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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 19/24
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
Part Sixteen
Part Seventeen
Part Eighteen



Part Nineteen

David and the vampire-to-be kept finding reasons to creep off together, oftentimes without taking even Carly or herself to keep any nasty surprises from occurring. Syesha chewed at her lower lip and wondered if this was supposed to be her triumphant return to the human race, this sudden caring about what someone else thought of her, but she was not sure how to broach the subject with David without making him angry. It was territory that she knew well, pretending that there was a person there when she ought to know damned well that there was not, but that did not mean that David was going to be eager to receive her pearls of wisdom.

She got her chance when David peeled himself away from their pet vampire yet again, leaving Michael sitting alone in the corner of the room with his head tilted back against the wall and his eyes closed. He had to know that every weapon in the place was being subtly or not so subtly angled towards him in case he should finally give vent to his inner violence, but he was doing an incredible acting job when it came to ignoring it. He was a lot calmer now than he had been before, but Syesha did not think that it was a sudden Zen. To her eye, it looked like resignation.

She didn’t like this. She didn’t like this suddenly being able to empathize with people who by rights were not people at all. It was throwing off her game.

“David,” Syesha said when he came close to her. He jumped slightly; just as she and Carly had been doing all night, most of his attention had been directed towards their new allies, who seemed to have no problem settling in as if the place was theirs by rights already.

“Yeah?” David asked, rubbing his hand over his face. He looked tired. I am a machine, Syesha repeated to herself, desperately. The thaw was coming whether she liked it or not, it seemed, and she could only hope that it held off long enough for her to get that one final, crucial thing done. Syesha was not even sure whether she was referring to saving Archuleta, or dealing with Ramiele.

“You sure that you’re doing the right thing here?” Syesha asked David, and jerked her head very slightly in Michael’s direction. She thought that she sensed his eyes opening for a second to look at her before they closed again and he went back to feigning sleep, or trying to keep himself from losing control, or whatever it was that he was doing over there.

“No,” David said. His lips twitched for a moment. “Which is why I’m keeping my hand very close to my gun.” He glanced over his shoulder. “We never really talked about Ramiele after she...after, did we?”

Syesha went very still. “Didn’t see that there was a whole lot to talk about,” she answered softly. There was a warning note in her voice. If David was wise, he would heed it.

But he wouldn’t be David if he was not also the stupidest smart person that she had ever met. “There was,” he said. “We should have talked about it. About her.”

“She died, David,” Syesha said. “She died, and there’s a thing walking around in her corpse.” Her voice began to shake. Syesha pressed her lips together so that she could not betray herself any further.

David cast her a sideways look. “We still should have talked about her,” he said. “Maybe we would have been able to...to stop the thing that’s left before this happened, if we had been able to come to terms with her.”

Syesha was already shaking her head, but she stopped as David’s words sank into her brain. “Before what happened?” she asked. I am a machine, I am a machine. Then she was a broken one at that, and Syesha thought that she could hear the scream of gears running out of sync with one another inside of her head.

David twitched her one of his ironic smiles, the kind which said that what he was about to say wasn’t all that funny, but he was going to give it a college try, all the same. Just so that the both of them would not lose their minds. “We’ve been waiting for it for months,” he said. “Ramiele finally got her nerve up enough to start exploiting this place’s weaknesses. There were vampires in here long before those alarms started going off.”

“Oh,” Syesha said faintly, and felt as if she needed to sit down before she fell down. She stayed on her feet by some miracle that even she could not explain, though she knew that she was swaying slightly on her feet and could hear David, as if from a long distance off, asking if she was okay. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m good.” I am going to have a mental breakdown right here and now, is what I’m going to do, and the crazy house is going to assume that everything I tell them about vampires is just a symptom of my illness.

David started to touch her on the arm, only to drop his hand awkwardly back down to his side as if he was not sure how she would take it. “It’s not exactly a secret that you haven’t been dealing well with Ramiele’s turning,” he said. At the word “secret”, it was all that Syesha could do to stop herself from coming right out of her skin. “So I have to ask you, and please don’t take it the wrong way and get offended: are you going to be able to handle what we have to do tonight? Because we have to kill her, Sy.” Carly was the only one who called her “Sy” any longer, really, and even then with a faint hesitancy, as if she knew that she was stepping onto ground where another had already been. “We can’t let her just walk in here any time that she wants to.”

Even though there was no way that he knew, no way that he possibly knew, not as careful as she had been, Syesha felt as if she had been kicked right between the eyes. He’s asking you if you can suck it up and do your job, Syesha told herself. Because there’s a kid’s life on the line at the very least, and God knows who else if Michael isn’t lying. She took several deep breaths through her nose and thought that she still might pass out right then and there, but that was all right. From here on out, she was not going to obey the dictates of biology any more than she absolutely had to. I am a machine. Goddamned right, one more time.

“You’re right,” Syesha told David in a voice calm enough to make him instantly suspicious, Syesha could tell in the way that his eyebrows drew together. “She has to be stopped. The end.”

“All right, then.” David didn’t hesitate this time before he rubbed her arm. “You should probably get some rest while you can. You’re looking really pale.” And they had some ugly work before them, was what went unspoken.

Syesha nodded and waited until David had turned away before she walked on stiff legs over to a weapons crate and did not sit nearly so much as she collapsed. Buried her head in her hands and breathed in long, deep gulps that only stayed away from outright hyperventilation because she refused to let them go that far. One thing at a time, Syesha began to lay out all that she was responsible for, and determine if she could accept it. One: their job was to stop vampires, and she had let several opportunities to stop the thing that was in Ramiele go by without taking them. She could accept that. Two: Ramiele had to have been feeding in the months since that turning. Syesha could accept that. Three: there was a kid just barely starting to stretch out and into manhood who had lost his family and then been taken by vampires determined to kill him in what was undoubtedly a nasty way, and he had been taken again as a direct result of Syesha’s unwillingness to say that Ramiele had been coming to visit her with a regularity ever since she had turned in the first place, because she had known that the invasion of their home would leave them with absolutely no choice but to stop her once and for all.

Could she accept that? Could she really accept that?

I am a machine.

If that was really the case, then she would not have spent the past several months feeling as if the slightest nudge would be enough to drive her finally and irreversibly right out of her mind. It was time to admit to herself that she was not measuring up to the ideal, she thought. Syesha took a few more deep breaths that nevertheless wanted very badly to become hyperventilation and decided that the only way she was possibly going to come back from this was if she was able to bring that kid back safe and sound. And that was only if this whole thing went off without a single hitch and no one was bitten or killed, which after all amounted to about the same thing. If that happened, well, then that was that. She would pull David and Carly to the side, tell them that she was done, and then...Syesha did not know what she would do then. As she would be an accomplice to a murder, she didn’t think that white picket fences were exactly in her future.

Laying out like that helped. So did the breathing. Syesha still thought that the mental hospital was only a few hours away. She rose to her feet and muttered to herself, “I need to hit something.”

“Are you all right?”

Syesha did not recognize the voice, which meant that it had no other choice but to be one of Kelly’s people. They weren’t really talkers, she had noticed. In fact, they didn’t seem to be big on doing anything at all that Kelly herself had not explicitly ordered, which from where Syesha was standing skipped right over the line where a little creepy began and instead became incredibly creepy. She turned and saw the tall, brown-haired man who had way too much pretty for his own good. Syesha started to tell him that she was doing just fine, thanks, with a side of bite me, but something stopped her just in time. She lifted her shoulders into a shrug instead.

“Got a lot on my mind,” she said.

Ace smiled at her. He had a crooked smile, one that looked as if had been made for much more pleasant surroundings than this. Though it was not her place, given that everyone had an unpleasant story or two and no one did this job because the booth had looked cool at their high school career fair, Syesha could not help but wonder what it was that had led him to stalking the undead for a living.

“That seems to be going around,” he said. “So the girl who masterminded that attack, she, uh, she used to be one of yours?”

Syesha felt her spine go stiff. “Yes.” she said coolly. If this Ace tried to turn it into a criticism of David or Carly, then Syesha thought that she just might have found that something that she needed so badly to punch. Syesha had it coming. They did not.

Ace took note of the change in demeanor, Syesha could see in the way that his eyes flickered, though his manners were too good to allow him to mention it. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder instead, to where the rest of Kelly’s team was cleaning their weapons and talking quietly amongst themselves. “You want to come hang out with us a little bit?” he asked. When Syesha hesitated, he flashed her that smile again, and Syesha decided that his story had to be a particularly good one. He looked as if he could have been a male model before all of the things that went bump in the night had come calling. “The last couple of hours before a big fight are always kinda stressful, and you look...” He hesitated. Impeccable manners, maybe, but he had absolutely no ability to improvise whatsoever.

“I look like I could use a distraction,” Syesha finished for him. Ace’s slightly sheepish smiles were crooked, too. “Okay, why not?” She followed Ace over to the little corner that Kelly’s people had claimed as their own in spite of being told that there were spare beds and facilities that they could claim for the duration, making eye contact with Carly from across the room as she did so. Carly looked slightly worried. “I got it,” Syesha mouthed at her before she settled down gracefully among this other cell that none of them had ever known of before tonight.

The most nervous among them by far appeared to be the youngest, Jordin, and Syesha wondered if she had ever been in the field at all before tonight. If not, then Kelly sure picked some pretty interesting missions to see if her people could handle it. Syesha almost didn’t want to know what her response would be if any of them failed. The others, though, seemed to have picked up on Jordin’s distress and were forming a protective flank around her even in the absence of any threat, Ace himself touching his fingertips lightly to her hair before he settled down and started cleaning his guns. The actual ones that he wore on his hips, Syesha reminded herself, and had to put her hand against her mouth even though she had not actually spoken. If her libido could even think of firing up again at a time like this, then maybe it was proof that she really was broken beyond repair.

The only one among the group who did not seemed attuned towards keeping Jordin from breaking away completely and flying up towards the ceiling was the smallest and most frightening of the blondes, the one that Kelly had introduced as Carrie. Carrie was staring out to where David, Kelly, and Carly were talking to one another in low voices, her expression intent. Syesha was not sure whether that meant that she was itching for a fight in general, was concerned for her leader, or was looking for any opportunity to take control of the team herself, but the rest of her people didn’t seem to see anything remarkable in the behavior.

“So,” Kim started, and only needed to gather her nerve for a second before she rushed forward. Syesha hadn’t even spoken a full sentence to the woman yet and already had a feeling that this was just her way. “What’s up with David?”

“Kim, oh, my God!” Jordin exclaimed, sounding absolutely mortified and so very much like a teenager that for a few seconds she managed to break Syesha’s heart. If this girl’s eighteenth birthday was more than six months past, then Syesha would swear under oath that her birth certificate was faked. Kim shrugged and didn’t look particularly repentant.

“David’s kind of intense,” Syesha said slowly, unsure of how much she wanted to say. For all that she knew, David might even welcome the attention, once all of this was over. On the other hand, there was something kind of weird and, from where she was standing, non-platonic going on between him and Michael If he thought that he was hiding it then Syesha needed to pull him aside and tell him that his secret could be seen from space, and Syesha wasn’t sure that he would be in any kind of mood to either give or receive company once this was over.

“There’s a reason that tall, dark, and handsome is a classic,” Kim said, but seemed content to lean back and start checking her sword’s scabbard for tears before she drove Jordin into an outright aneurysm.

“One of those vampires in here used to be one of you guys?” Elliot asked. He had a soft voice and low-key way of approaching a conversation, and that got him farther than he had any idea. Syesha glared at him; he did not appear offended. “It’s the going rumor.”

“Yes,” Syesha said tersely. “The small woman with the brown hair. Her name’s Ramiele.” There was a warning note in her voice.

None of them would be doing what they were doing with their lives if they had any talent for reading danger signals at all. Syesha saw everyone’s faces go still, down to a one, as she confirmed this news for them, even Ace who already knew. He replaced his guns in their holsters at his hips and drew his sword instead. It made a whistling sound. Chikezie pulled a face and shoved Ace’s arm away when it got too close; Syesha realized that there was something dark and glittering in Ace’s eyes that had not been there a second before.

“Watch what you’re doing with that thing, man, we’re going to be doing enough bleeding later,” Chikezie complained, and Syesha realized that the dark danger had entered his eyes as well. She shifted her weight so that she could leap up to her feet again quickly if the need should arise.

Ace did not seem to have heard him. He looked at the way that the sword gleamed in the room’s lights. “You know, that’s not uncommon,” he said to Syesha. “Work we do, people tend to get bit.” He even had Carrie’s undivided attention now. “Happened to one of my friends, about a year and a half ago. His name was Chris.”

Syesha made note of two things. The first of them was the way that Ace had used the past tense, and the second was the way that his voice still caught for the barest of seconds when he spoke his friend’s name, suggesting that “friend” was a fairly loose interpretation of what they had been. “And then what?” Syesha asked.

Ace met her eyes. He didn’t blink or move for long enough to make Syesha want to ask him if he was all right before he said, “I killed him. All that they are is meat once they turn. Meat that kills. Chris was long gone.” Ace’s face was so blank that Syesha could even think that he believed this. Looking around, she realized that his was only a mirror of the rest of his team’s, even little Jordin.

I am a machine. No, she had gotten that terribly wrong. She only wished that she was, they were the machines, and they were utterly horrifying. Syesha hopped back up to her feet. “I have a lot to do, if we’re going to get that kid back.”

“Or his body, before the leeches drain too much of that blood,” Carrie spoke for the first time in a low tone. Elliot leaned forward and nudged her, but Syesha did not think that he was disagreeing with the possibility nearly so much as Carrie’s shoddy timing in mentioning it just then.

Syesha whirled away. What was she supposed to do, she wondered, when her ideal ever since Ramiele had died was so abruptly revealed to be something utterly terrifying? How the hell was she suppose to go back, and did she want to, to that girl with her soft underbelly so perpetually exposed, who had allowed a monster to visit her again and again because she could not face a fucking inescapable fact?

You made walls around yourself, because otherwise the bogeymen crawled in through all of your windows. Syesha thought that everyone knew that.

She realized that she was fleeing through the compound without having any clear idea of where she intended to go, and that her breath was whistling like a tea kettle through her ears even though her eyes remained stubbornly dry. She heard someone calling her name and whirled to find Carly standing there. Maybe Carly had followed her once she had fled, maybe Carly just had a sixth sense telling her whenever someone was going to need her to step in and do that nurturing thing that she did, Syesha did not know and she did not care. “Are you okay?”

Not even a little bit, Syesha thought, though she could see in Carly’s face that she already expected Syesha to go on the same angry attack that seemed to be her way, these days.

“No,” Syesha said, and Carly stepped forward immediately. “I need to tell you something,” she finished, feeling her first tears since Ramiele had died start to fill up her eyes.

End Part Nineteen

Continue to Part Twenty