Chapter Text
During the worst experiences of her life, Angela Black's mind would tend to remember the best of them. She had spent many a year with her friends and family never far from her heart. She might say that she had loved all of her family and friends equally, but she knew she was never quite telling the truth when she said it. Because what she knew, as sure as she knew her own name, was that the two people she loved the most in this whole wide world were her rambunctious little cousin Billy Black and his soft spoken friend Charlie Swan.
They all grew up together. Every weekend the three children, often joined by Harry Clearwater and Sue Daniels, would play together for hours. Running through fields and jumping over logs only to end up at the beach, basking in the heat of the sun like they didn't have a care in the world. Most of the time, Angela would make sure to care for them, as she was the eldest. She took them swimming in the ocean when it was warm and showed them how to make frybread when it was nearing autumn. She even took to helping Billy with his regalia when his mother took ill and couldn't bead with precision anymore.
She may have been a good four years older than most of the other children on the reservation but no matter how old she managed to get, Angela Black always made time for her boys.
Angela liked her memories. She cherished them. Flipping through them like a much loved book when she needed to smile again. She remembered helping her father patch skinned knees. She remembered laughing loudly as Harry and Quil foolishly chased a rez dog into the woods. She remembered how she would scold Billy when he accidentally shot Sue in the foot with his new BB gun or how she would sit patiently as she showed a clumsy Charlie how to braid Harry Clearwater's hair just the way he liked it.
At 18 Angela Black had packed her bags and went off to Haskell for college.
At 24 she returned home. Older, wiser and with a bachelor's in history and a newfound joy for discovery. Though she herself had changed, The rez had managed to look the same as it always had. The back roads were still muddy, the old museum was still crumbling and the IHS building was still as far away from the housing as ever.
She wasnt the only one who had managed to change in the years since she left. Her boys had grown like weeds as well. Little Billy Black wasn't so little anymore, nor was Harry Clearwater, who took after his father, the boy as thick as a brick. And Charlie Swan, tiny, weedy Charlie Swan, had grown up and up, towering above them all, lanky and awkward as hell.
At 20, they all looked like men...hell.. at 20 they were men. Getting married, having children. Doing all of the things that people their age were supposed to do.
The last time Angela Black ever saw any of them was the week after Isabella Swan's birth. Charlie couldn't help but show off his daughter to anyone who would look at her. Pushing the bundle of squalling baby into her arms with the proudest expression he could muster. She and her family had been visiting the house he shared with Renee. Sharing smiles, warm cider and a football game with the Swan family as they too had managed to become part of the Swan family.
Sitting with her family, holding that little girl in her arms was the last warm memory Angela Black ever had.
A month later she was gone. Killed and turned as an experiment for some wandering vampires with an intense hatred for people like her.
"Go ahead, change that foul smelling bitch for me, Leston. "
What? No!
"She tastes as bad as she smells."
God she hoped so.
"Bite her again, let's see how many times it takes to take her down."
No. No please!
The last thought she had, with her bones shattered and blood boiling under her skin was of her family. What would they think of her now? She was a monster. Turned into something they hated the most, even as her heritage had promised her death in it's stead.
She would never find her family again. Though, as she squirmed in her cell, covered in dirt and bite scars and groaning through her aches, there was something in the back of her mind telling her that she was wrong to think that.
She only had to bide her time and wait.
Seventeen Years Later
Angela had been out hunting for her next meal along the abandoned highway when she felt her world shift at mile marker 6. Whipping through trees at inhuman speeds, she caught a whiff of the carnage and her world exploded around her. Dragging her away from her hunt and into something entirely unexpected.
The smell of gunpowder and death enveloped her senses long before she saw the corpses littering the ground. The scent, as it was wont to do, had become the driving force behind her harried movements. The scent of blood, thick and cloying, assaulted her sinuses, calling forth the naked frenzy of feeding that most vampires were unable to resist, beckoning her closer to the scene.
What she found there was by far the worst crime scene she had seen in a decade.
If she had been human, her stomach would have emptied itself at the sight.
Angela didn't expect it and by god she wished she hadn't stumbled across it, but in the time she used to catalogue the carnage, she found a familiar face amongst it.
Charlie Swan, she remembered him, even though it had been years since she had seen him last, his face was still as memorable as ever.
He was covered in blood and riddled with bullet holes, lying half dead in the dirt like an old raggedy Andy doll sue left in her garden. Angela found herself balking at the sight of him. As she made her way closer, she catalogued the scene. His uniform looked to be tattered and his gun was still holstered. Though everything and everyone else seemed to have been riddled with bullets, no officer she found there had an unholstered weapon.
Something or someone ambushed them.
Knowing had its consequences. She thought as she jumped and sped her way to his side, stepping over the others in her haste to get to him. And Angela...she knew.
Angela died knowing. She was cursed with knowing.
They called it precognition in the vampire community and it was her gift, given to her in exchange for her human life. She knew things. Felt them like a buzzing in her bones and in her soul. These feelings told her where to go and what to do. In the seventeen years since she had been turned, she knew where to go to save herself from her tormentors and who to meet to keep herself alive. She knew the winning lottery numbers to gain wealth. She knew what house to buy to avoid humans. Which coven to meet, which stocks to put her money into.
But the most damning of all.. She knew where her first changeling was going to die.
Angela had spent the morning with a buzzing in her skull and an unrelenting voice in the back of her head telling her the direction she needed to run in and the time she needed to go. She only left her cabin as the morning sun rose in the cloudy summer sky. So she did what she always did. she listened to the voice, she waited and she ran. Doomed as she was to carry both the sense of impending pain and the uneasy prickling of her gift crawling down the back of her spine.
She went out the door expecting a body, Knew She would fine someone. But what she didn't expect, what she could never expect, was him. As she ran up to Charlie, pressing a hand to the back of the cruiser to keep herself steady from the shock, she cursed the gods for her misfortune. Her new changeling, her new mate, was none other than Charlie Swan. The little boy she had grown up alongside. The man who had been a husband and father the last time she had seen him.
The man who would be dead at the end of the day.
It must have been fate that brought her back to him when he needed her the most. That's what Charlie thought when his pale body, broken and bleeding sluggishly, was overtaken by a human sized shadow. The vision in his left eye fogged out, graying around the edges as the person blotted out the cloudy afternoon sun. The woman, because that was what he was staring at, hovered above him like a bronze statue. Her kind golden eyes and warm smile was as intimately familiar to him as his own face.
The angel of death was said to take many forms when they spirited you away, your closest friend, your mother or father, your children or even your lover. The one assigned to Charlie must have known him well it seemed. Because when Angela Black, gone from this world for over seventeen years, appeared in his vision, Charlie Swan knew he was dying.
Realistically he knew that Angela was gone. She had been taken from her family well before she truly got to live. After a year of searching for her, the tribe declared her dead and she became one of many MMIW to add to the list. He and Billy searched for her for months after that but they never found her. Her files, when he became chief of police himself and could read them without anyone prying, said she was last seen in Seattle but the trail had gone cold and the woman's life with it. The tribe danced for her for many years after her disappearance, hoping the ancestors would bring her home.
She never came home. So it must be fate that she would be the harbinger of his own death. It must be fate that she be the one to bring him home.
"Fuck Charlie." The angel wearing the face of Angela spoke to him softly. He watched out of foggy eyes as she crouched next to him. Her blue jeans covered in dirt and her light jacket fluttering around her waist at her inhumanly quick movements. Had he been in his right mind, he may have noticed how fast she moved or how the force of her run and subsequent stumble into his cruiser had gouged thick angry tire marks into the asphalt beside him. But he didn't. All he noticed in his weakened state was her hand fluttering around his face. Not quite touching him as he suspected she wanted to. “What did you get yourself into now?”
She must have come to take him home. He thought, resigned to his fate. Everyone died, he would be no better.
The curves and valleys of her stricken face were filled with sweet memories of his own wasted life. Charlie drank them all in with hungry eyes, trying and failing to focus on her as he felt his blood dry to his abdomen and his lungs stutter feebly as he took breath after breath. It took all of his strength to stay there with her. Fighting the blackness away until he finally croaked for good.
"Angela, Angel please.” He begged her. He was who he was, a simple man and a god-fearing man. He hoped that heaven would take him in and he hoped Bella wouldn't be too heartbroken when he was gone. But most of all, he hoped his daughter would be safe and happy. He tried to grasp at her hands, losing the battle as his own bloody fingers fell to rest on his stomach once again. "Bella, my Bella, keep her safe." His voice cracked as he begged. He didn't think that the angel of death could do more for her than her own father could. but he could ask, couldn't he?
God he hoped someone out there would listen to the final plea of a dying old man. There was nothing he could do about it now.
The angel wearing Angela's face finally forewent her hesitation to touch him and pushed her fingers into his thick mop of hair. She stroked the sweat drenched strands with her death-chilled fingers as gently as she could. He sighed gratefully as she pushed the bloody mess back and away from his face, a few tendrils stuck to his forehead but he didn't begrudge her that.
Her touch was too gentle, cold like ice and almost soothing if it didn't feel so inhuman and if his skin wasn't so feverish. His head was pounding with the effort to keep on living but Charlie couldn't close his eyes if he wanted to. He could feel wetness gathering in the corner of them and allowed himself to let his tears go. Charlie had never been much of a crying man in his life but hell….today seemed like a special occasion.
It wasn't every day he would get to experience the end of his life.
"I'm dying aren't I?" The words sloughed out of his mouth alongside the blood that had filled his lungs. It hurt for him to continue talking but he tried anyway. Tried for her. The world buzzed in his ears. Blackness was creeping through his line of sight. "Figured I would go out like this."
In truth, he thought he would be dead years ago. But he didn't tell her that. She didn't need to know that.
"Have you finally came to see me home?" He didn't wait for her confirmation, though the stricken expression and the small nod she levied at him helped. Charlie smiled through the pain. Happy for the first time in years at the sight of the dead woman.
There wasn't much time left for him, he knew that.
She pulled her hands out of his hair and he hissed at the way he felt bereft without them. Angela shushed him. A look of fierce determination crossed her face and she absentmindedly pulled his hands from his stomach to hold in her own, crushing them to her as she half crouched over him.
Those chilled hands didn't yield as he held them. Nor did her arms yield as she pushed them under his head and pulled him from his grave of dirt and gravel to survey his surroundings. He let her crush him to her without a word, he knew he was too weak to fight back and he felt too exhausted to try. Somehow he knew that what little strength he had couldn't overwhelm a creature such as her.
This must be what angels feel like. Cold and hard like stone. As if a graveyard statue had come to life.
Angela didn't wince at his rattling chuckle. She continued to hold him as he laughed and moaned, never disgusted by the blood leaking out of him. Charlie took some of the time he had left to watch the rolling clouds above his head darken with rain and lightning. Enjoying a storm one last time. He wondered if Bella was alright. Was she was safe? Was she indoors, watching the storm? He hoped she was. He didn't quite feel so alone when he imagined his daughter in her own window, staring at the same sky and watching the same rain that he was.
The puncture in his right lung had slowly filled up with blood as the time slipped away. He could feel it slowly drown him. Warm and wet and so very painful. The hole near his heart pushed more blood into his chest cavity with every feeble beat. Bone and shrapnel burned as they traveled through aorta and vein. Charlie let himself wheeze loudly as the pain only got worse, each breath traced a burning path through his body.
The angel at his side cursed the creator for her horrible luck and he couldn't help but smile at the familiarity of it all. Angela's voice had been a balm to Charlie's battered ears for so many years, he couldn't imagine forgetting what she sounded like. She and her voice would always remain a soothing memory of his childhood.
Charlie turned his wary eyes back to her, watching her golden face as it in turn watched the rain filled clouds in the sky. It looked to Charlie as if wings, as black and shiny as the hair on her head, would unfurl along her back at any moment and she would finally fly them to the heavens above.
Instead she turned her head back to him, eyes filled with sorrow for what he had become. Her mouth opened and pearlescent white teeth glittered in the fast fading sun. The last thing Charlie would ever see as a living man was her head dipping to his throat, impossibly fast, and biting into his tender flesh.
The blackness of death finally overtook Charlie Swan as he screamed and thrashed in pain.
Charlie's lifeblood leaked sluggishly through her fingers as she ran. If her grip wasn't so solid as an inhuman creature, his much larger body would have slipped right out of her hands miles ago. Charlie wasn't large per say, but he wasn't a small man either. His weight was nothing but even the lightest person could be a struggle to hold when they're as damn lanky as he was.
Fuck. It's too much. If she could cry, she would be doing so already. No amount of precognition could prepare her for what she had seen when she came upon that gristly scene. Why me! She raged. Why him?
Angela barely spared a glance at her wayward passenger as she ran. She knew as surely as she knew her own name that the venom running through his veins was the only thing keeping him from dying in her arms entirely. She did her best to ignore his pained cries and adjusted him closer to her, too focused on getting him to a safe place to make his ride a smooth one.
"Oh Charlie. Fuck, I'm so sorry." She whispered into his hair as the trees flew by. “If I had realized. If I had known…”
To be aware of only a small amount of events. Cursed to know…but not to understand until it was way too late to change fate. Not for the first time she cursed at her half gift. Aware of the pain it caused her and countless others throughout the years.
The path to her home was thankfully clear of felled trees and summer hikers. Large pines and thick logs flew by as she made her way up the mountain. She couldn't imagine what it would look like to a hiker if they had intercepted her. She could only imagine the image she and Charlie made together. A small tan skinned woman carrying a bloodied cop in her arms like he was nothing, like a cryptid that would have been rumored to haunt these woods for millennia. She could laugh at the irony of actually being one of those haunting cryptids if it wasn't such a painful subject for her.
Charlie shuddered in her arms. The torn raincoat and drying blood didn't do much to cover him from her prying eyes. The wind and rain soaked into their clothes as she sped up, drenching them to the bone. She cursed at it as she ran. Though she couldn't feel cold anymore, Charlie still could.
But there really was nothing she could do for him now besides wait.
Angela mourned the loss of his humanity even as she selfishly begged for him to be ok.
Her little cabin wasn't much farther along. They would make it just in time. She didn't want him to be outside when the transformation really set in.
As soon as she entered her door, Angela sped to her guest bedroom and laid his body on the bed to get to work. Forgetting to close it to the rain and the wind picking up behind her.
Her first task was to rid him of his soaked clothing. The bloodied and shredded uniform would do nothing to help his transformation, should he manage to survive it. Those came off in tatters, ripped to shreds underneath her frantic fingers. Angela didn't even try to save them. Instead she lifted his loose limbs and pulled the stitching apart at the seams. The shirt flew from her grasp to hit the floor behind her in a wet plop. The badge still attached to it clinked loudly on the hardwood floor. His belt and pants came next, falling to the floor at her feet in much the same way the shirt and coat did.
God Charlie, what happened to you? She thought forlornly as she placed his left leg back in the bed. He was all long legs and gangly arms and thick brown body hair. She hoped he wasn't overly attached to any of it. Not much of him was guaranteed to stay the same after he turned.
The scar she remembered patching from so long ago was displayed prominently in the skin of his left kneecap. Angela brushed her finger along it, caught in nostalgia for the only moment she could spare for it. The cord of scarred flesh blended into his pale skin but her superhuman eyes could easily see every mountain and valley etched into his knee. She remembered patching up this same knobby kneecap almost thirty years ago.
And now she was patching up the rest of him.
Angela took a deep and admittedly useless breath before she moved to remove his socks and underwear. To most people it would be an awkward mess, but she was far past caring about his state of undress.
Vampirism manages to cure you of prudishness very quickly. Nothing about your first transformation would be pretty. Nothing about birth or rebirth is ever pretty. She thought to herself. She can at least do one favor for Charlie that she never got for herself. Charlie won't wake in a pile of filth like she did. Not if she can help it.
Angela listened to her grandfather clock strike six. She noted the time before she turned her attention back to his torso. Bereft of all clothing, she could see how bad off Charlie truly was.
He was breathing heavily. Somehow Charlie's torn chest had managed to keep heaving despite the horrors he had just managed to survive. The failing organs were working through the last true breaths his body will ever take. She knew that in about six hours, those movements will be more of a learned reaction than from any sort of true need.
Truthfully, if she was honest with herself, the wet breaths and rattling lungs were almost too hard for her to listen to. She wished, not for the first time, that she had the strength to walk away and come back in a few days to greet him as he woke for the final time. Angela adjusted his body to a more comfortable position to try to alleviate his pain instead. Despite becoming a vampire, she couldn't slough off enough of her humanity to leave him to his fate. Every once in a while Charlie's eyes would open and he would blearily stare at her before they closed again.
"Poor sweet Charlie Swan." She crooned at him as she sat on the bed next to his shivering body. It was hard to not see the little boy he had once been, always laughing and running hand in hand with the little girl she once was.
Life passes you by so quickly. Immortality only pushes childhood nostalgia further back into the past. It doesn't go away. Nothing truly ever goes away. Angela knows this. She didn't envy his next few days. Dying wasn't easy. What came after, that tended to be worse.
Making a snap decision, Angela crawled in bed next to him. His shivering had started and the tears had all but become sobs. His body knew it was dead and would be expelling everything it could. The transformation was never easy, nor was it dignified. The least she could do for him as his sire was give him comfort as he fought through it.
She hummed as she held him. He must have been coherent enough to understand she was there because he scooted closer. Positioning himself next to her thigh. Even as a man in his forties, he would never deny himself comfort. It was a miracle he could move at all. His head settled on her stomach. The blood flowing freely from his mouth and nose pooled onto her shirt but she didn't mind.
She held him like an old teddy bear and cried for their shared lost humanity.
It took the requisite six hours for the first stage of his transformation to complete. Angela sat with her shoulders and head resting on the headboard and listened to the grandfather clock strike each hour all the way up to midnight, the time between strikes seemed to crawl by, both slower and impossibly faster than any she had experienced before. All she could do to comfort him was watch him and offer herself up as a body to hold onto. Watching blood and viscera come out of his wounds, soaking the sheets and her shirt wasn't very comforting. Through those first few hours, he vomited a few times. Then quieted to a fitful sleep.
Angela watched through her window as the sky roared it's stormy fury into the afternoon. Yellow clouds turned to green, then to a dark orange and finally to black as night fell.
She checked on Charlie every hour, tearing herself away from her thoughts as she looked down at him.
Whatever was left in his body needed to come out. The bullets and shrapnel and chunks of bone came leaking into the cream colored blankets underneath them.
Charlie's still soft skin hadn't knitted back together just yet so he was still bleeding profusely. If anyone had entered the bedroom, they would have seen a horror beyond imagination. It filled her with dread.
Angela remembered her own transformation 17 years ago. The second big stage was cold. It was the worst cold a person would ever feel again, intense and all consuming. The process of dying sapped all of the warmth from you, never to be felt again. She remembered shaking and crying and begging for it to stop. Though the vampires that turned her only laughed and bet on her impending true death.
Charlie was thankfully asleep for this part. his shivers would do nothing to warm his skin and much like the fevered breathing, was an involuntary and instinctual reaction.
It would do no good for him now.
Angela tried to help him stay warm as best she could throughout the night. It was no use but she covered him in a blanket anyway. A warm quilt made by her own hands.
There would be no great harm in covering him. It wouldn't help, but human comfort was never truly forgotten. She hoped he would remember the comfort she tried to bestow upon him instead of the pain he was surely suffering though.
In twelve hours his nerves would start to change. Then the soft fabric would become too much for him and she would have to remove it.
She waited for that. Still as a statue and holding her breath through it all. The sun pushed its way up to the sky, then back out of her sight as a second day came and went. It took a while for the moon to replace it through the tree line. The moonglow of the second night cast everything into sharp relief. Under the cover of darkness she could almost forget what was happening.
The third stage began with a scream.
They always screamed.
This stage of the transformation felt like burning. Every nerve in the body would be reshaping itself at once. Angela was forever grateful for her inability to feel something like that ever again, though It broke her heart that Charlie had to go through it at all.
Charlie was sobbing. His tears soaked into her shirt as he grabbed onto the closest thing and held on for dear life. His bones and muscles would reshape next, so he would not have the strength to hurt her as she helped him through this.
His eyes, still brown, stared open and unseeing into the space by her belly. He sobbed as he thrashed. The venom that had replaced his tears burned through her shirt. Leaving smoking holes in the cotton. Great heaving sobs broke through the room.
It broke her heart every time she watched it happen.
Angela sang to him as he thrashed. Remembering songs from their childhood, and making up gentle tunes with no meaning after she exhausted those. Anything she could to give the man some comfort. Tears of her own slid down her cheeks and into his hair. They wouldn't hurt him anymore, not now that he was entering the final stretch. If she could hold him through this, she would hold him through everything. even when his blood burned her throat and coated her skin as well, she would hold him.
That was the only promise she could make to them both as the weight of her decisions finally pressed down on her burdened shoulders and tortured her along with his own screams.
The last stage would come soon enough and by then Charlie would be fully dead. Gone to the world and all of its suffering by the time his bones and skin hardened to steel.