Work Text:
Ray’s been reading stories lately; he’s pretty sure vampires are only allowed out at night.
“You’re so full of bullshit,” says Walt, who’s lying down in the backseat of the car, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. He gets twitchy when he doesn’t get fresh air for a while, poor baby.
“I’m full of God’s honest truth, puppy,” says Ray, sneaks another handful of Skittles out of the paper cup Brad’s got in the cupholder. “Tell you what, how about we pass a law saying vampires are only allowed out after seven p.m. Wouldn’t want our beloved lords and masters getting hurt, right?”
“Shut the fuck up, Ray,” says Brad peaceably, and snatches the remaining Skittles out of Ray’s hand. He has his sunglasses on, and his feet up on the dashboard; Ray had thought he was asleep.
“I’m only looking out for everyone’s welfare, Brad,” says Ray. The inside of the car’s dusty and hot today, the sunlight rippling through the windows. “Like, say you go up like a solar-powered flamethrower. What the hell happens to me and Walt? I mean, obviously we would go out of our minds like the savage dog-beasts we are and rip each other to pieces, but what if we actually managed to hurt some vampires before our inevitable demise? It’d be a fucking tragedy.”
Brad says nothing, but when Ray sneaks a look at him, he’s got that tight little smile on his face that means something’s on his mind. His nails are tapping a tight rhythm on his leg. Ray glances at Brad’s remaining Skittles, decides to ignore them.
It’s been a tense week for all of them. Full moon’s due on Saturday; Ray can feel the itching in his muscles and bones swelling into an impulse, the little tickle at the back of his mind that chatters run and wild and wolf and pack is louder and louder by the minute, and the continual stink of vampire from Brad is getting harder to ignore. For all his centuries, Walt’s still just a puppy; Ray can’t even imagine what’s running through his mind. And then there’s this damn thing they’re driving to, for God knows what reason—
Well, no, Ray knows what reason.
Everything always seems to boil down to Nate Fick.
It’s been more than a month since they’ve seen him. Brad says he’s busy—Brad always seems to have an explanation for what Nate does, but hey, what the fuck does Ray know about vampires? Maybe they can all read minds, or some shit.
In which case Ray is totally fucked, but, you know, whatever.
The hills are rolling past them, all golden and brown. The road cuts through like a knife through butter, a long slash of steel-grey biting into the landscape; the wind’s battering the sides of the car, and no one’s in sight but them, nothing but sky from horizon to horizon.
Ray pushes his sunglasses further up on his face, slams down on the accelerator.
It’s been a long time since Ray first met Nate.
Longer since he met Brad, of course—so long that he doesn’t like to think about it. Yeah, there was a time in his life when he wasn’t behind the wheel of one of Brad’s cars; there was a time when he didn’t flick his nails into claws when Brad glanced his way, a time when he wasn’t at Brad’s right hand, a time when he didn’t know what it felt like when Brad licked other people’s blood out of his mouth.
There was also, theoretically, a time when he wasn’t a werewolf. It’s not like he really wants to dwell on this shit.
But Nate’s different. Nate’s blue-blood, the type who stinks so badly of tailored suits and old mansions that Ray can barely breathe without choking on it. Nate’s old-school. He has what the ivory tower mansion type like to call class and what Ray’s always referred to as as blood money. He’s no one who’d ever talk to werewolves.
So it’d been a surprise when, one winter night a few centuries back, Brad had slipped into the passenger seat of the car and flipped a rectangle of paper with gold-embossed edges into Ray’s lap.
“Higher-up wants us,” he said tersely.
“What the hell you showing me for, Brad?” Ray said. “Go have your vampire party, sweetums. I won’t wait up.”
“Wants us,” Brad repeated. “You and me. And the kid.” Walt had been new to their car then, a loose-boned golden boy asleep in the backseat who Ray had only begun calling puppy a year or two ago, and who Brad still only half-trusted to keep up.
Ray pushed his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose, treated Brad to a yellow-eyed skeptical glare over the rims. “Pull one of the other ones, Brad, it has bells on.”
Brad gestured shortly to the card. Ray squinted at it, and read:
The presence of
Mr. Bradley Colbert and the werewolves Joshua Person and Walter Hasser
is cordially requested
by Lord Nathaniel Fick
There was a place Ray didn’t recognize, and a time in about a half-hour.
“Mister Bradley Colbert,” said Ray, and sniffed the edges of the card. It stunk of money. “Well, darn, Brad. When you move up in the world don’t forget us little guys.”
Brad had caught Ray’s gaze, then, and held it, hard, and Ray’d stared back without blinking.
“Tell me when I get to rip his throat out,” he’d said, and Brad had flashed fangs in what might’ve, on anyone else, been a smile.
They’d met Nate in an elegantly furnished office, styled in that pseudo-Victorian Lovecraftian aesthetic all the higher-up types seemed to love: thick red curtains, thick red carpet, thick mahogany desk, and Ray had rubbed at the short-cropped sides of his Mohawk, tilted his chin up, looked the vampire sitting in front of them up and down from the position he was most comfortable, which was lurking at Brad’s side with Walt; it was so much easier to assess the situation when nobody was really paying attention to the werewolves.
And—even then, Ray remembers—Nate had seemed too young for an old-money vampire, too bright, too fresh. He shifted in the thick black chair, rubbed at his short hair, said, “Thank you for coming.”
“No trouble, sir,” Brad said.
Nate leaned forward. “I’ll be honest with you, gentlemen; I was told to bring you here today for reasons you may not like.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Ray saw Brad’s face go flat. “Sir?” he said, his voice all politeness and ice.
“You specifically, Mr. Colbert,” Nate said, and stood up. “You’ve heard of Godfather?”
It was a rhetorical question. There wasn’t anybody on the North American continent who hadn’t. “Sir,” Brad said.
“Godfather,” Nate said, and then his face went tight, “or—a representative of Godfather, came to tell me that the Council and the rest of the peerage are concerned about you, Mr. Colbert, and your association with werewolves.”
Brad’s gaze flicked from Walt to Ray; Ray caught his gaze for a split second, let his smirk show in his face, and saw the answering smirk in Brad’s eyes.
“Sir,” Brad said, utterly polite.
“Which is why I asked all three of you to be here for this meeting,” Nate said, and sat back down. “If we were going to begin a working relationship, I felt it was best to begin with honesty.”
“Sir,” Brad said. His voice was all ice and no cream, and Ray saw Nate’s manicured nails tapping on the desk, saw the set of Brad’s shoulders that meant he was prepared to go on sir-ing until the end of time, and decided enough was enough.
“Okay,” he said, “except, like, we all know that Godfather told you to tell us that so that we’d trust you and spill all of our anti-vampire lunatic revolutionary plans and shit. Sir.”
Brad’s elbow was in his ribs, a split second too late. Nate’s face went shocked, and then thoughtful. He looked far too young for someone in the peerage, Ray thought for the hundredth time—not just physically young, not just turned as a young man, but young in his eyes. There was blood missing.
Nate said, after a long, terrifying second of silence, “If I were in your position I would say the same thing, Ray.”
The moment broke. Ray could feel the tension run out of Brad’s body, like a clock winding down.
“Gentlemen,” Nate said, and looked from Walt to Brad to Ray, “I’m sure the Council wants me to tell you—well, I’m sure the Council wants me to tell Brad to terminate his social interaction with werewolves.”
“That’s a very polite way of putting it, sir,” Brad said, and Nate laughed aloud, and Ray let his claws slide back into his hands.
And Nate had said, “How would you three feel about working for me?”
These are the kind of hills where, a long time ago, the idle wealthy might’ve lived idly wealthy lives. Ray sees empty swimming pools, the kind of rusted gates that would’ve had imported ivy twisting around them and been operated by remote control. There’s a twist in the road, and he’s staring straight across the sparkling bay below, over miles and miles of abandoned city.
“Jesus fuck,” he says, “I’m pretty sure I need fancier clothes to handle this.”
“Shut up, Ray,” says Brad, and there’s an edge to his voice like the wrong side of a nail file.
“Hey,” says Ray, and pulls the car over to settle at a bend in the road behind the ruin of an ancient old pickup truck—these urban vampires never did bother to clean up after the last species. “Hey, Brad.”
“What the hell is it, Ray?” says Brad, and Ray slides his sunglasses to the top of his head, grabs Brad’s arm.
“You gonna be with us for this?” he says.
Brad meets Ray’s gaze head-on, but there’s still something unfocused in his eyes, something very far away. “Of fucking course,” he says, all scorn. “Am I going to disappear to Timbuktu?”
“Hey,” says Ray, “you know, no matter what happens, you got us, right?”
Brad’s face is still all mocking and sneer and very far away, so Ray shakes him a little by the arm. “You want me to kill anybody, I’ll do it,” he says. “So will Walt, you know that. That’s what we’re here for, Brad. We’ll kill who you want, we’ll do what you say, we’ll give you whatever you need. You’ve got us. Right?”
Brad stares at him for a long moment with nothing in his eyes, and for a second Ray’s afraid—and then his face clears, and he’s there again, and Ray breathes a sigh of relief, lets go of his arm.
“Okay,” he says, “let’s go,” and Walt makes a noise of pure joy and bounds out of the backseat. Ray moves to climb out, but Brad grabs his arm, looks into Ray’s eyes.
“Good dog,” he says, and smirks.
Ray makes a face at him. “Woof, woof,” he says, climbs out of the car, stretches his arms high above his head. If he were a wolf right now, his tail would be wagging. It’s probably best not to let Brad know that; the asshole’s smug enough already.
The afternoon is fading into evening; the sky in the west is all butterscotch and soy sauce, the east indigo. The vampire’s garden is magnificently tiled, adobe and tan and umbrellas on the patio; Ray assumes she stole it wholesale from the human who lived here, however long ago.
The hedges haven’t survived the ages, though. From whatever neat shapes they were cut into, they’ve grown into a mass of ivy and camellia and hibiscus, climbing the fences and throttling the life out of the dandelions and other weeds at their base.
Brad’s by one of the tables, wearing a very polite smile and white knuckles. Ray and Walt are sprawled on the floor of the patio, a little ways off from polite society. Someone with a very specific sense of humor’s left them a bone.
“You see Nate?” says Walt to Ray, low.
Ray scans the crowd. Most vampires look alike to him, at this point; it’s getting hard to discern between one set of pale, dramatic cheekbones and another. But there’s no short-cropped head of hair in the audience, no voice just a shade too bright and idealistic.
“Not a sign,” he says. “If he decided to bail on us—”
“He wouldn’t,” says Walt.
“He wouldn’t,” Ray agrees, but he’s not happy. Maybe it’s the full-moon itch, maybe it’s whatever’s got Brad rattled, but there’s something that feels off about tonight. He’s got a bad feeling crawling up his spine. Something’s happened.
“You see the summons he sent us?” he says. “Pretty damn terse for Nate. I haven’t seen anything that formal since that first invitation. Usually it’s all oh, gosh, why don’t you all come over and I’ll feed Ray and Walt actual cooked meat, and Bradley you and I can have a nice romantic candlelit dinner, and maybe we can talk about assassination or something—”
Walt makes an irritated noise, and Ray laughs. “Come on, puppy,” he says, “wanna blow this popsicle stand? I bet nobody’s guarding the kitchens, they might have actual food there.”
“Yes,” says Walt, and Ray pushes himself to his feet, holds out a hand and tugs Walt up after him. The most obvious way to the kitchens is through the swirling mass of vampires, but Ray’s pretty sure they can loop around the side of the house, go in through a servant’s entrance—
“Where you going, Fido?” says a casual voice, and Ray stops dead.
“Thought I’d grab myself a bone,” he says, “the cupboard was bare. We’re hungry, Griego.”
“Did someone give you permission to move from where you were put?” says Ray Griego. He stinks of vampire, like Nate—but Nate’s stink is all old books and well-tailored suits, and Griego’s is, always and permanently, just blood.
“We’re not on leashes,” says Ray. “Or collared. Gee, it’s almost as if we’ve got enough brains to do what we like, not just what we’re told to do. Wow, it’s a pity there’s nobody else with that kind of mental capacity in the vicinity—”
“Ray,” says Walt, squeezes Ray’s hand quick and hard. Ray hadn’t even realized he hadn’t let go of it.
“I’m hungry, too,” says Griego, and his grin is all fangs. Ray’s nostrils flare; he knows where this is going.
“That’s horrific, we actually have something in common,” he says. “So let me and my littermate here go to the kitchens, and we can erase that disturbing-as-fuck connection—”
“I think I’ll start with your friend,” says Griego, “I’ve never tried a blond dog before, I wonder if it’ll be sweeter.”
Ray growls, very low. Griego won’t stop grinning at him, says, “Just try. I’d love to see you in court. A case of a werewolf assaulting a vampire? I don’t think the Council’s seen anything that open-and-shut since last century—”
“Assault is a strong word,” says a voice behind Ray, “be careful how you use it, I think you’ll find self-defense is still a strong justification,” and Griego’s grin only gets wider.
“I didn’t know you were educated in law, Colbert,” he says.
“I didn’t know you it was physically possible to walk with your head up your own ass,” says Ray, “and yet here we are.”
There’s a spreading circle of silence around them; vampire lords and ladies are looking their way, some faces amused, some very still. Griego’s not popular among the peerage—if he were, he wouldn’t be dog-bothering over in a corner—but the man he works for, Craig Schwetje, is one of Godfather’s men.
Ray feels Brad’s pressure by his side—watch yourself, Brad’s telling him, be careful, but Ray’s twitchy, and he’s angry, and he’s hungry, and he’s really, really done with two-bit social climbers like Griego.
“Take care what you say,” says Griego, “good dogs only talk when their masters say speak.”
Does he think that’s witty? Ray shrugs. “Rather be a bad dog than Schwetje’s bitch.”
Griego goes pale, then red, then says, “I’ll take the blond now, thanks,” and then he’s blurred, moving at unnatural speeds towards Walt, towards Walt’s throat—
Brad’s in the way, his hand planted firmly on Griego’s chest. “You want to start something, Griego?” he says.
Griego’s grinning again. “Don’t have to start anything,” he says, “you’re on thin ice already, Colbert. The Council’s given you enough chances as it is, if they hear how Brad Colbert loves dogs so much he assaulted a vampire to stop him from dinner—“
A voice says, “Let me make something very clear, Griego.”
Griego looks up from Brad, and Ray watches his eyes go wide.
Nate Fick steps between Griego and Brad; his suit is neat, his hands are clean, and at this moment, Ray doesn’t think he’s ever looked more dangerous.
“If you have a problem with me,” he says, “tell me. Challenge me, if you think you can win. Fuck with me all you want. But do not—do not—fuck with my men.”
Griego doesn’t move.
Nate says softly, “Do I need to repeat myself?”
Griego flees.
Nate turns to Brad, Ray, and Walt, and the sudden, passionate light’s gone out of his face. He looks very tired, and very sad. “Sorry I’m late,” he says. “Let’s find someplace to talk.”
Ray’s devouring a chicken leg, and a few slices of meatloaf, and some bacon, and some roast beef. And a steak.
They’re in a kitchen, finally, one of those beautiful kitchens in rich people’s houses that no one ever, ever uses; there’s expensive carpets on the floor, and the counters are gleaming and covered with silver heirloom-type dishes, and there’s no sign of a blender, or a can opener, or anything that might ruin the beautiful picture by being actually useful in cooking. Ray’s very, very tempted to wipe his greasy hand on the wall.
“The Council has plans,” says Nate.
“I’ve heard, sir,” says Brad.
Nate’s face goes sharp. “You’ve heard?”
“Not the details, sir,” says Brad. He looks almost as tired as Nate, and Ray’s eyes flick from one to the other. “Just that there were plans. And that they concerned us.”
“And you didn’t feel like sharing this at any point?” says Ray, outraged. “Hey, Ray, drive the whole team into the biggest nest of titled vampires on the West Coast, no, it doesn’t matter that the Council has unspecified plans for us, I’m just taking you and the puppy and we’re meeting Nate right where Godfather’s men’s men can threaten to eat Walt—”
“I’m sorry,” says Brad, and rubs at his eyes. “Didn’t know Griego would be here. I thought it’d be the lesser peerage, the type without ambitions. This is a school of sharks. That’s my fault.”
“Hey,” says Ray, suddenly alarmed, “hey, Brad, that’s okay. You’re okay.” Brad looks years older than he did an hour ago—where did this come from?
“When you say the Council has plans for us,” says Walt, “you mean the council has plans for Brad?”
Nate ducks his head. “I think we all know the Council’s opinions on werewolves’ higher brain functions, Walt. They have plans for Brad—they assume you’ll follow whatever Brad does.”
Brad’s lips are tight. Ray catches his gaze. “Assholes aren’t wrong,” he says, “just assholes,” he says, and Brad nods, and Ray knows he’s understood.
“The Council’s concerned about Brad,” says Nate. “They think he’s spent a little too much time outside of—similar company.”
“He runs with wolves too much, you mean,” says Walt.
“He means they think I’m in with revolutionaries,” says Brad, leaning against that gleaming marble kitchen counter.
“They want more direct control over him,” says Nate, “and they—don’t trust me as a handler, not as much as they did a few centuries ago.”
Ray smirks. Brad says, “That’s our fault.”
“If I wanted you to do what the Council wanted,” says Nate firmly, “I wouldn’t need to overexercise plausible deniability so much,” and he pins Brad with a look, and a slow, warm smile spreads over Brad’s face for the first time that night, and Ray feels relief sweep through him like wind.
“So what do they want our fearless leader to do?” he says. “Work a desk? I don’t know if they let you have pets in the office, Brad, but I’ll do my best not to drool on the carpet—”
“They want you to hunt down werewolves,” says Nate.
There’s a long, long silence.
Ray says, very quietly, “Excuse me?”
“This is the Council’s new plan,” says Nate. “The werewolf population of—well, North America, at first. Eventually the world. The Council thinks the revolutionary elements are caused by werewolves having—too much personal freedom of action. They’re going to pass legislation that—restricts werewolf movements. Restricts their legal privileges.”
Walt’s stopped eating. His face is paste-pale.
“Let me take a wild guess,” says Ray. His ears are ringing. “Either we collar ourselves to vampires—as meal tickets, as slaves, as pets—or people like Brad here hunt us down, and we end up with bullets in our backs.”
“That’s the gist,” says Nate. He’s looking Ray very steadily in the eye. In other circumstances, Ray might appreciate it, but right now, he’d happily trade solid eye contact for a Council that doesn’t want to murder him.
“Right,” he says, and “okay,” and wipes his greasy fingers carefully on the gleaming marble counter, walks over to the wide window overlooking the street, stares out into the dusty night.
“I wanted you to hear the news from me,” Nate’s voice says behind him, soft, “before you heard it from Godfather, or one of the Council’s men. And I wanted to offer my services in whatever plan of action you all decide to take.”
There’s a long silence.
“How will we contact you again?” says Brad. “When we’re off the radar.”
There’s a short noise from Nate, what might be a sigh, or the release of a long-held breath. “I’ll leave you a post office box,” he says. “Most of the postal system’s gone, but they kept some humans to run it. For—nostalgia, I suppose.”
“Nostalgia,” says Brad. “This whole fucking setup’s nostalgia. The Victorian houses, the overgrown hedges, the fucking peerage, for God’s sake. How many of us were even born before the twentieth century? We’re a bunch of immortals who haven’t lived long enough, we’re stretching for some past that those of us who lived in never even liked—we’re sick, this whole damn species, we’re static and we’re sick.”
Ray says to the cold glass of the window, “That’s great, Bradley, and what the hell else is out there?”
There’s a pause, and then Walt’s leaning on the counter next to him, his body big and warm. Ray presses into it on instinct—vampires are too damn cold, Ray wants to touch, he wants to wrestle on the floor with his brothers and sisters, he wants to sleep in a pile huddled together, he wants pack—and Walt presses back, leans his head against Ray’s, ducks his head and presses a kiss to Ray’s cheek.
“I’ll see you again,” says Nate behind them, “if I can,” and in the reflection in the window Ray sees him pause in front of Brad and then kiss him on the lips. Brad surges up into the kiss, pulls Nate’s body to him for a long moment, and then lets go.
“I’ll see you again,” he says, and his voice is rough, a promise meant for Nate’s ears alone.
In the reflection in the window, the blurred silhouette that is Nate hovers, pauses, and moves away. Ray hears footsteps growing fainter until they cross the tiled floor of the kitchen back to the carpet of the hallway, and from there back to the glossy, bloody party.
Ray feels a hand on the back of his neck, and closes his eyes. Brad’s thumb is rubbing at his hairline, gently, and Ray lets his breath go in a long, long rush.
“We ought to take off,” says Walt. “The Council’s men might even be here now.”
“Yeah,” says Brad, but he doesn’t take his hand off Ray’s neck.
It’s two in the morning, and the road’s unrolling before them.
Walt’s asleep, a huddled pile in the backseat. Brad’s fiddling with the radio; most of the stations have been dead for centuries, but every so often there’s a wavelength that works. It’ll fade into static in another hour—but isn’t an hour enough?
The moon’s a ripe fruit, bobbing fluorescent in front of the windshield. They’re far enough from the cities now that the sky’s lost its dull-orange glow, and stars are scattered like dust from horizon to horizon.
“Brad, what are we going to do?” says Ray, quiet.
The radio’s humming static. Brad looks at Ray, says, “What do you want to do?”
Ray keeps his eyes fixed far ahead. “I want to have a pack,” he says. “I want to keep driving with you and Walt. I want to have an apple pie without spitting it out because wolves are carnivores. I want to do what we did before, where Nate told us what to do and protected us from the Council and we did what we liked. I want to sleep under the stars. I want to go back to before all this happened, when we could get music on the radio, and when there were people on the roads. I want to burn everything down that I see. I want to be normal again.”
“Yeah,” says Brad, “yeah, Ray,” and lets the radio cough static.
Ray says, eventually, “I want to fight.”
“We can fight,” says Brad.
“You know me,” says Ray, aims for flippant and almost finds it, “sitting on my ass isn’t a big draw, it’s insulting to my warrior spirit, Brad.”
“God forbid we insult your warrior spirit,” says Brad, “your skinny ass would never recover from the blow,” and for the first time in hours, Ray smiles.
“You hungry, Brad?” he says.
He can feel Brad turn to look at him. “What?”
“Like, really hungry, or a little hungry?” says Ray. “A little hungry I can handle. I don’t know about really hungry.”
Brad says, “Ray—”
“Here’s what I don’t want to hear, Brad,” says Ray. “I don’t want to hear are you sure about that, Ray, or I don’t think you want that, Ray, or you don’t know what you’re asking for right now, Ray. Here’s what I want to hear: I’m a little hungry, Ray, or I’m really hungry, Ray.”
Brad says nothing. Ray adds, “Actually, if we’re being honest, I could handle really hungry. I’m a tough motherfucker, what can I say.”
“I’m hungry,” says Brad. His voice is rough.
“That’s fucking awesome,” says Ray, “and I’m going to pull over to the side of the road, because God and the good state of California know that drinking and driving is a bad idea.” He considers, smirks at the windshield. “Well, they’d know it if they weren’t dead. I’m assuming that at least one of them knew it, back in the day.”
The car slows, stops. Ray climbs out of the driver’s side; it’s one of those balmy summer nights when the wind comes from the east. The car headlights are shining long and low over the concrete of the road.
Brad’s pressing up against Ray before he can take a breath. His eyes are dark, his fingers are hard on Ray’s wrists, and he settles in between Ray’s legs like he was made to fit there; when Ray lets his head tilt back, he squeezes harder on Ray’s wrists, and Ray knows with a spike of satisfaction that there’ll be bruises there in the morning.
“Ray,” Brad whispers, and presses his fangs to Ray’s neck.
Ray’s tried to describe, before, the feeling of being bitten. He can never quite manage to capture it: the white-hot pleasure that trickles straight from Brad’s fangs to his cock, the lightheaded giddiness, the sensation of being so utterly at Brad’s mercy that he couldn’t break away even if he tried—even if he wanted to try—even if he were capable of wanting to try. Even if he could imagine anything other than this, this total submersion and submission, his neck bared, his blood Brad’s for the taking, his throat Brad’s for the using—
Brad pulls away, gasping, and pins Ray against the side of the car, kisses him hard. Ray tastes blood on Brad’s tongue, knows it’s his own, grins against Brad’s lips.
“You like that, right,” he whispers into Brad’s mouth, “you like how I taste, you like me—”
“Stop talking,” says Brad, and there’s an aching point of pleasure-pain on Ray’s jugular vein that’s just enough for Ray to obey.
Brad slips a hand into Ray’s pants, jerks him off rough. Mine, say his hands, and mine, says his mouth, licking into Ray’s, and Ray melts into Brad’s collarbone, comes with a groan, slides to his knees to return the favor.
Even if he doesn’t admit it—and he won’t ever admit it—Brad loves Ray’s mouth. Ray’s really damn good at using it, he won’t do false modesty, and when Brad’s making helpless noises above him and coming down his throat, when Brad tugs him up and kisses him again and again and presses their foreheads together long after the bite wound’s stopped aching, long after two in the morning has become three has become three-thirty, Ray knows that his mouth isn’t the only thing about him Brad loves.
Walt stirs in the backseat around six in the morning. “Hey,” he says, all sleepy and comfortable. “What are we doing?”
The sun’s rising, bright and brilliant; they’re driving directly into its glare. Ray pushes his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose, smiles like a wolf.
“What the fuck do you think we’re doing, puppy?” he says. “Welcome to the war.”