Chapter Text
Waking up dead is a process. It’s never like the movies where you just snap your eyes open and hiss.
For a Kindred, the sun is more of a physical weight than a mere deadly light source. It crushes you into a state of temporary rot. And when you are experiencing this daily death zipped inside a heavy-duty, light-proof body bag, crammed into the trunk of a Volvo 240 smelling of stale rubber and exhaust... let’s just say the accommodations lack the dignified gothic romance you read about, and leave a lot to be desired.
But the real torture isn’t the claustrophobia. It’s the hearing.
My superhuman senses always return a moment before my motor functions do. Through the thick nylon of the bag and the metal of the trunk, the low-frequency hum of the tires against the asphalt tells me we are still moving. Good.
Then, there’s the radio. The muffled voice of an NPR anchor bleeds through the backseat.
"...cases surging across the tri-state area. Governors are urging residents to remain indoors. Non-essential travel is strictly prohibited as checkpoints are being established along major interstates..."
And then, the sound that actually makes the dead, stagnant blood in my veins twist into a knot.
Dakota coughs.
Not a clearing-the-throat kind of cough, but a dry, rattling hack that sounds like sandpaper on glass. She tries to muffle it, but I can hear the exhaustion in her chest.
A month ago, I didn’t even know what a "lockdown" was. My Sire’s parting gift—aside from a curse that makes me short-circuit every screen I touch—was keeping me entirely in the dark about the mortal world collapsing while I was playing that designed-to-be-lost Camarilla political game. Now, the whole world is wearing masques and hiding from invisible killers.
The irony is thick enough to choke on. A global masquerade enforced by a virus.
The car decelerates abruptly. The tires crunch on loose gravel.
My eyes try to snap open in the pitch black of the bag and fail. The sun is setting, I can feel the oppressive weight lifting from my chest bit by bit, but I still can’t move a muscle. I am still a statue.
Through the metal frame, I hear a siren’s short, aggressive whoop.
No. No, no, no.
Doors open. Heavy boots on the asphalt.
"Evening, miss," a man’s voice. Authoritative. Masked, judging by the muffled consonants. "License and registration. You’re a long way from home with those New York plates."
"I... I know, Officer," Dakota stammers. Her voice is trembling. The cough left her breathless. "I’m just... trying to get back to my family on the coast."
"State lines are heavily restricted right now, ma’am. We’re looking for non-essential travel. And, frankly, people fleeing the hot zones." A pause. A flashlight beam probably sweeping the backseat. "You’re traveling alone?"
Dakota hesitates. I can practically hear her heart hammering against her ribs. A frantic, terrified bird.
"Yes," she lies. Badly.
"Pop the trunk, please."
"Officer, please, there’s nothing in there—"
"Ma’am. Step out of the vehicle and pop the trunk."
The latch clicks. The hydraulic hiss of the trunk opening sounds like a guillotine dropping.
The evening air rushes in. I am still paralyzed. The sun must be hovering exactly on the horizon, bleeding its last dying rays across the sky. I need thirty seconds. I don’t have them.
"What is this?" the cop demands. His voice loses its bored authority, replaced by sharp, sudden alarm.
He steps forward, reaching for the thing that is unmistakably a body bag.
Twenty seconds.
And then, Dakota breaks. She doesn’t just cry but throws her entire body weight against the bumper, physically blocking his path, ignoring his other hand that’s already on the holster.
"She’s dead!" Dakota screams. It’s a raw, jagged sound that tears through the fading twilight. "She’s dead, okay?! She caught it. The hospitals in the city... they wouldn’t take her! They just left her in the hallway!"
The cop recoils instinctively, his hand dropping from his holster as if the air itself just turned toxic.
"Ma’am, step back—" he barks with an intense voice.
"Don’t touch her!" Dakota falls to her knees, sobbing hysterically, her hands gripping the edge of the trunk. It’s a masterpiece of a lie, fueled entirely by the agonizing truth of her fear. "I didn’t know what to do! I just want to take her home!"
Ten seconds.
The cop freezes. I hear the rustle of his uniform as he instinctively takes another step back. The unique panic of 2020, the invisible plague, the overflowing morgues. He’s staring at a hysterical woman and a black body bag holding a confirmed casualty. He spends five crucial seconds just trying to process the liability of this situation.
Five seconds.
The last sliver of the sun vanishes below the earth.
And right then, the world turns. The invisible concrete block on my chest shatters. Dead, stagnant blood violently forces its way through my atrophied veins. The Beast wakes up, stretching its cold claws through my muscles, hungry and pissed off.
"Ma’am, protocol says I still need to verify..." His voice is muffled and reluctant. He holds his breath as he steps around her. The zipper moves.
He pulls it down just enough to expose my breathless, lifeless face. The face of a corpse.
Corpses don’t breathe, but I open my eyes.
The cop gasps, stumbling backward, his hand flying to his radio. He expects a corpse, sure, but he doesn’t expect the corpse’s eyes to be open, staring at him with nothing but the abyssal void.
I catch his gaze.
Look closely. I ram the command into the space behind his eyes. It feels blunt and heavy, like performing a lobotomy with a sledgehammer. I’m not a Ventrue puppeteer who weaves seamless, elegant illusions; I’m not good enough for that anyway. I just find the raw, pulsating nerve of his panic and crush it under my thumb.
His eyes lock onto mine. His pupils dilate. The struggle in his face dies instantly, replaced by an unnatural emptiness.
She died of the virus. My voice slides into his skull, cold and absolute. You are breathing her air. It is highly contagious. Close the bag. Let us go.
The cop blinks. The terror is gone. His hand moves away from the radio.
"It’s... highly contagious," he repeats. His voice is flat, entirely stripped of its previous authority. With stiff, almost robotic movements, he reaches out, zips the bag back up, and slams the trunk.
"I am so sorry for your loss, ma’am," he says. "Please, keep moving. Drive safely."
Dakota doesn’t answer. She just drags herself back in the driver’s seat.
The engine turns over. The tires hit the asphalt. We are moving.
For two miles, the only sound in the car is Dakota’s jagged, hyperventilating breath filtering through the backseat. And then, she breaks again. The car abruptly veers onto the shoulder, gravel crunching violently under the tires. We jerk into park.
I hear Dakota scrambling out, her footsteps frantic. The trunk pops open. The night air rushes in, cool and smelling of wet earth and pine, washing away the suffocating stench of stale rubber.
Dakota’s hands are shaking so badly she can barely work the zipper. When she finally pulls it down, she collapses against the bumper, gasping for air, her face buried in her hands.
I sit up slowly. My joints crack like breaking ice. The stiffness of the day sleep is fading, replaced by the gnawing hum of the Beast.
"You lied perfectly," I say, stepping out of the trunk. My voice is still a raspy whisper.
"I thought we were dead," she sobs, not looking up. "I thought he was going to call the CDC, or the state troopers, or... God, Jules. He had his hand on his radio. And then he just... stopped. He looked into the bag and went completely blank."
She finally looks up at me, her eyes wide, reflecting the red glare of the taillights. "What did you do?"
"I got into his head and pushed," I say quietly. "Just enough to make his fear override his training."
Dakota stares at me. I can see the exact moment the relief turns into a chilling realization. She has seen my fangs. She has felt the temperature of my skin. But this is different. This is the violation of free will. It’s the realization that I could rewrite the thoughts in a human skull as easily as editing a typo.
She shivers, wrapping her arms around herself. I half expect her to ask if I’ve ever used it on her, and I’d promise her I never have and never will.
"It’s cold," she whispers, looking away.
"Let’s get back in the car, then," I reply dryly. "I’ll drive."
Three hours later, the world is pitch black, and we are somewhere in Ohio.
I’m behind the wheel. Dakota is in the passenger seat. The glow of the dashboard illuminates the paper Rand McNally atlas spread across her lap. She’s using a small LED flashlight to trace the highways, preparing me for the GPS-less night drive.
She coughs again. She presses a fist to her mouth, turning her head toward the window. Her chest rattles, making that dry, exhausted sound again.
"Drink some water," I tell her.
"I’m fine, Jules," she rasps, though she takes a weak sip from a plastic bottle. "Just... dusty AC."
She’s not fine. I can hear her pulse. It’s sluggish, but beneath the smell of dusty AC and sick sweat, her blood still smells intoxicatingly warm. The infection is mild, her vitality is still fighting and even gradually winning, but she is fragile. So goddamn fragile.
I grip the steering wheel. The leather creaks under my cold fingers. The memory of that haphazard Domination is still fresh. The dangerous, intoxicating thrill of absolute control. The ease with which I erased that man’s agency.
"I could fix it, you know," the words slip out before I can stop them. A dark, pragmatic whisper from the Beast, dressed up in the guise of love.
Dakota turns her head slowly. The LED flashlight casts harsh shadows across her pale, tired face. "Fix what?"
"Just a sip of my blood, Dakota." I keep my eyes on the road, unable to look at her. "It would annihilate the virus. You’d never get those minor ailments again. You wouldn’t be exhausted."
And you would be mine. The Beast purrs in the back of my skull.
Silence stretches between us. It’s heavier than the darkness outside. She knows what I’m offering. I’ve explained the concept of Ghouls to her back in New York. Back when it was an intriguing story about the creature of the night, not a life raft offered in a plague-ridden Volvo.
My Sire once told me, “We’re cat people. We don’t want mindlessly faithful servants.” It was one of the few things she said that I actually agreed with. Keeping Dakota free in New York was my way of holding onto a shred of my own humanity. But the situation is different now. She could really use some of my protection, as I could use hers...
"No."
Her voice is weak, but the word is sharp enough to halt my train of thought. She switches off the flashlight, plunging her side of the car into shadows. "I still remember the look on that cop’s face, Jules. His empty eyes."
She reaches across the center console and places her warm, trembling hand over my freezing one.
"I chose to get in your car," she says, her voice softening. "Let me keep choosing you."
I stare at her hand on mine.
Then I shift my grip on the wheel, letting her hand rest there, and the tension drains from my shoulders.
The voice of the Beast fades. The sheer, defiant will of this fragile mortal silences the growl of the Abyss. If I feed her my blood, she’ll be mine and she’ll be gone. I would just be swapping the Camarilla’s cage for one of my own making. I would be doing exactly what Panhard and Arturo and all those bastards in the Ivory Tower do: turning people into chess pieces, and always trying to win something back with remaining pieces.
Love isn’t a game. And sometimes, the greatest victory might be choosing not to win.
Listening to the radio murmuring in the background about lockdowns and rising death tolls, I once again find it all deeply ironic. The whole world is shutting its doors. Mortals are hiding in darkened rooms, avoiding crowds, terrified of contact, paranoid about invisible threats. They are experiencing the nights we Kindred have endured for centuries. The world is dying out there.
The world is dying out there but... for the first time, I think we are going to live.
The road to the West Coast is long. There will be more checkpoints. She might get sicker. She might yell at me when things inevitably get too much. There is no script anymore. No Prince, no Primogen, no pristine narratives to construct and hide behind. There is no elegance in this.
But that’s okay. Let the story be messy. Let it bleed. I want it to be lively, as lively as my darling.
They say we have no reflection. That Lasombra are just a void waiting to be swallowed by the dark sooner or later. But in the faint, green glow of the dashboard, I can see Dakota’s reflection superimposed on the passenger window. And right beside it, barely visible in the peripheral light catching the edge of the glass, I can almost see myself sitting beside her, a cold reflection anchored to reality by her warmth.
I am the shadow. And she is the light that casts me.