InsaneJournal

Current mood:	rejuvenated
Entry tags:	american idol: fic, flyboys

AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 5/24
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
Part Four



Part Five

The trick to hiding weapons across one’s person was only to act as if you were completely confident that no one would find anything there even if they looked. Do that well enough, and no one would even think of observing the normal security precautions, even if there was something about you that would have set all of their nerves to jangling ordinarily. David flashed the bouncer a friendly smile and slipped a bill into his hand when that did not immediately seem as if it would be enough. “Give me a chance here, bro, I’m close,” he whispered to the man, jerking his head to indicate Syesha and Carly, who were already in without a problem. Since David was possessed of neither breasts nor legs up to his neck, he guessed that he would have to make do on his charm.

The bouncer’s eyebrow ignored gravity and physics both so that it could rise at least two inches. “With them,” he said flatly. Syesha and Carly were wearing clothes similar in nature to David’s own, something that they could fight in, but the effect upon them was that of grunge chic, while David had a feeling that upon him it was merely grunge.

David shrugged and grinned. “Well, I’m going to buy them a few first,” he said. The eyebrow went up even further. “Don’t ruin my night here, come on. Do either one of them look like they don’t want to be here?” Carly looked as if she was radiating back and forth between irritation and hiding a grin, while Syesha looked as if she was off in her own head. As usual. “Do it for the team.”

The bouncer finally sighed and rolled his eyes, and that was when David knew that he had won. “Don’t embarrass yourself,” he said as he stood to the side to allow David entrance.

David dropped the affable smile from his face as soon as he was walking through the door. He could feel people starting watching him from the corners of their eyes, and knew that they were assessing him as a dangerous man in a way that they hadn’t been doing even ten seconds before. David ignored them all, as did Syesha and Carly from their positions flanking the crowd on either side of the room. They weren’t here to flirt. They were here to do business. A friend of a friend who was a little more educated than the average civilian had gotten word to David that certain frequent patrons of one of the trendier clubs downtown were paler than others; that was all that he needed to know.

David stepped deeper into the crowd and looked around for these very special friends that he needed to meet, already judging the distance between himself and the door at all times. If he had a shot, he was going to take it. That would involve running like hell afterwards. David hated that part, that they were always forced to do their work in darkness and then flee afterwards as if they were the ones that had done wrong, but it was a key to their existence that he was helpless to change.

David glanced up purely by chance at the stage where a band was just starting to warm into its performance. The lead singer was yelling suggestions into the crowd that were just this side of sexually suggestive, and David could already see blushes rising in the cheeks of more than a few of a the women who were watching him. David took a long, lingering look at the man and abruptly decided that maybe he knew why. The lead singer of this anonymous band that did not understand how very unlucky it had become was tall and dark-haired, with features that did not immediately strike David as attractive until the man glanced down at someone in the audience and laughed, and then--

And then David was thinking of quite a few things that he could do to that body in order to draw the high flush into the man’s cheeks to match what he was doing to everyone around him.

Focus, David ordered himself, abruptly turning away. It was not the first time that he had glanced at a pretty civilian. Maybe the two of them could meet up in a dark alley later and work something out for an hour or two. Maybe they couldn’t. In the end, that all fell before the job.

David moved among the civilians without actually touching them, and he watched every move that they made without any of them being the wiser. They were all so...they were all so innocent. It was not a term of endearment in David’s mind; it made him tired. It made him one more thing that he had to keep his mind on, when he already had so much.

He lost track of Carly and Syesha both within moments as they drifted through the packed floor, doing their jobs, and providing a silent rebuke to David to do the same. He could not resist glancing up at the stage one more time as the band started to play, and the man at the microphone to sing. He had a rasping, bluesy voice that hung in the background as David scrutinized each face that he saw in turn, looking for the stand-outs. They would be paler than humans, and more intense. And some of them, if David was lucky, would be faces that he already recognized. He nudged his way closer to the bar and ignored the way that people were staring at him, whispering amongst themselves and moving away once they caught at the edge of danger that clung to him like a cloak. One of them was a boy pretending to be a man at the bar; David could spot all the earmarks of someone in on a fake ID from where he stood and wondered what had been used to convince the bouncer otherwise. The boy’s friends were slower to notice that David was there but stared like all of the others when they did, the taller of the boys reaching out to nudge the girl slightly behind him.

“You want anything?” the bartender asked him. He was the only one who seemed to have better things to do than ogle David like David was the second coming of Hell’s Angels. While David was well aware by now that this club was not the kind of place that got anything much more dangerous than the Abercrombie crowd, surely a few crept in now and then.

“No, thank you,” David answered, and saw the bartender’s eyes flicker, caught between annoyance that he was not going to be earning any kind of tip and faint surprise at the politeness of David’s tone. “I’m waiting for someone, actually.” He turned his head away from the bar and the people clustered at it, looked back over the crowd again. A head of dandelion-yellow hair made his fingers twitch towards the weapons that he was not supposed to have.

There were a lot of blondes in Los Angeles, David told himself as he gave up any pretense of discretion and began elbowing his way roughly through the crowd. It was the city’s stock in trade, it didn’t mean anything for certain yet, he couldn’t go around assaulting civilians--

And maybe someday David was going to learn how to stop overanalyzing everything and just go with this gut. The woman with the sunflower hair turned just far enough for David to see her profile, and a flash of blue eyes and a wide mouth that had been made for smiling. He saw her smile a lot. Usually there was blood on the floor when she did it.

“Fuck!” David exploded. He turned to yell a warning, “Carls, Syesha!” but the music was too loud as the band on stage moved deeper into their second song; David could hardly even hear himself. He snarled and knew that he sounded disturbingly like the very things that he hunted as he lunged through the crowd.

“Excuse me,” an irritated clubber snapped at him as David shoved her to the side hard enough to make her spill her drink on herself. Something prickled along the back of David’s neck; for once, he did not stop to analyze it. He threw the woman to the ground, and himself on top of her, as someone laughed and the air whistled above him. David looked up at a gurgling sound and saw a man, doubtless the woman’s boyfriend come to rescue her if the indignant expression bleeding away into shock on her face was anything to go by. Blood ran down from a deep gash in his neck before he dropped slowly to his knees, then to the floor itself. People screamed and leapt away before their shoes could be touched by the growing puddle. The music jangled to an abrupt halt on the stage.

Beneath David, the woman had realized what was happening and started to scream. “Shh, shh, it’s going to be all right,” David whispered to her on instinct, though if she was actually stupid enough to believe that then her chances of making it out of this club were even slimmer than every other civilian’s. He looked up instead at the boyfriend’s murderer.

Jason grinned down at David, lazy and slow, and flipped a knife end over end in his hand. David watched his nostrils flare every time that he had to let the bloodied blade pass by without stopping to take a taste. “See what you made me do, David?” Jason asked. His speech was as slow and as thoughtful as it ever was, as if he wasn’t just making conversation but really wanted David to think about the impact of what he was doing. A vampire PSA. “I hate to waste it.”

He’s carrying a weapon. That’s interesting. “You’re looking a little nervous there, buddy,” David said. He put his hand upon the woman’s shoulder one more time to urge her to stay where she was before he rose to his feet. People struggling to find somewhere, anywhere, else to be in the crowded space buffeted him from side to side.

Jason’s mouth twisted. “We’re here on business,” he snapped at David. “Sorry, bro, but I just don’t have time to catch up with you right now.” He spun. David swore and drew his gun, but Jason was as goddamned fast as he ever was, and disappeared among the human shields that were always so eager to lunge into harm’s way for him. David had a shot for less than half a second before Jason was gone and a terrified frat kid had taken his place.

The kid’s eyes widened even further when he saw the very big and very real gun that David was pointing at his head. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Look, man, I don’t know what’s going on here, I’m not the one you want--”

“No,” David grunted without lowering the weapon, “you’re not.” He spun towards a mob that was more willing to sway back and forth as they tried to fit everyone through the exit at once, and a woman on the verge of being trampled. “For God’s sake, will someone help her?” Civilians, he thought. Civilians never failed to make him wonder what exactly he, Syesha, and Carly were trying to protect in the first place. David swore again and abandoned Jason for the moment so that he could pull the woman back up to her feet, only hoping as he did so that he was not ripping someone’s throat out because David was not there to stop him. “Stay by the walls as much as possible and calmly--calmly--make your way to the door,” David hissed at her. “You have less of a chance of being trampled that way.” The woman nodded shakily. David had no idea if that meant that she was actually processing what he was telling her or not, but he had no time. He gave her a shove and then whirled back just in time to see Ramiele grappling with the lead singer that had so distracted David upon entrance to the club. The singer was able to knock her away from himself, only for her to immediately turn and leap upon one of the other members of the band. The singer ignored David’s internal order for him to just drop the heroism nonsense and fucking run already, picking up the mic stand and bringing it down heavily upon Ramiele’s back. He staggered back in surprise when that had absolutely no effect upon her, but she did not appear to be interested in him, he ought to be all right--

For less than a second, David saw light brown braids moving through the panicked people like a shark scenting after those precious few drops of blood that had been allowed to hit the water. “Motherfuck,” David said in a suspiciously calm voice that barely sounded like himself before he gave pursuit. His drawn gun helped to clear the crowd out from in front on him somewhat, but they only had so many places to go in the first place. It was like trying to fight his way through a vat of particularly stubborn and sentient molasses. David finally gave up on playing nicely with the other children and put a particularly vicious elbow into the back of a bystander so that he could cover the last few yards.

David exploded out of the panicked pack and came across Jason grabbing the clearly terrified singer by his throat and yanking him towards Jason’s own exposed and gleaming fangs. The man was not panicking, though, David noted with approval. Good. His chances of survival had just gone up. David took careful aim and fired a shot designed to go into Jason’s heart and end him right then and there, but it was difficult to draw a clean bead that would not also hit the civilian. He winced as the bullet entered Jason’s shoulder instead. Maybe, if he was lucky, the silver still would have gone close enough to the heart to do more than piss him off.

Jason started to fall forward across the civilian before catching himself and whirling to give David his deadly-bright smile. The civilian scuttled back against the stage and crouched there, holding one of his arms tightly against his chest as if it pained him. Jason may very well have broken it dragging him forward.

“Missed the heart shot,” Jason told David. The blood running out of his shoulder was black and so thick that it was nearly clotted. The thready whine of pain in the pack of Jason’s voice still said that David had gotten close.

“Won’t do that again,” David answered calmly, and steadied his hand for another shot. Someone screamed behind him. That was nothing there, there were screams happening all over the place right now, but at the sound of it Jason’s expression became one of utter triumph. That was enough to make all of the hair on the back of David’s neck stand up as one movement. He whirled.

Brooke had that goddamned kid from the bar with her fingers threaded through the front of his shirt and dragging him so close to her mouth that he could probably see himself reflected in the light bouncing off of her canines. It was a terrible thing, what was about to happen to that kid, but David was too far away and unable to get a clear shot, and, anyway, he had no idea what Jason was doing caring about the fate of one little human. Until Brooke didn’t take the opportunity to feed that was standing right there in front of her and instead dragged her prize towards the door, throwing humans out of her way like bowling pins as she did so. The tone of the screams changed as people finally began to realize that there was absolutely no way that a woman who looked as if she had been living off of tofu and pine nuts since the age of fifteen ought to be that strong. They were catching on.

Doesn’t matter, David told himself as he whirled back towards Jason. His job was to kill them, not care about what was going on in their little undead heads.

But they were in a war, his brain was swift to come back at him, and what was going on in their heads could very well be the key to everything. David swore, and Jason, sensing the moment of weakness, lunged. David’s shot went wild into the ceiling as he was driven down onto his back with Jason’s full weight coming down on top of him. Stupid, stupid, stupid, and there was a real chance that he was going to die for it ,too. David grunted and struggled to bring his gun back up so that he could force it directly into Jason’s eye before pulling the trigger--try regenerating from that, motherfucker--but Jason was leaning down on him so hard that David could feel the tendons in his arm creaking.

“This has gone on long enough, don’t you think?” Jason murmured to him. David could see the saliva gleaming on Jason’s eager fangs and feel the first hint of an erection against his thigh whenever Jason pressed down. Sex and death. It wasn’t as if writers had been making that connection of whole centuries before this moment.

“But we never set a safe word,” David answered back, and bucked his hips in an attempt to get some, any, of the necessary leverage that would allow him to throw Jason off of himself. His pelvis collided hard with Jason’s, giving him a rather unpleasant answer to an even more unpleasant question, but he wasn’t going anywhere. David gasped and tried to drive himself down through the floor itself as Jason leaned over him to keep his promise and end it.

David had to shut his eyes quickly as the first wooden splinters, casualty of the chair that someone was shattering across Jason’s back, fell down over his face, or else risk being blinded. He opened them again as Jason loosened his grip upon David’s throat so that he could look over his shoulder and see who dared. From his vantage point on the floor, David saw the civilian stagger back clutching a shard of the chair itself in his hand like a weapon. There was blood staining the forearm of his jacket and trickling down over his fingers. With Jason distracted for the moment, David rocked forward to get the leverage and then drew his fist back. Jason glanced back at him just in time for David to drive his fist hard into Jason’s mouth. He imagined himself shattering off every single one of those fangs at the base and filling Jason’s mouth with splinters of bone. Reality was nearly as sweet. Jason reeled back as his lower lip split open that black near-ichor that served as his blood rushed down his chin. He licked at in reflex and had to spit it to the side just as quicky; even vampires could not stand the taste of their own blood.

David took the split-second gift that had been given him and wriggled out from under Jason’s body, leapt back up to his feet. “Get back and stay down!” he bellowed at the civilian, who raised his eyebrows at David as if he was asking David what he really thought that he was doing, telling the civilian what to do after he had just saved David’s life. Because one fluke did not make you a hero, David felt like yelling at him if they had had the time, but thinking that it did might well make you a corpse. He used the force of his glare instead and hoped that it would be enough.

Jason grinned, and spit his next mouthful of blood at David instead. Panic rising in his chest like a live thing, David darted back so that none of it could hit him, and Jason laughed. The fucking leech had jumped up onto one of the tables again, and then away, before David could raise his gun and get another clean shot. He mouthed “Stay where you are,” one more time at the civilian without having any real hope that the civilian was actually going to do as he asked--he looked like that type--before giving pursuit himself. It was harder than it should have been, given that there only one of him but only one of Jason, also; the man was a magician, a tactician, an infuriating blend of both at once, and he knew that David would not risk wounding or killing someone within the crowd in order to take him out. Every time that David drew a bead, he was gone again, and more than once it was with a body falling to the floor and a fresh set of screams rising like vapor behind him. David had to fight in order to remember that it had only been a few minutes since Jason and his people had shown themselves at all; it felt instead like eternity.

From the corner of his eye, David saw Carly come up behind the blonde fluff at the bar, twine her fingers through all that hair, and yank her back so hard that she nearly lifted her off of her feet. Vampire or not, the blonde could not stop a shriek of surprise and pain from exiting her lips as she was hurled back. David felt his lips curling upwards in a small inward moment of “Atta girl” before he fired again at Jason. Jason twirled to the side with a grace that no human could have managed and left a destroyed tabletop in his wake as he deftly flipped it up to catch the bullet. David swore.

A woman screamed, and it was like a lightning bolt to the heart. David spun towards the sound before he even had time to think, even knowing that taking out the vampires before they could kill countless other civilians ought to be more important than that one finite life. He saw Ramiele and Syesha standing less than five yards apart from one another, Syesha pointing a gun and Ramiele wearing a smile which said that she already knew that Syesha was not willing to use it. A crumpled form lay on the floor between them. There was enough blood beneath her to tell David that she had no chance even if Syesha did take the shot, and yet they could still take one more monster out of the world.

Syesha’s hand was shaking, visible even from where David stood. She still did not pull the trigger.

David knew that he had better things to do than root for her to finally end it, and yet he could not look away. He paid for it, and paid for it dearly, with the shattered leg of one of the chairs had been broken in the melee striking him in the jaw so hard that David swore he could feel it going out of socket. He fell to the ground as bonelessly as a marionette whose strings had been cut. Jason was looming over him immediately afterwards. Of course he was. More than any vampire that David had ever encountered before, this one could scent trouble like blood and respond to it immediately.

“Look at what happens when you lose focus,” Jason said, as David worked his jaw in order to reassure himself that it was not in the end really broken. Jason leaned down like he thought that this was going to be easy. David was glad that he could answer that, at least, by raising the gun that Jason had not thought ahead enough to take away and fire one bullet, directly into Jason’s kneecap. It was self-indulgent, he knew--the bullet ought to be going directly into Jason’s heart or eye--but David could not in that moment resist. He wanted the fucker to hurt.

Jason reeled back, screamed. He still balanced much better on one leg than David liked to see. David was panting and leveling his gun for another shot when finally there came the sound of police sirens. He nearly cursed as Jason whipped his head up to track the sound and then whirled away, faster than David could hope to get a clear shot. Not unless he wanted to fire upon a significant number of those humans that he was trying to protect.

Maybe he was not as cracked out for this job as he wanted to pretend, David thought in frustration as Jason grabbed at a club-goer and threw her, screaming, into David’s arms to even further lessen David’s chances of getting a clear chance. He fired one into the ceiling in frustration instead as Jason was gone like smoke, and the two females with him. None of them looked as if they had taken more than minor industries. David told himself not to be too hard on himself or the girls over it, it had been three on three and if vampires were easy to exterminate then there would be a lot more people willing to take the job that the three of them had saddled themselves with, but it was hard. Harder still when David thought of how many people could be dying because one of those three vampires got hungry later on; Jason in particular would be needing blood shortly to help him heal his knee. A sour taste rose in the back of David’s throat.

“Is anyone hurt?” he asked shortly, so that he would not waste another bullet by firing it into the ceiling. Carly had a small cut beneath her eye that looked as if it had been caused by a stray piece of flying glass, and Syesha was visibly shaken. Neither of them appeared to have anything wrong with them outside of a few further cuts and bruises.

“They were after him,” Carly said without preamble. She had a grip upon the kid from the bar, her arm both thrown about his shoulders and his hand fisting through his shirtsleeve. It looked as if she did not know whether she wanted to comfort the kid or keep him from running, and so was instead opting for a combination of both. The kid did not look as if he was up to running, in any case. He was pale and had his arms wrapped around himself, and he kept looking around the bar as if he was expecting to be attacked again from any quarter.

“Why?” David asked the kid. His tone was rougher than he intended; he was not able to shake the future bodies out of his mind.

“David,” Carly started, a warning in her tone. The kid trembled harder and stared at the floor. After a long moment, he shook his head.

“I--I don’t know,” he finally managed. “I didn’t do anything to them, I don’t know why they would--” The kid snapped his mouth shut and then looked around the bar wildly. “Oh, oh, my friends, what about them?” The bar was clearing out of panicked patrons, finally, as the police drew closer, but David could not at first glance see either of the two teenagers that the kid had come in with. He rolled his eyes.

“We have bigger problems to deal with right now,” David started in an indifferent tone. He gestured at Carly to hand the kid over into his care, ignoring the way that she was making fierce faces at him over the kid’s head.

“I’m not going to abandon them!” the kid exclaimed. He started finally to struggle his way free of Carly’s grasp, apparently not realizing that even on their worst day any of them could subdue him without so much as raising their heart rate. Carly merely tightened her grip and raised her eyebrows at David in a clear order for him to handle it. Syesha looked around the bar with a furrowed brow and said nothing. David was not even sure if she was looking for the boy’s friends, or some lingering sign of Ramiele.

“Fine,” David said shortly. He left the three of them and treaded through the shattered remains of what had once been a fairly trendy establishment, making note of the wounded who were sprawled here and there like dolls. He didn’t stop to offer comfort. With the police would come ambulances, and they would do a far better job of saving those who could be salvaged than David himself would be able to offer with words. He did, however, stop to make sure that none of them were bleeding from bite wounds. That was one thing that the paramedics would not be able to cope with, when it came down to the inevitable.

David paused briefly as he came to the place where the civilian had been crouching. There was a puddle of blood there, but no sign of the man himself. Something that David was not quite sure that he wanted to remember began to tickle at his mind, but he moved on.

He found the kid’s friends crouching together behind a table that had been overturned on the far side of the room. How they had managed to get that far away while their friend remained by the bar, David could not say; none of them seemed like the type to abandon each other. The tide of panicked people had to have pushed them like a wave. The tall, pale boy was bleeding from a wound at his hairline, while the girl was crying softly and holding up the hem of her shirt to staunch a heavy flow of blood from her split lower lip. Neither of them appeared to be suffering wounds that even needed real medical attention, let alone were bad enough to threaten their lives. Feeling Carly’s eyes against the back of his neck, David still sighed and settled into a crouch in front of them. It was not until the kids stiffened that he realized that, bristling with weapons as he was, he was probably reminding them more of a predator preparing to strike than he was a savior.

“Hey, kids,” David said, struggling to overcome his appearance by keeping his voice warm and welcoming. “How are you doing? Are either of you hurt?”

“Where’s David?” the boy asked immediately, while the girl fired less than a second later, “What was wrong with those people?”

David startled for a second before he realized that the kid must also be named David. Yeah, they were going to have to find something else to call him. “He’s all right,” he told the boy, and then said to the girl, “They were, um, a gang. On drugs.” Inspiration struck him. “On PCP.”

The girl narrowed her eyes at him and managed to look fierce even as she was holding her shirt to her mouth. “I watched Buffy, too,” she said, and then her eyes widened. “Oh, my God--”

“You’re wrong,” David said shortly before he rose back to his feet. “Don’t worry about your friend, we’ve got it covered.” He returned to the girls. “Let’s get him out of here before the cops make it in.”

“What?” the kid seemed to realize belatedly that they weren’t asking him for any input on their next plan and began to struggle. Syesha put her arm out and against his chest without even bothering to look him in the eye.

“I’ll take him back to his house,” Syesha said. “Figure out why the leeches are so hot to catch him alive.” The boy went even paler. David felt badly for him, but he was about to enter a wild world that he could not possibly have any past preparation for, and it was not going to get any easier from here. David paused, thinking of the way that Syesha had had such a clear shot at Ramiele and yet had let it slide right past her. Syesha noticed both the hesitation and the way that David was looking at her and asked, “What?”

There was no way to possibly say this that was not going to get his head bitten off, so David decided to liken it to pulling a bandage off as quickly as possible and be done with it. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

Syesha’s eyes went narrow, and her hand against the kid’s chest turned into a fist. He very wisely had decided to stop struggling for the moment. “Why not?” she asked. Carly looked at David with wide eyes over the kid’s head.

“Because you’ve been having some problems lately,” David said bluntly. “We’ve all noticed it--” Syesha turned her head swiftly to the side to glare at Carly, too. Carly looked as if she absolutely could not wait to get David alone so that she could thank him for bringing her into this. “And it’s starting to affect your work.” Christ, he sounded so much like an uptight middle manager that he could have kicked himself.

“You want to lead this team?” Syesha snapped at him in a cold, dangerous voice. Carly went still, and David knew that he had, too. That was their biggest point of pride, that everything was equal between them. No one was the leader, no one was able to issue anyone orders.

“Why don’t I go with you, Sy?” Carly asked. Syesha flicked her a dangerous glance. Carly flashed her a tight smile. “Two sets of eyes are better than one.”

“You’re not a very good liar,” Syesha told her.

Carly lifted her shoulder into a shrug. “Rami might try to contact you,” she said gently. “You want to be alone for that?”

Syesha’s spine went as rigid as if she had been jolted with electricity, and David did not know why. Surely Carly’s comment didn’t warrant such a reaction. Before he could allow his brain to work over this for too long, however, the sirens were right outside the door, those in the bar who were capable of standing were making note of the group with, no doubt, enough interest to give the cops very detailed descriptions once they were gone, and Syesha finally seemed to realize that they were on a certain timeline here.

“Fine,” she said, pressing her lips into a thin line. Her hand tightened in the front of the kid’s shirt and yanked him away from Carly’s grasp. “Let’s go.”

“I don’t want to,” the kid said immediately.

“Kid, we’re trying to save you here,” Syesha said. Her tone, while it could not be considered nurturing, was at least milder than the one she had been using while she, David, and Carly had all been hissing at each other. “Work with that.”

Carly paused a beat behind Syesha so that she could lean close and whisper into his ear, “Do you like playing with badly-made bombs, too?”

“I’m a wild child at heart.” David looked around and said, “Look, I’m going to stay here a little while longer, check out a few things. I’ll meet you guys back at the crash pad.”

“Something wrong?”

David thought about a patch of blood on the floor in front of the stage. “I’m not sure.” He gripped at Carly’s arm. “Be careful.”

“Will do.” She squeezed back before she let him go. “Sy’s right. You do try to take control an awful lot.”

“Oh, God, please don’t have girl talk about me behind my back.”

Carly made a face at him, but did not have time for anything more before they both had to rush out the back exit after Syesha and the kid. David could hear the police finally entering just as their feet touched the filthy alley outside. He watched his friends leave with their only quasi-willing companion in tow and circled back around so that he could view the front of the club from a safe vantage point within the shadows. Just as he had suspected, whoever had managed to get a call in to the authorities had also been able to mention the wounded and the dead, and ambulances were already on the scene. The civilian had been able to slip out while David had not been looking. He was sitting on the back bumper of an ambulance while David watched, and an EMT was cleaning the blood away from his forearm with gauze.

As he was able to finally get a clear look at the wound, David’s heart stuttered. There was no mistaking what that was.

“Goddamnit,” he whispered. There was no accounting for how upset he sounded over someone that he had known for only a span of seconds, and most of that engaged in either saving the man or being saved by him. He was not the first one to die by vampire, in one way or another. He was certainly not going to be the last, either.

David stayed hunched in the shadows and muttered obscenities to himself until the ambulances pulled away with everyone that could be saved. There was no way for him to possibly intervene; he was amazed that the police had not actually cordoned off a search parameter to look for the ones who had caused the carnage. He bided his time until the final ambulance had pulled away and then strolled out of the shadows towards the bartender, who had his arms wrapped around himself and still looked traumatized by everything that he had witnessed. He was so wrapped into his own world that he did not even notice David there until David was nearly on top of him. He startled hard, his eyes widening.

“You,” he said. “You were in there--”

David grabbed the man’s arm and propelled him backwards before he pull attention down onto them. The club itself had been cordoned off as a crime scene by now, but the alley was still deserted as the CSI types there worked on the inside. “Yeah, I was,” David said in a low, fierce tone. “And since you were in there, too, you know that I was one of the good guys.”

“Okay.” The bartender nodded rapidly. “Okay. What do you need?”

“That man who was singing tonight,” David said. “Is he a regular here?”

“Johns? Sings here a couple of times a month.” The bartender shook his head and looked back towards the club again. David was only going to have a few seconds more before PTSD took over, he could tell, so he phrased his next question to get right to the point.

“Where can I find him?” David asked, leaning into the man’s personal space and using a tone that left absolutely no room for disagreement.

End Part Five

Part Six

</l-cut>