Page 2 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
Grabbing the last everything bagel and a full glass of water, he plopped down at his desk. His brain wanted nothing more than to drown in hisWar on Bloodarticle. It wasn’t technically an articleyet, just a chaotic outline of notes and questions, and he had nothing useful to do with them without that blood dealer interview.
But he’d gotten this far on determination and courage, and he would make it the rest of the way or die trying.
Since his first real encounter with one of the most stigmatized and sexualized nonhumans that night at the gala, he’d been slowly working himself into the hidden sub-community of vampires that existed within San Salud’s inner city. It had taken months of searching just to determine what exactly he was looking for in the first place, but the last few weeks he’d gone all in, running down rumors that took him into back allies and odd little sex and magic shops, frequenting the new vampire-centered blood bank in Ala Santa, and even paying a visit to a freelance metal-worker who accepted commissions from nonhumans. The backyard smith had refused to tell Shane anything beyond“my customers’ privacy is a sacred thing”and“maybe you should leave now”and“if you don’t get out you’ll be learning a hell of a lot more about vampires real soon.”
Learning a hell of a lot more about vampires was one of Shane’s only two hobbies—all right, yes, obsessions—but he was fairly sure the smith would have just called the cops.
Fuck though, if this lead panned out and he could meet the blood dealer who illegally supplied most of San Salud’s vampires, that would throw his investigation wide open. For the article, of course. Not because maybe, possibly, if he hungaround vampire haunts long enough, he might run back into his vampire.
Hisvampire.
It had taken the whole night to reveal that the monster was more than a mask—that he, in fact,washis mask, a fanged creature of the night in the flesh. He’d taken Shane’s breath away, catching him in the darkness, a baring of fangs and a prick of a finger so unlike those he’d grown accustomed to over a life of glucose monitoring.
“You’re not planning to eat me, are you?”
“I admit that would be very nice, if you were offering,”his vampire had replied, and then, as though he could see the way Shane’s fear and intrigue fought,“Do you think me a monster?”
“Aren’t you?”Shane had taunted.“Cornering swans in the dark.”
But as alluring as his vampire was, he was far from the only one sneaking through the shadowed corners of the city.
If Shane did well with his article, the Star might hire him full time, and he could bethejournalist for vampire-related topics. Topics like the cause for the decreasing vampire population in San Salud and why a random board member from Vitalis-Barron Pharmaceutical had admitted to her part in it. Shane could find no evidence linking her to anything shadier than a typical country club, but the more he got his name out there, the more doors he could break down in search of the skeletons within. He had already wormed onto the media list for Vitalis-Barron’s Met Gala-inspired party that took place in a little over a month, hoping that a few well-placed questions to the right people might earn him a lead, or else a beautiful criminal preparing to sink in his fangs.
As things stood though, it was still ChatterDash’s excruciating fluff bits that provided Shane’s insurance, which knocked the price of his insulin down enough that it would have almost beenreasonable, were it an occasional lavish splurge and not the unending cost of the thing literally keeping him alive. He turned to the meme-littered column of regurgitated celebrity gossip he’d been assigned the morning prior, trying to pretend it wasn’t the tenth one he’d churned out that week. At least back when they’d been paying him for his rating lists, he could slip in some thoughtful commentary here and there.
His mind was nearly sludge by the time his laptop’s chat app started dinging.
Nat20
San Salud.
LARP.
Con.
Of course it was Nat—no one else on his list had talked to him in months. Apparently there was only one way to make friends as a neurodivergent adult: you both had a socially unacceptable obsession with vampires and were just lonely enough to talk about them with a near stranger at a comic shop. Even if Nat’s obsession was based in trauma, while Shane’s was… less complicated.
Shane-anigans
Explanation please.
Nat1
Are you coming to LARPcon or not?
Shane-anigans
I’ve already planned a Shane Rates Things for it :)
Nat1
Loser /affectionate
Though not the “official” tone indicator for affection—that, Shane was pretty sure, was a shorter /aff—Nat’s spelled out versions made it easier for them both to create and decipher what they needed in the moment.
Nat1
Though tbf the only other person I know who’s into anything nerdy is my cousin and they’re a miserable overachiever who will drop a grand on a cosplay to make everyone else look bad.
