Chapter Text
i.
The night is slowly settling on the streets of Shreveport, Louisiana, when Brad Colbert steps out of the airport. He adjusts his backpack as he watches the sunset over the cityscape. The dark feels predatory, but this isn't an enemy territory. At least not yet.
He heads directly to the police office handing the missing person's case, only to be instructed by the sergeant manning the front desk to fill out a form elaborating the nature of his query. Brad waits for two hours and thirty-five minutes for the lead detective assigned to the case.
Brad wants to get his hands on the police report and finds out how much progress has been made, which is the only reason he waits, even though time is one thing he doesn't have. Precisely at the thirty-six minute mark, he picks up his bag and leaves.
Bright, festive colors are everywhere on the streets, and Brad easily fades into the blooming night crowds to find the nearest available cafe. Once he does, he parks at a corner and fires up his laptop. Another email from Mike Wynn does not provide any insight to the answer he's looking for, only a vague starting point, and he needs to recon. The location is too open, not ideal for this type of operation, but if he could make do during the Muwafaqiyah clusterfuck, he can manage in a medium-sized city in the United States of fucking America.
Three hours later, Brad has the basics. Nathaniel Fick has one debit and two credit cards—MasterCard and Visa, always paid full on time. His spending patterns reflect his status as a graduate student right down to the last penny. Most of what he has is spent on rent, utilities and groceries, and whatever little that's left buys him books and—of course—regular donations to charities. The status of the deposit account is a little more difficult to ascertain, but he manages to guess the password on the seventh try: his niece's birth date. There's been no recent withdrawal. The last time any of the cards was used was nine days ago, to check into a motel about ten blocks down from the conference center.
So, probably not a robbery gone wrong. It's still a possibility, but even on a bad day a former recon Marine isn't the easiest person there is to rob. Accidents are far more plausible.
When the local newspapers yield no results, Brad starts on the hospital and morgue records. He goes through them systematically, methodically, one by one. He looks at the descriptions of John Does and their pictures. For the ones without any records, he makes a few brief phone calls and asks around on any unidentified corpses in the city morgue or patients without any record. There is no match.
There's no relief, no lassitude. The recon's over, but no one just fucking vanishes without a trace.
Brad collects his things and goes on a hunt for that trace.
"When was the last time you saw him?"
"Look, I've already told the cops—"
Brad repeats the question, slowly and clipped, "The last time you saw him?"
At the look on his face, the receptionist, who doesn't seem old enough to be drinking anywhere in the States let alone manage a small motel, finally relents. "A week ago. I think I've seen him leaving in the evening, but can't say if he returned that night or not."
"And why is that?" It takes a serious effort on Brad's part to keep his voice level.
The girl seems to shrink in on herself. "We don't have an automated check-in system. We just have, you know, normal keys, so we don't keep track of people coming and going."
"You don't have a working CCTV system in this motel?" Brad asks, even though he's already assessed the AO and seen the cameras at the gate as well as the only backdoor the building has.
"Oh, we do. One at the entrance, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have come in through the back, and the camera there's been acting up. He was supposed to check-out next day, but he didn't show up, and Renee—that's the cleaning girl—said no one seemed to have come back to the room the night before."
Brad doesn't put a lot of stock on the abilities of the local police at this point, but he assumes the cops would have at least checked out the videos and verified the story, even just to go through the motions for a low-priority case such as this. If there has been anything amiss, the Ficks would have been notified, but no one has been notified of any new development as of yet.
No one currently knows where Nate is.
"Look, I'm sorry I can't help you anymore than that," the receptionist offers haltingly. "I really don't know what's happened to him."
She appears sincere, but Brad wants to throttle someone, and since he doesn't have a specific candidate in mind yet, this girl is fast moving up on the ladder. "Thanks for your time."
He stops at the entrance and reconsiders. Turns around again. "Which room did he stay in?"
Five minutes later, Brad walks into the room that no one else has been staying since Nate. He drops his bag by the bed and walks across the room to the large balcony. The motel is ancient and in disrepair, but it affords a decent view of the main streets.
The conference center is fifteen minutes away into the better side of the town. It was Brad's first stop, before he retraced the steps to the motel, studied the streets and put together a tentative picture of what it would have been like seven days ago. It doesn't help.
Brad has collected most of the timeline and the corresponding events. Nate's sister has already talked to all of his classmates who had attended the conference with him. After presenting his paper, Nate begged out early after Wednesday's session without joining them for a drink after, which was the last time anyone's seen him. He didn't show up for the last day of the conference and even missed one session for which he was supposed to be a panel member.
Assuming all of this is true, Nate has been gone since that night, when he walked out of the motel without any of his things.
Seven days. Anything could have happened in seven days.
Brad's fist curls up against the rusted metal railing under his hands. He turns his back to the streets of Shreveport that provide him with no answers.
His nickname, Iceman, has been assigned to him for a reason. He does not panic. And here he is now. This isn't him, this panic in his heart isn't him, and this orbiting around Nate—
And why now? Why now, after all this time? Now, orbiting around Nate is even worse.
Because Nate isn't here.
"Right, the Fick case. And you are—"
"A friend of the family," Brad answers flatly. It's not a lie. Not necessarily.
The detective assigned to the case, Johnson, flips through the file. "Right, well, nothing has reported that involves anyone fitting that description. If there's been any incident, we would've been made aware of it by now."
Since that is something Brad's already managed to find out, by himself, within three hours flat, the detective so far is not installing a lot of confidence in Brad. "What else do you have on his disappearance?"
"Mr. Colbert, the real issue is that he's a grown man, and the usual possibilities have been already checked out, like robberies and vehicle accidents. He's a student, at—" Johnson checks his file, "—Kennedy School of Government at Harvard?" He whistles. "Well, given his resume, it's not implausible he's cracked under pressure, in which case, he will reemerge elsewhere. We've seen many cases like this. It's quite common."
Brad has seen Nate Fick voluntarily jump out of a tin-plated Humvee so he could dive into the enemy forces that were baptizing them with bullets. No, fuck it, surviving Schwetje for a week alone builds you tolerance for stress to last a lifetime. He doesn't tell this detective any of that. "You think he cracked under pressure and left town," Brad fails to keep incredulity and vehemence out from his voice, "without any of his things."
"Well, he seems to have taken his wallet with him, at least. We're keeping taps on his cards, and we are doing everything that we can. Look, Mr. Colbert, I sympathize with your situation. I truly do. But we don't have the manpower just to go simply looking, and there is nothing you can do at this point but wait for new leads."
When Brad says nothing in response, Johnson presses on, cheerily oblivious, "Look, it's Mardi Gras. Maybe he lost the track of time, you know?"
Brad doesn't dignify that with a response. Fury in his chest barely subsides by the time he returns to the motel, and it takes most of his strength to keep it locked it somewhere in his chest, not to project it to some random bystanders.
None of this, none of this feels right. Experience has proven his instinct to be more accurate than any decent Blue Force Tracker, and this is usually about when Brad would start loading his M-4 and checking for extra ammo. This is all wrong and he cannot figure out why.
And Nate is still out there somewhere.
Fury is still in his gut. And now, so is this fear.
He returns to the room and makes a few more calls.
Sergeant Glen Hogan of the Shreveport Police is a heavy-set, genial man in his forties, and the best help Brad could find after activating and shaking down the US Marine version of the contact tree. "You're the Iceman," Glen says, looking thoroughly impressed. "Jimmy talks about you all the time. Said you are the shit. I was sure he was making shit up, but here you are."
"How's Trombley?" Brad asks, mostly just to be polite.
"Great, he's just great. He's almost done with the academy, trying to become a cop. Oh, and he's got a baby coming, too."
There are a number of things that are disturbing in this conversation. Brad cannot decide which tops: the fact Trombley is going around telling the glorified tales of Iraq clusterfucks that include stories of Brad, that there's a Trombley junior about to walk this world, that Trombley will be a fucking gun-wielding cop loose in the unsuspecting populace, or that knowing Trombley actually came in handy for once in Brad's life.
"Can't quite remember where, but feels like I've seen you somewhere," Glen continues, a frown making its way to his face. "Well, probably in the pictures Jimmy brought home."
Glen doesn't seem entirely too convinced, and Brad doesn't really care. Brad explains the details of the case, and Glen surprises him by asking the right questions and taking down the right type of notes.
"Not hard to see why the missing persons wouldn't be all that invested," Glen says, once he digests the most of the information. "Doesn't sound like a priority, what with it being a madhouse out there right now. Will be for a little while even after the last krewes put on the show."
Brad can see where this is heading. Fuck it, if he has to do this alone, he will. "Sorry if I took too much of your time."
Glen surprises him again by shaking his head. "If my nephew asks me to help you in any way possible, you've got my help, no matter what. So, at this point, the best guess is maybe he went out for a bite, went for a walk, sight-seeing, and somehow found trouble. Is he the type who would attract one?"
Brad has been considering this, too. "He's the type to try to stop one, if he encounters any."
"Can he handle himself in a fight?"
Brad's fairly sure he's heard more ridiculous questions in his day, but he can't think of one right now. "He was a recon Marine."
"Right, sure." Glen nods sheepishly. "Hard to imagine he would've gone down quietly if something did happen, in which case we would've heard something. Where was he staying again?"
Brad points at a dot on the map that Glen displays on screen. Glen frowns again. "What is it?" Brad asks, almost resentful at himself for actually sounding hopeful.
Glen taps at the screen. "That's fairly close to a local hangout. A bit notorious one, called Fangtasia."
"Fangtasia?" It's the kind of a retarded name that maybe only Ray could possibly come up with. "What, some sort of a fetish club?"
Glen looks grim. "You could say that."
"That isn't his type of place."
Glen raises an eyebrow. "Knew your CO that well, did you?" At Brad's look, Glen puts his hands up in a placating gesture. "Not saying your man had to have a predilection for that sort of stuff, here. Things just tend to happen around this particular joint, is all."
Brad allows himself to consider the possibility. "Drugs?"
"Nothing illegal that we know of. Nothing that we can pin down on them, at any rate. It attracts a certain type of crowds that know things. Let's just say it's always a good idea checking with 'em for info on missing persons cases."
It sounds like a flimsy lead at best, but Brad has nothing else to go on with. He grasps at it like a drowning man would with straws. "What's the next move? Walk right in and ask?"
"There're some calls I can make," Glen suggests, not entirely without hesitation. "Then yes, hell, I suppose we can go barreling in and see what comes out of the end."
Glen reaches for the phone, and then turns to Brad again. "Hey, you didn't happen to bring your sidearm with you, did you?"
ii.
"Eric, uh, the tap's run dry."
Eric is in the middle of sipping O-Negative straight from the source when Ginger interrupts him. He weighs an annoyed look he'll undoubtedly earn from Pam against the instant gratification of ripping off Ginger's head from her shoulders. Maybe tonight is the night he will finally end the piteous excuse for a human being that is Ginger, but then again, Pam is not wrong: a good help is difficult to find. At least, in this century.
"Eric?" Ginger mouses, twisting her short apron that's decidedly longer than her skirt.
He pushes off from the artfully writhing body laid out under him and bites out, "Then order more."
"Um, sure. Okay, Eric. Right away."
Ginger whimpers pathetically at his expression before running off to the kitchen. That display kills what little appetite he has left, so he pulls away from the warm and eager arms of the third woman who has offered herself to him tonight. They have been all so willing.
All too willing. Perhaps that's the problem. Hunger still coils at his stomach, unabated, along with a sense of sheer boredom.
The girl follows him up and purrs against his shoulder. "Baby, was I good for you?"
He flicks away her fingers from his shoulder. "No."
He quells the beginning of the girl's outraged whine with one glance of Glamour, mostly as an afterthought. She stills into a perfect example of taxidermy except for slow, rhythmic blinking of her eyes, while he licks her shoulder clean of the droplets of blood. Before leaving her on the couch, he takes away her memory of the last hour.
His club is full tonight, he notes with satisfaction. There's little room to maneuver on the floor, but wherever he goes, the crowds give him a wide berth, both humans and vampires alike, confirming that the survival instinct is one of the few things that remain when humans turn into his kind.
"Eric."
Pam, behind the bar, taps her perfectly-manicured nails on the marble surface, wanting and getting Eric's attention. She looks less than thrilled. "A call for you," she tells him once he reaches her side. "Nan Flanagan."
His expression alone would have had everyone else run off in fright; Pam, however, shrugs it away with practiced ease. "She simply insists on talking to you directly," she says, making a show of cleaning her nails. "Who am I to tell her otherwise?"
A good help is difficult to find, Eric reminds himself before snatching the phone away from Pam. He takes a second to smooth his voice before he answers, "Nan, to what do I owe this pleasure?"
"Eric Northman," Nan shrieks, "do you truly understand we've reached the demarcation point in the history of our kind?"
He controls the sudden desire to reap into the phone and tear something off, preferably one of Nan Flanagan's limbs. "I understand True Blood is ready to be unveiled to the public."
"And so is the American Vampire League, as well as our existence. We're about to be presented to the world as a minority with the rights. Do you understand its ramifications? The enormity of it? This monumental event may never come together if the incidents like the one from a few days ago continue to happen, if you cannot control your people as the Sheriff. You're supposed to ascertain that some random slaughter doesn't come into the public view!"
"Ah," Eric says languidly. "Am I then, in your view, negligent with my duties as the Sheriff of Area Five?"
There is a long pause as Nan assesses the implicit threat.
"Of course," Eric unveils nothing but courtesy in his voice, "you are free to bring your complaint up to the Magister whenever you wish."
There's another significant pause. "Eric, we're reaching a turning point in our history," Nan persists, but her thin, shrilly voice has been toned down a notch. "Control your people, and I'll control mine. Until the announcements are made, we must lay low. Fly under the radar."
"And?"
"And what?"
"I'm waiting," he drawls, "for you to regale me with more of your clichés."
Nan stutters a beginning of an indignant reply, but he hangs up before her screeching reaches a discernible level of irritation.
Vampire bureaucrats. There's an irony.
To be fair, this "coming out" plan itself is not necessarily without any merit. Played right, this may turn out to be an effective way of controlling the supply-and-demand issue in this so-called contemporary world. Mingle with humans, not to co-exist but to subvert from within. There's the millennium-old military strategist in him debating the idea, possibly somewhat intrigued. The plan had been a long time coming: there are humans who are in the know, so when the public at large reacts to the revelation, positive reactions that his kind has seeded and planted would counter the dismay and shock. It isn't entirely without its risks, but it's nonetheless a worthwhile option to explore for the long run, for the propagation of his kind.
On a more personal level, he welcomes the challenge. A thousand years of existence has left little that could constitute as a challenge, and he has to get what little amusement where he can find it. A new political climate may abate some of his boredom, if not all.
There's a trial bottle of True Blood on the bar. The artificial blood that, in theory, would enable the vampires to co-exist with humans.
Eric tilts the bottle with his index finger until it tips over. It shatters on the granite floor, bleeding red.
Noise. All of this is just a noise.
Pam notices his mood, but wisely restrains from commenting. This type of mood, they both know, perpetuates itself until it becomes an unmitigated disaster of a PR nightmare that Nan Flanagan is so fearful of. Or, it may be a sign that he'll become a morose recluse for a century or so. A case in point: Godric. There's no salvation for their kind, or so Eric's Maker would have him believe. So what, then, is the ultimate point of existence?
Morbid thoughts. Or what passes for morbid for a thousand-year-old vampire. He recognizes the fatal symptoms of boredom. If this continues on, it will be an unmitigated disaster.
Distractions. He's thinking of distractions.
Or, one distraction in particular.
"That human," Pam starts, confirming that yes, she can read his moods better than anyone alive or undead. "Do you plan to keep that boy around for long?"
Pam rarely interferes with or displays any real interest in Eric's hobbies, as she herself usually finds humans detestable, but she does care about housekeeping a great deal, which amuses him. "Now, now, where's your sense of curiosity, Pam? A human resisting Glamour?"
Pam makes a face. "I admit it's rather baffling, but Eric, it doesn't not happen, and it rarely warrants this much interest from you."
True. A human resisting Glamour has been seen before—not a lot, but it does happen. Still, this one is a normal human without any hint of otherness in the blood. Utterly, almost appallingly normal. And he's a pleasant, and possibly the only, distraction that Eric has right now.
"Besides," Pam adds pointedly, "people are already looking for him."
Of course Pam has been keeping tabs on the local police. She's never needed to be told—one of many reasons why he's fond of her. "Oh?"
"A missing person's report was filed only a day after. Nothing there to lead the search to us, per se—"
"Just as it should be."
"—but it doesn't mean it won't." Pam senses his attention is already elsewhere and sighs extravagantly. "Fine, Eric, you're allowed to enjoy your diversions. Just don't make me remind you later the body needs to be disposed of, clean, before anyone comes around to look. If I have to remove blood stains from the floor on a short notice again, I'll be cranky."
"Well, now." Eric grins slowly, indulgent of her petulance. "We can't possibly have that, can we?"
A couple of centuries ago, or even decades ago, this wouldn't have been an issue. Now they're relegated to worrying about corpse disposal methods. The modern world has its drawbacks.
But it also comes with indoor plumbing. Fair is fair.
Eric swats off the flies of human followers gathering around him before he slowly makes his way over to a secluded room at the farthest corner of the club that's been shielded from the public. He could've put the human in the basement, where they usually keep their livestock, but the basement isn't really conducive to the entertainment that he has in mind.
The only occupant of the room is slumped against the bedframe, slipped into a fitful sleep. Eric can tell the second the human is startled awake—the sound of his breathing halts and then quickens.
Eric stands over the bed and watches a pair of eyes flutter open, watches recognition tear its way into them. The heart begins to beat faster, pumping more blood into his veins, but there are no apparent signs of hysterics, no outward shows of fear in those eyes. They flicker at the sight of Eric, but only for a second. It's quite an impressive display of self-control.
It's also rather disrespectful, thinks Eric.
Eric grabs the man's neck in one hand and slams the body into the mattress. He doesn't quite yet dislocate the human's right arm, which has been shackled to the foot of the bed and drawn taut across the metal frame, only because he's feeling rather magnanimous tonight.
And Eric's benevolence brings its own reward. Given a little more room to maneuver, the human's free hand goes unerringly for Eric's jugular. This isn't as successfully executed as the first time the man had tried it on Eric, but Eric decides not to hold it against him. It's still entertaining enough, and a human can't be expected to be on the top form all the time, especially with more injuries than before. The blow doesn't quite have the same strength behind it, either, and Eric easily catches the arm with one hand.
And for all his troubles, Eric breaks two of the fragile human fingers.
This elicits a pained gasp, but not a scream. The human's heart, in fact, is screaming, but no more sound trickles out between those white, bloodless lips.
Now, this is plain insulting.
Eric doesn't take disappointments well. It's a notable character flaw. Eric straddles the body and crushes the neck slowly until only the barest of breaths can escape. When the pulse under his fingertips turns erratic, Eric eases the grip and tears open the brittle flesh of the human's neck with his teeth until it wrings another gasp and a shudder, and then a choked scream.
Somewhat appeased, Eric leisurely nips at the blood-smeared skin. With the other hand, Eric traces the outline of the body underneath him, hard enough to feel the bones and bruise the ribs. There are scars on this body that Eric hasn't caused. Curiosity rears its head. As does hunger. Excellent.
"Stop being so interesting," Eric murmurs, and presses marks onto the pale skin with his teeth and fingernails, covering the existing scars with new ones. "And I may let you go."
The body beneath Eric begins to tremble, which doesn't surprise Eric until he realizes it's not from panic or shock—but a laugh. A quiet and subdued one, but a laugh nonetheless. "You'll have to forgive me," the human says, his quiet voice just as always tinged with polite irony, "if I am less than inclined to trust your words for it."
Eric grins against the hollow of the human collarbone. As far as diversions go, this is delightfully, almost shockingly, perfect. A human that dares to talk back to him is hard to come by, let alone a human who actually speaks in complete, grammatically-correct sentences. "It's a rather ill-advised move on your part, Nathaniel, trying to hurt my feelings again."
"Possibly," the human muses. "But it's difficult to care about your feelings when you've shown a clear disregard for mine."
Oh, Eric does enjoy a challenge as much as its rewards. "I suppose then I should persuade you to care." Eric reaches up to clasp his fingers around the base of the human's neck before smashing his head against the headboard. Once. Twice. The human doesn't quite whimper, but after the second blow, he winces and screws his eyes shut. That won't do. Eric twines his fingers between the sandy hair and yanks until the green eyes finally manage to focus on Eric's again. "Nathaniel, Nathaniel, pay attention. Now, that really was not quite a polite way to respond to the hospitality I've shown, is it?"
"I didn't realize you were waiting for my show of gratitude," the human says, voice not quite shaken as it should've been. "You seem occupied with hearing your own voice."
Through the thin layer of the skin, Eric can hear the erratic beats of the human heart. The neck continues to bleed beautifully, there's a bruise forming at the temple, but the eyes looking back at Eric are calm. Eric contemplates prying him open completely until it reveals the blood and gore in all its glory, until that determined, resolute calm in those eyes become nothing more than a mere memory.
But then it is a novelty, this steadfastness. What kind of a self-respecting vampire would he be if he doesn't take his time with sullying it?
"You are, of course, not wrong," Eric concedes easily, "as I do have a great fondness for my own voice." With one hand, Eric slowly squeezes the man's broken fingers together until the calm completely bleeds out from the green eyes. With his other hand, Eric digs into the hinges of the human's jaws until the mouth is pried open so more sounds are allowed to escape. "Still, I think I rather enjoy hearing your voice."
Then Eric sinks his teeth on the vulnerable, cool skin just over the carotid artery.
The human doesn't quite manage to suppress the scream this time.
Pain, accompanied by fear or sexual frenzy, always tastes better than any other undulated human state. Eric eventually untangles his teeth from the pallid skin, sated and satisfied. The human huddles in on himself, one arm wrenched in an odd angle and the other limp against the mattress.
He trembles again. No laugh this time.
Hunger and boredom, both abated for the moment, loosen their claws from Eric's chest.
iii.
Nate has seen and experienced certain things that, for other people, may be quite impossible to believe. Up until this week, however, all of them have involved different and varying degrees of human stupidity in action. This, what's happening now—this is something else entirely. Something he cannot fathom nor explain based on the depth of his learning or experience.
He doesn't have anything to set the broken bones in his hand with, and it's unlikely setting them would do much good at this point. The heat of pain radiates from his neck and hand and spreads agonizingly slowly that it's nearly incapacitating.
He feels drained. He winces at how apt that description actually is.
He pulls at the metal cusp on his right wrist, but by this point it's an empty gesture equivalent of hoping for a miracle. He's already tried and found that no amount of force he could exert would tear it loose. He's also tried to pull apart the wireframe of the bed instead of the manacle itself, and neither gave an inch.
And even that strategy is not without some serious flaws. Once he's free, he still has the locked room to deal with. And outside the room, he assumes, is also Eric Northman. And it's proven more than once Nate cannot fight his way out, not with this Eric who wears Brad's face, who looks at Nate with Brad's eyes.
No, Brad Colbert doesn't belong in this reality where everything oscillates between the surreal and the horrifying so devastatingly quickly.
Nate needs a way out. If there isn't one, he has to make one, because soon he wouldn't have enough strength to carry out any decent plan he might come up with. But now, even the mere act of breathing seems to take everything out of him, staying conscious is a struggle.
And it turns out to be a losing one.
Twilight was blanketing the streets of Shreveport, Louisiana, when Nate returned to his motel room from the conference hall.
Most of the other students opted to stay in the hotel where the conference was taking place, but Nate's own choice was a small, almost dilapidated motel at the far corner of the city. It suited his needs well enough, especially his particular desire to be away after eight hours sequestered in a spacious, beige-white conference room with well-mannered, soft-spoken policymakers and would-be future heads of the government.
He dropped the backpack at the corner of his room and sank onto a chair nearby. He rested his head against the wall. After a moment, he breathed in once and took out the conference binder and reviewed the previous sessions instead of recalling the message Mike had sent.
Perhaps as somewhat expected, rereading the dry, technical materials on strategic advantages in trade treaties as a means of conflict resolutions did nothing to alleviate the pressure forming in the back of his head. The stale air of the conference room was still clinging onto every part of his skin, and the sudden desire to shake it off won over probably more logical, practical desires—shower, dinner, sleep—so he slipped into a pair of sweats and stepped out for a run.
Through the corridor and down the winding staircase that must have seen its better days right around the World War II, Nate passed by the receptionist behind an old mahogany desk that would have unlikely seen its better days any time before the last century. The lobby was empty saved for the receptionist and an old woman hunched over an armchair next to the door.
Shreveport, even in near darkness, was lit with life. Mardi Gras was officially a week away, yet festivity was already in full swings. A few of the classmates had wanted to explore the city after the conference, citing some strange and exciting times to be had in Shreveport. Everything about the city felt surprisingly old, and normally he would enjoy exploring any new place he was visiting, but just then he wasn't in the mood to play a tourist.
He slowly jogged down several blocks, consciously avoiding busy districts filled with crowds. He purposefully emptied his thoughts and concentrated on counting his steps and regulating his breathing. It worked well, for a while, until he had to stop to tie one of his loosened shoelaces and break his rhythm, along with his thoughts.
Thoughts, not governed, inevitably returned to Mike's call the night before.
Nate had never served with Brent Morel, but he had known Captain Morel was good enough to serve as a platoon leader of any Recon Marines unit. He'd known that Brent would be good enough to lead the Marines. Good enough to lead his, Nate's, Marines.
And that Brent was now dead. Killed in action.
Pappy was injured, but recovering. No one else in his platoon—former platoon—was hurt.
Brent was still dead.
Nate felt untethered from the choices. The choices he'd made, those he could never undo.
He pushed himself to run through quieter streets and corners of unfamiliar alleys, until his breaths caught in his chest and pulsed through every inch of the body, burning and wiping off every thought in his head. He stopped only when the muscles spasms held him up and he had to lean against a wall to steady himself.
He needed to go back. He needed to book an early flight back after the conference. He needed to attend the funeral and face his men again.
It took a second to recall the map he'd studied the night before arriving at this city, another second to place himself—about twenty blocks down west from the motel. Never a good idea to lose the sight of himself, to lose his steps in an unknown city.
He was about to backtrack when he heard the noise that made him turn and step toward an alley between two grey warehouses. He caught a flash of silver at the corner of his eye, and the dark shadows in the shapes of people. One prone woman and two standing men, and the sliver of silver—a knife, not a muzzle flash of a pistol, he assessed quickly—held by those two men.
He didn't think twice. "Hey!"
His shout diverted the attention of the attackers onto him, which achieved what he'd set out to do—stopping the attack at least momentarily. What wasn't as optional was now the two men, whose movements did not seem drunk-stupid, were advancing toward him.
—A pretty fuckin' retarded move, LT. It's the kind of shit only white-ass boys like you would pull, walking straight into a totally unknown situation, weaponless to boot. You sure you didn't lose all the brain cells at the fancy school?—
Nate didn't even want to take a guess as to why the warning voice in his head suddenly started to resemble Espera's. He risked a glance at the woman on the ground—he could see her arms move, so she was alive. The priority was getting her help, so he held up his hands in his best non-threatening gesture. He was painfully aware that he normally looked as intimidating as a high school kid on his first fucking field trip, as Espera once put it. "Look, I just called the—"
He didn't even get to the word police; one of the men lunged at Nate, the knife aimed at his chest.
Absurdly, as he twisted the knife out of the man's grip, Nate felt a distinct sense of a déjà vu: one of his moments at Pendleton, first assigned to Bravo Platoon, his every move seemingly observed and evaluated by his men as he had tried pretty pathetically to hide the eagerness to prove himself. The second man launched himself at Nate and threw him off balance, but Nate easily twisted his upper torso out of the grasp. The man went down flailing and stumbled on the broken pieces of furniture piled at the end of the alleyway. The other man, now weaponless, frantically tried to drag his friend away from Nate.
"Shit. Shit," the first man stuttered, "let's just go! It's not worth it."
They scrambled away, and Nate didn't pursue them. The woman had a bleeding gash on her arm, and there were angry red lines around her neck, marked by blood, as if they had been trying to chock her with her own necklace. Even in the shady lamplight, he could see the deadly pale face. When he touched her arm, her body rocked with sudden convulsions, every movement apparently in sizzling agony.
He didn't think his decidedly basic first aid skills would be of any use here. He was halfway up trying to call for help when two bodies were hurled past him and crashed against the wall behind him. Nate whirled around and watched as they slid off the wall and crumbled on the ground. The two attackers were strewn at Nate's feet. Their legs twitched—still alive then, though barely.
Ragdolls, Nate thought suddenly, thrown away on a whim of a wayward child.
Before he could move, a shadow fell over them. A blond woman was now standing over the two bodies, staring down with a look of utter distaste. She huffed as she glared at her shoes covered with dark stains. "I just bought this pair," she said plaintively before turning to Nate. With a hand on her hip, she drawled, "Well, what do we have here?"
This, all of this, felt—wrong. He had not seen her enter the alley; he had not seen her move. And these men—had she just flung a couple of two hundred pound men against the wall? Still, Nate managed to pull together some facsimile of calm. "She was attacked by those men. She requires immediate medical attention—"
"My, my, my, aren't you a gentleman?" A slanted grin on the woman's pale face blossomed into a full, wide-teeth smile. "That's so sweet of you and all, but no need to worry your pretty little head, honey. She'll be just fine."
She stalked over and, with her gloved hand, picked up the gleaming necklace draped on the girl's chest. The necklace hissed as it was disentangled from the girl's neck. The red mark instantly healed, flesh seemingly growing over itself.
Even as Nate watched in disbelief, the girl sat up immediately and groaned, "Oh, damned the blood hunters."
By the time she straightened up, the bloody scars on her arm and neck were completely gone. The girl ran her eyes down at herself and stared quizzically at the blood trails smeared on her arm before she started licking at the blood.
"Tell me what happened first," the woman ordered. "Eat later."
The girl obediently turned to the woman. "V-hunters cornered me, had stakes and silver chains and knives—big and also coated with silver, too, and they almost had me, but then"—she licked her lips and flashed a bloody grin at Nate—"then he appeared and saved me."
The woman considered Nate for a moment before turning to the girl. "Get back to the club and report to the Sheriff."
"Yes, Pam." The girl was deferential, fearful even, which did little to ease Nate's mind.
"See?" the woman—Pam—said to Nate after the girl beat a hasty retreat. Her grin was wide and glittery, even friendly. "All better, quick as that."
"Yes," Nate heard himself say the words, "I can see that." Staying calm and not descending into hysteria was proving to be difficult, but Nate had had a fair share of experience with suppressing the fight-or-flight instinct and assessing a given situation quickly. Fight, clearly, wasn't a wise option.
But flight no longer became an option, either, when he turned and found Brad Colbert leaning against the side of the building and observing the spectacle with something akin to amusement.
Gunnery Sergeant Brad Colbert should be currently in Baghdad. So he couldn't here, Nate told himself, sauntering into the alleyway in slow, unhurried steps.
No matter what Nate told himself, his eyes told him otherwise, even though Nate was now becoming more viscerally aware that this wasn't, couldn't, actually be Brad. Even without the telltale sign of the clothes he was pretty sure Brad would never be caught dead wearing, there was the distinct lack of warmth in the eyes that told Nate everything he should know.
This was not Brad Colbert.
"Eric," Pam addressed the man and pointed at the long elaborate leather boots she was wearing, "my boots were sacrificed in the line of duty."
"My condolences," the man—Eric—said. If there had been any doubt left, that voice eradicated it. There was a lilt in this voice that didn't belong to Brad, one that Nate couldn't even place. Eric tilted his head at the bodies, and the gesture and the movement, too, were completely alien to Nate. "They were indeed lovely."
"You approve?" she said, though it was unclear what she was referring to, the bodies or the shoes.
"Very." Eric turned to the side and flicked a glance at Nate. "And this?"
The man's eyes were the same blue Nate had found whenever he turned his head in the burning white of the desert. The same gaze he'd never failed to meet with his own sand-stung eyes because—now, now he may admit it—when every second of being in command stole the very last bit of his breath and every leg he could stand on, after those precarious, precious moments, he could suddenly breathe and march forward again.
Those same eyes were now appraising Nate, void of any emotion or recognition. Nate fought a sudden, inarticulate sense of betrayal.
"This here is a Good Samaritan," Pam answered Eric, and took a few steps closer to Nate, accompanied by crisp staccatos of her heels. "You sure are pretty. What's your name, honey?"
She didn't actually wait for his answer; or, perhaps it wasn't even required. A blow-like force, one he hadn't seen coming, punched Nate in his chest, and he hit his head against the wall behind him. By the time Nate struggled to pull himself up, Pam already had his wallet fished out from his back pocket.
"Nathaniel Fick, twenty-seven, hails from Boston, studious, tourist, wrong place, wrong time." She tosses his various ID cards onto the ground, disregarding them rhythmically as if whoever, whatever Nate was mattered absolutely none to them. "Oh sweetie," she crooned at Nate, "you could've let the girl die, you know. We really wouldn't have minded. And now, well, this is all very so unfortunate for everyone involved." At Eric's snort, she amended, "Well, all right—mostly just for you."
Nate suddenly thought he would dearly like to have a 203 round at hand.
"Eric," Pam started, tilting her head, "didn't you say the do-gooders went extinct about four decades ago? How their actions tend to be 'detrimental to maintaining longevity'?"
"A case in point," Eric said, gesturing at Nate. He was imbuing Nate with as much interest as one would with an interesting insect specimen. "So, answer me this, Nathaniel. Are you trying to become a living proof that evolution can indeed work backward? See, my one and only flaw, as Pam tells me,"—Pam rolled her eyes—"is my unbecoming curiosity in futility of human nature."
Human nature. This man, this thing, Eric, wanted to play games, while the blood from those two men was still smeared just a few feet from where Nate was standing.
Nate was completely out of his elements, the light-headedness was making him suspect a concussion, and it hadn't escaped his mind that at this moment he might be out of his fucking mind. But the bored indifference Nate heard in the man's voice rattled something loose in Nate in the way very few things had ever managed, so his better judgment did not actively restrain him from answering quietly, "We've already established that I meant no harm to you or your friend. I don't owe you any more answers and I certainly don't owe it to you to appease your curiosity."
—LT, sir, that's just simply not on, alienating the natives like that.— His subconscious dredged up Ray's voice to admonish him, but Nate couldn't bring himself to regret his words when they were perfectly true to his sentiment.
He regretted them, maybe a little, when his head crashed against the wall again, this time hard enough that the impact rattled his teeth and shocked him into a brief moment of paralysis. When Nate finally found his footings and steadied himself again, Eric's arms were already planted on Nate's either side, effectively trapping him on spot.
"Now, why would you go and hurt my feelings," Eric's voice was laced with mock hurt that set Nate's teeth on edge, "when your continual survival is entirely dependent on my goodwill?
Eric's face was close enough to Nate's to feel his breath, except all the air Nate could breathe in was cold. This time Nate could not stop the shiver—wrong, so wrong, that foreign smile on this thing wearing Brad's face.
His reaction didn't go unnoticed. Eric's unnatural grin was wider.
Pam was watching from a few steps back, her arms crossed. "Now, now Eric, there is PR to think of. Those two lowlifes were hunting for V, and we have every right to dispatch them. But this boy isn't exactly a run of the mill."
At Nate's look, Pam elaborated helpfully, "Oh, honey, we can't just have people thinking we go about sucking people dry willy-nilly. We're trying to go for this whole coming-out thing soon, and it would be simply disreputable if this whole incident gets out. I'm afraid we can't let you leave."
Anger was just as pointless as hysteria, but for a moment, Nate couldn't suppress it. "Yes, I can see how a homicide would be a far superior and more viable option from a PR standpoint."
Eric flashed him a lazy grin. "A wrong word."
Nate saw it then, the thinly veiled madness behind the dark eyes that may look like his friend's but weren't, no matter how Nate wished them to be. Nate had faced madness before; he couldn't say he understood it, but he'd witnessed, far more times than he'd wished to, that slow descend, triggered by fear and desperation and hopelessness. This —this was something different, unknown and unknowable and—
—hungry.
Nate tried to break away from his gaze, a second too late.
A feeling of something silky soft and cool and taut slithered as it cast over him, and just as suddenly, everything around him was filtered, hazy, and pleasantly null, like the utter calm you felt submerged underwater, just seconds away from drowning.
Nate could feel Eric's icy fingers on his neck. He couldn't lift his to stop Eric.
He was not exactly certain if he wanted to.
"Homicide, one human killing another human." Eric's voice sounded far away, except it was also echoing cacophony in Nate's head. "And that," Eric whispered at his ear, "is definitely not," against his throat, "what we're doing," in his head.
There were movements around Nate: none of them registered. Teeth nicked at his neck: he didn't feel it.
"You will forget every moment of this," the voice in his head commanded, a cold hand clasped on his arm. "You will remember nothing."
--Wait. Wait.
Nate blinked, and the thin threads that seemed to tug and pull at him from all directions snapped at once.
He surfaced and gasped for air; feelings, foreign and strange, flooded back again. And just as soon as they did, he almost wished they hadn't. The searing pain at his neck came alive, vivid and paralyzing.
He lifted his heavy arm and grasped at Eric's fingers digging painfully into his neck. "Stop it," Nate said, with only the faintest of tremble in his voice. "Right now."
Eric froze, staring at Nate's hand on his wrist. His eyes narrowed and then snapped back at Nate's.
The effect was immediate. Nate's fingers started to numb, and the tingling began to spread all the way up to his head. Nate couldn't make himself look away.
If he couldn't look away, then he'd have to face it. Nate curled his hands into fists, digging nails into his skin. The numbness subsided, and he bit down on his lips hard enough to draw blood. He didn't break again.
Eric dropped his hand and took a step back. "Huh."
"Eric?"
He didn't take his eyes off Nate. "Yes, Pam?"
Pam, hovering over them, squinted her eyes at Nate. "Did he just?"
"Yes."
"Did he just snap out of Glamour?"
"Yes, Pam."
"Well, what the heck is wrong with him?"
Eric looked somewhat pained. "There's nothing wrong with him. He's entirely human."
"And yet?"
"And yet," Eric admitted begrudgingly, "it didn't take."
Pam shot Nate a sympathetic look. "Really, hon, this is not your night."
No, it really wasn't. Nate recalled the two bodies. And he tried to remember: dead man walking.
If you knew you were already dead, all that counted was what you did between.
The girl had said, she'd said—what was it? It came to him, then: stake and silver. He didn't know how this worked, how any of this worked, how any of this could even be real. Nate pulled himself up, breaking one of the chairs thrown away at the corner and grasping a piece of wood. He'd been hoping to locate the knife that the one of the two attackers had dropped, but there was no time. This would have to do.
They were watching him without making a move. Pam was looking highly amused, and Eric had his arms crossed over this chest. "Really?" Eric asked. He looked so completely beleaguered that it was almost comical. "You really think that's what you want to do?"
"Futility of human nature, you said," said Nate, deciding right then that he would truly like to give this Eric something to consider before another unsuspecting bystander ended up in this alley.
Nate was tensely watching for movement, but he almost missed; the piece of wood in his hand went clean through Eric's arm, not the chest. At least it was more than Nate had hoped for. It was certainly more than what Eric had expected, if the deadly look on his face was any indication. Eric swatted Nate off like some fly, and Nate landed on his back a few feet away.
Nate watched with grim satisfaction when Eric pulled the stake out from his arm with a single grip, unflinching and obviously unhurt. It was a juvenile thought, but Nate hoped it'd at least scar.
"Well, Nathaniel, we have a problem." Eric stood over him, paying little attention to his own arm dripping with blood because his eyes were on Nate. "You now have my full and undivided interest."
There was no deceit in the flat, bland tone of the voice. Not that Nate had expected any.
This time, Nate didn't even see him coming.