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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 20/24
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



Chapter Twenty

“Here’s the plan,” David said.

It was all about the blood. Michael had never realized that before, how much of life on Earth came down to that simple, salty red substance, but it was absolutely everything that he could think about now. He drew deep breaths, because that had calmed him earlier when nothing else but David would, but all that happened now was that more of that scent was brought to him. The fluorescent lights had stopped stinging his eyes. Michael did not guess that this was a good sign, either.

“Something here boring you, vampire?” Kelly asked him, and Michael realized that he had been looking towards the floor and lost the thread of what David was saying altogether.

“Wide awake, sugar,” he could not resist, his voice sounding more hostile than even he, who had been living with these urges inside of him since their beginning, would have thought possible. Kelly did not look surprised. Neither did Kelly allow her hand to move very far from her gun.

David had paused and was watching Michael with an unreadable expression. He finally said only, “I’ll start again.” Michael tried to ignore the terrible thundering of blood all around him, everywhere that he turned his head, and focus. He was only going to get one chance to do this. It was taking him everything that he had to hold on even for that.

“Based upon their hunting grounds, we’ve managed to triangulate down to a pretty good idea of where Jason and his group have been spending their days,” David said.

“How long ago did you figure this out?” Carrie asked. Kelly said her name sharply, though Michael could still see in Kelly’s face and the spike of her pulse that she had been thinking the same thing herself, and Carrie fell silent. The quick communication that she and Kelly were doing back and forth with their eyes need not have been verbal, anyway.

“Weeks ago.” David did not seem offended. Seemed was still the operative word, because Michael could sense everything now, and Michael thought that he could even smell how someone’s blood chemistry changed with an infusion of fresh adrenaline. His mouth was a constant wash of saliva. “But it’s in a district full of abandoned buildings. Going one by one would take weeks and would destroy any element of surprise. The vampires would have a chance to lie in wait for us, and I don’t think that any of my people are disposable.”

As far as critiques went, it was not subtle. “I don’t think that mine are, either,” Kelly said crisply. “You can imagine my reservations, then, when I’m putting their lives in danger on the word of something that I’ve sworn to kill.”

“Still someone, actually,” Michael said. He let his fangs droop over his lower lip as he smiled at her. “For a little while longer, anyway.”

“Let’s not waste that while we have it. We’ve triangulated down to where Jason and his group most likely are, and Michael will be able to track Jason’s scent down to an exact building for the attack.”

“You can do that?” Outside of Kelly, Michael thought that it was one of the first times that any of Kelly’s group had spoken to him. Jordin managed the faint miracle of managing not to sound hostile, either, only faintly awe-struck and as if she was regretting that the whole killing him thing would have interfered with putting him in a jar and staring at him for a while.

“Think so.” When David started to look dubious, Michael changed his answer. “I can’t get his stink out of my head. Yeah, I can do it.” If he could stay in control long enough to see it done, that was the real question on the table.

David dropped his hands back down to his sides, clearly finished speaking. He glared at Kelly when she seemed inclined to interject something, most likely to ask one more time what they planned on doing if Michael took those final few steps in turning before they managed to see this done. It was not the first time that she had raised the concern, and it would not be the first time that David would have bullshitted his way through an answer that even Michael could tell that he was making up on the fly if she had done it. Kelly arched her eyebrow back in faintly amused response, seeming to ask David if he really thought that she could be cowed by all that, but let it drop.

David’s gaze jerked away, to where Syesha and Carly were standing very close to one another. They were both extraordinarily pale and had been throughout the entire proceedings. “What’s up?” David asked them. His voice was pitched low, intending to keep the conversation private, but Michael could still hear every word being spoken as if he had been standing right next to them.

Carly opened her mouth and then abruptly shut it again. “Nothing,” she said. Michael could tell that she was lying, and he didn’t even know her the way that David did. “Something, okay, but it’ll wait. Until afterwards.”

David leaned back. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes,” Carly said firmly, and then flashed David a big smile. “Go play with your pet vampire.” She at the very least managed not to say it as if she was comparing him to a plague rat. Michael supposed that he ought to be grateful for small favors.

As David reluctantly walked away, Syesha said to Carly in a low voice, “Thank you.”

Equally low, Carly answered back, “You’re welcome. I’m not about to start that fight up right before we go out onto a battlefield.”

“I’m going to bat for you here, man,” David said as he reached Michael’s side. “There are a lot of people in this room who would like to tear you apart.”

“I know,” Michael answered, and then, “Are you one of them?”

David hardly hesitated at all before he answered, “When the time comes, it will as quick and painless as it can possibly be. You have that much coming.” He paused for a moment, and then put his hand on Michael’s arm in what Michael guessed was meant to be a gesture of comfort. It was ruined somewhat when David jerked back again a bare second later.

“What is it?”

“Your skin.” David looked as if he was working very hard to keep his face from betraying him. “It’s getting cold.”

Michael let out a short laugh even though mirth was the very farthest thing from his mind. “Fantastic,” he said. “You’re the one who said that we shouldn’t waste any time, Hero. Let’s get on with it.”

“Okay.” David turned away, and by some unspoken signal they all headed towards the vehicles. Kelly’s group drove a series of sleek machines which made David’s, Syesha’s, and Carly’s hardy little cars look square and clunky by comparison. Michael wondered where Kelly’s group was getting their money, then, and what kind of supplements to vampire hunting they were actually accepting.

Riding in a crowded vehicle, even and perhaps especially a vehicle bristling with weapons pointed at him, was a darker and more extended torture than Michael would have thought possible. With deep breaths taken from him as a method of staying calm, it seemed that he had no other choice but to not breathe at all. Michael tried this just to see what would happen and was horrified to realize that oxygen was becoming strictly optional for him, too.

David threw Michael a wary look once they reached the edge of Jason’s suspected territory, as if he didn’t need to know the real and enhancement-free Michael to know that silent was not a natural state for him, but he said nothing, addressing the group as a whole instead. “We’ll split up once we’re inside,” he said, for all that he and his group professed to working without a leader seeming to have no problem whatsoever taking charge here. “Not until then.”

Worried about ambush, Michael thought, a little shocked to realize that he could read David’s thoughts on his face that clearly. It was clever. It was clever, because getting them separated from one another and then picking them off one by one was exactly what Michael would have done if that final scrap of control had slipped away from him.

“Do you have the scent?” David asked him, making Michael realize that he had been dangerously close to wandering again. His thoughts were no longer his friends; he needed to stop doing that.

Michael took one of the deep breaths that his body needed less and less of and then fell into a full-body shudder as something that was wild and rank and had no place whatsoever being around people assaulted him. “I have it,” Michael said. Had a vampire, at the very least, and if there was more than one nest in this area then fighting them at all was such a fruitless enterprise that Michael did not even want to think about it.

“Okay.” David gestured for Michael to do his thing, and it was suddenly all that Michael could do not to laugh. Their very own bloodhound. If he could not force thoughts of all of the gallons of blood rushing around him out of his mind soon, he was going to need a leash. Michael followed that sweet, wild odor of predator like a trail laid down in neon paint and wondered how it was that the humans behind him could remain so incredibly oblivious to it. It ought to be choking them with its strength. It ought to be making them run back to their little burrows and cowering from the shadow of the hawk. He ought to be making them do that, for weapons or not, Michael still knew that he could snap every single one of them over his knee without suffering a scratch.

Michael knew as soon as he saw the building that it was correct. Something in him wanted to reach out for it, equally as strong or stronger as the part of him that wanted to retreat, and the predator scent was so strong that he could almost touch it. “Here,” Michael said, pointing to the hulk of a condemned movie theater in front of him. All around him, he could hear blood singing.

End Part Twenty

Continue to Part Twenty-One