“You could go get your own girlfriend, or boyfriend,” she added, “inbetween friend, neither friend. Whoever makes you tingly in your—”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Pingly,” Kendall managed to get in before her video officially closed out. Wes’s screen turned back to his usual background picture of them from college, Kendall with her tongue stuck out and him smooching her cheek.
Wes shook his head and laughed. As he stripped and started the shower, he couldn’t get the thought of vampires out of his head. If by some crazy turn of fate, there was one actually biting him in his sleep, then that would be terrifying and dangerous. And lucky.
A message pinged on his Griffon chat app.
KendallCanoodles
Dude, if there is a mystery neck-nomming vampire, then I wager a hundred bucks that you can’t get them to go with you to that research job thing.
LordOfTheWin
Deal.
3
WESLEY
Wesley turned off the light, scrunched his pillow under his chin and closed his eyes. Sleep didn’t come. In the back of his head, Kendall’s bet returned.
“You’d think I’d know if someone was in my bed.”
Both of them understand just how unlikely this was. But Kendall had still wagered a hundred dollars. And Wes had still accepted.
It wasn’t as though vampires weren’t known for this kind of thing: for stealing blood in the dead of night, whether from sleeping victims, or lonely travelers, or blood banks already struggling to find enough donations for their human patients. It wasn’t entirely impossible. Wasn’t his window screen looking a little more bowed than usual? Hadn’t he been sleeping in later, waking up a bit groggier some mornings?
Wes shuddered from the top of his head to his toes. He didn’t believe the rumor that bites could randomly turn humans into vamps—if that were the case, he figured far more vampires would lurk the streets at night—but being bitten in his sleep, without his consent, was still a terrifying form of assault. Maybe it wasn’t deadly research level cruel, but it was up there.
And it was exactly what Wes needed. A vampire willing to commit these crimes was someone he’d had no regrets turning over to Vitalis-Barron for the chance to take them down. It was almost too perfect, in fact. Like the universe had aligned this for him because it knew Vitalis-Barron had to be dealt with.
As the night wore on, Wes’s mind couldn’t quite seem to shut off. Every creak and bump in the night flared like a firework behind his eyes, jolting him out of a half-sleep. It was all in his head, he told himself. Just his worries slipping into his dreams. Those, too, were filled with vampires and the dark, things that were half visions and half his own imagination, just conscious enough to be lucid. While there were probably no vampires coming for him, he couldn’t stop himself from picturing what it might be like to encounter one now, vulnerable in bed.
It would be the swish of dark fabric spilling through the window, eyes tracking along his sleeping form, the shift of the bed as a monster joined him. Something hungry coming for him, because it wanted him. Because itneededhim. A gentle breath on his neck, shivering down his spine. Fingers touching his hair, winding into it, holding him in place. His life in the hands of a stranger, an adrenaline rush that no amount of gambling with Kendall could ever match.
Lips on his skin.
The prick of fangs.
Still half awake, Wesley’s lungs caught in a little sound that pressed out of him unbidden, and he fluttered back to full consciousness. The half-dream came with him: the pressure of a mouth, the hand pressed against his head and another on his shoulder and—oh fuck, oh fuck, there was a vampire: a real, non-imaginary vampire holding him down and sucking out his blood. And it felt… Wes couldn’t think about how it felt, becausevampireandhereslammed through his head hard enough to propel him into his lampstand. He flicked the switch.
The light burst on, so bright Wes had to blink. He half expected to be wrong again, that it was still just a hyper-real dream. But hot blood trickled slowly from his neck, and flinching away from the light across the bed from him was an honest-to-god bloodsucker. The vampire’s shaggy black hair tangled around his eyes and draped onto the collar of his even shaggier, ratty black coat. Beneath the dark clothing he looked nearly as pale and sickly as the vamps Wesley had shot up in-game a few hours earlier, his irises an icy blue and a trail of scarlet dripping down the edge of his lips.
He narrowed his eyes at Wesley, brows pulled tight and gaze a little distant. As the vampire’s focus clicked, fear tore across his face. He scrambled backwards, falling off the bed in a clumsy pile, and lunged for the open window.
A vampire was in Wes’s house. A vampire who’d assaulted him in his sleep. A vampire he needed to bring with him to Vitalis-Barron Pharmaceuticals. A vampire who was going to run off into the night in the next ten seconds if Wes didn’t do something about it.
Wes was shorter, and, even if vampiric strength wasn’t in play, probably still weaker than the vampire. He had no weapons at hand and every fighting technique he’d picked up over the years had come from some kind of fictional media. So he did the only other thing he could think of.
“Wait! Wait, come back, you can eat me!” As he said it, the hazy desires of his dream returned in tingles and flashes, forcing him to swallow at the end. It wasn’t like hewanteda vampire to pin him down and snack on him. If his aversion to the bloodsucker wasn’t so outweighed by his loathing for Vitalis-Barron, he wouldn’t have wanted this particular vampire near any part of his body. It was just that the idea of being bitten triggered a rush of adrenaline. Like the thought of skydiving. Except that in one of those situations you died, and in the other one a beautiful monster licked your skin and told you how delicious you tasted.
Whatever the case, his wild exclamation worked. The vampire slowed, one hand on the window. His breathing seemed to be coming unusually hard. Or maybe that was Wesley’s.
The vampire’s eyes dropped to Wesley’s neck and his throat bobbed.
Wes lifted his hand to the spot. His fingers slid over a warm liquid. Ah, fuck. Bleeding, right. The top edge of his t-shirt was already wet, the stain spilling quickly down his shoulder in a crimson streak. Wes had lost this much blood before, doing one stupid thing or another—and won something for his efforts most of the time—but the shock of it still turned his head a little woozy. He grabbed the bedpost to steady himself.
