Archive of Our Own

Massachusetts

Three Years after the Treaty:

It was maybe eleven in the evening on a soft June night on the New York State line, and the night started beautifully. And by beautifully, Conrad meant like complete shit. It had been fine for the first little while, after Hanna left—apparently something fairly urgent had come up, and the council wanted to amend their orders quickly. Conrad had no idea what it was, but if it was important enough to have one of the Council's telepathically inclined members go poking around in Hanna's dreams then it must be pretty important.

So Hanna had gone, to find somewhere quiet and watery for one of his scrying sessions. And Conrad had settled into the booth in the RV, in the hopes of getting some reading in before the inevitable dash and frenzy drove him utterly mad. Which it would. Because it always did.

The book was something he'd picked up in a library raid not too long ago—the RV was stuffed with their spoils to the point of claustrophobia—and he'd thought that grabbing one or two for himself wouldn't hurt anything. He'd just do what the zombie usually did and pass them off to somebody in a wayside town when he was done, to avoid filling up limited living space. It was always kind of... nice, kind of amazing really, seeing the way that somebody who'd been reduced to hand-to-mouth survival could still find time for art for art's sake. Even if art was just a bent-up copy of Going Postal.

Somewhere in the real world, outside Conrad's head, Worth said something. Hadn't he been outside? Go back outside, Worth.

The doctor dropped down into the seat on the other side of the table, fingers dancing over the surface in random, quick patterns. He must have been pacing, outside the RV, and the early summer air was still clinging to the collar of his shirt. Worth made the beginnings of a quickly aborted snatch for the cigarette packet in his pants pocket. It was empty, Conrad knew, it had been empty for nearly a week, and there was nothing to be gained from peeling off its battered plastic casing and tearing apart the white cardboard, although he did it anyways. Then the dickwad grabbed the top of Going Postal with his dirty bony fingers and, honestly, he was just like a seven-year old sometimes.

"What?" Conrad demanded, finally looking up. "I'm kind of in the middle of something here."

Worth looked at him for a split second, like he was about to do something—

"Ya wanna fuck?"

Oh, sweet merciful god, what.

It took Conrad a precious five seconds to fully comprehend that sentence. Then a few more to struggle down the images that popped up in its wake—it was like wrestling closed a suitcase filled with the most uncomfortable porn ever photographed. Oh, he did not need that thought illustrated. Close it, close it quickly.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Conrad inquired, struggling to keep his voice level.

Doc Worth let out an irritated breath—oh, well, sorry for deviating from your deranged script, mea fucking culpa. "You, me, bedroom. Dicks. Ya wanna fuck?"

Conrad looked down at the book, then back at Worth, then down at his book again. Was he for fucking real right now? Did he have absolutely nothing better to do with his life? Did he really think Conrad was that stupid? What did he expect Conrad to say, oh yes Doctor, please bend me over this table I've been dreaming of this moment for—

Ugh, that was too much detail, retreat now. Conrad wrenched his book out of Worth's hands and flung it spine-first at the doctor's head. "JesusfuckingChristWorthcan'tyoujustbenormal?"

As he stomped out the side door, punching a dent into the metal where the handle bounced back towards him, the undead man considered the option of one of these days just playing along with Doc Worth's deranged idea of entertainment, if only to see what could possibly be more obnoxious than this, day in and out.

"Yer loss!" the doctor yelled after him, through the unlatched window. "Woulda given ya a reach-around!"

Conrad snorted, furious. Sure, yes, right after they went on a candle lit dinner and a moonlight stroll. Fuck. He'd show Worth a reach-around, he'd reach around and crack his bloody skull open.

The worst part was that Worth always knew just how to strike a nerve. He cut in with his dirty fucking scalpels and rummaged around and selected raw, throbbing nerves like a soldier diffusing a bomb and pulled and it hurt. He had a talent for it. It was like he knew things about Conrad that Conrad didn't even-

Jesus...

Because—honestly—it wasn't as if he hadn't thought about it before. Him and Worth. Not the sex part because no, no he definitely couldn't think about that and ever look anybody in the eye again, especially not Worth. But maybe them, maybe them being something… else.

It was a secret thought, and it only made moments like these worse. Worse, because what if he did like Worth, somehow, in the face of all decent human reason? What if he had considered it once or twice, in the quiet privacy of his own mind? Was that really so fucking hilarious?

Apparently, Conrad was too pathetic to even have feelings.

For the next hour or so, the vampire skulked around the edge of the road in silence, kicking at rocks and bits of disconnected asphalt. He could stay angry for a very long time, and right now he didn't feel like getting anywhere close enough to the doctor to get into a fight with him. Better just to wait out the storm out here with the rocks and the trees and the blatantly unimpressed owls.

It was like owls knew that he was secretly a bat, and they couldn't be arsed to fly away from the bat man even when he was kicking holes in their trees.

Slowly, bit by bit, Conrad calmed down.

Hanna showed up about that time, looking a little worn at the edges. He spotted the vampire cooling down under a spruce tree at the shoulder of the road and gave a cheery wave.

"Hey, Connie," the magician called, "whatcha doing out here?"

The undead man sniffed, managing to remember a polite nod towards… Ghiberti? Conrad had gotten to name him today, although he'd been so out of it when he first woke up that the memory was a little fuzzy. You had to remind yourself to greet the zombie, because if you didn't then he'd startle you halfway into the conversation and make you feel like a jerk.

"Just…" Conrad paused, searching for something that wouldn't spark off an endless waterfall of inquiries, "…dosing up on a metaphorical anti-claustrophobia pill. How far are we going this time?"

Hanna grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him back towards the RV, and Conrad had given up on trying to stop him from doing that years ago. There was very little you could do when Hanna felt like being chummy with you. He'd sort of gotten used to it, despite his best efforts to the contrary.

"Not too far," Hanna replied, excited. "Actually, just a little way north probably! Sorry it took us so long, but I had trouble finding a still spot and then Czernobóg did his Batman entrance thing about halfway through my briefing and he had all this stuff to add and it was like, really? You didn't even wait for the Czern-ster to come back before you started filling me in?"

Hanna was pulling Conrad up inside the camper before he could begin to protest, bright smile and wild gestures with his free hand to compensate for the other one immobile around Conrad's wrist.

"But this is going to be so cool," Hanna went on, finally letting go about the same time he spotted the can of spinach he'd left half opened on the counter when he left. "They want us to track down this—wow, spinach is still the grossest thing ever, I don't care how hungry I am—this vampire somebody sighted down in upstate New York. Left a whole messy trail of empty corpses on Lady Cunegonde's territory and woo, you know how the landed vampires get about their property rights."

"They want us to capture their criminal?" Conrad paraphrased, distinctly unenthused. "Don't they have their own… shouldn't Cunegonde be tracking them down herself? We're not hardly qualified."

"We did it once before," Hanna pointed out, slurping up canned greenery fast enough to make you nauseous. "And a little daring chase will be great. Right Worth? The real old school bounty hunter shit?"

Worth looked up for approximately one second, just long enough to roll his eyes at Hanna, and then he was out of the conversation before you could say disingenuous asshole.

Hanna kept talking, but Conrad tuned him out.

They had a fair drive ahead of them.

It ended up taking more than an hour for Hanna to get back, but they were off again just about the moment he stepped onto the threshold, dragging a sulky Conrad behind him, informing anyone within earshot that they were off to do some old school bounty hunter shit. Blah blah blah, Worth wasn't paying attention. He had other things on his mind.

So the night flashed by hour by hour, and the moon crept up in the rear view mirror, and the RV trundling down the interstate rumbled with stomachs as well as tired mechanical bits. Hanna was in the back, reading side by side with his undead BFF, and Conrad was up front steering them through the usual maze of tree blockades and washed out roads. Worth had fallen into silence a long time before, in the first hour of driving, with his feet up on the dashboard, sorting through the CD case for something that would piss off Conrad for later on in the night. It was a quiet more than a silence, an absence of sound rather than the hard nothingness you got elsewhere, the kind that Hanna calls family quiet time, although Worth wouldn't really know about that with the family he'd had. Occasionally he wondered about his sister. He'd be better off if he didn't.

They took a turn onto a smaller road, the kind that usually left off with a dead end, but Worth didn't bother to comment on it. Connie had the map out, and in spite of all reasonable logic he hadn't gotten them irreversibly lost yet in three years.

About five miles down that dubious trail, their undead chauffer pulled them over aside the clearly abandoned husk of a massive trailer, covered in moonlit vines and peeling paint. The headlights went out, and Conrad threw his door open.

"What, somebody throw up the bat symbol? Ya runnin' off to yer secret double life already?"

Conrad slammed the door, and a few seconds later Worth got a face full of yellow light as the vampire yanked open the passenger side.

"Just so you know," he announced, "I'm going to look for water. Hanna said we were low a couple hours ago and I think I saw a river on the map, so if you'll just stay put for ten minutes I'll see about refilling the supply and everybody with a working set of organs will be happy again. Unless you want to do it."

"An' deprive ya of one of those few, shinin' opportunities ya get ter be useful? Wouldn' dream of it."

Conrad rolled his eyes. "Yeah. Not even gonna mess with that. Just keep an eye open, okay? I don't want to come back to find this thing hauled away by some rogue Amish gang."

"Sweetcakes, if a band'a rogue Amish gangbangers come rollin' up to this vehicle, ya can bet they won't be after the car."

"Maybe that's why they're rogue, douchewaffle."

Worth cocked a brow. "Douchewaffle? Is that one new?"

"Yeah, I picked it up at Insults 4 Less. I hope you like it; I got it just for you."

"Ya shouldn'tve."

"I'm generous like that."

And then Conrad closed the door in the doctor's face. Worth blinked at the glass and the new smudge from the end of his nose, and figured he might as well check on Hanna. Various bits and pieces clicked and snapped as he got up—Christ, but he was getting older every day, wasn't he—and he did a couple stupid looking stretches while he could get away with it. Some concessions to health had to be made if you wanted to keep barreling into the kinds of situations they always ended up barreling into, and he'd be damned if he got ditched in the middle of a raid because he threw out his back like somebody's goddamn grandfather.

With one final pop, he made his way out of the cockpit and into the den. Hanna looked up as he pushed through, the dark semi-circles that had loomed under his eyes for the last couple weeks finally lightened to a faint smudge.

"Hey," he said, "where's Connie off to?"

"I 'unno, he gave me some bullshit abou' toppin' off the water jugs. Maybe he's searchin' fer a copy of Cosmo in the house up there."

"Oh." The redhead turned back down to his book. "I hope he does find water, we could kinda use it."

"Hey." Worth paused with a hand on the table. "Ya think he sneaks off ta squeeze the weasel?"

Hanna scrunched up his nose. "Uh, no idea. That's reaaaaally not something I'm interested in finding out. Ask him if you want."

"I mean, can vamps even pull that off?"

"See, I would never think to ask that question?" Hanna replied. "And you think you're subtle."

Worth reached over the table and batted the novel out of Hanna's hands. "I'll show ya subtle, eh?"

While the younger man was muttering and flipping pages, the Doc sailed off towards his destination while avoiding the mass of scavenged books spilling across the floor. It was like living in a nutshell, or a roach motel maybe. Honestly, he couldn't blame Conniekins for ditching the wheel—they weren't headed anywhere on a deadline, as far as he knew, and the car was too stuffed with salvage from Philadelphia for breathing.

Worth settled in on the bed in the back room and stared at the ceiling for a while. The possibility that Conrad actually was out there in the woods jacking off kind of dulled his impulse to get out of the RV himself. As funny as that would be, there was always the possibility Conrad might tear off something that couldn't be reattached. Minutes blurred together in an unmeasured trickle, and Worth figured at some point after the fourth blast of random laughter from Hanna in the kitchen that whatever Conrad was doing, he ought to be done with it by now. Time to go round him up.

The doctor pushed his way out the side door and into the summer night, boots kicking up dust on the dry road. Now, if he were a blushing lady of the court, where would he wander off to in an unfamiliar forest in the middle of the night?

Huh, kind of thought himself into a paradox right there.

Alright, so if he were an irritable fag avoiding his own benevolent and completely tolerable company, where would he go?

Ah.

Worth grabbed a spare jug from under the camper and went looking for the river. Figure Connie wouldn't want to come back empty handed after throwing such a hissy fit about his motives, and chances were he'd gotten lost looking for a water source of some kind. It took a while, but eventually he did stumble on a spring tributary running into whatever river was around there, and set about looking for footprints in the mud for lack of clues. No luck. He could do with a bit of rain about then, or rather, he could have done with some rain here a couple hours before. The banks were pristine and bone-dry.

"Oi," he called, "Meriwether Louis, ya down this way?"

The inky water bounced his sound away on the empty channel, and brought back no reply. Worth shoved his hands in his pockets. Nothing for it but to keep walking. He was a little wary of leaving Conrad for too long near running water—it had a nasty habit of leaving the undead man dizzy and disoriented. When they crossed long bridges in the RV, Conrad usually locked his elbows so they wouldn't swerve into a wall. Sometimes he had the Zombie take over for a couple minutes.

"Connie!" he called again, further down the bank, "Conrad Achenleck, ya stubborn idiot, didja fall in already?"

Nothing.

Christ, if he had to go swimming in after that dumbass corpse he was going to be one seriously pissed off camper.

The banks were steep as Jesus-fuck, and these little flashes of potential events were scrabbling for attention at the back of his head. Somewhere along the way—with the nagging feeling he was going to have a hard time finding his way back, too—he stopped and filled up the spare jug at the edge of a bend. A mass of stars glittered up at him like bubbles in black champagne, scattering when he dunked in the plastic container. There was something white floating not too far—

Oh, of course. For fuck's sake.

It was their other gallon jug, and he knew that because he could see the top of the sharpie inscription reading "if found return to Hanna F Cross in the big RV with the Zombie in it". Well, at least he knew Conrad was somewhere around here, and at least he couldn't drown. Couldn't get himself out, but couldn't drown, so.

He rolled his eyes and began a preliminary search. "Gonna hafta start callin' ya Ariel, ain't I Princess?" he asked the air.

The banks were empty—that was too much to hope for, he decided—and there were no cross-eyed spooks stranded in the forest, so that left one option. Probably could have saved himself time if he'd just done this first like he'd figured he was going to have to anyways. Swearing, Worth shucked his shirt and his undershirt and his boots, and his pants too for good measure. Ought to just pull off the boxers too, serve Lady Achenleck right to get his ass saved by a naked bloke. He didn't though, mostly because the water was spring water and thusly cold as icy fuck.

Doc Worth went stomping in.

An indeterminable amount of time later, despite finally giving in to diving under the surface, Worth had found absolutely nothing. Not an inch of pallid skin, not a corner of floating fabric. The current couldn't have taken Conrad much further along than the jug he'd dropped, and still facts were facts. There was no Conrad.

Worth swore again, this time louder and with a lot more spit. He pulled his shirt on haphazardly and threw the rest of it over an arm, ignoring the rocks and roots that punched up at the soles of his feet on the way back to home base. They were going to have to do the search party thing now, and he was aggravated to high hell already.

Wasn't it usually Hanna who started trouble? One thing you'd always been able to say about Conrad, he never caused trouble. Reported it sometimes, always managed to get involved one way or another, but never started it.

Worth pounded on the RV door. Water was dripping down his neck and it was dripping right over his newly irritated nerves too.

"Whoa," Hanna said, as he popped the door open, "what happened to you?"

The doctor shoved his dry clothes into Hanna's arms and pushed his way inside. "The Lady'a th' Lake fell into a puddle an' drowned himself. I can't find the useless twat anywhere, an' as ya can see by the ocean I'm sheddin' here, when I say anywhere I mean anywhere."

Hanna looked down at the denim and cotton wad he was now holding. "You jumped in the river? Wait, you couldn't find him?"

"Just said that; ya gone deaf on me?"

The zombie caught Worth's arm as he passed by the table, green fingers curling a gentle but firm grip around his damp wrist. Grudgingly, he paused and looked down.

"Doctor," the undead man said, "this is a bit more serious than you seem to think. You clearly weren't paying attention when we were filling in Conrad earlier tonight, but the rogue we're supposed to be hunting down tomorrow is a feral vampire. We don't know where it's hiding right now, but the last sighting was in the Staten Island refugee camp. Considering how territorial even our allies are…"

"Vampires," Hanna moaned, in the background, "you lift up a rock and they come scuttling out."

The doctor yanked his hand back. "You tellin' me ya let Conrad, can't-tell-my-own-dick-from-a-doorknob woe-is-me-I-broke-a-nail Con-fuckin-rad go off inta the forest by hisself when ya knew there was a loose cannon pinballin' around out there waitin' ter go off?"

The magician threw his hands up. "Hey, in the area means anything from the Vermont border to Jersey. Our guy could be anywhere in New England at this point! I'm not saying it's even a likely thing, I mean Conrad probably just got stuck on the other side of the river. But we should, you know, go look for him now. Cause I've seen a territory battle before and woo it ain't pretty. They always go for the eyes first. Then the heart, like slooosh, you know why they have those wicked looking fingers when they go all one-winged angel transformation sequence? It's for poppin' a hole through—"

"Hanna," the zombie interrupted, firmly setting down his book. "Please. You'll only make Worth more… irritable."

"Irritable?" Worth growled. "Who's irritable? I'm just as cheery as a fuckin' cherub over here, bloody well thrilled ter get a chance at playin' seamstress with Connie's corpse. I'm already diggin' out the eyepatches an' peglegs."

"It's probably nothing," Hanna insisted, hands out, with that awkward smile he always plastered on when he wasn't sure he believed himself. "I mean, the odds of stumbling across them in exactly the same place we just happened to pull over, the one time that Conrad went out alone have gotta be…"

"A million to one?" the undead man suggested.

"Oh," the doctor replied. "Well in that case, we better buy ourselves a fuckin' urn."

About six miles west of the burnt-out remains of Hudston Town, Conrad bid his passenger a snippy farewell and grabbed the water jug from underneath the camper. Technically, it was a milk carton hastily relabeled by Hanna a year or two before, but it hadn't held any actual milk since the first week of its existence. Conrad snatched it up and started over the hill.

One of the upsides of vampirism—well, upsides for everyone else, not really much use to him personally now—was that you could always find water. First of all, water had a smell. And second of all, failing at that, running water always felt a bit like a splash of vertigo in the very edge of your peripheral vision. Or at least, it would be like that if vertigo was something you could see.

Conrad followed the tick of dizziness down to the river.

There was an odd sort of trick to doing this, and it involved a lot of steady, unnecessary breaths, some kneeling, and a load of cursing. He wouldn't even be here doing this if he didn't desperately need to get out of that seat and away from Worth and his weird silence.

They'd been driving for hours, and he'd hardly said a word.

That wasn't terribly unusual on its own, but—it was almost like he was sulking or something, and Conrad might have said it was about that absolute dick move he'd pulled earlier in the evening, except that Worth by nature flung around his dickery like a kid throwing balls through neighbors' windows. Once they left his hands, he lost all interest in them.

The undead man grit his teeth, both from irritation and dizziness. The water was about a foot away, and it was sucking at him like a vacuum. He pressed on with due care.

So. Worth couldn't be sulking about that, because everyone knew the only thing he ever got invested in was Hanna's continued existence, and even that came grudgingly. Which also kind of pissed Conrad off. He wished Worth would get mad about him not playing along with whatever twisted game he thought up today. It would be nice to see him irritated with Conrad, for once. Wouldn't it be nice if Conrad wasn't the only one around here tired of getting fucked with?

Conrad thrust the jug into the stream with a hell of a lot more force than necessary, lost his balance, and promptly fell in.

Fuck.

Well, the bank was just right there, he'd…

Wait. Which bank was it?

Maybe if he just stood up—

Oh. Or maybe not. Yes, not going to attempt that again.

Scrabbling, the former artist managed to get his fingers around a rock in the middle of the stream—thank god he was a former artist and not a current one, and he'd long ago rendered his fingers chunky and inelegant on countless triggers and carburetors. After a long moment of desperate clutching he struck out with one foot, nearly losing his shoe in the process, in search of the riverbed. It couldn't be—yes, just a little deeper than shoulder-high here, he should be able to wade up out of it.

Of course… that would require letting go…

...Worth was going to absolutely murder him.

Conrad tried to let go. He really did. It was only that, when his grip started to loosen, the current came along and tried to spin him like a top and he just couldn't do it. Dizziness crushed him and instinct kicked in. God, he was an idiot. He was going to get lost in a fucking tributary and wash out into the ocean and get eaten by a shark all because he was irritated at Worth for being a callous git, which was nothing fucking new at all.

The gallon jug floated merrily past his head and yes, vampirism was officially the worst thing in the world. God this was more embarrassing than the time he'd turned into a bat in the middle of a dinner party. Hopefully they'd find him soon, before total incoherence set in…

Nope, too late for that.

It is, for the record, very strange to drown without suffocating. That was the next-to-the-last last thing Conrad thought, before the world faded into a bizarre swirl of blue and white and rushing, snatching water.

The very last thing was, I wonder if they'll ever let me leave the RV again?

The zombie stood ramrod straight on the bank of the creek, as absolutely still as a tree stump. Now a human, a human would at least tilt a little with their feet that close together. That was the thing about him—even if you took away the glowing eyes and the stitches, and the inexplicable green color, he still set off just about every button in the depths of a human brain that fired up the not-like-us sirens. They'd actually done it before, about a year ago, made him look human for a while. Story for another day. If anything, he'd made people more nervous, not less. Lucky thing it wore off, probably.

In any case, at the moment he was standing on the bank and Doc Worth was really irritated by his absolute lack of movement.

"Think ya might want ter help any time soon?" the doctor demanded, tossing a chunk of cement off a larger pile of rubble. "Not that ya don' make a fine flag pole as it is, but without a flag it ain't doin' us much good, issit?"

"I'm sorry," the dead man replied, glancing briefly downwards. The sand at his feet took on a faint orange tint. "I don't think that I'll be of much use after all."

Worth straightened up his spine and gave the revenant a battery-acid glare. "Yeah? An' why not?"

"This hill is… very steep. To be completely honest, I'm suffering an unexpected form of paralysis brought on by the knowledge that I might lose my balance and fall in."

"Lay off him, Worth," Hanna called from across the river. "You know he's afraid of water. Have a heart, kay?"

The zombie looked down again. Worth glanced back and forth between him and the river, suddenly feeling a little bit like he might stop talking for now. Forgot about all that, actually.

"Bet if the ginger moron fell in you'd be flyin' down that hill about now," he muttered, teeth grinding the syllables a bit. And then he went back to searching the sand for some kind of clue.

All together, they found four discarded bras in various states of decomposition, two tires, and a stainless steel pocket knife that looked like it hadn't been out there too long. By the end of it, Worth sat on the bank flipping the knife open and closed as Hanna patiently coaxed his unusually timid partner up the hill with all the diabetes-inducing gentleness of a horse trainer from one of those award-bait movies where the main character literally has no human friends. God damn, he hated those movies. Ought to suggest they buy Tall Green and Nameless a saddle next time they were in town, the way they carried on.

And Worth sat there, flipping his knife, trying not to crawl out of his own skin.

"Okay!" Hanna called down the hill, "so this was kind of a bust! The good news is, there's definitely no sign of a fight and I'm not seeing any, uh, well you know. So he's out there somewhere."

The older man glared up at the pale face peeking over the top of the bank. "Well then, what're we gonna do about it? Cause at th' moment, I'm just sittin' here with my thumbs in my ass waitin' fer ya ter talk the pony down from crazy land."

Hanna's square face blinked at him. "Pony?"

Worth tossed the compacted version of his new pocket knife at the magician's head. "Ferget it."

"Ow, what'd you do that for? Uh, hey this thing is new. And it's got some other guy's initials engraved on it. You steal this? Dude, you know I hate the stealing thing."

"Didn' steal it," Worth bit out. "Found it stuck in the sand over there."

"…And… you didn't think that was relevant?"

The doctor looked up immediately, narrow gaze crashing into Hanna's. His thoughts did leap frogs over each other, racing towards the inevitable conclusion. "Humans?"

"Could be," the redhead replied, tossing the knife back down. "You know how he gets around rivers. It wouldn't be impossible for them."

"Th' fuck would humans want with Count Fagula if it wasn' ter stake 'im?"

"Heck if I know. But I haven't found any ashes and neither have you and it doesn't look like Connie is anywhere along this river, so when you've eliminated the impossible what remains must be the truth, right?"

"God bugger the day yer parents letcha read Sherlock Holmes."

"Um, ew? I think?"

Doc Worth stood, bare feet sinking into the thin, dry layer of sand. His muscles were itching to move. "Awright, so we track down whoever dropped that thing an' shake some answers out of 'em."

"Yeah, okay. Let me get some stuff, we can do a rune track. You know, I'm starting to see the positive side to human kidnappers. At least you can out-magic them."

The older man didn't bother to reply. An owl hooted just over their heads, and he had a sinking feeling that it wasn't going to be anywhere near that easy.

On resuming some semblance of consciousness, Conrad found himself—not for the first time, unfortunately—in a strange place surrounded by strangers with a profound aching in his head. It was a semblance of consciousness, of course, because the tug of rushing water had its claws in him still, trying to pull him back under like a grindilow, and, oh no, that was one of those things that didn't actually exist, wasn't it? And Hanna had laughed at him when he'd mentioned it, because silly Conrad, that's just Harry Potter, don't take everything you read so seriously.

Speaking of Hanna…

The first thing Conrad did upon becoming self-aware again was to search unsteadily with his dull and somewhat-cross eyed vision for a spot of worried looking scarlet. He hoped they hadn't had to look for him for too long. It was still night, at least, which besides meaning that he was still alive(ish) also meant that they couldn't have been searching for too god-awful long. Actually, judging from the moon, it couldn't have been more than a couple hours, at most, and maybe Worth would only make fun of him for a day or two… oh who was he kidding, he was totally—

Wait. Who was this guy?

"—dunno," the unfamiliar face was saying, "maybe we better just leave him?"

"Maybe he's just a corpse? I mean, I've seen a headless snake attack a shovel. Maybe the eyelids just got a burst of… neural something-or-other?"

"Jimmy, his goddamn eyes are moving. You work for a dead person, try not to be a complete pinhead."

"Hey, fuck you, my cousin in law is a pinhead. I find that offensive."

And Conrad just… stared. Who the hell were these people, and why were they standing over him, and where were Hanna and the doctor and the zombie? Couldn't they pull him onto the shore? There was wood under his back and he dimly reasoned he must be in a boat, but a boat was still on the water. The shore would be much better.

"Look," a third voice cut in, "he looks like another vampire to me. See the red eyes? I'd say… well, he looks kinda starved, doesn't he? Like he doesn't feed too often. Real pale. I figure this guy lost a fight somewhere up the crick."

Contemplative silence, and Conrad tried to get his muscles working. This was bad, this was very bad. There were about a million different ways this could play out, and none of them involved him living to see the morning as it stood. He knew; he'd been here before.

"Should we drop him back in?"

"We could just kill him? Wouldn't be hard."

"No, guys, you don't get it. Ms. Léglise is gonna want to see him herself. I dunno, they all know each other, vampires. They might be friends. Or relatives. Or maybe she'll want to kill him herself."

"That's so racist."

"Shut up, Jimmy."

Terror bubbled up in the bottom of Conrad's brainstem, hot and thin and working against gravity. It was hard to be afraid and half asleep at the same time—to be tranquilized and panicked all at once—but hell if he wasn't trying his bloody damnedest.

"Let's just take him with us—Jeremiah's right, Ms. Léglise will have her own ideas about what to do with him. Look, we'll stop by your dad's house and pick up some chain. No problem."

"What happens when we get off the water?"

The one named Jeremiah looked down at Conrad, eyes glinting white with starlight bouncing off the river. His whole shape was a fuzz of white and black and cold, calculating narrowness. Conrad realized, belatedly, that the world was blurred because his glasses had slipped almost off the end of his nose.

"Well," Jeremiah replied, slowly, "I can back the truck down to the dock…he looks about the same size as the toolbox, if we pull out the shotgun."

The groan that came out of Conrad's mouth was something that, probably, would not have been out of place in a documentary film about slaughterhouses. Even with the coherency of a concussed five-year-old, Conrad knew that nothing good had ever come from the mention of a toolbox.

The next hour or two of his life would not be something he particularly liked to dwell on.

Even in the sunlight, Hanna's palms glowed the same magenta as the neon sign of a strip club Doc Worth had once frequented, a long time ago. It brought back memories, most of them good.

The man Hanna was attempting to wring information out of didn't seem to be reacting to the glow quite as amicably, because the nervous twitch downward in his gaze was actually preventing him from formulating sentences. Worth kicked his feet up on the porch swing, pouring over the details of the property as Farmer Brown attempted to spit up a coherent phrase. A clothesline fluttered in the breeze, the mass herd of milk cows was doing an annoyingly good job of blocking his appraisal, the bright midday sun left shadows under every tree in the field, and where the river ran through the faded green some hundreds of yards away there was the new wreckage of a small boat.

"Listen, sir," Hanna was saying, still maintaining his patience by some miracle, "we just want to know if they came through here. We're not stopping by, and we're not gonna blow up your house or anything. I promise. Just, which way did they go?"

The farmer stuttered.

Worth gave up and pulled the bill of his stolen hat down over his eyes. "Mebbe we oughter burn it down after all. See how tongue-tied 'e feels about it then."

Hanna scowled at him. "Don't joke about that. He's freaked out enough as it is, and I'm not gonna have a heart attack on my hands if I can help it."

"Says I was jokin'?" the doctor mumbled, mostly just to get the last word in.

Weariness was seeping into his bones along with the northern summer air, and there was a part of him that wanted to just lean his head back and sleep for a while. He was shot on stale adrenaline and frayed nerves, and tired of tramping up and down the blasted river looking for twelve-hour-old clues.

But that was just one part, and the rest of him was as hellbent as ever to be out of this chair and doing something.

Hanna took a step back, across the grayed wooden slats of the porch and into the shadow of his undead babysitter. "Okay," the magician sighed, his hands finding pockets. "It's alright, we'll leave you alone. Sorry for the bother."

The magician stumbled down the steps in a rag-dollish sort of jarring motion, fatigue painfully obvious, with the dead man close on his heels and a hand on his shoulder. Worth extricated himself from the chair and waltzed past the petrified farmer after them, sparing a nasty glare for the useless sack as he passed.

"I have to wonder what he was so afraid of," the zombie mused, as they circled the house. "A normal man isn't stunned to speechlessness by a little dayglow skin."

"Post traumatic stress?" Hanna offered, thoughtful. "Maybe?"

"I've never studied psychology," Greeny admitted. "I wouldn't know the symptoms."

There might have been more speculation, except that at that moment Doc Worth spied a miniature face blinking up at them from the bush under the western window. He elbowed Hanna in the ribs.

"Ow, dude, what?"

The doctor jerked a thumb over at the shadow with the pair of wide, blinking eyes. "Looks like Farmer Brown ain't holed up in here alone."

The immediate lighting up—as a ten thousand gigawatt smile flips on—across all of Hanna's features had Worth rolling his eyes. Figures somebody has to like kids, and Hanna was about one party hat away from being a five year old himself. It bears considering, too, that they still need a tip and if there's one thing Hanna can do it's communicate. With everything that doesn't have tits.

"Hey, um," Hanna paused, "little boy?"

The kid made a face like a particularly grotesque latex Halloween mask. "I'm a girl."

Hanna winced, and Worth pinched the bridge of his nose. Right. Never mind tits, apparently anything female was a lost cause. He should have guessed as much.

"Right," the magician replied, palming the back of his neck. "Sorry, you're kinda in the dark and your hair is really short and… uh, sorry. We were just wondering if you could help us out maybe?"

The girl sniffed, stuffing tiny hands into her overalls. "I don't talk to strangers. Go talk to my dad."

The three of them shared a look. "Well, we tried that," Hanna admitted, uncomfortably, "but he couldn't really help us, yanno? And maybe you can't either, but maybe you can. It'll just take a second."

After a short pause in which Hanna looked hopeful and the dead guy looked stoic and Worth looked suspiciously at the shadowy enclave underneath the foundations of the house, the kid let out a massively put-upon sigh and sat down in the dust and the grass.

"Okay," she said, "but I'm supposed to be weeding the garden right now."

"Excellent!" the redheaded man cried, flopping down into the dirt beside her immediately. "Kay so, we're trying to find our friend who totally disappeared into like thin air last night, and the only clue we've got is this knife that Worth picked up—this is Doc Worth by the way, yeah, I know, he doesn't smile much. Unless other people are miserable. Anyhow!"

Hanna threw up a hand and the dead man obligingly slipped the pocket knife into his still-glowing palm.

"The thing is," the magician went on, flipping open the knife for inspection, "whoever it belongs to has some sort of scrambler spell on them. It keeps pushing us off course every time we get close, like it's leading us down side streets in the hopes we'll get lost and give up. It's not particularly sophisticated, I'd explain but I figure you're, oh, ten? Nine? And you probably don't care. I will if you want me to, though! No? Okay. The point is, knife's owner was here at some point, but not recently. Maybe a couple weeks ago? So—"

"It's my brother's."

Hanna blinked at her, mouth open in mid-word. "Really?" he asked. "That's… does your brother live here?"

"Yeah," the girl answered—and then paused. She directed a contemplative stare at an ant crawling past her leg. "Well, nobody's seen him in, like, a week or something. Delany says he ditched us, 'cause he's been talking about going south to Staten Island. He's a teenager you know," she informed them seriously. "They do that kinda stuff."

"Anythin' we know about in Staten?" Worth mused, still hanging back. "Delicatessen black market? Zoo? Hostage trade? …Prozzy ring?"

Hanna shot an annoyed look over his shoulder. "Those are all stupid and you know it. Besides, who the heck would sell Conrad to a prostitution ring? They'd all get their unmentionables bitten off." He turned back to the kid. "So, your brother left a week ago. Okay. Did he say anything to you before he left?"

"No."

"Seriously? Nothing?"

"Nope."

Hanna's head clunked into his folded knees. "Damn. I guess the trail goes cold here. At least we know we're in the right area… maybe we go on to Staten after all. Thanks for the help, uh, what's your name?"

"Max." The kid looked at Hanna, all black circles and frizzy, disheveled curls and seeping disappointment. And she bit her lip. "Hey, you're leaving right?"

Hanna looked up, vaguely. "Oh yeah," he replied, "we'll be out of your hair as soon as I can get my legs working. I've been walking all morning and I'm kinda tired."

"No," she pushed, "I mean, when you leave, you're gonna go away immediately? You're not gonna talk to my dad?"

"…No? I mean, no. Wasn't planning on it."

"Okay. Well, this is pretty much top secret," she informed them, eyeing the window above her nervously, "but as long as you're leaving I think it's safe to tell you. The day Jimmy left, a bunch of his friends came over. Like, all of them. They didn't say anything to me—they never do—but his friends were saying that his girlfriend wanted him and he had to go. I didn't even know he had a girlfriend until a couple nights before that and he never talks about her, I don't think anybody knew. So Jimmy was gonna go, but Dad said he had to stay and then they all got into this fight with Dad and… I don't know what happened because I was in my room, but whatever it was it totally freaked my dad out. I came out after they left and he was all quiet and stare-y."

Running a hand through the thin grass, Hanna considered that for a moment. "Do you know anything about this girlfriend?"

The kid bit her lip. "I followed him out to the river and he was meeting with her. I wasn't supposed to—I'm not supposed to leave the house, but I really wanted to know. And his girlfriend was… she was really pretty, kinda short, but I think she was a witch."

Hanna frowned, surprised. "A witch? Really?"

The kid shrugged. "She did this glowy thing… like that, like your hand. Kinda. And she made my skin crawl. And she did this poof thing and then she was gone, like the wicked witch of the west."

Looking up at the zombie looming over him, the magician murmured, "maybe a sorceress, can't be a rune-mage or I'd feel it in the second we stepped into the area, and witches don't have poofing powers. What do you think?"

Whatshisface contemplated the question for a moment. "Do we even genuinely know that it's female?"

The girl screwed up her face. "My brother doesn't kiss boys."

Hanna glanced back at her and shrugged. "I'll take that for now. The real question is, what does a sorceress want with Conrad? Could be a live sacrifice thing, I've heard some rumors, but the whole thing is just kinda weirdly opportunistic—I mean, nobody noticed anyone tailing us and we just left official Council territory and you know how hard it is to get hostile parties onto neutral land…"

"Unless it really is a vamp," Worth noted. "Could'a been doin' a batman with the poofing."

"Vampires can't do magic," Hanna replied, patting down his pockets for something. "They're basically animated by nothing but magic and bad attitude. If you tried to get a vampire to cast a spell they'd just short out like a blown fuse. Same reason you can't track them with magic. It's like shining a flashlight into a funhouse full of mirrors."

"Um," the girl said, "can I go now?"

The three men glanced down at her.

"Oh, yeah," Hanna replied, flashing one of his brilliantly grateful smiles. "Just one last thing. Was there somewhere you brother and his friends used to hang out? Boy's club of some kind?"

"No."

"Somewhere he used to stay a lot?"

Max tapped the ground, raising tiny clouds of dust. "They all used to go out to Jeremiah's house whenever Daniel got in a fight with his dad. Jeremiah's parents both died during the 'demic and they've got this huge house in Arkham."

"An hour from here," the zombie filled in, without prompting. "If we take the interstate we could cut that down by half, but…"

"Bandits," Hanna agreed. "Right. Well, thank you so much Max, you've been a whole mess of help and if there's ever anything you need help with… maybe a pesky ghost, or a local skirmish even…"

Hanna fished a coin out of his pocket, a silver dollar with a hole punched through the center. It glittered in the sunlight, a faint blue sheen glimmering oddly around the ridges.

"Take this, and we'll find you. It's got a wish upon a star charm on it. If you need us, we'll be there."

The girl blinked at him, dusty freckles and nervous fidget, and then she nabbed the coin and scurried off under the bushes, headed god only knew where. Kids usually had something in mind when they dashed off like that.

"Since when've ya got those?" Worth demanded, extracting a toothpick from the tiktak case he'd shoved full of them. "Fancy bit of magic ta be passin' around like a cold."

Hanna stood up, joints popping loudly. "I thought it would be nice if we could be where people need us when they needed us. Rush to the rescue and stuff, like proper heroes."

"Sure, sure," Worth muttered. "Make us the fuckin' A-Team, why doncha."

But Hanna was already halfway off the property line, racing through grass knee high and yellow in the sun—in khaki shorts and a bright orange t-shirt, he looked for all the world like man-shaped forest fire rushing over the field. Worth shared a look with the dead man beside him.

"Come on Doc," the redhead shouted, "Ludwig, you too! We got a mansion to investigate!"

Worth rolled his eyes and called back, "Comin' officer, don't get yer pannies in a twist!"

Louisiana

Two years after the Fallout:

It was September then, officially, and the air was thick with the stale heat of dying August. The feeling of it buzzed on the edge of his consciousness, dragging him back to battered memories of pulling on his uniform for another year of school, all obnoxiously thick cotton and starched ties.

Doc Worth stabbed a needle into a sunburnt arm, flicking quick stitches through the skin in a few ruthlessly efficient movements. Sweat was pooling around the creases of his eyes and running through the bloody gash over Hanna's triceps, making every little sensation feel inappropriately moist.

"What am I?" the doctor grumbled, "Yer goddamn wetnurse? Ya need a teat ter suckle next?"

"Ew," Hanna replied, preoccupied with the strawman fetish he was clutching in his left hand. "And you can stop complaining now, seriously. This one wasn't even my fault."

Worth muttered something about fucking voodoo and swamp vermin and various mothers, but he could tell that Hanna wasn't paying attention. Took some of the fun out of complaining. In revenge, he yanked on his last stitch just short of hard enough to rip the whole thing out.

"OW!"

Tying off the end bit, Worth offered a toothy smile. "Next time, ya might think twice about rushin' in alone. Jesus kid, five minutes waitin' fer backup will not kill ya."

"Like you could know."

"Well, not waitin' nearly did kill ya."

Worth glanced over his shoulder at the black mass huddled under a knot of cypress trees, quietly steaming in the morning sunlight, and felt the length of his lips turning to a hard, thin line. They needed to get Conrad somewhere out of the light, somewhere that his now tiny form could be stashed away until the sun punched its clock for the day.

"Nearly got the furfag killed too," he pointed out, teeth skinning each other on the consonants. "Then I'd hafta bury the both'a you dumbasses, an' you'll end up sharin' a grave till kingdom come 'cause I got better things ta do than dig a couple holes in the dirt."

Hanna looked guilty for about a fourth of a second, and then he grinned like an even bigger idiot than he really was. "Yeah, and then you'd spend the rest of your life sniffling like an old widow 'cause you were always a dick to us and you never told us how much you loooove us."

"Fat fuckin' chance. I'll be retirin' ter someplace in Virginia. Any luck, governor's daughter's still got the hots fer me."

"Oh, you'll miss us. I guarantee it."

Worth raised one eyebrow and kicked the log Hanna was sitting on out from under him. "Well, the way I figure it don't much matter, since I'm goin' long before you two."

"Jeeze Worth, you're not that old. You're like… thirty something. Thirty-eight?"

The older man started stuffing things into his bag, pointedly not looking up.

"I'm goin' first," he said, flicking the clasp, "'cause I called dibs at the start'a this shit, an' if any'a you so much as think about pullin' out ahead'a me…" He stood up. "We're gonna have ourselves one helluva a fight."

New York

Three Years after the Treaty:

Arkham was one of those dimly shadowed skeletons left in the wake of the plague's pale, crushing fingers. It was like any thousand of small towns across the continent whose dull eyed residents had watched on, boarding up window after window as the world crumbled on every side like a burnt-out sheet of paper. Too far away from the epicenter of the madness to riot, and too close to survive that first fell swoop.

They arrived in the town proper as thick clouds were gathering overhead, curling like a great grey fist across the sky. In the driver's seat, the Zombie lowered his eyes and offered to keep an eye on the car, and Hanna replied with some bubbling reassurance that Worth was decidedly not paying attention to. When they pulled over into an empty parking lot, Worth found himself hesitating in the doorway for no real reason he could name—there was a chill in the air, like the disappeared sun had reached down and pulled all its heat up behind the cloud cover, and the world had slipped into newspaper monochrome.

"Kinda grim," Hanna observed over the doctor's shoulder.

Worth stepped aside and pushed the younger man out onto the step. "All the more reason ter get our damsel found pronto."

"Okaaaay, I just gotta find a local real quick. I mean, unless you somehow know exactly where the mystery mansion is?"

Rolling tired eyes, Doc Worth disembarked and they started on their wandering. The empty-eyed candy store and the smashed grocery and the scorched Italian restaurant felt like eyes on his back, and when the summer rain came racing down the hill toward him he was almost grateful for the distraction. But mostly irritated and wet.

"Hey, do you hear that?"

Hanna was gesturing, brows furrowed, down a side street. Worth paused mid-step, and after a moment he thought he could hear it too, the echo of something besides rain bouncing down the line of walls. He nodded shortly, and two sets of boots went pounding down the concrete. The strand of sound led them down an alley and into an intersection at the edge of a neighborhood, where the paved city abruptly gave way to rogue greenery.

There was a crowd. Died dark with water and shaded under umbrellas, they milled like a shadow thrown across the asphalt around the pointed finger of a familiar looking shape.

Gallows.

A quick glanced sideways, and Worth could see that Hanna was struggling to stay calm, avoid jumping to conclusions. Probably best not to let the kid start things on that note.

"Oi," Doc Worth called, a hand cupped around his mouth, "You lot! Mind givin' my friend 'n me some directions?"

A score of gaunt faces peeled away from their previous occupation and leveled scorching glares at him.

Worth returned the glares with a couple raised brows. "Wot, ya don't know how ter treat a couple heavily armed strangers round here?"

"You don't look to heavily armed," someone said, a warning note in his voice.

"Two knives an' a derringer beg ta differ. Woulda brought the shotgun, but Hanna here thought it might not make the right kinda first impression."

There was a pause.

"Who's Hanna?" someone else asked.

Worth jerked a thumb in Hanna's general direction. "This kid."

The crowd digested that for a moment.

"But… Hanna isn't…"

The magician cut in— "Yeah, trust me, I know. Let's not go there. So, can one of you guys help us out for a minute? We just need directions to the big crazy mansion house on the edge of town."

Immediately, a ripple of suspicion raced through the crowd, so thick you could feel it in the air, like the fur down a cat's spine standing up straight. An older man pushed his way to the front of the mass, chewed up blue jeans and a dark green raincoat.

"What's your business in the West mansion?" the man demanded, in a voice graveled with a life of cigarettes.

Worth quietly stepped back. The trick to working with Hanna was to make it look like a good-cop-bad-cop scenario—that grimy blond is a loose cannon, but at least the redheaded guy is pretty reasonable, right?—and the really funny part was that it wasn't too far from the truth. Hanna was pitifully good cop.

"Our friend was kidnapped," Hanna told them, fingers knitting together in suppressed emotional turmoil. "The best we've got to work on is that one of his kidnappers likes to hang around in that house. Um, Jimmy, last name is Parker, friends with a Jeremiah whose parents owned the place?"

A collective easing broke the air, and various faces throughout the crowd started to turn and shift, and people at the edges took steps back, returning to their interrupted tasks. Raincoat's sallow face softened, and he broke away from the mass to approach them with splashing footsteps.

"Where are you from, then?" he asked. "You're sure not locals. Well, Mr. Hanna, you could be from further upstate. But your well-armed friend definitely isn't."

"This is Doc Worth," the redhead explained with a vague hand-wave. "He doesn't mean any harm. We… well, technically we're from California. But we haven't lived back home for nearly three years. Lately we're kinda from all over."

The look Raincoat gave them was verging on pity. "Name's Zadock. I'm sorry your friend got pulled into the bad doings 'round here. I wouldn't wish our troubles on anyone, even if some people might be grateful for the reprieve."

"Troubles?" Hanna repeated, thoughtful. "These troubles wouldn't have anything to do with that scaffold you're putting up, would it?"

Faint, distant thunder rumbled in the east, the first of the afternoon. Zadock nodded slowly.

"Executions are never the best way to deal with things," Hanna said, ridiculously earnest. "Mob justice is pretty, uh, not cool. No offence. But seriously. What's the trouble? Maybe we can help you with it, after we save our friend."

"I don't expect outsiders to understand," Zodock replied, expression hardening. "You don't know what it's like to live here—there isn't one person in this town who hasn't lost a friend to the shadows in the forests, who doesn't triple lock their doors at night to keep their children inside. It's been like this since our grandparents were children, and the time for cowering in our kitchens is over. Maybe you think we're crazy, but there's things out there—we know they're real. And the boys at the West mansion know more than any Christian body's meant to know."

"Okay, hold on," Hanna interrupted, hastily. "First of all, we definitely don't think you're crazy. You know anything about Salem? No? Well, I guess news doesn't circulate like it used to. But no, you're totally not crazy, things go bump all the time. Second of all, you're gonna lynch a couple of kids? Because I am so not standing for that, not today, not ever, okay? That will not be happening."

Oh, Jesus Christ. Worth quietly flicked off the safety on his gun. Fuck kind of diplomacy was that, Hanna?

"You're gonna tell us how to run our city, kid?"

"GoddamnitI'mtwentyfuckingseven and no, I'm not, but I am gonna tell you that you can't just string people up for living in a creepy mansion and having a lot of books! Jesus, man, what the hell?"

"You haven't seen what we've seen!"

"Yeah, I've never heard that one before! What was it this time, did they curdle milk when they walked by or did Goody Thompson see a whole naked bonfire party in the woods? Are you gonna blame them for the plague too? Because I gotta tell you, you're really scoring high on the witch hunting bigot scale so far!"

"I saw them take my daughter!"

Hanna paused, mouth open, finger jabbing at the green plastic of Zadock's raincoat. Warily, he closed his mouth and retracted his finger slightly.

"Literally?" he asked, eyes narrow behind his thick framed glasses. "Don't fuck with me now. Did you literally see these guys, faces and all, pick up your daughter and run away with her?"

Raincoat's steely expression more or less spoke for itself. "Yes," he answered, fists balled up into massive circles. "One full face. Two voices. There were three of them. They came into my house and blew up my living room and then they took my daughter away. Son, when you have kids you'll understand, and until that point you can shut your trap and get out of our way. I'm about to blaze a trail of hellfire up to that house, and God help them if they get between me and Melissa again."

Hanna shot a helpless look over his shoulder at Worth, thwarted desperation wringing the color out of his face. Worth just looked back—as far as he was concerned, this guy was walking in pretty black-and-white territory. Hanna wasn't getting any help from his quarter.

"Look," the redhead offered, "let us help. We've got a rescue too, let us try to get your daughter for you. Maybe nobody has to die, maybe we don't have the whole story here. Please, let us try?"

Zadock stared at the younger man for a long time, implacable and gray as the rain-thick air around them all. A hammer pounded, the sound almost lost under the rush of that rain. And then, he looked away.

"You have until tomorrow morning," he announced. His colorless fingers drew a dimestore rosary from the corners of his pocket, worrying the beads absently. "We probably won't get organized until this evening anyways, and you'd have to be a damn fool to attack at night. So you have until sunrise, and then the motherfuckers are fair game."

Hanna's hands shot out like lightening and wrapped around Zadock's empty one, squeezing so hard the veins popped.

"You won't regret this," he insisted, blue eyes wide and near manic.

"Yeah, yeah, we'll see. Come one, they can spare me for half an hour and there's no way I'm letting you two walk all the way up to the West mansion. You'll break an ankle on the driveway and then we'll all trip over you on our way up."

The local extricated his hand, and puddles of water sloshed out of the creases in his jacket. Slowly, Worth slid the safety back on. The single shot tucked away in there would live to see another day. He turned to Hanna, who was talking in that relieved mile-a-minute way that told you he'd been gearing up for a fight.

"Well we wouldn't really be walking but okay thank you so much, seriously, this weather sucks like I'm not even kidding and, hey, would you mind swinging by somewhere on the way? We've got a friend who needs to come with us."

Whoever Ms. Léglise was, she hadn't been home when they dragged Conrad through the door of a wicked looking mansion and down the steps into an absolutely horrific basement. He'd nearly escaped, while they were unlocking the basement door. Nearly. He'd come so close, he really thought he was going to make it out, trailing chain and all—

And then he found out that whoever Ms. Léglise was, she had been smart enough to prepare a small arsenal of weaponry in case of vampire attack. Naturally Conrad got to experience the full range first hand.

It was… unpleasant. Very.

The fact that they had used it all up by the time he was recaptured was very little consolation.

So Conrad slumped over in the darkness, and shuddered occasionally as the rips and blisters in his skin knitted themselves up with an unflinching businesslike efficiency. He'd had a donor in Salem the other night. There was always someone around Salem willing to part with a pint for various favors—bizarrely cosmopolitan, it was like one of those trader's towns in the early gothic period. Just the first hints of future cultural masterpieces. Maybe, if he lived long enough, he'd get to see what it turned into.

And that was what Conrad thought about, in the darkness. He certainly did not think about this Léglise woman, or about the metal stinging his wrists, or the distinct possibility that no one would ever find him here, because who would ever think to check the basement of a mansion two towns down the river? Or imagine that a vampire—even as green of a vampire as he was—would allow himself to be kidnapped by a few bumpkin teenagers? No, he definitely did not think about that, or the distinct possibility that he'd be spending the rest of his unlife trapped in a cellar until the iron rotted through his wrists or somebody staked him, one.

Nope.

The stone walls swirled with guttering yellow light and Conrad's meandering thoughts, until in some place far distantly removed from him, the sun rose and unconsciousness seeped in for the second time in hours.

The next thing Conrad knew, he was blinking himself blearily awake to the charming sound of someone beating a stone wall with an oversized dinner spoon. Well. It could have been anything actually; his glasses were god-knew-where and he was currently limited to an impressionist painter's rendering of the world around him.

"Hey," the intruder called out, shuffling closer. The features of his face blossomed into existence. "Hey, wake up."

Conrad contemplated just keeping his mouth shut. Maybe the little prick would go amuse himself somewhere else, and Conrad could go back to the blissfully stress-free emptiness of sleep. If he closed his eyes, would the boy be stupid enough to think he fell asleep again?

Something poked him in the chest. Well Conrad was positively on fire this evening—it really was a spoon.

"Do you want something?"

The teenager took the tiniest of shuffles backwards.

"Uh," he started. "Yeah. We—tell us who you are!"

Conrad did a quick lookover of the room. As far as he could see, it was just the two of them and the creepy green stones.

"Yes," the vampire snorted, "that's really intimidating. Look, I've had a pretty full day and if you don't have the decency to let me sleep in a more horizontal position, I'd at least appreciate some peace and quiet."

There was an awkward pause, in which the kid appeared to be regrouping. "This spoon is silver."

"Jimmy, isn't it?" Conrad guessed, squinting at the pale face in front of him. That was the first name he remembered. "Right, Jimmy. A word to the wise? Silver is for werewolves."

Jimmy seemed monumentally confused. "Well… I could still hit you in the face with it. That would hurt."

Conrad hung his head. God, this was embarrassing. If he ended up executed by these idiots, it was going to be the most piss poor excuse for a death imaginable.

"You hit me with a grenade a few hours ago," he sighed, "do you really think a spoon to the face is going to do much?"

Another awkward pause.

"You're not going to get anything useful out of me," Conrad went on, hoping Jimmy would get the picture and go the fuck away. "And you're not doing a very good job of intimidating me. Sky cells? Done it. Buried in a garden? Done it. The first few times were terrifying and all, but now it's just old."

"Are you sure? We've never had a real prisoner before," the boy admitted, "I mean, except for her. But she doesn't do much."

Her?

"Sorry to disappoint," Conrad replied, clearly not sorry. "Better luck with the next prisoner."

"I was kind of thinking you might be like… just wait till my friends get here, or you'll never get away with this or something."

"You've watched too many movies," Conrad noted, increasingly irritated. "And if I did have friends, I certainly wouldn't tell you they were coming for me, would I?"

"Well…"

"Listen, Jimmy," Conrad went on, taking reluctant pity on the guy. "I really don't think you know what you're getting into here. I've been around the block, unfortunately, and I can tell you that nothing good ever comes out of antagonizing the supernatural world. I've seen… more than enough bodies, including my own. You're not playing a game here. You're going to get yourself killed."

Conrad had seen well enough what happened when people stood between Doc Worth and something he was after. What happened to people who stood around too long in Hanna's general vicinity. If, somehow, his friends really were coming for him—which he didn't really believe, but just supposing—this kid was going to be quickly acquainted with the inside of a pine box. And failing at that, anyone who went around capturing waterlogged vampires willy-nilly wasn't looking at a terribly vigorous life expectancy.

Jimmy looked miffed. "I know what I'm doing! Ms. Léglise has precautions for us, in case—"

"Oh yes, and you're certainly not expendable to her. You're, what, fifteen? You'll just be a nightmare to replace."

"Sixteen!"

"All I'm saying is that you're poking around in hornet's nest and you're not going to like what happens when the hornets come out."

"Says you!"

"Is there somebody else you're having a conversation with?"

Jimmy turned around and stomped away towards the stairs, fading into a pale yellow and blue blur. "Just try saying that to Jeremiah," the boy muttered, so low Conrad might not have been able to make it out if he was human. "See what he's got to say to you."

Conrad glared at the blur as it stalked across the stones. Dim twit.

"I'm going to escape," he announced, suddenly, and the words came slicing out like lightening through his teeth. His lips skinned up of their own accord, flashing wickedly sharp canines. "And when I do, you're not going to like what happens."

The blur paused, for a moment, looked back. And then it faded into nothing.

Slowly, Conrad's lips slipped back down to curtain his teeth. The glare softened into nothing. He wasn't going to escape. Oh, he'd try. He would certainly try, damned if he'd just give up here. But in his bones, he couldn't believe that he'd succeed. When had he ever succeeded at anything? His life was a string of dismal failures held afloat by his own scrabbling nails and other people's good luck.

But somehow, in the moment that he'd spat out those words, he'd almost believed it was possible.

Some number of minutes ticked by. It wasn't easy to measure. He wondered what time it was—Worth had made it plenty clear that he slept like the literal dead while the sun was high, so it must have been evening. Eight? It didn't really matter, he supposed, but if he was going to be trapped in this… this gothic horror snuff film cliché, he'd better keep his days straight. If he lived more than a day or two, he'd appreciate knowing it.

Death loomed weirdly at the edge of his vision, marked out in solid lines and uncolored. It's funny how you can believe something on the one hand and not really accept it on the other. He wasn't panicking. He didn't understand why he wasn't panicking—he was stuck here where no one would ever think to look for him, with little likelihood of escape, surrounded by the kind of idiots who probably enjoyed a good witchburning, and there was nothing to do but sit here and watch his wrists turn red.

And his level of fear was way below a healthy level.

What would they do when he never turned up? Hanna would want a funeral or something, which made Conrad uncomfortable. They wouldn't even have a body. But no doubt Hanna would want one, and they'd probably rope the whole population of Salem into it, like he was some kind of a hero or something. Conrad would be shifting awkwardly in his metaphorical grave, wouldn't that just top off his life perfectly.

And everyone would suddenly remember all those things they never thanked Conrad for, all those favors he did them, what an excellent marksman he'd been, et cetera et cetera. It was a funeral after all, of course they would. Well, they had better.

Worth had better.

Conrad frowned, tipped his head back so it hit the wall with a dull thump. Who was he kidding, the dickwad would probably just climb up to the podium thoroughly sloshed and start telling stories about all the times Conrad had embarrassed himself, probably rounding the whole thing out with the absolute knee-slapper about exactly how Conrad had died, just like he lived, an idiot and a load on the team. What a useless prat, that Conrad. Yes. Wouldn't that just be the cherry on the top of his absolutely bollocks life.

He supposed, all cynicism aside, he'd just like to know that Worth would at least miss him. Nobody in their right mind would expect tears, or flowers, or pretty speeches about how good of partners they had been and how, after all this time, he'd finally realized how unnecessarily—

Well. None of that.

But would it be too much to ask to be missed?

It was probably five in the afternoon by the time the four of them pulled up to the West mansion, although with the rolling gray ocean between him and the sun Worth couldn't have said for sure. Hanna had spent most of the ride alternately giving a nearly-coherent rehash of everything they knew about sorcerers and wringing information out of their reluctant chauffer—who had, unsurprisingly, almost refused to drive them any further when he realized that their final passenger was a decade old corpse. Supposedly, the mansion had a long history of bad doings—odd lights, tight-lipped residents, bits and pieces of never-quite-proven rumor—sunken into its looming walls. This generation had been the first of four to come down from the hill regularly, with smiles that seemed genuine enough as long as you steered clear of their family history.

Hanna had asked what sort of rumors these had been. Their driver replied with a suppressed tremor, and an admission that none of the details had slipped through the sieve of his parent's shuttered whispers. In recent decades the empty seats in classrooms had been attributed to any number of things—serial killers, a kidnapping ring, even a series of drownings in the Miskatonic River that ran thick and cold through the edge of town. The length of wakes and quickness of funerals was never addressed. The age of reason had strung up the practical knowledge of previous eras where it hung useless, until the plague had come marching across New England and cut it down again.

"This is as far as I take you," Zadock shouted, over the swelling storm and the rumble of the decade old engine. "If you're not back in town by sun up, we're coming in after you!"

With the fading roar of the retreating Chevy in his ear, Worth looked up at the mansion properly for the first time. In the lightless afternoon it was a strange kind of purple-black, slickened, and its three stories loomed over them with stray yellow-blazing windows. Electric. They had a hell of a generator, and funds were clearly no concern.

"Okay," Hanna announced, speaking quickly, "plan A is hide and seek, if we do it right they'll never know we were here. Plan B, we get an inside guy to give us the tour. Plan C is Die Hard in a Mansion. Clear?"

"Clear."

"If ya say so."

Hanna snapped the cap off a marker and scribbled detection-shielding runes on the backs of all their hands, in quick succession—tracing the still not fully faded outline on green skin. They slipped up the driveway, clinging to the shadows of the trees that lined it, three sets of eyes searching the lawn for a flicker of motion. The further they went without interruption, the more tightly wound Worth's nerves grew. No one with means would leave their base of operations unguarded, not with the spectrum of mundanities running from enraged townspeople to the bands of bloody-mouths roaming the interstates.

Pressed spine-flat against the mansion wall, Worth entertained a brief, blinding moment of desperation, fingernails digging flakes from the stone. There was the familiar dizzy sensation of a fight building like a crescendo in the orchestra pit, but the empty place in their formation—the gaping emptiness in the conversation—was clutching at his lungs too.

A moment of fumbling, and Worth had a window open. No time to worry about what would happen if the next room over was occupied, or the hall, or the bathroom. One after another, they slung their legs over the sill and touched down on the Persian rug.

The zombie slid the window shut behind them, and silence crushed the room under its heel. Somewhere in the maze of the building, the faint crackling strains of a record were whispering under doors towards them.

"Let's get going?"

Worth lifted the revolver he'd retrieved from the camper—for maximum hand freedom, in case the Princess needed a hand into her carriage—and followed Hanna out into the halls. They traced the inner wall, checking room after room, footsteps on the carpet muffled by mud and fuck, they were leaving tracks, goddamnit why hadn't any of them noticed?

"—Home yet, she—"

There were voices in the room ahead, and they made their way around it painstakingly, all eyes on the ribbon of light below the door, watching for the shadows of footsteps. It would be so easy to kick that door open, three shots for the three known men, a fourth for any backup, a fifth for a headshot to anyone still moving and a sixth to dispose of the tour guide the second they were done with him. It would be so easy.

"—when should we—"

But Hanna was already down the hall, and his tide-pull was dragging Worth after him, and the little dipshit would never forgive him if he ruined their idiot bid to keep the peace intact. Deep breath, fill crumpled lungs. Keep moving.

They reached what appeared to be the center of the house, where a spiral staircase twisted its way up to the second level at the back of what might have been a reception room. The doctor met his own gaze in a mirror, barely recognizing the reflection in the darkness.

"This is going good," Hanna murmured, pawing through the contents of a coat closet. "I was worried that we'd get some kinda tripwire alarm pulled on us or some crazy boobytraps, but so far it looks like it's just a bunch of stupid kids who got into magic at the totally wrong place and time and they may not even have this girl which would suck but also be kind of a relief but still suck you know?"

"Cross," the doctor hissed, "keep yer trap shut, will ya?"

The tiny man gave him a sheepish look and closed the closet door. At the bottom of the staircase Whatshisface regarded them both with a half-seeing gaze.

"I'm beginning to worry that this will take longer than we can afford," he murmured, as motionless as a glacier. "I wouldn't like to be caught here after sunset, regardless of the actual solar visibility at the moment. There's something… as they say, in my bones. This house is wrong. It makes me uneasy."

Hanna looked over at him, hands around an expensive looking vase, immediately attentive. "Uneasy like how, Masaccio?"

Caution-light eyes blinked slowly. "Uneasy as if there was a current running through me from every surface I touch. There's something in the air—in the walls—that feels like the outside of a coffin."

"That… sounds bad. Like a really bad thing."

"I agree."

"So what are we gonna do?"

The zombie gave him a very serious look. "Spend less time admiring vases, perhaps?"

"Me? What, I—no, never mind, I'll explain later I guess. You wanna split up? I mean, it's usually a bad horror movie idea but it would speed things up and we've got like a thousand times more experience than the kids in Haunted House 7 so we're probably not going to end up… like, rabies-foaming amputees stitched together or anything…"

The doctor rolled his eyes. "Ya think we're stupid? Less just take the stairs. Check yer script, they always keep the princess in th' tower."

"Worth, I really don't think—"

"Who the fuck are you?"

The fake chandelier buzzed into light, like an explosion above their heads, and the three men whirled to where a stranger was standing in the doorway. He had an aluminum baseball bat clutched in his freckled pink hands.

"I tol' ya ter shut yer goddamn trap, didn' I?" Worth growled, briefly glaring cold death at Hanna.

"I said," the furious teenager repeated, "who the fuck are you?"

Somewhere in the depths of the house, a record jumped tracks. Worth felt, rather than saw, his compatriots take subtle but substantial steps backwards—fucking cowards, the two of them—and he pointed the barrel of his pistol right down the sights at the kid's torso.

"Us?" the doctor replied, with a smile. "We're the motherfuckers with a gun apiece standin' in yer goddamn livin' room, that's who we are. Ya feel like dyin' today, Caulfield?"

"The hell?" teenybopper answered, face screwed up in a mask of angry confusion. "Who the fuck is Caulfield? I'm Jeremiah West, and nobody threatens me in my own house!"

"Oh," Hanna spoke up, "you're the owner? Perfect! Plan B, dudes, let's get on this bus. Doc?"

The older man nodded, once. "Alright kid, here's the deal. Ya got somethin'a ours squirreled away around here—'bout five foot six, curses like a sailor, one fang? Total pussy?"

"What do you want with—"

"Yeah, that one. An' yer gonna take us to 'im, an' we're gonna take the dumb bugger home before he breaks a nail in here. You got a bat, but we got these nifty li'l things called guns, blast a hole in yer esophagus 'fore you can say 'batter up', see?"

There were a lot of looks Worth had gotten familiar with over the years, schooled in every classroom from countless barroom brawls to insurrectionist coups. He knew this one. It was the 'I'd show these punks a thing or two about blasting esophagi if I hadn't left my gun on the sofa' look. If the glare wasn't enough of a tip off, the frantically patting hands would be.

"We would appreciate it if you kept this between us," the zombie spoke up, thoughtfully. "That might also go a ways towards protecting your esophagus."

Hanna giggled, and despite himself Worth smothered a twitch of the lips. Better. If things kept on like this, he could almost believe this was one of their regular, run-of-the-mill life-or-death escapades.

"You just wait," Jeremiah snarled, "you won't be laughing for long."

"All the more reason ter get hoppin'. Lead the way, kid, an' don't try nothin' stupid. We know where yer friends are."

So buddy boy turned around and marched down the hall, shoeless feet smashing soundlessly on the colorless carpet, and they followed. Worth's ears were focused on the rooms ahead, listening for that telltale consonant hiss or muffled movement that would tip him off if they were being led back to an ambush. That was the thing about enemy territory—you never had an advantage. You only thought you did.

By the time they reached the east wing, Worth was getting antsy. So far they'd avoided meeting any resistance and it didn't seem like they were going in the aimless circles you got sometimes in time-buying resistance gambits and that, if anything, only fed the suspicion welling up in his gut. He shared a look with Hanna, just a glance, but long enough to know that he wasn't alone—and underneath that flashing smile, there was the same seething fear that had been rising around their ankles all morning.

"Here," the kid said, suddenly, halting in front of a great black-polished wood door. He ran a hand down the eldritch looking scrollwork and sneered over his shoulder at them. "And a fat lot of good it'll do you, huh? There's only one key, and I don't got it."

"Well, maybe we oughter just shoot ya now an' be done with it, then."

But Hanna was already pressed up against the thing, uncapping a marker to scrawl something across the key plate. Unlocking spells. The zombie moved quietly to stand at an intimidating lack of distance behind Jeremiah West while Hanna worked.

"Alohamora, bitches," Hanna muttered, grinning. Then he reached down and twisted the knob.

Nothing.

A thin twist of adrenaline wound up around Worth's legs—adrenaline and something like pain, or suffocation.

"Shit," Hanna hissed, yanking the doorknob again. "Shit! There must be a deadbolt component somewhere in the mechanism! Shit! This is one hell of a lock."

"Well," Worth announced, "looks like we're comin' at this the old fashioned way, eh?" He started to back up.

"What?" Hanna asked, peering over his shoulder.

"Door's old. Lend me a shoulder here, would ya?"

A pause, while Hanna's brain spun the wheel, once, twice, and then the spark caught. They lined up side by side, counted down, and threw themselves at the smooth center panels of the massive door. Thuck, and they bounced back. Thuck, and they bounced back again.

And again.

The hinges rattled, but didn't give, and Worth almost didn't feel the screaming in his shoulder over the wild clawing in his lungs. The old fashioned lamp hanging over the door swung on its hook.

And again.

Finally, the dead man caught Hanna by the arm, hands bright green in the yellow lamplight, jerking him still in mid-run. There was sweat on the redhead's lip and he was panting as he wriggled, jerking vainly for freedom.

"Hanna," the zombie said, "Hanna, it's clearly not working. We need to regroup, find a new way in. If you keep going like this, you'll injure something that we simply don't have time to fix."

A thread of tension snapped between them, fists clenched and shoulders squared, and then Hanna slowly opened his hands, flexing the fingers.

"Alright," he said, "alright. We can retreat and I'll see about working up a demolition spell."

The three of them looked down at Hanna's wrists, at the pearly white scars from past spells. Logically, Worth knew that a destruction spell was a hell of a lot cheaper than a creation spell, and it wouldn't take long—not more than a few minutes—to retreat and set up a proper explosion.

And still, instead of stepping away and bowing to the pressure of logic, the doctor found himself reeling back and rushing the door again. Harder this time, if anything. He was going to get through that door if it was the last thing he ever did, and fuck anyone who thought he couldn't. He was going in there now.

The force of shoulder on oak paneling rattled every bone in Worth's body from his teeth to his dactyls. He slammed against the door again, and again, and felt the muscles and veins in his arm crushing under the pressure.

And then it flew open, and he went stumbling in, jarring a wrist as he lost balance and landed on his hands. Oriental carpet rushed up towards his nose. Behind him he could hear the sounds of Hanna and the zombie scrambling in after him, and their feet slipping into a sudden stop.

A staircase started about an inch from Worth's head.

"A basement," the doctor muttered into the carpet. "Clearly these cocksuckers don't know a goddamn thing about holdin' damsels hostage." Then he looked up at buddy boy, grinning out the side of his mouth. "How's that fer yer key, kid?"

The guy just scowled at him. What a useless little fucker.

"Wow, Doc, you have such a way with teenagers," Hanna half-giggled, elbowing the teenager in question good-naturedly. "Lead on, my dude. Host goes first!"

They descended.

It wasn't a long flight, but it was dark—the faint dance of lamplight above them painted the stone of the stairwell an unsteady yellow-green, like the walls of a cavern leading down to some cold stygian ocean. The door at the bottom, as best Worth could tell, was a cheap affair. Its plainness was out of sync with the rest of the house, and he wondered for a brief moment if it had been replaced before. Maybe more than once. It swung open at the lightest push.

Inside, there was a fair sized, doorless room lit by a gas lamp situated on top of what appeared to be an ancient operating table. Judging by the straps, it looked to be at least as old as the first world war, and hardly used since. Just at the edge of the light, there was something newer, very new—a web of strings and rods and bits of glass, laid up on a long weathered table like some witch doctor's science fair project. First prize in hoodoo fuckery. And at the other end of the room—

"Hanna?"

There was Conrad, squinting and without his glasses, chained to the wall like Edgar Allen Poe's wet dream. Christ, who built this house? A nineteenth century dominatrix?

"Conrad!" Hanna shouted, rushing across the room like lightening on legs. "Conrad, bro, you okay?"

Conrad glared at him, and even then, uncovered his eyes looked so much bigger. "No, not really. Wanna get me out of these things? I think my wrists are starting to bubble."

And just like that, Worth found his lungs.

He hung back. Hanna called out something about looking for the girl, must be in here somewhere, let me find her first and guys would you give Conrad a hand for a second? But he still hung back. There were words in the gut of his throat and someone needed to check Conrad for wounds stat and they were going to have to break him out too, and Worth stood still at the entrance, legs leaden and unmoving. And that was—

That was whatever. He glanced over at the Zombie, who had his florescent eyes fixed on the rusted operating table as he carefully blocked the doorway. They were eventually going to have to do something about Jeremiah West, currently observing silently under a pillar.

"What's eatin' you?" the doctor asked, turning. Hanna's babble would keep Conrad company for the moment, and he clearly didn't need immediate assistance. Certainly wasn't asking them for any.

Hanna's undead boyfriend broke focus. "I… really don't know, doctor." He gestured meaningfully around the room, with one of his painfully economical motions. "Have you ever had the feeling that… not déjà vu, but rather… an odd sense of continuum? As if something has happened, and kept happening?"

"This got anythin' to do with that coffin thing y'were feelin' earlier?"

Slowly, the zombie nodded. "There's something ominously familiar in the air."

"Right. Well now that we're all feelin' so warm an' fuzzy, guess we ought ter getcha out of here on the faster side'a business."

"That would be nice."

With a narrow sort of look, Worth ditched Dead Guy McNameless and his irritating deadpan. Could never tell if he was making fun of you or not. Instead, he moseyed on over to Conrad and his nightmare fetishist chains while Hanna was off and, according to the steady stream of narration, searching for something to perform a good old fashioned lock pick with now that he'd located the local chick.

"They got ya strung up good, princess," Worth observed, leaning up against the wall beside Conrad. He poked the chains, making them rattle thickly. "Almost makes up fer forgettin' ta put ya in the tower."

"Ugh." Conrad's head thumped back into the wall with a low thud. "Yes. Exactly the voice I want to hear when I'm covered in iron and attached to a dungeon wall. Yes. Now I know there is a God, because he clearly hates me."

"Ey," Worth replied, "is that any way ter thank the man who rescued yer lily white ass?"

Conrad's face looked oddly empty without the thick rims of his glasses. It had the odd effect of making his eye roll look almost good-natured. Worth quickly glanced around the room and spotted them on the floor nearby.

"Glory hog. I wasn't even there, and I know all you did was point a gun at that kid's face and put on some macho cowboy bullshit."

The doctor gave him an unimpressed look. "Yeah, that's real gracious of ya. Fer yer information, since ya wandered off last night I've jumped in a goddamn river, intimidated a fuckin' mob while they were building a fuckin' scaffold, nearly splintered my goddamn shoulder, and I broke down that monster of a door up there just ter see yer lovely smilin' face again. An' this is what ya give me fer my troubles?"

"Apparently."

"Remind me never ter rescue you again, princess."

Conrad sighed, shifted, and winced as the cuffs around his wrists shifted too. "Well what do you want, oh gallant knight?"

Worth grinned. "Oh, what every knight wants from 'is ladylove. Think a kiss is well within my rights, don' you?"

"Excellent logic, smartass, except for the part where you didn't rescue me."

One end of Worth's mouth twisted up, and he could feel the sharp-curl in every inch of his skin. "Well then, ya gotta least owe me backpay fer all the other times I saved yer sorry self from unholy peril, eh? I mean, damn, ya pro'lly owe me a handjob fer that mess back in Virginia."

"Oh, fuck you."

"Well… maybe if ya factor in interest…"

There was a wild rattling as Conrad flailed one restrained arm, trying to land a hit on his grinning antagonist. So close, and yet, so far. The younger man's bone-white fingers wriggled vainly about a centimeter from Worth's face.

"C'mon," the doctor insisted, "I'm th' chivalrous sort, ain't I? Just one kiss, fer Virginia, an' the rest of 'em are on the house. Bestow me with the burnin' token of yer undyin' gratefulness, milady."

"The hell kind of romance novels has the zombie been reading you while I was asleep?"

"Be happy ter give ya the list after I get my kiss."

Conrad stared at him for a moment—longer than he should have, and Worth wondered if maybe this episode had been harder on the vampire than appearances indicated. Conrad stared at him, and finally sighed, letting his head bump back against the wall again.

"Worth, cut the crap. We both know you don't want me to kiss you."

Before Worth could iron out a good comeback, a flare of orange hair exploded into his line of sight and a makeshift lockpick was being shoved into his hand. Hanna was gone without a word, and fuck if that wasn't more unnerving than the operation table and the chains combined. Quiet Hanna? What was his deal suddenly? Worth's face sunk into a scowl.

"Course I do," he told Conrad, reaching for the manacles. "I got my reputation as a knight in shinin' armor ter think about, don't I? What'll all the blokes at the round table think when they hear I rescued a damsel an' I didn't even get a lousy kiss fer my trouble? Most guys get a marriage outta the deal. "

"Do you even know what a damsel is? Maybe you didn't notice but I'm missing a key part of the definition here."

"Aw, honey, yer pussy enough fer a whole harem an' don't let nobody tell ya different."

The cuff clinked open around Conrad's wrist, exposing a thick band of glittering purple-red skin. Worth felt his teeth lock together. How much iron was in those things? How the fuck long had Conrad been down here? Half a day shouldn't have…

The vampire flexed his hand experimentally, and the red band swelled with each contracted muscle. There was a flicker of dullness in his eyes, when Worth looked up again, that meant he was in more pain than he wanted to let on. Oh, the dumfuck would whine for an hour about a stained shirt or a stubbed toe, but the supernatural equivalent of a chemical burn? Nothing. Christ, his life was a long string of suicidal patients.

"Tell you what," Conrad was saying, obstinately looking down, "when you pay me back for all the times I've saved your ass, I'll think about paying you back for mine. I think that's fair."

And who knew where that conversation might have gone, if events hadn't knocked back and kidney-punched Worth at exactly that moment. He was in the middle of shifting to the other arm, leaning more into Conrad's personal space than was really necessary, when something inexplicable shifted in the very atmosphere. The air went taut, for a moment, like God had just caught his foot on a tripwire running through the mansion. The doctor might not have even noticed it—it was gone so quickly it might have been a shiver. It was nothing. But a soft ha caught on the edge of his hearing, and suddenly he had this feeling that it was the very opposite of nothing.

"Oi," he called out, over his shoulder, "Green, get this unlocked would ya?"

The dead man tilted his head, slightly, in what Worth could only assume was a curious manner. "If you insist."

"Yeah," Worth replied, tossing the lockpick over, "I do."

And the doctor made his way swiftly and mutely to the edge of the room, where Jeremiah West was staring at him from underneath a squat stone pillar, smiling out the side of his mouth.

It wasn't really a conscious decision—it was the maddening rush of every stupid contradictory chemical in his cerebral cortex being released at once—but Worth found himself rounding on his heel and slamming Tour Boy into the walls, one forearm pressed dangerously hard against the kid's windpipe.

"Awright," he growled, "what's the catch, Jerry?"

"Catch?" Jeremiah wheezed, brown eyes cold and glittering. "No catch, pops. Did what you wanted. 'S not my fault if your timing sucks."

A vein of ice streaked down the doctor's spine. "Ya better start talkin', now. The hell's that mean?"

The kid just laughed, as best he could with hardly enough airflow to form sound. Instinct overcame reason, and Worth threw the kid down, reached for his gun, started loading up an extra clip—fingers lightning fast and motions panic-smoothed. He swung the barrel down, sights resting on the pale blot between the eyes. He'd had just about enough of the adrenaline rollercoaster for one day, and it wouldn't do him anything but good to take it out on somebody. Dare you.

"Talk."

"Adelaide's home," Jeremiah said. And then he smiled, like a shark. Like a kid who's about the pull the legs off a spider that bit him. "And she's definitely gonna know you're here."

And suddenly, Worth realized they'd been out of time for a long time now.

In one swift motion, Worth pistol-whipped the living shit out of the kid and raced across the room, grabbing the newly freed Conrad by the shoulder so hard he probably left a new purple armband around the bottom of his deltoid.

"We gotta get the fuck outta here," he hissed, already pushing bodily towards the stairs. "Hanna, ya got the girl?"

"I have her, Doctor," the zombie replied, reappearing just inside his peripheral vision. "She says she can walk, and seems to be unharmed."

"Gonna need 'er ter run," Worth said. "Hanna, the fuck're you up to? We're gettin' out!"

At the bottom of the stairwell, Hanna was scribbling something complex across the greenish stone, hands moving like whirlwinds over the massive canvas. The runes caught the light in silver ripples every time Worth moved.

"I'm setting up a demolition!" Hanna answered, fast talk, hands never stuttering. "Have you looked around this place? It's fucking Doctor Frankenstein had an illegitimate lovechild with Doctor Jekyll down here! Whoever built this place had a gothic horror fetish to end all fetishes, and I am really uncomfortable letting future generations have a go at it. Shit shit shit, no wonder this town is fucked up!"

"Hanna we don't have time!" Worth shouted, grip on Conrad's arm tightening. He couldn't even hear the protests, not really, even though he was sure they were there. "These motherfuckers're workin' fer Adelaide!"

"Are you kidding me?"

And then, with a sharp-nailed finality, the room was silent. There was nothing but the sound of feet, one after another, making soft clicks on the stairwell.

"Aha," the familiar voice began, "I thought I smelled something rank on the lawn. Mr. Cross, it's always such a delight."

Hanna took stumbling, unconscious steps backwards until his shoulders bumped into Worth's chest. The older man grit his teeth.

Adelaide stepped down from the stair, elegant tiny feet in elegant tiny heels. She looked—of course she did—the same as ever. She smiled at him, and it was in every way a perfect smile. It dripped impish humor, the kind of smile an old friend smiled over a cup of coffee. And Worth would not be ashamed to admit that his blood ran cold.

"Well," he said, "if it ain't Monty's ex girlfriend."

"Doctor!" she exclaimed, pressing together her long-nailed hands. "Always a pleasure. How is Toucey, by the way? I haven't seen him since you all ran me out of California—I've often thought to myself, oh, no doubt he's off profiteering somewhere... I really do miss doing business with him…"

Worth's lips skinned back from his teeth, but he wasn't altogether sure what expression he was trying to make. "Mont's dead."

There was a flicker of silence, like a struck match that flashed void instead of light. It shot through the room so quick that is wasn't even there, the illusion of darkness leaping across the walls.

And then Adelaide was tossing her hair with a thick pout. "Shame. You know, if he'd taken me up on my offer he'd still be here. Mortals, hm? Fatally silly things. Speaking of which, I must ask, what are you doing in my house?"

"I've got a better question," Hanna replied, stepping forwards again. "What's Conrad doing in your house?"

"Yeah," the former artist murmured, "that's definitely what I'd like to know."

Worth realized about then, with that largely ignored portion of his brain responsible for trivial observances, that Conrad had stopped trying to pull himself free at some point. Despite the fact that Worth's grip might have been slowly tightening for a while now.

"Oh, that's not my doing. Not exactly."  She tapped an arched nail against her glittering teeth. "But what timing! You know, lately, I've been thinking about taking this whole motherhood thing seriously," she informed them, leaning fluidly against the wall, one elbow bent against the glittering black ink—almost invisible, except where the light struck it. "I know I haven't been the most involved of sires these last few years, but honestly, unplanned parenthood is just such a trial, you know? And I thought, what's a year or two to someone like us?"

Hanna's fists tightened, visibly, the white going whiter.

"That is such total BS, Jesus. Although if chaining people up is how your family raises kids, I could kinda see what your damage is."

Hip cocked out, Adelaide examined her nails. "Tough love, Mister Cross. It's worked a charm for six thousand years."

"Yeah no."

"Well then," the woman sighed, blinking bright red eyes, "I suppose I must have my darling baby boy here for some rather more sinister purpose, hm?"

Behind Worth, Conrad was muttering, "God, this is going to give me more complexes than Oedipus."

In front of Worth, Hanna and Adelaide were suspended in time, caught in a net of ice and acidic familiarity. Adelaide's violet lips broke open over two perfectly pointed canines.

"What you don't quite grasp," she announced, loose hand fluttering down to rest on her hip, "is that the four… five, of you are quite inarguably trapped. This is the only exit."

Thunder rumbled through the foundations.

"I have human assistants—and Hanna, I know how you loathe having deaths on your hands. Besides all which, the last time you fought me, darling Conrad there died. Would you like to bet the good doctor's life on another witless exercise in futility? I guarantee I won't be so inadvertently generous this time."

"You don't scare us. We really have you outnumbered."

"As if that matters." The lady vampire tisked. "You really do need to learn how to accept defeat gracefully, Mister Cross."

And all the while, Worth's flickering eyes were searching the room for something. Anything. The operating table in the middle of the room, the chains, the ancient tools scattered across the stone floor. Christ, bullets were all well and nifty for witches and wizards, but a vampire? They had all seen her in action at one point or another, and they had a chance as a unit—a good chance even—but as for Worth himself? He was out of his depth and he knew it.

"What do you really want with Conrad?" Hanna needled, and Worth could hear in his voice that he was searching for an edge, for a deal to spin or a trade to offer, something to grab hold of and wrench them all up by. They could fight, and they could probably win, but Worth suspected that Adelaide's talk of causalities had unnerved him. It was that or he was hunting for information, while the option was in front of him.

He was unsure. Four years ago, the promise casualties would have stopped Hanna cold. Now… they would probably only rip him to shreds.

Adelaide pushed off the wall, brushing dust off the dipping neckline of her black dress. She danced forward, pushing between them with the cool confidence that comes from knowing, without a flicker of doubt, that you are the fastest and the strongest in the room. She reached for Conrad, and Worth immediately caught her wrist in both hands, muscles straining to halt the motion. He bared his teeth at her.

"Oh," she murmured, "I'm so intimidated."

"Y' ought to be," he replied, lips curling up into a nasty smile. "Keep yer hands ta yerself, Addy."

"Very chivalrous," she noted, and promptly threw him halfway across the room.

Lights bloomed across the doctor's eyes, and after a wild spinning second he felt a hand—a small hand, too small to be a man's—on his shoulder, trembling as it pulled him up into a curled, but at least sitting, position. The girl, then. He'd forgotten about her.

Adelaide was talking again.

"I admit it," she was saying, circling a stone-stiff Conrad, "I'm not really the mothering type. But I really do think I've ignored him long enough, don't you? He's mine, after all. I have to say I grew a bit fond of him despite myself, during the Van Slyke incident. You never know when you'll need an assistant, so why not keep the fledgling on hand?"

He could see Conrad bristling, teeth gritting, the sunburn-looking rings around his wrists doubling in healing speed as anger built under the bottleneck of caution. Worth remembered that look, from a long time ago—before the disease and the running, back when they were nearly strangers and Conrad had still, somehow, thought that Doc Worth was a man you could reign yourself in around. It was that look that came from thirty years of bottling up and tightening down in front of friends and strangers alike.

Movement caught his eye, and from his place on the floor Worth could see the zombie reaching out for Hanna's shoulder. "Something has just occurred to me," the dead man interrupted, doing a fairly unsubtle job of reeling Hanna back into relative safety. "If you were the one responsible for kidnapping Conrad, then who was the woman who called Jimmy away from his farm?"

"Oooh," Adelaide responded, "I know where that question is going."

She flicked Conrad's ear and turned on one thin heel, waltzing off towards the end of the room where the bizarre tangle of string and metal crouched across the tabletop. The more closely Worth looked at it the more his skin started to itch, until he was gritting his teeth and not entire certain why.

"I'm a woman who knows how to take advantage of a situation," Adelaide went on. "Let me give you a brief introduction! This little beauty is the work of innumerable grimoires and the notes of one devil of a man, the late Herbert West, dead these thirty years. The boys have taken to calling it my Game Breaker, the little rascals, and I'll admit the modern jargon is a little grating, but. It doesn't much matter to me what they call it. It really only matters that it works—which, at the moment, it only does to an extent."

She ran pointed nails down the length of one silver string, wound between spidery copper poles, curved like the ribcage of some unearthly dead thing. Suspended in the center, something, a pendulum constrained by the web, glittered as Adelaide pulled at it. Hanna's breath shuddered through the length of the room.

"Adelaide," the magician hissed, voice tense, "is that—are you telling us—"

"What's the one big disadvantage vampires have," she asked them, glancing over her shoulder, "compared with the other big shots of the Moonlight Races? Why do the other creepy crawlies never invite us to their parties, their coalitions, their Wild Hunts? Why do we have to keep our own courts? Magic, of course."

Worth forced his eyes to break contact, spared a look at the girl whose hand was still on his shoulder. She must have been thirteen at best, and her eyes were glassy—staring at him, or through him, and he wondered if she had even the slightest fucking clue what she'd been dragged here for. He was starting to uncover threads of a suspicion, and he didn't much like where it was taking him.

"Well," Adelaide went on, "there's always some fool stepping on my heels these days, popping up in my living room just as I'm getting cosy. I'm still a wanted woman, I'm sure you know—I heard that Salem had you on the payroll. Though I doubt anyone ever told you why; it's all ancient history, really, and that's all the more reason that I refuse to serve time for it. Suffice to say I've had just about enough of the Queen's Mercy, and the whole rolling stone lifestyle is getting old. But what else is there? I'll be honest with you, I've never been much of a duelist. If I had been, well, I wouldn't be in this mess, would I?"

The woman turned, dangling in one curved hand the glittering centerpiece of her foray into mad science.

"This little darling," she announced, "is what Mister Cross may recognize as a God Stone. They're supposed to be theoretical, but as anyone who's been around the block like we have knows, theoretical is just another word for expensive. So far, as it stands, it's limited to your basic physical concussive forces, a light show here and there… a parlor trick, really, but a fair start."

Hanna took slow, halting steps towards the vampire, hands up and splayed flat against the air, universal sign language for unarmed. "Adelaide, listen, you don't understand what you're holding. That thing is like the hydrogen bomb of magic and it should not exist."

"And yet, it does." The woman hopped up on the edge of the table, white legs crossing gracefully. "Herbert always had a passion for delving into realms of things men were never meant to know. I'd say it was compensating for something, but I honestly couldn't tell you what. No doubt it was appallingly Freudian. You know, I always thought his projects were limited to a more… resurrective avenue of thought, but come to find out all those years he was holding out on me. I do wonder why."

"Adelaide, I'm serious, you don't know what you're messing with here. You'll be lucky if that prototype is limited to a couple flashy blasts."

"Oh, but it isn't! See the thing about magic," she told him, running her hands over the bizarre chimera of steel and glass and string, "is that it's got to come from somewhere. The Law of Conservation, isn't that what they're calling it these days?"

Hanna blanched, and in the back of Worth's head a memory flickered to life—hazy, of Hanna twiddling his thumbs, quietly explaining why he'd been willing to let all the powers of a god slip through his fingers without resistance. Worth knows how this works, he'd said. Yin and yang, give a life take a life.

Adelaide pursed her lips when nobody bothered to answer her. "Well, regardless, the magic has to come from somewhere. Turns out this place is just sopping with magic—darling Herbert and his abominations, I suppose that sort of thing never really scrubs out. But if I want to really get my money's worth—figuratively speaking—I'm going to have to get a bit more ambitious."

"Ambitious how?"

"Ah," the woman answered, examining her nails. "In the spirit of the twenty-first century, I'd like to make a battery."

The air went out of the room. Worth watched Hanna's features flare up with barely constrained rage, watched Conrad make the face that he always made when he had just realized things were about to get much worse but didn't yet understand how.

"Let's just be clear," Hanna spat, "is the battery Conrad, or is it Melissa?"

The hand on Worth's shoulder jerked in what was probably an involuntary reflex. He didn't bother to check.

"Melissa?" the lady vampire blinked, almond eyes fluttering. Goddamn, but the bitch was good looking. "Oh, the female. Well, potentially, it's both of them. Out of, you know, motherly love and all that, I plan to test the design out with the girl first. I'd just hate to kill my own fledgling when something else could suffice. But of course, we all know how much untapped power is animating that scrawny little frame and, oh, sometimes we have to make sacrifices, don't we?"

"That is so fucking twisted," Hanna bit out. "And if you think any of that's going to happen then you need one hell of a reality check."

"There's one door," Adelaide pointed out, almost idly, "remember? I mean, what are you going to do about it? Fight me?  Please, I may not be much of a duelist, but I can crush a couple of mortals with guns like cockroaches under my shoe, let alone Conrad. Just try it."

She paused, as if she was waiting for someone to throw the first punch. The patronization grated over Worth's exposed nerves. As if they would be stupid enough to rush her headlong, right now, when she was expecting it even. Worth did, however, slowly gauge the sensation in his limbs, flexing digits. The shock of hitting stone had long worn away, and he wanted to be ready for the right moment. There would be one. There always was, if you were watching for it.

He'd followed Hanna's lead this long. Hopefully it would pay off.

"Or," she went on, when no one made a move, "hmmm, here's an idea I had this morning! Mister Cross, you stay at the mansion and help me design my living battery, get it into the prototyping stages, you know, be my new German. My last one got a bit... flighty, after somebody popped a hole in his tower. Herby never even dreamed of getting this far, so I'm flying a bit blind and admittedly I'm not really any kind of scientist. I'd be ever so grateful for the help."

Weirdly enough, it was Conrad who answered that one.

"Yeah," he said, "and name one good reason why Hanna would help you? Again, I mean."

"Oh, that's the beautiful part," she purred. "I'm not even promising to free you boys. No, darling, Hanna's going to do this because I promise to keep you alive, instead of simply ripping your heart out and eating it like I have been sorely tempted to do in the past."

The doctor expected to see Conrad gaping like a speared fish, thoroughly unnerved by the casual viciousness in Adelaide's voice, the audible twisted lip and the teeth. Instead, the undead man took a step back and planted his feet, heels digging into the stone floor.

But she had already turned her attention back to Hanna. "You're going to help me, Cross, sheerly for the hopeless, desperate hope that eventually I'll slip up, and you can make off with him when I'm asleep. Of course I don't plan to give you the chance," she admitted, "but let's be honest, what other choice have you got?"

Slowly, Worth coiled the muscles of his arms under him, pressing the balls of his feet down flat on the ground. Hanna was tensing too, and the reanimated strip of green flesh was shifting his weight slightly, and more than that the air itself was tightening with promise—familiar and flashing hot neon in the pit of Worth's stomach. Adelaide hardly seemed to notice, and it occurred to him that maybe those quiet shifts that blazed red alert klaxons in the back of his head were really nothing much to someone else.

For a brief moment, the doctor caught Conrad's eye, and he could see immediately edges slipping away into predatory angles. Quick glance. Yeah, those were claws. Something was happening and Worth suspected he could make a fairly decent outline of what it was.

"Got a better plan," the doctor spoke up, peeling the hostage girl's hand off of his shoulder with as much delicacy as he could manage under the circumstances. "How 'bout we don't?"

And like clockwork—like he'd flipped a switch somewhere—Conrad sprang forward into motion.

There was something that Hanna called flashstep, the thing that let vampires and other assorted ghoulies move like the fucking Flash himself dashing across the Twilightzone. It was like watching a ceiling fan thrown on high speed, so fast that you could only see the ghostly impression of every fifth motion. Conrad had picked up something of a proficiency for it in the last four years, that was true, but Worth had never seen it executed on offense before.

Later, Worth came to the conclusion that if Adelaide had been better used to the glittering weapon clenched in her delicate fist—if she had even had the hard-won instincts of the duelist she had admitted to never being—she could have broken Conrad's clumsy charge before it began. But she went with her first instinct, ducking and weaving out of the line of attack, and with that she lost her first advantage.

The far side of the room was a blur of slashing claws, and while the vampires whirled at each other Worth leapt to his feet, snatching up the girl's hand and all but flinging her towards the stairwell.

"Get," he shouted, pushing at her spine when she remained frozen. "We'll be on up soon's we've had a good look at Addy's circulatory system, awright?"

He didn't bother to watch for her reply—his eyes and hands were occupied with wrapping Lamont's rosary around his fist, searching the room for a foothold in the offensive. Across the floor, Adelaide and Conrad had locked themselves in a straining stalemate, hands jittering from the force of their equal and opposite pressures.

"Somebody's been bulking up for Armageddon," the female snarled. "Does it make you feel any less pathetic, Achenleck?"

The undead man didn't bother to reply, teeth clenched so tightly that the muscles of his jaw bulged grotesquely in his shifted face. Worth was on the balls of his feet before he could find himself, bounding across the squares of stone, fist pulled back, closing the gap so quickly that he could feel the echoes of flashstep in his own heels.

The breath of an inch from contact, Adelaide broke the trembling deadlock and slammed Conrad loose into the table, rounding to block Doc Worth's incoming fist. From there it was all the messy thrash of four men on one ruthless, ageless woman. It was, he thought somewhere in the middle of it all, one of God's nasty little taunts that even against someone like her, they could only have kept the upper hand between the four of them until someone gave in and started to wear down.

She had underestimated them, but casualties was still ringing in Worth's ears and he knew good luck never lasted. This needed to end, fast.

"Demolition!" the doctor shouted, swinging something embarrassingly like a haymaker at the vampire woman's temple. "Green, help here!"

And the two of them, together, threw themselves at Adelaide as she reeled back to take a stab at Conrad with her distorted, gleaming talons. The sheer weight of two six-foot plus men knocked her off her uneven feet—somewhere along the way she'd snapped off a heel and the broken end ripped a jagged cut through the unpatched hole in Worth's jeans as she went down.

The doctor grabbed Conrad by the collar, sparing a jerk to get him turned the right way round and then making a break for it, just steps behind the zombie, rushing towards the stairs in what was possibly the stupidest, most haphazard escape ever planned. And fuck, it had better work.

It couldn't have taken Adelaide more than a second to get back on her feet, but they were already across the room, exit within reach, distance withering away into nothing under their boots. Hanna was already on the first step, hands pressed flat against the stone with his mouth forming soundless syllables, and the lintel was dissolving into hairline fractures, and Worth looked back—

To where Conrad was falling forward, knees bent in a half-controlled tumble, followed to the floor by Adelaide whose claws—but no, Worth had already pivoted without realizing it and now he brought the heel of his boot down on Adelaide's skull, bet she didn't count on that, did she, bet she thought he'd just keep running like a mercenary bastard and she could just pick them all off one by one. He brought his heel down on her skull, and in the white hot moment of reprieve between her shriek and the re-knitting of her cheek bone Worth wrapped an arm around Conrad's waist and dragged him like a drunkard up to the stairs.

All of that, so fast that the order of events was a whirl inside the doctor's head as he felt rather than saw the bottom of their escape collapsing into rubble behind them.

Hanna shouted at them from the top of the stairs, realizing seconds too late that they'd fallen behind, but Conrad had gained his footing on the third step and they made it. Somehow, they made it. Breathing heavily, the four of them paused at the huge black doors while the last chunk of stone bounced down to pile at the base of the stairwell.

Dizzy emptiness. Worth's heart punched at his ribcage like a cornered prizefighter, and the absolute stillness in the air knocked his remaining breath out of him. He tried to double over, but at the slight shift in weight Conrad's whole frame tilted dangerously and the doctor quickly dug his grip into Conrad's side.

"Connie," Hanna said, panting, "Connie, you okay?"

"Do I," the vampire moaned, "fucking look okay?"

No, he did not fucking look okay.

"C'mon," the doctor cut in, "let's get outta here already. Crazy bitch ain't gonna stay down there forever."

"Oh, I dunno," Hanna replied, "I think it'll take her at least a day. Blade, help Melissa out, will you?"

It was at that point that Doc Worth realized the shadow huddled against the wall was the curled shape of a girl. Warning bells went off at the back of his mind—he had a feeling that breaking down cationic ten steps into an escape was a bad sign.

"Hey, you," an unfamiliar voiced shouted, "where the hell do you think you're going?"

And there's the other two.

They ran.

It was still a fucking half-assed escape attempt. They raced through the house like rats in a maze, and Worth would have laughed at how stupidly Scooby-doo the whole thing was if his lungs hadn't been on fire from lugging his own exhausted, poorly-treated body along with Conrad's near-useless one. And he didn't really feel like laughing anyways. The injured man in his grip was losing mobility as they went, each step a little less coordinated than the last, and no, Worth didn't feel much like laughing after all.

Their ragtag group skittered through a massive doorway, at which point Hanna promptly swung the whole thing closed behind them, snapping the lock into place.

"There! I love fighting humans," Hanna panted, palm splayed across the wallpaper. "Lock a door and you got the whole house to yourself."

"Yeah?" Worth muttered, elbow against the frame as he struggled for breath, "how about we take a vacation with the CUT bastards next time summer rolls around? Sounds like it'll be a right vacation."

Hanna was about to respond when the huge panels of the door let out an ominous creak. Slowly, four pairs of feet started to take long steps backwards. Conrad's sort of dragged across the carpet.

"That… can't be good," Hanna whispered, reaching one unsteady hand for the marker in his pocket. "I think we better—"

The doorframe lit up like a firecracker.

"Run!"

They got out.

There was never any real doubt. There was a close call on their way down the very last corridor as Conrad's strength completely gave out, and Worth had to swing the useless bastard up bridal style, arms screaming, as they tumbled toward the exit, but—

They made it out.

Down the driveway, into the forest, the zombie tugging Zadock's glaze-eyed daughter and Worth awkwardly sharing the load of pale faggot with Hanna, thank god being undead lightened a body a little, and they just kept going. The rain came and went, spatters like the sky was shivering, and they struggled through the muddy woods until their legs gave out.

Worth collapsed under a tree, numb hands refusing to let loose their grip on Conrad's chest, and he pulled the whole body right out of Hanna's arms.

"Fuck," Hanna said. Nobody replied; it summed things up pretty well.

In the drizzling silence that followed, Worth tugged the vampire into his lap. His unsteady hands pawed at the shirt, unbuttoning buttons with dumb haste, and with a feeling like a streak of ice through his gut he realized that the black fabric was soaked with something thicker and stickier than rain.

Forgetting the last few buttons, Worth ripped the whole thing open.

The pale expanse of Conrad's chest was smeared with something dark, and in the stormy evening light he couldn't tell if it was red or black. His fingers traced the abstract designs of the blood, thickened with something that felt like flour. Or ash. The cold surgeon's voice in the back of his head was telling him that severely damaged vampire flesh reverts to ash. He told it to shut up. Every smear led him back to the same spot: a black well in the right pectoral, where the skin was peeled away and loose around the finger-width hollow in the flesh. A stab wound.

Slowly, Worth ran his hand down around the ribs, to the edge of the shoulder blade.

Four matching punctures. A scrape from a thumb.

And his hand came up looking like an oil-slick.

Alabama

Two Years after the Treaty:

Conrad was outside.

No that that was particularly interesting on its own—her ladyship might have been a retiring semi-agorophobe in a past life, but necessity had stripped that away years ago. What gave Worth pause, as he stalked past the window on his way to the kitchen, was that the clock on the mantle clearly pointed to four.

Four twenty-five, actually.

And Conrad was sitting on the porch, in the rain, with his arms crossed over his knees.

Worth pushed the screen door open and made his way across the warped planks, shoeless feet pushing up irritated splinters. He poked Conrad's back with one boney toe.

"Oi," he said, "tryin'a get yerself boiled out here?"

The vampire frowned up at him, sniffing slightly. There was a slight red tint to the crest of his forehead, like an old sunburn.

"It's plenty dark," he replied, gesturing out at the purpled sky with one slender artist's hand.

"The hell it is," Worth snorted, poking him again. "'M I the only one round here with a decent sense'a self preservation? Jesus, get outta the light 'fore ya bake yer brain inta mush."

"Hey, here's a novel idea," Conrad retorted, "how about you keep your nose out of my business, huh? If I say it's safe out here, then it's fucking safe out here alright?"

"Well its yer funeral. Though if ya got a deathwish 'n all, coulda done us all a favor an' offed yerself months ago. Let me have the bed ta myself. Y'know, done somethin' noble with yer inglorious demise."

Conrad reeled back and elbowed him in the calf, scowling as Worth started laughing and dropped to the ground. A thin mist of fractured raindrops splattered their legs. Conrad had one of Hanna's paper cranes in his hands, Worth realized now, a little newspaper one made of print so smudged that it was more gray than black and white. Hanna was still making them, here and there, where people could spare the supplies. When they first hit the road that dismal smoky spring he'd made towers of them, liberating all the origami paper he could find on their long trek across the continent, stacking them in awkward piles under the bed and in the glove compartment. Worth had been more than irritated when he found a gaggle of them in his sheets.

And then Hanna had started passing them out, leaving a few behind in every town they visited, handing them out to children and leaving them in tree branches. It wasn't the keeping that was magic, he had insisted; it was the making.

Conrad tugged the bird's tail.

"You know this is the only way I can see daylight," he said, at last, determinedly looking down. "Even if it's not really daylight. It's the best I can do."

"Thoughtcha didn' miss it?" Worth answered.

The vampire shrugged. After a moment, he tossed the gray crane into a nearby puddle. "I guess I just don't want to forget," he replied. "It's worth a headache. It's not even a bad one."

The rain didn't let up for another day.

New York

Three Years After the Treaty:

When they arrived on Zadock's doorstep in the lightless evening, the world hung in a dull haze of inexplicable motion like a silent movie playing around them. Worth pulled Conrad's limp body on to the kitchen table, movements quick and efficient, while somewhere else in the world Hanna attempted to calm a shaking, traumatized girl and her confounded father. Worth never did find out exactly how that ended, because he spent those moments examining the stab wounds running up Conrad's shoulder blade like glittering purple buttons. Adelaide's claws had sunk as deep as her bent thumb would allow—the doctor pieced the story together, bit by bit, the gash from the thumb and the shredded wells the perfect space and size for fingers. His irreparably damaged flesh, crumbled to ashes, floated in the ooze.

Hanna must have settled things with Zadock because the next thing the doctor, knew there were voices over his shoulder swearing and a small white hand clutching at his forearm.

"Oh Jesus Christ," their host breathed. "What happened to him?"

"Got caught in th' retreat," Worth replied shortly, rolling Conrad onto his back. A wrist flopped over the edge of the table.

"Goddamn," Zadock swore again, "you could have said something! I would have… lysoled the table or something. That can't be sanitary."

"Won't hurt 'im," the doctor retorted. He ran a hand over the ruined pectoral, measuring the distance between the exit wound and the useless ticker. "Shit. Mighta nicked his heart, but then, why's he still—Hanna, kin they survive that?"

Hanna, he realized for the first time, was standing on the other side of the table with his pale hands bloodless and clenched around the edge. He had a blank, strained look on his face while he wrestled with himself in some dark cavern behind his eyes.

"I dunno man. I know next to nothing about vampire physiology. Maybe if you want to kill them you have to properly stab it, maybe a nick doesn't count. I don't know, I don't—maybe you have to, like, fully obliterate it for it to count? It's like a… I think that's where the magic circulates, like blood in humans, only they… or maybe not… fuck."

"Bloody fuckin' hell Hanna, tell me somethin' I kin use!"

"I don't know, alright! Vampires are paranoid douches and they don't want anybody to know how they work, and nobody's told me anything concrete, and I don't—I think their organs change, and I've never used a healing spell on someone who's already dead, I'm not sure—"

"Fuck it," Worth interrupted, chest vibrating with wild heartbeats, "never mind. We need somebody who knows what th' fuck they're doin', an' clearly that ain't you. Say g'bye ter yer buddies, we're outta here. There's a coven down in Mayfair, an' if that don't work Salem's only a six hour drive from there. Faster we ditch this mud pit the better. Make some calls while we're in route, see if ya kin pin down somebody's location, maybe that Casimiro dick."

Hanna's hand came down on his as he was reaching for Conrad's shoulder. The freckled fingers dug into the web of skin between the doctor's thumb and index.

"Worth, we can't," he implored, blue eyes wide and pained. "I mean, first off we really shouldn't move him any more than necessary right?"

The older man was already looping arms under the inert torso. "Sure, 'cept that proper medical attention is over there an' we're here. Now help me get this useless cocksucker out the door, alright? I can't carry 'im by myself."

"Worth."

The Doc stilled, through sheer force of will. "What?"

Hanna grabbed his hand again. He looked like—maybe, it was hard to tell, and Worth chose not to look too hard—like he might be fighting back tears. "Look, you know that I'd do absolutely anything for Conrad, right, you know that. But we just dropped a ceiling on a pissed off lady with superpowers, and she's not gonna stay in that basement forever. We've probably got a day before she digs herself out, and what do you think she'll do once she gets out?"

"Come after us?" Worth hazarded, noticing that his heel was tapping a buzz onto the linoleum floor. "All the more reason ter get the fuck outta dodge."

"No," Hanna replied. "I'll tell you what she's gonna do. She's gonna come busting through this town, tearing down buildings looking for us. And when she doesn't find us, she's gonna tear down some more buildings. And then, when she gets over it, she's gonna redouble efforts on her freaky science experiments until she's got a Godstone that can annihilate the west coast in one blast and then, and fucking then, she's gonna come after us."

"So we get our own Godstone, no problem, ya already know where ter find one."

"I don't think you get the magnitude of what you're suggesting, bro. That's nuclear war, only with more reality dissolving around us."

Worth jerked his captured hand free. "So we leave, we get Conrad treated, an' we come back before she gets her science fair project entered. Great. Let's go."

"Except for the part where she destroys half the town and kills a shit ton of civilians!"

"They'll be fine," Worth growled, ignoring the furious looks that were blossoming in Zadock's corner. "Let 'em solve their own problems fer once. Might do the dim fuckers some good. They were all gungho about stringin' up some teenagers before, let's see 'em string up a real threat."

"Lucius fucking Worth!"

"Who the hell gave you permission ta use my first name, Cross?"

The air between them exploded with hostility. They got into a row, in the same way that Germany had gotten into a fight a couple times.

By the next morning, Worth's hands would be covered with faint bruises from punctuating his points across the table top as Hanna desperately tried to talk him down. Zombie had fluttered nervously like an unsure moth over Hanna's shoulder, waiting for the first swing, not understanding.

Worth had never hit Hanna but once before—of all the people that Worth had ever considered a friend, in all his life, Hanna was the one person he'd held back a punch for—regardless of how many times Hanna had ignored his orders or pissed him off or stolen his drinks, or accused him of things he may or may not have deserved. That one time was years and years ago, not long after they first met. Hanna had been in bad shape, still, and he'd disappeared for days, and Worth hadn't known, sitting in his chair in his back alley that didn't yet feel like any kind of home, and what if Hanna was lying in an eviscerated heap in some new back alley, alone, and he'd just—

And Christ, he'd just tonight too.

In the aftermath of the blow, silence had fallen over the kitchen. It was a vacuum, the cold silence of space, while Hanna slowly raised a hand to his red-blooming cheek and Doc Worth stood there in the electric light, with his stinging knuckles and his too-tall height, frozen. All eyes on him.

And it felt just like last time.

Slowly, Worth uncurled his fist and turned around, making his way to the door that seemed so tiny and wafer thin compared to himself. A stiff breeze could knock over the entire house.

"Get Conrad into a bed," he said, refusing to look back. "Call up anybody ya kin think of. I'll keep watch, in case Mommy Dearest manages to claw free faster'n we expected."

And he left the too-small house with its too-small people, and thought about nothing for a long time.

It was June in New York State, and the sky was thin and worn at the edges overhead. Doc Worth was asleep in a graying wicker rocking chair whose gnawed feet shifted uneasily over the wooden planks with every shift of his lungs. The motion had kept him awake until a few hours before dawn, when he finally slipped, nails scrambling at the slope, into an uneasy sleep.

In the patchy summer sun, Worth had dreamed about a tower built from shards of glass that cut as they crumbled down, and he dreamed about a house wrapped up in a little box with a bow, and slipped away into Conrad Achenleck's pocket. The dream was a shattered string of images drawn along by the same guide that always took these dreams, and Worth woke up irritated and exhausted in the shade with fluttering white hands in the edges of his mind.

There was a blessed emptiness in their wake, those first few moments of consciousness. Worth was an observer only, untied and uninvolved in the searing, churning reality that crashed underneath him. Unattached. The way he used to be, lifetimes ago.

He dug through his pockets for the last of their cigarettes, fingers slipping around the twisted end of their hastily thrown together home-mades. He'd attempted twice in the twenty-four hours before this clusterfuck of an episode started to get the blasted thing into Hanna's possession, but after three years of stepping all over each other's toes and six years before that of unorthodox doctor-patient relations, the kid was wise to all his passive-aggressive underhanded tricks. They'd been in this situation before, and Hanna was an idiot but he wasn't stupid—he'd figured it out.

Sometimes it felt like their martyr complexes were doing competitive bumper cars in the background, fully keeping in mind that there's no way to win bumper cars. You just keep going till the ride gives out or the kid next to you pukes.

Worth sighed and wedged the thing between his teeth. His mouth still felt gritty this morning, full of mud from the forest that had crawled up between his teeth during the slog from that clearing to this house, god only knew how. Had he been biting his nails? He hadn't done that since high school.

In spite of himself, it looked like he'd slept through most of the day—clouds were gathering on the horizon for another late afternoon rainstorm, and the sun was glaring through their gray edges. Four o'clock? He'd slept for twelve goddamn hours. Fuck.

Stumbling a little, he eased himself out of the rocker and leaned a shoulder against the dingy grey side of the house, waiting for his balance to catch up with him. The wood was cool against his shoulder, and he fancied he could hear the Zombie rustling around on the other side of the window. He wondered if Hanna was up. He wondered if Hanna was even back yet.

He wondered if he was really suffocating to death, or if it was just a clever imitation his lungs were trying out on him.

Reeling with early morning nausea, he shuffled back inside, past the dead guy digging through the cabinets for something edible, past Hanna mercifully passed out on the living room sofa, and stopped.

"Oi, Green," the doctor started, voice thick with sleep. "Any good news I missed? We got a cure yet?"

The dead man looked up from his search, features as inscrutable as ever. "I'm afraid not, doctor. We were unable to make contact with any vampires before Hanna's strength gave out. We've asked the council to bring a consultant in and put out word for any sympathetic parties in the area to assist us. When Hanna is recovered enough to scry again, we'll see who they've gathered up. In the meantime… we wait."

"Wait," Worth repeated. "What fuckin' use're any of 'em? Sure, wait, no fuckin' problem."

"We have no choice," the zombie pointed out. He looked down. "It will be difficult enough to find a vampire willing to divulge race secrets to outsiders, even outsiders as well connected as us. That's fact, and we have to accept that."

"Accept my boot up their fuckin' ass," Worth growled, stalking out of the kitchen before he did something else he'd regret. He shouldered his way into the guest bedroom where Conrad was splayed out in the darkness. White flesh on white sheets, the absolute stillness of a sleeping corpse, the soft bumping sounds of sorting boxes from the house behind him. Worth leaned against the doorway.

The fact of the matter was he was no medical genius by any means. He had gotten by on street savvy, slashed prices, and the ability to keep his mouth shut when it mattered. He'd gotten pretty far in the system before he dropped out all together—never made it to residency, but he knew all the bones, all the basics, could do most of it by a combination of books and trial and error. And he'd done alright. If this was Hanna... if this was anyone, anything, else... then he would have had his sleeves rolled up and a scalpel in his hand the moment they had come stumbling and shaking through the door of Zadock Allen's fuck-ugly house.

But Doc Worth, for all the things he'd been accused of over the years, was still no miracle worker. Had never been a witchdoctor. He'd told Conrad that once. Nobody ever sat him down and gave him a crash course in voodoo or undead physiology, and he'd asked a question here or there when he could get away with it, read what material he could when no one was looking, but.

But.

But he was at a goddamn loss for this one. If he was the praying type he'd fire up a few words and hope they hit a mark, but he'd been kind of soured on religion lately and his pride wouldn't let him.

The red, glittering welt under Conrad's collar bone pulled his eyes like an old bitch snapping up a leash. It hadn't oozed much at all during the night, and that might have been a good sign. But after so many hours lying here in the empty darkness, it was just as wide and angry as it ever was. The thin stream of light pouring in over Worth's shoulder was barely enough to make out the color—from here you might even believe it was the hot cherry color of living blood.

"Doctor," the zombie said, somewhere behind him—too quiet, damn him, he had had no business being so quiet- "I've discovered that this house is equipped with alarmingly meager supplies. I'm going to try my hand at a bit of foraging, will you be alright here while I'm gone? Do you need assistance with anything?"

"Ain't nothin' I kin do," the living man replied, eyes locked on the mattress in front of him. "Least one'a us oughta be useful. You go on."

The presence at his back dissipated, back door creaked shut, and Hanna made a soft noise in his cushions like someone had kicked him in the gut. Worth pulled himself off the doorjamb and let it close behind him. The absolute darkness around him swallowed up the glitter of second-hand blood in an instant, swallowed up the walls and floor and ceiling and the white sheet and the accumulated layer of shit on the floor from years of disuse. He stumbled, cursing in a wheeze, to the edge of the bed and navigated his way to the head of it by the edge of Conrad's lukewarm skin.

A hand slipped over the smooth top of a pectoral and onto the sticky mass of torn flesh and thick blood. He could feel the grit of ash mixed into the center of it, that little reminder that this was not just any patient. He reminded himself that infection was something that just didn't happen to dead people, and pushed a finger through the skin and muscle and fluid down to the bottom of the shredded injury. He was hoping—stupid, idiot hope—that there was something there he could pull out, something keeping the wound open when it ought to be healing. A bit of wood, a glob of dirt, a broken nail, something that he could get a hand on and fix.

All he could feel was Conrad.

"Ya know ya gotta wake up sometime," he informed the body, wrenching the finger free with a sick squelch . "Nobody around here's allowed ter die before me. I'm older, I got seniority. You gotta wait yer turn, Princess."

The hand settled down blindly on Conrad's stomach, just below the arch of his ribs. The shape was more familiar than it ought to be, by all rights, more familiar to him than Conrad could have known.

"You wake up now," he went on, "I'll getcha all the goddamn flowers Hanna keeps tellin' me ter get. Figure it's about time, innit? I'm not gonna be around forever, unlike some people, might as well give it a stab while I got a few years left in me. We'll go shoe shoppin' 'r summat. There's gotta be a mall somewhere that ain't burned ter the ground yet. Talk about our feelin's, all that girly shit. Whatever ya wan', 's on me."

The absolute stillness underneath his palms unnerved him, gave him the creeping feeling that he was alone in this room, talking to himself. He grimaced, teeth grinding as his jaw pushed out.

"We all know y'ain't gonna die, Princess. Nobody's fooled. It's just a matter'a time 'fore Hanna gets ya… I dunno, some kinda transplant or a proper witchdoctor. Fuck me if I know how this magic shit works. He'll figure it out. Maybe ya gotta kill somebody. Course yer just gonna be a pansy about it if it comes to that, but I s'pose I can handle the nitty-gritty this time, what with yer…"

He didn't realize he'd stopped speaking for a long minute, about the same time his crooked, calloused fingers reached the invisible top of a hip bone. The empty space swished around in his mouth where words should have been, dry and inadequate.

"Gonna kill 'er ," he remarked, at last, splaying his hand out across the boneless, vulnerable pelvic region. "Bust that fucker's head in fer doin' this. I can take a lotta shit from a lotta people, but we crossed the motherfucking line on this. I'm gonna kill 'er."

All this whispering and ooze and stifling airless darkness, and his ruined lungs were being crushed by an invisible fist while he pushed past it. He'd had a thought.

They needed a vampire. He'd get them a fucking vampire.

"Here's what we're gonna do," he announced to the darkness, suddenly, digging in with jagged nails. "I'm givin' ya a pint'a mine, I'm gettin' us some answers, an' then I'm gonna go take this fist an' see how that cunt likes havin' a foreign object shoved through her chest cavity."

The doctor stood up and went digging around in the drawers for his transfusion apparatus. His fingers shook slightly as they gripped the plastic tubing.

This was where he drew the line.

Conrad woke in darkness. That was pretty standard. He thought he could probably count on one hand the times in the last year he'd woken up in the light. What was notable about this darkness, for once, was that it was empty and full of crushing agony.

People talk about heartburn. They have no fucking clue what they're talking about. Conrad's chest was a white-hot core of acid and fire, and in the absolute silence of the unfamiliar room he imagined he could feel his own muscles melting and rehealing in an endless loop inside of him, and promptly felt the phantom sensation of needing desperately to vomit.

"Oh," he gasped, "Oh my god. I'm dying. Again."

And the empty house replied nothing.

After a few moments the pain dulled slightly, just enough to give him back sentient thought. Yeah, and he expected that to last long. Slowly, minding his injury which he still had yet to really look at—yes, he was putting it off—the undead man pushed himself into a sitting position. Okay, so far so good.

"Hanna?" he called, voice breaking on the first syllable. "Hanna?"

He didn't bother to call for Worth. Experience told him that if the doctor was in the house, he'd be in the same room as his patient. That was just how Worth did things. He couldn't pass up the opportunity to be the first person to yell at you after you opened your eyes. If he wasn't here already, then he was out...

Out...

Out where?

Conrad had a whole lot of questions, and nobody to answer them. Whose house was this? Why was he here? What the hell happened to him? Why was there mud in his hair?

He didn't bother to ask himself why he was in so much pain because, really, the answer was obvious.

Hesitantly, the vampire turned his attention to the glittering pool of blackish ooze in the side of his chest. Yeesh. He prodded the gooey edge (ouch), completely grossed out by the texture. Was his blood always this disgusting? He quickly pulled his hand away and went about getting himself up from the bed.

What if Worth wasn't here… because Conrad wasn't a patient?

Conrad struggled with his limbs, knees giving out as he hit the floor. Fuck. The bedside table made a decent handrail, and he pulled himself up with his left arm. What if they never made it off the mansion property?

Conrad found himself in a two-fold wrestling match, trying to get his shaking legs under control even as he fought with pain for control of his brain. Pain was trying to draw a line down the middle, there that's your side this side is mine, but Conrad needed that side too and fuck you Pain, this isn't a sitcom.

Oh, he was addled. He was definitely addled.

The vampire could smell Worth on him, cigarettes and sweat and blood, still plenty fresh enough. His last lucid memory was clinging to the doctor's side like a spineless leech bombarded with the kind of pain that makes your vision go starry. The scent was still there. He couldn't have been out for too long. Maybe a few hours.

And he was still alive, somehow, and that was good. Why they'd left him alive he didn't know, but then he didn't completely understand why they'd kept him alive before either. Was he still in the mansion? An upper floor room maybe? If he was, Hanna couldn't be too far away. She'd keep him, definitely, and maybe Conrad wasn't supposed to be awake yet, and if he could get to Hanna maybe...

With that thought in mind, Conrad pushed his way out of the bedroom and down the hall, and through a living room, and-

Out onto a lawn that was decidedly more suburban than he remembered. Conrad stared at it. Stared at the big curly tree that had clearly been some kid's playground in the years past. Turned and stared at the little suburban house behind him; old, but definitely not a century old. And he started laughing.

It was pretty morbid laughter and it hurt like hell, but he laughed anyways. What the fuck was wrong with him? He wakes up safely in a real indoor bed for the first time in weeks, and his first assumption is that he's been recaptured by a crazy woman who thinks she's his mother and he needs to escape. That's just... it was so...

"I need a new life," he muttered, slumping against the twisted playground tree.

But he could faintly smell Worth again, here. Worth had leaned against this tree. Recently too, or else the rain would have washed it away. Conrad looked up, towards the sky, and realized for the first time that it was technically daylight out, behind the clouds and the raindrops that were getting in his eyes. He'd just walked out into the daytime air like a crazy person.

Well, he was already outside, and he wasn't a pile of mud so that was a good thing. Contemplating the grey-indigo swirl overhead, Conrad ran a hand over the trunk of the tree. Worth had been this way. The house was empty, and maybe he hadn't been recaptured or anything but the house was empty. If something strange had happened, they might not have had time to take his bed-ridden unconscious self along. They might need help. At the very least, they might need him to meet them half-way.

Conrad took a deep breath, and started walking.

The RV was parked down the street, and a flicker of relief seeped through his oozing chest. They left the keys in the ignition. Yes. But if they left the RV behind, then where had they gone? Conrad stared at the road through the windshield. There were footprints, here and there, where the thicker mud had sucked at a large boot. He'd bet anything he knew exactly whose boot that was, and judging by the direction...

Well, it was as good a guess as any, although he couldn't imagine why it would be the case. Maybe he should stay back. Maybe they meant for him to be here, where it was safe. Maybe...

Conrad drove off towards the West Mansion, chasing a specter.

None of them were stupid. Nobody with the kind of experience they'd accumulated over the years would set off to track down a rogue vampire without a fool proof method to get it done—even if it was only supposed to be reconnaissance, the chances it would stay that way were slimmer than Hanna's underfed waistline. On the list of beings you didn't want to even consider the idea of a fair fight with, bloodsuckers were probably third down after Gods and Fey. But they have weaknesses. Everything does; it's written into the contracts of nature, like the inevitability of gravity or decomposition.

You've got different levels of rules. At the bottom, you've got personal codes. They're easy to break. Then you've got societal rules—you can break them, easily too, but you might end up regretting it. And then there are cold hard laws, which usually boil down to a seesaw balancing act between action and death.

Law one: sunlight kills.

Law two: starvation kills.

Law three: a stake through the heart kills.

Worth was thinking about this as he broke down the mansion door. It was a shame he'd come here for more than just killing.

The standby plan for acquiring rogue vampires had always been track and capture, like rabbit hunting at a distance. Traps, ideally. Find their coffin, if they were old fashioned, and lock it up tight enough to lug back to the nearest Court for extradition. Lure them into a cardboard box and pull the string. And, if none of that worked, there were weapons that could give you the upper hand in a conventional fight. Nobody looked forward to those.

You start by setting up a perimeter.

In the dull drizzle, Worth laid down a thick ring of rock salt around the outside of the mansion. It was crude, but without Hanna's magic it was the best he could do. A salt ring would hold anything, right down to the goddamn devil himself, and he'd have a while before the rain washed it away. Long enough to start something, anyways, and that was all he needed.

With the perimeter securely in place, proceed to fuck things up.

So Worth broke down the mansion door. It wasn't hard. He'd come prepared, and he was nothing short on ammo. No subtlety this time. He wanted noise.

Three of Adelaide's boytoys found him in the first corridor. He put a slug through one's lung and lost a second bullet to another's abdomen. Third shot went wild, hit a vase. Fourth got the last kid in the leg, damn him for moving so much. This was why he'd come here alone. There was no time for sentimentality, no time for begging or truces or clever arguments, no wringing hands and stalemates as you beat away on the thick shield of human arrogance. No time for the inevitable betrayals, or the mind games.

Maybe they were innocents, in the grand scheme of things. Worth kind of doubted it. One way or another, he'd probably never have to explain himself.

As he marched past the yowling body of the last one, nearly trod on a scrabbling hand, Worth dropped his empty gun at the doorway and moved on. Wouldn't do them any good, and he had more. The next gun in his hand was Conrad's, one of the twins, and his hand tightened around the grip that was just a little too small for him. The twins had always been his favorites. Always got a kick out of watching Connie use them.

He pushed his way deeper into the house, towards the demolished staircase where a search could properly begin.

Now, where was the last kid?

By the time he found his way back to that broken, eldritch door, Doc Worth was convinced that the last one had hightailed it out to his perimeter and started kicking the whole thing apart. Wouldn't that be lovely. He came to a stop just outside the doorway, glaring down the sights of Conrad's gun into the quiet darkness of the obliterated stairwell. Chunks of stone covered the carpet at the top, a two-way excavation effort. Despite the lamp still hanging, somehow, over the entrance, Worth could see all of about jack shit into the depths.

Rolls of thoughts unraveled from their skeins at lightning speed. The junior mooks were already on their way to the front door by the time he broke in, meaning they had to have been on that side of the house. While the complex was silent enough that you could probably hear a couple gunshots in the north wing from the east wing, getting from point A to point B would take longer than that. So they hadn't been here, clearing out debris when the doctor arrived. And if they hadn't been digging here, then the chances were that—

Worth turned, and realized belatedly that he wasn't alone in the hallway any more.

Adelaide leaned against the doorway of a nearby room, looking at him. Not smiling, not glaring. Just looking. And he looked back.

"Where's yer last henchman?" Worth asked, finally.

Adelaide blinked at him. "I ate him," she replied. "Just now, actually. You dropped a ceiling on me, you cretin, did you expect me to simply waltz off into the night?"

Worth said nothing.

"Don't tell me you came here alone," she said at last. The thin lamplight coiled in her ragged hair. "Even you're not that stupid."

Worth said nothing.

"It would be nice if they were all dead," she went on, as the strap of her torn black dress limped its way down her shoulder. "But I don't think I'm generally that lucky. Did I at least manage to kill the little nerd?"

Still, Worth said nothing.

"Maybe you're here to avenge him," she mused, coldly. "He did smell an awful lot like you, I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe you've gotten closer over the years. Well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but that's really not allowed. Rules are rules, and we dueled, fair and square. He lost. I get the spoils, technically— property, titles, servants... if he'd had any. The point is. He's dead, I win, no takebacks. No revenge."

"He ain't dead," the doctor replied. "And yer gonna tell me why."

Adelaide frowned. "Even if I knew, why on earth would I tell you now? There's nothing in it for me. I hope Achenleck chokes to death on his own putrid lungs like the gutless worm he is."

And in lieu of reply, Doc Worth drew Conrad's gun and shot her through the chest.

The shot was too low to splatter the only target that mattered, but the shrieking wail that punched out between her teeth indicated a hell of a lot of pain if not outright fatality. In seconds she was on him, claws bearing down on his face, and he jerked aside to escape the slice. Slow, yeah, but not for long. She had been healing as they spoke, was still healing as they fought- nails and fists steel hard- and she'd only get stronger.

It's always easier to go for the kill. You don't fire unless you're willing to have somebody's death on your hands. You don't cut unless you're squared with the fact that there's a chance it could all go wrong. He probably could have offed the bitch with that first shot, if that's what he was here to do. If he was just here to kill her, he could have brought the incendiaries, or the stake-gun, that bizarre piece of Hollywood absurdity that Hanna was so proud of. But he was here for something bigger.

A jagged talon caught him in the flat of one cheek and tore a line under his ear. He landed a crucifix-studded blow to her sternum. She threw him into a wall, and the abused arm from last night—already well aquatinted with the door behind them—ramped up a shriek that rattled his nerves and left the whole limb next to useless. Everything passed through him like snapshots, disconnected moments rattling past so quickly that they almost made sense, his muscles filling in the gaps between frames.

She made a stab for his heart; there were no words between them, but he could see her eyes blown wild and furious and he knew that this was her contribution to the conversation they were sharing, the equivalent of a spitting verbal barb, and he dodged.

The dodge threw him off balance, near-useless arm barely breaking the momentum before he hit carpet-covered stone, and then of course she landed on his chest, of course, why miss out on the fun of having someone's heel puncture a pancreas. In the flashing seconds before she brought a second heel down on his ribs, Worth twisted his hand loose from the iron beading and threw himself upwards off the floor, scrawny chest overturning the eerily light form perched atop him.

She went down, and he tumbled forward after her with his fist clenched around the crucifix like a knife. Pencil-thin tine met vulnerable throat and was lost in the sizzle of flesh.

Adelaide screamed, and the scream came out as a gurgling monster from the depths of her boiling throat. Worth landed knees-first on her delicately boned ribcage, not so much fun now is it, and drew a forest of tapering pins from his pocket. Fuck garlic, give him something iron and sharp any day. Point after point, they tore through her misshapen hands until the white flesh went inert and useless.

"How about now?"  Worth demanded, slamming a pin into the fleshy gap between tibia and fibula. "Wanna tell me now? 'Cause I'll tell ya the truth, this don't bother me none. I kin do this all fuckin' day."

Adelaide cursed out something wet and incomprehensible that probably wasn't English to start with. "Keep your nose out of vampire business," she spat, at last, shoulders jerking fruitlessly. "He should have known better than to start a duel he couldn't win. His death is on his own head."

"Tell me what ya did to 'im," the doctor said, "an' this won't get any uglier."

A wild punch, thrown in a boneless whip from the shoulder, caught Worth in the side of the head like a blast of thunder, sent him bouncing across the carpeted floor as Adelaide's victorious shriek rattled off the walls. Veins popped where his skin met floor, joints rattled, his bad arm went utterly numb, and at last he rolled to a gasping stop against a door jamb.

Motion caught his eye.

The woman had rolled herself into a crouch, teeth glowing as she yanked pins free and spat them across the floor. Worth went for his gun, fumbling left-handedly at empty space. Shit. He'd lost it somewhere in the tumble. He went for the last one, strapped awkwardly under one shoulder, as Adelaide stumbled gracelessly to her feet.

"Imbecilic infant," she hissed, skin melting from wickedly curved bones. Her petite form tilted uncertainly and righted itself. "Are you so stupid? I am four centuries old! I survived the French Revolution while I was still mortal! To even imagine you were a match for me, alone, you pitiful, arrogant son of a bitch, is—"

The black-slicked end of a talon blossomed at the center of her chest. Adelaide glanced down, took a half step forward, and crumbled into an explosion of feathery white ashes.

Standing in her shadow was Conrad, face contorted with pain and fading fury, torso lined with a thin trail of black ooze. He wobbled slightly, and the shredded welt in the right of his chest glittered under the lamplight.

"You should start paying me for every time I have to do that," he muttered.

Ten minutes before, outside the mansion grounds, Conrad was not having a good night at all. "Fucking salt-circles," the vampire grumbled, kicking the dirt. And to think he'd been worried about his 'invitation' into the mansion wearing off. Fucking Worth and his fucking dirty tricks. Conrad wiped a rivulet of water out of his eye. There was nothing for it but to look for a weak spot somewhere else.

He circled the property, feeling out chinks in the theoretical armor. It felt a little like he imagined a force-field would feel: like a wall of electrified air was pushing against him. In the back yard, if you could call this sprawling neglected garden a yard, he found a spot where the glittering white powder had been covered in mud. Did that count?

He took a step towards the break.

Well, he reasoned, there was salt naturally occurring in the ground plenty of places, and he'd never had inexplicable force-field trouble anywhere else. Holding onto that thought, Conrad threw himself through the break.

It was kind of like being squished between two bosomy spinster aunts until your lungs screamed, and he was very displeased to be reminded of that experience. The hollow core of acid pain in his chest flared up, lighting his whole torso on fire, and oh that had been a stupid idea why had he even tried that?

Then he popped out the other side.

On a twisted sort of upside, he considered as he stumbled his way to the back door, at least the agony there had made his normal pain feel more manageable.

The inside of the house passed by in a kind of blur—he caught a whiff of the doctor and followed that, and then a nose-full of blood that nearly made him turn right around. Jesus, the whole place smelled like blood. He couldn't figure out which direction it was coming from. A moment, frozen, and then he raced towards the basement. He had this feeling...

Around a corner, and there. There it was.

Conrad felt, for a second, as if he had stumbled into some bizarre fresco panorama.

The vampire woman, ripping stakes from her mutilated hands with her own teeth, represents the devil and the temptation to evil. See how her sexuality is obscured by her battered, inhuman appearance? Notice the glow where her teeth touch the iron, how it lights up her face and creates an inversion of the natural light play. The human, of course, represents humanity- observe his expression, it's very subtle isn't it, the way the artist sculpts fear into his shoulders but not his face?

And then Adelaide rolled to her feet, a five-foot-four tower of animal rage and arrogant fury, and shattered the illusion.

And Conrad realized that this was his opening.

It wasn't the first time he'd done this—caught someone in the back mid-strike, used the doctor like a decoy without meaning to. They always end up like this. In a way, they started like this. He thinks, privately, that that night in the gas station two and some-change years ago was really the beginning of him and Worth. Before that, it had always been Worth, and him, and the space between them where you could fit a convenient comma.

He had a talon through Adelaide's heart before he even realized he had talons. And unlike her, he did not miss.

"You should start paying me for every time I have to do that," he quipped as she toppled and disintegrated, doing his best to pretend like this was just another fight in a long line of fights, and Worth's bloody, bruising face didn't unnerve him to hell and back.

God, he looked awful, like he'd been through a minefield in a hurricane. Conrad's stomach twisted into knots.

But Worth didn't say anything. And the emptiness hung between them like a thick smog, obscuring everything except Worth's horribly still blue eyes. Panic clawed its way up his throat. Why didn't he move?

Say something.

"Now, what the fuck is going on here?" he started, desperately. "You jerks leave me to wake up alone in a strange house with a hole punched through me the size of a marker, which hurts like a motherfucker, by the way..." He paused, briefly, a wave of pain breaking over him. Well, say goodbye to that lovely adrenaline-numbness. He made a throaty noise, half-misery and half-annoyance. He just had to remind himself, didn't he? "Actually," he added, wincing, "I think following you here was a really bad idea on my part, I—ow, I think I'm just gonna-"

And then Worth finally moved. The relief that hit him knocked the rest of the words right out of his mouth—they hadn't been all that important anyways—and left him a mute observer as Worth struggled to stand. Did he need help? Would he accept help? Maybe if Conrad grabbed him really hard, he'd be too weak to push free. Stubborn ass.

But why wasn't he saying anything? Had Adelaide done something to him? While theoretically Conrad was completely for a permanently muted Doc Worth, the potential reality of it made him feel that same phantom nausea from earlier. A ghost of a question, a thoroughly strangled are you okay died on his lips.

And then the doctor was standing in front him, oddly tilted and bloody and favoring his left leg, and shit, that must have been one hell of a fight because Conrad hadn't seen the man so messed up since that time they got mixed up in a gang war in what was left of Chicago. Guilt prickled under his skin, underneath the pain and the exhaustion.

If he hadn't fallen in that damn river, none of this would be happening.

Worth wrapped his hands around Conrad's neck, and the undead man completely froze. This was weird. This was really really weird. Maybe if he'd had regular breath, it would have caught. He didn't, though, so it was hard to tell.

Lips. Conrad had a mouthful of lips. And that was really the best way he could describe it, because Worth and kiss were such completely antitheses that his brain couldn't even string together a sentence with the two words in it. It lasted probably half of the theoretical eternity that Conrad had been allotted the night he was turned. It lasted seconds.

Jesus Christ, Worth's lips were warm.

Finally, finally, the doctor pulled away, grinned, and said, "There," like he'd just checked off the last item on a grocery list. "Looks like ya got ter rescue me after all."

And Conrad just stared at him.

And stared at him.

And...

Punched him in his goddamn stupid miserable motherfucking face.

Later he'd feel kind of guilty all over again about making the split in Worth's lip worse, but at least he hadn't actually broken anything like he'd really wanted to.

"I can't believe you just did that!" the vampire yelped, pushing the human so hard he actually fell over. On his ass. Like a fucking toddler. "That is such a fucking invasion of my personal space, and you got blood in my mouth and now I'm fucking hungry, do you really think this is the time or the place for your astounding brand of dickery?"

And Worth just grinned up at him like the cat that got the canary, and Conrad knew better than to give him what he wanted but god, the man just pissed him off in every way. He was good at it, slicing away with his little scalpel at all the angry, raw nerves in Conrad.

"That's it, I'm out of here," the undead man snarled, marching off back towards the hall. "Next time you need a rescue, call somebody else."

There was the sound of uneven feet, and then Worth was behind him, inhumanly long legs keeping up despite his awkward limp.

"Aw," the doctor breathed, grin in every syllable, "y'liked it. Admit it."

"Piss off," Conrad growled, wondering if his injury would let him walk any faster. This felt like pushing pain-thresholds as it was. "I did not."

"Yeah? Then how come ya didn' throw me off, eh?"

Fucking Worth. Like it wasn't enough to screw with him in the real world, the bastard had to crawl his way into Conrad's head and graffiti embarrassing fluttery feelings all round the inside of his brain. What did he get out of this? Even broken and bleeding and—god Conrad was hungry now—limping, couldn't he take a break for just one hour?

Conrad had been worried about him. Couldn't he understand that?

"Don't reckon I'm in ravishin' condition," the doctor went on, positively gleeful, "But I figure, what with you bein' th' big strong man'a this particular scenario, maybe y'd like ter switch it around this time. I do a pretty good blushin' damsel, tell ya the truth."

"I'm not talking to you," Conrad replied, so furious that the words actually came out as a perfect, wild serenity. It was like hearing himself in the third person.

Conrad practically kicked the front door open, and fuck everything, the world didn't just taste like blood it smelled like blood too. This was horrible. And Worth laughed, and Conrad felt this insane urge to start breaking things, because fucking Jesus Christ, Worth was finally the damsel and Conrad was still at his goddamn mercy.

So Adelaide was dead. Worth felt like he was walking through a weird sort of dream world as he dug Lamont's thoroughly abused cross out of the landscape of ashes on the mansion floor. Every muscle protested, he couldn't feel his arm, his vision was going a little blurry at the edges from the bouncing, he was bleeding in five places, and despite all that- together with it even, linking it all up into one great wild grin- Conrad standing there, bitching at him, oblivious. And nothing was real, and he didn't even care. Because fuck everything. They won.

There was a lot of first aid in the next couple hours. Conrad, the stubborn bastard, insisted on being the one to drive the RV that he'd hijacked back to the house where Hanna and the zombie were waiting, oblivious to the fact that anything had gone on while they were out. Nobody had bothered to check the guest bedroom to see if Conrad was still there. Why would they? He was supposed to be in a coma.

No one bothered to look for Worth either, but he'd been counting on that.

By the time they got their stories sorted, Hanna had nearly hacked up a lung freaking out over how dangerous Worth's plan had been, and Worth talked himself hoarse explaining that he had it, seriously, it was under control you goddamn little hypocrite. And then they all jumped on Conrad for leaving the RV when he had a puncture in his chest cavity, because what the fuck, Conrad you're supposed to be the sensible one. Wounds were bandaged, a couple fingers were splinted, and when they went to do something about Conrad's gaping wounds they found them decidedly less gaping than before.

Hanna explained as he went.

"So," he started, dabbing uncertainly at the gooey mass of blood and ash and barely-started scabs. "While you two crazy people were gallivanting around trying to pull a double suicide on us, I was getting some answers. Turns out Finas was in the area, and—well, I guess Casimiro probably wasn't too far away, but he always gets weird about helping people, you know, so it was just Finas. I think he might like you, Connie."

The undead man scowled. "Doubt it," he retorted.

"Well, let's see, where to start..." Hanna paused, hand stilling. "You know how we're always talking about vampires having rules, right? Gotta do this, gotta do that, protocol protocol sunlight protocol? So... well no. Um. So imagine, for a sec, that you've got a couple hundred potentially immortal superhumans who all know each other, and they're sort of by and large amoral sociopaths, right? They're all friggin' nuts. Short of going totally Highlander on the whole power structure, how do you keep them from just freaking out and starting crazy civil war feuds with each other all over the place?"

"I dunno," Worth replied, in the middle of performing a sloppy appraisal of his numb right arm. "I kinda liked the Highlander option."

Hanna snorted. "And that ended so well for the civilian casualties. No, okay, it's more like... think of vampires as the nobility. There's not too many of them, they all know each other... they've got serious snobbery issues... anyways, they do what the nobility does. They form up a shit ton of internal protocol, and when all else fails, they have duels."

"What does that have to do with—"

"Shhh, Connie, I'm getting to that. So a vampire duel is like a magically binding contract—it sort of referees itself yanno, prevents interference and stuff. The duel is in play until one party dies. Or both. It can, it can really go either way. The magic doesn't care. The junior vampire makes the first move, and—yeah, you can see where I'm going with this, right?"

"Unfortunately," Conrad muttered.

"So it went down like this. You made the first move on Adelaide, initiating a duel. You're not supposed to have more than two parties fighting at any given time, but see it's vampire rules so non-vampires are like basically non-entities as far as the magic is concerned. We all pitch in, we get Adelaide on the ropes. I bring the roof down, and while we're not paying attention Addy uses those claws for exactly what they're intended for. That's heart-stabbing, to be clear? Only thing is, she misses. Worth pulls Conrad out, still more or less intact, and we all run like hell. Great, good. Except nobody's dead, so the duel is still in play. Meaning..."

Nobody said anything.

"Oh come on," Hanna frowned, "it's not that hard! Meaning, Conrad can't heal because the magic is still enforcing duel-rules. Magic's still waiting for the kill shot. At least, that's what Finas thinks was happening, it's kinda hard to diagnose from a hundred miles away. So his body shuts down, trying to rewire itself around the injury. That, by the way, is kind of impossible, but props to Conrad's body for giving it a shot. In the mean time, Worth gives Connie a transfusion- nice job cleaning up all that equipment, by the way, were you just figuring you'd die in there and somebody else would have to wash it out?"

"It was an option," the doctor replied, tearing apart a bandage with his teeth. This would be a lot easier with two hands.

"Right. Can we just go back to how stupid that was for a second? Because dude, that was so stupid I need to, like... invent a new word for it. Neeeever hunt vampires alone. Never ever ever."

Worth looked staunchly out the window, peering into the dim blue fields. The clouds were clearing up just in time for night to fall, leaving the world in a vague haze between shudders of rainfall. Hanna hadn't asked about the boys yet. Worth wasn't sure what he'd tell him, when the question came. He was hoping it didn't.

"Wait," Conrad said, after a moment. "Does this mean I won a vampire duel? Because, I mean, she's dead and this whole... business... is healing up now, so. I won?"

"Ya wanna trophy?" the doctor asked, reaching for the gauze. "Kin put it with yer Junior Miss England Pageant trophy, eh?"

"Still not talking to you," Conrad huffed, glancing pointedly at the Conrad-sized fist print in Worth's cheek. A reminder of Worth's desperate sentimentality.

From his quiet corner, the zombie finally spoke up. "Doctor," he said, "would you like assistance with that bandage? It seems to be giving you trouble."

"'M fuckin' fine,"  Worth grunted. "All'a you dumbasses need ter lay off. I got it under control."

Hanna made one of those flappy quiet please motions. "Kay, yes, Connie, you won the duel. And Finas tells me that you keep what you kill which means, like, everything of Adelaide's is now legally yours I guess? And that's... kinda cool. I guess. D'you have a particular craving for minidresses?"

"When don't he?" Worth observed.

"Not. Talking," Conrad repeated through gritted teeth.

"A thought," the zombie interrupted, single index finger raised. "The Godstone was in Adelaide's possession at the time of her death. By that logic, it now belongs to Conrad."

Momentary silence fell.

"Well I don't want it," Conrad announced, running a thumb around the edge of his chest wound. "Hanna can have it. I'll stick with guns, which conveniently have explicable mechanical functions and don't start interracial arms races which I know this will."

Hanna tapped the table thoughtfully. "I don't really want it either," he said. "I mean, absolute power, am I right? Totally not my thing. And it's like... probably some kind of unnatural abomination considering the guy who designed it. Probably made it out of orphan guts and kitten tears."

"Can it be destroyed?" the zombie inquired, steepling his gloved fingers over the corner of the table.

"Maybe, could be. Hopefully it's not one of those fires that forged it deals because I am so not feeling like a trek up to Mordor in this weather. And we definitely couldn't take Worth with us, because he's a huge frickin' hypocrite and he'll probably get himself killed."

"Takes one ter know one, fucker."

Later that night, bandaged and tired and aching in various degrees, four men limped out of an old Volvo and into the damp darkness hanging over the hill at Arkham's eastern edge. Doc Worth slipped into step with Conrad, a ways behind Hanna and the dead man and their irritatingly undamaged selves. If they walked any faster they'd have a marathon on their hands.

The fuckers were already half way to the mansion door by the time the doctor dragged his battered ass to the bottom of the hill.

"So," Worth said, "ya still givin' me that silent treatment?"

Conrad sniffed, looking as dignified and aloof as you could with a head covered in mud and a vest thrown over bare chest like a gay '80s pin up. He hadn't wanted to risk leaking ooze on one of his own clean shirts, and neither of the two closets in Zadock Allen's house had had much of anything in Conrad's size.

"Remind me not ta kiss you again," the doctor muttered, rubbing a sore spot at the base of his spine. "Yer a goddamn cold fish of a White Knight, tell ya that. Stick ter the damsel business."

"I just. You. It. Fuck, is it that hard to just give me an hour or two to myself?"

"Now see, tha's just a piss poor attitude ya got goin' there. I'm startin' ter think we'da been better off diggin' ya a hole somewhere an' tossin' ya in. Coulda saved myself an arm, at least."

"Look, do you want something?"

"Just figured," he answered, after a moment, "Won't be pretty once we get inside. I could use the backup when Gingersnap blows a gasket, might keep 'im from rippin' off my other arm."

"Backup?" Conrad echoed, clearly nonplussed. "From Hanna? What did you do, piss on the rug?"

"See," Worth remarked with a nasty sinking feeling, "that wouldn' bother Hanna. That's just you."

And then Hanna's horrified yelp floated down from the entrance, and Worth considered, briefly, that when he burst through that door earlier that night he had half expected it to be a one way trip. He hadn't really considered that he might have to actually explain himself.

Conrad and Worth took off at the same time, and came skidding to a stop in the doorway at exactly the same time. The room already smelled like blood, and gunpowder, and the crawling scent of a gut wound. Hanna stood in the middle of the ancient oriental carpet with his fists clenched so visibly tight that there was probably going to be muscle damage.

He whirled, nostrils flaring. "Conrad, how come you didn't tell me about this?"

The vampire did a terrific impression of a businessman about to be squashed under Godzilla's foot, terrified petrifaction and all. He blinked, bug-eyed. "I didn't notice?"

"You didn't notice this? How did you not notice this?"

"I. I don't know," he tried, uneasily avoiding eye-contact. "I had other... things on my mind?"

"Conrad, this room is like practically carpeted with dead teenagers and it smells like a fucking slaughter house. How did you miss that?"

The hunted sort of cornered look on the undead man's face shifted sideways into irritation and right on into righteous indignation. "Well I had just nearly died, for one thing!"

Silence; ugly silence, like the silence over an empty, wet road just before the crash.

"There wasn't time, Hanna," the doctor tried to explain, words jumbling up and falling flat. Hanna wouldn't understand- Hanna couldn't understand. "Ya know as well as I do what happens when y'let 'em live. Riddles an' backstabbin' and—goddamnit, Hanna, y'd rather me bet yer friend's life on some idiot's honor code?"

Hopelessly, Conrad tried to interrupt. "I never actually asked—"

"Butt out, Princess, we're talkin' about yer life 'n death here."

The magician let out an awful noise halfway between a yowl and a groan and did an about-face, marching off down the hall. They all scrambled after him.

"Look," he snapped, stomping down the corridor, "I get that you've got a really fucked up view of the world, okay, I get that. We all get that. But these guys are—those guys were younger than I was when I first met you, do you get that? I mean, do you really get that? They had time, they had choices."

"Three strangers fer... a guy ya know well is a fair trade. I've settled fer worse."

"They were living people, Worth! Not trading cards! I just thought," Hanna went on, heedless, "you know, oh he's pragmatic, but he'll do the right thing. Fat fucking chance, right? I guess that's my fault, for thinking you had a heart or something this whole time."

Worth was pretty sure he had stumbled his way into a lucid nightmare. Of all the things he'd known would catch up with him one day, every pessimistic thread of fate he'd traced in silence with his masochistic fingers, this was the one thing he'd allowed himself to believe he could avoid. And he knew that it wasn't just this- not just his personal fuckup driving the growing rage through Hanna's skinny form, but some bitter scraps of expired fear and stress too and maybe Hanna didn't really mean it, or maybe he did. It didn't matter. The kid he'd pulled out of a gutter nearly nine years ago had finally figured out what kind of person he was.

"Hanna," the zombie was murmuring, "I'm sorry, but I think perhaps you're overreacting. This is by no means the first time one of us has killed to save ourselves."

"No," the magician retorted, "but it's the first time somebody killed people I specifically made deals to keep alive because they couldn't wait five fucking minutes to kill somebody else. The world is just piling up with dead people and now we're responsible for throwing a couple of teenagers on the pile too."

And Worth felt this… this thing clawing its way up his esophagus. Knew he was backed into a corner. He pushed himself forward, sped up his steps, and grabbed the younger man by his pale forearm.

"Hanna," he hissed, swinging around to grab the other forearm. He loomed over the redhead like a man staring down at a child, and Hanna stared back up coldly. "Hanna, try ter understand. Look at what we had on th' line."

"Were you even going to tell me?" the younger man demanded, jerking free. "Worth. Were you just gonna let me leave here thinking they were still alive?"

The doctor said nothing for a long time, until the silence became a suffocating thing that only his toneless "No," could puncture. "I wasn't gonna say anything."

And then Worth had a chest full of flailing redhead beating disproportionately heavy fists into his already-bruised sternum. Worth shifted his footing so that the blows didn't push him into the floor. Pain welled up in the webwork of his nerves. A blow hit him in the gut, and over the years of brawling he'd begun to think he was nearly numb to all of it, but Hanna's fist hit like an ice-bomb across his stomach.

"I can't fucking believe you after everything we did to save these guys and all the fucking stupid you ruined it all I just thought we could save at least someone was that really so much to fucking ask?"

Another icy blow rattled through Worth's guts, like a shock wave from a nuclear bomb, and he realized that it wasn't in his head. Hanna's hands were burning cold, white and electric like the sparks that come from snapping mint lifesavers in the dark. Between bombshells of blows that were hardly strong enough to leave a bruise, Worth felt the hairs on his neck and arms rearing up against whatever it was in the blows that made his flesh squirm for some kind of escape.

"All this time I've been making excuses for a sociopath, I should have gotten a clue years ago—"

Okay, something was seriously wrong here. Worth reached out and caught Hanna's fists mid-blow, watched electricity crackle across them as the kid struggled to get free, pitting his scrawny strength against Worth's lean muscle. Light caught the older man's eye, and he glanced down at the ragged t-shirt pulled across the magician's chest. Five points glowed faintly, and Worth could follow the zig-zagging line between them all too well.

"Hanna," Worth wheezed, losing his footing briefly. "Hanna, y'need ta—"

"Don't tell me to calm down! You don't have any room to tell me to calm down! I will fucking—"

"Hanna, yer gonna—"

"—Deserve after doing this!"

"Don't ya tell me y'wouldn'ta done it too, Hanna!" Worth shouted, losing his temper as well. "Don't ya even fuckin' dare!"

"You think I would have killed a bunch of kids?"

"I think ya look like yer about ter kill me, that's what I think!"

Blue eyes, blue like icebergs in the snow white of Hanna's sclera, glared and for a moment it looked like he was going to physically throw Worth off. He shouldn't have been able to, but in that moment, something told Worth that he could have. And then he glanced down, at his crackling knuckles and the points of light melting pinprick holes in the fabric of his shirt, and froze.

"I…" he said. "I didn't… do that?"

"Just happened," Worth agreed, breathing hard. "Yeah. Tends to go that way when yer pissed the hell off. I get it, yer fuckin' mad."

Slowly—half-terrified, half-defiant—the younger man turned his attention around Worth's shoulder, to where Conrad was standing awkwardly, sharing a desperate look with the zombie. Worth held his breath, willed Hanna to understand. He'd nearly lost one person tonight. He'd come too far to lose another, here, when he'd fought so hard.

Hanna turned his attention back to the doctor, and the look softened. The fizzling white running through him faded to dimness and then nothing. His hands went limp in the doctor's grip.

"I... guess it's different," he said, quietly, although the words seemed to take something out of him. "When it's like that. Feels different, I mean. It's not really different. Maybe I would have done it too? For him. I don't know. I just… wish you hadn't, you know?"

Yeah.

Worth let go.

And that was pretty much that.

They arrived at the stairwell of horrors not too long after, sober and silent where they had been cocky and relieved. Four pairs of shoes shifted uncomfortably around the field of ashes on the carpet, trying not to step in the remains of the woman who had managed to fuck them up more in the space of one day than three years on the road had even come close to. Worth walked the fine line where rubble dust faded into worse.

Conrad sniffed. "There's a body in there," he noted, nodding towards the room where Adelaide had recuperated. "You know, she was probably planning on eating the others too. She's... well, she was like that."

Hanna shook his head, looking pained. "Doesn't help. But, uh, thanks. Nice try."

In the end, they sent the zombie down into the basement to look for Adelaide's glittery H-bomb. Conrad offered to go, grudgingly, but no one wanted to peel back his bandages to see if he was healed enough to go down safely. The doctor was fully against it.

"Ya know," Worth said into the silence, while they waited for Frankenstein to crawl back up, "bet there's still some blood in the guys back front. Conniekins could prolly use somethin' fresher than the bagged shit I pumped in."

Conrad looked queasy. "Worth, don't."

"Seriously," Hanna muttered. "I'm having a hard enough time forgiving you as it is."

"Awright, awright. Christ. Jus' thought y'might appreciate the recyclin'."

There was the clinking sound of ruined masonry shifting in piles, and then the caution-light glow of reanimated eyes lit up the stairwell. Sans jacket, the zombie's lengthy form clambered over the boulders of rubble with an unnerving sort of swinging grace. He stepped onto the threshold, retrieved his jacket, and held out a book.

"These appear to be Mr. West's original notes," he explained, gently passing over the thick greenish binding into Hanna's tentative hands. "Adelaide's notes are affixed to the backmost page. I thought perhaps that Mr. West might have had some rudimentary plan of disposal."

"Too bad he couldn't give it a self destruct button," Conrad groused, toeing a pile of Adelaide. "But I guess he was working a couple decades before the whole mad-science thing really got codified."

Hanna flipped it open and sank into a cross-legged seat on a clean patch of floor. Pages of notes flew by, carefully detailed sketches of anatomy interspersed with thick cursive scribbles and rough approximations of what were probably ingredients—feathers and intestines and… coins. What the fuck. On casual glance, the book looked like it was full of any number of projects besides the one that interested them. Searching through it might take-

Hanna's flipping slowed, near the middle of the book, and finally halted on one intricate, detailed sketch sprawling over two pages like a morbid centerfold. Hanna went utterly still, hand hovering over the graphite face. A cadaver lay across the yellowed length, an ugly Y incision down the center of the chest and two thick curves of stitching under the heavily shaded cheekbones.

"Shit," Conrad breathed. "That looks a lot like…"

"Yeah," Hanna murmured.

They all looked up at Green.

"It..." the dead man began, hesitating, "does bear an unmistakable resemblance."

Hanna lifted up the book so it was nearly pressed against his nose, squinting at the nearly illegible notations around the page's edge. "Serum proved effective... something... subjects- test subjects- ummmm... we are still negotiating with the morgue... It's gonna take me forever to work out this guy's handwriting... may soon achieve full motor recovery..."

"Shit," Conrad repeated. "Are you guys thinking what I'm thinking? That... that's only half-way through the book. What if..."

"But Mr. West has been dead thirty years," the zombie pointed out, slowly. "And I have only been dead for perhaps fifteen. A decade when I met you."

"Are you sure?" Hanna asked, looking up. "I mean, you didn't have a calendar. Could it've been more than ten years?"

"While I might be willing to provide a ten year margine of error at worst, there is a significant difference between one decade and three. I'm fairly confident it was the former."

The pages lay quietly between them all, curves and lines of black on yellow-cream shifting just beyond the reach of the periphery like a snake sleeping in the folds of bed sheets.

"Yeah," Hanna muttered, and Conrad followed it with a softer "But... still..."

Doc Worth bent over—shit well that was a bad fucking plan—and snatched the massive thing out of the magician's hands. "Y'kin study this later, Hanna. Right now, we're sittin' in a house full'a bad mojo with a bunch'a bodies an' I got the feelin' that those two things ain't gonna mix well."

The eerie serenity shattered, and suddenly the room was an awkward scramble to kick rubble back down into the half-cleared stairwell before hightailing it out the front door, pausing only long enough to scoop up a pocket full of Adelaide for god only knew what purpose. They'd be back to bury the bodies the next afternoon, after sleep and business and crying parents.

There were calls to make—the Council needed to be notified that they'd terminated the target, and Finas had asked to be informed of the night's outcome. There would be some kind of outcry from the blood-sucker courts while they bitched about mortals sticking their grubby fingers into other folk's business, never mind that they'd asked for the help in the first place. They were just like that. Get it done exactly like they wanted or hang yourself trying, those were your options.

That all came later.

For the night, there was muted relief and muddled words, pain and the echo of fear, and guilt as they made their way back to Zadock's house. It all passed by in a jumble of sensation, physical mixing up with mental until it felt like Worth was on some bad trip, carving his brain out of his skull and slapping it back together for an arts and crafts project. Nobody said much. He figured he wasn't the only one who felt about half dead and fully gutted by then.

They made their briefest explanations to Zadock, did a quick check up on his traumatized daughter—definitely some therapy in that girl's future, if they could get it—and parted ways. Hanna took the couch again, and the dead man quietly settled himself into a chair by the side, gloved hands fluttering over Hanna's. Good. He'd be alright. They'd all be alright, given a little time. As much as he hated to lay it all on the kid's shoulders, Worth trusted him to set them all right.

Hanna had something Worth never really had.

The doctor kept his mouth shut as he made his way through the house, scowling when Zadock insisted on turning the guest bedroom over to him tonight. It was Conrad's room, he retorted, Conrad barely made it back from death's doorstep, he gets the room. And then a wrong step lit up the doctor's right side, and he realized for the first time that out of all of them, tonight, he had come out the worst.

Grudgingly, he took the bed. He was going to feel like shit in the morning.

There was a whole mountain of rubbish between Hanna and Worth that night, but it wasn't really Conrad's business, apparently. Never mind that it was, as Worth generously pointed out, his life and death they were talking about. Conrad could tell that Hanna was running on steam by that point, physically and mentally, and that was Conrad's fault too, wasn't it? So he kept himself out of it.

There had been a moment where he had stared at Jimmy's wide-eyed corpse in the hall, while they hissed at each other in their own little bubble of rage and soured fear, where he tried to decide how he felt about it all. He'd warned the kid. But that didn't really make him feel any better.

Once Conrad had grudgingly slipped the Godstone into his pocket—shit he hoped this really wasn't going to be one of those Lord of the Rings things after all, because it would be just his luck to end up as Shmegul—and they were all quietly slipping into their respective positions around the Allen house, Conrad finally turned his attention to Hanna. The younger man was toeing off his shoes at the edge of the couch, innocently knocking chunks of half-dried mud all over the early-nineties carpet. That was going to bug him all night.

"Hey," he said, painfully aware of what an awkward start that was. "Hanna... Just how angry are you? I mean, if you're seriously pissed off, I'd be more than happy to help you ostracize Worth for a while. It would honestly be my pleasure."

Hanna made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sigh. "Thanks Connie, but it's okay. I'm not really, like… mad anymore. I just…"

The ginger tapped the cushion beside him, searching for words, Conrad presumed.

"…You know seventy percent of the people I knew three years ago are dead now?" Hanna asked, looking away. "I don't know, it just seems like sometimes Worth doesn't even realize it. Like, he was just waiting for this his whole life and now it's here and he barely even remembers things used to be different. It's only been a couple years, Conrad. A couple years. Even you forget sometimes."

Oh, hello there Sensation of Being a Horrible Person. How are you today?

"It scares me, sometimes, you know? How you guys just forget. You weren't there when we were burying them, so I guess it's probably easier for you. If you'd seen it, those first couple months… if you'd been out there digging trenches with us… Remember the panic, what that felt like? And we came out of Salem like we were this big thing, gonna make everybody safe, already saved the balance in the Force for future generations, and it was like… death everywhere. Big damn heroes, and what could we do?"

Conrad couldn't remember a lot of all that. He remembers Hanna, sunburnt and drawn, staring out the RV window when Conrad woke up in the evenings. He remembers silence in the darkening streets, lightless and soundless like a ghost town everywhere they went. He remembers the smell of death, ugly and thick in the air, and the dirt under Doc Worth's nails, and the expressionless faces of the few people he spoke to in those months. But nothing much more.

Those early months had just passed him by while he was wrapped up in his cocoon of blankets, and by the time they'd begun to all go out regularly in the evenings—slip into their pseudo-nocturnal lifestyle—the worst of it was over.

"I'm just so tired of people dying," Hanna told him, quietly. "I'm so tired of having that on my shoulders. And I thought… what if you had died? And Worth would never've forgiven me, and I'd so deserve it."

"It wouldn't have been your fault," Conrad tried to explain, feeling this odd sensation of running up against an invisible wall and not knowing why. "I'm the idiot who fell in the river."

"Would too," the magician retorted, and, well. How do you even start to argue with that kind of certainty?

"Well, regardless." Conrad looked down. "He'd get over it. Like you said. He doesn't really give a shit."

Hanna snorted, a little life coming back into his expression. "Dude, let's give him a little more credit than that. He gives a shit about us. It's everybody else who can go to hell, far as he's concerned."

Half true. The way it looked to Conrad, Worth was the closest thing Hanna had to a father, and that ran both ways. Hanna was the doctor's kid. It was sort of endearing, in a totally weird way, how they worried about each other. Even in his most vengeful moods, it was something Conrad could never bring himself to resent. Everybody ought to have a father, if he could get one.

"Maybe you," Conrad replied, not at all petulant. Really. "He'd replace me soon enough. Maybe with some dispossessed hooker from Brooklyn."

"Wow," Hanna said, one ginger eyebrow going way up. "Man. Are you mad at him too? Because that was kinda harsh."

Conrad felt that odd, tingly sensation of blushing without actually blushing. Vampirism helped the poker face, if nothing else.

"I'm always mad at him," the undead man muttered, rubbing absently at the corner of his mouth. "He's a perpetual motion machine that puts out nothing but misery."

"Weeeelll, I mean, not to sound all hypocritical which apparently I've been doing a lot today? But maybe a little less of the mad right now. I've got an excuse, but you kinda don't. Unless you're mad he nearly got himself killed trying to get you a cure? Which… actually, I could maybe see that, I'd be a little ticked off if he went around trying to do a graveyard exchange for me too."

"He had it under control," Conrad echoed testily.

"Yeah," Hanna retorted, "like the government had the Cloverfield Monster under control, right. What kind of idiot goes vampire hunting alone? A dead idiot, that's what. You reaaaally shook him up, man. I mean, you shook us all up."

Conrad was quiet for a minute. It seemed like he was always sleeping through the things that were hardest on the people around him, slipping out the back door just before the worst went down. And he was so lost right now.

"You should get some sleep," Conrad said, stepping back, and then turning to leave. "I mean, that much scrying has to be massively draining. I'll see you when you wake up."

"Wait," Hanna called after him, "where are you gonna sleep?"

The vampire poked at the bandages across his chest, feeling the wound healing in its glacier pace from the inside out. He was tired. "I'll be awake for a while. Maybe I'll take the guest bedroom when Worth wakes up."

He made his way into the hall, leaving Hanna's unsure protests behind.

There was a lot to think about now, and he wasn't altogether sure that he wanted to wrestle with it at all. Worth never made an ounce of sense. The bastard was supposed to be the practical one, the dirty bottom line of cold rationality in this fucked up family. It was becoming clear that either he was a bigger idiot than even Conrad had ever given him credit for, chasing after Adelaide like that—that, or, he'd really been… worried.

And Conrad knew, on some level, that Worth must give a shit about him. Too many instances piled up on each other in his memory, building a tower that by all rights shouldn't stand at all. A risk here, a bargain there, little moves and big moves that just felt too wildly out of character for the grinning caricature Conrad had so very, very long ago set to stand for the doctor. So he must care, in his own fucked up way, somehow.

But this was a whole different kettle of fish.

"It was a possibility," the man had said, as if dying on some fool's errand to wrench Conrad's life out of Adelaide's deadly claws was just a part of the job description. Had he been worried? Had he been afraid? For Conrad? Whining, irritable, too-many-fucks-giving Conrad?

The vampire paused at the door to the guest bedroom. It was a twin bed, hardly big enough for two people, and he was stupid even to contemplate it—Worth was a bloody wreck, and he didn't need stupid fucking Conrad who caused this whole mess hogging the sheets. Dumb idea.

But.

But if Worth had been worried about him.

He pushed open the door.

The sound of Worth's heartbeat was soft, a hardly-there flutter of percussion at the edges of his senses. For a moment, he thought maybe the living man was asleep—he'd been in here for an hour or so, and in his condition, it wasn't hard to imagine—but then the heartbeat skittered in the silence, and no, no, Worth was awake.

Conrad expected him to say something, ask what the fuck he thought he was doing, and Conrad had no idea what he'd say, because he didn't know what he thought he was doing. It just felt necessary, almost fitting, to sit down in the pile of blankets by the closet and keep watch in the silent space. Conrad had woken up smelling like Worth, him and the whole room, and that meant that Worth had been there with him while he was teetering on the edge of death and… undeath. Maybe Worth had been worried. Well. Kiss or no kiss, Conrad had been worried too, in his own turn.

Tonight, in the face of Worth's bloody, broken form, Conrad thought maybe it was time to let himself have a little bit of faith. In Worth. In them.

And maybe, if Worth let him get a word in edgewise, Conrad might find a way to explain all that. Right. And maybe Conrad would go sunbathing tomorrow.

But if Worth had anything to say… he kept it to himself.

And Conrad stayed there until the dawn broke.