowing smile.
“How much distance are you covering today?” Near asked, more to make conversation than because he didn’t remember from their last talk.
“We’re headed to Danis,” Rester replied. “We’ve heard rumors of an outbreak, and we need to know for sure. Best to be ready for the worst. We’re catching the train in Vailiff, and we’ve got permission to sleep in a church in Acerton.”
“That shouldn’t be too bad, then,” Near concluded, of the transportation at least. At this juncture, it was pointless to make predictions about the rest of the trip. He did glance down the table, though-John, another relative vet, was spooning at his food with a characteristic lack of enthusiasm. Near had asked Rester about John McEnroe once-he’d joined up after the vampires had come to his small town in the dead of winter, when the snow had muffled everything until it was too late. They’d shredded his livestock, and then they’d started into the house.
John’s wife had been tending to their newborn, and he’d woken to the screams.
Rester’s voice had lowered, unconsciously perhaps, and run with something like a somber admiration as he’d mentioned the result. John lived every day like a dead man walking, but they’d made him like them without ever getting to his blood-when night fell, he came alive, and when the fight began, he was a demon with a grudge. Nothing stood in the way of his vengeance for long.
Near thought it was somewhat fortunate that he himself had been too young to understand revenge. He didn’t remember much about the attack that had erased his family-he remembered the anxiety before, remembered his mother starting at shadows and his father barring the doors after sunset, but the event itself was nothing but a blur.
The important thing was the fire-the vampires weren’t beasts; they were sentient, if not always terribly smart, and they frequently burned what was left. It marked their territory and destroyed the would-be survivors, as it would have destroyed Near if he hadn’t reached up from the wreckage to be gathered into Rester’s arms.
They’d been vagrants for a few months after that-homeless, with nowhere to retreat. The cities would have tucked them into an alley and left them to die, and other towns were terrified of the contagion. The police had chased them from the slums of the capital when they wouldn’t surrender their weaponry upon making it to “safety,” and the vampires had hounded them when they’d ventured too close to the woods. They dodged from one boundary to the other for nine weeks, fighting nightly over where to run and whether Near would let the others give him their portions of the dwindling food. They slept during the days.
And then there had been the House.
It hadn’t surprised Near, really, how quickly, if still in silence, Rester had regained his faith when he had organization and efficiency on his side against the cruelty of the dark.
Near could still see it in him now-progress was slow, if it was happening at all, but Rester believed. He’d been galvanized, and he still had the lightning in his veins. He had a home now, and a means, and a hope. He had something to fight for, and a unified front to pitch his battles on. He was a soldier, and he was strong.
As Near watched Anthony Rester stand from the table, tugging his cargo jacket into place, he was very, very glad that they had this man in their fight.
Rester smiled as the rest of his troupe took to their feet.
“We should be back next week,” he noted. “Have any plans between now and then, or are you all running the patrols?”
Near drew himself up too for a proper farewell. “Patrols, mostly,” he answered. “I’ll see you next week, then.”
There was some comfort to be had in assurances that might turn into lies.
There was more still in Rester’s tight hug, in Halle’s warm kiss on his cheek, in Gevanni’s disheveling of his goggle-tangled hair, and in John’s soft touch to his shoulder.
Seeing them off to the last tended to make Near depressed. Instead, he went to the church to watch the morning’s light shift upward through the stained glass, pretending not to hear a jeep engine gunning, roaring, and settling to a rumbling growl that faded into nothing as its passengers rode away.
This morning, however, the church wasn’t empty when he arrived.
The figure chained to the altar rail lounged extravagantly in a pool of light, eyes half-closed-but as Near stepped uncertainly closer, he saw that they were unmistakably red.
Near heard his heartbeat skitter in his ears.
The young man looked up at the soft patting of Near’s footsteps on the floor, the sound echoing gently as if to apologize for giving him away. The creature at the altar gazed at him unperturbedly, red eyes set in a heart-shaped face on either side of a sharp, angular nose, their sightline partly obscured by the matted brown hair hanging over them like distended lace. The head tilted slowly, doll-like, to one side, and then the creature cracked a grin.
Near was startled to see straight, round-edged teeth-a human mouth.
He clenched his fists and took one step back. Whatever this thing was, whatever was going on, he wanted no part in it. Not with those eyes crawling on his skin.
“It’s quite all right,” the creature said. It was a smooth voice-calm, pleasant, and a little bit high. Its owner tipped his head towards the adjacent hall, a glance towards which made Near’s knees go jellied with relief-L and Wammy stood just past the threshold, conversing quietly.
If it was safe-if it was under control-if there was no danger, none at all-maybe he did want to know.
Just a few questions. Then he’d go.
Near had always been addicted to knowing things.
He swallowed and moved closer-close enough to see the dust dried on the pale face; close enough to wonder what had made the rents in the shoulders of the rough, woolen shirt; close enough to marvel that the wounds had left only the thinnest of white scars.
“I’m one of you,” the creature assured him, noting the trajectory of his stare. “Just… special. They tried to get me, but my body said ‘No.’” He grinned again, broadly and heartily, and now Near saw the delicate points of his eyeteeth-long enough to look profoundly wrong, but far too short to pierce through skin and puncture veins.
“Why?” Near asked, pausing at the frontmost pew to curl his fingers carefully around the scarred wood of the back.
The young man shrugged, smiling still. “Stranger things have happened,” he declared.
“Not many,” Near replied, inching forward again.
The grin resurfaced, shining in the swelling light.
Near frowned, fingertips skating thoughtfully on the edge of the bench, and raised his other hand to twist it into his hair.
“How much are you of each?” he asked.
Another smile and a languid wink were his reward.
“It’s hard to give percentages,” the creature answered, sounding far from discontented about the fact. “But I have a lot of their talents, and a lot of their faults. I’m faster than you, for instance, but as of now-” He inclined his head towards the crucifix that towered on the wall behind. “-the power of Jesus Christ compels me.”
Near did not think this was very funny.
“Why?” he repeated. “Why do crosses even work?”
Again the bony shoulders lifted and dropped, and Near saw a sliver of the promised preternatural grace.
“I suppose it’s the shape,” the creature said. “Maybe a plain ‘x’ would do just as well. In any case, it does. It bothers me. It’s like a nagging in my mind-like a grinding metal voice saying words that I can’t understand, getting louder and louder until I want to claw it out of my head.” He smiled lazily, eyes half-lidded and warmly gleaming. “For a vampire, I imagine that whisper would be a screaming. It’s torture, purely mental, no evidence, no marks. Too long, and it would drive them insane.”
Near’s scalp tingled as he pulled harder on his hair.
“What about sunlight?” he asked.
The young man stretched both slender arms high over his head, still beaming, the chain swinging as he moved.
“It hurts like hell,” he announced in the same lilting tone-which, to Near, discredited the revelation a bit. “It does,” the creature assured him, as if Near’s doubts had been written on his forehead in calligraphic ink. “I’ll sunburn soon; I’ll be peeling by the evening. Real vampires just burn. I imagine it’s a side effect of the virus-extreme photophobia. Evolution isn’t perfect.” The corners of the red eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Not yet.”
Near shifted. He was too close now-much too close. He could see the rust on the chain links and the grains of dust in the thick black eyelashes, dipping low over irises the color of…
“Why the blood?” he asked.
The creature laughed, a tinkling sound like bells and wind-chimes and breaking glass.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Sunlight hurts like hell, and blood tastes like heaven.”
A shadow fell over them, and Near looked up to find that L, barefoot, had soundlessly approached.
“They need the organic materials,” he murmured, his eyes flitting over the creature’s form, “and they have to get them directly. Their metabolisms are so fast to support their speed and strength-and to allow them to regenerate cells and repair any wound but an oak stake through the center of their circulatory system-that their bodies simply don’t have time to process more complex food.”
He paused, itching at his ankle with the opposite foot.
“It’s heliophobia,” he added. “Photophobia is more general.”
“Pardon me, Professor,” the young man purred, only grinning wider as L fixed him with an incinerating glare.
“Is it true what you said?” L inquired, frostily at best. “Will you be in physical pain if we leave you here?”
“You don’t trust me yet,” the creature inferred, as always seeming deeply satisfied with the condition of things. “That’s good. That’s probably why you’re still alive.”
L angled his head-just a fraction, but in such a way that the message of disinterested dismissal was painstakingly clear.
“In the interests of my joining you in survival,” the young man amended glibly, speaking hastily for the first time since Near had begun to listen, “yes. It hurts. It hurts a lot, and it’s still early now. You can extrapolate the rest.”
L considered, and then he turned to their commander.
“Quillish,” he said, “do we have an umbrella for Beyond?”
The creature smirked. “Oh, yes,” he murmured, white fingers curling and uncurling around the rail. “You’re very good indeed.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Wammy volunteered, joining them, as incongruously striking as ever-glasses clean, mustache straight, rifle straighter still. “L, when was the last time you slept?”
L touched a thumb to his lips, a gesture so familiar that a host of flutters and flickers in Near’s chest immediately calmed.
“A while,” was L’s unenlightening response.
“We’ll keep him in the church,” Wammy promised, “but out of the sun. Get some rest; you’re due back out tonight.” He smiled, gently, at Near. “That means you, too.”
Near would be lying awake for a long time after this conversation-rewinding it, replaying it, rediscovering every nuance he could coax free.
But it did sound nice to curl up in a hollow between Matt’s and Mello’s tangled bodies as he worked it out.
With one last look at the strange being chained to the rail, he scampered off.
In the instant of eye contact, Beyond winked.
[Chapter I] [Chapter III]