Page 5 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
Calls to the team members he’d be taking on this heist didn’t help either, one of them acting like he needed Maul to personally confirm every step of the plan and the other’s voice going audibly distressed when Maul’s name was mentioned. Andres worried about her. She said she was fine, though. That she was dedicated. He wasn’t quite sure why those two things went together, though occasionally Maul made a fuss over the latter, so perhaps that was it.
If anyone knew what it felt like to be berated and coerced by their boss, it was Andres, but at leasthehad learned how to conceal his emotions from his voice, or to find other outlets. He was a proper vampire—no matter how much some of his conversations with Maul made him feel like a will-ridden drone from the human’s monster legends—and he could prove that. With four hours before he needed to be at his team’s meetup point, he had the time for it.
There was more than one way to steal blood in this city, after all.
Besides, he’d been hounded that week by the sort of craving that only something warm and fresh and tasty could satisfy… something straight from the veins of an attractive human with a sharp smile and a fierce intellect. The image that thought conjured—dirty blonde waves tucked behind a feathered mask; hazel eyes that had flashed with such an enticing, breathless combination of fear and intrigue; a perfect, delicate neck scattered in soft freckles—made him sway. Andres hadn’t thought of that night in days—weeks?
After he’d first broken down and used the author name listed on Shane Cowley’s ChatterDash gala article to stalk like a cyber predator through his socials, Andres had sworn he was done fantasizing. But no matter how many times he put away his gala mask, it always managed to return to him.
It hung now from the mannequin bodice, atop the cape he’d worn that night, which he’d since embellished with a patchwork of black lace flowers and deep red satin that turned it into a beautiful, billowing wrap. It struck Andres as the wrong size and style for him, perfect for someone smaller, fairer. Someone who’d worn a swishing shawl when they’d met, whose slim lines and long limbs would glow beneath the darkness of the fabric. That was a ridiculous thought, though. He would never see Shane again. With Maul’s presence still leering over his life from a distance, he wasn’t sure it was right to pull any human into that.
Andres lifted his hand to his hair, then forced it back down. His insides felt wrong, a slight burn at the back of his eyes.
Perhaps he was more stressed by Maul’s nonsense than he’d assumed.
Or he simply needed the release of having a human beneath his fangs. That was it, probably. It was certainly why he was now envisioning the moment he’d first caught his little swan, clothed in white and already flushing beneath his touch.
Andres swore his heart had stopped.
He hadn’t meant to keep coming back throughout the party, to lead Shane on, but each flirtatious tease pulled at him, and the eagerness with which Shane fell for his every charm was intoxicating. When his swan had trembled as Andres finally bared his fangs, it had ruined him, like that single moment of vulnerability was carved into his soul. Andres had called him Cygnus teasingly, but by the end of the night, he thought perhaps Shane really was his constellation. The last time they’dmade eye contact, Andres had turned back to steal a final kiss goodbye, as half a taunt and half a gift—something to remember him by, for better or for worse.
The soft graze had lingered on his lips for hours, then weeks.
But Shane Cowley wasn’t his, and he never would be.
Andres tried to ignore the way that knowledge sunk into him like claws, hitting all the same places that Maul had already felt the need to maim. He’d just have to find another release. There were other humans in this city who’d tremble under the pressure of his fangs.
He threw on one of the three leather coats he’d customized during a series of sewing tutorials on his channel—the black one with so many cutouts of lace roses that it was hardly a jacket at all—over a scarlet button-down opened to the middle of his chest and a black gem necklace to match the large studs currently in his ears and the shimmering black of his nail polish. He checked the look in his foyer mirror with a hum. It held a certain masculine draw, while still feeling veryhim—very not-quite-gendered—like thehe/theypronouns he’d added to his business card at the start of the year. He’d wondered at first why the change hadn’t prompted any rearranging of his own thoughts; even if his heart soared when others referred to him with his secondary pronouns and danced when he heard the singulartheyon the streets, he still felt himself gravitate towardheandhimin his mind; the words Cygnus’s lover would have used when he proclaimed who he was, who he loved. And that didn’t mean Andres was any less non-binary, he’d finally decided. Any lessthey.
He figured that he was making a bigger deal of it all than he needed to—but it felt like a big deal, felt like his heart and his bones and his soul trying to come into alignment after nearly three decades apart, bloody and torn and working little by little to heal back into place.
He had one baby cousin, at least—his Hellbeast, the other black sheep of the family, the two of them practically raising each other despite their seven-year age gap—who never failed to make him feel whole. He snapped a quick mirror pic and sent it to her, with the captionam I breaking gender yet?
She replied with a line of middle fingers, followed byyou’re not as hot as you think, you fuckfaced themboy.With a sparklingkilling itsticker.
He laughed and returned her insults with his own middle finger emoji, but the joy didn’t stick, the discomfort Maul had left him with returning beside a creeping loneliness that felt like a layer of grime on his skin.
Killing, perhaps not, but stealing a lot of blood from a bank and perhaps a little directly from the veins of a gorgeous human? That, he’d become a professional at.
Regardless of how he felt now, he was going to make this night a good one.
The Fishnettery was already bustling by the time Andres walked in.
With its colorful fairy lights strung behind draping fishnets, the glitter that seemed to occupy every free space, the overpriced rainbow shots and the happy hour deep-fried cocktail shrimp, the place looked like a fancy crab shack had collided with a gaggle of twinks. It was slowly losing its reputation as the last genuinely queer bar—or bar-adjacent alcohol-serving spot—in San Salud as the cishets wormed their way in like it was a friendly tourist spot, and not a place deliberately curated to be free of their unwanted attention, butit was still far gayer and brighter—and as safe as one could get for a gender-not-normal sort—than any other establishment in town. And the calamari was delicious.
Andres ordered an Old Fashioned at the central square bar that sat beneath a fishnet canopy and strolled through the adjoining rooms with their arched wood ceilings and colorful underwater theming, keeping an eye out for the red pin that covertly signaled that the wearer was happy to be bitten. Such humans were rare these days, and always sure to have their pick of the single vampires. Everyone wanted a safe neck to nibble on. But any harbor would do in a storm, and plenty of humans were open to a bite, so long as it came with an orgasm in the bathroom and they didn’t have to risk leaving the building with the fanged monster after.
Andres meandered through the space, letting his gaze slip from human to human—gender wasn’t important for this. While it were always men who stirred his heart and left him daydreaming months later, his physical needs were less picky. Right now, he just wanted someone who could hold his attention long enough for him to forget the way caving to Maul’s demands made his bones itch and his stomach turn.
There was someone else it seemed he needed to forget first though.
Every time Andres caught a mildly enjoyable blood scent, his brain jumped to the smell of Shane, bright and sun-kissed, like breathing in the earth after it had baked for hours. It made Andres think of the last time he’d been able to properly lay out on a summer afternoon, nine years ago. He’d spent months picking that scent apart: a little spicy, with a depth like umami, a tinge burnt, and something shockingly sweet at the end. It tingled Andres’s nose now with such luscious veracity that he could have sworn, over and over, that the man was somewhere in the next room.
It was as if the universe was reminding him just how little control he had over his life at that moment. He knew how to display just the sensual aspects of the tall, handsome, dark-haired vampire of myths, to use those parts of himself like a weapon, but between thoughts of Shane and Maul’s lingering domination, it seemed even that had been stolen from him. He dragged his hands through his hair, reminding himself that he had power over his own body. His own emotions.
He could push through this.
Still, his lungs refused to open all the way, as though Maul himself were squeezing the life out of them. Andres finished off his alcohol, but all that achieved was a burning sensation behind his eyes that produced a film at the back of his throat.
