Chapter Text
Owen was killing a woman, when he heard a soft, musical sound.
He didn’t recognize her. Owen didn’t recognize many people here in town, when they had never tried to meet his face before, in all the years he had lived and worked and tried to live alongside them.
His wrist was tucked up inside of her rib cage, hand clenching down on whatever hard nodules of cartilage and bone and gobbets of soft, squishing viscera he could manage to grasp. He stilled in the tableau, knees wet where they were pressed to the stones on either side of her, the tunic down his front sodden and heavy and dripping with blood. His mouth was so rich with it that it ran between his teeth and down his chin, matted his tangled and wild hair to his cheeks, and coated his arms to the elbows.
The woman had been struggling, but it took mere heartbeats for the shock of the wound to start to kill her. He could feel the flutter of something against his fingertips— her heart, or the lungs struggling to inflate with the weight of him on top and inside of her. But she wouldn’t be living through this.
None of them would.
He bent his head down again, somehow still hungry, burning through the blood he was harvesting as quickly as he could glut himself on it— but that sound came again. A soft, trembling trill.
Owen opened his mouth and released the woman’s neck, dropping her like a dog would a ruined bone, and lifted his head. His eyes flashed in the dark, all the torches snuffed and the people who had lived through the slaughter fled to the far corners of the town. No doubt barring their doors, saddling their horses and carriage. It wouldn’t help them.
But when he opened his mouth something… some noise came out that he didn’t. Didn’t mean to make. A quiet, soft thing, like a cat’s trembling exhale when it saw the flash of a fin underwater.
‘That wasn’t human,’ he had time to think, confused— but there was that response again. Something calling him, saying come here, and, I love you.
Owen pulled his hand free from the body, the sucking noise of him wrenching it out of the gristle lost in the distant sound of bells, and the crackling of distant flames that had yet to reach this dark corner of the main street he had found to eat his latest meal. His wings had been laid behind him like the trail of a cloak, and as he stood he drew them back around himself, comforting and soft. They reminded him of Louis’ wings— he’d shown Owen, one private summer night. So pale they looked silvery, the same translucent blonde as Louis’ hair. Golden. The membrane felt like butter against Owen’s wondering fingertips, the fur soft as velvet along the arm and wrist of it where it folded elegantly along Louis’ back.
‘Two hundred and forty three,’ he thought, reaching up as if in a trance to smear a hand across his mouth, accomplishing nothing. It did bring his attention to the new length of his teeth, so much longer than Louis’ had been, and the rough sandpaper feel of his tongue when he couldn’t help but lick hungrily at his hands— to lick at the sharpened bone, and keratin at the tip of his fingers that created deadly, curved knives. There were shreds, caught underneath.‘Two hundred and forty three people dead, two thousand five hundred and fifty six to go.’
The counting was soothing. His brain was rattling and banging against the cage of his skull like a gibbering lunatic, screaming and aching and pounding. His heart no longer beat but he could feel the pulse of strangeness making his own wings shift restlessly behind him, spread and arc and strain for something. To fly maybe, although Owen didn’t know how. To hide perhaps— but Owen was done hiding.
He followed the sound.
It brought him towards the pyre.
The town square was deserted, flags snapping in the brisk night time breeze that came off of the river, clouds passing so quickly in front of the moon that it was bright and dim in flashes like a lighthouse. One moment Owen could make out a silver glint on the shine of exposed bones and standing puddles of deep red blood. The next, the world was painted flat white and black and gray as his eyes adjusted to the dark of an unlit night. Ropes hummed and strained under the wind as they held down canopies and market stalls and tents— a festival had been coming to town.
Louis had told him about it. They were going to go together, once Owen finished his sleep.
The pyre stood at the center of town, the pole they had tied Louis to snapped in half from the heat and crumbled to coal and ash. The stack of logs and thatch had stood as high as Owen’s chest, and the heat had been so intense that he still had the burns across his face and hands, only just freshly healed by the blood and lives he’d consumed. He would have burnt himself to ash if one of the villagers hadn’t dragged him screaming back away from the fire. Long enough to come to his senses.
Louis, he couldn’t save. But them? He could kill.
Now the pyre was burnt down to cinders, the residual heat still warm on Owen’s bare feet as he stepped on the soot stained cobbles. He left tacky footprints behind him as he moved between the bodies— some laid as if they were sleeping, faces turned up towards the sky and eyes blank. Some were in pieces, an arm or a leg ripped off in Owen’s fervor to keep them from escaping. He didn’t feel horror, or disgust at what he had done. He felt nothing. He felt like he was looking at the stump of a great tree that would keep him warm for a long time to come.
That sound came again, louder, and Owen’s newly lengthened ears swiveled, his head tilting and turning in a motion he could barely control to pinpoint where it was. Even as his long fanged mouth opened and chirped back, pleading, because… he didn’t know. He didn’t know why he did it.
The air stank of ash and soot and blood so heavily that he couldn’t smell anything else, but he could hear something move slightly in the ash. That soft, sibilant sound calling him forward until he fell to his knees, hands outstretched, mind wiped as clean of thought as if the fire had raged there instead.
Louis was alive.
Owen stared, hands held helplessly in his lap and head tilted, staring at the thing that was Louis.
It had to be Louis. No human could be that burned and be alive.
His hair was gone, as well as most of the skin, blood and soot streaked bone showing where the scalp had curled back like old dead leaves. One eye was left, rolling in a socket so horribly burned that Owen could only make out a glimmer of blue behind the swollen and burned flesh, staring sightlessly through the burnt and scarred cataracts. The other socket was sightless and empty, a clear liquid still sizzling on Louis’ ruined cheek that Owen suspected was what was left of the eye after it boiled right out of his head.
His limbs were twisted, shrunk, the heat sucking all the moisture from Louis’ body to the point the sinews and tendons had tightened like an overstrung bow. They had snapped, in some places. What fingers were left on Louis’ left arm were curled like a dead spider, wooden and shriveled with the skin peeled back over the back of the hand and up the arm.
Owen could see the tracks in the soot, along the ground, where Louis had dragged himself on his single partially working arm. Like some blind sightless worm, in order to reach a puddle Owen had left behind in his eagerness.
Louis’ lips and cheeks were gone, fire yellowed teeth showing through the holes in his skull— but Owen could see that this was him healed. This was the damage improved, after Louis had dipped his head enough to get a few mouthfuls of blood left in a cobblestone divot, where some horse long ago had struck it’s shoe too hard on the street. Louis had lapped it up with what was left of his tongue, and it gave him enough strength to pull him to the next puddle, the next body, all while Owen had been sick and exhausted and killing.
He was alive.
“Oh Louis,” Owen was sobbing helplessly, weak with sorrow. It came up like a retching, horrible cough, uncontrollable. It was the bark of a wounded animal, echoing off the silent watching buildings around them. Owen couldn’t even move to him, his limbs so weak all of a sudden, misery dragging at him until he didn’t think he could get up any more. He wanted to lay down and die, where they could not be hurt any more, by people, people who had tried to take away Louis.
“Louis, my love, sire, what did they do to you?”
Louis must have heard him, that blind eye rolling to fix itself on him, and it was only Owen’s long familiarity with Louis’ face that allowed him to see past the carnage and ruined wreck of his sire, and see the slight opening of those sharp fanged teeth, and the way the eye slit shut in gladness. Louis heard him, and was smiling, and Owen began to cry so hard he felt truly sick from it, stomach rolling and vision swimming. He finally crawled forward on hands and knees, through the mud and the dirty street and the blood coating his hands to lay himself over him. Louis made that sound again, that soft tremulous whistle and Owen answered mindlessly, between horrible wracking sobs, pressing his face to the ruin of Louis’ cheek, to his burnt and craterous bare chest, where the buttons of his vest had melted into his skin and left shiny weeping wounds of gold.
“I’ll fix this,” Owen promised fiercely, his hands moving as light as butterflies over Louis, his love, trying to find a spot that was safe to touch, to move him and lift him out of the mud where he was laying. His skin was still hot in some places, still burning faintly despite the amount of blood Louis had managed to find in the carnage. Owen pressed a hand down to starve the heat somehow, put out the flames remaining. “Oh, Louis, my love, I’m so sorry, I couldn’t stop them.”
That noise came again, and Owen answered just as mindlessly as before, and it felt right. It felt like a call and response from God. It felt better than his mother holding his hand, it felt better than food after days of no eating, to hear Louis call for him and he could respond and say, ‘I love you, I’m here, I found you!’, all in one gentle, bird-like sound.
There were footsteps behind him.
Owen went blank, everything seeming to move slow. He stood, but it was as if he were on strings, incapable of stopping, incapable of doing anything else but stand, and turn to look at the villagers behind him. Something else was controlling him, some vicious, horrible coldness. Something that put itself on it’s feet between the rushing noise and lights of the mob of people, and Louis lying helpless in the smoldering remains of a witches pyre.
They brought torches and lamps, the light dazzling Owen’s wide and staring eyes for only a moment before his pupils narrowed to a slit as thin as a razor. Leaving nothing but red.
“Monster!” screamed a woman, and Owen knew her.
She was the baker. She had thrown a brick at him to get him off her stoop last winter and it had knocked out one of Owen’s teeth, and part of another. The pain had been terrible, and he’d worried all winter he’d die from infection— until the remnants of the black root had finally fallen out, and he could eat solid food again. Weak, and sick, and it had almost killed him, all for the insult of sleeping two hours on a stoop that didn’t have a foot of snow on it.
Owen bared his new teeth now, sharp and long and dangerous, the gifts Louis had given him. “Monster?” he asked quietly, not even sure if the villagers could hear him over the sounds of their screaming and shouting, as they spread like water to the edges of the town square, trapping him, blocking him in. It was a mockery of the pyre before, the light leaping up from their lamps and torches to cast dancing wicked shadows along the doorways and windows. The fire elsewhere in town was tall and bright enough where Owen thought he could see the glimmers of light cast on the bottom of low hanging clouds, glowing sullen like hell had opened beyond the town gates, waiting for him.
He turned his face up and see if he could catch a glimpse of the moon in the quickly darkening sky. No such luck.
“Monster,” he repeated thoughtfully, quietly, weakness no longer suffusing him, grief no longer crippling him. His sire was still and silent behind him, not breathing, no heart to beat— but he could hear that sound occasionally, that soft small whistle or chirp. As if to say I have not left you, I’m still here, be brave!
He would be brave.
“Roald,” bellowed one of the men, one of those witch finders that had been sniffing around Louis for weeks. Louis had brushed them off, said it happened every hundred years or so that people got such ridiculous ideas. After all Louis didn’t kill people. Not like those vampires that were hunted— wicked, silly things that made a spectacle of themselves, and made things hard for the vampires that simply wanted to live quietly. Louis was gentle, gracious, leading his flock like one of the great pale golden hounds Owen would see on occasion, that protected the sheep outside of the town gates. “Roald, put the silver down! We’re not going to let them escape—“
Owen’s hands ripped through the man’s throat, only meeting the slightest resistance as the trachea came loose from the bottom of the witch finders jaw, and went flopping down across his chest in a spray of blood and spit and bile. The screams rose in pitch and fever as Owen went loose among the crowded townsfolk like a terrier in a barn full of rats— eyes wide open and unseeing, teeth bared in an unending guttural furious roar as he snapped someone’s neck, pulling with all the fury in his body and tearing their skull loose from their neck in a fountain of blood.
The crowd stood firm for longer than he thought they would, the blood fueling him even as fatigue pulled at his limbs, even as his vision swam and pain burned through his teeth and throat and gums from the unending work. The labor of killing, that had him staggering, putting his hand through someone's chest and slamming them into a wall to let the force kill them— rather than the effort of sliding his hand up, into something vital.
It had him picking up his axe, and swinging it in a perfect fulcrum of violence that sliced the old school teacher clean in half, when he felt too tired to use his claws.
It had him putting his foot down and pressing down on the local dentist, who had refused to even let Owen into his shop for treatment, even with double the money needed, desperation coloring Owen’s words because he hadn’t wanted to die. The man’s body gave with a crunch, something deep inside snapping that made the screaming fall silent.
The last of the screaming.
He was truly drenched now, panting from effort, clouds of hot breath misting in front of him from the fevered heat of exertion, cheeks and chin and mouth wet with blood. The clearing was silent, and Owen swung his head around like a cornered wolf, ears pricked.
But he heard nothing. They had fled.
‘Two hundred and sixty six,’ he thought numbly, crouching to grab the still breathing and wheezing body of the dentist, dragging his leaking soiled corpse over to where Louis was lying.
Owen had seen a bird once, hovering over her chicks in the nest. She had chattered and scolded Owen as he looked up through the sun dappled leaves below, her song bright and loud and charmingly angry. He saw her covering her brood with her wings, the barest glimpse of naked pink skin and soft, downy feather visible inside the nest.
Owen had cut a different tree down that day.
Now he covered Louis with his wings, bringing the food up to his own mouth and biting down. Hot, warm live blood flooded into his mouth, the pump of the man's panicked heart pushing it up into his mouth and gullet and warming his already fevered face to a pleased flush. Owen didn’t swallow, moving down and pressing his lips to Louis’ ruined mouth, locking around the damaged skin and ignoring the pained inhale he heard from Louis.
He fed Louis like that, in the dark beneath his spread wings. The villager died in his arms as Owen dipped his head again and again, and he only started swallowing when the heart stopped beating. He just kept drawing blood up into his mouth to feed it gently to Louis, drop by drop, swallow by swallow.
The moon had moved down behind the town's rooftops by the time there was no bone showing on Louis’ scalp, and his limbs had filled out slightly so as not to be skeletal. Vampires cry blood, Owen discovered, although it was hard to tell from the sheer mess on his own face and in his hair. But Louis had thin red tracks coming from each eye, which Owen thought for a moment was a wound of some kind— until he again read the expression behind the lipless mouth and the pockets of burning half melted flesh, and realized Louis was in pain and weeping from it.
He probably couldn’t draw breath in to scream. Owen had heard him before, and had to rest his head now against his own knees at the memory. Louis screaming until he couldn’t any more, on the pyre, smoke thick and black and choking and probably burning him inside just as much as out. Owen felt sick, and dizzy, and felt fresh warm blood joining the cold sticky mass on his face as he cried his own tears.
As if sensing his distress Louis made that noise again, and Owen answered, muffled by his knees. Louis had stopped crying.
Sniffing heavily he spread his wings again and exposed the two of them to the moonless sky, to the silent bloody village. He was as gentle as he could without doing the disservice of being slow as he picked Louis up in his arms, cradling him with all the strength and gentleness that remained to him. The villagers had left for now, but Owen was starting to flag. He wasn’t sure how many more times this night he could repel people trying to kill them, and they had to get somewhere safe. Somewhere Louis could heal— if he had come back from the skeletal half melted thing on the pyre, Owen had to believe he could come back further.
“I can fix this,” he promised again, voice thick and heavy with tears, with weariness as he spread his wings. He gave a few testing flaps, knowing that this would hurt Louis, would hurt him probably, because although Louis was reduced the burden was heavy and Owen had never flown before. It would be awkward, tiring— but he only had to make it to the treeline. To the safety of the forest, that Owen knew better than any villagers or soldiers even before he had the senses of a nocturnal predator.
Owen gave one more hard testing flap, ash billowing from the pyre with the force, before he took a few staggering steps and flapped once more with purpose—
They took off into the night, gone in a moment. Slowly, one by one, the bells in the town behind them went silent, and the fires cooled to cinders.