** Language, graphic violence, some slight nsfw, all content that follows is 18+ **

When the days are cold
And the cards all fold
And the saints we see
Are all made of gold

When your dreams all fail
And the ones we hail
Are the worst of all
And the blood?s run stale

I want to hide the truth
I want to shelter you
But with the beast inside
There?s nowhere we can hide

No matter what we breed
We still are made of greed
This is my kingdom come

When you feel my heat
Look into my eyes
It?s where my demons hide
Don?t get too close
It?s dark inside
It?s where my demons hide

When the curtain?s call
Is the last of all
When the lights fade out
All the sinners crawl

So they dug your grave
And the masquerade
Will come calling out
At the mess you made

Don?t want to let you down
But I am hell bound
Though this is all for you
Don?t want to hide the truth

No matter what we breed
We still are made of greed
This is my kingdom come

When you feel my heat
Look into my eyes
It?s where my demons hide


Don Francesco was an old bulldog of an Italian, a fixture in Rhy'Din with wide-spread territory not far from the docks. Mesteno had been in his employ for some years, a Giovanni D'Onore - not family, but a trusted outsider, and even if the work did have a habit of becoming stale (particularly when it included escort duty for the Don, or his beloved and overly clingy daughter) he'd a grudging loyalty to them which kept him from breaking ties. And besides, it gave the necromancer ample opportunity to play, plenty of harvestable 'parts', and on rare occasions, even a challenge.

Tonight, no such luck. His briefing had suggested that there was a leak, territory borders blurring as pushers tried new street corners, new alleys to ply their trade, and the Don wanted them gone.

They'd set up shop across from a seedy bar, two of them draped faux casual against some ancient, wrought iron railings painted black and peeling, lining a short flight of steps to an abandoned squat. They looked much the same as the other refuse stumbling in and out of the bar, except that they were furtive in their mannerisms, and occasionally had nameless visitors to their chosen spot, discreetly exchanging cash for product, one handling the goods and the other stood tall and imposing, all shrewd eyed and intent on who, or what came down the street. Had they been less in the open, it might have been easy to dispatch the pair, but they'd a hive full of witnesses, and so Mesteno played it patient, watching them through the neon-lit window of the bar, a filthy beer glass half-full in one hand as he waited for them to make some change of locales for the night.

When he needed to, Gideon could play chameleon. Hell, it was one of the things he did best, hiding in plain sight among the sheep of the city. But sometimes he took things a step further, shed the fine clothes and comfortable elegance of his preferred settings. Nobody slummed it like he could, a mismatch of worn jeans and fine shirt untucked over hips, tie looser than it should have been, a thin slice of onyx black, the much-loved, weatherbeaten and creased leather jacket. Perfect paragon of one of those boys who ran the streets, upstarts and up and comers. Too brash for their own good as they both tried too hard and not nearly hard enough.

So it seemed as he came strolling round the corner, hands shoved deep into pockets of the jacket, chin dipped enough that the stiff, circular collar rubbed pleasantly against his jaw. From behind the glass where Mesteno sat, the whole exchange played out like a silent movie reel - and it might have been asking a bit much that the Sadist recognize him, the silhouette cut of a young man that paused before the pair and struck up conversation as he lent upon the peeling, rusted railing, one foot upon a stair. Casual enough he could have been a customer, or perhaps just an acquaintance pausing long enough to chew the fat. The difference here was, after a minute or two it was the visitor who handed something small over to one of the pair, who took the object curiously, glanced it over and palmed it off to his companion. A second later the youth had straightened from his lean and was strolling off down the sidewalk. A minute passed before the men followed at a distance.

Mesteno observed the encounter in perfect stillness, unblinking, unsure about who this third was because there had been no mention of another accomplice for this little hotspot. It couldn't hurt though, to take out this third, too. Drag him home and question him beneath the ersatz solarity of the flurescent lighting. There was always the possibility that this little tresspass was more than it seemed, and a little necromancy to finish off the evening appealed.

Leaving the sticky glass behind and peeling himself up off an equally sticky bench in tacky, red faux-leather, he made his way out of the bar and onto the street just in time to see the original pair turning to follow their new boy in the rumpled suit. He let them draw out a lead, get far enough that it wouldn't seem he hounded their heels to begin with, and then set off in pursuit. Matched their pace and kept out of the orange spill from the streetlamps should one of them think to turn around and see that they weren't being followed. But these were amateurs (or supposed to be...) and he expected no trouble. Maybe a sidearm or a razorblade, but nothing out of the ordinary.

So they had a little parade going, a paced out game of follow the leader played between three parties. Two blocks down, Gideon cut a sharp right, down into a broad partition between buildings and back through the convenient curtain of a tall wooden fence, ducking through the jagged opening where someone had kicked in half of three vertical slats, into the cramped courtyard of a tenament building - what had once ostensibly been the trash chute for the mouldering brick monstrosity before the city installed its dubious excuse for a waste removal service. For all intents and purposes, it seemed the building's inhabitants still used the space for trash, as broken furniture and piles of rubbish lay heaped in corners.

He ducked inside, and stood patiently, waiting on the footsteps following him. The men grumbled at the fence, but climbed through. The things you'd do to feed greed and addiction. He waited till the second man had fumbled his way through the fence, caught his shoe against the ragged wooden splinters and stumbled, hopping to catch his balance. He reached out a hand, caught him by the wrist and steadied him. The man glanced up with an ill-tempered snarl at the offer of assistance that felt more like mocking than a gesture of civility, and made to jerk his arm away. The snarl died on his lips as his arm didn't budge, and the young man's grip tightened. He yanked again, and this time straightened sharply as his violent pull backward jerked his arm clean out of it's shoulder socket. The sharp slice of a smile cut itself like a white sickle across Gideon's face.

He hardly had time to open his mouth and suck air, and not nearly enough time to let it out in a howl of pain and surprise before that loose line of an arm was used against him. Used to whip him toward the outcropped corner of a brick wall, face first into the sharp angle of it. Brick and mortar embedded like a wedge, splitting forehead and face wide open. He spasmed, limbs jerking in a macabre little dance before he went limp and slid down, fell to the side, air gurgling in a hot, red, bubbling mess as it escaped dying lungs.

Shock, horror, disbelief, and last that deliciously primal survivalist rage all did a dance across his buddy's face. He had his gun in his hand and leveled at the young man who'd just proven psychopath instead of the promised windfall. Well, he thought he had it leveled at him. He was there one second and gone the next. And then there were bricks, hard up against his face, something had hit him from behind like the force of a freight train, sent him flying. Some detached part of his brain could hear his gun clattering against the concrete, the rest of his grey matter was far too occupied with the fact that air had exploded from his lungs and left them burning, empty, unable to restart their engines and refill. The diaphragm under the deflated sacks of lungs shuddered, seizured. He could hear himself sucking wind - why was that part of the brain so damned insistent!? What good were sounds? There were more of them to come, the high pitched, strangled whine he made when fingers closed in his hair and wrenched him backward, the sound of his jaw and cheekbone crushing from a blinding hammer of a blow. The soft-sticky splash of sputum and blood he was spitting up onto the pavement, face down against the filthy concrete. Dully, he could feel the hard pressure of a knee pushing into the base of his spine, hear the tear of the fabric of his shirt, and then the world went mercifully black, the last lingering sensation that of razors carving into the flesh of his throat.

Corners allowed for catch-up time, and once the two followers had turned the right and vanished, he picked up the pace.

Mesteno hadn't been born with the gifts that allowed him to move so silently now, he'd taken years getting it down to an art form before the shadows which so lovingly trailed at his heels had done him the favour of obliterating any trace remnants he couldn't mute with care alone. So there was no warning for the three that a wild-eyed, blood-maned bastard was rapidly cutting the distance, making damn sure he didn't lose them. No heavy ring of steel boot-sole upon the paving, not even the whip-snap of the trench coat's knicked hemline lifting away from ankles and calves as he ran. He arrived just in time to see the second man ducking under the broken slats, and pulled up sharply.

There was potential for following through to get messy, no easy way in, and were they wary of being followed, all eyes would be there immediately. He glanced up, estimated the height of the fence, the stability of it, and ruled that out, too. It was about that point that he heard the unexpected sounds of impact as the first man hit the wall, caught the scent of blood and the scuffle of shoes against gritty ground, so he swept a look along the fence to find the nearest gap in the vertical slats, and watched the whole, grisly debacle for the handful of seconds that it lasted. He couldn't see from there that it was Gideon, could make out only a preternatural speed to the movements of the aggressor and the child-like ease with which the full grown men were whipped about and crushed like fragile things made of cheap china. Such a worthy end, for small-time low-lifes. Spending any more time on them than that would have been a waste.

Curious to find out who else had been hunting the pair, he remained. If Don Francesco had been hiring some Rhy'Din freak, he'd have told him. This had to be an outside party, and said party would need to come right back out of that hole in the fence. He plastered himself to the wood beside it, out of sight, and waited patiently, spreading the shadows along the front of the fence so that his silhouette would not be visible from the other side, so that the whole world seemed that little bit darker in that courtyard where the bodies now lay. If Gideon came slinking back through that hole and left the refuse behind with the rest of the broken trash, if he was too careless to realise that there was something living, so close, he'd emerge to the feel of cold steel against the nape of his neck. So many ifs!

A special talent, that silence the Sadist managed. Useful little trick. There was one thing he couldn't hush, though, or perhaps didn't think to - the slow drumming tympani of his heart in its lazy pace. War drum in the deep, the sound of it unmistakable, proof of life.

Crouched over the dying man, Gideon took what he wanted before tearing free the hunk of flesh caught between his teeth, letting the rest bleed out into a steaming black puddle to stain the pavement. Sweet kill, too fast for more than a quick rush of endorphins and adrenaline, and blood laced with the lush poison of whatever the man had been using that lingered in his system, giving the taste of it a heady quality. Kneeling back, rocking back, he spat the torn flesh aside and let his head drop back with a sigh, the crouched frame of him gone boneless in pleasure. It was then, as the rush of the kill and the afterglow of the feed died down that he heard it - the heartbeat just outside the fence. The dull phosphorescence of eyes ticked toward the source of it, and he moved carefully, a casual nonchalance covering the face he knew he was observed. He pulled a swatch of fabric from the torn shirt of the man under him, wiped clean the red staining his chin and face, and rose, tossing the scrap aside. Unhurried footsteps carried him to the fence and the hole through it, but paused there, vanished.

Sometimes he was a very, very good vampire. It was best that this happened as infrequently as possible.

Speed could play terrifying optical illusions. A disappearing/reappearing act that would have rivaled any level of prestidigitation in the world.

The next sounds were those of hands hitting the wood of the fence on either side of the Sadist's shoulders shaking it violently, Gideon suddenly just there, boxing him in, and then a low snarl cut short as he jerked back slightly in recognition.

"Mesteno!" The ragged velvet of voice kept low. "The f*ck are you doing here?"

True enough, he couldn't hide it. It was distinctive, a punch so powerful it kept the blood moving through vessels just strong enough to cope with the high pressure, and thank whatever Gods were real it was so infrequent, that the fibrous arteries were not strained too often

The machete Mesteno carried in a spine sheath strapped snug to his torso and hidden beneath the battered old trench coat was an ugly, brutal piece of equipment, short enough to be wielded close range, though bringing it up to defend himself when his mark had so rapidly vanished from the hole was impossible. It was a sad truth, that the Sadist swam in a pool with some very large sharks, and Gideon certainly outsized him. Made the weapon as obsolete as a six shooter compared to an M-16, with his hands empty. Not that he'd known it was him. Not that he realised until they were abruptly face to face, and the fence was tremoring behind him, pushed into as much by his own retreating shoulder blades as by the pressure the dead man put upon it.

"F*cking-- Gideon!?" Spoken over the other's outburst, their exclaimations almost comically timed.

He had the audacity not to look alarmed, little bastard, but rather to look mildly outraged that it was him that'd plucked his targets from life, disallowed him any minor satisfaction for the night. "Since when do vampires suddenly care about a couple of small time drug dealers? They were mine." Perhaps he should have clarified what he meant by that, because it certainly could be misconstrued that they were working for him. Not that they were his marks.

"They were not." He shot back, no misunderstanding there - he knew enough of the underbelly to know they weren't the Sadist's payroll - and letting hands slid away from the fence, he backed up to give Mesteno several feet between them. "They were mine. They were selling my blood. And you know the funny thing about dealers? They're almost always users too."

He glared over the other's shoulder toward the fence behind which the pair in question lay, littering the ground with their useless carcasses and spat, the taste of the one man still lingering against his tongue. Eyes narrowed as they ticked back to the angles of the lean man's face in the shadows and his dark head canted slightly.

"Why did you want them?"

Did Gideon just...? Needless to say, judging by his reaction, Mesteno was not accustomed to having anyone deny the credibility of his claim, and he'd been about to snarl a retort when the dead man admitted the cause for his hunt. Gold-shot eyes, so fiercely bright when it was this dark, dipped twards the hole in the fence as if he'd intention to go crawling through and fish about in their pockets to see if he spoke true, but he scowled instead, reaching back to sweep his hair aside and slide the machete back into its concealed housing.

"They weren't supposed to be selling here. Boss man figured they were working for one of the other Families and wanted to know who's. So I was watchin' them when all of a sudden this punkass in a suit shows up and leads 'em out here," he grumbled, stepping away from the fence as if he resented the restriction it placed upon his movements.

"I take it now that you're finished exacting your revenge, you're done with what's left?" A pause, before he added, "And, aside from the principal of people getting high off your blood, is this really worth wasting your time on? They have a short-lived high, it's not like it's effecting you, is it?" He'd good reason for asking, though he wasn't about to let on why, just yet.

Gideon spread arms and glanced down at himself, ever the peacock, as if to question the validity of this 'punkass in a suit' slander. The arched brow he leveled at Mesteno as his gaze rose again spoke clear enough for him. What suit? He let arms fall by his sides again before raking fingers roughly back through dark hair, setting the muss of it on end slightly.

"Personally? I don't give a shit what people get high on, get off on. So long as it's not me. These idiots take enough tastes - and it doesn't take much!" He leveled a finger at the Sadist to punctuate his point. "And it forges a bond. They think this blood is just that - blood. And it makes them feel good, heals things, can send them tripping f*cking balls if they have enough of it. But its more than that. Three good tastes and we are linked."

He paced slightly down the alleyway, turned sharp on a heel and stalked back, visibly agitated. "I can hear them, all of them. Hundreds of them. ALL the bloody time. All the mundane bullshit, all the horrific things they think and do, every last god awful thing. I can't f*cking stand it!"

He drew a breath, let it out slow, straightened himself and smoothed a hand over his tie.

"So. I'm silencing them. And, at the same time, looking for the bastard who took it all in the first place." The broad sickle of his smile gleamed in the low light. "I'm well done with those two. You're welcome to the sloppy seconds." Brat. Prince.

Not a suit then. Don't mind him, he'd caught one glimpse of the tie and seen little more than Gideon's face, those strangely phosphorescent eyes which could be so hypnotic, no matter the mood they were lit with. He rolled his own at the pantomimed clothes check, a whatever without vocalising it.

"It doesn't take much..." he echoed. "And you let my drink how much when you came to my home?" Admittedly there had been no ill effects since, and he didn't think that Gideon was bonded to him in any way, but where these addicts might be swallowing down a cup's measure, maybe even just a narrow vial, Mesteno had fed like a glutton. "It has to be three times though, yes?" It had been that way with Sinjin. Perhaps it was the number of occasions and not the quantity that he needed to be concerned about.

"Those two were nothing. You're wasting your time killing off the small fry. They won't have it in any great quantity, it's the ones that they report to who'll have it. Find where it's stashed, dispose of it." Hundreds of voices crowding a man's head could do some pretty permanent damage. To a vampire, nature so violent already, Mesteno was surprised that Gideon wasn't out there making more of a name for himself. "Of course, you might find it a little difficult to find out who it is supplying them if you keep snapping them up like twigs. You're so heavy handed, Gideon." Not that he'd complained back in that damned night club. No, he'd urged the bastard on as if he'd welcome the crush and tear.

He took a few steps his way, bold, incorrigible, a slight tip to the heavily angled jaw giving the suggestion that he looked down his nose at him. "I could help you." Hello, bait.

One edge of his smile hitched higher than the other, and he shoved hands into the pockets of jeans that rode low without the benefit of a belt.

"I let you take what you wanted." He lifted a shoulder in a shrug, "The blood had no effect healing you from the outside, and whatever else you are, you aren't... well." Eyes swept the Sadist with no small amount of appreciation, "Normal."

He pulled a thin vial from his pocket and held it out in offering. The glass was about half the length of his index finger and half as thick as well, full near to the stoppered top with the black toxin that ran thick in his veins.

"Three doses. Three tastes, three little pulls off this tube and that's it." It wasn't the number that counted, it was the quantity. Enough to coat the tongue. Rinse, repeat, repeat.

"I can't hear you." he reassured, though he might have sounded a tad bit disappointed. "I figured it wasn't likely to have that effect on you anyway. I wanted you to have what you wanted." As if that made up for the recklessness.

He slid his hand back into his pocket and closed the gap between himself and the Sadist gradually. He was heavy handed, had the propensity to let his temper and let instant gratification get the better of him. He arched a dark brow and came toe to toe with the haughty looking red lion. Reached up and ran the backs of fingers down the column of his throat, stroked them over the hollow in the dip of his collarbone.

"Would you help me?" He asked sotto voce, the softer qualities returning to his voice as the blood in this throat faded away. There was, after all, a difference between can and will.

Gideon ought not have been disappointed. Mesteno's head wasn't a pleasant place to be, and hadn't he seen how furiously guarded he was? How determined to have Aoife dead for dipping into a mind better locked up like the worst of secrets? He said nothing of it, did not seem to be inclined to reach for the vial when it was produced as if he were tempted like the addicts who must have ached for it. In there it must have been cold, possibly watered down or mixed with an anticoagulant, something impure.

"It's never as good as it is fresh from the fount," he admitted, his eyes shifting as his gaze slipped from the vial to Gideon's neck, the freshly smoothed tie hanging beneath.

"You did," he told him, "though I'm not sure why you wanted me to. What do you get out of it? Being fed on doesn't bring you any particular pleasure. You weren't the one who ended up..." hard. But he was distracted from what he'd been saying by the sudden nearness, and his body remembered the last time clearly, even if he did not make mention of it.

He reached across, not very far at all as if happened when they were stood toe to toe, slipped fingers through the belt loops of those low clinging jeans, so conveniently empty, and gave a short, sharp pull to bring him close enough to knock knees.

"It wouldn't be very difficult," he confided. "Talking to the dead is...well interrogating them I should say. I like my work more than a should, you understand?" A shameless confession. He got his kicks out of it. "And I would help you. If you'd just...ask."

Sound familiar? Didn't the bloody maned bastard look pleased with himself!

Mesteno wasn't the only one looking pleased if the fox-sly slant of ice shard eyes had anything to say about it. He bonelessly let that jerking pull drag him closer, hip to hip, lean planes of stomachs pressed flush.

"What did I get out of it?" He echoed, as if Mesteno had just answered the question for himself. He was willing to belabor the point slightly, though. "Among other things... a little taste of pain from you that wasn't because I prodded you into a rage, and I got to help after I'd made such a mess of things. Both of those were more than enough motivation."

Knuckles turned and fingers slid to shape themselves a ladder up the column of Mesteno's throat, cradling the contour of it as they slid up under the hook of jaw and soft fold of an ear. Gideon's mouth parted, teeth sinking into his own lower lip as if to catch it prisoner to the thoughts running silent behind pale eyes. He released it slowly as the corners of his mouth tugged upwards.

"Please. Help me."

The vampire had an uncanny ability to surprise him that he didn't find wholly unpleasant.

"One day I'll get you all figured out," he murmured, as if he didn't mind the effort that would require. That he wouldn't mind a little digging if there were buried facets every step of the way. "You're either one of the most complicated people I've ever met, or you're clear as glass."

And he didn't want to assume it was the last one, because he'd never have seen that trick in the basement coming. He was too cunning.

There was no one to see them down there in that dump of a space between buildings, so he didn't seem to mind the way he was touched. Wouldn't have let him that near at all if they'd been somewhere they might be stumbled across (that wasn't somewhere like the establishments they'd visited the night of their impromptu little excursion) but for now he seemed about ready to purr for the touches. Tactile was good, even if it wasn't the obscene variety. One hand lifted from the belt loops he'd seized, lifted to put a thumb to Gideon's lower lip, tugging downward in the hollow just beneath the fullest part to give him a glimpse of teeth. Were there fangs to be seen? If they weren't hidden away, if those needling ends were visible, he quite deliberately pressed the pad of his thumb against one to let it puncture, smear a broad, gleaming bead of what rose across the lip he'd just been toying with.

"You're beyond help, Gideon," he laughed warmly, low, low, as if it were a secret. "But good. I'll help you."

"One day." Gideon murmured in echo, and it was difficult to parse out if that was pleasure in the agreement of it. An arm slid round the Sadist's narrow waist, under the heavy fall of that trench, locked him close. Teeth, impossibly sharp, long things slid out obligingly as his lower lip was pulled down - as if the traitorous little ivories knew what was wanted of them. Glistening, watery milk-blue translucent things that looked far more deceptively delicate than they were. It took no pressure at all to slice the pad of his thumb open, leaving one of those needle points stained ruby at its tip.

The dull fire of eyes extinguished completely, shuttered by dark lashes the second the rich, powerful taste touched his tongue. Licking the copper end of a battery, full of small jolts, promising lightening in a bottle at its source. His lips closed over that thumb, and his tongue made wholly indecent advances upon the little wound on it as he sucked, once, before letting it free to slide away if it chose. He was not above the brief breath of a moan the taste stole from him, wrung from deep in his throat.

Gideon might have fed on the latter of the two men and had some residual warmth as a result, but Mesteno offered him a little more, must have seemed a little fever-touched when the arm at his waist locked them in such an intimate press.

Close, he watched with gentle fascination as the fangs emerged, the simulacrum they were, for fragile things such as those could not be. Not when they tore out throats. Not when they should have fractured a thousand times over for every artery they fought and punctured. Transiently camptive, his thumb pressed back against the indecent little squirms of slick muscle working against the miniscule wound, forced out another little glistening bead before the digit was allowed to slide free. That sound torn from Gideon's throat pleased him too, but he didn't praise him for it with anything more than those exotically golden eyes, and Gideon's were far too closed to see!

"Leave them with me," he told the vampire abruptly, flattening his palm against his chest, taking a back-step towards the hole as if to guard it now. They were his again.

Mesteno observed Gideon in fleeting glimpses as he drove, sidelong flicks of preternaturally golden eyes and a moment here or there where the rearview was not used for the road as its maker had intended. Nonetheless he was as alert to the road as he was to his passenger, and they never veered in error, heading into progressively quieter streets, the buildings more affluent, the properties modern in that samey, white pickett fence style so often seen in suburbia.

"Clover? I know that name. Wasn't she the pin-up girl flogging the cologne?"

He hadn't known she was dead, but then so much escaped him with the infrequency of his visits. Really, she wasn't an important factor in this story however, and if Gideon chose not to comment, he wouldn't be troubled over it. Elias and Tim were far more relevant.

"I see why you said you were used to people wanting your blood now," he remarked wryly, "but I'll be honest with you, as annoying as the voices in your head must be with all these junkies getting high on it, I'd be more concerned about what Elias is doing with the dregs he managed to drain out of you."

He turned his head to glance across at him while he waited for the lights to change, wondered over things he gave no voice to, and let the piano concerto fill the silence, melancholy as a funeral dirge.

"Someone in this city must know where Tim is. How else would he get the stuff out to distribute it? He's still at large somewhere, or no one'd be selling. It might be a long shot, but it's worth trying with the dead guys. If it comes to nothing...well no harm done. It's not like you'll have lost anything, letting me have them."

"She was." Gideon agreed tersely. Clover had been more than a bit garish, over-the-top in flaunting herself, but she'd been a friend to him without question or complaint, which was more than he could have said about 99% of the population of Rhy'din or of the Inn's regulars in general. Mesteno didn't know that Clover was dead...and Gideon didn't know that she wasn't. He could have sworn he'd murdered her, and by all rights he ought to have done, the way he'd drained her, but the girl was made of stronger stuff, and he had been fed some terrible lies the next evening about the ultimate end of her. As for Mesteno's estimation about Elias, Gideon simply laughed quietly.

"Elias used all he took from me to turn himself from a halfbreed into a full vampire. He had to have done. Nothing less would have saved him after I got done with his useless carcass the night I got free. Anything else in the lab that belonged to me burned with that building."

There had been people inside, innocent people - Elias had stationed himself carefully under one of the city's poorest clinics, and along with all of Elias's revenants and monstrosities they had perished in the flames, the good and the bad dying in tandem like some study in macro of the end of days. All for the sake of Gideon's wrath, of his own blind vengeance. He shrugged at the suggestion Tim might still be somewhere to be found.

"I hope you're right. I can't leave this city to track him if he's gone." He offered the Sadist a thin slice of a smile, that habitual easy-going charm and wickedness sliding back into place to mask the bitter, hollow hatred and anger that burned in low constant fires deep beneath. "I'm happy to have your help. And if you find anything from them that helps you..." A lift of his hand, palm open, rose briefly before falling back upon his own knee, "Even better. I'm sorry I stole your kill."

"All of it?" he asked, eyebrows knotting above the bridge of his nose, the habitual pin-scratch frown wedged between. "As pleased as he must be to have come through it," not survived, really - he was a dead thing now, after all, "I'll bet he's kicking himself for not having a little left over. Sure he has his own now, if he wants to play around with vampire blood, but there are so many personal things you can do with such a small amount of someone else's." Perhaps Gideon ought to rethink handing over the vials!

On Dovedale, he took them smoothly to the high walled property at the end of the road and turned in through the yawning space the crumpled gates had once occupied, pulling up on the short spit of a gravel driveway that hadn't been swallowed up by the shoulder high grasses sprawling over the acre before the trees. Silver trunked, grown densely, the little cabin of a house lost in the centre of that woodland was out of sight, the dark canopy of plum coloured, waxy leaves too high for the roof to loom above it. For the few seconds before he killed the lights, there were eyes gleaming amidst the grasses, several sets with a reflective gleam not wholly dissimilar to his own, but nothing stirred and the Sadist offered no warnings. Instead he turned off the engine, the concerto cut off rudely before he reached to unfasten his seatbelt.

"You don't need to be sorry about the kill. It wouldn't have been much of a challenge and they weren't of any value to me. But if you're feeling terribly guilty, I'm sure you'll think of a way to make it up to me. Hey - you're not gonna start hurtin' all over again if I'm careful, are you?"

An abrupt change of mood and subject, from boldly deviant to match the characteristic wickedness Gideon took to so easily, to a genuine concern that things might not go to plan. It wouldn't do to have an angry fae child and a furious shadow hunting him down if things went amiss (and this was Rhy'Din, where nothing ever went smoothly.)

He'd have an angry fae child, a furious shadow, and an unpredictably dangerous cross-breed fae changeling all vying for his scrawny, scar-ridden hide should things 'go amiss'. Gideon simply shrugged though.

"You didn't hurt me before, it just felt terribly uncomfortable. I'm sure I'll be fine, either way."

He pulled open the latch of the door and slid out of the van onto his feet, keeping an eye on all the spots he'd seen those dull yellow reflections of watching eyeballs - dogs? The placed smelled of them, and he wouldn't be surprised. He offered the Sadist a fox-sly slant of a grin before slamming the door shut.

"And I'm sure I could find a way to make it up to you...but..." He lifted shoulders, shoving hands into his pockets as he rolled his head to the side noncomittally, "...if it really didn't matter to you, then I guess I wouldn't need to."

Truth be told, he'd faced worse than the three combined (survived somehow) and he had a particularly unhealthy lack of respect for his own mortality. A man could only nearly die so many times, before it became a matter of same shit, different day!

Sliding out of the driver's side, he vanished from sight to haul open the rear doors, and the dead men stirred as if they were merely groggy from slumber, climbing out single file to trail him towards the grass. There was the scent of dog upon the air, but the single growl, so low as to be almost sub-audible was from a chest of massive proportions, sounded feline, not canine. Mesteno murmured something sharp in his native tongue, an order judging by the tone, and the threat subsided. Beyond that, the predators kept themselves concealed, and the grasses never stirred to indicate any movement towards, or away from them.

"Y'know it's strange to me," he admitted, brushing through the wheat-gold sea turned silver under moonlight, "that you talk about it so easily. They had you captive, they drained you, they almost turned you revanant and they loosed you on someone you considered a friend, yet you don't cringe from the discussion the way you seemed to when we seemed to about other things when we were down in the basement with Aoife. You were so stubborn when I asked you about the man who'd lived there. F*ck, you told me more about his pet than you did him. What happened there that could be so much worse than what happened to you in Elias' lab?"

Gideon arched a dark brow at that noise emanating from the undergrowth, but nonetheless fell into the single file line that trekked through the tall grass toward the house, bringing up the rear of the line. Implicit trust or extreme hubris was anybody's guess. The sharp tell of the muscle in his cheek jumped hard at Mesteno's change in questioning, though, and he dropped his chin, watching the grass beneath his steps as he willed his answers to some modicum of civility and proper blandness.

"Its a good deal easier to talk about the people you hate than the people you used to love." He replied tersely. He managed to bite off the heated accusation that threatened to spill out after, something to the tune of Mesteno asking a great deal many questions for someone who offered so little by way of information in return. Kept that one walled behind the barrier of cold, hard ivories for the time being. Chill eyes glanced upward briefly before sliding back down.

"Let it be, will you please?" He asked quietly, tone softening its edge somewhat.

Mesteno's stride did not falter, but there was a lapse in conversation as if he was considering the request. It was also a good deal easier to be a bastard than it was to crush his curiosity, particularly when he'd a certain fondness for provoking Gideon, and the dead man probably had no idea what an effort it was for the redhead to bite his tongue. With the soft, barest suggestion of a sigh at the denial, he stretched an arm aside in an oddly elegant gesture of acquiesence. So be it.

Behind him, the deadman traipsed along through the kweneskat without a stagger or a stumble, and upon reaching the trees blockading the cabin from view, they kept to his path as if they were a train's carriages meandering along pre-set tracks. The ground was littered with heaps of charred masonry once ornate, personal affects half buried and left that way. It had the look of an overgrown warzone, and so little light filtered through the waxy foliage overhead, moss draped and dense, that without a guide it would have been easy to get lost amidst the trees. At points, Mesteno did glance back to be sure that he hadn't lost any of his entourage, for things seemed to shift and change for no rhyme or reason, and what was behind them was not what had been before. Things groaned, creaked and shifted unseen.

"What would have happened if Elias had tried to take you out of the city when he kidnapped you?" he asked, when the solid outlines of the cabin finally came into view sometime later. "I know you're not allowed to leave, this whole excile thing, but it isn't as if you'd have had any choice in that situation."

He followed close enough, close to the wandering dead and the forces that animated them as he cared to get, eventually skirting the pair of them in long strides to walk abreast the Sadist.

"I honestly don't know. The terms of my exile are that I cannot leave of my own volition. If someone carried me out, I imagine I'd just be hell bent to get back within the confines of my prison. But perhaps it would release me from my obligations instead? No one's ever broken an order like that before...then again not too many of my brethren get the amnesty of exile over death when we've been disobedient."

Far happier to theorise over this topic than the last, he rambled on easily enough.

"You're either very curious about me, or else very uncomfortable with silence." He remarked, eyeing the lean silhouette beside him. "Tell me about you, instead. I wouldn't even begin to know what to ask. What's your story?"

"Well now that's interesting. If the whole Hell bent on getting back didn't make me think you'd try'n tear out my spine through my nose I'd be tempted to try it. Wouldn't be the first time I'd kidnapped someone...perhaps the desert would be a bad place for a vampire to wind up though," he teased mildly, and where the way was too narrow for them to walk abreast, he touched the tips of his fingers to the base of Gideon's spine and ushered him through ahead. Any old excuse to touch. As for the observation about his questions, there was laughter, soft like he'd muted it because this wasn't a place to be loud.

"Now you're just being sly," he accused, though there was no heat in it, just a gentle kind of amusement which seemed ill-fitted to the keen edged smile. "That uncomfortable talking about yourself that y'try and divert the attention? What's wrong, are you afraid I'll start asking you things you can't be honest about?"

A few steps further and they were out of the trees and arriving at the steps to the porch with the dead men a few feet behind them. The smell should have been far worse than it was, more than just blood and drying flesh, but necromancy wasn't picky about what muscles it animated, and Mesteno had learnt early that it was far cleaner to make the effort to keep everything functioning, rather than relaxing and spreading filth everywhere.

"You know about me already," he reminded. "I'm a necromancer, I do bad things to people and I get drunk on my days off. Now and then I play the good guy because it amuses me to," hello, Lelah, "but I usually regret it."

"If you drug me out to the desert, I think I'd rip your spine out through your nostrils on pure principle." He replied with a growing, teasing grin spreading across his generous mouth. Touch, no matter how weak the excuse for it, was always welcome, and spread pleasant, slow curling tendrils of electricity down his spine. He huffed a snorting breath of laughter.

"I know as much about you as any stranger might after ten minutes. If I could read your skin like braille it would tell me a great deal more, I imagine." He smiled to himself, chin ducking once more in pleasure, "I'm not going to deny your imitation of a good guy isn't appealing, but I'd have to say I enjoy your true nature just as much."

Up the porch steps he went, and down the boards toward the door. He hesitated before it, hands sliding into his back pockets, brows drawing toward one another before he turned attention back upon the Sadist and their erstwhile companions.

"Should I go? Leave you to it?" Eyes flicked from the red-maned bastard and that damnably winsome, sharp edged smile of his to the pair behind him and back.

"And at your own admission, you know my 'true nature' so very well," he countered, though he'd have had to be a damn good actor to maintain that facade of being the raw-edged bastard he most often seemed.

The door was unlocked as if there was nothing precious within worth guarding, but the presence of those watchful eyes they'd come past in the grasses spoke otherwise, and those possessed of particularly sharp sight, or with a sensitivity to energy might have detected potent wards as they'd approached. Small, intricate symbols chiseled into rock or carved into wood, inked or etched or burned, no two alike. The dead men walked inside, a pair of dullards vanishing into the gloom, but Mesteno remained out on the deck with Gideon and watched them not one bit.

"Well that's up to you. I don't make a habit of letting people watch, but perhaps you'd like to talk to them. It might be that they'd say something I might not think important but which meant something to you. If you're worried you might be effected, you don't have to. It's messy..."

Unpleasant to watch. He wouldn't deny it. It was also somewhat personal, might seem inappropiately intimate, but this he didn't warn him of, half expecting him to decline anyway.

"Or if you don't want to join in, you could stay anyway." And while his words might not have been suggestive of anything more than company, the hand he reached out, index finger curling around the tie to one side of the knot to tug - come here - made up for it.

The tug was all the invitation he needed, the catalyst of a few small stones falling that started the avalanche. He closed the gap between them, arms winding under the folds of the trenchcoat the other wore to crush close, hands clenching in the fabric of his shirt before they relaxed, stretched wide, only to curl in again with the slow drag of blunt nails dulled by the fabric between them and flesh.

Teeth sought out the sharp curve of his chin, scraped lightly in a tease of a bite before his mouth moved just a bit higher, allowed for the brush of one lower lip against another. Catch, drag... before he closed the fullness of it between his lips, Sucked slow, let sharp teeth prick harmlessly. A quiet moan growled itself out low in his throat, brows furrowing further as all concentration bent itself upon the taste of the mouth caught up with his. Easier to savor the little things outside of the crush of a crowd and the pounding, disorienting music of the club that night past.

One hand slid out of the confines of the coat, rose to slide fingers up Mesteno's throat and cradle themselves to the shape of his jaw. Oh yes. He'd stay.

Yes, 'A Gideon', as if he were some creature all his own. It would have been easy to classify him as just another vampire. Just another pretty boy. One of the legions of 'out of Mesteno's league' that the lucky bastard had somehow managed to lure to bed over the years. Fortunately, he was intriguing enough to the bloody maned bastard not to kick straight out of bed, nor to be dispassionate about knowing.

"He taught you to stop pretending...and yet you still pretend in public," Mesteno remarked, the cant of his head characteristic of that curiosity of his, the tendency to be tactless which'd found him in trouble more times than he'd care to admit. "I understand why you would, but not all of your kind do. There are some high profile ones in this city that's grown on you." He almost asked whether it had been part of the orders which saw him exiled here, that he keep things hidden, but that would have counted as his third question, and he was saving that. Didn't want to waste it on something he might be able to pry out of him in discussion that lacked self-imposed rules.

"You can count on me for more of the same if you ever feel inclined," he added. "I happen to like a good brawl, and it doesn't really matter if I'm outmatched. Perhaps next time, not with the audience though?" he suggested, for there had been eyes to see them at the end, True amongst them, and it'd rattled his cage to hear the youngster boasting of his lover's win to the other patrons. "I won't give you any rules there," he added, with the kind of grin that could've cut diamond it was so damned hard, so shamelessly sharp edged. "Your turn," he added, his leg stretching out lazily under the hand roaming its taut muscled length.

Gideon nodded, one half of his mouth curling higher than the other as eyes slid from Mesteno's face to pay due diligence to the paths his fingers were idly tracing out along one long, lean leg. Fingertips smooth and cool as marble slid along the heated satin of the inner thigh, rounded over a knee and dug blunt nails in for a slow upward drag until they hit a hip, then returned to make tracery of scars.

"Yes, well...it's important. More important than some of the other vampires in this city seem to think. If they were smarter they'd hide in plain sight as well. We aren't overly a welcome lot, not once people get past the whole ridiculous romance of our mythos, come to know the killers we really are. But that's part of it isn't it? Our sheep's clothing has come to fit so well that we can and do let ourselves be known, and people barely flinch."

Back at the top of a thigh his thumb slid itself along the crease where it met with the jut of a hip, pressing against the ticklish region just hard enough.

"You are our food. You are our prey. Our cattle. We murder at will, and while some of us choose our meals with a bit of morality in mind - as much of a joke as that is - most of us will just as soon as look at any random person as they would tear them open and lick suck the blood from their marrow. We aren't leeches, but we are parasites...and every good parasite knows their best defense is camouflage. You can't rip out the worm within that you can't see."

The glacial wash of eyes returned for a moment, slid up to offer Mesteno a brief flash of a needle-sharp smile before they dipped away again, to resume fascination with the feel of warm flesh under his hand as it curled over a hip, splayed fingers wide before stroking them up along his side.

"I'm sorry for the audience. I hadn't wanted one either." Fingers inevitably found scars, every place they went, and he could have lost himself in the myriad of them, in all their littler intricacies and eccentricities. He drew a forefinger gently along the furrow of a deeper one. "What happened to you? Where did all this come from?"

That leg was long, coltish and as lacking in any extra flesh as the rest of him. Mesteno was rigorous about maintaining the kind of low body fat percentage which few people could manage, or would want, an extreme which he found easy due to maintain because his appetites did not lend themselves to consuming what other men would. In many ways, he was as much of a parasite as Gideon, though he kept that knowledge to himself for now, greedy with his secrets. Fafnir had been given none of his.

"Most predators don't f*ck what they intend to eat, nor get f*cked by 'em," he pointed out without any particular malaise for being likened to cattle. He'd heard it before, from other fanged friends, and simply appreciated the distinction they made for him. Kept him comfortably separate. "But you're right of course. Until you get so old, so changed that hiding it is impossible. Or until the madness comes. The Elders I've seen tend to be a little doo-fuckin'-lally, you know?" He whirled a finger demonstratively beside a temple. Like he needed that!

The way he let that sleek leg tip outwards seemed an absentminded gesture of welcome for a continuation of the same exploration, the tawny skin just as dark there, where the sun never reached as everywhere else. Now and then, a particular region (behind the knee, at the groove between groin and thigh) elicited a shiver he couldn't keep from showing, but his reactions were more often seen in his eyes, the fluctuations of the pupils and the gentle changes to the shape of that full mouth.

"I got tired of being kept perfect," he stated bluntly, and it seemed as if that might be the end of his answer for that question, because his lips pressed together, flat-lined introspectively. "It used to matter whether or not I was desireable, and when it stopped mattering, I wasn't careful anymore. I learned how to kill people, I stopped bowing my head to the those who expected it. You'd be lucky to find more than one scar from the same giver though. These are nine years worth of being very, very reckless. I've more metal holding me together than I care to remember, one part of me isn't even mine," briefly, his fingers ghosted a touch to a scar that stretched across his torso, just beneath the arch of the ribcage. Old enough to be pale, but neat. Surgical. Where the liver might have been.

" 'S true..." He agreed, "And while I know a few that would put a preying mantis to shame with their fuck-and-feast habits, I've always found that practice rather distasteful." Bit by bit the darkness that had consumed him with Mesteno's initial question was fading away. Amazing how well adapted a thing like repression made one seem. The next he grinned, the guard had slipped slightly, there was warmth and humor back to color it. "Well...at least the killing aspect of it."

How well he knew the distortion that age brought to his kind, how they became more terrifyingly beatuiful with the passing years while rotting away at the core, and he nodded slightly, listening intently...even if those shivers were wonderfully distracting things that sent gaze flitting toward the Sadist's face to catch the minutiae of expression that chased themselves across eyes and mouth. The explination of the scars earned a broad, lucifer's son grin of approval, and he bent, head lowering until he could catch that velvet flesh of the out-turned thigh beside him in his mouth, draw the heat of sensitive skin between lips in a light suckle, left the lush patch of skin glistening wet as he lifted his head, eyes turning up under dark lashes, locked upon the face above until his own came even with it.

"You have to know you are no less desirable for them all." He spoke low as hands splayed into the mattress that groaned softly under their weight on either side of Mesteno's hips. "Not in the least."

It was unwise of Gideon to become too comfortable. Surely he hadn't forgotten that he still owed Mesteno an answer?

Scars being what they were, satin-slick, raised lines in aged ivory or angry red, Mesteno did not think them beautiful. He did not wear them like some women wore their baubles, to draw the eye and prove his survivability. There was a limit to what was aesthetically pleasing and what simply looked train-wreck ugly, and it had been years since Mesteno has judged himself at that point. He hid them away under his clothes, did not brag or compare, and often, found the way others examined them should they be in a situation to see plain uncomfortable. The inner thigh the vampire chose to mouth at was one of the few places which hadn't been torn into by bullet, blade, tooth or claw, the nerves there all beautifully alive, the flesh supple, and he hissed between his teeth for the feel of that wet, cool suction, his toes curling as he kept from responding like the harlot he'd been once upon a time.

"No?" he asked, and it was difficult to tell whether he was dubious of the claim or amused by it. "Imagine I was someone you care a great deal for, that I were wounded and that there would be scars such as this. You wouldn't use your blood to heal my flesh if it were possible? Keep me from looking like something patched together by a really bad seamstress?" There was something like tension in his muscles at the other's rearrangement, the way the hands bracketed his hips against the mattress, but it was not displeasure at the proximity. Only care not to wind up unbalanced. "Those aren't my questions by the way - shut up, don't answer them." Pre-emptive!

Gideon chuckled low, snapped teeth at the tip of the Sadist's nose and slid back to give him space once more, filing away the reaction to that simple little suckle. A weakness to be fully exploited to maximum effect at a later date, perhaps.

"I'll give you a free one, since it is your house after all. The answer is no, only if you asked for it. Only if you wanted. Though I can't say that I wouldn't go about ensuring that whoever injured you would find themselves incapable of ever doing so again, should you have been merciful enough not to do that yourself." He'd got himself in hot water once by doing just such a 'favor' for a friend once, what he thought was a noble gesture of retaliation - and had got his nose broken as thanks. Slow learner, that vampire.

"There's nothing boring about you, nothing bland." He went on, defending his opinion, "You have stories written all over you, and they do nothing to ruin you." In time perhaps, as skin sagged and aged, it might be a different matter, but youth still had that tawny bastard in it's grip. Gideon lifted and dropped a shoulder in a shrug of dismissal, one hand reaching up to rake fingers through his own short, dark hair, leaving it ruffled in all kinds of indecent directions.

"My interpretation of what is beautiful has always been a bit twisted though, so perhaps I'm biased." A wicked slice of a smile tugged up one half of his mouth.

These teeth snaps were something he'd had before from Gideon, even as long ago as Kestrel's involvement, and with a little practice he'd learned not to flinch away from them. In more relaxed surroundings, his tongue came out to chase the teeth once they'd clicked together, but perhaps he wouldn't be quick enough. Gideon was fast, and he'd had the element of surprise.

"That's what I used to tell myself. The stories, you know? I thought if I had to wear the scars, I'd remember to be quicker the next time, I'd have learned a lesson. My oldest friend, he's a healer, and after a point, when I finally came to the conclusion that it didn't matter how fast I was here, that there was too much more physically capable than I was, he refused to fix me up all the way. He hoped if I had to hurt a while after, I'd stop getting into the kind of trouble that left me injured. That didn't work, either." Reaching across, his index finger otustretched, he touched the pad to the bridge of Gideon's nose, and reminded absently, "I think I've broken your nose twice. If you were mortal you'd have a f*ckin' beak by now." Charming as ever!

His turn to shift, pursuing the vampire's retreat by invasively leaning over into his personal space, a warm palm star-splayed, fingers fanned wide between the pectoral muscles and pushing back, to try and tumble him over again, make a half-hearted captive of him that he could loom over, a knee to either side of his thighs.

"You are beautiful. Severely f*cking f*cked up, but beautiful. And I'm going to ask you what you don't want me to ask," he warned. "I want to know about the man that lived beneath the Turkish baths."

"Beak, nothing...I'd have a pulpy mess." He replied, cheshire ivories bared in humor as he sank back obligingly under the shove, hands coming to rest light upon the thighs on either side of him. Again came that low chuckle. "And your friend the healer clearly underestimated how goddamned f*cking stubborn you are."

The sharpness of his smile softened at the compliment and chill eyes watched the wiry creature looming over him, all manner of silent secrets swimming in their arctic depths.

"Ah. Well... I've actually already told you about him. He was the one I spoke of when you asked what made me happy." A thumb slid an erratic little metronome against the flesh that lay under it. "Thalon, his name was. I still don't know what he was, though. He had blood like fire, he was damn near strong as me, perhaps stronger - I never really got the chance to test him. He was dangerous, bloody-minded, cruel and perfect. And the day after he told me he lov - " He pulled up short, drew a breath, "The day after he offered himself to me, called me lover, mate, he disappeared." Glacial blues ticked over the face above him, carefully, cautiously dispassionate. "I waited, searched, starved. And one night, when I was damned near close to revenant - I killed a friend. When I realized, I turned her, and she kept me from walking out into the sun. But after a little while she went mad, and I lost her too. I don't know why I chose that stupid bathhouse to take your brother's fae, it just seems like the place everything goes to die and be forgotten."

It was Mesteno's turn to dismiss things with shrugs, though this time because he didn't wish to let his mind linger on the healer who went unnamed. The Sadist had his own ghosts, these friends who vanished, lovers, and foolishly, he'd thought himself resigned to the frequency of such things happening.

What Gideon told him of Thalon therefore didn't come as a shock, but it didn't mean he found it any easier to speak on the subject. He sat haunches to heels, his hands resting loosely at the cool pale contours of the abdomen beneath him, his touches not designed to inflame despite the familiarity of them.

"It seems to be a pattern 'round here. You find yourself falling for someone, they vanish just when things are better than they thought you could be. I think anyone that's stuck 'round this city long term has had that happen at least once. It's inevitable. It also makes it really fucking hard to trust anyone," he muttered softly, before letting the subject go. He wasn't about to offer any sympathy, nor any leniancy over the friend he'd turned, for he didn't know enough to declare him blameness or otherwise. He wasn't a vampire. Had never experienced what it was to be revenant.

"My brother's fae lives still," he confided quietly. "She dragged me into a dreaming a couple of weeks ago and wouldn't let me out. Demanded we leave her alone." As if it were that easy.

"Amen." He muttered in agreement more resigned than bitter at this point. Agreement to it all. Dark brows arched upward at the newest revelation however, and he drew elbows under himself, if only to prop head and shoulders up slightly.

"And will we?" Almost as an afterthought he added, "And did she harm you?"

"I told her it was too late," he admitted. "But I won't hold you to such things. She's my problem." It wasn't the first time that he'd relieved Gideon of this particular responsibility, but it had been months since that fiasco, and the Sadist had reached the conclusion that involving anyone else would only worsen matters. "If she comes near the inn while I'm there, she'll be leaving me no choice. I'll do it dishonourably if I have to, put a bullet in her from a distance so that she can't sing me to sleep again. If she stays vanished and out of my head, there's no reason to go looking for her."

That ought to please his brother, anyway. He hadn't seen Salvador in almost as long, and so far as he knew, the Spaniard had no idea that he'd been involved in the attack on the girl.

Quiet in his regard of those pale eyes thereafter, he sat poised above him as if he weren't quite sure what to do with him. His intentions had been far from pure when he'd come clambering over him again, but remembering the business that'd thrown them together in the first place was sobering. "Besides. From what I've seen tonight you have enough on your plate, with fools peddling your blood. She hasn't been able to get to you, since you swallowed mine, I take it."

"More than enough, but there's always room for a little more." Gideon had no qualms about what constituted honourable or dishonourable murder. Death was death, no matter how it found its victims. He shook his head and eased back onto the mattress.

"No...I don't dream, not really. I've had a nightmare or two, in that half second between the nothing and being awake, but that's all the longer that lasts, half a second. I think I saw her once, almost a year ago, in one...but I'm sure I was wrong. Nothing's happened since that night."

He reached up, let the flat of his palm and splay of fingers slide up over stomach and chest to wrap round Mesteno's throat, just enough of a grip to demand that the Sadist oblige its pull downward. Mood changed indeed, but he'd be damned if he'd let it slip away without one last taste of that full mouth. His chin tilted up, tongue touched at the little nick of flesh missing from the bow of his upper lip, traced the place both lips touched before pulling back.

"This night won't last forever." He mumbled, nipped at the fullness of lower lip, caught and drug it between his own only to release it slowly. "Either the work will wait, or this will."

Gideon managed to return home in time to miss the searing sunrise, safe behind the steel that kept the massive flat dark as midnight, in time enough to collapse upon the bed, still clothed, before greedy Morpheus' hands snatched him down into the black unconscious. Probably for the best that he hadn't stayed, taken one of the slabs as a bed, for he was well and truly dead during those daylight hours, nothing at all left to distinguish him from the other corpses Mesteno had laying about, save that he did not rot. Also better for the state of Mesteno's morgue, after all Gideon had been through at Elias' hands. Waking in a strange place that resembled a laboratory might have been enough to set off a blind, panicked rage that would have seen the place destroyed or worse, burnt to the ground.

Gideon was good as his word, though, returning the next evening to rap knuckles against the glass of the french doors, and one would have thought he might have dressed a good deal more casually this time around, unwilling to sacrifice any more buttons to the Sadist should it come to it, but they'd be wrong. Dark, faded jeans and a crisp oxford black as squid ink, the sheen of a silk vest over it, equally dark but shot through with black on black pin striping, the tie tucked into it a grey so pale it pretended white all clothed that pale frame of his. Sleeves rolled to just below the elbows the only sign he took any notice whatsoever of the oppressive, humid heat of the summer evening. He shifted weight foot to foot, listening to the decking creak softly under him, and rapped upon the glass again. It felt...odd. Like a reverse walk of shame, returning the next night - but they had work to do, he reminded himself. It didn't have to be about wanting to see the viciously beautiful bastard again. It wasn't about that. Really.

Mesteno People said they'd come, but Mesteno never really expected them to. That didn't mean he hadn't hoped that Gideon would of course, but it saw no change in the state of the property, nor in the man himself.

He'd been down in the morgue, the thick, steel door at the top of the downward flight left ajar so that he'd be able to hear should company arrived. Surprising that he could hear at all, with the drone of the fume hood in operation, filtering away the downright evil stink coming from the cadaver waiting patiently for his attention. It was cold down there, had to be, and summers heat couldn't touch him. He'd retreated under the weight of a sweater so large that the stretched out neck was having a hard job of staying put on both shoulders at once, a wifebeater beneath it in faded, navy blue and jeans once black now charcoal. For practicality's sake, he'd bound his hair back into a rudimentary looking braid, the fiery red of it a cobra's hood about shark cheekbones and the attractively angular lines of his arrogant jaw.

Unsure if what he'd heard was just a figment of his imagination, or actually a Gideon come calling, he waited until the second rap of knuckles before climbing the steep, stone steps on bare feet, prowling out of the gloom filled kitchen (eyes visible first, all prdatory gleam) to pad silently towards the door where the vampire stood waiting so politely.

"Gideon," he began once the door'd opened, and he'd backed up a step to make it plain he was invited in, "you didn't have--," a pause, a quick, there and gone smile, "No, of course you don't have any scruffy clothes to throw on. You're Gideon."

What began as a smile of greeting quickly carved itself into a harder, sharper, more lopsided grin, wry amusement for the observation.

"I own ...scruffy...things." He protested. Hell, the entirety of True's wardrobe looked like clothing dug out of a pile of worn scraps or else items that had been used to the point of transparent, threadbare fragility. He could have easily stolen from the boy that night. "You didn't say I'd need to."

No matter, he lifted and dropped a shoulder in a shrug, stepping in where the Sadist fell back to allow entrance. He paused however, just inside the door, the grin struck clean from his face as he sniffed once. Twice. Expression undergoing an astounding transformation as he struggled not to look, well, disgusted.

"Gods...what is that smell?" He lent toward the other and sniffed again, only to pull back sharply.

Alas, poor vampires and their oversensitive sense of smell. Mesteno hadn't yet gone carving into any bodies, wasn't saturated with the stench of it, and the worst of the fumes were sucked away down there, but if he could smell them that badly, already...

"Anyone'd think you've never smelled corpse rot before," he remarked, looking thoroughly amused. A squeamish vampire? Truly? "Suck it up, rich boy. It'll be far worse down there, and it's your mess. It's about time you got acquainted with what happens to your leftovers. Or don't you have the stomach for it?"

Quite possibly not, and Mesteno could have been truly cruel and roped him with an arm, got the scent all over him, but he left the choice with him, turning away to head back towards the kitchen where the doorway to the false-fridge was left open, the harsh, ersatz solarity from the flurescent lighting downstairs making the steep, downward flight less of a peril. Should Gideon follow as he had the choice to, he might find the morgue surprisingly large. Certainly, it spanned a larger area than the little cabin above it, and unlike the barren, un-cared for quality of the rooms Mesteno supposedly dwelt in, this little hell-hole was immaculately clean. One wall was row upon row of lockers for body storage, a low hum emanating from the refridgeration. The floor sloped, was equipped with drainage gulleys which ran to either side of the steel operating table bolted to the centre of the space, everywhere white tiled and sterile. Stainless steel cabinets, glass-windowed, work units and sink were all immaculately kept, but a glimpse at the instruments inside proved they contained as much in the way of torture equipment as medical.

Further along one wall, another steel door, this one with a porthole style window and a control panel beside it hinted as to how well prepared he was - an incinerator on site - and lost in the shadowy, unlit far end of the warehouse like space, were the gloomy forms of ancient, inquisition style equipment. Antiques which were as practical as they were pleasant.

One of Gideon's victims was stretched out in all his glory on the table, face a blackened ruin, body subtly swollen with trapped gases.

Gideon's mouth peeled into a show of gleaming ivories, as much smile as it was a feral baring of teeth, broad as it was wicked.

"I'm not in the habit of playing with my leftovers. Do you like rolling about in dumpsters after a meal?" Never mind that the sadist didn't eat - these were things Gideon had yet to learn. He followed though, trailing the Sadist at his heels in spite of the churning reek of death and decay that clung to him. He undressed as we went, though, tugging loose tie, unbuttoning waistcoat and then shirt, pulling it all off to leave behind a black undershirt. He left the pile of fine cloth on the stairs, out of the sterile, if stench ridden, morgue. Pale eyes ticked across the expanse, and at the bottom of the steps he left off following the other to pace a slow half-circle in silent observation. The cabin had become so much more of a metaphor for its owner in that instant. Isolated, spartan to the point of near neglect above, with so much more going on beneath the surface in cold, harsh-scrubbed rooms kept secret and locked behind thick doors. Gideon wandered over toward the table, dark head canting slightly as he looked the victim of last night's murderous rampage over dispassionately. Death, be not proud.

"What now?"

Such a clever creature Gideon was to realise such things. Few people had been down here, or even knew of its existence. His brother, a lover here or there, a Lion who'd wandered down the steps uninvited, Riley, back when she'd been the Minister of Justice (and oh how she'd cried, wanted to leave) and none came back into the frigid cold willingly. Mesteno did not expect Gideon to, either, though at least he wouldn't make him stay, the way he had with O'Rourke (now Lo.)

"I usually f*ck my leftovers, Gideon. I thought you'd have realised that by now," he countered, with the kind of smile that was just as suggestive as the words had been. Much like the vampire did, he fed at the throat, or he fed off the soul's energy, very much a leech.

As for his other question, the answer to that became quickly apparent when he tugged his sweater off overhead, tossing it aside onto the steel work top and approached the table where their subject lay. There were no arcane symbols, there were no candles lit (how lacking in romance!) and no books splayed open - blood on skin parchment. There was blood though. Did the vampire recognise the vial Mesteno took out of the pocket of his jeans? The very same one he'd asked to keep, after it'd been retrieved from the men they were about to raise. He set it on the dead man's belly, then reached into his other pocket (oversized jeans had roomy ones, perhaps it wasn't just a fashion choice after all!) and pulled out four, carapace like pieces of metal. Curled, hinged, they looked like pieces of a gauntlet, designed to bend with the fingers, but the ends were clawed, razor sharp.

"I'm going to wake up your friend here," he told Gideon as he fitted them over the fingers of his right hand. "And then we have a nice, civilised little talk. Ask him whatever you'd like."

"Oh. Well in that case I'm so glad you were able to get two courses out of me." Deadpanned enough to sound a bit harsh, eyes were far too busy, lost in examining the minute detail of the ruined face upon the slab in morbid curiosity to glance up and offer any softening of that statement. They did stray eventually, when Mesteno drew out the vial and the odd little metallic tools. He took a bit of a step back, nodded once and ran a thumb over his lower lip, watchful, wary. It wasn't wholly distrust, just a desire not to repeat the sensation of getting too close to the current that the Sadist wielded that he'd experienced last night.

"Why is it when you say 'civilised' I automatically begin to wonder how many showers its going to take to get all the bits out of my hair?"

Flexing his fingers, testing out the hinges as he slipped the armour rings into place, he couldn't help pausing, scrutinising Gideon for that deadpanned tone. He wouldn't have thought he'd take offense, wasn't sure that he had, and it wasn't in his nature to soothe. Instead he complimented shamelessly, without any intention of trying to butter him up. Facts were easy.

"I've rarely been so satisfied. It's a pity you aren't open for business more often." Charming.

Blood, being the currency via which most dark magics worked was rarely as potent as what was in the vial resting on the dead man's belly. This job, with the dead being so new didn't require anything nearly so powerful, and yet the alternative was to open his own veins (or Gideon's) or find something, or someone else to sacrifice in their place. At a push, he could play with souls using his own energy, but it was taxing, left him voracious and ill afterwards - why bother? Lithe and quick, he vaulted up onto the table with the dead man, a knee planted to either side of his thighs without a care for how inappropriate it must have looked, and thumbed the stopper from the neck of the vial.

"It depends on how much he has to tell us. For your sake, I'll keep it quick 'n clean, hmm? I'm not being paid for this by someone that wants them to hurt for a long time." A pause, and a dispassionate glance down at the ruined face, hands busily spilling the blood out and over his own fingers, the dark stuff clinging, slick and heavy scented.

"And here I thought the subject of just how open for business I seem to be was one that earned me a black mark in your books."

He wasn't bitter, nor offended, just seeking out soft spots to drive needles into, back to poking that bear for amusment. It never disappointed. Leave it to Mesteno, though, of all people, to surprise him. He'd opened his mouth with another smart-assed retort only to find his jaw hanging open as the Sadist vaulted onto the table and straddled the corpse. He forced his mouth shut again, managed to wipe the stupid off his face, and edged a bit nearer as Mesteno poured the vial of his blood out. He could have offered fresher stuff - it cost him next to nothing - but he didn't protest. Better it be put to use here than get back into the hands of another junkie who would add their inane inner monologue to the cacophony of a chorus already ringing madly in his head.

"Do whatever you need to...I just want to know where they got their fix from, who's selling, and if they know where to find the source."

It was probably better that Gideon didn't go offering to shed anything fresh. Not if he didn't intend to distract the necromancer from his work. What he had was sufficient, more than, and he was tempted to steal a taste as he settled, sat stoop-backed with the spinal rings starkly outlined through the back of his wifebeater. He studied the dead man, but he listened, certainly, and there was a wolfish smile for Gideon's poking.

"Maybe you should be more selective with your clientele," he suggested, with just a faint hoarseness lingering as a result of the previous days exertions.

Enough play. The blood tingled across his skin, and much in the same way that he'd unstoppered the vial, he let that dark energy he contained so effectively come spilling out. There was nothing for Gideon to worry about however, for he controlled it this time, exerted its influence in a specific direction, and that was straight down into the corpse he sat astride, right down through the tips of the armour rings which he plunged into the softness just beneath the arch of the ribcage. Nothing happened, at least not immediately. The air became so cold that it was uncomfortable to inhale, breath steaming air (at least from one of them) and for those sensitive, a terrible, negative energy. An inward pull like a black hole swallowing everything up. It seethed under his skin like black flame, his skin paling where his wrist emerged from the body cavity, and for a moment all the sharply raised blood vessels in his arm began to darken as if polluted.

Mesteno wore the look of a man transfixed, his concentration absolute, and when the flesh of his arm began to look worryingly unhealthy, it all changed. The metal inlaid beneath the skin of his arms played conduit for all the foulness instead, took on a faint incandescence as he reached in deeper, the noises sickening. He looked to be searching for something, feeling his way around up into the chest. Whatever it was, he found it after a moment or two, made a soft sound like a man making a discovery, a sigh.

Then the corpse screamed. It heaved under him, a great rush of clotted, dead blood exploding up out of its mouth as it cleared its trachea of the mess that'd sat in there since its death. An eye flicked open, rolled wildly, and then the scream again, thin and strident.

Gideon at least offered up a sickle curve of a half smile at that comment. No real need to inform the Sadist he'd been the only other one to share a bed or blood with the vampire in the past four months outside of the permanent fae fixture at the Lanesborough. After Kestrel, after Elias, he simply didn't have the urge to slide back into his old habits; wallowing at the inn and waiting for the next pretty thing to come along and drown his sorrows for an evening. Some wounds ran far too deep for that kind of superficial soothing, and more often than not it left him angrier, more pained than before.

He watched silently as Mesteno went about his work, breath held more out of anticipation and reverent silence than due to any of the foul oders permeating the tiled room. He couldn't help it, how he edged forward inch by inch, even the chill of the air and the obvious crackle of energy not enough to keep his distance. Eyes flicked from the work of that arm sunk deep into the carcass up toward the expression of complete concentration and back again. He was practically hovering over the elbow of Mesteno's arm before the dead man screamed. He jolted, jerked back. Not clear across the room, mind you, but back a good half a foot. A hand rose, pressed the back of itself against his nose, dark brows drawing hard together as he watched the wretch vomit the coagulated rot upwards, his muttered curses unintelligible behind the back of his hand.

From the onset it became apparent that this wasn't a case of simple animation. The body twisting and thrashing beneath the Sadist was occupied. Souls cut free, abruptly recaged by flesh gone bad always panicked, were always so horrified to be back in their old shell, and who could blame them? Mesteno made sure they felt every little change that'd come over their corpse, every little agony it would have been to live with such injury. A sightless eye saw again, nerves inoperative made to feel again, muscles spasming as if parasites rippled beneath the skin. Maggots perhaps (though thankfully, the corpses had been retrieved before any flies laid their tiny eggs.)

It took time for the corpse to stop screaming, for the airway to clear itself of filth, but when the eye fastened on Gideon, recognised him, it started to scream all over again. No one wanted to see their own killer again!

"That's enough," Mesteno interrupted, contentedly playing puppet master, stealing the sound from its throat with his golden eyes contentedly hooded. "Now listen carefully. I know you can hear me perfectly well. I'll let you go back as soon as you tell us what we need to know. This gentleman here with the...delicate sensibilities," Mesteno was grinning horribly over that hand to mouth stance his audience had taken! "is going to ask you some questions."

Pale eyes flicked from the screeching monster upon the table to the Sadist and back again. He pulled the hand from his nose and glared hard enough to burn holes through the side of Mesteno's brilliantly red head as he sidled closer again, braced a hand against the table and leaned over slightly - as much as he cared to - jesus the smell.

"Where did you get the blood you were selling? Who is your supplier?" He snapped.

If one could poke the bear, it was only fair that the game could be played both ways! The Sadist grinned, shark-savage at the vampire, had the strangest impulse to hook his shoulders with his free arm and draw him in close, introduce him to all the little details that would probably nauseate him even more than the stink. He refrained though. Looked pleased enough with the fact that he'd come to stand beside the table.

As it happened, the dead weren't always completely cooperative to begin with, particularly not if they were being tortured and questioned by the same people involved in their deaths. So much for being at peace, after all! It didn't come as a surprise to Mesteno when the dead creature beneath him replied with a gargled "F*ck you!"

"I don't think he likes you, Gideon," Mesteno crooned, the devil, but he wasn't about to leave him unassisted. He twisted his hand inside the corpse's chest. Had hold of something which tore and squelched audibly, which flicked a spray of cold, jellied vitae and putrefied flesh up, out - Gideon might want to move out of the way. Pain, under Mesteno's fair hands, was transferred from flesh to soul, magnfied several times over in the process, and the dead man howled again, the kind of shriek a man gives when he has no control over his responses. He stopped long enough to ask speak. "Try again. This time tell us something useful."

Sometimes he was very grateful indeed for the preternatural reflexes he possessed. This was certainly one of them, as he jerked out of the way of whatever the f*ck that vitriolic poison was that came slinging upward with the digging of Mesteno's hands in the innards of the fetid corpse. Gideon's face as he avoided being hit by the putrescence was priceless. So was the snarl on his lips as he lent back down again.

"WHERE did you get the blood?! Speak or gods help me I'll have him shove his arm high enough up you to grab a hold of your tongue and tear it out from the inside so you can f*cking taste that rot inside you before it comes out through your ribcage."

If he had any qualms whatsoever with the torture taking place on the slab before him, it certainly didn't show. The dead had no sympathy for the dead, and when the Sadist was done with him, the man would go back to a better rest than Gideon could ever know. It might have been a bit of a stretch to say that envy and bitterness made him cruel, but it wasn't too far from the mark, not with the incessant noise inside his head from dusk till dawn, killing concentration and ruining sanity slowly.

Perfect the room was not. At least not now, with the gore painting the tile and the table, the drip-splatter trail which marked the path Mesteno had taken in carrying the corpse to the incinerator a glaring eyesore in a world of otherwise pedantic sterility. And Mesteno, he didn't look like he fitted there, could have used a good scrub and polish himself, before he even dared set foot within the room. Leaving the claw-tipped armour rings by the sink for a meticulous scrubbing later, he watched as the water rinsed away the old blood in clots and clouds down the drain, then began to scrub his hands and forearms, right up to the elbows, practiced as a surgeon prepping for a stint in theatre.

"Well let's just say I won't complain if they're gone. Maybe Francesco will find some more exciting work to assign me, with Gambino's foot-soldiers out of the way. It never really feels fair when I have to put down the nobodies." Glancing up from his soapy limbs to where Gideon was sat on the frigid stone step, he was quiet a moment as he considered the indecisive sounding compliment. Wasn't really even sure if it was a compliment, or just a statement, but it earned him a smile anyway. The crooked sort, sharp despite a certain degree of uncertainty in its forming.

"Wasn't exactly a chore you know," he responded, having rinsed off the surgical scrub to dry off his skin, indelicate, brusque. "And if you come across anyone likely t'have a little more knowledge about whose wheelin' and dealin' your blood, don't be afraid to bring them here."

Normally, he'd charge for work like that. It wasn't a well known fact that he was capable of wrangling truths out of corpses, so those that were privy to the knowledge didn't get the service cheaply. Gideon he appeared to be willing to do it as a favour for.

"You shouldn't chew your lip like that," he told him as he tossed the crumpled towel into the clinical waste bin. "Makes you look..." What? "Very young."

Dark brows arched and he released the lip he hadn't even realized he'd been gnawing on. Thoughtless habit. Mouth shaped itself to a mirthless little smile.

"I am very young." Tone teasing. Both in the frozen eternity of his physical state and in terms of his...well, let's call it species. "And I appreciate the offer, but I have my own ways of wheedling out secrets. I was just more concerned with killing that pair than I was about getting information out of them. I knew they were users, I just had no idea they were dealers as well. But if I accidentally kill anyone else who might be more valuable alive and talking, I'll be sure to take you up on your help."

He had a quiet laugh over Mesteno's complaint about foot soldiers, sharp shards of pale eyes narrowing in michevious amusement. "Unfair, hmn? I'm sure the nobodies feel the same when they realize its you they're up against." He nearly began sinking teeth into that lower lip again and stopped himself self-consciously. "Why do you work for these families? Mob business? Organized crime? It just seems..." he shrugged slightly, "Beneath you. Small time."

Leaving the floor and the filth for later, he padded back towards the steps where Gideon had settled, and crouched low to occupy another, one or two places further down the flight where he wouldn't cramp his space. Head tipped against the smoothed stone wall, he watched the vampire, watched his mouth like he intended to catch him out in doing it again.

"When I was young," a pause, for he couldn't be considered past it, not yet, "younger, my employment wasn't particularly respectable. By the time I got out of that, I'd met a Syndicate, The Syndicate. In fact I married one of their Agents, and they put me to work in interrogation after hearing about a grisly little mess I'd got involved in. Anyway, as happens when you're eighteen and an idiot, the marriage didn't work out and being employed by the same people was really inconvenient." Awkward, would've been a more appropriate word. "But they'd trained me up by then, field missions, a little tactical espionage and I was good with a sniper rifle, so my friend Raoul," a name which should've been familiar! "got me in contact with Francesco's people, and it was safer to work for the families than doing everything solo. Give it enough time and you can get fond of a decent boss, and I did with the Don, so here I am."

"If you think that's beneath me, Gideon, you should probably know I shovel horse shit every morning and that I volunteer at an animal shelter." His grin flashed particularly broad, like he took some pleasure in being a potential disappointment!

Gideon listened attentively, expression lost in an unreadable neutral. He'd abandoned chewing his lower lip in favor of biting at the short, perfect crescent of a thumbnail. Yeah, no fixation here.

"Fair enough." He replied evenly, "I mean I understand it, how you came to it. Seems like a natural progression."

Natural but still... Those talents, that power seemed wasted at the beck and call of organized crime, what with the deeper currents that ran through the city underground, the more powerful, more dangerous factions that really ran this city, this macrocosm. Sometimes it paid to keep one's observations to oneself though, especially when the holder of said observations and opinions was a vampire who lived in his own fragile glass house. He canted his head slightly, giving the Sadist a narrow slice of a smile, eyes slanting.

"Married." Not a question, not really. More a single word statement, and more than a little mocking. No need to pour salt in that wound, he left it alone, content to just set his finger on the sting of it. He held hands up, palms open at the last admissions.

"Easy now, I said organized crime was beneath you, not mucking stalls or saving kittens. Clearly those are jobs you're cut out for."

"Married," he cofirmed, but he didn't seem prickled by the mockery. In fact his smile was suggestive of sheepishness. He never claimed he was smart! "You live and learn, right? That was almost a decade back though, and as you can see," he lifted a bare hand, gave it a demonstative shake, "I managed t'keep my fingers free of rings after that, with some effort."

As for the other jobs... "It's work. I don't advertise the necromancy. Usually brings trouble t'my door, so I only usually use it when it's personal, or something preternatural." Like you, his tone seemed to imply, for he hadn't spared Gideon the touch of it, attempts to control, to smother him in shadow or mar that beautiful face of his, alabaster work of fucking art that it was.

"You though...what do you do, Gideon? Who pays your bills? Did you ever have to work for anything, or d'you still have that silver spoon to chew on..." Instead of his nails. Mesteno reached up, fingers curling around the vampire's palm to bully him into leaving his nails alone.

"Bossy..." He grumbled as his hand was pulled away from his mouth, but he turned it to catch the Sadist's wrist, fingers wrapping lightly round the corded, narrow girth of it in a casual bracelet of a grasp, his own arm back to dangling over the angle of his knee. His thumb rubbed over the soft skin of his inner wrist, settled at the divot near the base of Mesteno's thumb, right where the slow percussion of his pulse thrummed under the skin. His thumb pushed against it unconsciously, and there was an odd little loosening of the lines of him, some well-hidden, previously unnoticed tension draining away.

"What do I do? You mean besides get into trouble? Because I'm thinking of turning that into a full time profession. I might order business cards. Perhaps teach a class or two at the university. Night classes." Pale eyes narrowed in wickedness, crinkling at their outer edges, watching the Sadist from their corners before sliding away.

"I pay my bills. And no I don't have to work. I've done a bit of business, did a great deal of it actually when I first arrived here, actually had some dealings with DeMuer for a few years, handling some things for him. I got bored of it though, all of it. Its always the same old, same old. I've tried my had at venture capitalism, if you want to call it that - setting up friends here and there with businesses, providing financial backing, I set up a trust for a writer I knew once, so maybe you could call me a patron of the arts." He rolled eyes and shook his head. "To answer you more succinctly? No. I don't have to work for anything. I never have. Aren't. I. Lucky."

The cold shards of eyes strayed back toward Mesteno's face at that last, piercing.

He didn't argue the first, though where a piece of street filth'd ever come by the notion that he had a right to order anyone around was a mystery. Particularly upper crust types like Gideon, who succeeded in fulfilling all his expectations on the working life front. Indeed, he had none.

He didn't pull his wrist loose from the cold coil of pale fingers, seemed to think himself under no threat despite the deliacy of the region, but his eyes settled there, fixed on the back and forth of the thumb, the way it teased the nerves in his skin to life with the barest tickle. To him it appeared Gideon liked to touch as much as he liked being touched. Slow, the pulse, not in the least hastened from his efforts with the corpse, but it was there, and he knew the vampire was feeling it out.

"Y'go out and get into trouble 'cause you're bored, y'told me that before, so I don't think I'd call it lucky. It's a good job you have a nemesis or two, people to hunt down or you'd wither away from the boredom. Then again, you probably lose y'savour for that after a while, too. It doesn't sound like you have much fun, Gideon."

Not unless he was getting dragged out into the city for impromptu club excursions, anyway.

"Tell me something you'd like to do. We'll go do it."

Dark brows lifted slightly and he was mid-nod in agreement with Mesteno's summation of his shortcomings when he perked at the suggestion. A slow smile spilled across his broad mouth, the arc or it dangerously feral and beautifully refined all at once.

"I want to hunt. Come help me find a few more of these addicts. I promise it will be more fun then the last time." That boring little woman who'd come wandering out of her home in a hypnotic haze when he'd called. No, this was not merciful death, this was Gideon provoked. Out for blood and murder. He drew Mesteno's wrist up, turned it over to reveal the soft, sensitive inner skin and pressed his mouth to it, lips cool, the flat of teeth smooth and hard as steel. "Come hunt... and if we get bored of that we can certainly pay your interesting little club a visit again."

The blue of eyes hid themselves behind lids and dark lashes as he ran the tip of his tongue light across the warmth of the wrist he held, chased it with another push of a kiss, and then rose, tugging at that tether to urge the Sadist up with him.

There was an answering smile from a mouth more prone to sullen scowls and downturned corners, and it seemed distinctly pleased at the dead man's apparent keenness for this pursuit. Good. After all, it wouldn't do to have him head out on his own bored and get into more trouble than he could handle. It never seemed to occur to Mesteno that there was potential to wind up with an unnecessary reputation for helping him that Gideon's enemies might take offense too. Or perhaps it did, and he just didn't care!

"That's the spirit," he approved, like at any moment he might reach across and ruffle his hair in that irritatingly patronising way that friends indulged in for the sake of playful antagonism. He didn't though, because Gideon had hold of one wrist, and he was using the other to leer hiself up off the stone step before he could be dragged up the steep flight bodily by an over-enthusiastic vampire.

"Slow down, cowboy. I need to change and grab a couple'a things before we go. I go out like this and we're gettin' in nowhere." The shabby wifebeater and rot-stained jeans were going to get him kicked out of even the shadiest places and he wasn't sure where these addicts Gideon intended to hunt down might be found. Street corners, bars, brothels...those he was comfortable in, but if they were headed anywhere more upmarket, it'd be nice to know! For now, he took the steps in twos, accustomed enough to the sharp incline not to struggle, and no sooner were they at the top than he was twisting to shove the facade of a fridge door shut....all eight inches of steel clanging closed resoundingly, heavy duty locks sliding into place to keep the morgue off limits.

Gideon gave him a once over as he rose and somehow managed to refrain from making a lewd comment to the tune of him just stripping off the muck-ruined clothing and going as is. Barely. The grin he hid as he ducked his head and let Mesteno pass him on the stairs before following him up spoke it for him, though.

Back up in the sparse living quarters he re-dressed himself, pulling the dark shirt and vest back on, doing up buttons in no particular rush and tucking tails in before drawing out his tie and fussing with the knot. While he dressed and waited he wandered out toward the room adjacent to the french doors he'd entered through, the one with the long wall of windows looking out onto the night, contented himself with exploring the space, barren though it might be, searching out those little signs of life like Mestneo had done in his own bedroom, trinkets of sentiment or memory if they existed. He finished the noose of the pale, perfect tie and smoothed the length of it under the close-fitting waistcoat, sliding hands into the pockets of jeans before taking up a lean against one of the windows, waiting patiently, eyes drifting closed as attention turned inward, seeking, sifting through the discordant chorus of voices within to find those nearest, loudest, get a bead on them and their location. It was no easy thing with so many vying for attention in the confines of his mind.

Given Mesteno's fondness for clothing, he'd probably have laughed in Gideon's face for even suggesting it, so it was better that he remained oblivious, only puzzled and good humoured for the cause of the grin he caught sight of as he climbed the stairs.

Leaving Gideon to tidy himself up in the living room (although the only thing which identified it as such was the sagging, black leather couch) he vanished off to the bedroom to salvage something passably neat from his closet. The vampire could nose about to his heart's desire. Most everything was packed away in boxes piled high against the walls, stacks which looked precarious, as if they'd as much delicacy to their balance as a house of cards. There was a tarnished music stand in one corner though, a few creased pieces of hand inked sheet music sat untidily upon it, and stood against the wall in the shadows, a violin case, dusty and showing recent evidence of use in the fingerprints stamped into the fine coating. There was a sorry looking sheepskin rug on the floor in front of a never-used hearth, ancient looking, leatherbound tomes in the Latin tongue piled or splayed open around it, and a black, swan's feather quill (which looked suspiciously as if its end might have been chewed upon) sat playing bookmark in one volume. Someone was studious. And potentially a drunkard, considering the empty bottles lined up next to the hearth.

There were no pictures or paintings upon the walls though, no suggestion of a liking for domesticity, not that it should come as a surprise!

Mesteno returned minutes later, clad in the kind of sinfully sleek, black leathers so butter-soft and long worn in that they whispered rather than creaked, biker stitching at the knees and a belt slung around the snug fit of the hips that served to hold double gun holsters, sheathed blades and God only knew what else. A shirt in gunmetal grey, tidy but with the potential to be as casual as it was smart, and a strip of leather to bind back his hair, and the result was something half-way handsome. Not up to Gideon's standards by any means, but good enough. "Where are we headed?" he asked, padding toward the window-leaning vampire with the barest of smiles threatening.

Eyes slanted open at the quiet susurrus of leather, then popped open wide upon a second take. Gideon sucked a breath between his teeth.

"Jesus." Murmured appreciatively. Very appreciatively. Never mind the stare, please, nor the unguarded admiration. This was unfair, almost better than when he'd showed up in that suit at his bedroom door. Gideon managed to wrangle his jaw up off the floor, managed to blink.

"Ahdthoudperhah..." Yes, lovely. Well done. He cleared his throat and tried again, looking deeply annoyed with himself. "I thought perhaps we'd get back to town,into the West End. They are thickest there and we can just start with whoever is closest and cut a path through the city as we like. And here."

He dug in one pocket, and a second later tossed the silver jangle of keys in a neat arc toward the Sadist. Gleaming chrome things upon a keyfob made of smoothly polished alabaster, a small square of pale stone with an intricately carved caduceus upon one side and a death's head upon the other, the skull etched with twisting shapes and patterns.

Not what he'd expected, for Gideon'd seemed so fond of the suit that the necromancer had suspected he'd disapprove of anything that didn't scream of expense, or come finished with a tie! But he was pleased anyway, and that garbled first attempt at speaking around a shock-made-clumsy tongue saw him grin, a slim, white crescent. "Leather huh? I'll have to remember that," he remarked absently, nodding his assent for the plan. This time, he was along for the ride, not guiding it, so he'd follow the pied piper wherever he led.

"What's this?" he asked, a tawny, slim fingered hand suddenly there, and the keys swallowed up in their curling lengths. They fanned wide again after a moment, so that he could inspect the set, the polished alabaster of the fob they were connected to, stylishly gothic. A tricky little twist of his wrist and he was dangling them, clink clink, by the pale stone between forefinger and thumb. "A souvenir? You changed your locks at last!" Hadn't he after all, been encouraging him to do just that since the first time he'd snuck in? "What is it now, keycodes and wards? I can always get in through a window somewhere you know..." Teasing. That building was tall, and he didn't relish the idea of scaling it, spider style just for the challenge of a little breaking and entering.

Gideon looked sufficiently indignant at the remark, one brow arching upward as he returned hands to the folds of their pockets. All the better to keep grabby impulses under control, because god damn they were itching to do a bit of damage to the perfectly clad bastard before him.

"No, I have not. And I wouldn't know the first thing about wards and whatnot. One of them is a key to the flat - only so you'll stop breaking the f*cking lock. I've been informed the building manager is fed up to his eyeballs with the demands for repairs the penthouse has incurred, and I can only throw money at them for so long before they start asking questions. The other key goes to what's outside."

He grinned broadly, pushing himself off the window and ambling past Mesteno, close enough to knock shoulders lightly, teeth snapping a hair's breadth away from the curve of an ear. Across the room and out he went at that lazy pace, through the french doors, down the decking and out into the tall grasses toward the thick copse of trees that lead out toward the road and the dead end where Mesteno had parked the van from the night before. The object in question belonging to those keys was parked beside the well-used van, its matte black paint sucking in the light of the thin sliver of a moon that labored under cover of passing clouds to shed any illumination on the dark world below. Gleaming chrome, however made up for the sucking void of flat paint, shining like mirrors at wheels, bumpers, running all along the chassis and lines of the roof. 69' Chevelle SS. Old, beautiful, fast, and so f*cking loud.

"Well I'd hate to inconvenience you with fussy managers. F*ck, that'd be even more trouble than the blood addicts. Good thinking," he declared, though the deviant gleam in his eyes suggested it might just be the worst idea ever, Give a thief a key and he'd rob you blind. Oh, but Gideon might have forgotten Mesteno's light-fingered tendencies! He'd only ever pilfered directly from his pockets after all. "Outside? What's outside?"

But to find that out he'd have to follow, wouldn't he? Shoulder jostled, he turned just in time to aim a flat-palmed smack at Gideon's ass in crude retaliation for the snap of teeth, the kind that sounded just as bad as the sting of it must've felt. There his harassment ended though, and the spartan little cabin was abandoned for the jungle-thick woodland which surrounded it. Tossing the keys idly, never once resulting in a drop, he made sure the local wildlife (cats, dogs displacer beasts should one happen along...) kept their distance. What he found parked out front looked like it should've been kept behind glass, on a pedestal, being polished by pristine people in sparkling white uniforms, not pulled up beside the serial killer (or pedo according to some people) van.

"Gideon, Gideon," he sing-songed, stood with a hand on one hip and his eyes licking over the car with undisguised pleasure. "You do realise one of my dogs has been up here to Christen the wheels, right?"

To Gideon's credit he didn't even flinch when that hand found its mark. He might have grinned like the devil himself though, but the fact he had his back to the Sadist hid that well enough. Once out of the thick woods he rounded the car, toward the passenger side, and lent crossed arms over the roof of it, watching Mesteno's reaction with relish. Shoulders lifted in a neglectful shrug.

"I 'd suggest then you train them not to go pissing on your car if you don't want to drive about in something reeking of dog urine." He lent back, let a hand trail appreciatively down over the slope where door met windshield. The interior was leather stained a dark, rich shade of blood red so deep it took on burgundy-black tones, the dashboard and upholstery as beautifully detailed and lovingly refurbished as the exterior.

"Do you like it?" He cocked a curious glance over the car toward Mesteno. "No offense meant to your ah..." Eyes strayed toward the serial killer vehicle beside him, "Your um...work vehicle...I just thought you might like something a bit faster for everyday."

As for the chance that Mesteno might make off with objects from the Lanesborough... if he did, he'd be the only one with access to the flat who was bold enough and foolish enough to steal from Gideon...and the vampire would gleefully take the opportunity to 'educate' him on why such things shouldn't happen.

"Excuse me?" He sounded so comically polite, as if he was quite sure he'd heard incorrectly.

But it sounded very much as if the vampire had just given him a car, wasn't just giving him the opportunity to drive it, or borrow it for a few days, and who the Hell did that kind of thing? Taking a step closer, winding up on the opposite side of the car to that upon which Gideon leaned, he narrowed his eyes suspiciously, thinking back over the words like he'd find the catch in them somewhere before he got laughed at.

"If you really hate my van that much...I should probably inform you there's a Merc parked up...oh just over that way," he tipped his head towards the trees. Damn things could be hiding any number of small buildings, tall as they were. "And if you're feeling sorry for me, you shouldn't. Because I have more money than I know what to do with." Apparently, buying furniture, buying anything that might have screamed of taste of wealth just didn't occur. "So what exactly have I done to make you think I deserve a very, very beautiful car?" Because he wasn't blind, and nor was he ungrateful. Part of him wanted the damn thing because it'd be fun as fuck to drive around in, but with his luck, it'd probably be full of bullet holes by the time the year was out.

Maybe this was a Gideon thing, he mused, giving people expensive gifts.

And would Gideon even notice if his impersonal apartment got burgled? Mesteno would just have to steal the contents of his wardrobe.

The slight smile toying at the edges of his mouth faltered, dark brows drawing down somewhat. His hand fell away from the car and he took a step back, gaze listing over the hood of the beautiful thing as Mesteno went about his little rant. He lifted shoulders impersonally.

"I don't hate your paedophile van, even if it does smell vile inside." He informed the Sadist succinctly, "And I far from f*cking feel sorry for you. You're the last miserable creature I'd feel sorry for." He raked a hand back through his hair irritably. "Deserve, I have been accurately informed, is a stupid, pointless concept perpetuated by people who think more highly of themselves and what they are owed than they have any right to. It's nothing to do with what you do or don't deserve. Nor is it about favors or owing or debts or any of that bullshit. Its just a gift. If you don't want it, I'd be happy to take it back."

A hand extended, palm open for the keys. It was indeed a Gideon thing, this offer of unprovoked generosity. He was a bit notorious for it, almost as much as he was for that unpredictable, changeable temperament.

And if Mesteno laid a finger upon the contents of his wardrobe (or another effing spider) Gideon was prepared to thrash him hard enough to leave walking an impossibility for at least a good week.

Some people might have been easily insulted by the giving of such an expensive item, suspected they were being bought, but Mesteno had learned after their last, violent discussion over the blood, that Gideon didn't operate the way most people did, Now he was seeing another perfect example of that bizarre (at least to him!) behaviour, his eyes taking in the set of his shoulders, the change of tone and temperament.

With the hand extended towards him, he arched the wing of a brow and made his way unhurried around the front of the car, the keys swinging from a semi-hooked finger. But when he lifted them as if to drop them into the waiting palm, he shoved him instead, up against the side of the Chevelle, and followed him in to press him tight to it with the lean lines of his own body.

"You're prickly as a damn cactus," he murmured, vividly golden eyes fixed on his face intently. "I like you. I like your company. I like f*cking, and being f*cked by you. I even like it when you're all f*cking angry with me. You gave me a gift already this evening, agreeing to let me come along, so. How about you take a second, ease the f*ck up? This wasn't a rejection, but if it was your intent to make me happy, know me better. Please."

Giving the least materialistic man in Rhy'Din a car might not have been the best choice! A battered old book, something in that beautiful, dead language he loved, or the dated, classical pieces he played in his van, they'd have meant just as much as something a hundred times their worth.

He'd been reaching resolutely to snatch the dangled keys and the shove caught him perfectly off guard. Sent expression changing from sullen to surprise to a brief flash of stifled rage to shock. Hands had settled of their own accord, bracketing Mesteno's sides, spanning fingers high on his ribcage as the Sadist hemmed him in, fit all those sharp angles of himself up against Gideon's smoother lines.

The shove and the sudden invasion of personal space had his face turning reflexively to the side, and eyes turned slowly upward to meet the gaze of helios gold fixed upon him, dull luminescence cool under dark brows. Sufficiently chided, every part of that expression read. Fingers squeezed at the flesh under their grip and he nodded, once, drawing his lower lip in - to wet this time, not bite!

"Alright." Gideon made his fair share of mistakes but he rarely, if ever made the same one twice. There would be no repeat of this particular one, to be sure. One hand strayed up, curled to a fist to run knuckles along the sharp line of the Sadist's jaw. He tilted in a fraction, just enough to steal the brush of a kiss from the outer corner of that bastard's beautiful mouth. A half second later his hand was snatching the keys clean out of Mesteno's fingers and he was sliding slippery out of the crush between the other male and the car.

"I'll drive then!" Sly, shameless, wicked bastard. He was grinning like the devil, fighting his way past the side-view mirror in an attempt not to break the glistening chrome thing off before he could slide over the hood of the car.

Sometimes, I think you forget what I am, a lover had once snarled at him, shoving his face into dirt beneath trees not so very far away from where they stood now. Tanziel had been all the more furious later, when Mesteno had finally forgiven him, released him from his punishment. He'd been wrong though. Mesteno had a bad habit of tangling with men who were not human, who could feasibly kill him with careless retaliation, but he was always wholly aware of what they were. Gideon, had he been offended enough, could have snapped him like a matchstick, but Mesteno couldn't help the instinctive urge for dominance, anymore than Gideon could help being Gideon. It was not arrogance which made him assume himself safe from Rhy'Din's powerful elite...he simply couldn't deny his impulses! And now, with the vampire's face turned away from him as if the dead man had expected him to strike him, he had to wonder why. Whether Gideon had some lingering issues from the beatings he'd taken at Vincent's hands.

He felt bad for it.

Maybe that was why when the kiss was pressed to the corner of his mouth, he turned his head just enough to make it something more, a stroke of a touch, uncharacteristically affectionate. If he had time, before those keys were snatched from his half closed hand and the bastard was making a break for the driver's side.

"Oh you can drive," he agreed, laughing languidly as he waited for the bastard to unlock the doors so he could slink in the passenger side. "This is a manual I take it." Gideon had grown up in England, where 90% of the population 'drove stick'. He'd have been shocked if it were automatic.

Vincent may have been the deepest, blackest shadow in Gideon's life, but there had been many others who helped shape and refine the Gideon behind the mask, the one that showed through in those little knee-jerk reactions and unguarded moments. Ones who'd carved indelible marks into the shaping of the who and what and why of him. For a human it was the kind of outside influence that turned one bitter, made one spiteful and jaded in old age. For a vampire such things were the sands and waves, leaving the cold stone of them ultimately polished, wearing away the softness, the humanity. Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. But he was young yet, and a miserable excuse for a vampire.

Gideon slid neatly down across the hood of the car, rolled gracefully off one edge and pulled his door open. The wrong door in his opinion. It was an American car, though, the Chevelle, and everything familiar was swapped sides. He slid in behind the wheel, lent over to pull the lock up on the opposite side and gave Mesteno a suitably contemptuous look as he lent over the center console.

"Of course it's bloody manual."

He sat back and shoved the key into the ignition. When the engine roared to life it ROARED to life; angry, powerful, ready to rip someone's eyeballs out. Gideon barely waited for the Sadist to get in and get the door closed behind him before he popped the clutch out and had the car fishtailing round in a semi circle that sprayed dirt and grit out in a fan beside them, then behind them as he peeled out of the dead end and toward paved streets where the thick tires could grip, bite in, and really move. The torque each time he touched the gas felt like it would twist the car right off its chassis, and the horsepower was enough to push you back into the give of leather seats like a lover hell bent on pinning you down no matter how hard you fought. They ate the distance into town, sliding into wide corners damn near sideways, Gideon having far too much fun with the e-brake, the car straightening out with a shudder and a shake as if it'd buck them out for mistreating it.

Miserable, often he suspected. But his youth was so obvious at times, his perennial moodiness so unpredictable that he couldn't see him as he did the Elder vampires. Or even Sinjin, the dead Spaniard he'd known near a decade. Gideon seemed so human yet in many ways, and he liked that. Just didn't tell him, because it was hard to know what would offend or hurt, and for now, he just wanted to have fun.

Of course hunting down blood addicts, watching a dead man feed, was not what most people considered an evening of entertainment, but for Mesteno, the promise of violence and the perverse voyeurism promised to be a kick.

Sliding into the passenger side, reclining against the leather seat, he'd barely got the damn door shut when they were moving, and he snatched back for the seatbelt (presuming there was one!) because Gideon might drive like a demon, have responses that'd see them safely through most potential collisions he could see coming, but that didn't mean other drivers would be so careful! ear whiplashed, he kept his head firm to the headrest and couldn't help but laugh at the appetite Gideon had for the joy-ride viciousness of the drive. At least this wasn't London, where he wouldn't have been able to go fifty feet without having to drop to a crawl!

"One day, I'm assigning you as gettaway driver," he called across to him over the savage roar of the engine, and maybe he had a deathwish too, because he waited, waited until Gideon was so into it he wouldn't see it coming...then slipped a hand across and gripped him tight, a squeeze at the crotch of his jeans just to see if he'd still handle the car without sending them into a tree!

Oh, he was madly in love with the power of this car. More often than not, Gideon eschewed vehicular travel. It was so much slower than he could be under his own power, and often needlessly loud and disgustingly smelly, the petrol fumes, greasy inner workings of a combustion engine all more insulting to preternatural senses than to most normal ones. But cars like this one were fun for their own sake. The raw power of them more viciously amusing than anything else.

And Gideon could drive, drive with a precision and an unpredictable penchant for wild little stunts that would have had most passengers begging for their lives. Clearly this was not a concern with the Sadist, and that made the ride all the more enjoyable. He spared a grin for the offer of a job, and when the sudden grip of fingers found his crotch eyes sprung wide and his foot slipped off the clutch clumsily, leaving him grinding gears for a second as he struggled to regain momentum with the tach falling off sharply and the car slowing to a more reasonable pace. A good thing anyway since they were entering the West End proper and the sharp, short little roads that made a maze of the city were far less forgiving to speed and stupidity than highways.

Gideon flicked a bemused, slightly chagrined glance between the hand cupping his groin and the Sadist that was attached to it. No complaints here, mind you. He took his hand off the shift to grab hold of Mesteno's wrist and push him in harder, hips sliding forward an inch. Feet shifted and he had a foot on the brake, slowing them, pulling the car into a recess between buildings, off the street, but close enough to discourage would be vandals. The harsh roar of the engine dulled to a low, thumming purr. He slid his grasp of the other's arm upward, enough to reach the shift and slid it into park safely before he reached for the sharp angle of his jaw, closed thumb and fingers bruisingly upon it and pulled the bastard toward him, intent on claiming the heat of his mouth in a hard, vicious maul of a kiss.

Mesteno's van might had been a far cry from the Chevelle, but Gideon might have been surprised had he driven it. It was a heavily modified creation, the engine whisper quiet but the technology advanced, powerful. It could be fun to drive with the Watch in pursuit, a few dead people tumbling around in the back, a bullet or twenty punching dents into the armor beneath the filthy black paint. Watching him handle the Chevelle, Mesteno had no doubts he'd make a fine partner in crime if he ever needed one. Cooper had complained far too vociferously, the kill-joy.

Sure as Hell pleased by the result of his across-the-gears groping, he grinned wolfishly for the grinding gears, teased him with, "I thought you said you could drive a manual!" and since it seemed his hand was welcome there, he let it stay, kneaded roughly through the denim as hips rocked forwards to fit him more neatly into the snug grip of his palm.

By the time they pulled up, the speeds far slower, it would have been obvious to anyone who glanced at the pair through the windows that his hand was not in any place appropriate, and there was a furtive look creeping in about the corners of golden eyes, like he was ready to slip his fingers away, unappreciative of people seeing. "We leavin' her here?" he asked, because cars were always 'her', the same way a ship was. Not that it mattered a great deal to him a moment later, when he had his mouth mauled at, hand scrabbling for something to brace on so he wouldn't fall flat across the seat. He got out an mmnf of a sound before he opened up to it, drove the hard, slick point of his tongue in to taste him. Leaned across a little further.

Mesteno would have to wait for his answer a bit, mouths far too busy with something infinitely more pleasant than words. The cool, slick cavern of Gideon's mouth was all welcomes, opening against the other, tongue a slippery twist and stroke of invitation, invasion. Teeth there too, but slightly, dangerous sharp points unable to hide with the way he wanted that mouth against his. It skirted the borders of abuse, the way lips demanded, domineered, played rough games with the sensuous fullness of the lips caught against them or between them. When breath became shallow gasps and he was close to growling he pulled his chin back, pushing his forehead against the Sadist's fiery red temple.

"Yeah, we're leaving her here for now." He managed to get out, sucking the lingering taste of the bastard off his lower lip savouringly. He reached blindly to pull the keys from the ignition, and slid a hand between them both to release the catch on Mesteno's seatbelt before leaning back to grasp at the door handle, generous mouth turned up in a never ending cheshire grin. "Come on, there's one nearby. You can have first crack at him if you like."

As it happened, leaning was no problem at all with the seatbelt playing harness, but it also meant he couldn't get as near as he wanted. He'd effectively bound himself, and just then his mind was in no fit state to figure out what the Hell was going on, shoulders twisting ineffectually as he crushed his mouth in against the cool, clean-water taste of Gideon's. Inevitably, where one domineered, the other countered, made sure that bruises were given as well as taken, that teeth did not remain harmless behind full lips, for he bit at Gideon's mouth hungrily. Managed to stretch an arm across and sink fingers into thick, dark hair to grip close to the scalp as they swallowed one another down hungrily. He made a soft sound of complaint when it ended, tipped his head against the vampire's in half-hearted belligerence.

Thankfully, he'd sat back by the time seatbelt was released, and he let slip a soft oh! like he'd finally realised what it was hindering his efforts. "You're so good to me," he drawled, letting himself out, shoving the lock down his side before slamming the door shut and heading Gideon's way to let him play guide.

"Just the one?" he asked, as if he'd hoped for greater numbers, but he supposed the addict could be hanging out with others. Men and women who didn't drink down his blood and were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally, that might prove awkward, so his next question was... "Any idea if they have company?"

"Gods, you're making it hard not to f*ck you over the hood of this damn car right now." He grumbled in mock complaint, grinning like a bastard the entire time. Even if it was true. That little noise of complaint was nearly enough to make him want to scrap the whole hunting idea for an hour. Or three. Bloodlust ran as strong and potent as physical lust though, sometimes a great deal stronger, and there was fun to be had. He stepped out of the car and shut the door behind himself, tossing keys toward the Sadist as he drew up alongside him.

"Just the one right now... there are plenty more around, though." He agreed, leading them out of the recess and down the street less than a half a block to turn the corner and descend the crumbling concrete stairs down into a basement level dive bar lit with flickering neon lighting. He set a shoulder against the peeling paint of the door and swung the thing inward, giving Mesteno a passing glance of impish joy before strolling slowly in. Music thumped hard, the tattered lot of tired-looking, hard-living clientele all lost in their drinks or their companions, too bleary eyed to spare much attention for the young men who clearly did not belong. Gideon cut a bee line for the bar against the far wall and one of the occupants slumped in a stool there, hunched over his drink. A starved-looking waif of a young man, chatting up the girl beside him, black vial in his hand twisting between his fingers nervously. As they strolled for the bar the girl gave the man beside her a broad, if gap-toothed smile, nodded and tilted her head back to open her mouth, tongue lolling out like a penitent about to receive communion. Looking far too thrilled for words the guy was fumbling clumsily to get the lid unscrewed from the vial.

Gideon shouldn't have said that. Mesteno wasn't going to be able to look at the damn Chevelle without wondering what it'd be like to f*ck on. "Keep y'mind on the game," he chided him playfully, the hypocrite, and he caught the keys when they were tossed his way, tucking them into a pocket and out of sight.

Thereafter, he followed, content to travel at his side rather than the half-step back and aside he'd favoured months ago before the club, before Aoife had made fools of them both. He'd travelled the West End often enough to recognise where they were, but he'd never been to the bar that Gideon found their target in, a step up from the playgrounds of the tired dock workers and off duty hookers he knew down at the docks, but the clientele no happier. The drinks probably just as watered down. Had Gideon been here before, he wondered? It didn't seem his kind of place by a long-shot, and yet perhaps there was more of the rebellious princeling to him than he knew. Did he dress up like a commoner every now and then, pretend not to he rich or handsome?

Gideon's direction left it a mystery as to whom the target was for this locale, but it became apparent soon enough if the destination was anything to judge by. Trailing more slowly by then, he spotted the eager pair already in possession of a vial, and deciding the last thing Gideon needed was some addle brained girl's thoughts in his head, he took action. Thus, while the fool of a youth supplying her struggled to get the lid from the vial, Mesteno decided to make his life a little more difficult. Places like this, there were always shadows to coax and wield, and he brought one coiling up surreptitiously from beneath a stool, such a thin, snaking thing that you'd have to be looking to see it...a helpful shove against the bottom of the vial might just get the thing slip-slithering out of his hands to crack upon the filthy looking floor.

He'd not been here before, but such was the connection between him and all those little lives now tied to his that navigation came easy, every single mind a homing beacon in the dark. Gideon did, however spend a fair amount of time in the West End, playing commoner among the masses, though he was piss poor at hiding the wealth he came from, he nonetheless managed to somehow blend in among the riffraff, sometimes mistaken for one of the up-and-comers in the crime elite, sometimes for a wealthy john out looking for a filthy trick or two...or any of the inventive reasons a man with money might wander into the dregs of the city. Gideon made slumming it an art form, and in Rhy'din people didn't ask a lot of questions.

"F*ck!" Mesteno's little trick worked perfectly, and down came the little vial, tumbling to its demise upon the floor, shattering silently under the over-loud music. The glass shards crackled under Gideon's foot as it came down atop the mess, discouraging the hands that went futilely reaching downward. He sucked his tongue against the back of teeth in a chastising tsk.

"Oh, clumsy! What a shame, mate." The young man, bent half off his barstool in his abortive reach for the broken vial glanced upward darkly. Gideon was all easy smiles though, one first for him and then for the girl looking disgustedly disappointed. "Such a waste."

"Woulda been less ov'a waste wivout you standin on it." Snarked the man, righting himself and glancing from the girl now making eyes at Gideon to Gideon himself. "Coulda saved a drop or two."

"Off this floor? Hope you're up on all your shots. You'd come away with more diseases than you'd get spending a night with..." eyes strayed toward the girl and he laughed softly, turning back to face the young man. "Well a night with some of the walkers down at Third and Harper. Tell you what though. I could help you out if you like. I happen to know someone who could find you more." He nodded toward Mesteno pointedly and the man's watery, blood-shot eyes drifted in the direction of the tall, red-headed colt of a man curiously.

There was the suggestion that the shadows dropped, like water splashing outward over the asphalt and trickling back to their accustomed places. So beautifully short-lived, a gleam of hoarfrost clung to the cracks in the brickworrk, the edges of the dumpster, and small patches of spilt blood had crystallised in the bitter cold of that shadow world, only to melt apart into miniature puddles, black as ink in the night darkened alleyways. Mesteno was using a leather-clad knee to shove the crumpled corpse aside, giving the knife a dispassionate flick to rid it of stubbornly clinging drops of his filthy blood. One down, and yet so many more to be dispatched.

"Whoever's selling it off, must be selling it cheap," he told Gideon once he caught sight of those cool, phosphorescent eyes near by. "There's no way someone so low down the food chain should be able to afford it. Unless he stole it." He slipped the slender blade back into a sheath at his hip, and then dropped with his knees crunching noisily to begin feeling through the wretch's pockets. A distasteful act, he didn't doubt, but it was worth it to see if there were any potential contact names, a phone that might hint towards a supplier. If he found such a thing, he was tossing it across to Gideon, for the chase was his to direct, not the Sadist's.

Leaving the cooling body to the carrion crows which would surely come to feast at daybreak, he wiped a smudge of unwelcome junkie blood from his jaw and moved back to Gideon's side. "What'd you do to the girl?"

A wallet was all that was to be found, and it was probably best to take that anyway - make it look more like a random act of violence than a coolly conducted murder. Gideon plucked it out of the air and lent a shoulder against the bricks as he rifled through it.

"Hm? Bought her a drink, left her at the bar." He pulled a wad of crumpled paper from the worn leather - mostly useless receipts - and let them fall at his feet as he flicked through them one by one. "She hadn't used before, least not my blood."

The wallet proved useless, and he scattered the rest of the papers in his hand to the wind before shoving the billfold into his back pocket and pushing up off the wall to reach out, catch the sharp angle of the Sadist's jaw between thumb and forefinger, to lean in and lick away the stain of blood that remained. Just a brief touch of cool, smooth tongue, and he was moving away, leading them back toward the street and away from the bar.

"You are a terrifying bastard sometimes, you know that? He was more concerned with trying not to piss himself than he was with all the blood he was losing." It was meant to be a compliment, or so said the thin arc of ivory that accompanied it. Three blocks down and one to the left, Gideon pulled open the door of a ubiquitous looking, bloc-style apartment building. Only a step and a half up from tenement housing. Seven story walk up, the narrow, concentric stairs lit by dull yellow candescent bulbs, some of them flickering hard enough to bring on epileptic fits. Up he went, five flights, then shoved open the door to the hallway and strolled down it, in no particular hurry.

"If they are selling it cheap then they cut it with something, or else I guess I'm just not a very valuable commodity." One sardonic brow pushed upward. "All the vials we've seen are small - enough for an ounce or two...and Elias and Tim took a good deal from me...over a long time."

He paused by a door at the very end of the long corridor and rapped knuckles just below the fading 518 painted upon the wood. A muffled shouting came from beyond, some variation on 'be right there'. Gideon lent a forearm against the lintel as he waited, turned to offer Mesteno one of those slow growing lucifer's grins that heralded imminent trouble. "Five of them in here....oh...aaand..." He squinted slightly, eyes flicking toward the door and the approaching footsteps beyond, "Two of them armed. Ready?"

The door cracked open and before the young woman beyond had a chance to get the confused hello out of her mouth, he'd reached in, grabbed hold of the flimsy security chain and yanked it loose from the wall. She was all wide eyes. Big brown doe-things, even if they were rather bloodshot and bagged. Hard living took its toll. Eyes flicked from the men at the door to the broken chain back again, but too late, Gideon was inside. Behind her, and those eyes of hers rolled up, went glassy the second he snapped her neck, her chin cradled in his hand. The sound of her crumpling to the floor had someone calling from another room just down the short all into what passed as a living room, where that dim yellow light of the hallway had been turned rich reddish, rusty orange thanks to the scarf someone had tossed over a lamp in a halfwitted attempt to decorate.

"Rissa? Who is it? Did Bran order food again and forgot before he passed out?"

Mesteno watched as the contents of the dead man's wallet gathered around Gideon's feet, not entirely surprised when nothing of use was found. The cash was just as useless so he made no complaint when Gideon tucked it away rather than offering him a share, and would have stepped away if his jaw hadn't been caught, the dark smear left behind from his careless knuckling more effectively erased by a hungry tongue. The subtle curl to his upper lip was a result of distaste for what the vampire was consuming, rather than for the touch itself, and he was shameless when he reminded "I'm sure there's better on the menu," in the kind of tone that suggested his company had just done the equivalent of drinking out of a toilet bowl!

Terrifying was a compliment of course, and rather than shrug it away in a false show of modesty, he cracked a smile that suggested he had fun scaring people. That he was as much a Sadist for the psychological fun as he was the physical.

"I'm glad he didn't piss himself," he drawled, "I don't particularly like paddling around in urine while I'm killing people. It'd be a shame to spoil the leathers." Gideon had so liked them after all, that he'd some vague notion of keeping them nice instead of allowing that they should end up tattered like almost everything else in his closet.

Prowling around at night with a predator, killing things for the fun of it, and for the revenge factor was strange to him. Something he usually did solo (as he did most else) but there was the pleasure of having an audience, someone to appreciate it with, and it appeared as they reached their next destination, several floors up, the rare occurrence of fighting back to back. Or at least on a team.

"Armed?" he asked, tucking himself against the wall and out of sight of any peepholes in the door, "if I end up full of holes, be a friend and put me back together?" He seemed entirely too undaunted, despite the fact that he wore no armour beneath his clothes.

As Gideon popped the door wide, dispatching the unwitting woman on the other side before she'd even had time to choke out a warning (how quick the dead could move!) Mesteno slunk in after him, and, just because he could (and it wouldn't hurt to have the men distracted...) he crouched down near the corpse, spilling a little blood (his own, the scent of it potent, dark) from a deftly sliced palm to bring her up again, head lolling brokenly to one side. He didn't bother to right it before he sent it ahead of them, down the hallway towards the source of the voice.

Leave it to the Sadist to be more of a snob when it came to blood than the vampire. But Gideon wouldn't, couldn't, argue that the stuff that ran just under the skin his tongue had passed over was better, more craved than what he licked off it. The scent of just that, when it hit the air inside the small flat, was heady, distracting. His side pressed to the wall on the inside of the entrance to the hallway, he stalled for a second, eyes closed, the generous line of his mouth tightening as he deep a breath deeper than necessary. Attention snapped back, however, as the corpse of the girl went stalking past him, her head rolling like a macabre marionette who'd lost its string.

"I'll do my best." He muttered, a delayed response to Mesteno's request.

The girl made a decent shield for bullets, but certainly did some damage to their element of surprise, as at least one of the three people in the room beyond was not too stoned to notice that something was very much not right about her.

"Rissa....what the f*ck!?"

There came the sound of clattering bottles, furniture overturned, and a feminine shriek as the three unfortunates clamored to their feet, or in the case of one, went backward over a couch. Gideon groaned softly and pushed off the wall to stroll into the room behind the girl.

"Evening." As if the ironic greeting could be heard over the ruckus the others were making. The one behind the couch came up, gun in hand, attempting to get feet under himself as the other two, another man and a woman, both scrambled to grab hold of whatever they could and throw them at the hollow husk of their former friend and the stranger behind her as they made abortive attempts to find a way out of the room. The girl was headed toward a door on the left, possibly a bedroom, while the second male was edging back toward a window. Gideon was across the room in a blink of an eye, hand shoving the gun down into the cushions of the couch as he caught the man wielding it by the scruff of the neck and drug him half back over the couch, toward waiting teeth that sunk deep, tore ragged fissures through flesh to slice thick veins wide.

Who needed the element of surprise when the opposition were busy panicking about the fleshy shell of their dead friend lumbering towards them?

Mesteno allowed Gideon to follow after her first, have the pick of the bunch before prowling in after him more sedately. The fleeing woman might potentially find an exit in the bedroom she was headed for, so he moved to intercept her, his gun in hand. The Colt Delta Elite was a good firearm for putting big holes in people, and combined with the glaser slugs he preferred, the round he fired into her knee made a Hell of a mess, shattering the bone and punching out of the back in a gory splatter that very nearly amputated it entirely. He didn't finish her off though. Let her lie there bleeding so long as she showed no signs of having a weapon to draw herself, and turned to catch sight of the male throwing things at the corpse. She had, by then, made to throw her arms around him like a lover, take him apart with tooth and claw.

He appeared to be distracted enough that Gideon could feed in peace, but he hadn't forgotten the man who'd shouted to the Rissa woman...about a 'Bran' being passed out somewhere. There were only three in the living room, and Gideon had specified that there were five in the apartment. He took it upon himself to check in the bedroom, and see if the last of their junkies was somewhere sprawled within.

It might have been a slower mode of murder, but so much more satisfying, the feed. Gideon swallowed the liquid life gushing into his mouth greedily, took only enough that he knew there would be no coming back from, and then dropped the man back behind the couch to bleed to death on his own time. He glanced round as he rose from the half kneel he'd taken upon the couch. Mesteno clearly had things in hand with the girl who lay screeching at the top of her lungs upon the floor, hands contorted into open claws that hovered, trembling over the mess that had once been her leg. His head whipped the other direction in time to watch the other man grappling with the dead woman, back up against the screen of an open window. The rusty, ancient metallic mesh gave a soft moan and then ripped, sending the pair of them plummeting out the window to hit the sidewalk below with a sickening wet, splitting sound.

"Huh." He frowned slightly at the lost sport and with a shrug turned back once more to stalk slowly across the room toward the girl, bent on stopping that god-awful noise coming out of her mouth.

The girl had at least got her hand upon the doorknob to the bedroom and managed to open the door a crack. It was dark within, and as much of a slothful mess as the rest of the place, a hazard of furniture arranged pointlessly, piles of clothing, or trash, or god knows what in nonsensical piles hear and there. Nothing moved within, certainly not the long lump under the mess of sheets strewn over a disgustingly bare mattress.

With all the noise coming from the apartment it was a wonder that people in those adjoining hadn't come to see what the commotion was, so Mesteno was pleased when the man and the dead girl went plummeting from the window, but less so when he realised it would draw a gathering outside too. That given a short space of time, they'd have the Watch attending the scene, armed and wary because it had to be a pretty terrifying thing, trying to police a city like this.

Leaving the shrieking girl to Gideon's tender mercies (or perhaps he'd just do them all a favour and break her neck with a pragmatic twist the way he had with the woman that'd answered the door..) the Sadist pressed the door open a little wider, and peered around the corner in an effort to see where she'd been trying to escape to. Thankfully, Mesteno's night vision was almost as clear as one might see normally with the light of day illuminating everything.

His gaze fell immediately upon the long lump beneath the sheets...but was it man shaped, or merely a ruse? He flicked his gaze away from it, body still guarded by the wall and the edge of the door. Made himself as small a target as he could in case the man in the room was something a little more than his companions had been. Two are armed, Gideon had said. This had to be number three.

So long as he saw nothing, heard nothing elsewhere in the heaps of trash and clothing, so long as it appeared safe to assume that it was a man in the bed, he decided to wake him up with potentially the cruellest method possible. He put a bullet in the bed-lump, right about crotch level.

Gideon could very well have given the girl upon the floor the kind of 'gift' he'd offered her flatmate, but he was in no mood to offer kindness to strangers, and her keening was setting nerves on edge. Bless her, she did her best to edge away from him, wide eyes turning up as he approached, the open maw of her mouth turning its corners down even further in terror at the look of calm, dispassionate death upon his face. Her hands scrabbled for purchase on the cheap laminate of the floor, and she left a trail where she drug the stump of her leg.

Gideon tugged at his jeans where they hit the tops of his thighs, hitching them slightly as he knelt, and placed one hand on the girl's forehead, fingers spread to palm her skull like a basketball. That at least stunned her enough to shut her up for a moment as she stared at him in perplexity. That amusing little look lasted all of a half a second before he used the grip to bash her head backward into the floor. All done with the casual calm and effort it took one to crack an egg against a countertop. And with the same result.

Inside the bedroom there was no sound save for the report of Mesteno's gun as it went off. And terrifyingly enough that lump on the bed made no real movement, no leaping, shrieking, howling man leapt from under the covers to convulse around his ruined manhood. Only feathers and bits of fluff burst up into the air. A half second after the recoil had jarred its way through Mesteno's wrist and hand came clapping down upon it, twisting, dragging the Sadist into the room to shove him up against the door, the cold barrel of a gun pressing hard up under the soft bit in the center of his jaw as the man pinning him there bashed his hand into the doorknob over and over in an attempt to get his to drop his weapon. Tall, well built, and looking tough-chewed as an alleycat, this Bran certainly had a bit more presence of mind than his erstwhile compatriots.

Just as he'd suspected - he snarled out a curse as he was rewarded with a spray of feathers instead of blood, but even that was cut short when, abruptly, his wrist was taken captive and he found himself hauled.

"Crap--," he spat, before vanishing into the room and out of sight, too whipcord slender, too lightweight to resist the drag of the larger, stronger body.

Shoved hard against the door he found himself in an irritatingly familiar situation. Getting out of tight spots like this was never easy for him (little wonder he always preferred room to manoeuvre!) but he wasn't about to release the gun so easily, not even with the cold metal of his opponent's jammed up beneath his jaw, uncomfortably tight. His hand was bruising with the repeated hammering against the doorknob, and much more was going to have those slender fingers snap like twigs, but he still had a hand free, and it snapped up, palm shoving hard into the bastard's wrist to knock the gun away only for him to snap his head forward, hard, to try and break his nose.

A sensible man might have dropped his own gun, held still and been a good hostage, but Mesteno didn't know how. Or, if he did, he'd chosen to bury it for he wasn't happy being a victim. Better to be reckless and follow his instincts than have to depend on someone else to get him out of the shit storm. Not that he didn't trust Gideon to, but why give him something to gloat about!?

Mesteno didn't have much to worry about there. That head butt of his worked like a dream, sending the taller man's head snapping back, setting him reeling as blood spurted from his nose. However... the shock of it was enough to convulse hands, and gripping a half pound trigger it was enough to set the gun he was holding off as his arm swung out to the side from Mesteno's grip. Out in the direction of the open door, where Gideon stood, having leapt back to his feet at the sound of a scuffle within the bedroom. The first bullet grazed the outside of his shoulder, taking out a hunk of flesh. The second lodged hard about five inches in from the first, narrowly missing his collarbone. The third hit much lower in the arc, down in his side above his hip.

The gun unloaded fast enough he just had time for a brief shout when the pain of the first bullet exploded across his shoulder, the other two earned no response save for that convulsive, reflexive jerk the body always gave when the inertia of a bullet struck solid flesh. He rolled back, out of the doorway, out of the line of fire, slipping on the smears and puddles of blood left by the girl laying not far off as he put his back to the wall, grimacing, gripping at the shoulder wound that was healing underhand.

"Mesteno?" He shouted hoarsely toward the bedroom, sucking a breath through his teeth as he pulled his hand from his shoulder to push knuckles against the wound above his hip. "Stop playing with your food and kill the f*cker - we gotta go."

Below the sound of a gathering crowd could be heard round the bodies that had fallen from above, along with the authoritative shouts of the Watch. It was a matter of short minutes until they were running up the stairs, toward the apartment with its torn screen left flapping in the wind and the sound and flash of gun reports coming from within.

Well damn. It seemed Mesteno was very out of practice where it came to working as a team because he hadn't thought to check where Gideon was when he shoved the gun aside. Wide eyed at the shout of pain, he had just enough time to see the third bullet punch in above his hip, to utter another curse, before the vampire rolled aside and away from the open doorway. "Sanctus futue," he muttered, trying to fight off the irrational concern because come on, Sadist. This was a vampire. A few bullets might hurt but they weren't going to kill him!

"Fine!" he snapped back, and did just that. The free hand closed, palm first over Bran's face, fingers splayed to let his eyes see (unintentional but he didn't mind seeing the terror in a victim's eyes when he did what he did...) as the rot set in. He channelled his mother's gift, that deadly, fae creature known as the Linewalker. Pumped the entropy through his own flesh so that every cell he touched decayed. It was in the space of a few seconds that the flesh sloughed away, the eyeballs withering back in the sockets, tongue shrivelling in a mouth doubtless screaming its horror. A worse way to die than bullet to the crotch, far messier too, and so the stink of blood was joined by that of putrid flesh, as the man fell at his feet, the rot spreading down his neck and into his shoulders.

No sooner was he free than he was abandoning the bedroom, his gun still clutched stubbornly tight in a bruise battered hand, to find Gideon.

"Hey, where'd you-- f*ck, come on we need to find a fire escape or something. We go back the way we came and we're f*cked." He didn't insult the vampire by offering him a shoulder to lean on at least!

The snapped reply had him smiling, grimly, but smiling nonetheless. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and, keeping one hand clenched to the burning ache of the bullet in his hip, bent to wipe clean the spots and spatters of black blood that mingled with the red upon the floor, scooped the hunked spray of his own shoulder from off the industrial spool that served as a coffee table, and glanced up as Mesteno came striding back into the room.

"No sh*t, and calm down. Follow me... there's one on the other side of the building." It was indeed a kindness to his pride not to be offered a human crutch, he was moving alright, if stiffly, and hurries out of the apartment and back down the hallway toward its opposite end. A tall window stood there and out it the rickety, rusted ruin of a a fire escape barely clinging to the brick by dry-rotted bolts. He yanked the window open and held the sash up for the Sadist when it decided not to stick open.

"Get down and head northeast...it only looks like a dead end alley, but trust me."

So attentive to the remnants! But they'd have been a poor pair of assassins to leave evidence everywhere, and Mesteno liked to be thorough. He'd have approved, had he seen him do it. Instead he was making a quick assessment of the vampire's injuries before following him to their escape route.

He'd been about to suggest they take to the rooftops, for once upon a time he'd known them well, known precisely where to step and leap, sure footed and fearless enough to make the modern parkour enthusiasts look clumsy. Given Gideon's lingering stiffness, he decided not to argue for that idea, and head down the perilous looking fire escape instead, expecting at any moment once he'd clambered out through the uncooperative window that it would spring loose, and send him crashing down into the alley. And perhaps it would have, had he not weighed less than the average woman.

"Don't worry about me," he told Gideon as he began the descent, and he resisted the urge to ask if he'd be able to keep up. He'd seen that preternatural speed often enough to know that he'd have no trouble, even wounded. For the sake of drawing as little attention as possible, he called the shadows in to muffle the sound of his boots on the metal steps, a clamour that might have brought sharper minded folks coming to see if the culprits were fleeing by that route, and once he was close enough to the bottom he simply vaulted the banister, landing smoothly cat-like before launching himself off at high speed northeast. A man should not be able to run that quickly!

Closing the window behind them quietly at some pretense of keeping their path of escape a momentary secret, Gideon followed behind, at a bit of a distance, if only to keep both of them from weighing upon each tier of the rickety escape at once. He followed Mesteno's suit though, and the second the Sadist was on the ground, Gideon was in the air and quickly beside him, wincing at the impact as he fell to a crouch, let legs absorb the shock.

A muttered curse was all the more outward expression the pain of that little manoeuvre earned. He ran a pace behind Mesteno, down into the narrow alley where two men couldn't stand abreast, that seemed for all the world to dead end into a solid brick wall, but there on the left, just pushed back into the wall a bit lay a door, and Gideon put a shoulder to it, popping the thing open with a resounding bang. Down into a subcellar it lead, abandoned floor littered with industrial bits, rusting machinery long since forgotten, dusty mounds of boxes and other brick a brack winding a wide maze toward yet another door on the far side.

Gideon slowed his pace, drawing up to the door to open this one like a normal, civilized human being, and opened it to reveal the shallow space between buildings just off the street where they'd left the Chevelle. He offered Mesteno a fox-sly smile, all his usual devil-may-care charm, save for the lines of pain etched round the gleam of pale eyes. This time he walked for the passenger side, and once more his hand found its way unconsciously toward his hip to press over a wound long since closed up.

"I think..." He began, through breath as ragged as if the running had actually cost him something, "That might just be enough fun for the evening, hm?" He lent an elbow upon the roof of the car and immediately regretted it, recoiled and pushed his hand against the other sticky wet, black-stained bullet-hole left in his shirt just below the outside edge of his collarbone. "Ffffff*ck."

Gideon certainly knew his way around. Without the sly bastard to guide him, Mesteno would have been perfectly lost, and likely had been ever since they left the bar full of down and outs where their first victim of the night was probably being looted by the alley filth who didn't care enough to report the death, or feared to have it pinned on them. Trusting in him, he followed on silent feet, glancing back only once to see if he could see, or hear signs of pursuit. Somehow, they'd come away from it without a tail of Watchmen hunting them down like dogs.

His surprise when they wound up stood back beside the Chevelle was unguarded and obvious. It did not linger long however, for he was distracted by the pained groans, the curses of the vampire whose hunt had all gone a little wrong.

"Christ, how many did you take?" He blurted rudely, before his more pratical side took over. The one which'd somehow come out of countless such escapades and had injured allies to tend to. Only he couldn't very well drag Gideon off to a healer, and nor could he take him to one of the hospitals where his secret would be outed and all for nothing. For he'd heal faster than their stitches could patch him up, so long as the bullets came out. "We need to get those out of you," he stated, "Get in-- f*ck, I'll take you back to yours and we'll fix you up there, all right?"

Unless Gideon had other plans. Maybe he didn't want to risk running into True while he was full of holes! It might worry the kid.

He pulled open the door to the monstrous, beautiful car and sank in, slamming the door shut beside himself. He shook his hea dand pulled away the hand he had pressed to his shoulder, eyeing it. The only blood left behind was that which had leaked onto his shirt before the wound had healed over.

"Three." He replied dryly, "And no... unless you propose I dig the bullets out with a teaspoon." He glanced up, leveled a cool, icewater gaze at the Sadist and pointed a black-stained finger in his direction. "Don't suggest that. I need to get these f*cking bullets out... you have a...a..." What to call it? "A morgue full of interesting equipment that I'm sure might work better?"

He offered Mesteno a broad sickle of a smile, eyes sliding down over him, considering.

"Or you could just lend me a knife and I'll dig them out now, but it would be a shame to get stains in here." Anyone else's blood would have done no damage to that deep crimson interior, but Gideon's black as pitch stuff would ruin the leather like a bottle of ink.

Full of holes would worry True, but the fae was most likely out and about his own brand of villainy, but if not no need to concern him unduly.

He did have a knife. He could have prised them out there. It was on the tip of his tongue to suggest just such a thing (instead of the spoon!) when the suggestion was made to head back to Sanctuary again, and Mesteno gave him such a look.

"Jesus f'in Christ, Gideon. I knew you were a masochist but this takes the f*ckin' prize. You're willing to put up with that just so we don't get the damn car dirty?"

All right, he might concede that the Chevelle was a beautiful piece of engineering but he didn't share Gideon's determination to keep things nice. The state of his own hide was testament to that.

"Whatever," he decided. "It's your call. Never known someone keen to get taken down to the morgue," he muttered, and settling in the driver's seat, fastened in snug, he reached a hand across for the keys before starting up the engine. Another time, he might have enjoyed the opportunity to take the car out, to really test the limits of her speed, but they were a little limited on the busy streets of the West End, and once he'd reversed them out of the alley (at speed) he had to contend with the rest of the damn traffic, and slide them slowly past the Watch cars with their lights flaring and the sirens shrill and wild. It wouldn't do to draw attention.

"It's lasted FORTY THREE f*cking years without being ruined!" He exclaimed, gesturing with open hands at the pristine dashboard, "I'm sure I can wait the fifteen or twenty minutes to dig out non-lethal bullets. If you're really that concerned, fine, pull over when we get out of the West End and I'll get out and cut them out. Better yet - no. Take a right here and head back to the Lanesborough. I'm sure I can find a pair of tweezers."

He gave the Sadist a look of intense exasperation and slumped back in his seat, pushing absently at the lack of wound in his shoulder with a thumb as he turned to stare out the window. It was painful yes, but in the way that there was something lodged in the layers of healed muscle and sinew that shouldn't be there, something jagged that kept opening new pockets of bleeding each time he moved. A long moment of silence passed, him chewing distractedly at the inner lining of his lower lip, before he finally muttered,

"You did really well. You're fun as hell to hunt with, you know that?"

His mouth twitched, something like a grin threatening, but he managed to crush the impulse, grunt some sound that suggested he approved of Gideon's determination even if the self-sacrifice for a possession was something he'd never be able to consider worth it. Wasn't the vampire pleased he hadn't accepted it now? God only knew what kind of state it would have ended up in.

"Lanesborough and a knife would be better. I happen to have a few of those, if you don't mind who's been poked with 'em tonight," he added. They'd work better than tweezers anyway...not that he had any idea what a vampire would need tweezers for. As for the compliment, he snorted softly, as if he were about to say something derisive. An I know, or a pity you couldn't keep out of the way! But he knew how unfair it would have been, caught himself before he ran his mouth and stared introspectively at the road ahead.

"If we ever get to doin' something like that again, don't feel like you have to come save me, or whatever it was you thought you were doing, okay? I mean, I get it," he was a human, and therefore not so resilient! "but I've been in worse places. I've ridden out on a battlefield against a damn titan and didn't get dead, so don't look after me. Then I won't have to feel bad when you get shot full of holes on my behalf."

"What I was doing was finding out what was going on - not riding to your rescue. But duly noted. When in a scrape, let the bastard die." He grinned across at the bastard in question. "I was slow, that's the only reason I got shot. We've fought before, yeah? I'd like to think I know that you know how to handle yourself. "

He shrugged, winced, and laid off such gestures for the moment.

"Hell, better than I do." Dark brows lowered slightly as he watched Mesteno with unguarded curiosity. "A titan? Like...a Titan titan? As in the cyclops, the kraken?"

This time the grin slashed his mouth open broad, a flash of teeth viciously grim. Let the bastard die indeed! Not that he took offense to such words, he truly was a bastard of the worst sort.

"We've fought," he agreed, handling the car with particular ease, taking the quickest route he could to get them to Gideon's building, "but I've seen the way you move when you mean to kill someone, and you didn't move like that with me. So I have to figure you went easy on me. I'm almost offended," he added.

As for the titan... "Old friend of mine called Koyan, he 'n I used to be real competitive. Over stupid shit. One week it'd be fist fighting, and another it'd be who could learn the other's native tongue quicker. We'd spend most of our time insulting each other, and there came a time he told me how he'd had to fight this titan on his land. I can't recall how or why it was originally raised up, sure as Hell not for sh*ts 'n giggles, but he took me out there to see the crater where it'd come out of the ground and I got this harebrained idea that it'd be awesome to bring up another. You know, for fun." Unfortunately he was entirely serious. Looked fondly reminiscent. "It took a few months, and finding volunteers wasn't easy, but enough of his men had a mind to get some glory, and we had some help of the Rhy'Din demi-God kind, for a price. So we had our titan. Don't get much more of a thrill than bein' on a battlefiend with one of those and all its minions."

Gideon should never, ever feel bad for thinking Mesteno stupid. Or suicidal. Probably both.

The little metal scraps were fiddly, slippery between his gore stained fingers, and he couldn't seem to quite get them to cooperate in piecing together as he wanted. In the end, he reached to snatch down the first bullet from where he'd set it aside so that he could compare the weight, the quantity of metal...and yet he soon forgot all about it when he heard Gideon ask to be let down. Fingers stilled, bits of dull metal gleaming in the puddle of black blood, and he lifted eyes bright as newly minted gold coins to fix his sight on the bound vampire. Let him go? Well he'd been going to. Wouldn't have even given it a second thought if he hadn't still been harbouring resentment for that comment about the silver bullets. Poor Gideon didn't even realise that was what had insulted him, and here he was eyeing him up the way a cat might a cornered, maimed sparrow.

That couldn't have been the proper, respectful manner in which a vampire was accustomed to being observed by a human.

His interest in the bullets faded as the healing wounds did, and when he got to his feet in the blood puddle it was with a sickly squelch of it beneath his boots, yet more running backwards down his forearms, following the streaks originally painted in the opposite direction, to dribble all raindrop pitter-patter from his fingertips. Instead of letting the shadows loosen and spring back to their usual positions, he fed them. Gave them all the concentration he hadn't been able to afford them while he was digging around in cold, dead flesh.

"You look like you need their help staying on your feet," he told him coolly. This could be translated to a F*ck you. No.

That was not a good look, that narrow-eyed, clever gaze full up on wickedness. The shadows twisted tighter, became thicker, and Gideon's own pale eyes widened. He strained forward, shoulders and chest leaning all his weight into it as he pulled fruitlessly at the dark bindings, stretching the limits of their strength.

"N-no. I'm fine...please."

About as far from fine as could be, with the way an icewater rush of adrenaline shot through veins and that clenched knot in his stomach doubled over on itself. One might think it was difficult for a being with no heartbeat that could go pounding madly away to feel panic the way most did, not so, if that expression playing itself out upon the angles of handsome features had anything to say about it. Dark brows furrowed together hard enough to draw a thin vertical line between them as he gave up pulling to collapse back against the wall, only to put all his effort into trying to yank his left hand free. Three inches of give was all he managed.

If it was any consolation, the dead eyed look with such a parity to the soul-lacking glare of a shark's was gone. His tone might be cool, but he was enjoying seeing him squirm. Enjoying doing him harm without doing him the kind of physical damage which might be enjoyed.

Turning away, he moved to use the basin, warm water sluicing the dark blood from his skin, which might have been considered an insult for he had an appetite for Gideon's blood, and it seemed such a waste for it to go swirling out of sight down the drain. One of the junkies they'd slain that evening might have paid extravagantly to lick it from his skin, for there was several vials worth clinging, pooling in the scars and congealing in the fine hair on the skin of his forearms.

All of Gideon's effort for three inches...and as soon as he subsided, they tautened again, as if he'd done nothing to weaken them whatsoever.

"I think," he told him, vigorously scrubbing to get his skin clean (it needed to be off, so that he'd be easier able to resist!) "that you'd be better off doing as little as possible. You lost a lot of blood. Staying right where you are is a very good idea. How about I come back and check on you in a few hours?" Bastard!

Panic mounted, melded into the rising heat of anger, undeniable and ever present just under the surface, rattling the bars of its cage as he watched the Sadist scrub himself with the kind of roughness that made the blood that stained his skin seem like unwanted filth. His generous mouth peeled back from teeth, a gleaming white clench of ivories, the sharp, deadly ones showing against the others in stark contrast. Cold eyes narrowed to dangerous slits of blue phosphorescent fire.

"Don't you f*cking dare." Someone was done asking nice. "I have lost a lot of blood. I need to feed."

Again a hard yank at the shadows, this time his right arm, straining the ephemeral bonds until they nearly sounded as if they creaked, like fabric stretched too taut.

"I'm not bloody human, I'm not going to f*cking faint. Now let me go."

It didn't seem to want to come off completely. It clung around the edges of his nails, beneath them. It was ingrained in the shallow creases over his knuckles, and in the lines of head, heart and life in his palms. He'd probably have to get out the kind of stiff bristled brush he used for scrubbing instruments in his morgue to see it gone at last. Shaking the water from his arms with a couple of violent flicks of wrist and hand, he searched out a towel, and left it filthy with streaks of the dark, clinging residue.

"You're really being very ungrateful," he told him softly - a tone like that, it sounded more dangerous somehow, than a voice raised in fury. "I woke up your refuse to get you answers. I took you hunting," like it hadn't been Gideon's choice! "I got you home safely and I dug the shrapnel from your hide. Now you're ignoring sound advice." In precisely the same manner that Mesteno had chosen to ignore the fact that Gideon was not human. Would not faint.

Fearless, he prowled a few steps nearer, and for the sake of safety, gave the shadows as much fuel as they needed of him to keep the vampire restrained. Then he leaned in close, intimately so, and let him see when he bit into his own tongue, brought the blood welling dark and rich and potent around the hard, white edges of his incisors, the smell of it maddening. Both hands reached to frame his face, long, strong fingers holding him as if for a kiss.

At the last moment, mouths a hair's breadth apart, he tried to twist Gideon's face aside as if he'd damn near break his neck...and instead painted his cheek with a long, bloody swipe of his tongue, just out of reach should Gideon try and stretch his own to taste it.

And then the bastard went prowling off for the door, and out of it, letting it slam shut behind him.

"Ungrateful?!" He snarled, voice saturated with contempt as he glared down the Sadist with absolute derision, disbelief. "You act like I asked for your help!"

The struggle was turning more violent by the minute, and Mesteno was either incredibly brave or deeply foolish to close rank on the vampire once more. Cold eyes tracked him like prey, calculating, ruthless, darting between all the places a kill strike might be most effective. The scent of blood other than his own hit the air and he made a strangled, unearthly noise deep in his throat before lunging forward against his bonds, teeth gnashing in sharp, metallic-sounding clicks. That Mesteno got his face in his hands was nothing short of miraculous, and it didn't still the struggle one inch, Gideon striking for his face, his mouth, the throb of a vein just under the hook of his jaw. All of it as if he'd tear the other male to shreds, suck the blood from the marrow of cracked bones. His face wrenched voilently to one side, he hissed as slick, sticky heat of that tongue slide over his skin, the feel of him colder than ever, a chill that clung to skin that touched his as if he'd pulled the heat clean out, the uncannily marble-smooth skin assimilating it, craving more. Not so with that thin, glossy streak of red that stained his cheek now.

"Mesteno..." Warning. Rage. Not that it made much of a difference. That door slammed shut and from behind it a howl of pure wrath echoed, deafening within, the way the accoustics of tiled was magnified it. Alone, in a small room, hungry, standing in a pool of his own blood and bound to a wall, Gideon snapped. Far too close for comfort to what he'd managed to survive at the hands of Tim and Elias. Only this time the things that bound him didn't have the benefit of a weight-triggered electric current rushing through them. Tiles smashed and drywall underneath crumbled as he fought, frenzied. It was a full five minutes before his right arm dislocated at the shoulder, the socket joint tearing free with a sickening pop that slowed him not at all. Another two before the flesh of his left wrist began to break, bleed, break again until he'd flayed it clean down to the bone.

Later on, if he yet lived, Mesteno would probably consider the mess of a situation and decide that, in retrospect, it'd been a bad call. His appetite for payback always landed him in trouble, and really, wth a vampire he should've known better.

He didn't loiter outside of the door (at least not immediately beyond it) but retreated into the wide, open space of the rest of the apartment, listening to the resultant chaos in the bathroom with his expression dark, eyes brooding beneath knitted brows and the temptation to break a few things, put some holes in those fancy clothes or fill the area with shadow spiders. Let Gideon howl! Let him panic for a few minutes. It would do a top predator good to fear a while, to realise that he was not invulnerable to those weaker. Those with sadistic tendencies.

Yet the sounds of crumbling wall, the smash of tile, they surprised him. He scowled, turning a look in the direction of the bathroom door as he prowled, pacing like a caged wolf, and tried to make up his mind whether to simply flee the scene and let the shadows dissipate with his distance, or whether to go back in there and see what a mess he was making. Around the eight minute mark he relented, having been too introspective, too occupied with doubt to indulge in any of his usual pranks.

The bathroom door swung open and revealed to him the state of carnage, the crumpling wall and the disjointed shoulder. The blood and bone and Christ... Little wonder he stood there framed by the exit, wide eyed and looking for once, a little unsure of himself. Gideon had snapped, that much was hideously obvious, and he started to recall things he'd said. Things like having gone mad and killed a woman. Having left a place burning and truly, he was standing on pretty precarious ground. If he let him go, he was pretty sure he'd be paying extortionately for his error. If he didn't, Gideon was going to pull himself apart in his restraints. Mesteno must've had terrible survival instincts (or just a bit of a guilt complex) because the shadows uncoiled all at once, loosed their captive.

And then Mesteno did the sensible thing and ran. After slamming the door shut again, the bastard. Any little barricade might be useful just then! Staying in the apartment just then seemed a bad idea.

The scene that bathroom door opened upon was the stuff of nightmares, the blind, searing rage-fed panic of a being too strong and too resilient to even feel the horrific damage he'd inflicted upon himself, all sense of humanity bled out of the arctic fire of those eyes. Eyes that snapped, un-recognizing, to the figure in the doorway, pupils contracted to nearly invisible pin-pricks. Again, he roared, the terrifying volume of it only increasing the sense of animalistic pain made audible. ....and Mesteno unleashed those shadows.

No door in the damn world short of a bank vault three feet thick and coursing with electricity was going to stop what he released. Gideon left the door of the bathroom cracked damned near in half and hanging off one hinge (the building super was going to murder him for sure this time). Run. Mesteno could have been fast as a cheetah and Gideon would have been on him in no less time than it took to blink. He caught the Sadist halfway out the bedroom and hit him like a Mack truck going seventy. Leveled him to the floor. He was over him, the good arm, if you could call it that with the flesh slowly creeping back over exposed bone and sinew, muscle regenerating visibly in small increments, grabbed him, flipped him over, hand him by the throat in a grasp that was damned close to crushing the delicate bones of the larynx. He hauled the Sadist toward him and teeth filled the unfortunate bastard's field of vision - if he was lucky enough to still be lucid and have eyes open. Razor sharp fangs carved their points into the rise of a cheekbone just under an eye socket.... and stopped.

Barely a scant half a millimeter of ivory had sunk into the skin, and two thin drops of blood welled up around them, but the scent of it was enough. Enough to spark some kind of recollection, the striking sparks of flint in the dark that caught, brought back the light. That scent. Mesteno. Teeth withdrew, and he shook - the effort it took to repress all the momentum of the engine of rage he had become - as he sat back, looked down at the male under him. Gideon was there, somewhere, struggling to the surface, bitterness and bile gradually taking the place of that terrifying blankness. He drew the Sadist up further by the grasp upon his throat. Bared teeth.

"Leave." He hissed. Flung Mesteno back toward the floor and rose from off of him.

Mesteno didn't like passing out. It was one of those particularly unmanly things he'd learned how to disallow himself after years of pit brawling and dealing with the local nasties, and generally nothing short of blunt impact to the head from something substantially harder would do the trick.

Gideon hit him so hard that he didn't even have time to coordinate his arms into bracing to keep himself safe. One moment he was upright, the next he was crushed flat, cheek to the floor, pain absent because it needed time to catch up! Inevitably it did, just about the time he was flipped over, and then his head was ringing, his vision was blurred to a palette smear of colour, vague shapes, shadow and light, and his hipbones, ribs, temple and jaw started to throb. Air had emptied from his lungs, and that first, panicked suck of air burned. Something had snapped twig-like, was needling the soft stuff his ribcage was supposed to guard, and yet his limbs felt too rubbery to do more than lift, flatten hands to what grappled with him ineffectually. He didn't have to worry about trying to remember how to breathe after that, because the hand at his throat left a collar of bruising where it squeezed, and he couldn't have, even had he been able to.

He couldn't see well enough to recognise the danger of fangs, but the proximity was alarming, the sudden darkness as Gideon loomed over him made the world dark, and the sudden, unwelcome prickling in his cheekbone...well it should have elicited a horrified, fearful response. Unfortunately he was damn near incapable of even staying awake. Compared to the pain of everything else, he barely registered the discomfort that the bird-bone rattle of his body back against the floor experienced, and he lay there like a broken marrionette, a trickle of blood at one corner of his mouth (presumably from the tongue he'd bitten into earlier, unless Gideon had knocked a few teeth loose) and more upon his cheekbone.

Did he breathe? Did he see? He was so still that both seemed unlikely. For ears attuned to it, there was a heart which beat however, sluggish, and moments later, long moments, he stirred. Seemed to be trying to shake it off in an uncoordinated rise to hands and knees. In the end, he was a tough, resilient little fuck. He'd had practice for this after all, being smacked into by more than one car!

Hopefully Gideon was patient. Leaving was going to take a few minutes, unless he wanted to help him out say...by the hair?

There would be no help forthcoming, by the hair or otherwise. No help up, or out, or for all those painful injuries that made moving, breathing such a labor. He backed away, watching the Sadist struggle dispassionately, and damned near warily. So much more had been broken than flesh and bone in that bathroom. Trust lay shattered upon that black-blood slicked floor amidst the shards of tile and hunks of drywall. There had been, Gideon felt, a tenuous, unspoken, implicit trust between the pair of them, a fragile little thing that kept bites from turning into out and out deadly draining, kept violent play just that - play. Kept them honest, and had bought Mesteno the truthful answers to questions more painful than he could have known he'd been asking. Gone.

Gideon backed away, to the far side of the bed, turned and crumpled, slumped back against the mattress, knees drawn up at sharp angles. A hand grasped the limp lay of his arm at the shoulder and he struggled vainly to pop the thing back into its socket, wincing, sucking air in sharp bursts through clenched teeth. He gave it up after it began to feel he was doing more harm then good, the agony of bone rubbing futilely against bone too much to try even one more time. The back of his dark head, visible just above the edge of the bed, slumped, his face falling into the cradle of his hand, breath gone ragged as the nightmare, the flashbacks, all came slowly creeping back, silent and taunting, opening wounds old and new over and over again.

Such a mess! A moment of poor judgement and he'd almost ended up lacking an eye, or simply drained. This had yet to dawn on him of course. It had yet to dawn on him that Gideon had mistaken him for someone harmless, too. Someone it was safe to befriend.

Had he really wanted to do him harm, he would have resorted to necromancy again, outright tormented him with it while he'd been shadow bound, but he'd made his promises not to and opted for a less damaging (or so he'd thought) form of payback. Maybe that had been a mistake, too! Eventually he found his feet again, the world spinning, more reliable when guided by touch than by sight, and it was pure luck which saw him arrive at the apartment door without tripping over anything. Distantly, he could hear Gideon struggling for breath, but he made no offer to aid him (would not have been capable!) and the door clicked shut behind him with neither slam nor deliberate softness. Gideon had his privacy, could recover from his breakdown sans audience, and Mesteno, he was heading back to that glass cage.

The package sitting upon the worn boards of the porch arrived that evening, in the minutes prior to sunset, while the brilliant August sun hung heavy and low over the horizon, burning out in a hot, humid display of chromatic brilliance. Oranges and hot, coral reds, retina searing pinks fading into diaphanous golden clouds. Fall was not far behind, and this palate was setting the bar terribly high.

How the package got there was anyone's guess. Money could buy a great deal of things, and privilege was not one of the muscles Gideon was above flexing when the means suited the ends. A foot and a half by foot in measurement, nearly five inches thick; heavy and wrapped in crisp brown paper, tied with unassuming bookbinder's twine. It had words scrolled across its front, fountain pen in a spidery, languidly masculine hand.

Ego sum ​​paenitet. Propositum non nocebit. ~G

They ought to have been familiar words. The Sadist had spoken them himself once. Not that many months ago. The ink was strange though, not quite black, not really red, and glossy, as though it hadn't dried, had rejected the paper instead of sinking into its fibers. It didn't smear to the touch though, and the scent of it was odd. Copper, clean water, cold earth.

Inside the package lay a book. Thick, bound in a leather tanned to a dark, deep red mahogany, aged near to black in some places, the hide strange, mottled with suspicious pores that seemed to come from some creature neither cow nor pig. The gilded name had long since become illegible, a lost word. Ancient Latin attempt at capturing a name well outside its sphere of expression.

Leave it to a vampire to find one of the ancient Catholic relics that the church would rather see buried. Saint Cyprian of Antioch, patron saint of necromancers, an occultist turned martyr - or so the church would have one believe. The addendum in the back of the book told an entirely different story of persecution, politics, and bloodshed. The text itself was exquisite. Illuminated to a degree of nearly embarrassing craftsmanship, but not with the boring menagerie of many of the other ancient texts, oh no. Darker, morbid, terrifying scenes lurked within the paint and gilding, laced the intricate lettering. Beautiful, terrible. Perfect. If there were such a book as the Necronomicon, this was its grandfather.