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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 3/24
TITLE: A Rush of Blood to the Head
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: R
PAIRING(S): Michael/David
DISCLAIMER: This is a wild-ass AU. Nothing that happens in it is true.
SUMMARY: There’s someone in Los Angeles who could change the dynamic of vampires versus humans forever. Naturally, both sides want him dead.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Due to subject matter, most of the details of David Archuleta’s family have been changed.

Part One
Part Two



Part Three

She was a fighter, she told herself. She was a warrior. Flesh and bone stripped down to the very smallest essence of what it actually took in order to survive, and make no mistake, baby snakes, that made her eight different kinds of bad-ass at what she did. She could turn herself into a machine merely by focusing for a few moments on putting herself into the right frame of mind, she could ruthlessly hunt and kill things that had once been human and now only had the audacity to wear their faces. She didn’t like it; to like it would be to admit that people could become like them without the damning press of fangs into their neck first. But she could do it. Oh, how she could do it, and without the faintest scrap of remorse to cloud her vision or make her hand tremble.

It was making her so goddamned tired, too.

Syesha sighed and rubbed at her jaw, which was tender and already turning purple with an infant bruise. She needed to ice it, but that would involve going to the shared freezer, which would in turn mean running into David or Carly and enduring either their pity, their lectures, or both. With the mood that Syesha was in, that was more likely than anything else to send her running right back out the door again, never mind that the sun was just coming up over the horizon once more and she would be the crazy girl with the unregistered guns on her hips, not the smooth and sleek hunter that she was in the nighttime hours. She would much rather just endure the swelling.

Syesha closed the door to her quarters behind her and began shedding weapons immediately, rolling her neck to ease the pain and fatigue. Getting cracked in the jaw had the unfortunate side effect of being hell on a person’s neck and shoulders, too, if it was done with sufficient force. And angry vampires had a way of making good and sure that they did not lack for force. A hard twist of her back made her spine crack all the way from the base of her neck to her tailbone. Syesha immediately felt better, at least physically. The rest of it was not something that she had any control over.

Syesha unbuckled the gun belt from around her waist and then laid it to the side on a chair by her door. She would clean the leather and oil the gun metal later; right now, all that Syesha could think about doing was chewing enough aspirin to put her stomach lining in grave danger and then sleep until the sun set again.

Syesha had not bothered to turn on the light in her room as she had entered, since they had managed to stay in one place for once long enough for her to memorize the room and the first gray rays of dawn had been coming in through the room’s single window, a narrow rectangle set up high near the ceiling. She glanced towards it once out of habit, checking the security measures that she had put into place without really expecting that any of them would be disturbed. If the vampires were bold enough to come here, to the place where they lived, then it was as good as over, anyway.

It took her less than a second after glancing up to process that the window was just slightly open. Not broken, just...cracked. Syesha felt her heart become as useless in her chest as one of the leech’s own. She swallowed hard and forgot immediately that she had been so exhausted mere moments before that she had about to fall asleep on her feet. Syesha strode across the room and then knelt to touch at the useless lock lying on the floor beneath the window with shaking fingers. The metal had been torn off with such great force that it was actually warped out of shape, a useless curve of brass.

There was no need for that, Syesha thought. Not if the aim was merely to get into the room, anyway. Breaking the window would have been more than enough to get that point across. But if someone wanted the owner of that room to know just how powerful they actually were, just how vulnerable the owner of that room and everyone left that she cared about actually were? Then it was the perfect stylistic flourish.

Her hands suddenly shaking so badly that she could hardly stand to look at them, Syesha whirled around and hurled the lock across the room as hard as she could. It bounced off of the guns and fell back down to the floor again. Syesha stared at it for a few seconds, breathing heavily, before she turned back towards the window. It was impossibly small, and the plaster surrounding it did not appear to have been so much as cracked. It would have taken a very small person to fit through it.

And an exceptionally vindictive person to leave the box that Syesha just now noticed in the center of her bed. She swallowed hard. Plain brown box that could have been used to contain either a cake or a woman’s hat, no flourishes. It was damned near a signature at this point.

She was a machine, Syesha reminded herself. She was a warrior, and she did not bow down in the face of anyone else’s horseshit.

And she was not going to touch that box until she managed to make her hands stop shaking and her heart fluttering like a wounded bird in her chest. It took longer than Syesha liked, but so much less time than it had the first time that a plain and unassuming brown box had appeared where it did not belong. She had nearly hyperventilated, that first time. Now it took her less than five minutes to have herself back under control so thoroughly that even David and Carly themselves could not have suspected that something new had arrived to upset her.

Syesha took a seat on the edge of her bed, as far away as she could possibly get and still be able to reach the box in the center. She dragged it towards her with the tips of her fingers only before she ultimately had no choice but to pick it up and put it in her lap. It was light, only three or four pounds at the outside. There wasn’t anything leaking from the bottom into Syesha’s lap. Had there been, she was sure that she would have given in, thrown the box across the room, and finally had that total breakdown that David and Carly had been watching and waiting for for the past three months.

You are a machine, Syesha reminded herself. You don’t feel anything that you don’t want to. She took a deep breath and waited until her fingers had stopped trembling before she slid the lid off of the box.

The smell of it hit her immediately. Not a lot; it looked as if it had been held in a freezer for a few hours, at least, before it had been presented to her, and the person who had made the cuts also looked as if they had known what they were doing. The former owner of the hand had been white. If the hair on the back of the knuckles was anything to go by, he had been male. And there was a pale band around one of the fingers which suggested at a wedding ring. Everything else was left to Syesha’s imagination to make up, what he had been thinking, whether he had suffered.

Ramiele had always been a natural talent with a knife. In her hands, it was actually smarter to use a blade that it was to use a gun; she was that good.

Syesha nearly slammed the lid back down on the box and shoved it to the floor on pure instinct. You are a machine, she thought again just in time. There was a sheet of plain paper sitting on the top of the...the remains of a person. Syesha could not bring herself to touch it, but she did lead forward far enough to make out the writing in sharp black ink, nearly lost in all of the blood.

So you don’t have my heart, the note said. It used to be said that the left hand was one of the steps on the way to it.

Syesha slammed the box shut, finally, and lunged from the bed so that she could put her hand over her mouth. She was trapped for several seconds without being sure if she was even going to make it to the toilet to deal with the gorge that was rising in her throat, before she was finally able to force it back down again. She had faced horrors before; this was no different.

Never before had she faced horrors and been able to remember when the offender was still a person. That was different.

Syesha glanced back towards the box, discovered that glances were all that she could manage. Looking at it directly again was out of the question. She could still smell the scent its contents brought with it, blood and meat. The vomit tried to rise again and was harder this time to shove back down.

It occurred to Syesha, but only for a second, that David and Carly needed to know about the box. This was their home, too, and they needed to know if Ramiele was finding it so terribly easy to creep in and out as she pleased. And they needed to know that Ramiele was taking such a twisted and personal interest in Syesha herself; what affected one person affected the entire team.

And they were worried about her, purely for her, and would want to help her in every possible way that they could. Syesha allowed that to cross her mind as an afterthought before she shoved it away. This was her deal, she didn’t need to let anyone else in until she was good and ready. Syesha forced herself to touch the box again so that she could shove it quickly under her bed, planning to slip out as soon as David and Carly were asleep for the day and dispose of it more properly. She would have to be careful, as daylight was a human time and that hand belonged to someone, but that was all right. Syesha was accustomed to hunting much more dangerous things than cops.

A light knock sounded on her door. Syesha jumped hard before she was able to catch herself. A leech wouldn’t knock, genius, she told herself sourly before she was able to make herself sit back down on her bed again. Her nerves had been frayed beyond repair over the past three months. Syesha was finding it hard to even remember a time when she had not lived on a constant hair trigger.

“Come in,” she called out crossly. Her voice did not sound quite right, but whoever was at the door was hardly likely to pick up on that.

The door opened, Carly entered tattoo-first. There was clear concern on her face as she looked Syesha over. Syesha shifted in her seat on the bed and crossed one leg over the other. The corner of the box, she noticed, was sticking out from beneath the bed. Struggling very hard to keep her eyes from widening and hoping that Carly would not notice the way that her breathing had suddenly hitched, Syesha nudged her boot back until she was able to push the box back beneath the bed a few inches at a time. She also prayed that Carly would not notice the faint coppery scent that Syesha could not seem to now stop noticing; maybe they had been around enough blood while they had been hunting the night before that Carly would be able to smell nothing else.

And maybe Syesha was about to get fantastically lucky. Carly had a raw, ugly bruise forming at her hairline and a swollen shoulder that she was favoring by holding it as close to her body as she possibly could. Syesha remembered that an overzealous newborn had nearly yanked the arm out of socket altogether before Carly had been able to dispatch it to wherever the hell the leeches went for their afterlife. Surely she would be focusing too hard on her own hurts to pay undue attention to Syesha’s own.

Carly took a seat on the edge of Syesha’s bed without being asked. Syesha would have glared, but she was too preoccupied with how close Carly’s foot, swinging back and forth as Carly visibly struggled with what she wanted to say, was coming to striking the box. If she happened to knock it open, that smell would be unmistakable.

Just tell her, the sane part of Syesha’s brain that would not shut up insisted. For God’s sake, just tell them both, they can help. You’re being ridiculous. But she and Ramiele had moved in their own little orbit around each other the same way that David and Carly did, and whatever Ramiele did from here on out, that made her Syesha’s mess to put to bed.

And Syesha swore that if Carly did not stop kicking her foot like that, Syesha was going to slap the shit out of her before she was able to stop herself.

“Oh, come on,” Syesha nearly exploded when Carly seemed determined to do nothing more than fidget until the sun set again. “Just spit it out already.”

Carly flinched and leaned back slightly before she gathered herself. Her foot finally quit moving. “I’m worried about you,” she said, and made a helpless gesture that was meant to encompass the space outside of Syesha’s quarters. “We’re both worried about you. You’re not grieving.”

Because there was a part of Syesha that could not quite except that Ramiele was dead, and because it was far better when she simply did not feel at all. She rolled her eyes instead. “I don’t know how many times I have to say that we are not having this conversation--” she started.

“It’s starting to affect how you fight,” Carly cut her off, and just like that, a switch had been flipped. She was not the nurturing and nearly hesitant woman that she had been, but instead made Syesha feel as if they were only a few participants short of an actual intervention. She stiffened.

“I had some bad luck tonight,” Syesha gritted.

“You’re having a lot of bad luck lately.”

Syesha made a dismissive snorting noise only so that she would not outright snarl. “Says the woman who damned near had her arm ripped out because she was too busy fucking watching me.”

Carly rolled her eyes. “David and I want to help you,” she tried again, and Syesha could see in the clench of her jaw that she was barely keeping a lid on everything that she wanted to say. “I know what you’re going through--”

“Do you?” Syesha interrupted. Carly was interested in holding back the full effect of the hurtful words that she could be saying. Syesha did not have that problem. “Because from where I’m standing, your best friend is still alive.” Carly fell into a shocked silence. “Yeah, maybe you should shut the fuck up about pretending that you have any idea what I’m going through.”

“I’ll do that.” Carly rose stiffly from the bed. Her heel came within six inches of kicking the box. Syesha held her breath. “Look, you’re going to have to let it out sooner or later--”

“Up yours,” Syesha responded pleasantly.

“Atta girl.” Carly left, and came very close to slamming the door shut behind her. Syesha listened to the sounds of Carly moving about in the common area outside, lowered voices. She fucking hated it when people talked about her.

Three months before, Syesha would not have thought it possible for her to sleep on a bed that had a human hand resting beneath it. Three months before, she would not have thought it possible for her to do a lot of things. She was so goddamned tired, though; it was almost no longer a matter of choice. Syesha closed her eyes and opened them again when the shadows coming through her single small window had changed, the light striking her across the face. It hadn’t been nearly enough sleep and she felt as if she had been running through unpleasant dreams that refused to be brought up again now that she was conscious, blood and fangs and a laugh that had used to be silly and now wasn’t. Syesha scrubbed her hands over her face to chase the cobwebs away and listened carefully for movement in the space outside her door. All was silent; David and Carly must have given up their muttered conference so that they could sleep in preparation for going out again tonight.

She ought to be getting as much further sleep as she possibly could, too, but she could not bring herself to lie back down. Syesha pulled her shoes on quickly and then leaned over and grabbed for the box that she had not moved before falling asleep. It all but burned her fingers just to touch the damned thing, but she could hardly leave it beneath her bed until the smell of blood finally pulled everyone into her quarters. She crept out of their headquarters with the box tucked under her arm and blinked hard for several seconds as she encountered the bright sunlight outside. She wasn’t accustomed to that, either; they weren’t any more made for sunlight than the vampires were.

Syesha ranged out farther from the base than she had actually planned on, looking for a place where she could safely deposit her inhuman present and be gone again. Anything close to home would not do, for police could cause them every bit as much trouble as the vampires, in the end. It took her well over two hours before she found a dumpster that was sufficiently abandoned for her to flip open the lid and hurl Ramiele’s present to her inside quickly. The clanging sound made her jump and stare around quickly to make certain that she had gone unnoticed, never mind that this was likely to make her stick out even more than if she had just dumped the package and left.

That’s what’s left of your friend, Syesha ordered herself as she hurried back on foot. She slid her sunglasses back down over her eyes. So suck it up.

The sun was still a few hours away from setting by the time that Syesha made it back and slid inside. David and Carly both ought to have still been asleep, and so Syesha was shocked to discover the both of them standing in the center of the common area and talking to one another in low voices. They looked up to hear her enter, but for once did not ask her what she had been doing acting as if she was actually diurnal.

“What’s up?” Syesha asked in an airy voice, even though she had a feeling that what they had really been discussing was her.

It was nice to have her ego let down for once. David looked up with a solemn expression and then smiled his grimmest smile, the one that made Syesha think that they were on the same page far more often than they were not. “We’ve got a lead for tonight’s hunt,” he said. “How do you feel about rock and roll?”

End Part Three

Continue to Part Four