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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 6/24
Pay attention to the author's notes on this one, folks.

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



Part Six

Every time that he thought he was calmed down, everything that had happened over the past hour would catch up to him, and then he would be on the verge of hyperventilating again. He wrapped his arms around himself until his ribs ached as he sat between the two women who acted as if they could break him over their knees and stick him in the trunk at the slightest hint of misbehavior from him. He had hopefully suggested that he sit in the backseat at first, rather than shoving one more body into a front seat that had really been designed for two, with an eye towards maybe jumping out as soon as a suitable intersection presented itself. The withering glares that both of the women had given him as soon as he had suggested this told him that they both knew what he was planning as soon as he thought of it and, sorry, son, but that was just not going to fly.

So now he was crammed into a front seat between two very beautiful women who would have made it very difficult to sit still under normal circumstances. Normal circumstances meant any situation in which his official entrance into adulthood had not gone wrong in a way so much more awfully epic than drinking too much and spending his Saturday morning hunched over a toilet, when he had not witnessed, he was pretty sure, several different people being murdered, and when he had not been forced, practically at gunpoint, to abandon his friends when they were hurt. David hunched more deeply down into his jacket until he was sure that his shoulders were about to touch his ears and stared out at the city that was whipping by them at incredible speeds. The woman named Syesha drove like a crazy person; the woman named Carly leaned one of her elbows against her armrest, bit idly at her nails, and did not seem to see anything about this worth mentioning. David tried his best to give other cars a pleading expression before they whipped by and prayed for a cop to notice how fast they were going.

“Really,” he tried again. Neither woman seemed very interested in talking to him at the moment, and David did not know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Weren’t you supposed to talk to your captors in situations like this, get them to see you like a person rather than an object? On the other hand, the less that they wanted him to know about them in return, the less that he could tell the cops when he was let go, so maybe general silence was a good plan. “I don’t know anything about what went on in that club. I swear.”

“We believe you,” Carly said, taking her thumbnail out of her mouth. She and Syesha shared another one of their conversation-laden glances. David had hardly been in the car for ten minutes and he already knew that he hated it when they did that. “But those vampires were definitely after you. Just because you don’t know what the reason is doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.”

Those vampires. David tried to roll the words around in his mind until they actually made sense, but so far he wasn’t having any luck. His mouth felt dry, his hands would not stop shaking, and he didn’t know who was supposed to be the crazy person in that car, himself or the two women. Vampires don’t exist vs. I saw one of them put her teeth into someone’s neck. He swallowed hard. “That doesn’t even make any sense.”

“We believe you,” Syesha said. She took a sharp left turn without so much as touching her brakes. David’s heart rose up into his throat and he grabbed for the women’s arms, one for each side, before he knew what he was doing. That he let go immediately afterwards didn’t help. “But here’s the thing, kid. Vampires are real. That’s just a fact. They kill people. That’s a fact, too.” There was a crack in her voice that made David look at her sideways, uncomfortably aware for the moment that Carly was doing the same thing, before she went on. “What they don’t do is take an interest in individual people. You’re an anomaly, and we have to figure out why.”

“Why don’t we go to the cops?” David asked, his voice far more normal than it probably should have been, given everything that he he had already seen. As far as hostage-takers went, Syesha and Carly weren’t being that terrible. They were answering every question that he asked, even if they were answering in probable crazy-person language, they weren’t pointing any of the numerous weapons that David could see scattered across both of them at him, so far they hadn’t even raised their voices at him. They were probably the most polite kidnappers in history; this thought had barely entered David’s mind before he stopped to wonder how quickly Stockholm Syndrome could actually set in.

“Because they won’t be able to do anything other than get themselves killed,” came Carly’s terse reply. She seemed to rethink it a moment later, for she took her latest nail out of her mouth and tried to smile at him. “We know what we’re doing, sweetheart, we’ll keep you safe.”

If that was the case, then it was only because they were scary enough to make the scary things afraid. David fell silent as he considered this and wondered one more time if he would be able to scramble across Carly’s lap fast enough to get out the door at the next intersection. Then he wondered if that in itself would not be a surefire way to commit suicide even if by some miracle he was able to get past Carly, because Syesha was thus far treating any and all traffic laws, including red lights, as more like suggestions than anything else.

The streets were suddenly becoming familiar. David straightened. “Hey,” he protested. “I didn’t tell you where I live.”

Carly smiled and lifted something between two of her fingers. It took David a few seconds to realize that it was actually his driver’s license. He snatched it back from her and then felt immediately for his wallet. “If this isn’t a fluke, and the vampires really are after you for a reason?” Carly asked him. “Then you have got to pay more attention to your surroundings, sweetheart, because that kind of thing is going to get you killed.”

David tried to work up a sense of indignation, but after what he had seen in the club earlier that night it was hard. He put his license back into his wallet and drummed his fingers against his thighs in nervousness. “You’re not going to hurt my family, are you?”

“No.” Syesha this time; she sounded sincere. The nicest, craziest kidnappers who had ever walked the planet. “If we get there in time, we’ll probably be saving them.”

If we get there in time. David straightened in his seat and felt his pulse quickening. “What do you mean, if you get there in time?” he demanded. Carly and Syesha shared another one of those glances. “Knock that off, what do you mean?”

“Vampires get at individuals by going through the people that they care about,” Carly answered softly.

His world had officially gone insane one hour before, and David was sure that he was going to have eight pages of questions as soon as he had managed to catch up to all of it, but right now every thought save for one had been knocked straight out of his head. “Have you known this all along?” he demanded of them both. His voice was rising in both volume and pitch, and he didn’t care. “Did you just not tell me so that I would play nicely?”

“Shut up,” Carly said suddenly, in a voice so savage that it shocked David into doing as she asked. At the same time, Syesha asked, “Do your parents usually leave the porch light on?”

“Yes,” David answered in a faint voice as his blood rushing through his ears became the loudest thing in the whole world. They were on this street. He could see his house from here, closer with every second that the tires ate up ground. It was very dark. “They’re practically religious about it.”

Syesha came to a halt in front of the house by slamming on the brakes so hard that all three of them were hurled forward. Carly put her arm in front of David’s chest to keep him from kissing windshield mostly, he thought, on reflex. Her face had become a cool, blank mask as she stared out the windshield, and she was leaning forward very slightly like a dog going on point. Syesha cut the engine.

“Take him with us or leave him here?” she asked Carly, jerking her head very slightly in David’s direction. He was back to being the luggage carted back and forth. He didn’t like it.

“I want to go in,” David said, and nearly winced. That sounded like he was asking permission to enter his own house. “I’m going in.”

“Can’t leave him alone,” Carly agreed, making David blink in disorientation. He had expected a fight. “Be just like the bastards to circle back around.”

Syesha slid out of the driver’s door and then gestured at David to indicate that he should follow her. “Stay by me,” she told him in a tone that brooked no argument. Wanting to bolt more than he had ever wanted anything before in his entire life but still understanding that this would be an epically bad plan, David obeyed, staring at the dark rectangle of his porch where a light should be burning. He did not want to run away. He wanted to run forward, to find out what had gone so terribly wrong inside his home. He had seen a woman be bitten in the neck until she had fallen to the floor and not moved again; he had a feeling that what he had actually seen was her death. David’s brain could conjure up all kinds of dark possibilities for what might have happened inside his house that made it difficult to stay still.

Syesha gestured at David to indicate that he should stay behind her as she drew one of her guns and walked--no, stalked--up the walk to the house. Carly was behind him, gliding in an eerie way that did not seem quite human, and after a second David realized that they were keeping him between them for protection. His heart found a way to beat just a little bit faster in his chest.

The woman separated by mutual unspoken agreement as they reached the porch, Syesha going to one side, Carly to the other. There was barely enough moonlight for David to have slid his key into the door’s lock without fumbling, but the women seemed able to see everything around them as clearly as if it had been noon. Syesha settled down into an easy crouch beneath the porch light; her boots made a crunching sound. “It’s been broken,” she said, picking up something. David saw it glitter.

Behind him, Carly sucked in her breath very softly before she put her hand on David’s shoulder. “If I give you a gun, will you wait in the car for me and Syesha to come back?” she asked him. “Inside the house--”

They had been determined not to leave him alone for any reason less than five minutes before. David could imagine what they were worried must be in that house, and it was already making him want to be sick. He broke free of Carly without speaking and rushed to the front door, already fumbling his key from his pocket. It didn’t matter; the door swung open at the very lightest brush of his hand. And now David really did know that something awful had happened.

“Don’t touch anything,” Syesha started sharply behind him. David ignored her and swatted for the living room switch. The space was immediately filled with buttery yellow light. David paused in the doorway, blinking. Everything looked normal. His mother’s carefully chosen decorations, his father’s work briefs scattered across the coffee table, the MP3 player that Alexandra never managed to actually put where it belonged. It was all there, and it was all normal.

And David still did not think that his heart would stop racing again for as long as he lived. “What’s wrong here?” he managed to whisper.

“Kid, you definitely want to go wait in the car,” Syesha said in a low, firm voice from beside him.

“I’m eighteen,” David said automatically. “I’m not a child.”

“Yes, you still are,” he heard Syesha mutter in return, but she did not try to stop him. “You have no idea how much.”

“Hello?” David called as he raced past the living room and into the kitchen, which also proved to be empty, perfect, and utterly capable of paying all of David’s nerves jangle at once. He could feel both of the women behind him cringing at the unnecessary noise, but neither of them tried to urge him to be quieter. David did not think that they would have had any luck even if they had tried. “Is anyone here?”

“Sweetheart--” Carly tried again, and the worst part was that she was trying to be so nice about it. David thought that he would have been able to deal with the rising sense of dread in his chest so much more easily if she had been mean.

“Stop calling me that!” David yelled at her, and ignored the part where, his body filling with panic, it was more like a scream. He whirled out of the kitchen and back towards the living room, the stairs, the upstairs portion of the house where his family slept. David had been going up and down these stairs since his family had moved into the house more than a decade before, and he still did not ever think that he had raced up them as past as he ran up them now.

It smelled upstairs. David paused, frozen, on the upper step, because he had never smelled anything like that, something that managed to be both coppery and sour, before and yet his body could not help but respond to it all the same. It wanted him to run. David clenched his hands into trembling fists at his sides and strode off down the hall. Both of the women paused when they reached the top of the stairs, too, but there was no surprise to them, none at all. They knew exactly what the smell was and, as he read their reactions, David realized that he knew it, too.

He broke into a run to cross the last few feet that took him into Alexandra’s room and didn’t even care about touching things as he slapped at the light. It looked normal. It looked very normal. There were her things, and there was her bed, and if the bed looked rumpled and as if someone had been sleeping in it before being yanked rudely back out again, geez, it wasn’t as if Alexandra ever managed to make the stupid thing, she and Mom fought over it at least two or three times a week--

There was a foot sticking out from the other side of the bed, so still and so pale. David began to cry without making a sound. “Oh, sweetheart,” he heard Carly say in a heartbroken tone behind him as he rushed around the corner of the bed. Alexandra was crumpled on the floor beside her bed, her hair in a wild cloud around her face. There was some kind of black goo around her nails. David hope that that meant that she had fought. He knelt down beside her body, ignored the way that the carpet was making a wet sound underneath his shoes, and with shaking fingers pulled her nightgown further down on her thighs. Carly’s hand on his shoulder nearly made him scream.

“I think that’s just coincidence, the way that she fell,” she told him a soft voice. David had no idea if she actually believed it or not. “I don’t think that they actually--”

“Do you think that that helps?” David asked her, and heard in his voice how close he was to losing it. She was his sister, she was his baby sister, and even if she was more likely to throw a hairbrush at him than thank him for it, he was supposed to protect her.

“Not even a little bit,” Carly said. She sounded like she meant that, too, and understood. Her hand curved around his elbow, intending to help him to his feet, but David shook her off. He reached out so that he could close Alexandra’s eyes for her.

Still standing in the doorway, Syesha screamed out abruptly, “Carly!”

Carly dropped David’s elbow and was whirling around and on her feet again in a movement so smooth that it hardly seemed human. David saw a shape rush out from his closet so quickly that he was amazed that the human eye could even follow it, let alone hope to fight it. It bowled into Carly with such force that she was hurled up onto the bed before she even had a hope of resisting, but it didn’t want her, it wanted David, it only wanted David. Syesha fired several shots from the doorway and then yelled as a dark shape of her own came at her from the hallway; David saw the body twitch as at least two of those shots made it to flesh. He didn’t know when he had so easily started to use words like “body” and “it” to himself when he still would be much happier if he could somehow prove that Carly and Syesha were out of their minds and this was some kind of hallucination brought about by the powers of suggestion; God, he wanted nothing more than Alexandra’s still form on the side of her bed to be nothing more than a mental break on his part. He hardly had time to think, let alone resist, as the dark form that would have been a good-looking man with dark hair to his shoulders and flashing, seductive eyes picked him up and bowled him backwards with the sheer force of momentum. Its teeth darted towards his neck; David reacted on a split-second burst of self-preservation and jerked his head to the side. It got his shoulder instead, and it was still all that David could do not to yell. It hurt, was the thing, it hurt and worse brought with it the terrible sensation of something incredibly vital leaving his body.

That’s my blood, David thought in a dazed and disembodied way. It’s drinking my blood. That same small and controlled part of himself that seemed perfectly okay with his baby sister being slaughtered mere feet away and with a monster sucking his blood out through his skin ordered him to bring his feet up as far as he was able in the small space that he had between bodies and kick as hard as he was able. He might as well have been fighting a brick wall, but it was still enough to anger his captor and cause him to let go of David long enough to throw him hard against the mirror above Alexandra’s dresser. The glass shattered all around him, and the shrapnel drove further wounds into the skin on his neck and shoulders. It all smelled like blood, the whole world was going to smell like blood before it was over.

“David, duck.” Carly had recovered and risen behind them with her gun drawn as the thing reached out for its prey after David had supposedly been subdued by a good throwing around. She didn’t yell; she didn’t need to. Her voice echoed across the room loud and clear. David did as she said.

One single shot echoed about the small space, and the body in front of David slumped. He could feel something warm sliding down through his hair before Carly grabbed for the it and threw it to the carpet with a disgusted noise. “Don’t let any of that get in your mouth,” she warned David. He hoped that what he could feel sliding through his hair was blood. The it on the floor didn’t have a head any longer.

From the hallway, Syesha still fought. Before Carly could get to her, they both saw her take a punch to the mouth that snapped her head back, and then she reached for a long silver-colored stake at the back of her jacket. She hurled her own it back against the wall with a strength that had to have been born of pure rage and drove the stake rapidly into its abdomen several times before she finally pinned it to the wall with a stab wound through the heart. The it went still. It was only then that Syesha let it slump to the floor.

Seeing the death of any of those things, after what they had done to his sister, was worth a wild scream of triumph, but Carly looked more troubled than anything else. “That was dangerous,” she said to Syesha.

Syesha knelt so that she could clean the stake off quickly on the carpet before tucking it back where it belonged. “Talk to me about dangerous when it doesn’t work,” she tossed over her shoulder.

“Won’t have a chance to. You’ll be dead.” Carly and Syesha glared at each other for a few moments more before Carly looked towards David again. “You’re hurt.”

“Not bad. The mirror broke.” David didn’t think that he was capable of anything more than short sentences right now. He glanced towards Alexandra again and, just like that, had no other choice but to lean over and be violently sick. Carly rubbed at his back until she was done.

“Come on, we have to get the vampire blood cleaned off of you,” she said in a low, soothing voice. She guided him to the edge of Alexandra’s be bed and then used the edge of one of the sheets to wipe at the back of his neck. “We can’t let any of this get into an open wound.”

“Why?” David asked in a dull voice. “What would happen then?”

Carly stilled. “They carry the disease in their blood and their saliva,” she said in a hard voice. “If you’re bitten, or any of their blood gets into an open wound, then you become one of them.”

She must not have seen, then, she must have been too busy getting turned right side up again to see the vampire stick its fangs as deeply into David’s shoulder as it was able before David could pull away. He looked at her from beneath his lashes and knew that she would not be looking at him with such compassion if she knew. He had just watched her shoot someone in the head without so much as flinching.

“I want to see my parents,” David said abruptly, rising from the bed as soon as Carly indicated that she was done cleaning him up as well as could be done with the sheet. That he might turn into a monster meant absolutely nothing in the face of his larger fear.

“You sure that you want to do that?” Syesha asked him. The wild killer’s light was gone from her eyes, and she looked sad. “We can go now, we know what we’re going to find--”

“I want to see them,” David repeated, and forgot for the second that he was supposed to be the hostage here. There was a raw, wild note to his voice; if Carly or Syesha tried to stop him, he thought that he would knock them to the side and run down the hallway by himself.

Syesha and Carly looked at each other over David’s head. He hated being so short; that he could still be annoyed in a situation like this made him want to double over and be sick all over again. “Please,” he said. He was ashamed of how small his voice sounded, and how young, like he was much younger than the eighteen years that he had been so proud of when the evening had started.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Carly said finally. She put her arm around David’s shoulders. He was still too stunned, too filled up with broken glass and battery acid, to think about shrugging her off. David did notice that she was not even trying to keep her gun out of his reach any longer. Either she and Syesha both were the absolute worst hostage-takers in the history of the industry, or they really didn’t see David as anything that resembled a threat at all. Or the third option, that they really did know what they were doing and did have his best interests at heart, which was somehow the worst blow of all. “We’ll go with you.” Carly shared a significant look with Syesha, her voice harder than David thought that he had ever heard her before, even when she had been ordering him into a car with the implicit promise that she could manhandle him in there if he gave her reason to. David did not know what misbehavior Carly was expecting from Syesha, for Syesha was standing with her bloodstained hands hanging by her sides and looking as if stricken did not even begin to cover it.

“I don’t--” David started, and then broke himself off as he realized that no words would begin to cover it. He flailed for Carly’s hand instead without caring if he was turning into a textbook example of Stockholm Syndrome right there, because Carly squeezed back. She walked him down the hallway with slow, reluctant steps, while the smell in the hallway grew even stronger. It was far less than the eternity that David expected before he was standing in front of his parents’ bedroom; the door was ajar. David found that his fingers were trembling all over again as he reached out and touched the knob so that he could push the door open.

Their eyes were open. They looked like they had died scared.

David stumbled backwards and didn’t even realize that he was falling until he felt the carpet beneath his rear, and Carly was holding him, she was warm and she smelled nice and it was the only nice thing left in his entire world as she whispered over and over again, “Oh, sweetheart, oh, sweetheart, oh.” The entire world went hazy and dark; David liked it that way.

End Part Six

Continue to Part Seven