Page 52 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
Vincent, who was alone out there somewhere. With a tracker. Being hunted by Babcock.
Shit.
Wesley snatched his jacket off the stair’s railing, shoved his feet into his shoes, and threw himself into the night. His phone chimed on the way down the front drive, and he fumbled it open, heart slamming against his ribs. It was only Babcock.
In the Sunset Ridge neighborhood; I think you live around here? We traced the vampire to a house on Timmons Street but he’d already fled, and the tracker went offline shortly after. Scouting the surrounding area now.
Matthew
No more tracker; that was a relief, at least.
Wesley double-checked both directions to make sure that Babcock and his assistant weren’t currently in his line of sight before turning at the street he’d always seen Vincent appear from. He stalled a block down. To the right the houses split off into a cul-de-sac, but otherwise this was the end of the residential area for at least a two- or three-minute walk as the road weaved around the cemetery and through the local shopping center. Vincenthadimplied he didn’t have a standard place of living. And he was a vampire.
Wesley turned toward the cemetery. He jumped the little stone wall that surrounded it. Instantly it felt darker, the streetlamps all behind him or far to his left or right, their reach receding with each step he took. He couldn’t use his phone light, not without the potential of alerting Babcock to his presence, so he stumbled blindly through the gravestones, apologizing to the ghosts every time he knocked one of his legs against something hard and dark.
He realized halfway through the cemetery that he wasn’t entirely sure how he was supposed to be helping Vincent like this. Vincent clearly knew that Babcock was trouble. He’d already found and disabled the hunter’s tracker. Unless Wesley was going to tell him about his dealings with Vitalis-Barron—something he was now certain would destroy any chance he had at proving he could be trusted not to fuck Vincent over in the long run—then it wasn’t likely he could say anything about Babock that Vincent hadn’t figured out himself. And if it came down to a fight, Vincent was stronger and faster than Wesley and probably a lot better at hiding.
He’d still been shaking though. As clearly as he’d been trying to hide it, the sun-poisoning was far worse than he’d admitted. Of fucking course it was; Vincent was the vampire Babcock had been trying to flush out. He must have been in the sun on and off all day. Wesley’s chest ached for him. He couldn’t just leave Vincent to suffer through that alone. Even if all he could offer was his support, as a friend or a boyfriend or their weird in-between thing, whatever Vincent needed, then he wanted to be there for that.
He just had to find the damn vampire first.
“Vincent,” he hissed, ducking past the sweeping wings of an angelic monolith and creeping across a set of flat marble grave-headers like they were steppingstones. The ghosts he was apologizing to had better not have been real, because if they were he was going to be pissing so many of them off. He snuck around the side of the graveyard’s three stone mausoleums, whisper-shouting again, “Vincent!”
Nothing.
He kept moving, but as he turned away, the roof of the furthest mausoleum clattered.
“Wes?” Vincent’s voice was soft and a little wobbly.
Wesley’s heart caught. “Yeah? Yeah it’s me!”
A little choked sound followed. “I could kiss you right now.”
“Please do.”
He swore he didn’t imagine the curse in Vincent’s intake of breath and the moment of stillness that followed, but then the vampire said, “I wager you one piggyback ride that you can’t climb this,” like nothing had changed.
Wesley’s hope plummeted. Maybe he was wrong about being wrong. Or maybe…
He just had to come out with it. Though if his actual coming out experience had been this hard he might have been in the closet still. Wesley gritted his teeth as he pulled himself up the side of the mausoleum and prepared to do the impossible. When he reached the top, the words died in his throat.
Vincent lay on the slanted rooftop, curled in on himself and shaking beneath the starlight. He’d wrapped his arms around his body and while the darkness hid most of his expression, what Wesley could see looked pained.
Wes dropped down beside him, pressing his palm to the vampire’s shoulder. “It got worse.”
Vincent gave a little laugh. “The after-affects keep creeping back up on me.”
“Would more blood help?”
“Probably. But I’m not exactly fit to pay you back.”
“Fuck that, Vinny.” Wes settled onto the roof at Vincent’s side. He scooped an arm under Vincent’s back as he shoved his sleeve away from his wrist. “I meant what I said. I’m here because I care about you. All the payback I want is for you to feel better.”
“Thank you.” Vincent’s voice sounded a little rough, and his trembling fingers were delicate as he held Wes’s hand to his mouth.
Wes looked away, worried instinctively that maybe like this the fangs would nip right through his tendons. But Vincent’s lips met the tender skin so gently that Wes breathed out. He barely flinched as his skin broke, sighing when the venom finally began to settle his mind. It was subtler this way, the whole process a lot less of a rush. There was something lovely about it despite that. Or maybe because of it. He was giving Vincent a part of himself not for the endorphins or the intoxication, but because hecould.
And he wanted to give Vincent everything he possibly could for as long as the vampire would let him.
