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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 15/24
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
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven
Part Twelve
Part Thirteen
Part Fourteen



Part Fifteen

Syesha could only remember a handful of times when she had been in trouble like this before. Her first fight, when Justin had just barely managed to step in and save her ass before beginning a three hour dissection of everything that she should have done differently, once when she and Ramiele had been caught flat-footed on a job in Chicago, the night when Ramiele had stopped being Ramiele.

Syesha swung punches until her muscles burned and counted every bullet that she fired, realizing that as that number grew so fell the number that she actually had left. Stakes were dangerous proximity weapons; with this many vampires in such a tight area in the first place, Syesha did not see that she had all that much to lose. She worked her way over to David so that they were fighting back to back for a few seconds. His face whenever Syesha had a fragment of a second to make note of it was set and grim. He was probably thinking of how Michael had barely even paused before he had gone to join Jason’s group; if Syesha had been the only one arguing in the first place for stopping him while they had the chance, then she knew that she would have been brooding over it, too. She had not changed her vote fast enough.

A vampire did its level best to sweep Syesha’s feet out from under her, and level best still came frighteningly close to doing the job. Syesha put one hand out behind her to catch the fall and sprang back up again with dancer grace before any other portion of her body even had time to touch the ground. This was clearly not what the vampire had expected from her, and he gaped right up to the moment when Syesha fired a bullet into his mouth.

There were so many, though. There were so many, it put Syesha to mind of ants swarming over spilled honey. She took a roundhouse to the mouth and fell to the floor for real this time, managing to catch herself with her hands just before she would have broken her face against the cement. Flipping back over onto her back quickly gave her the opportunity to seize the vampire’s neck with both legs as it dove down on her, twist sharply, and hear a crack that echoed. Syesha used the stake on that one as she jumped back up. Because she could.

The alarms cut off as Syesha scrambled back up to her feet again, leaving a faint ringing in their place. It took Syesha a few seconds to realize that the ringing was coming from inside of her own head, but not nearly so long to realize that something else had gone wrong, as if they needed one more thing. The alarms didn’t have a time limit. Something had to have turned them off. Syesha did not have nearly enough room for home left in her to suppose that it had at least been a someone. rather than a something.

Maybe she needed to start looking into that. While every single one of the vampires was wearing heavy clothing over their faces and bodies in an effort not to be harmed by the UV lights, the several new people who swarmed through were wearing an assortment of tank tops and loose shirts, and every last one of them had their faces bared. Syesha could have laughed as a brunette woman whirled past her, stake in hand, and made the move look safer than a gun as she slammed it through a vampire’s rib cage and straight into the delicate heart beneath. The body dropped, whoever knew how long after it had actually died.

With numbers on their side to actually match the numbers that the vampires had brought with them, the fight became something else entirely, and the taste of adrenaline in the back of Syesha’s throat stopped being so sour with fear. She put her hands against her knees as the final corpse slumped to the ground and panted, hardly realizing that she still had a bloodied stake clenched in one hand. Meanwhile, their rescuers were also breathing hard, but Syesha thought that they managed to make even that look disciplined. They were also all clearly looking towards the brunette who had whirled past Syesha and used a dangerous proximity weapon like she had something to prove with it for the next cue to their behavior, even a slighter blonde who looked as if she would really rather not.

“Who the hell are you?” David demanded as soon as he had put his guns back into their holsters. Syesha reminded herself sharply that she could indulge in being awestruck after they had figured out just who these people were and what they were here for, and she took a step closer to David. She noticed that Carly was doing the same from the other side.

David had not exactly been following the rules for good introductory behavior, but the brunette still smiled as if she was willing to overlook that. The grin did not reach her eyes, which looked as if any smile that tried to make that far would be summarily hunted down and killed. “I’m Kelly,” she said. She did not extend her hand out to shake. Neither did Syesha, Carly, or David make any attempt to initiate the gesture themselves. Syesha was absurdly reminded of a group of kids sizing each other up on the playground, or of a pack of dogs. She looked past Kelly: a blonde woman who was small and slight enough to make anyone who had never seen Ramiele in action wonder if someone who really had that little to them would be able to fight vampires, a brown-haired man who was way too pretty for his own good, a tall and curvy black girl who didn’t look as if the new car smell had even been worn off of her yet. An affable-looking black man touched at her elbow and murmured in her ear when she looked around the carnage in the compound as if she was sorely reconsidering this life path that she had chosen for herself. There were two more beyond them, but Syesha pulled herself away from gawking as she realized that she might have to stop her friend from actually getting into a fist fight with the apparent leader of the newcomers, and that had to take up far more of her attention. That she looked like the least trigger happy among them at the moment maybe should have been a warning sign.

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” David asked in a brusque voice. He was balanced up on the balls of his feet, his hands clenched at his sides in a way managing to suggest that, even though he had put his weapons away, he was now wishing that he hadn’t.

Kelly blinked and leaned back. Syesha got the feeling that she was not surprised very often. “Where’s Justin?” she asked. “I want to know why he never told you about me.”

“Justin died almost a year and a half ago,” Carly answered. She did not sound gentle or soothing in the way that she usually did, but her shrug suggested an apology. “The usual way.”

The usual way still meant something to Kelly’s group, too, it would seem. Kelly’s shoulders slumped and she drew in her breath sharply before she was able to get control of herself again. It was the only visible sign of distress that she gave at all. Syesha envied her for that kind of control.

“And that’s why we don’t offer retirement plans,” Kelly said crisply. “Since Justin clearly neglected to tell you about me and mine, it looks as if I’ll have to make up for his oversight.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “This is Carrie, Ace, Jordin, Chikezie, Kim, and Elliot.” Kim and Elliot, the two that Syesha had not been able to get a clear look at before, were a blonde woman and a white man with a thick growth of facial hair and kind eyes. That did not stop him from looking around their blood-spattered home as if he was sizing it up. Kim, Syesha noticed with a faint shock, had begun to size up David instead.

David, for his part, seemed to have other things on his mind to keep him from realizing that he was the recipient of appreciative female attention, folding his arms over his chest and staring at Kelly hard. “You’re planning on going on, right?”

Kelly tilted her head to one side and looked at David as if she was wondering whether she even wanted to bother coddling him or just get on with smacking him in the mouth right then and there. She had guns on either hip, like they did, knives and stakes strapped to her biceps and scattered about her person, but there was also the hilt of a samurai sword peeking over one of her shoulders. Quick glances around told Syesha that this was standard equipment among all of Kelly’s people. Syesha immediately knew that she wanted one.

“Since we’re clearly not amazingly competent tourists,” Kelly told David in a tone which managed to suggest that she was just barely resisting the urge to grind her teeth, “I thought that it would be obvious what we do. We hunt vampires. Like you.”

“What I think that David is trying to say here,” Carly broke in, apparently recovering enough to remember how often she was the only thing standing between them and all-out brawls, “is that we don’t exactly advertise our presence. How did you find us?”

“The vampires monitor the blood banks,” Kelly said calmly. “So we do, too. When the red flag went up on that kid, we knew that they were going to be going after him. It was just a matter of triangulating from there.” Kelly looked around at each of them in turn before she said, in the gentlest tone that Syesha had heard from her yet, close enough to the training tone that Justin had used when he had still been alive to make Syesha startle hard, “Your enemies are embracing technology faster than a Silicon Valley high school student. If you want to keep up with them, you have to do the same.”

“The kid.” Syesha’s eyebrows drew together. “What do the vampires even want with Archuleta, anyway? We haven’t been able to figure that out, and with this--” Syesha flapped her arms out to indicate the ruined room. “We’ve never seen them do a focused attack like this before.”

Kelly frowned and tilted her head to one side. Syesha thought for a second that this meant that Archuleta’s name was pinging with her, somehow, until she realized that it was equally likely that Kelly was just confused to hear Syesha rather than David speaking. None of Kelly’s team had actually opened their mouths yet, content to let their presumptive leader handle all of that for them.

Wonder how she’s going to handle it when she realizes that we don’t exactly work like that, Syesha thought, and glanced across David just in time to share an eyebrows-raised look with Carly as Carly apparently had the same thought.

“We don’t know,” Kelly said. She sounded frustrated. Syesha did not guess that a great many situations came along in which Kelly found herself feeling out of control. “I was hoping that you would. Justin had an extensive intelligence network--”

“Justin is dead,” Carly said firmly. Again that faint surprise from Kelly. Syesha saw David struggling to hide a smile. “This is not Justin’s team. Please stop comparing us to him and say what you need to say.”

The arch of Kelly’s eyebrow still managed to imply a great deal of danger about it. She bit back what she had been intending to say and made a ‘Go on’ gesture that was probably intended to be gracious but mostly came out sarcastic instead. “Where’s the kid?” she asked crisply.

“We don’t have him,” Carly said. Kelly went very still. As one mind being forced to share multiple bodies, a ripple ran through her people scattered out behind her. “He was taken just before you got here.”

David’s face had gone drawn and pale ever since Kelly mentioned monitoring blood banks. “And he was bitten,” he said. Syesha and Carly both jerked, and Syesha felt for a few seconds as if she would have to sit down. Every drop of blood that she had was rushing away from her head, leaving her feeling cold and stupid. Not again, she thought. The kid was no Ramiele, he couldn’t possibly be after they had only known each other for the span of a day, but she still liked him, could still sense a kindred spirit in him. He didn’t deserve that. And whoever among them was going to have to put him down once they caught up to him didn’t deserve that, either.

“When?” Kelly snapped out quickly. “When he was taken?”

“None of us took our eyes off of him for a second,” David answered her. “He had to have been bitten at his house.” Syesha saw Carly’s eyebrows draw together for a second, as if there was something about that sentence that did not sound right to her, but Kelly’s grim answer swallowed it.

“Then we have one more reason to catch up to him fast,” she said. “Because if the vampires don’t kill him quickly, we’re going to have to.”

End Part Fifteen

Continue to Part Sixteen

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